The Sideways Door - Riser Troy by Doctor Who

Author:Doctor Who [Who, Doctor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: time, adventure, action, hunter, bomb, war, Sci-fi, Doctor Who, SCIENCE FICTION, telos
ISBN: 9781845838096
Publisher: Telos
Published: 2011-05-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

The following morning, Emily rubbed the sleep from her eyes as she entered the dining room. The first thing she noticed was Honoré. The second was the table – or rather, the silver service, china place settings, and platters piled high with sausages, scrambled eggs and fresh fruit.

‘That smells good,’ she said, pulling up a chair across from him.

‘Help yourself.’

‘Have you been learning to cook?’

‘I am a man of many talents,’ Honoré said. ‘Cooking, though, is not one of them. Tom brought it in. He seemed a little shocked to see me. No, not shocked. Nervous. I think he was surprised to see “me” already awake.’ He rearranged the eggs on his plate thoughtfully. ‘Apparently he intended to be in and out before anyone was up and about.’

‘You didn’t sleep?’

‘Too much to think about.’

‘Your mother?’

Honoré said nothing. He glanced up at a photograph, neatly framed and set on a shelf all its own – a photograph of himself as an older teenager, sitting on the steps of his grandmother’s house, one arm around the old woman and the other around an older-than-he-remembered-but-still-striking Evangeline Lechasseur.

‘Hearing her voice must have been quite a shock.’

Honoré maintained his silence. The only sound was the scrape of silverware on china.

Emily put down her fork. ‘Honoré? How did she die? She must have been quite young.’

Honoré ignored the question. Relating the story of his mother’s murder would be too much at the start of the day. ‘Here is something I don’t understand,’ he said, finally. ‘Our doubles stopped the War from happening. Without the War, there was no reason for “me” to come to Europe. Without the War, he should never have had his time-sensitivity awakened. Yet here he is, here they are. How can that be?’

Emily shrugged. ‘We have encountered paradoxes before, Honoré. I classify inexplicable contradictions under “just one of those things”.’

Honoré nodded, stretched his lips in a smile. ‘So if a problem is fixed,’ he said, ‘how do we notice the problem in the first place?’

‘Schrödinger waves,’ Em said, entering the room at that moment. Honoré could feel the slight breeze she made as she walked by him on her way to the refridgerator, and caught a faint whiff of her perfume. After she’d passed, he saw she was wearing a long-sleeved, striped nightshirt barely covering her thighs, opened wide enough at the front to show off a wide expanse of her cleavage. Emily – his Emily – was probably one of those people who had anxiety dreams about appearing naked in a public place – not because Emily was a prude, he thought, but because she defined herself differently from this woman. Honoré suspected Emily sometimes resented her own beauty, thinking it a distraction from those qualities she worked so hard to attain or already possessed: intellect, wit, courage, character. He averted his eyes as Em took an apple from the fridge, placed it on the cutting board on the kitchen counter, and began slicing it expertly into perfectly-proportioned chunks.

‘You haven’t explained things, Emily?’ she said.

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