Tristan's Father, Part 4

"Not like you're thinking, no." I said it more sharply than I meant to as the bewildered bliss of the night before and the stranger morning after suddenly jangled me, and a giggle of terror and delight escaped my lips: the Doctor! I found I was shivering all over, listening to Peter stammer an apology in my ear and watching Michael wave me over to the yellow taxi at the curb. How could I let him go? Even just back to the TARDIS. The sure certainty rushed at me that I would not see him again.

Oh, gods, I'm being ridiculous, I admonished myself as I climbed into the cab, Michael's hand at my elbow, his handsome face quirking into a frown as he felt how wobbly I was.

"No, Peter," I said into the phone, "I'm sorry. Don't mind me, please."

"Okay..." He sounded uncertain.

"Look, I'm on my way into a meeting at UNIT about the park yesterday." Michael had given the driver our destination, and we were inching up Eighth Avenue in morning rush traffic. "You got anything at all I can bring in with me?"

"Yeah," and he was all business again -- I could hear him shuffling papers around. "I had the ME up all night doing autopsies, and she found something... Here it is: The victims all died from, well, having their midsections removed -- not blood loss, obviously, since they still had plenty of that sloshing around in them, but general shock and loss of vital organs."

"Right..."

"But she thinks they might have died anyway because they all had the same weird protein or enzyme in their bloodstream, and it was doing some strange shit to their biochemistry."

"Weird how?"

"Weird as in 'not of this Earth.'"

"Ah, this was your coroner. The one who... knows?"

"Yeah. She says that it's absolutely not like anything she's ever seen before, and probably not like anything that could have evolved on Earth. It actually crashed the PCR, which I didn't even think was possible."

"Wow. That's... weird."

"Yeah." There was a pause. "Ayren, it would be so much more helpful to both of us if I was in that meeting with you."

I sighed -- this was far from the first time we'd had this discussion. "I know. You know I've been lobbying them to bring you in. I'm not gonna let up."

"All right. Let's touch base later?"

"Of course."

Michael was grinning at me as I dropped the phone into my bag. "Poor Peter... What will he think when he learns about the Doctor?"

"Peter met him yesterday in the park, actually."

"Oh, you just couldn't wait, could you? That was cruel," he said, but lightly.

"Was it?" I thought about the look on Peter's face when I'd kissed him in greeting yesterday, and how that had been a betrayal of our friendship, which had always been purely about giving pleasure to each other, with no other complicating factors. But I'd used him then, and he'd known it. "Yes, it was, wasn't it?"

Michael's grin fell away, and he lay a gentle hand on my arm. "My God, I've never seen you like this before..."

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to recover some measure of poise, and covered his hand in mine in thanks. "The Doctor did always have a way, sometimes, of bringing out the worst in me. The best, too. But sometimes the worst."

"Well, that sounds like love, all right."

We rode in silence for a few minutes as the cab picked up a bit of speed and made all the lights between Madison Square Garden and Port Authority. We slowed again into the theater district, and Michael threw a glance at the driver -- he was chattering away on his phone, and was paying no attention to us, but Michael lowered his voice anyway.

"So," he asked with a smile, "the Doctor... what did he look like when you knew him before? It was the blond one, wasn't it? Tristan looks a lot like him."

I chuckled. "Yeah."

"But how do you know for sure he's the same man?"

How to explain it? "I... I have... ways of recognizing him that are..." That are so psychically sensual you wouldn't believe it. "...that have nothing to do with what he looks like."

"Ah, that's not too carefully vague, now, is it?" His smile turned impish and a naughty gleam came into his eye and his voice dropped to a whisper. "We're talking about an alien sex thing, right?"

I smiled in a way I hoped was mysterious and intriguing. "Maybe..."

"Oh, come on." He nudged me conspiratorially. "How alien is he?"

One thing I'd probably never get used to here was the idea that hardly anyone on Earth at this point in time had ever had sex with an alien. That just seemed silly, almost like saying that no one here had ever had sex at all. The Doctor was barely alien, at least not physically, at least not at a casual glance -- he could probably even have sex with a human without ever letting on that he wasn't human himself. He certainly was far more human than some of my previous bedmates.

But I had a mystique to maintain.

"Hey," I said, nudging Michael in return, "do I ask you about... you and George?"

"George is from Oklahoma City!" he exclaimed with a laugh, which made the driver throw a momentary suspicious glare at us in the rearview mirror. "Which is, I grant you," he continued in a whisper again, "pretty alien to a bloke from Islington. But it's hardly the same thing, is it?"

I only shook my head at him, and smiled.

***

"Primaries only," the clipboard-wielding nerd at the door to the conference room announced, blocking Michael from entering behind me. I suppose that was brave of him, because Michael had a good six inches and fifty pounds on him.

Michael just stood aside, and sighed.

"If he can't come in with me," I said, "then I'm going home."

"I'm sorry," the nerd said. His UNIT security badge read "Robert Richardson," and with his puppy-dog zeal and shiny new shoes, he looked like he was just out of whatever law-enforcement academy had coughed him up. Not unexpectedly, he crossed his arms and inched more directly in front of the door. "I have my ord--"

"Oh for Christ's sake, Richardson, let the man in." It was Elsdon Beranek, the head of UNIT-NYC, ambling down the hall with a cup of coffee in one hand and the last bite of a donut in the other.

"But he's not on the list, sir!"

El popped the pastry into his mouth, passed me his coffee cup, winked at me, and grabbed the clipboard out of Richardson's folded arms, then proceeded to make a great show of removing a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket, scrawling "Michael Leatherby" across the bottom of Richardson's list, and wedging it back into the young man's defiantly still-folded arms. "Now he's on the list."

Richardson deflated, and shuffled aside.

Inside, the room was still nearly empty, even though it was mere minutes till ten, with just a few familiar but never terribly friendly faces dotted around the enormous conference table. I took a seat on the side closest to the window facing out over Times Square thirty stories below -- it made me feel less hemmed in, somehow, to know there was all that open space so near, even if it would take jumping out the window to enjoy it. Michael arranged himself next to me, sitting tall in the chair he drew protectively closer, and threw me a sidelong glance of solidarity.

"How you doin', sweetheart?" El asked me as he took his place at the head of the table, sipping his coffee.

"I'm fine, El, thanks."

He leaned toward me with that odd expression he always wore when he looked at me, his weatherbeaten gaze shrewd but not unkind, his crooked smile gentle and wondering. He told me once that I reminded him of his daughter, who'd been killed in a car crash not long before we'd met, though of course I was barely younger than El himself... not that I looked it. But I suspected that he was actually constantly in awe of the fact that I -- strange womanlike creature from the future, mother to a half-alien son -- existed in his here and now.

"And Tris?" he asked.

"He's fine. We're both fine."

We were both so many kinds of not-fine that I could barely begin to calculate them, my son for reasons to do with his uniquely awkward adolescence, which El wouldn't care about, and me, since the day before, for reasons that El would care about very much indeed.

So I kept my mouth shut.

Still, would that everyone I was about to face was as friendly as El, or could at least muster a posture of politeness, as perhaps El was doing himself, if only as a concession to needing me.

UNIT-NYC was a much more casual affair, at least to look at, than UNIT-London was. With the British Army in charge over there, it was all full uniforms and snapped salutes and meetings that started on the dot. Here, the conference room was still not quite full at ten-fifteen, and the dress code for what was here an interagency governmental taskforce was all but nonexistent -- Michael in his crisp, elegant suit was the most formally dressed, in fact, an affectation I suspected he employed merely to stand out in this crowd. El, a senior FBI agent in jeans, cowboy boots, and a blue blazer, set the tone, and the array of representatives from all the federal departments that could be remotely considered law enforcement, national security, or diplomatic tended toward khakis and jeans and golf shirts and sweaters.

They all managed to scowl at me in a way, however, that felt formal and official.

"Can we get this thing started?" El said around ten-twenty. "Where the hell is Ada?"

"I'm here, I'm here," she huffed, hurrying in but not forgetting to throw a smile my way. Ada Olgierd, at least, didn't dislike me -- she found me and my situation genuinely fascinating, in fact, and for no motives more nefarious than her own intense curiosity. But then, her approach to UNIT was radically different from that of everyone else in the room: she wasn't terrified of the inevitability of regular contact with aliens, and had enjoyed more than a little herself. As near as I could determine from what I knew about UNIT-London from the Doctor and from my time there when I arrived alone on Earth in 1991, Ada served here in much the same capacity as the Doctor had done there in the 1970s: she was scientific advisor and resident genius. Except she wasn't from another planet -- she was from Atlanta.

And she was my friend, too.

"Okay." El laced his hands together behind his head and leaned back in his chair, which was never a good sign. "I have had the goddamn vice president's office howling at me since about five minutes after this shit went down in the park yesterday. And as much as I would love to give someone else jurisdiction over this mess, I shudder to think what that man will do the second he gets his hands on E-fucking-T -- it'll make Guantanamo Bay look like Club Med. So someone give me the bad news that this actually was E.T. and not A.Q. so I can tell the veep to go screw himself, this is our turf."

"Well," Ada jumped in before I could even open my mouth, "there was all sorts of very very very very bizarre stuff happening all over the place yesterday. I sampled extremely odd and maybe even alien rare gases in the air over the city yesterday--"

"Gases didn't kill those people," the CIA rep, Copestake, said.

"No-- well, actually, we don't know that," Ada rushed on. "Maybe the gases did kill them somehow. Anyway, they could be associated with an alien presence, or with whatever weapon was used. Or maybe the three earthquakes centered under Central Park yesterday that measured between two point one and two point three on the Richter scale were connected with whatever did kill them. Or maybe the fact that sunspot activity has been up almost thirty percent over the past year and spiked--"

"All right, Ada" -- El held up a hand -- "we get it. There's no actual, direct evidence of alien involvement?"

She sighed. "Not at the moment, no."

"There is, actually," I said.

All eyes turned to glare at me, which I tried to ignore.

"Peter Varela's coroner," I said, "found proteins in the bloodstreams of the victims that are definitely not of Earth origin."

The room exploded in my direction with shouts of exasperation from everyone but Michael, El, and Ada over UNIT's lack of control of the incident scene and why didn't we have this information first, over suspicion about where my loyalties lay -- Earth? Mars? Planet X? (someone actually said, "Planet X," and I longed to tell them about my once-and-future connections with Mars) -- and over my "collusion" with the NYPD. All the same garbage that was usually tossed into a meeting like grenades came shooting at me like bullets. It was kind of refreshing, in fact, if in a pointlessly hateful way -- at least it was honest, and not sneaky.

"That's enough!" El yelled, and the barrage cut off with barely abashed abruptness. "I'm the one who sicced Ayren on the Varela's Weird Shit Squad," he continued in a voice so low and angry the room seemed to rumble with it, "so if you want to scream about that, scream at me."

No one screamed, though Kornblut from the NSA squirmed in his seat like he wanted to.

"I didn't think so," El snarled.

"Agent Beranek." It was, inevitably, Meredith -- I could never remember whether that was her first name or her last -- the woman from the White House who despised me for reasons I couldn't fathom. This would be one of those sneaky grenades, except I could see it coming. I would have thought she'd have given up on these long ago, especially since they never had any traction with El. "I have excellent intelligence that suggests that Miss Tabeth Here" -- she always referred to me like that, Miss Tabeth Here, as if she didn't even believe that my name wasn't an elaborate hoax -- "has been engaging in an inappropriate relationship with Lieutenant Varela--"

I couldn't stop myself from barking out a laugh: If puritanism could be obscene, this was it. I knew instantly I'd regret it later, but I said lightly, "Of course I'm fucking him! Have you seen him? He's gorgeous."

Next to me, Michael intoned, "He really is," which made me laugh again.

It made Meredith even more livid, especially when it was obvious that El was struggling to smother a grin. "And," she went on, not looking at me but straight at El, "she was in the thrall of that alien Doctor for God knows how many years." Ooo, I thought, "thrall" is good. She doesn't know how right she is there. "Who knows what kind of ticking time bomb he turned her into before he dumped her here?"

I shook my head in disbelief -- hardly anyone knew the full story of how or why the Doctor and I had been separated, but this was particularly fantastic. "What on Earth are you talking about?"

Now she looked at me, with daggers. "Not on Earth. That's the problem. And then" -- she snapped to El again -- "there's that abomination of a son of hers."

It was harder to laugh this off, even if it was nothing new either. But I tried. "Say that to his face," I told her, "and he'll zap you with his laser eyes."

Meredith kept her venomous gaze squarely on El. "This isn't a joke, Agent Beranek."

"No, and it isn't funny," I said. "What does who I'm sleeping with or who my son's father is have to do with alien proteins in the bloodstreams of the victims?"

Meredith didn't turn from El. "Maybe she put them there."

"I don't believe this..." I sighed, and I was surprised to see that most of the other faces in the room, the ones who'd been shouting at me, looked as bewildered as I felt. So I focused on them. "As long as UNIT is secret and it's the NYPD publicly dealing with these things, there's no way UNIT is ever gonna be first to get its hands on evidence. Bring Varela in--"

"Ayren," El said, "you know it's not as easy as that."

"--or bring UNIT out into the open," I continued. "It's gonna happen eventually anyway--"

"You'd like that, wouldn't you?" Meredith sneered.

"It has nothing to do with what I'd like." Now I focused on El. "There are alien ambassadors at the UN -- how long can that be kept secret?"

No explosion now from the table -- El's glare ensured that -- just grumbles and mutters over what a security risk I was and why should they trust me and who knew what my agenda was and maybe Meredith was right about me being a plant of the Doctor's. I glanced at Michael for support; he smiled and nodded reassuringly.

"Ayren's right." El leaned in over the table now, his taking-command posture. "And not just because we've got spaceships with diplomatic plates parked in orbit above us. There's been a definite uptick in alien activity on Earth recently, and we're not far from the moment when it's gonna be common knowledge. I wasn't gonna share this yet, but what the hell..."

Everyone leaned in, including me: I was terrified he was about to say something about the Doctor's arrival on Earth.

"The 'terrorist bombing' of Downing Street and Big Ben in March?" El went on. "It wasn't Al Qaeda. It was aliens."

Dumbfounded silence. Then Wolski, from the Justice Department, said, "What?"

"UNIT-London has a report from an excellent source who was on the scene that they're a race called the Slitheen," El continued. "The why of it is sketchier -- so is whether they constitute an ongoing threat." El turned to me. "You ever encounter Slitheen when you were with the Doctor?"

I hadn't. "No, and I don't think he ever mentioned them."

"Well--" El drummed his fingers on the table. "--that report also includes mention of the Doctor..."

I gasped before I could stop myself -- my heart was suddenly pounding. "We get reports of the Doctor all the time," I said, forcing myself to sound far more casual than I felt. "All those conspiracy people on the Internet. When was the last actually confirmed sighting? San Francisco in 1999?"

El put on his inscrutable face. "This witness is unimpeachable: a member of Parliament. The Doctor was at Downing Street--"

"See?" Meredith hissed. "He's dangerous."

He was here? On Earth? Just a few months ago? How many other times has he been so close? I swallowed down a sob as I realized: lots of times, of course. He wouldn't have stopped visiting his favorite planet just because I was here, a bad reminder of the past and everything we'd lost.

"Ayren?" El was saying -- I got the impression he'd said it more than once.

"Sorry, what?"

Michael shifted in his chair next to me, and I knew that if El asked if I'd seen the Doctor, Michael wouldn't cover for me.

"You were in the park yesterday?" El asked me.

"Yes, I was."

"Did you see anything that looked like anything you saw when you were with the Doctor?"

This I could answer honestly. "No."

"And what's your general impression about what happened there?"

I sighed: he was asking me to boil down everything about the strangeness of life with the Doctor -- about finding oneself constantly surrounded by things you couldn't even begin to fathom and having to decide instantly whether those things wanted to kill you or wanted to be your friend -- into something they could understand. Yet I still didn't understand it even after five years with the Doctor and fifteen more since to try to make sense of it all.

It seemed strange to me that I could do this better than anyone else here, but that was the way of it.

"Well," I said, "I'm not sure that it felt like a crime scene. It was more like an accident scene. It could be that there was intelligence behind what happened, but I'm not sure if there was malice or intent to harm. Or it could be that it was some kind of creature, not a sentient being at all, some alien animal that somehow found its way here and was merely scared and confused."

Copestake snorted. "Is a monster running loose in New York any better than an intergalactic serial killer?"

"Maybe not better, but different," I said. "You don't hunt down a rabid dog the same way you hunt down a murderer."

"Rabid dogs don't stop until they're taken out," El said. "Neither do serial killers. Are we gonna see more of this, Ayren?"

"I don't know," I replied. The Doctor had said not, and maybe he was right. "I think not."

"The Doctor's the one we should be hunting," Meredith said. "He must be involved with this." A murmur of agreement ran around the table.

"None of you have ever met the Doctor." I gritted my teeth to keep my sudden anger in check. "You don't know him. If he was involved, he'd be here, in this room. You wouldn't be able to get rid of him, and you'd be complaining about how he was handing out orders like he was in command. That's what he does: he takes charge. He doesn't sneak around."

So why does it feel like that's exactly what he's doing?

***

"Thanks for coming with me," I whispered to Michael later, leaning hard into him as we waited in the corridor outside the conference room. "I always feel so... ganged up on."

His body against mine shook with gentle laughter. "You don't say..."

The door to the conference room opened and I straightened up and stepped away from Michael, lest someone accuse me of having an inappropriate relationship with him, too. The rest of the meeting filed out, all eyes studiously avoiding me, except Ada's -- she grinned at me and mimed a "phone me" -- and El's, which met mine as he sighed heavily.

"That went well," he said with a wry grin once we three were alone in the corridor.

"Just like always," I said.

"Ayren," El sighed again, "tell me you're not actually sleeping with Varela..."

"Well, sure, sometimes."

He rolled his eyes.

"What?" I shrugged. "Not at incident scenes. And why does Meredith have 'intelligence' on me, anyway? Is UNIT spying on me again?"

El's gaze flickered for the briefest moment to Michael, then back to me. "No, not that I'm aware of," he said. "You know Meredith is a force unto herself. God knows what she's up to. But Varela... that could cause problems."

I laughed in exasperation. "Only because you people are so uptight. Your culture is totally awash in sex" -- I waved to the billboards selling lingerie and beer in Times Square out the window at the end of the corridor -- "but gods forbid anyone actually gets laid once in a while. Besides, aren't UNIT and the NYPD on the same side?"

"That's debatable," El huffed. "Look, stay with Varela on this, help him if you can, and tell me everything we need to know."

"Don't I always?"

He nodded. "Yeah, you do. And when this is over, you and I are gonna sit down and talk seriously about the Doctor, and what--"

The floor jolted suddenly under our feet -- the whole building was shuddering violently.

"What the hell...?" El muttered.

Michael was instantly on alert, but there was nothing to respond to: the shaking subsided.

And then came the screams, echoing faintly up from Times Square below us. Michael and I exchanged an uneasy glance.

El laughed nervously. "No, no, it's just all those kids in the street outside that MTV thing every day."

He didn't sound like he believed himself -- those weren't fannish teenaged swoons for the pop stars who appeared in the television studio overlooking the sidewalk below us in this very building. They were screams of terror.

"No, it isn't." I gripped Michael's arm. "We have to get down there."

He nodded brusquely, with a grin of nervous anticipation, and as one we ran to the elevator, and stood there bouncing on our feet and punching the call button repeatedly, waiting impatiently for the lift's arrival. I looked back at El, still in a daze by the window.

"El," I called, "you comin'?"

He hesitated for a moment, then dashed into the elevator with us as the doors opened.

"You wanna know what life with the Doctor is like?" I asked him as we rode down. "It's about running toward the screams."

[Part 5]

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