Jenny Colcan, page 8
The snake reared and hissed crossly.
'Argh,’ said the Doctor.
He held her by the shoulders, her eyes still desperately searching out the apples, her feet still leading her closer and closer to the orchard. The scent on the air now was completely soporific, lulling. It was very hard to think clearly.
With a huge effort, he spun her round to face him again, pushing them both
fiercely back from the fence they were drifting towards, their feet not obeying their heads. With a massive effort of will, the Doctor shoved them away from the sharp iron posts so hard he tore both his hands in the process
'I have it,’ he said, fast and intent. 'You know I do. I have it already. You can have it. You can have it. Just...' He glanced at the snake. 'Just, please. Take it
from me.'
'He doesn't even care for you!' screamed the snake. 'He lets you bleed and you don't even know it! Will he bleed for you?'
The Doctor lifted his injured hands instinctively, and let the wounds show.
She hadn't even known his blood was red.
'Always,’ he said simply.
They both watched as the drops fell, vivid on the bright green grass, forming a 'C'.
The second the first drop hit the ground, she snapped back to him.
'Stop that,’ she said, looking directly at him at last. 'Stop it immediately.'
The Doctor reached out, gently, his fingers weaving into her dark hair. He had forgotten how small she was; she barely came up to his chest. 'Look at me,'
he ordered sternly.
Reluctantly Clara focused her eyes on his.
'It is what you want, I promise.'
This was not quite a lie. He would show her the temptation and fruits of that knowledge; everything he had. But he would also show her what it cost and what it really meant and how, afterwards, the rest of her life would be like a dark, spoiled fruit. She could not do this. She was not capable; it would kill her. Or worse.
Etienne had been quite wrong. He had never tasted the fruit. He had never had to.
Her focus wavered.
'Clara! Look at me. Look at me. You have to let me in. You have to let me.
You have to say yes.'
Finally, slowly, she blinked her assent and breathed 'Yes', and he pushed his fingers a little more firmly on the side of her head. A golden light started to flow between them as he moulded their selves together, concentrating on pushing to her an awareness of what was there, what he lived with, what the cost would be; how she must resist the temptation; she must.
Just as he was concentrating on the flow from his brain to hers, however, he
stopped, and his eyes flicked open suddenly in surprise as, suddenly, he felt her: felt her self-knowledge buried so deeply underneath, so deep in her subconscious; but that showed what the snake had said was true.
She remembered so little, but it was there, deep in the bone; her frustration and her fear and her pain at being around him, all of it buried so far beneath the surface that she did not understand it herself.
Abruptly, shocked and startled, he jumped back as if electrified, and their connection instantly ceased, far too sharply. Clara crumpled underneath him like a paper doll.
The Doctor stared down at her, horrified, then instantly made use of the situation, grabbing her up in his arms and running for all his life, the sunlight softly glinting in his hair, the deep, corrupt, sweet scent of apples in the air, the shrieking, furious scream of the bright green snake. He tore back to the house of skulls, his heart in his mouth, his shock and incredible regret cluttering up his mind.
'Shut the door!' he yelled at Etienne as he entered.
But Etienne simply laughed and said, 'I thought I wasn't in charge any more,’
and did not move his vast limbs away from where he was reprogramming the skeletons.
'Shut it!’ The deadly sunlight was still streaming in. The Doctor look around for a hanging, a coat, anything, that could cover it, as Clara started to stir in his arms. The light lit up every dark corridor, every grim comer flushing out its secrets to the bright golden glorious flood of tempting rays.
'There it is!' said Etienne, raising his fingers from the screen. 'The robots are all fixed. I am a genius. Guards! Take them!'
There was a rattling noise. The tallest of the skeletons, the one they had first seen on the cliff's edge, came marching into the room, followed by another, then another, then another. The Doctor stood up, carefully. Etienne laughed in triumph.
But instead of seizing the Doctor and Clara, the skeleton did something quite different: he led them up to the door's edge, and slowly laid himself down.
Etienne pressed a button on the console and the skeleton spasmed as the white light flashed up and down, but it did not stop what it was doing. Another lay down on top of him, then another and another even as they were shocked, again and again, and Etienne screamed at them, until gradually they filled up the space, every chink, and the light died down and down until it vanished completely.
Clara lay on the floor, her eyes flickering. Eventually she came to, blinking.
She looked around the room. 'What happened here?' she asked, gazing at the pile of bones.
Etienne and the Doctor stared at her. Then Etienne turned his attention to the Doctor.
'Those worthless bits of bone,' he growled. 'You utter idiot.'
'They're not worthless bits of bone!' said the Doctor furiously. 'Do you know
they even try and warn people who land here? Leave them messages?'
Etienne shrugged. 'They're robots.’
'You tell yourself that.'
Etienne shook his head. 'But you came back to this place.'
The Doctor stared at the floor. T didn't know what it was then, either,' he said. 'It wasn't protected.'
'Chuh.' Etienne stood up, wheezing slightly. He was not tall. 'How do you stop it?' he asked, suddenly serious. 'How do you stop all that knowledge and that power from making you take over the galaxy? From making you destroy it
all? From making you an eater of worlds? How do you stop it?'
The Doctor was still staring quietly at the ground. 'I work at it. Very, very hard. All the time. Every day. And I don't always.'
Etienne gave that maddening grin again. 'But you told the Shadow
Proclamation it was here?'
The Doctor nodded.
'And then they "hired" me. Or they thought they did. To protect everybody else.'
The Doctor nodded again, very, very wearily.
Etienne watched him as he moved things into the room; much of the packet
food, the water filter, every bit of computer equipment.
'What are you doing, man?' he said, nervous. 'You guys are leaving, right? I
mean, you'll need me, right? You'll never get back alone, you'll need me to guide you - there's stuff out there you haven't even seen yet. There's stuff out there I don't even remember making. You gotta watch for that zombie ravine, it's hideous. They've got rakes for hands. Boy, I was out of it that night.'
At that, the Doctor marched forward without saying a word, took every handset and controller he could find, and crushed them under the heel of his boot. Then he went back to working quietly, saying nothing.
Etienne tried to leave the room, but more skeletons came to block his way.
Sweating heavily, he turned round to try and reach his remote control, only to remember that the Doctor had it and it was now sticking out of his top pocket.
His manifest unfitness made any attempt to launch himself at the Doctor or Clara laughably feeble, the heavy atmosphere in the room growing increasingly unpleasant. He gave up, and started to whine again.
'They're not real people! I didn't know they were! I just thought—'
The Doctor set down a final pile of blankets, apparently satisfied that was enough. 'You know,' he said, in a voice of great weariness and near infinite
sorrow. 'You know I cannot let you free. To sit here, and wait for the deaths of others, and use their remains for your own ends... You have proven yourself too dangerous to be let loose on the universe.'
'They let you out,' said Etienne sourly.
'Here is everything you need. You will protect the drawbridge: the skeletons
have done their duty well. You may build your little worlds, Etienne, on your computers; you can play in a virtual world till your heart's content, but you must never see sunlight again. I will deadlock seal this room.'
'Nooo!' said Etienne, tears now mingling with the sweat pouring down his face, his eyes darting all around looking for an escape route.
'You can take the drawbridge of course...'
Etienne shook his head frantically. 'No. No no no no.'
'Then we understand each other,' said the Doctor. 'Build virtual worlds of suffering. This one can no longer contain you.'
He moved over and spoke quietly to the skeletons piled by the drawbridge.
They rattled once, twice. The Doctor understood. He took out the remote control and, with a consoling hand on the uppermost skull, gently powered it down until they were, once more, simple piles of bones. Etienne, screaming in disbelief, followed it with his eyes, and the rest of them as they filed out, leaving him alone.
Outside, it didn't take much; a simple act of the sonic screwdriver to deadlock the door for ever. They could hear Etienne inside, cursing and yelling and screaming and banging on it; a toddler in a rage.
'But what about the... the tree,' said Clara, whose memories of exactly what
had gone on were hazy and muddled. 'Isn't it round the back of the house?'
'Go look,' said the Doctor, and Clara did, even though it was dark and freezing and once more the empty, horrible windswept plain of before - and remained so, all the way around.
'Where is it?' she asked.
'Through his drawbridge, in that room,' said the Doctor. 'He always controlled the portal.'
'And won't he go through it?'
'He knows exactly what will happen if he does,' said the Doctor. 'The instant he takes a bite of that apple, the cold wind will blow and the sun will disappear and his mind will be full of the knowledge of a universe of pain and suffering and death, and he will have to live inside that mind a long, long time.'
He picked up one of the many loose pebbles then, and hurled it with some
force at the horizon. This time, nothing rattled.
'Is that what you have?' Clara asked timidly.
He turned to her with a half-smile. 'Not quite,’ he said. 'When you gain knowledge for yourself... when you see the universe and learn about its good and its bad... you get the fairy in the bottom of the box too. You see the whole picture, not just... the entropic chronicle of perpetuity.'
Clara was still thoughtful as they stepped out in the moonlight. 'Doctor...' she said nervously. 'What are you going to do with him?'
'Oh, I expect the Shadow Proclamation have been looking for him for a long
time.' He stared back at the house, shaking his head.
'And, er, how are we going to get off this planet?'
The Doctor gave her a gentle smile. 'Very, very slowly and with great care.'
The Doctor was true to his word. First he gathered all of the remaining skeletons together. Then he sent them out with all the seedlings, to disseminate throughout the planet. He brought the bees and birds out of hypersleep and sent them forward to pollinate the seed, and recalibrated the weather centre to give them hyper-fast growing seasons, which meant it was rainy and sunny every five minutes it seemed to Clara, mostly wet.
Every time he emptied out a room, they dismantled the bones and buried them far and wide so they could fertilise the earth, until there were only two rooms left standing; Etienne's, which they gave a wide berth (it had gone very quiet: the Doctor suspected that Etienne had gone straight back into eating and playing with computers and wasn't necessarily having a much different experience to his life before, except now he was doing it virtually), and the library, tidied up, as a shelter from the rainfall.
The rain washed away the scree, and extraordinarily fast the plants began to
sprout and take hold, spread about like a desert after rain. They grew up thick and fast. Some Clara had seen before: huge, sprawling bushes of bougainvillea, in thick pinks and purples, bright and popping against the pale blue sky between showers; willows that followed the rivulets of water; sunflowers that sprang up overnight and followed the path of the sun, a banana plantation the Doctor had insisted on. And others she didn't recognise; great yawning bushes that looked like sea anemones; flame-coloured trees in bright red. Every day the landscaped changed; the scents strong on the gentle morning breeze. Vines grew up and wrapped themselves around the two remaining rooms, almost concealing their grisly origins.
Clara sat shelling peas and glanced over at the Doctor, who had taken off his
jacket in the sunshine, turned up his sleeves, and was whittling. He was humming a cheerful song of contentment as he did so. A light breeze was ruffling his hair, and she smiled involuntarily as she watched him. He looked up just at that moment and caught her eye and smiled back.
'What?'
Clara shook her head. 'It's just... I can't believe how peaceful it is here now.'
He held her gaze for a long moment. 'I know,' he said. 'But we have to move
on.'
She nodded.
'And you...' he said. 'When I was in your head...'
Even though her memories were confused, she remembered glimpses; her inexplicable fury at the ravine, and her sense of him: of pity and of shame.
'Do you still feel like that?' he persisted, obviously uncomfortable with the conversation. 'About me, you know. About what we do. I mean, because, for me.
Well. You know. Surprise! Ha!'
Clara picked her words carefully. 'I don't know,' she said, truthfully.
'Sometimes I feel that things are too hard. And sometimes I feel brave as a lion.
But I don't know why. It's like a dream I had once, that's just out of reach... but it's always with me.'
'Because I can't... I can't be a burden.’
Clara looked at him in surprise. 'But burdens can be shared,' she said gently.
'And I am... I am...'
They were interrupted suddenly by one of the taller skeletons. The Doctor had found old identity passes and names scattered about one of the rooms, but there were so many, so many, and they had not been able to give anyone a name, or a grave.
The adult skeleton before them held up his finger to indicate that he wanted
to talk, and the Doctor nodded. Clara came over to watch, as the ash scattered on the ground.
'O-N-E-T-H-I-N-G,' it said. 'T-H-E-N-G-O.'
The Doctor nodded respectfully. 'Of course,' he said. He took the skeleton's
claw in his and held it carefully. 'Thank you.'
The skull nodded.
'What?' said Clara.
'Time to leave,' said the Doctor.
The Doctor made final adjustments to the weather station to set it on a smooth path; tidied up carefully, glanced not even once at the locked bone room
sitting solitary.
'Why didn't they destroy this planet?' said Clara, as they started to move, following the long marching line of remaining skeletons, who travelled ahead.
'To have all the knowledge in the universe concentrated in such a small way. It's so dangerous. Any life form that takes it... it's dangerous for everyone. Wouldn't it be better just to destroy it?'
The Doctor shrugged. 'I don't know,’ he said quietly. 'There may come a day
when the universe needs that knowledge, when everybody needs it.'
'Who put it there?' said Clara.
'Oh, it has always been there,' said the Doctor. 'And I was just the unutterable, awful fool who told somebody.'
Clara patted his hand. 'But look at it now,' she said, indicating around them.
The fresh earth and new moss was soft under her bare feet. The tangle of growth meant the world was a riot of green and cherry blossom; long avenues of new fruit trees, some flowering, some already dropping fruit, like all the seasons come at once.
'This you can have,' said the Doctor, handing her an apple, green and red. It was sweet and sharp all at once and its juices ran down her chin. 'Anyone that lands here now... I hope there will be so many orchards, they won't find that one in a hurry.'
'That's amazing,' she said, looking round. 'But what about all the monsters?'
The Doctor took Etienne's controller from his pocket. 'Quite handy having monsters you can turn on and off at will,’ he said. 'Wish they were all like that.
But there was only one monster, really.’
'And the big snakes?'
'Oh, they're real,' said the Doctor. 'But hopefully now we've established an ecosystem, they'll be able to survive in it without being half-starved to death and furious.'
' Hopefully,' said Clara, still eyeing the trees with some nervousness. But all she could see were brilliant parrots flitting from branch to branch and, from far off, something that sounded a little like the chattering of a monkey.
'You brought monkeys?'
'Come on,’ said the Doctor. 'You don't grow this many bananas without letting in a few monkeys. That'd just be selfish.'
Finally they reached the large crevasse again that split the world in two, but it was unrecognisable. Now, a massive waterfall, formed from all the rainfall, fell over the side, a rainbow prism dancing off it. Below were fresh waters
