Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [19]
‘Maybe the SmithSmiths have got it right,’ said Chris, from the doorway.
‘Ah, good. Come here, the pair of you. We might as well get this over with.’
The Doctor got up and pulled some sample-takers from a drawer. Roz held out her hand. The sample-taker pricked her finger and drew the bead of blood into a capillary tube.
Chris was still hanging back in the doorway. ‘It doesn’t hurt,’ the Doctor promised. Roz lifted an eyebrow at Chris, smiling at his sudden reluctance.
He grimaced, and proffered his hand. ‘I don’t like the idea of anyone messing around with my genes,’ he said. Roz barked a laugh. ‘Body-bepple is different,’ protested Chris.
‘Just a moment...’ The Doctor took his samples over to the bench, rummaged through the equipment.
‘I chose to have a body-bepple done,’ Chris was saying.
‘And I didn’t get any brain enhancements.’
‘There’s a kgotla this morning,’ Roz told Byerley.
The medic nodded. ‘I’ve just read the e-mail from Captain Kamotja announcing the meeting. We’re going to be bringing our results. It’s about time we decided what the hell to do.’
‘Thought so,’ announced the Doctor. ‘You’re both antibody positive.’
The Adjudicators looked at him.
‘Don’t worry,’ said the Doctor. ‘You’ve probably been infected since shortly after we arrived. If you had any symptoms, they would have shown up by now.’
Chris glanced at Roz, and away again quickly. ‘What about Benny?’ he said.
‘She’s probably been infected too, but since she hasn’t shown any symptoms, we don’t need to worry. Unless, of course, there are more surprises packaged inside the bug.
Things we haven’t discovered yet.’ He drummed his fingers on the bench. ‘In a way, pricking myself with that wretched needle was serendipity. Look at this.’
He pulled up another DNA schematic on the computer, and they crowded around. ‘This is from a sample of my blood which Byerley took when I was still infected. What you’re looking at is a tiny piece of someone’s personality. Think of it as a computer virus, trying to overwrite the “software” of the mind. That sequence is different in different samples of the virus.’
‘The “software” is mutating?’
‘No. I think someone took a whole lot of memories, and put just a few of them into each of the original viral particles.’
His eyes glinted in the light from the screen as he pored over the schematic. ‘We might be able to put them back together.
Work out who they were. And why they’ve tried to turn five hundred people into a library of their past experiences.’
The sun was coming up over the top of the temple when they walked into the clearing.
They stopped for a moment, silent. Even though Zaniwe and Jenny had seen the temple twice before. Even though Benny had seen dozens of temples on dozens of worlds.
They put down their packs, eyes glued to the building, eighty feet high.
It was nearly invisible until you were in the clearing. The open area wasn’t more than a hundred feet across, and the undergrowth was thick, pushing up around the bases of the buildings. They crunched through it as they slowly circled the site.
Benny was still feeling slightly bizarre after their discovery of the piece of — presumably — a spacecraft.
They’d used a metal detector to find more bits and pieces, scattered under the soil of the clearing, mostly smaller than her hand. Several of them had writing on them, in English and Kiswahili, mostly safety instructions.
Zaniwe and Jenny said that the planet had been surveyed three or four times before the colonists had arrived; it was possible that the bit of shrapnel was from one of those ships, or maybe a smaller vehicle. They’d have to check the survey records when they got back to see if anything had been lost.
There were ten huts clustered at the western end of the clearing, stones glistening wetly, (thatched? mud?) roofs long since gone. The walls were tumbled down and eroded. Plants grew inside them like thick, green