Tristan's Father, Part 8

I could have written anthropological papers about how current events are shaped by mass psychosis that no one would understand for a thousand years. The watered-down versions of my future-historian perspective on now that I posted anonymously on the Internet caused consternation enough among those who were moved enough to comment on them.

But Nate Steele was real, and the New York Post was real, and the smirk he'd thrown my way in the media room at Midtown South had been real. I'd accompanied Peter to his impromptu press conference on my way out of his HQ, without any sense of urgency to stay and watch -- I'd learned that what was important, in the larger scheme of things that UNIT charged me to keep an eye on, was not what Peter said here but what version of what he said ended up on TV and the Internet later... and I would watch for that on TV and the Web later. But Steele was there, among the mob of TV cameras and newspaper reporters and respected bloggers, and when he saw me enter behind Peter, an unpleasant grin lit up his face, and when he caught my eye, the grin became that slimy sneer of his... with a lot more spine behind it than it usual had. Steele always fancied he'd happened onto something sensational about me, though a lack of surety tempered his arrogance -- but all of a sudden there was a new confidence in his sneer, and that terrified me.

Now, I couldn't help glancing over my shoulder as I strode up Seventh Avenue toward 1515 Broadway, feeling like I was stumbling all the way. The streets were eerily empty for a Wednesday afternoon, so many people having been scared off the island or into the safety of indoors by earlier events, but I felt nonexistent eyes on me anyway. Steele had rattled me like never before, particularly when I recalled with a jolt that Michael had photographed him lurking around outside my house that morning, and that Steele had surely seen the Doctor leaving -- there was something ominous in that, and I wasn't quite sure what yet.

I laughed at myself, humorlessly, as I walked, remembering how I would have welcomed media attention once, for a brief period after I was first abandoned on Earth in 1991. Because I had been separated from the Doctor once before, just after we'd met, and he'd found me, dumped in 1930s England, because of a photograph in a newspaper. And I had thought, back in 1991 -- and in England again! the Master was nothing if not predictable -- to replicate that on a larger scale. The story of a woman from future -- and I could have proven it! -- with a half-alien baby! It would cause a sensation that would surely catch the Doctor's attention, from wherever and whenever he was certainly scouring Earth media for evidence of me. I would be rescued!

Of course, the idea that he wasn't looking for me at all would never have occurred to me. And still, Miranda, the UNIT psychologist who listened to me rail and sob and was so kind to me even though she couldn't have understood half of what I told her, she'd made me understand why media attention would be a very bad idea for me, and worse for Tristan, who was just an infant then.

Now, it could be very much worse.

This paranoia was infecting everything I thought about. There was something about the cop who'd driven me home earlier that was nagging at a corner of my mind... something he'd said wasn't right, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it. Or there was nothing there, most likely, and I was inventing something nefarious.

And the funeral on Saturday... I called Peter's cell phone, knowing it would be ringing alone on his desk in his empty office, probably, with him still at his press conference. I left a voicemail: "How come there's a funeral already on Saturday? Why are you releasing the bodies from yesterday? Aren't they part of an ongoing investigation? Aren't you worried about evidence being lost or destroyed?"

I hung up before I realized I'd barked the message, before I realized I had said nothing pleasant or even mannerly to this man who was always tolerant and patient with me, even though I knew he found me odd and probably more trouble than I was worth.

I didn't deserve any of the people who were kind to me...

At 1515 Broadway, I was profoundly glad to encounter no one at all between the security guards in the lobby -- who were merely rent-a-cops serving the entire building, with no notion of what, precisely, the neatly dressed, slightly wonkish people were doing on the twenty-fifth through thirty-second floors -- and Ada's lab on twenty-seven. The lack of uniforms and military procedures made it surprisingly easy for UNIT to hide in plain sight in New York.

Ada was bent over a worktable where the man-sized severed tentacle lay splayed, its innards glistening in the harsh laboratory lighting, its scalpeled skin pulled taut by surgical clamps. "Oh, Ayren!" she exclaimed, looking up when my ID card slotting through the reader buzzed me in. "C'mere, c'mere!"

It suddenly occurred to me that she and Tris were getting along so well recently because she had retained, well into her thirties, her adolescent enthusiasm about everything... and especially about the extraordinary things that had become routine, even tedious, for most UNIT personnel, and certainly for me.

"Look at this!" she cried, waving me over. "It's amazing! Ohmygod, I've never seen anything like this!"

"What is it?" I asked, smiling, leaning over her and over the half-dissected tentacle-- and then the smell struck me. "Ugh!"

"I know!" she cooed. "Isn't it awesome?"

"It smells like sewage." I slapped a hand over my mouth and nose, and talked around it. "No, like... like rotting fruit."

"It's this, I think," and she pointed to a milky fluid pooling on the table near the intact end of the tentacle. "Watch." She scooped up something that looked like a soldering iron and squishily prodded around inside the tentacle -- and with an electrical zap and a momentary stench of burning meat, a slender member shot out from the intact end of the severed limb, and from that spurted a dollop of the viscous grayish liquid.

"Oh my gods," I gasped.

"It's okay," Ada soothed. "It's just, you know, reflexes and stuff. It's definitely dead."

"No, it's not that--"

"You know what it makes me think of?" Ada could barely contain her giggle.

"Yes, I do," I snorted. "Ada, after I hit my head, I was a little bit dazed, and while I was sitting there on the sidewalk, looking at this thing twitching in front of me... it made me laugh because I thought looked like a big penis."

"I know, right?"

"But, Ada," I said, low and serious, "what if that's exactly what it is? What if it was trying to impregnate those people?"

"Yuck," she moaned. "With what?"

I shrugged. "With more of itself, presumably."

"But... so... then... what stopped it?"

A chill shot through me. "Nothing. I mean, this one was stopped because Peter and Michael shot it. But the others... Peter said everyone who died had gotten stabbed by one of these things."

Ada was shaking her head. "No, that doesn't make sense. If this creature was looking for incubators for its babies, why would it then kill those incubators?"

And I knew. "It didn't. Something else killed them."

"Huh? Who? How?"

"I don't know how..."

A nervous grin spread across Ada's face. "But you know who." It wasn't a question.

I nodded: someone who knew that letting more of these things hatch on Earth was worse than stopping them, even if it meant the only way to stop them was killing the hosts.

She huffed an excited breath. "Him?"

I nodded again. I couldn't say his name. Oh, Doctor...

"What do I tell El?"

"Nothing," I whispered. "Don't tell him anything yet."

She thought about that for a minute. "Okay." She was silent for another long moment while we both stared at the dead tentacle. "Ayren... tell me he isn't as bad as these things..."

"Ada," I replied, "are you free Saturday night? I'm having a little party. There's someone you need to meet..."

*** *** ***

48.4 hours earlier (Earthtime: Monday 5:51pm Eastern)

The Doctor

It was as Tristan was slouching up the ramp to the console that the TARDIS breathed a little telepathic sigh at his presence, like a welcome-back, like a where-have-you-been.

If I'd been alone, I'd have keeled over and sobbed, but if Tristan hadn't been there, the TARDIS wouldn't have sighed... But how? Tristan was saying something to me -- his words didn't register. I was drowning in a sensation that overflowed from yet another small corner I'd forgotten Ayren had once filled: Ayren's aura, suffused through the psychic atmosphere of the TARDIS, and now Tristan's. Rougher and angrier, unripe and dilute, but much the same as hers! The TARDIS, with its dim light of sentience and feeling, had embraced Ayren, loved her perhaps because it loved me and I loved her, or simply loved her on its own. And it had missed Ayren. And now it recognized Tristan as her child... as our child!

"...go home now?" Tristan was asking, slumping against the console.

I leaned heavily on the railing, and he mistook my upset for anger.

"I guess not," he sighed.

I moved to the console, desperate not to stagger and just about managing it. "No. Er. We have to... trace your timequakes." On automatic, I set instruments to analyzing data. "To see how far back they go. How much damage you've caused."

He just frowned and cast his gaze down at his trainers. And his sorrow and regret flowed through me. It was warm like a hug, not his pain but his presence.

I closed my eyes, savoring the memories of how filled with tenderness and company the TARDIS had been with Ayren onboard. Even when we shouted at each other.

We'd often retired together in the evening, to her room or mine, to talk or to Share or to love, but her biological cycles were so different from mine. All those late nights while she slept and I was awake alone, tinkering in one of the labs or exploring the libraries for a book to bring back to bed or simply wandering the TARDIS reacquainting myself with its secrets... I had felt Ayren near even then. And when I returned to her and curled around her, it was almost as if I'd never been gone.

And then she was torn from me -- and from the TARDIS -- and there was nothing but searing cold and emptiness aboard, and for too long a time, the ship's usually calming environment held no succor. It had mourned her, too.

A chime from the console brought me back, and the TARDIS suddenly felt cold again. "No no no..." Oh, Tristan, what have you wrought?

"What is it?" he asked.

"Do you know what happened 250 million years ago?"

He shifted uncomfortably, his gaze turning terrified and intrigued at the same time. "No."

"Ninety-five percent of all life on this planet went extinct. Do you want to know why?"

"I don't know if I do, actually..."

This was an attempt at bravado, and it did not amuse me. "Oh, you're gonna see it, mate." The Permian-Triassic extinction was a mere hop from the early Industrial Revolution, and we were there in moments. I dug up two breather masks from under the console and tossed him one -- he caught it instinctively, but it might as well have been a grenade I'd thrown at him, for the look of horror on his face.

"Put it on," I said.

Pangaea was a sparse, unfinished-looking landscape at its best, and it was not at its best on the particular day I dragged Tristan out into. The skies above the blasted desert were blackened by throngs of monsters that could be called insectile only as filtered through the limited acuity of chrononormatives such as humans and even Gallifreyans. Each of the things was the size of an orbital shuttle... at least the parts that were open to our perception. The horrid thrum of their wings was deafening, but worse was the sucking sound that came with their attacks: with a great inrush of air, one of the fiends materialized so close to us that even I started. But it was only interested in the squealing protomammal it crouched over, the one it swiftly impaled with a fat tentacle that dematerialized in a blur as it punctured the animal's midsection and withdrew again without appearing to do any damage. Then it scooped up the screaming beast and disappeared again in an enormous pop of dimensionally disturbed air.

I looked at Tristan: he was backed against the TARDIS, his eyes wide with fear and near to hyperventilating, so heavy was his breathing behind his mask. "It didn't kill it?" he heaved.

"No, it didn't." I struggled to keep a quaver from my voice: these things had been the stuff of the nightmares of my childhood, even as players in the stories of Time Lord adventures from the time before the Seclusion. "The animal is incubating the next generation, hundreds of them in its belly now. The baby monsters will eat their way out."

"Ugh."

"And each of those babies will spawn thousands more within a matter of days. The infestation here is just beginning. These" -- I waved at the swarm above -- "are little ones."

Tristan moaned.

"Some cultures call them the Horden, others the Infectivora Pestilence. The Time Lords knew them as blastavia cosmiatos, and only the Time Lords could stop them when they swarmed though this arm of Mutter's Spiral."

"How did the... er, Time Lords? How did they kill these things?"

I took a deep breath behind my mask, glad of the bracing extra oxygen. "They can't be killed. They straddle temporal dimensions. They're here and not here at the same time, and no moment of time can ever see them end."

"I don't understand..."

"Earth was low on the Time Lords' priorities for containing them. Dozens of world with advanced civilizations had already been destroyed, and dozens more were threatened. Earth was just an evolutionary playground at this point. Thirty million years it took for the planet to recover a semblance of biodiversity--"

"How did the Time Lords stop them?!" Tristan was shaking: he was beginning to suspect...

"The Time Lords hunted down every last damned one of the things and imprisoned them in chronic hystereses. That's a sort of time loop. A chronic hysteresis goes on forever, recycling one chunk of time over and over. Unless someone unlocks it. The Horden would have been locked up for all eternity. Except you, with your little toys and your little timequakes, you rattled the cages. Maybe opened a couple. Who knows how many. All it takes is one, though."

Tristan tore his mask off and keeled over and retched into the Pangaean sand. I let him.

"If the Time Lords were still around, they could slap a chronic hystersis around the whole ruddy planet. The Earth'd be consumed, but maybe that's what you stupid bloody apes deserve. But at least they could keep it from spreading. If the Time Lords hadn't been destroyed themselves, that is."

Tristan, still kneeling next to the TARDIS, muttered something I couldn't quite hear over the dreadful noise of the swarm.

"What's that, mate?" I said, horrified at how chipper I sounded through my bone-deep shock.

He spat into the dirt and coughed as the primeval air started to sear his lungs and fitted his mask back over his face. "Isn't there anything we can do?"

I shook my head. "I have no idea, Tristan. I really don't."

*** *** ***

Wednesday evening

Ayren

Il Bastardo was deserted on this beautiful spring evening -- when the weather was warm enough for tables to be set out on the sidewalk, that usually meant those tables would be crowded. But tonight the Doctor and I had our pick of seats, and I chose a place for us where I could keep an eye on the TV over the bar inside, just beyond the thrown-open window-walls of the restaurant. Behind the bar, Giovanni, the regular evening bartender, nodded at me, and I nodded back, which meant The usual, please. Which Carla, the regular evening waitress, brought to us, a bottle of dry white Italian wine.

"Crazy, isn't it?" she said as she settled us in, inclining her head toward the TV. "I saw that cute cop boyfriend of yours on there earlier." She threw a curious glance at the Doctor and quirked an approving smile at me. "Aliens, huh? Crazy."

"Aliens," I echoed with a doubtful cast in my voice, and now the Doctor, who'd been following us with interest, averted his eyes and bit back a grin.

Then she was gone. Malcolm lay at my feet and huffed a bored sigh at the bowl of water Carla had brought him. The Doctor leaned back in his chair and sipped his wine and gazed at me and exuded something very like the contentment he had used to relax effortlessly into with me, and I wanted to hit him for daring to let himself enjoy that old, familiar, easy comfort when he wouldn't let me do the same.

"So, about those people you killed, Doctor..."

I didn't say that. But it had been all I could think about since I'd walked, almost in a daze, home from Ada's lab, found the Doctor exploring my bookshelves, and dragged him (and Malcolm) out for dinner. Of course it wasn't murder, of course he had the very best of reasons for doing what he did. So why not tell me?

"Tell me a story about Tristan," he said.

"What?" I was startled, but not for the reason he believed.

"I know. It's not fair of me to ask, is it? After all these years..."

I sighed, not knowing where to begin, though I'd been waiting for him to ask about his son since he arrived the day before. "He's like you in a lot of ways. He's smart -- he's so smart. Scary smart. They're terrified of him at the UN, I think..."

He grimaced. "Don't talk about them right now."

I nodded. Malcolm sighed again, and leaned heavily against my leg, and that reminded me... "Tris is smart, and he's got a strange sense of humor. But when he was little... well, every fixation that little children have was amplified in him..." I laughed, remembering the beautiful, demanding infant who had so exhausted me, particularly in those early days of my grief over losing his father. He'd been able to cry out an insistent ma at six months, with adamant nos and gimmes not long after. And later came the truly clever wordplay regarding every concept connected to the bathroom.

"Tris was about three and half when we moved from London to Long Island. He'd been begging for a puppy for as long as he could talk. And he was talking at six months, so..."

"That's rather precocious, isn't it?" the Doctor asked.

"Oh, you have no idea." I closed my eyes for a moment in sympathy with my decade-ago self and her sleepless nights and long days filled with a genius toddler's endless inquisitive questions and nonstop commentary on everything. "I think the first time he really left me alone for five minutes was when we got Malcolm."

The dog perked up at the sound of his name, and rose shakily to his arthritic legs. "Do you remember that, Malcolm?" I said to the animal, stroking the soft fur of his head. "Do you remember running on the beach with Tristan when you were both babies?"

The dog panted happily, lay his chin adoringly on my knee, and gazed up at me in bliss. Oh, to be that content! And I was, once...

I looked up at the Doctor to find him gazing at me in almost the same way. The bastard.

"Anyway," I sighed, "there was more room on Long Island than we had in London, so we got the dog. And I told Tris he could name the dog anything he wanted."

The Doctor smiled. "He did not spontaneously come up with 'Rassilon,' I take it."

"No. Tris was three. He may have been brilliant, but he was still obsessed with the same things that all three-year-olds are obsessed with. He wanted to call the dog Poopyhead."

"Ah."

"Mmm. I told him that we would not be calling the dog Poopyhead. So then he suggested Malcolm."

The Doctor shook his head, quizzical.

"It was Tris's idea of a joke, you see. Malcolm had been the name of our bodyguard in London, and, um..." I laughed. "Well, he was kind of a shithead." Not the least of which was for not coming with us to the States after he and I had been sharing a bed for the previous year.

With a small sigh and a sorrowful little smile, the Doctor stared away down the empty sidewalk, sipping his wine quietly. After a few silent minutes, he said: "This kind of thing doesn't-- didn't-- doesn't happen on Gallifrey."

"What? Kids don't want to name their dogs Shithead?"

I said it lightly, because I could see how distressed he was, suddenly, but it didn't help: his gaze was solemn and sad when it met mine again. "Children aren't nurtured and cherished so much as they're... cultivated: planted and tended and pruned, and the deformed ones get weeded out, one way or another. No one tells funny stories about what Junior got up to today..."

In the five years we were together, he'd never talked much about his home, for all the other intimacies we'd shared -- I'd never talked much about my home, either, so I didn't find that particularly odd. But he'd told me enough that I knew he traveled not merely for adventure but to escape a culture he found stifling.

But he'd run away from us as well, because we would have stifled him too, and I knew I'd never forget that, even if I someday found I could forgive it.

"You missed a lot," I said softly, pointedly. "You missed a lot of really amazing things."

Even though he wouldn't Share with me, my mind had been casting itself gently out toward his all along, as an unconscious, instinctive thing, and I felt him swell, on the inside, in a way only I could perceive, with something like grief. It was, I sensed, a particular sorrow he'd lived with for a long time, it was so worn-down shiny from overworry. So he's regretting not being here for us. But not enough to come back before now.

"I don't know how to be the kind of father that Tristan needs," he said. "But I'd like to try. If you'll let me."

And now he wanted to just jump back in? This cavalier selfishness of his! He'd always been this way, but I'd never noticed it when I'd been inside his bubble with him. Now, it made me want to hurt him.

"You haven't even met him. Maybe you won't like him."

Now he laughed, without humor, as if I were misunderstanding him for some reason I couldn't grasp -- we were such strangers now, and that stung anew. "How could I not like him? He's our child..."

Now he's our child? Now that it's convenient for you, you mean.

"Tristan already has two excellent father figures in Michael and Peter," I said. That was true: From what I'd seen of the people here and now, my son could not have had two better examples of what it meant to be a good, decent man in this place and time. If Tristan turned out like either of them, I'd be very happy.

The Doctor said nothing.

I took a gulp of my wine and looked away down the street. "They love him, they spend time with him... And Tristan adores both of them."

"I see." His voice was a small, quavering whisper the likes of which I'd never heard from him before.

I couldn't torture him any more. "But they can only teach him how to be a human man. Only you can teach him about the other side of who he is. He needs that."

He let out a deep breath, and nodded. "I'd like to get to know him. I won't let you down again. Or him."

Yes, you will.

We sat in silence for another few minutes, sipping our wine, until the Doctor asked, "Ayren, why do you have a bodyguard?"

(to be continued)