Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [7]
‘ Alien is the word you’re looking for,’ said the Doctor. ‘It shouldn’t have affected me at all. But it did.’
Chris and Roz followed Bernice’s gaze. One of the kids, a girl in overalls, was backed up against the wall, trying not to cry. The teacher was getting food from the counter, her back to the group. The other children, in their temporary freedom, were lobbing chunks of clay at the girl.
‘Now, a virus designed to alter human genes can hardly do anything to me,’ the Doctor continued, oblivious. ‘But memory sequences, that’s another thing. My metabolism is capable of interpreting human memory RNA, producing the Gallifreyan equivalent.’
He noticed that none of them were listening to him. Saw the bits of clay arcing towards the girl, jerking back, as if they were bouncing off an invisible shield a foot from her body.
‘That’s forty-eight,’ he said softly.
‘Odds are,’ said Roz, ‘one of us is going to be infected.’
‘One of us already has been,’ muttered Chris. The tall blonde’s boots sank into the grass as he followed her.
‘I meant the humans,’ said Roz sourly. ‘You, me or Benny might suddenly become telepathic. Or psychokinetic.’
The colonists digging and planting looked up as they passed. Chris found himself nervous under their eyes. He could imagine what Roz was thinking. Here, like everywhere else, they were the aliens.
Yemaya 4 was ideal for colonization — a large temperate zone, gentle seasons, biochemistry not too different from Earth’s. Thick forests, rushing rivers, no large predators. The gravity was slightly lower, which leant a spring to Chris’s step as he hurried after the short black woman. From here, the cluster of domes were distant bumps, the big silver habitat dome surrounded by storage sheds.
The colonists had been here for two months. They had started accelerated gardens around the habitat dome almost immediately, and now they were busily turning some of the surrounding meadows into farms. The Doctor said that their ecological plan was exceptionally good — they were going to be able to use several Yemayan native plants as crops, and planetfall had been timed to allow almost immediate planting of Terran seed stock. Until one or the other crop came up, they’d be living on a combination of rations and veggies from the garden. It would be more than a year before they could think about unfreezing the animals.
The whole colonization had been proceeding like clockwork when the first infections occurred. Someone’s kid had fallen in the fast-running river nearby, and, when the mother couldn’t reach the boy with a tree limb, she’d pulled him out with her mind.
The next day, her husband told Doctor St John he thought he was going insane. Hearing voices. Byerley had checked him with a standard telepathic potential test, and the results had been off the scale.
It had taken Byerley a week to isolate an unknown virus from their blood. In that time, there were a dozen more cases. The day after that, the TARDIS had plonked down in a field next to the habitat dome, and the Doctor had poked his nose right in.
It had been the Time Lord who had isolated human genes from the virus. The bug was travelling to the brain and releasing its payload: psychic powers. There was even a pyrokinetic and a couple of psychometrists. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to who got what.
Chris caught Roz up. ‘Would it be so bad if one of us did get some kind of power? It could be useful. Imagine smashing a Dalek up inside its shell by thinking about it.’
‘Imagine smashing up someone’s brain inside their skull by thinking about it.’ Roz stopped still and looked out across the field, where Cinnabar’s green jumper was visible against the fluorescent bulk of a hovertractor. ‘Why do you think the Gifted were registered back home, Chris?’
‘I thought it was because they needed training to use their powers safely.’ Chris found himself trailing behind her again as she cut across the field. ‘What do they do with them in this century?’
‘Nothing at all, apparently. They just let them run loose.’
‘Hey there, hi there, ho there,