Doctor Who_ Beltempest Part 23

Did it matter anyway?

Did anything matter beyond this moment?

Denadi cupped his hands around a seagull. He wanted to see it heal. He wanted to see the miracle of life one last time. One last time before - - the sun swelled suddenly.

Then just as suddenly contracted, sheets of flame darkening to black incandescence, invisible, ghost radiance, a final birthing scream.

His time had run out.

Amused at the ironic contradiction, Denadi cried as he let the seagull loose. He stared up at the sun, wanted to scream, realised he already was.

Then the shock wave ripped across him and there were no more desires, or wants, or needs or confusion.

Only life.

Normal, ephemeral life.

A life Saketh could never accept.

She watched the fireworks from the cruiser nervesphere. The Shockwave smashed against the fleet. Ships collided. She heard screams. Or imagined them. Or screamed herself.

Ships burst, emptying their human cargo into the void.

Beside her Smoot braced himself against the captain's podium and remained motionless, silent. Fool. Robot. How could he remain unmoved by this moment? She knew why their marriage had never worked out. This was just further proof. He was an unfeeling, incapable, militaristic idiot without a gram of human sensitivity in his entire body. She looked at him angrily, wanting to scream at him, wanting to shout, to blast some feeling into him, to let him see, just for a moment, what life - any life, however short or long - was really all about. What the stakes were. What the rewards were. If you just took a chance.

He wascrying.

Crushed, she closed her mouth.

She just watched him.

It was the birth of something new. Something she had thought she had seen before but in truth had only been lying to herself about.

She reached out and took his hand. 'Either I'm just about to make the second biggest mistake in my life,' she shrieked above the racket made by the dying ship.'Or -'

And that was as far as she got before the sun exploded, and the largest force short of a full-blown nova ever witnessed reduced the balance of the fleet and every living thing within it to its component molecules.

Eternity was banished in a heartbeat.

From the open door of the TARDIS - freshly recovered from an infant ring system now orbiting Belannia VI - Sam watched the red star swell to blinding incandescence.

Fire gave birth to new life.

The light bathed the thousands around her, the billions more she could not see, the billions every one of them could no longer contain within their bodies.

Sam wanted to watch what happened but it all took place on a level beyond the perception of human eyes. The second most significant thing she would ever experience and she could not sense it in any way. Sam tried to decide how she felt about that. Then she decided that, far from bringing the answers, growing up simply showed you there were more questions than you could ever have imagined as a child. She wondered if she would ever find answers to even some of them. She wondered if and when she would ever get to drive that red car.

She didn't know.

After a while she realised that not knowing was part of growing up too.

She turned to go into the TARDIS - then paused. The TARDIS. She'd only really thought about it as a method of conveyance... like a car, say. Beyond this she'd never considered the implications of this peculiar blue box with a universe inside. Indestructible. That's what the Doctor had called it when she had asked how it survived the destruction of a moon. Indestructible. Eternal. Like she was herself? She puzzled over the potential similarities for a moment - a moment that, perversely, seemed to last forever. Her mind filled with questions... no, not questions... hints... teasing glimpses... the shadows of puzzles mapped onto the future... she shook her head - then continued her move into the TARDIS. The Doctor was waiting with answers to questions she had not yet even learned to ask.

'And I thought babies came with storks,' she giggled with a last look back at the tumultuous sky, and beyond, to the worlds even now being rebuilt by people who had found - and lost - the G.o.d within themselves.

As she had lost the G.o.d within herself?

As the blue wooden doors closed behind her, she glanced at the Doctor and grinned. 'Come on, Doctor, cheer up. I'll make you some breakfast. How about a little ham and eggs? I hear the green ones are very nice.'

She laughed - too loud and too long He didn't join in.

Later, she placed the tip of her finger against the hot grill, suffering the pain gladly because it was the sign that would tell her about the future. The future and her place in it.

She waited for the wound to heal.

Epilogue.

Ex-navy Captain Ruth.e.l.le Bellis stared out at the landscape of Farnham's World. Above her, four crescents shone - new worlds blanketed by the night, a sky rippling with sheets of light. A summer storm to rank in history, its birth had changed the face of a solar system for ever.

As her life had changed.

Changed with the loss of her son, her grandson.

Both gone, swept away by the storm.

But people change. People adapt. They grow. And so she had come here. A new life. A new future.

And regrets?

Only one. One she could do nothing about now, or ever again. Something precious lost, never to be found.

Something she would have to leave behind if she was to move on.

Ruth.e.l.le Bellis lifted the six-month-old orphan she had come here to adopt. It was a strong child, born of a strong world. It would need a strong parent. A good start in life. A kick in the right direction.

It had been a long time. Her body would remember.

Goodbyes over, she turned to walk back across the fields, back past the hill-sized machines already imposing human will upon intractable rock, back to First Town. Back to her new home and her new life.

She almost b.u.mped into a strange man wearing a strange look and a frock coat. His hair was as wild as his eyes - wild but somehow gentle.

'Do I know you?'

'I saved your life. Twice, I believe. I thought you'd be needing this.'

He held something out to her. Hefting the child into one arm, she took the object from him. It was a small sliver of paper, grimy, crumpled. A photograph. Her son and grandson.

Her last regret, now at last made whole.

'How did you know?'

His voice was quiet. 'Believe me, I know what it's like to lose someone you love.'

She looked up through tears of memory but the strange man was gone. Something made her glance upward then, searching for the triple crescents of the new planets, the new planets and their single moon.

They were gone too.

Even stars die.

They may grow old, they may seem inconceivable when held against the flickering candle of our own existence, yet they too have lives that are shaped by the same universe, the same immutable laws as are our own lives.

In the measure of Deep Time the brief moment of existence of all the stars in the universe is as the moment a b.u.t.terfly lives compared with all the summers that will ever be. For the red giant, galactic summer is over and winter is approaching for a second time. Its hydrogen fuel long since exhausted, this old, mad sun has consumed its inner worlds and barely noticed their absence. Burning helium now as a lingering precursor to death, the red giant prepares to shrug off its outer mantle of remaining hydrogen and take its remaining family of planets with it into oblivion.

Within the star, a schism: its core shrinking and growing ever hotter even as its outer layers expand and cool. Soon now will come the moment of death, of explosion - the surviving solar matter burning in a tiny incandescent lump at the heart of a nebula composed of the tattered shreds of its own corpse.

Yet from death comes life. A truth unchanging while there is yet energy in the universe.

While the red giant continues slowly to die, life on its many worlds continues to grow and evolve.

It is a process observed fleetingly by four planet-sized ma.s.ses as their divergent orbits carry them beyond a solar system now flourishing with the new life they have inadvertently made possible.