that. It’s the best I can do, sorry. You’ll just have to take precautions.
In the morning, she thought. I’ll set up in the morning.
She woke up in the middle of the night, fumbling for her cigarettes. The lights came on at her voice command. She stared at the pack. At the picture of the Yemayan ziggurat on the front.
At the words printed underneath: PRODUCE OF YEMAYA 4.
Her favourite brand, the cigarettes she’d been smoking since she was a squire, even though it added six per cent to the cost of her medical coverage. Except they couldn’t have been Yemayan Strikes because the colony on Yemaya 4 had collapsed in the twenty-third century and been eradicated by the Dione-Kisumu Company.
Not that I cared or even knew, she thought – ancient history at the time I was born. But she remembered buying cigarettes as a young woman – packet of Strikes please, the Yemayan ones .
Sense memory of the packet with the ziggurat on the front, the smiling Turtle logo of the Yemaya Tobacco Cooperative.
There was no colony on Yemaya 4 until the Doctor stopped it from going under, fought off DKC, unpicked the mystery of GRUMPY the telepathic supercomputer and yet she remembered .
She wrapped herself in a sheet and stood in front of the window. Fury was a thicket of blocks and towers crammed into the circumference of the dome. Beyond that she could see the low rectangular shadows of the old foundry. On the horizon was the dull, almost imperceptible, red glow of Clytemnestra. Too big to be a mere planet, too small to be a sun.
She shivered. How much of what she remembered had changed since she had started her travels with the Doctor? Maybe they’d always shifted, adjusting to all those changes made in the timeline and she was only aware of it because she travelled out of time. And if the shift was so catastrophic that you ceased to exist, would you know you’d ever lived?
49
One of these days she’d ask the Doctor about that.
She stepped back from the window and turned on the simcord.
The Doctor’s device hummed to itself, perched atop the screen.
‘Give me a likeness of Tsang Mei Feng,’ she told it.
Agamemnon lifted his burning orange face over the limb of Clytemnestra to gaze down on the city of Fury. His light cut the city like a razor, driving away the boldest of the rats and fading the cheap holographic signs of the bars and comfort houses.
On the Via Grissom the dregs of the previous night’s clientele staggered into the daylight to stand blinking among the rubbish and the sleeping bodies of the street children, curled like so many shrimps against the plasticrete and breezeblock walls of the bars and shops. The soldiers moved away in packs, like dogs that had lost a scent, back towards the service embarkation points on the Piazza Tereshkova and the transmat to orbit.
Some of the soldiers looked around them, confused and deaf from a night of loud music, nasty vodka and industrial-strength narcotics. They stared at the fading colours of the holograms as if wondering if these were the same signs as had blazed so gorgeously the previous evening, enticing them into the hot smoking interiors of the bars that promised a few hours’ pleasure and a chance to forget. PINK FLOWER, TORPEDO LOUNGE, LADY
GREY, DK’S and below the names of the bars their attractions, SKAGS FOR RENT, NAKED SERVICE, REAL BEER, LIVE WRESTLING
and the ever-popular lie HUMANS ON STAGE.
As Agamemnon rose higher, the doors and windows of the bars and apts banged open. Ogron servants or Skagettes, too old at twenty-five for ceiling work, walked down from their quarter-room shares in the tenements above the bars to mop up the spilt drinks, the vomit and the occasional pool of blood.
The streets of Fury had their own way of talking, a lingua franca that had pushed itself through the cracks in the pavement like a troublesome weed. The humans called it gobble , 50
thinking, as always, to ridicule that which they couldn’t understand. The
In the morning, she thought. I’ll set up in the morning.
She woke up in the middle of the night, fumbling for her cigarettes. The lights came on at her voice command. She stared at the pack. At the picture of the Yemayan ziggurat on the front.
At the words printed underneath: PRODUCE OF YEMAYA 4.
Her favourite brand, the cigarettes she’d been smoking since she was a squire, even though it added six per cent to the cost of her medical coverage. Except they couldn’t have been Yemayan Strikes because the colony on Yemaya 4 had collapsed in the twenty-third century and been eradicated by the Dione-Kisumu Company.
Not that I cared or even knew, she thought – ancient history at the time I was born. But she remembered buying cigarettes as a young woman – packet of Strikes please, the Yemayan ones .
Sense memory of the packet with the ziggurat on the front, the smiling Turtle logo of the Yemaya Tobacco Cooperative.
There was no colony on Yemaya 4 until the Doctor stopped it from going under, fought off DKC, unpicked the mystery of GRUMPY the telepathic supercomputer and yet she remembered .
She wrapped herself in a sheet and stood in front of the window. Fury was a thicket of blocks and towers crammed into the circumference of the dome. Beyond that she could see the low rectangular shadows of the old foundry. On the horizon was the dull, almost imperceptible, red glow of Clytemnestra. Too big to be a mere planet, too small to be a sun.
She shivered. How much of what she remembered had changed since she had started her travels with the Doctor? Maybe they’d always shifted, adjusting to all those changes made in the timeline and she was only aware of it because she travelled out of time. And if the shift was so catastrophic that you ceased to exist, would you know you’d ever lived?
49
One of these days she’d ask the Doctor about that.
She stepped back from the window and turned on the simcord.
The Doctor’s device hummed to itself, perched atop the screen.
‘Give me a likeness of Tsang Mei Feng,’ she told it.
Agamemnon lifted his burning orange face over the limb of Clytemnestra to gaze down on the city of Fury. His light cut the city like a razor, driving away the boldest of the rats and fading the cheap holographic signs of the bars and comfort houses.
On the Via Grissom the dregs of the previous night’s clientele staggered into the daylight to stand blinking among the rubbish and the sleeping bodies of the street children, curled like so many shrimps against the plasticrete and breezeblock walls of the bars and shops. The soldiers moved away in packs, like dogs that had lost a scent, back towards the service embarkation points on the Piazza Tereshkova and the transmat to orbit.
Some of the soldiers looked around them, confused and deaf from a night of loud music, nasty vodka and industrial-strength narcotics. They stared at the fading colours of the holograms as if wondering if these were the same signs as had blazed so gorgeously the previous evening, enticing them into the hot smoking interiors of the bars that promised a few hours’ pleasure and a chance to forget. PINK FLOWER, TORPEDO LOUNGE, LADY
GREY, DK’S and below the names of the bars their attractions, SKAGS FOR RENT, NAKED SERVICE, REAL BEER, LIVE WRESTLING
and the ever-popular lie HUMANS ON STAGE.
As Agamemnon rose higher, the doors and windows of the bars and apts banged open. Ogron servants or Skagettes, too old at twenty-five for ceiling work, walked down from their quarter-room shares in the tenements above the bars to mop up the spilt drinks, the vomit and the occasional pool of blood.
The streets of Fury had their own way of talking, a lingua franca that had pushed itself through the cracks in the pavement like a troublesome weed. The humans called it gobble , 50
thinking, as always, to ridicule that which they couldn’t understand. The
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