Tristan's Father, Part 5

"Making things is good," I said, feeling like I was tiptoeing across thin ice. "I like a bit of tinkering myself. But you've got to be careful."

"But I'm not doing anything wrong!" my son exclaimed, his voice rising to an indignant adolescent squeal.

My son... I fell back to lean against the other workbench before my legs gave out under me. The rage and the frustration: why had I not expected this, to see myself so powerfully in him? A child of Gallifrey would never have dared blaze so defiant to his elder, and yet I had dared it, and been punished for it, and now hot jealousy surged in me -- Tristan was so much freer than I had ever been as a child -- and I barked a laugh I couldn't stop at the absurdity of that, of being resentful of him, who had had no more control over where he'd been born that I had had.

He misunderstood my self-deprecating snort as a different kind of reaction to what he'd said.

"They told me I could do whatever I want here as long as I don't make any trouble." He sounded scared now. "And I'm not!... Am I?"

"Trust me, mate," I told him, "you don't want them finding out what kind of trouble you're causing here."

"Why should I trust you? I don't know you. Aren't you them too?"

I stared at him, suddenly terrified that I'd ruined any chance I might have had at winning him over by barrelling into his life, however unintentionally, like an inquisitor, like an overlord -- like my own father had been. And keeping my identity secret... the longer I did that, the harder it would be to tell him the truth, and that stung hard, now that I saw myself in him, and so instantly, far more than I ever had in the children of my long-ago life, before I left Gallifrey to wander forever, children who became staid, conservative adults who were long estranged from me, were long strangers I barely recognized, and were now gone.

The crushing totality of my life seemed to have collapsed into the singularity of this one moment: I could have a future that included this miraculous child of mine, or I could have a future that did not.

"Tristan, I..." How odd that he made me reel with uncertainty just as his mother sometimes had! If not for the immediate jeopardy his tinkering was putting the city in, I'd have turned and run, and slunk like a coward to Ayren and let her do the uncomfortable job of introducing my son to his father. But there was a coward's way to stay, too. "Let's just say I'm a bit of a freelancer within UNIT. I can help you fix what's wrong here, and no one else ever need know about it."

He cowered against his workbench, half protective of his work and half thoroughly unnerved. "Really?"

The expression on his face was, again, so achingly like Ayren's had sometimes been, when I'd unwittingly pushed her into corners she hadn't even known were there, that I longed to draw him into my arms and hug him like my father had never done for me.

"Really," I said, folding my arms tight against my chest to restrain myself. "Let's start again. Tell me everything."

Tristan shrugged, and sighed, and stepped aside so that I could join him at the workbench. "It's just-- it's no big deal, really." Tristan jostled the device as if to demonstrate how harmless it was, just a shoe box crammed with circuit boards and other gizmos, all of it wired into an ordinary circa-2005 laptop computer. I didn't tell him so, but that he'd managed this with such primitive equipment was quite a big deal indeed.

"I call it a microquake generator," he said. "It causes earthquakes of magnitude 2.4 and under. Nobody feels them. Most of them can't even be measured, they're so small."

"So why generate them?" There were, in fact, many good reasons to create small artificial earthquakes, but most of those had to do with geological surveys that seemed unlikely to be of interest to anyone other than a geologist. And I did not think he was about to tell me that geology was one of his hobbies.

"I dunno. To see if I could, I guess."

"So you were just bored one day and decided to try your hand at earthquakes?"

He was silent for a long moment, ringing with hesitation, and I realized that I was actually experiencing that hesitation, that he was broadcasting his emotions to anyone able to receive them. It wasn't like Gallifreyan telempathy nor quite as strong as what Ayren had been able to do, but it was there.

Now, I knew that there was something he was afraid to tell me.

"Tristan," I said, "I promise you, I'm here to teach you, not to punish you. But you've got to tell me everything."

He laughed uncomfortably. "You're not going to like it."

"Try me."

"Well--" He cringed for a moment, and then rushed on: "I have a tap into Ada Olgierd's computer network..."

"Ada Olgierd's computer network?" I tried to sound as if I knew who Ada Olgierd was, and also as if I was stunned at both his audacity and his technical capabilities.

He sighed hugely. "Yeah."

I gazed levelly and sternly at him.

"If I promise to remove it," Tristan asked, "will you promise not to tell anyone?"

"We'll see. And you found something interesting in Ada Olgierd's computer network, did you?"

"Yeah. A few weeks ago there was an earthquake -- a natural one, a very small one -- centered under Washington Square Park, and afterward there were all these weird gases in the air there. That's the kind of thing her network is always monitoring--"

"Weird gases?"

"Yeah, like ones not usually found in Earth's atmosphere."

"Alien gases?"

"Yeah." He laughed then with genuine delight. "Why not? There's aliens here in New York now, maybe there were some a long time ago, too. I mean, did you know that Washington Square Park used to be a graveyard two hundred years ago? There's like twenty thousand bodies buried there! Maybe some of them are alien, and they're decomposing and releasing their alien gases."

I sighed. "And what if they are?"

"Well..." He shrugged. "I wanted to see if I could make it happen again."

"And you built this" -- I waved at the shoe box on the workbench -- "in a couple of weeks?"

"Sure."

Even I hadn't been quite so reckless as an inquisitive child... but then, he didn't realize how reckless he was being. It was breathtaking, if what was going on in his head was what I suspected.

I pointed to one component of his device, a gyroscope twined with filaments of gold and titanium... and now I saw for the first time more closely how it was wired up, and a new chill shot through me. "Tell me about this."

"What do you mean?"

"What does it do?" I knew what it did, saw how very much it was doing -- I wanted to know if he knew. "Why is it here? How did you design it?"

He leaned over the shoe box and rested his chin in one hand, completely flummoxed by my question. "Um, no one's ever asked me anything like that before. I dunno how I designed it. I just saw it in my head and knew it would help me."

It couldn't be... "Tristan," I said very softly, afraid to give voice to the possibility, "when you close your eyes, what do you see?"

He laughed that nervous laugh again. "Why do you ask that?"

"Tell me."

He scowled at me, pursing his lips pensively, and when I didn't break off my stare, he closed his eyes and tossed that towish mop of hair off his forehead and got as still as I was. "I see..." he whispered. "There's no words... It's like... deep spirals... no, that's not quite right either... But I don't see it, I feel it... twisting in my head..."

The shape of the Vortex. The form of eternity. He is a Time Lord.

I stumbled then, back against the wall, rushed by grief... for myself, for everything I'd lost, and for him, for everything he'd never know about life among our people... and by a sudden, urgent, fierce love for my son that I hadn't ever dared to anticipate.

And then I startled myself: Can he sense what I'm feeling? Before Ayren and since she'd been gone I'd been around only people who were blind to me in that way -- and even with her, she'd been an oasis in a desert that wasn't meant to be a desert. It was a sickness, to be so alone: it was the wrong way of things for a Gallifreyan, and it had become so normal for me that I'd forgotten what it was like not to be so isolated. I'll spoil it all if he guesses who I am...

But Tristan was lost in his own upset, not even registering mine -- and I knew that he sensed me not at all. Not fully a Time Lord, then, for all that he accidentally stumbled across the basics of temporal mechanics. Or maybe he merely wanted for training in expanding both the mathematical and telempathic ambits of his mind.

"What does it mean?" he asked in a tremulous murmur.

I couldn't stop myself. Enraged by sorrow and infuriated at myself for neglecting him for so long, I grabbed his arm and jabbed a finger at his terrible toy. "What temporal coefficient are you working with?" I demanded, knowing he wouldn't have an answer for me.

"What?" He was stunned. "Temporal what?"

"What's the Rassillonic factor of the quantum foam?" I shook him angrily, hating myself for doing it but wild with uncontrollable fury. "How are you accounting for the normal variance in Q-dimensional calculus?"

Tears of shock slid down his cheeks. "I don't know what you're talking about..."

"So you don't know what you're doing, and you don't know why you're doing it, except that it's cool?"

His whole body was shaking -- I could feel it through my tight grip on him. "I dunno..." he said in a tiny voice, his eyes full of terror. "I'm sorry..."

"Do you have any idea what you've done?" I didn't shout, but whispered instead, and I think that scared him even more.

"Temporal," he said. "That means time..." He was trying to gather his reason around his fear, and pride surged in me: this is my son, managing to think straight even when he's afraid--

Afraid of me. Shame kicked me in the gut, and I let go my clench on his arm, shaking myself now.

"I made earthquakes in other times?" he said, wonderingly.

I took a deep, calming breath. "You made timequakes, mate. That's way worse. You've done some very nasty things to the local spacetime."

His eyes went wide. "Can you fix it?"

"I can try. And you're gonna help me." I took his arm again, only slightly more gently this time, and aimed him at the stairs up and out.

*** *** ***

"I'll have him back in time for supper," the stranger with the ultra-high-security badge said as he hauled the Tabeth boy by the arm through the lobby and out the door into the street.

It wasn't there. Yet something made a little alarm ring in the man's head; something set off antenna tuned by professional paranoia. He picked up the phone...

*** *** ***

Wednesday afternoon

Ayren

Times Square was eerily quiet.

Times Square was chaos on a normal day, mobbed with tourists blocking the paths of frustrated locals; jammed with cars and taxis and pedicabs, their drivers all shouting at one another; lorded over by bored cops ignoring the lights in the intersections and directing traffic around the mysterious lane restrictions.

But now it was silent, except for the distant blare of car alarms set off by the temblor, and that was terrifying.

We rushed out of 1515 Broadway -- Michael and El and I -- into a morbid calm that was not like anything New York City was used to, but that I had encountered more than once in my journeys with the Doctor: it was the collective stunment of ordinary people unable to accept that something terrible had happened. I saw a crying woman in a business suit, carrying a briefcase, blubbering incoherently into her cell phone; I saw a man in workman's overalls striding down the sidewalk, seemingly purposefully but with a look of distracted disbelief on his face. Vehicular traffic moved through the square, but there was no angry horn-honking, no aggressive lane-shifting. It was as if indefatigable New Yorkers had given up their unbustable cool... temporarily; this had happened on 9/11, too, and it broke a few days later. But I'd only seen that on television -- I'd still been living far out on Long Island on that day, and I'd never heard the city so quiet.

There was a nexus of nonmovement across the square, in front of the Virgin Megastore, where it looked as if everyone had frozen in horror and incredulity.

"There," I pointed, and Michael and El and I dashed across the crisscrossing of Broadway and Seventh Avenue, taxis braking uncharacteristically without complaint to let us pass. El flashed his FBI badge, and Michael his nebulously federal badge -- the one that allowed him to roam the city armed without being hassled for it -- at a young uniformed cop who let out a huff of relief to see such clearly higher-ranking officials to whom to pass off her responsibility for the scene.

"He was just walking along," the cop explained -- she didn't even seem to notice the tears rolling down her cheeks, "and then he was like this."

The man lying prone on the sidewalk was in his 50s, wearing an expensive business suit, his eyes staring sightlessly up at the sky: a neat hole about eight inches in diameter had been scooped from his midsection, just like the people in the park the day before. A younger man sitting on the concrete held the elder's head in his lap, and gently stroked the dead man's hair. I pushed through the stunned mob ringing them and crouched down next to the young man.

"Who is he?" I asked the young man softly, letting my hand rest on his forearm.

"I have no idea," he said. "He was just walking along in front of me, and then he stopped for no reason, and I yelled at him because I walked into him and spilled my coffee -- you don't just stop like that in the middle of the sidewalk, you know, only stupid tourists do that."

"It's okay," I said. "Then what happened?"

The young man kept petting the dead man's hair. "He just stood there with this dumb look on his face like he didn't know what was going on. And then there was that little earthquake and totally out of nowhere all of a sudden his stomach was gone." Now he turned to look at me finally. "I didn't know New York had earthquakes."

I squeezed the young man's arm. "I don't think it was an earthquake."

"No!" he cried. "The earthquake was first, and that's what made him stop walking. And then he fell and he said, 'What the hell?' and I couldn't just leave him."

"Did you see anything?" I asked. "Like... like a laser beam or... anything that could have done this?"

He laughed, the young man: he laughed. "A laser beam? That's ridiculous."

"Okay." I stood up and looked around at the silent crowd in despair. "Did anyone see anything?" I asked of no one in particular. Dumb, terrified stares responded -- no one said a word.

What the hell is going on? I'd seen so many strange things at the Doctor's side, but never anything so seemingly senseless or random.

I pulled out my phone and called Peter, and he answered on the second ring.

"Ayren," he said, like he was in the middle of something else.

"You need to get your team to Times Square," I said.

"Ah, Christ, I'm already here. Tell me you're not in the middle of this. Where are you?"

"In Times Square."

"Damn. I don't see you. Where are you?"

"In front of the Virgin Megastore. There's a body here. With a big hole in it."

"Shit. Here too."

"Where?"

"In front of The Lion King." That was three blocks below me, and just three blocks, in the other direction, from Peter's HQ on West 39th Street -- no wonder he was on the scene so quickly.

An unbidden hunch welled in me. "There will be two more bodies. In the same configuration as in the park."

"Like in the corners of a square."

"Yeah, I think so."

"Shit."

I had never worried about Peter before, but something made me suddenly scared for him. "Be careful," I told him.

He laughed, a nervous twitter. "You too."

I'd barely hung up on him when my phone rang back: it wasn't Peter but from a source the phone couldn't ID. "Private," it said. I almost ignored it, but then the same intuition told me to answer. It was the Doctor.

"Ayren, where are you?" he asked.

I couldn't help but laugh like Peter did. "In Times Square. That thing you said couldn't happen again--"

"I know," he snapped.

"Where are you?"

"I'm in the TARDIS. I'm trying--" He swore under his breath, a Gallifreyan oath I'd heard him utter only very rarely, in extreme circumstances. "Get out of there! It's not safe--" And the call cut off.

The Doctor! The Doctor wouldn't lie. The Doctor wants me safe. The Doctor-- My gaze sought out El and Michael, talking to the young cop, and I jumped over the dead man on the sidewalk to rush up to them and grab their arms and whisper urgently, "We have to evacuate--" and then the ground was shaking again, the whole city seeming to emit a low desperate moan, and Michael and El and I had to cling to one another just to retain our footing. And people were already frozen but my eyes went automatically to one woman who seemed even more still than the others, her mouth forming a tiny O of surprise, and it seemed she wasn't even moving to breathe...

She was standing there whole and intact one moment, her eyes riveted on me, and the next, she was looking down at herself, her hands grabbing at the empty space where her stomach and intestines and womb had been. "Oh, no," she said in a small, astonished voice, and just stood there, dying.

I tried to break free of Michael and El to run to the woman but they held my arms tight, and I yanked at them with a cry, and then I heard Michael gasp. There was a... thing shimmering in the air before us, a sinuous, tentacly thing that had materialized out of nowhere and was attached to nothing, and yet it was waving in the suddenly tropical-steamy air. It was as big around as a man, but it was obviously only one tiny appendage of something much, much larger, and it seemed to be heaving toward Michael and El and me, and time seemed to slow down.

I stood dumbfounded, riveted to the sidewalk as Michael, in a crawl of a whirl that was all smooth, soldierly professionalism, unbuttoned his jacket and whipped out his pistol and aimed it square at that enormous, grasping member glistening with slime that dripped all over the concrete as it hunted out human bodies... my body! As if it had eyes it focused on me, jerking in evil alien thrusts straight at me, and I couldn't move, but I sensed Michael's head snap around to me. "Ayren, get down!" he shouted, and I heard it like he was under water in a dream, or I was, and when I didn't move he planted his free hand in the middle of my chest and shoved me out of the thing's path just as it was about to impale me.

I fell down and against the building, whacking the back of my head on the marble facade and banging my tailbone with a wicked rattle on the concrete sidewalk, and I may have screamed through my daze as my eyes refocused in time to see Michael bend impossibly backward, his arms pinwheeling, but the tentacle missed spearing him, too, and then he was twisting effortlessly back to his feet and emptying his gun into the thing, and then Peter was there too, his weapon raised and his bullets flying and the cracks of the gunshots echoing among the tall buildings and the screams, and I found myself marveling with a small, mystified laugh that I had come to be surrounded in this new life of mine by men with guns, because I hated guns, hated everything about them, and it was on that last terrible day with the Doctor when he had forced a gun into my hand that perhaps finally broke me even before I thought he had abandoned me...

And then the end of the tentacle was on the ground in front of me, maybe six feet of it, twitching and oozing gelatinous purple blood from the ragged shot-up end, and I giggled because it looked unexpectedly like an enormous severed green penis, and then I cried as Michael and Peter came to me and knelt over me and cooed and soothed and asked me if I was okay, these two beautiful men I loved so very much in such profoundly different ways.

"I think I hit my head," I said. And I sobbed again. "I want the Doctor."

Peter was on his feet again and barking into a radio for paramedics asap, and Michael placed the back of his hand against my forehead like I might have had a fever and I wondered why he did that except it did feel nice, and he said to Peter, "I think she means the Doctor... Tristan's father," and Peter scowled and shouted into his radio again and said to Michael, "She's disoriented, she's concussed."

But Michael was right, I wanted the Doctor, my Doctor, my cheerful, carefree, golden Doctor who shone like the sun and beamed like a god, and I wanted the me that I had been with him, cheerful and carefree too, and I wanted the life that we had had. I wanted to go to the Taanutian royal wedding again, somewhen in the future in some distant quadrant of the galaxy, where for days and days and nights and nights we danced and partied and ate and drank and made love in decadent luxury, and I wanted to spend another summer on Long Island alone on the beach with him and his private way of gazing at me that made my insides liquefy with a deep desire it wasn't possible he could satisfy and yet always did, and I wanted to be that happy again, and instead I was just sitting on a dirty sidewalk with my head ringing and tears leaking from my eyes.

***

"Call Ada and tell her to get down here," I remembered telling El numbly at one point, as I stared at the dismembered tentacle on the sidewalk in front of me. "She should collect this before Varela gets here."

"I'm already here, sweetheart," Peter said with a laugh. "But you can have your monster bit if you want it."

***

By the time a harried young paramedic got to me -- there were many people much more badly hurt than I was -- I was fully alert again and embarrassed by my tears and my secret sentimentality.

"No, I'm fine, I didn't lose consciousness," I insisted to the paramedic, who flicked the beam of a penlight into my eyes and gave me a cold pack to hold on the lump on the back of my head.

"She was disoriented--" Peter said.

"But I did not lose consciousness," I said.

"No!" I heard the roar, and recognized the Doctor's new voice, and when he pushed his way through the milling mob I got a psychic smack of his frantic worry -- he'd spotted Peter in the crowd, I think, and then the flashing lights of ambulances, and feared I'd been seriously hurt, or even killed.

It was Michael who caught him bodily in the midst of his headlong hurl toward me and tried to calm him down. "She's fine, she just banged her head, she's fine," Michael assured him, as the Doctor struggled to free himself from Michael's strong grasp, glaring at Michael all the while, for of course he did not know Michael at all, even though Michael knew the Doctor from his surveillance video.

And I was fine, although I wasn't sure I wanted to stand up just yet, but I tried, Michael and the Doctor supporting me on either side, and Michael leaned in and whispered in my ear, "El's gone, he went back upstairs with Ada," which I'd forgotten I'd even had to worry about. Relief and vertigo dizzied me, and they saw it, Michael and the Doctor, and they eased me back down to the sidewalk again.

"Sorry," I said. "I need a few more minutes."

The Doctor sat down next to me, leaning against the building and pulling his long legs up almost to his chest. "Is this what you're getting up to these days?" he asked with a grin. "Chasing monsters and giving yourself concussion?"

My still-muzzy head was keeping me from figuring out how what he had been doing on the TARDIS could be connected to what I had witnessed. So I focused on what was right in front of me: him. He was wearing blue jeans now, and a red sweater, and the same black leather jacket, and the same black Doc Martens. It was bizarre.

"Look at you," I said, trying not to sound as shaky as I felt. "What's wrong with you?"

"What?"

"Jeans, again?" I plucked at the fabric at his thigh, teasing, but only barely. "You look like... you belong here."

"Jeans! They're humanity's greatest invention. Comfy, long-wearing, they fit in everywhere. People will be wearing them millions of years into the future."

Ah, I thought, so he's still using the silly-ass blabbering as a way to deflect actually talking about something. He hadn't usually tried that tactic on me, though.

"But that's it," I said. "You never wanted to fit in before. Passing for local? Since when?"

He frowned. "It's just a pair of jeans, Ayren."

But it wasn't. Even through my wooziness, I knew this was not the Doctor I'd known. He wanted to blend in. He wanted to disappear. That wasn't like him at all.

[Part 6]