ALIEN BODIES.

by LAWRENCE MILES.

LAST RITES.

[THE PAST].

The Doctor had said he'd wanted to conduct a funeral. Well, whatever made him happy.

He'd been standing at the console for over an hour now, never moving from the spot, never looking up from the controls, never even bothering to check the scanner. Occasionally, the TARDIS would dematerialise, but the trips would be short and the ship would groan its way back into reality after a second or two. Every now and then, Sarah would wander into the console room to see how things were going, although there was never anything worth looking at on the screen. Far-away star cl.u.s.ters, and the s.p.a.ces where star cl.u.s.ters couldn't be bothered forming. Eventually, after a hundred or so short hops, something interesting finally appeared.

"Interesting" being a relative term, mind you. It was a silver smear, hanging in the vacuum of nowhere-in-particular; not a planet, not an asteroid, not even a sinister abandoned s.p.a.ce-station. Just a smear.

'What, is that it?' Sarah grumped.

The Doctor didn't reply. He looked up, at last, a frown of concern blooming among the wrinkles at the corners of his mouth. Still wearing his "grim" expression, Sarah noted. Actually, the Doctor's face had a kind of built-in grimness about it. A nose that wasn't so much hawk-like as vulture-ish, a forehead that someone had carved worry lines into with a Swiss Army knife... sometimes, his features almost looked as if they'd been sculpted out of marble, and that white hair of his which never seemed to get ruffled, no matter how many ventilator shafts he crawled through didn't make him look any more human.

'Oh,' Sarah mumbled. 'Sorry. Forgot. A funeral. Sombre atmosphere from now on. Promise.'

'Thank you,' said the Doctor, quite gently, and his hand performed a fifteen-second ballet across the console. The central column shifted an inch or so, the scanner flickering as the TARDIS moved closer to the smear. It was a metal tube, that much was clear now, evidently a relic from the days when sticking antennae all over s.p.a.cecraft was considered to be a really smart idea and you could still use the word "rocket" without anyone sn.i.g.g.e.ring.

Sarah tried to look interested. 'What is it?' she asked.

'A tomb,' said the Doctor. He couldn't resist a touch of the theatrical, G.o.d bless him. 'It's been floating freely for some time now. That's why it took the TARDIS so long to find it, you see? No fixed co-ordinates. Won't be long before it gets pulled back into Earth's gravity and... fsht fsht.' He demonstrated the concept of atmospheric burn-up by making an elaborate gesture with three of his fingers.

Sarah clacked her tongue. 'All right. You said you wanted a funeral. Any explanations, or should I just go off in a sulk again?'

The Doctor smiled, but only weakly. 'There's a body inside that capsule, Sarah-Jane. The body of a traveller. A great traveller, you might say. This is something I've been meaning to do since the early days, but it's only now I've put the new dematerialisation circuit in that the TARDIS can steer herself properly...'

Sarah had the horrible feeling she was about to be kidnapped and led blindfold into Technogubbins City. 'So why would anyone want to put a corpse into orbit? Bit grizzly, isn't it?'

'Oh, the occupant was alive when the capsule was launched. Alive and kicking.'

'What went wrong?'

'Nothing went wrong. It was a one-way trip, that's all.'

The column shifted again, and something began to materialise on the floor of the console room, a few feet from where Sarah was standing. The object was roughly the same shape as a shuttlec.o.c.k, a couple of yards from tip to tail. No, not a shuttlec.o.c.k; more like one of those ice-creams you used to get in the '60s, the ones that came in plastic cones with b.a.l.l.s of bubblegum at the bottom. The shape was smooth and metallic, with rust-coloured letters stencilled across its surface. The words weren't in English, and the Rs were the wrong way round.

It was the silver thing, Sarah realised. Or at least, the capsule that had been attached to the end of the silver thing. The TARDIS had neatly materialised around it. Sarah had no idea where the rest of the tube might have gone, but she doubted it was worth asking.

The Doctor knelt down, with a small sigh of effort, then slipped his sonic whatsit out of a crushed velvet pocket and got to work on the capsule's rivets. A minute later, the wide end of the object fell away. The scent of old leather and electrified air wafted out of the s.p.a.ce inside, but there were none of the smells Sarah would have a.s.sociated with death, no hint of decay or decomposition. Trying not to feel like a spectator at a traffic accident, she squatted down next to the Doctor and peered into the opening.

There was hardly any room in there, almost no s.p.a.ce for supplies, barely enough even for the tangled ma.s.s of metal and rubber that was presumably the rudimentary life-support system. Just as Sarah was reaching the conclusion that no normal human being could possibly have squeezed into the thing, her eyes focused on the corpse. It was stiff and it was pale, its body clamped to a throne of leather and plastic, a look of exhaustion smeared across its face.

It was the corpse of something that had died struggling.

It was the corpse of a small dog.

Sarah remained silent as they crossed the surface of Quiescia, not being able to think of anything remotely worthwhile to say. The Doctor more or less ignored her, and concentrated on dragging the wooden casket behind him. The bottom of the box made nasty crunching sounds against the blue pebbles, but the atmosphere seemed to soak up the noise, turning it into nothing more than a m.u.f.fled scratching. Even the air here has tact, Sarah reflected.

They stopped at the top of a low hill, where the stones beneath their feet were tinted violet by a sun that was either slowly setting or slowly rising. The sun was huge and red, but seemed to give off very little heat. Sarah pulled her hands into the sleeves of her jumper, while the Doctor began sifting through the rocks on the hilltop around them. Quiescia was nothing but rocks, apparently. As far as the eye could see, everything was blue and jagged, a landscape of cerulean plateaus and lumpy turquoise mountains.

Eventually, the Doctor found a rock that was roughly the same size as a tombstone, and began burning letters into its surface with his screwdriver thingummy. Without waiting for instructions, Sarah started digging, pushing the pebbles and the cobalt-coloured earth aside until she'd made a hole big enough for the casket. Once his work had been completed, the Doctor balanced the tombstone at the head of the grave.

He'd carved the name LAIKA into the rock in block capitals, without dates or descriptions. The Doctor tugged the casket towards the hole, momentarily catching Sarah's eye and giving her a fleeting smile (of grat.i.tude, she supposed) before the box slid into its final resting place.

'The first traveller ever to leave the Earth,' he said, as he stood before the grave. His voice was tired and fragile, little more than a whisper. '1957. The Sputnik Two experiment. Sent out into the dark places without any way of getting home again. Alone and abandoned.'

Sarah lowered her eyes. She wasn't sure why.

'Why do I care?' she heard the Doctor mutter.

He scooped up a handful of blue dirt, and let it slip through his fingers onto the lid of the casket. After that, there was silence. There were no native life-forms on Quiescia, Sarah noted, no predators or scavengers or any of nature's other little graverobbers, despite the breatheable atmosphere. And come to think of it, where was the air coming from, if there weren't any trees? Briefly, she wondered if this whole world had been set up by the Doctor, put here purely for the purposes of the burial.

'This is the furthest system in Earth's galaxy,' the Doctor explained, gently. Sarah wondered if he was addressing her, or the occupant of the coffin. 'As far out as you can wander. As good a place to rest as any. Yes. As good a place as any.'

Sarah said nothing. They stood by the grave for a few minutes more before heading back to the TARDIS.

'Well?' Sarah asked.

On the scanner, a purple-veined planet basked in the light of its sun. Quiescia, Sarah realised, seen from the quiet side of the ionosphere. The capsule had already vanished from the floor of console room.

'Sent back into s.p.a.ce,' the Doctor told her, his attention fixed on the console again. '"Things come from the void, and return to the void."'

'You know the answer really, don't you?'

The Doctor looked up at her, furrowing his brow.

'On the planet,' Sarah elaborated. 'You asked why you cared. Oh, come on. You know why you care. I know I I do.' do.'

He paused for a moment, as if wondering whether to take her seriously or not. 'Do you?' he asked.

Sarah nodded. 'You buried Laika,' she said. 'But...'

Then the TARDIS folded itself out of existence, and the sentence was finished in an entirely different galaxy.

A hundred million nights pa.s.sed on Quiescia. Nothing changed, and no one else came.

1.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

East Indies ReVit Zone, 15:06 (Local Time)

There were things in Lieutenant Bregman's hair, and she was pretty sure they were trying to make nests in her scalp. The bugs were the worst thing. The heat, she could deal with, even if her shirt now showed sweat stains where she didn't even know she had glands. The dirt, she could deal with, even if the treetops kept dribbling toucan-guana onto her shoulders and her trousers were covered in several exciting new varieties of animal excrement. The tedium, she could deal with, even if she'd been walking through the rainforest for so long that she was starting to see hidden messages in the bark.

She tugged at her hair, pulling out a few black strands stuck together with four-day-old hairspray, and felt the insects squirming between her fingertips. They started biting their way into her hand, so she went "ugh" and tossed them into the undergrowth.

Six metres up ahead, Colonel Kortez stopped, turned, and looked back at her.

'Insects,' she said. 'Sir.'

The Colonel nodded. His face reminded Bregman of one of the stone heads on Easter Island, a near-rectangular block of skull with a frown that looked like it had been chiselled into place. Bregman saw his eyes start to glaze over again. 'Insects,' he agreed. 'The insects aren't what they seem. Be alert, Lieutenant.'

'Yes, Sir. I will, Sir.'

So far on this expedition, the Colonel had named over fifty different things that were "not what they seemed", from the natives they'd met at the last village outpost to the small mammals nesting in the forest canopy. Kortez had been in UNISYC for over thirty years, according to his ident sheet; he'd been part of the ISC division during the Cyberbreaches in the '30s, he'd been at Saskatoon when the Republicans had issued their ultimatum against Canada. If the rumours at UNISYC Central were true, he'd also been shot at by prehistoric lemur-people and survived an a.s.sa.s.sination attempt by an android a.s.sa.s.sin posing as the Norwegian Minister for Health.

The human brain, Bregman reflected sagely, is not designed to deal with that kind of thing. She briefly wondered if she'd end up like him one day, another victim of Displacer Syndrome, two steps away from a padded cell and seeing robot a.s.sa.s.sins peeking out from behind the bushes.

Kathleen Bregman had been part of UNISYC for nine of her twenty-seven years, and with the exception of the pickled exhibits in the Little Green Museum had never seen an extraterrestrial. She was quite happy to keep it that way, as well. G.o.d knew, they were bad enough when they were stuffed and dipped in formaldehyde.

Suddenly, the bugs were back in force, sticking hot pins into her scalp. They were sucking her blood, Bregman was sure of it, and she felt skinny enough already without any more of her body ma.s.s being taken away. At the last outpost, she'd tried to buy some insect repellent from the village medicine man, but he'd ended up selling her a box of aspirin he'd insisted had been made from the roots of local mystic herbs, despite the fact that the packet had been marked with the name of a leading multinational drugs company and a sell-by date of 23/4/2064.

'What for you go into great dark-heart forest?' the medicine man had asked, pretending he couldn't speak proper English just in case they turned out to be tourists.

Colonel Kortez had puffed out his chest, so the man could see the insignia on his shirt pocket. 'We're searching for the places of the ancients,' he'd intoned, like it had been some kind of holy mission. 'We're looking for the Unthinkable City.'

Amazingly, the medicine man had kept a straight face. 'You go to next longhouse,' he'd said. 'See Kamala the Shop. He know. He know all about secret of City.'

Kamala had turned out to be a wrinkled, dry-roasted native who ran a souvenir shop, its main line being t-shirts bearing the legend I SAW THE UNTHINKABLE CITY AND LIVED!, plus maps showing where the best UFOs could be sighted. Bregman had wondered how he managed to stay in business. She and the Colonel were the only foreigners she'd seen around the village, and the island hardly had the facilities for tourism these days, not since the interior had been re-carpeted with forest.

Still, maybe it was the off-season for UFOs.

Kamala had actually succeeded in selling the Colonel a b.u.mper sticker, which he'd insisted was really a lucky talisman in disguise. It was highly unlikely, he'd said, that they'd find the Unthinkable City without it. Kortez had nodded and said that the b.u.mper sticker was not what it seemed. Of course, even with the sticker, Kamala hadn't been able to promise them they'd find what they were looking for. Once the merchandise had been paid for, he'd pointed out that the City had only been sighted four or five times in the twenty years since the island had been turned into a ReVit Zone, even though the entire forest had been meticulously surveyed and v-mapped. Kamala had proudly pointed out that it was therefore the last true "lost city" on the face of the Earth.

The last thing Bregman had noticed before leaving the shop had been the message on Kamala's own t-shirt, which he'd worn over a traditional native polyester loincloth.

SO, THIS MUST BE THE HUMAN DELEGATION, it had read. Bregman hadn't understood that at all. Probably a native in-joke.

She saw Kortez had stopped moving, and was staring up at the office-grey patches of sky just visible between the treetops. No sunshine here, thought Bregman, not these days. Still d.a.m.n hot, though.

'Here,' Kortez proclaimed.

She blinked the sweat out of her eyes. 'Sir?'

'Here. Here. This is the place.' He extended an arm in her general direction, a thick pink branch 50 per cent fat and 50 per cent muscle. 'The card, Lieutenant?'

Bregman reached into her top pocket, and slipped the card out of its protective envelope. The card was a brilliant metallic silver, its surface reflecting sharp white light into her eyes despite the obvious absence of sun. 'Sir? I, erm... I thought we were looking for the City, Sir.'

Kortez nodded. 'Did you ever see Brigadoon Brigadoon, Lieutenant?'

'Er, no. No, Sir.'

'Beautiful film. Beautiful. All those wonderful old songs. Do you know why they don't write songs like that any more, Lieutenant?'

Oh G.o.d, his eyes were going all gla.s.sy again. 'No, Sir. No idea.'

Kortez shook his head, sadly. 'No. Neither have I. Neither have I.' He fell silent.

'Erm... Sir...?'

'Brigadoon. It was a village. In Scotland. You remember Scotland? No. You were born after the Unification. I remember. This village... this Brigadoon... it became misplaced misplaced.'

Bregman was having trouble working out whether he was talking about real life or the film, now. 'In what way, Sir?'

Kortez shot her a suspicious glance, as if the answer were obvious, and by asking she'd revealed herself to be an evil enemy spy-clone. 'It was going to be attacked by witches,' he said. 'So it was removed. Brilliant tactic, I always thought. The local people made a deal. With G.o.d. So that Brigadoon would vanish from the Earth, and only reappear again once every hundred years. Can you imagine that, Lieutenant? A place that only exists once in every century. And then only for one day.'

Bregman nodded. She kept nodding until she was sure he wasn't going to add anything else without a prompt. 'Is this relevant, Sir?'

'Of course it's relevant,' the Colonel snapped. 'Why would I mention it if it weren't relevant? Here. Here is where we enter the Unthinkable City.'

'Oh. What Unthinkable City would that be, Sir?'

Kortez gave her another one of his looks. 'Get a grip on yourself, Lieutenant,' he said, and pointed.

Bregman followed his finger, only to find herself staring at a gigantic stone cube, a solid off-white block set into the ground a couple of paces to her left. So near, in fact, that there was no way she should have been able to get this close to it without noticing, unless it had spontaneously appeared out of thin air or...

No. That way lies madness, Bregman told herself, or Displacer Syndrome at the very least. The block was eight metres along each side, primitive pictograms of tiny bubbleheaded Von Daniken s.p.a.cemen scratched into its surface from top to bottom. Bregman stepped back, and saw there was another cube next to it, and another next to that, and another next to that, and...