Doctor Who_ Sleepy - Kate Orman [82]
White took his usual chair. His lieutenants seated themselves, ignoring one another.
The soup was vegetable. The main course was pasta.
Dessert was the Doctor.
White dabbed at his moustache with a napkin. He caught the Time Lord’s eye, as though he were about to say something. He reached out across the table with his mind, a cold white hand snaking through the ether. He clutched at the alien mind, unable to get a purchase, sliding off the fugue that was playing over and over.
Black got up from his seat. He walked up to the Doctor and put a hand on his shoulder.
The second telepathic contact joined with the first. It was all right; it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. It was as though two people were knocking on the door of his house, but they didn’t have a key. He kept his eyes on White.
Bach played, a little more loudly. The Doctor remembered leaning over the harpsichord as the composer had worked out the theme.
White must have looked into so many human minds, gatecrashed so many consciousnesses. Had he found them disappointingly identical?
Black’s name was James Munoru, and his family owned a tea plantation that stretched from one horizon to another, green plants against red soil. And when he was twenty he had wanted to see the universe beyond those horizons, and if that meant carrying a gun that was fine by him.
Turquoise stood on the other side of him, putting a hand on the side of his face. Three of them. There was a fierce pressure in his head. It wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.
They let their minds blur together, becoming three in one, instead of three individuals. The Doctor felt his heartsrate shoot up, tried to coax it back down. Gently, gently. They couldn’t get at him.
Turquoise’s. name was Ngaiyo. He remembered holding a cow, one hand tightly gripping its head, the other the thick cord around its throat, while his uncle carefully aimed an arrow at its neck. He remembered the way the fresh, hot blood tasted. When he went back to Nairobi he hadn’t been able to eat meat for a week.
Red, now, a hand on his arm. He was having trouble catching his breath. It wasn’t loud, the way that SLEEPY had been loud, a burst of static in the mental headphones. It washed over him, watery, looking for any hole, any gap through which it could drip into his mind.
Red’s name was Seketo. He had been picked up by a Company employment drive while he was working as a tour guide in Brisbane, taking African tourists up the Gold Coast for a taste of the unspoilt white Australian lifestyle.
Yellow got up. She was already in rapport with the others; he could feel her as she came closer, and he suddenly knew that she had it, she had caught it, the virus was inside her.
She pushed her hand down onto his shoulder.
Yellow’s name was Chesinen.
She was neither a girl nor a woman.
Her parents were conservative, to put it mildly. She’d been happy enough for the gynaecological exam to go ahead; it only made sense, after all. But that hadn’t been enough for them. Her mother had been circumcised, and her grandmother before that; and besides, these days they did it in hospital. Her grandmother had had it done with a shaving razor.
Chesinen had said she wasn’t having any perfectly healthy bits of herself sliced off, especially not those bits.
Which century did they think this was?
When her mother wouldn’t stop shouting at her she packed her bags and left. She arrived in the city of Kisumu with dusty feet and left it with a degree in electrical engineering and a Company uniform.
In Pokot terms, she had never completed her initiation.
One day, she thought, she might go back to Kenya for the rest of the ceremony. When she worked off enough of her Company debt. One day.
The Doctor let out a yell, convulsing in the seat, grabbing at the hands that held him. They pushed him down in the chair
He fought, trying to get loose, as Yellow forced her way into him, widening the cracks in his mental armour. His heartsrate shot up, his breathing was fast and shallow. The others pushed with their minds, and clawed, and snatched, like