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ISpyder points value: 650

NINETEEN

My name is Hr’oln, and I am the last of the Cirranins. The Doctor has persuaded me that it is important to write down my story. He himself appears in the story, although not until the end – but I do not think that is the reason he wants it told. I believe the Doctor has been in many, many stories, and has no particular need to be recognised through one more.

No, I think he wants me to tell my story as an act of remembrance for my people. It is a thing that I must do, but not yet. It may have been hundreds of millions of years but, for me, the pain is still raw. So for now I will just explain how I got to be here.

I am – was – a scientist, back on my home planet. We were a technologically advanced people, which proved to be our undoing. There was a terrible, final war. The whole planet was destroyed and everything on it – every Cirranin, every Vish, every Elipig, every Grun. But… there was me.

I was a pioneer, I had flown to the stars. I had been expecting a hero’s welcome when I returned home. But there was no home to return to.

Grief‐stricken, I flew on. My shuttle was still experimental, not built for long distances but, just as it began to fail, I found a new world. This world. It was not all I had hoped for – the people were few, and they were primitive. My appearance scared them, so I constructed an android in their image to interact, and named it Eve. I gave it all my technical knowledge, equipped it with circuits that would allow it to develop and grow and build on what I had taught it. Between us, we began work on a teleportation system that would allow me to visit other planets, perhaps find others closer to my own kind – although the loss of my people was a wound that would never heal.

And then disaster hit this planet too. Not, this time, through manufactured annihilation, but through nature’s curse: plague.

Medicine was not my field, but I thought that there might be a cure out there, somewhere. I began work on a process of suspending life functions, of keeping a living being in a state of continued existence. In this way, they could be preserved until the solution was found.

I was too late. On the day I completed the process, the last native died.

My alien physiology may not have been affected by the disease, but my heart began to burst.

Up to that point, the people of this planet had meant little to me, but I realised then that they meant everything. With my teleport not yet complete, they were the only living beings I knew. Eve was my constant companion, and I had designed her – by that time I thought of her as ‘her’ – to be indistinguishable from an animate individual, but she was in reality nothing more than a construction. After losing my own people, I could not bear the idea that another species was gone for ever. The thoughts that I had been trying to contain erupted inside me. The universe would never know another Elipig, The Grun would fade into myth and legend – if that. Generations of children would grow up on a million worlds, but not one of them would ever stroke a pet Fruzin or take it for a walk. And now this race, too, was lost.

I cried for three days.

Then I said to Eve: We must stop any more species dying out.

She said to me: How do you know when a species is dying out?

And I suddenly thought: My species is dying out. I had thought of it as dead, but it isn’t, not yet. I said this to her, I said that I was the only one left and when I was gone my people would be no more. I see now that she took me at my word. In her eyes, a species was dying out if and only if there was only one example left. I should have talked to her about conservation, education, helping a species to continue. But I didn’t.

I told her that these species mustn’t be lost. That the rest of the universe must know about them. Everyone must be preserved. Every planet must be remembered.

And she said to me: I understand. Your species is dying out. It must not be lost.