Doctor Who_ Return of the Living Dad - Kate Orman [5]
‘History remembers,’ said Benny. She took a large swig of the tea. ‘Fixing history used to be my job.’ Whatever Groenewegen made of that, she said nothing as the younger woman looked around the clearing. ‘This isn’t what I should be excavating. It’s me. My archaeology. My past.’ She held up the flight recorder, its black surface shining in the morning light. ‘My dad.’
Jason stretched, yawned, sneezed and realized it was lunchtime.
He dragged himself out of bed. Benny had probably been up with the dawn. She —
He looked around the tent. Everything was gone, the tent was empty. He yelled, involuntarily, and ran outside in his pyjama bottoms.
He nearly ran right into Benny, who was standing amidst neatly packed boxes and backpacks, doing up a shoelace.
He gaped at her. She had cut her hair, a little roughly, so that it looked the way it had when they’d first met. Her fringe hung down into her eyes as she tied off the lace and straightened up.
‘Fold up the bed,’ she said. ‘We’re off to see the wizard.’
2 Earth
Sydney, 1996
Death has no name.
The Doctor lifted the mop and dipped it into the bucket, operating the little handle that squeezed the rollers.
The old fairy tale had been in his thoughts a great deal over the last week, and no surprise. Death was born when the gods had been drinking; they accidentally gave her name to someone else. No one remembers —
He moved the bucket to one side and glanced at his watch. Chris and Roz were due to pick him up at about twelve. He only needed to finish this floor, and it would be over; his last day here. No one remembers what her name was, or who it was given to. ‘Everything and everyone has a name,’ she lamented, ‘except for me.’
Neither of his companions had really understood why he wanted to come here, but they’d accepted it, the way they’d accepted the last couple of months. The three of them had stayed on Earth, in the late twentieth century, just doing...
small things. Nothing important on a cosmic scale. This last week had been spent in Sydney: movies and coffee, art shows and museums.
Volunteer work in a hospice.
So Death takes our names. She finds out what we are called, and takes our names away.
The Doctor squeezed his mop out for the last time.
‘Why don’t you just stop it?’ Chris had asked him. The young man’s voice had been very serious. That was a week ago, just before they went their separate ways. ‘All those twentieth-century diseases. They’re so simple, anyway. Why don’t you just cure them?’
‘You know why,’ the Time Lord had said.
Chris had sighted down the arrow, trying not to squint at the straw target. ‘Tell me anyway,’ he said.
The Doctor hesitated, as though appraising the young man’s stance and aim. ‘Should I go back and put a stop to the Black Death?’ he said.
Chris let the arrow go. It sliced through the air, thudded into the TARDIS wall behind the target, clattered to the floor.
He made a face. ‘That’d be easy,’ he said. ‘You’d just work out where and when to be with a bottle of penicillin, right?’
‘But then Europe’s population would rise instead of falling dramatically. Labour would become cheaper instead of scarce and precious. Feudalism might continue for centuries.’
‘So it’s too big to stop. Too much a part of history.’
‘And changing that history would mean erasing the thirtieth century you and Roz come from.’
Chris nodded to himself, flicked his yellow hair out of his eyes, and nocked another arrow.
The Doctor said, ‘This is a well-worn discussion.’
‘It helps to hear it from you,’ Chris had said. ‘If you’re certain, then I’m certain.’ The arrow had bounced off the wall.
‘This is really starting to bug me!’
The Doctor emptied his bucket into the laundry sink. He couldn’t change history on such a massive scale. Not Earth’s history. His voyages through time and space had taken him from one end of the little blue planet’s story to the other, from the beginnings of life to long after its destruction. But he