Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [121]
'Crackers, mushroom pate.' He laid out each item in turn. The mushroom pate came in a ring-pull can. 'Apples, fresh strawberries.' The apples were small and irregularly shaped, beaded with moisture. She assumed the soft red fruits were the strawberries.
Out of the hamper came delicate china plates and gleaming silver cutlery. 'Sheffield steel,' said the Doctor. He spread some of the pate on to a cracker and watched intently as she ate it.
'Good?' he asked.
Zamina nodded. The Doctor seemed relieved.
'Try a strawberry,' he said.
'Did you come to talk to Kadiatu?' she asked.
'Actually I came to see you,' he said. 'I thought you might need cheering up.'
'Why? I'm not important.'
'Rubbish,' said the Doctor. 'You're just as important as anyone else.'
'I don't believe that.'
He spread some more pate and together they sat and watched the blue Aegean waves lap against the Piraievs breakwater. 'What you believe,' said the Doctor, 'doesn't enter into it.'
Central Line
She had come to know them quite well in the short time before they left. They seemed rougher than the people of her own time, as if there were ragged edges in human culture that had yet to be worn smooth by four centuries of war and galactic expansion. Their faces were harder, features more idiosyncratic and ethnically diverse. Infraspecies ethnic conflict had always been a hard concept for students. The idea that human beings could fight over skin colour had appalled her at the academy. How could they fight when their fragile world was adrift in the same galaxy as the Daleks?
They were pleasant enough to her but she suspected that they were uneasy in her presence. One especially, the tall African woman, made a point of never staying in the same room with her.
She could understand that. She had her own doubts about the things she had done. The possession of her mind had seemed so light, surely she should have broken its control sooner? The Doctor made no such recrimination, accepting her treachery the way he accepted everything else.
'Can't we be partners?' she'd asked him on Heaven, just before she stepped into the TARDIS. She saw now that the question was irrelevant. Partnership would imply a measure of understanding and that was impossible.
He walked alone through the universe, playing some huge game of solitaire with shadowy cards. When the cards he dealt came out wrong he just dealt new ones.
What was her role in the game, what was Ace's, or any of the others' that had accompanied him? Company perhaps? Someone to talk to when he got lonely, fetch his slippers, beg, roll over, play dead.
She could get off the train at the next station, vanish into this century. There was a lot to see, a lot that was going to happen in the next fifty years. Leave the Doctor to play his games on his own.
She knew she wasn't going to do it. She had crossed a line when she stepped over the TARDIS threshold. Bound herself to his service tighter than any vow she could have made. A faithful companion for as long as she could stand it.
'Woof,' she said and the Doctor looked at her sharply. 'Growl, bark, pant pant.'
The Doctor shook his head sadly.
'You're wrong,' he said. 'It's not like that at all.'
But Bernice knew it was.
The Stop
Dogface took a look at the problem and stuck shaped charges in a seemingly random pattern around the TARDIS. They retired to the safety of the tunnel and Dogface tripped the explosives with a microtransmitter.
When the dust had cleared the cavern had a fresh annexe and the TARDIS was standing free.
'That's what I call indestructible,' said Dogface.
'What are you going to do with this place?' asked the Doctor.
'Francine thinks it would make a good venue,' said Dogface. 'Put a stage over there, bar over there. Something for when we retire.'
'It's not what I'd call a good area,' said Lambada, glancing at Benny.
'Haven't you heard?' said Dogface. 'The computer at Stone Mountain bought the whole project and is planning to redevelop it.'
'Did you say the "computer"