Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [101]
Roz winced as he yanked the last thorn. He wiped up tiny beads of blood with a napkin.
'It was a white dwarf at the time,' he said. 'We had to tinker with it a bit.'
'And yourselves?' asked Roz. 'You must have tinkered with yourselves as well, so you could interbreed. It would be too much of a coincidence that different species which evolved out of different biospheres would be biologically compatible. That would be taking convergent evolution too far.'
FeLixi sprayed regen over the cuts. The spray was perfectly capable of dissolving the thorns on its own but then he wouldn't have had the chance to touch her leg. 'It was a long time ago,' he said. 'We have a saying: "The more alternatives you have to fighting the less likely you are to fight." Especially if the alternatives are more fun.'
He replaced the spray in the first-aid kit. Roz slipped her leg off his lap. Carefully, so as not to spook her, feLixi lay down beside her on the blanket. Roz didn't make any objections. 'So what's natural about this place then?' she asked.
'When the sphere was first constructed there were only twenty billion or so people so God figured it had some room to experiment. It set aside six million hectares, gave it only a minimum of landscaping, just the mountains and some bacteria to break down the rock into soil. All the flora and fauna here migrated in from the surrounding landscaped areas over thousands of years.
God let the area form its own ecosystem and calls this place the Wilderness Recreation Area. It won't let anyone live here.'
Roz sighed. 'Where I come from,' she said, 'there are no wilderness areas, natural or contrived.
We have parks at the top of the overcities, beautiful ones, but it's not the same as this. Hard to believe that anything so beautiful could have arisen spontaneously.'
'You did,' said feLixi and then really wished he hadn't. As a chat-up line it was incredibly inept.
Roz obviously thought so too; he heard her laughing. 'Men,' she snorted. 'Why do you always talk such bullshit.' He felt her shifting beside him, lifting herself onto her elbow to look down on him.
'You don't think it's true?' he asked.
'I've seen myself in the mirror,' said Roz.
Her face was so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. 'No one,' he said with absolute conviction, 'ever really sees themselves in the mirror.'
Roz, as if suddenly realizing how close their noses were, pulled away from him to scrutinize his face from a distance. FeLixi resisted the urge to reach out and pull her back down. She wouldn't resist, he knew that; she could feel the attraction between them, but he knew that it was too important that Roz came to him in her own time.
Turning her face, Roz picked up his hand, pressing her thumb into his palm, feeling out the myriad small bones under the skin as if examining it for defects. 'I saw a hologram of you yesterday,' she said. 'You had an extra thumb on both hands.' She let his hand drop back onto his chest and traced a finger up his forearm, pausing when she reached the inside of his elbow.
FeLixi tried to keep his breathing under control.
'Your elbow joint was different too,' she said. 'Looser and more flexible.' She turned back to look him in the face. 'Your eyes were pink.' It sounded almost like an accusation.
'I was doing a mission on a barbarian planet during the war,' he said. 'The locals were extremely xenophobic so the ship had to modify me cosmetically to fit in.'
'There was a woman with you,' she said.
'She was part of the mission too,' he said, wondering how much he dare tell Roz. 'She was an agent we recruited locally. We were friends.'
'What was her name?'
'Soo'isita,' said feLixi. 'In her language it meant "laughing bird".'
'Where is she now?' Roz's eyes looked strange, both shuttered and suspicious at the same time.