Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures - Bernice Summerfield [072] - Oblivion by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1998-03-27T23:00:00+00:00

20

PAST TIMES CATCHING UP

The first thing to do was get off the street, to find somewhere to hole up and hide. The world they were in might have been different from the ones they had known, but in immediate terms they could feel and touch and taste it, and to be hurt or killed here would no doubt be as painful, inconvenient and final whether the world it happened in was ultimately real or not. Avoiding the Patrols and the heavy armoured caterpillar-treaded prowl cars was easier than they had expected. The darkness was one factor, but the far more decisive factor was that the forces of this world seemed to be innately geared towards an utterly predictable populace – whether of the dronelike, psychically cowed City or the savage, fundamentally ignorant and so effectively stupid Underclass.

The methods of dealing with intelligent, responsive individuals, who were more or less in the saddles of their minds and wills, were simply not in place.

In a patch of waste ground they found a dying-down garbage fixe and banked it up. Other figures lay huddled, wrapped in blankets or in makeshift huts of cardboard, ply and plasterboard, but nobody more than vaguely stirred.

They remained undisturbed.

‘I just can’t think how we didn’t notice,’ Leetha said.

‘Hm?’ Li Shao had been lost in looking at her face in the firelight. It was a face of someone he knew and loved, but, while humanoid, the red eyes, reptile skin and saurian features were in no way human. He wondered how he could have possibly not noticed a small detail like that. The comment, meshing as it did with his own thoughts, pulled him back from his reverie. ‘Notice what, exactly?’

Leetha reached over and touched his steel-reinforced jacket. ‘All that red leather you wear, the bloody big sword slung across your back. I’m sure I should have noticed that. Did it all appear out of thin air? That seems… impossible, somehow, even with the strange things that have happened.’

She flexed cramped shoulders in her own leather corslet, in a manner that would have had anybody standing stock still and noticing in almost any world.

‘I don’t think we could notice,’ said Kim, who was wrapping his silk robes around himself carefully, trying to eke out the best benefit from them in the now chilly air for which they were not entirely suitable. ‘Our minds threw up memories of events and personalities that had to be, if we were to be where we found ourselves. Anything else was incompatible; our minds wouldn’t let us see them. I think we could only break out of that under moments of extreme stress.’

‘You’re right, in all probability.’ Li Shao recalled the instant when he had returned to his true self, briefly, during the fight with… something about being underground, fighting monsters that physically, he now seemed to recall, were certainly no worse than members of his own family, even, but at the time he had thought to be repugnant.

The memories of these other worlds seemed to recede.

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