• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

I didn’t realise what she meant, not until it was too late. And as I realised, I shed a tear for my people, who had no future, and that is all I knew for millions of years.

Then the Doctor came into my story. He was there when I awoke, although to me it did not seem that I had slept, just that I blinked and the world changed. The news was broken to me of where and when I was, of what Eve had done at my unwitting behest. You would think a person could not take it in, 500 million years passing in an instant, but when you have already lost the planet you knew, to lose the universe you knew seems barely a step further on.

But… it did not have to remain lost. The Doctor made me an offer: he could send me back to my own world, before it was destroyed. My heart sang. To be with my own people again!

But I could not change history, he told me. I could not prevent the planet’s destruction, I could not warn my people.

I said to him: if this were you, would you do it? He looked sad for a moment, and then told me it had to be my decision.

And though I had thought I would trade everything for another glimpse of a Kivurd or Fuffox, I realised that I couldn’t do it. How could I live every day, knowing what was going to happen yet being unable to stop it? I would stay here, and try to make up, in some small measure, for what my creation had done.

Eve’s collection was no more, the Doctor told me, and although I knew why he had done what he had done, my heart felt hollow for all those species condemned to non‐existence. I told the Doctor, and he smiled. There were DNA samples, he said. There was Eve’s cloning apparatus. And there was a whole planet going spare.

I do not know if I can learn the skills required in the time I have left. I will rebuild Eve, and give her a new task. But this time, I will be careful. This time, things will be different.

So here I am. The last of the Cirranins. When I am gone, my people will be no more. The Doctor has other stories to go on to, but mine approaches its end. So I will, soon, do as the Doctor suggests and tell my tale, and then the Cirranins will live on, in a way. Perhaps, even, my own DNA… Well, I shall think on it.

I thought Hr’oln was going to cry again when we took her into the laboratory and she saw Eve lying there, but whether it was for herself, or for the dead android, or at this further evidence of what her few ill‐chosen words had led to, I couldn’t say.

‘She was my only friend once,’ Hr’oln said, ‘and I think I have need of a friend again. We will work together to repopulate the planet.’ She gestured round her at the scientific apparatus and the dodo pen. ‘After all, no one knows better how this all works.’

‘You could maybe rewire the “murderous scheming cow” circuit, though,’ I suggested. But you couldn’t really blame Hr’oln for what Eve had become, any more than you could blame Eve herself. After all that Hr’oln had lost…

And now the museum had gone too. ‘No one will ever see an aye‐aye again,’ I said. ‘Or a passenger pigeon, or a three‐striped box turtle. No one without a time machine, anyway.’

‘Nothing lasts forever,’ the Doctor said, gazing into the distance. And then he focused again, and grinned. ‘Well, except the dodo…’

Something struck me. ‘Hang on, I know about cloning. You only get an exact copy, you can’t propagate a species by it. Eve only had one of each kind. There won’t be any boy Dorotheas.’

True,’ the Doctor agreed, sighing. He drew something out of his pocket, which I recognised as the feather from Dorothea he’d used to track us to the lab. Then he drew something out of his other pocket. The original dodo feather that had brought the TARDIS to the museum in the first place. ‘Looks like it belongs to a boy to me,’ he said.

Woo! I gave him a hug. Then I thought back to all those genetics lectures again and let go. ‘Oi, you are talking to a medical student here, and I know you can’t clone from a feather. You’re just trying to make me feel