Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [83]
There's bound to be some mood swings while she sorts herself out.'
'Love's a funny thing, isn't it?' said Chris. 'I mean, there's love and there's love, like the difference between me and Roz, and me and Dep. I mean if they were both trapped in a burning building – which one would I rescue?'
The Doctor gave him a sharp, unsettling look. 'Well,' he asked, 'which one would you rescue?'
'Dep,' said Chris without thinking. 'No, Roz, both!'
'Come on, Christopher,' said the Doctor. 'They're in separate rooms, you only have time to save one and you have to make your decision now.'
'I don't know,' blurted Chris.
'Too late,' said the Doctor savagely. 'They're both dead.'
Chris stared at the Doctor, appalled. 'But that's not . . .'
'Fair?' asked the Doctor. 'The universe is rarely fair. What if it was Roz and Bernice, or Bernice and me?'
'What would you do?'
'That's easy,' said the Doctor. 'I'd put out the fire.'
'I didn't know that was an option,' said Chris.
'You didn't ask,' said the Doctor.
'How would you put out the fire?'
'Will you stop asking so many questions,' snapped the Doctor. 'You're scaring away the fish.
They hate philosophy almost as much as they hate mathematics.'
'Who?'
'The fish,' said the Doctor. 'No fingers to count on, you see. Drives them crazy. Except for dolphins and whales, who aren't fish of course and therefore count in base five.'
Chris determinedly didn't ask what a whale was.
They sat in silence for a while, watching their floats bob up and down on the restless waves.
Water dripping from the edge of the umbrella was creating a damp patch in the small of Chris's back. The rain had a dampening effect on any sound so that it began to seem as if he and the Doctor were sitting in a rapidly shrinking bubble of reality. He wondered if it were actually possible to die of boredom.
'Or was it up to five,' said the Doctor suddenly. 'I can never remember.'
The rain rattled on the windows of saRa!qava's house. It pinged and jumped on the metal surface of the lift that Dep used to get her flying machines on to the roof. Dep herself was lying in mid air, her hair twisting around her naked body as she daydreamed of constructing real wings and swimming through the falling water with Chris.
SaRa!qava, downstairs in her kitchen, ignored her screens with their complex problems of heat convection and biomotic growth parameters. No longer interested in the idea of baking better bread, instead she listened to the rain and the squeals of the children outside as they splashed in the puddles under the watchful eyes of House. She caught herself thinking about Dep's father and the way he reminded her of Bernice. It could never have been permanent between them, she knew that; they had spent as much time arguing as making love, but she still wondered if it had been right to steal Dep from him.
In his upside-down rocketship-shaped house, feLixi was seized by a sudden romantic melancholia. He instructed aTraxi to access certain prohibited datacores that only he, God and the Doctor knew existed. He needed the information for a translation analogue that would allow him to transcribe certain thoughts he'd had into a language Roz could understand. On impulse he turned off all his monitoring equipment while he was writing, leaving his listening room strangely silent except for the melancholy sound of the rain.
High up on the hill behind iSanti Jeni, the rain soaked the formal lawns in front of the power station and tap danced on the bare concrete roof of the control centre. The clouds were low enough to brush the tops of the windmills whose blades turned quickly in the strong wind. In the control gallery the antique analogue needles jumped and quivered as electricity poured into the