Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [26]
His eyes traced the faint UV pattern which guided bees to the petals. It must have been such a shock when the human race had first looked at a flower under ultraviolet light. So much for Sherlock Holmes’s idea that the rose proved God; the blossoms’ beauty wasn’t meant for humans at all.
On the other hand, how many Time Lords would bother to stop and look at a flower? After a few thousand years in the sterile air of the Capitol, your emotions simply withered away. In a lifetime a human would know fear and anger, love and pleasure, hate and joy. A Time Lord might feel apprehension, irritation, amusement, a certain uninterested curiosity. If anything stronger flared in their hearts, they were expected to silently quash it.
And they almost never laughed.
54
No wonder they hated him so much. Well, found him so distasteful.
He was sitting on a stone at the edge of the forest, looking down at the village. The patterns of ordinary life were in motion. Children were playing, women were weaving, and in the fields he could see the wide hats of the farmers bobbing up and down as they worked. Robust patterns, centuries old.
Fragile patterns, easily disrupted by an afternoon’s random violence.
Chris was coming up the hill towards him, adjusting his jacket. The Doctor waited.
‘So,’ said Chris, ‘what is that thing, and what are we going to do about it?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor, answering both questions. ‘What do you think we should do?’
Chris gave him a surprised look. He leant against a tree in a very unsamurai-like slouch. ‘I don’t know.’
The Doctor went back to considering the flower. Chris fidgeted. ‘How can we find out what it is?’ he said.
‘Simple. Open it up.’
‘It looks like a satellite,’ said Chris. ‘With antennae at the top. Maybe it fell out of orbit. But if it’s some kind of container, Goddess knows what could be in it. Radioactive waste, anything.’
‘Schrödinger’s Cat,’ said the Doctor. ‘It could be anything – until we open the box.’
‘Do you reckon it is Kannon?’ asked Chris. The Doctor tilted his head. ‘I don’t,’ the Adjudicator went on. ‘Kannon’s derived from the Hindu Avalokites-vara. The pod would’ve had to have landed centuries ago. Assuming this is its first visit.’
‘Mmm. . . ’
‘You said you’d had a lot of experience with deities.’
‘None of it good,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s amazing how a spot of omniscience can make someone miserable company.’
Chris laughed, and the Doctor smiled despite himself.
‘What do you think of Penelope?’ said the Doctor, changing the subject.
‘She’s for real, I think. But she’s scared of you. That’s why she keeps arguing with you.’
‘Mmm. She’s got the wrong impression from whatever Joel has told her.
She thinks I’m some sort of temporal traffic warden.’
Chris laughed. It was still a boy’s laugh, clear and happy, after everything he’d been through. ‘Nothing wrong with being a traffic cop.’
‘True.’
‘No, I mean it. When I joined the Academy, I wanted to be out there solving great crimes, but the first thing they put you on is traffic. I hated it at first. I felt like such a doofus telling people off for flying their flitters over the speed 55
limit. You know, like I was their mom. And then I saw my first really bad accident. . . ’ He shuddered, rubbing at the cut on his face. ‘It wasn’t a great job, but at least I was saving some lives.’
‘Let me see that.’ The Doctor got up and examined the sword cut on Chris’s cheek. He took a small bottle of salve out of his pocket and applied a dab to the cut with his little finger. Chris winced, trying to stand still.
‘Sometimes,’ said the young man quietly, ‘I kind of wish I could go back to being a traffic cop.’
The Doctor sat back and looked at him, feeling a sadness deep in his chest.
And something else: a claustrophobic, uneasy feeling. He shrugged, and the feeling was gone.
Chris said, ‘I really let you down in that fight. We would have both died.’
‘I didn’t manage any better,’ said the Doctor. ‘I should have seen it coming.
And I should have been able to talk my way out of that situation.’
‘They were going