'Why? ' The priest was furious.'You brought me back! What right did you have to do that?'

Sam smiled.'"... death is among us... but do not fear... death is our friend... death frees us from the prison of our lives... death is the doorway to our Endless State..." '

Denadi's face twisted with horror as he recognised the words of his own sermon quoted out of context.

'How wrong you were, Father. I always knew this in my heart -that religion was wrong. All you do is take away people's choices.'

'You don't understand. People make their own choices.You did. I did. You altered my choice.'

'I saved you.' Sam thought back to a time that seemed so long ago that it was a distant memory.'You saved me. Now I have saved you.'

'You d.a.m.ned me.'

'I gave you life. I gave you the Endless you so desired.'

'You have kept me from heaven! '

'There is no heaven any more,' Sam said mildly. 'Perhaps there never was, except in your scriptures.'

Denuded bunched his hands into bear's fists, his bulky body hunched, a combination of anger and despair. 'You do not understand.You are but a child! Your mind is young and now it is Endless. You are not ready for eternity. You do not understand the responsibilities.'

'Oh, I think I do. Why else do you think I repaired the ship?'

Denadi's face twisted in confusion. "The refugees -'

'- have their own ship. How else did Saketh arrive here? They remain in this moon of their own choice. I offered them freedom, sSferevi Xhtm green ham an6 eggs. Did they tislen to me? "No. Well. That was their choice. I have other work to do.'

Denadi bit his lip. Blood flowed - briefly.'Work?'

'Yes.Work, Father. No doubt you are familiar with the concept. I must pa.s.s on the Message. The Message of Life Eternal.'

'To whom would you pa.s.s it?' There was real fear in Denadi's voice now.

'Why, to everyone of course.'

'And if they chose not to accept?'

Sam shook her head wearily. 'Most people are powerless to make choices for themselves, Father. I have seen this. But I know the right choice to make. I can save everyone. I can show them the truth.'

Denadi seemed to crumple. 'If you believe that you are truly d.a.m.ned.'

Sam smiled, the newly healed skin crinkling.'I am liberated,' she said in a whisper.'I am the liberator. I am the light.Well... I say let therebe light, in this dark old universe!' Incredibly she laughed. 'What do you say, Father? Shall we shine a little light? What about a little love?' She repeated the words, singing them this time, a twenty-year-old pop song lodged inescapably in her mind.' "Shine a little love on my life - ooh - ooh - ooh!"'

She grabbed the controls and yanked hard on the stick. Nothing happened.

She blinked, thought for a moment, then told the computer to take off.

The ship quivered, lurched upward, leapt clear of the ice. Glowing holes contracted in the surface behind it, showered with fountains of slush and broken ice.

Denadi watched her at the controls and his mind recoiled in horror. Horror at what she was, horror at what she had made him, horror at the fact that she thought it was light.

Sam just kept on singing.

Somewhere, the song became a litany; she was raving, her voice a delusional hymn: a torrent of words spilled from her lips, prayers to the G.o.d of broken minds.

She was quite mad.

' "Shine a little love on my life - and let me see!" '

She was still singing the same tune an hour later when she angled the ship towards a new gravity well, opened the engines up to full throttle and drove steeply downward into the killing atmosphere of Belannia XII.

Chapter Eight.

Symbiosis.

The sum function of a child and its parents.

Growth.

Life beyond death.

A kind of immortality.

The Doctor gazed at his body. Not beautiful - quirky. Attractive, yes, but to her it was so much biological machinery. Form with a very specific function. In his case the function was less than perfect.

She was puzzled. So far the pregnancy bad gone without a hitch. Why the complication now? Why this late?

There was always a reason. Drug factors, disease factors, violence, sometimes just plain old-fashioned bad luck.

The patient was in pain. She ordered bis spinal block increased. They were hovering dangerously near the point where anaesthesia would have to be discontinued. Full anaesthesia was out of the question for obvious reasons - she needed a conscious patient to deliver this infant. But delivery was turning out to be a big problem. She turned to a nurse and ordered the preparation of a section set. If a Caesarean was the only answer she would perform it unhesitatingly. But the time was not quite yet.

A moment or two.

She called for a blood-pressure reading.

The answer worried her.

She placed a gloved hand on his swollen belly. If his kicks were anything to judge by the kid was going to be a centre forward.

If he made it through the next few minutes.

That addition to the thought caused her to glance at the nurse. 'Prep for Caesarean. We're going to have to do this the hard way.'

The Doctor felt the blade that opened him, felt it on a level deeper than the anaesthesia could prevent, felt it almost at the level of atoms. He was intensely in tune with his body. Knew it intimately;felt the molecular dance of skin and fat and muscle interrupted by sharp steel at body temperature.

When they took the baby from him it was as if they had taken a part of his very soul.

The Doctor worked hard to close the opening in his belly -quickly but methodically sealing, st.i.tching, keeping his life intact.

She felt her brow mopped as she worked. Good team. Trustworthy. Reliable.

She reached a break point, stood back, allowed the surgical a.s.sistant to close. She turned then. She had a second patient now.

The infant's life signs were weak.

She cradled the new life in her hands, cupped fingers as big as its whole body.

She moved quickly towards the incubator.

He raised his head painfully from the table; his last desire as the full anaesthesia took hold was to see the baby. He fought the drugs, the scream of foreign material holding the new opening in his body together. He struggled to rise, managed to lift his head a few centimetres from the table.

The baby was alive. Cupped in the Doctor's hands, his baby was alive! He saw its arms waving, heard its voice crying for attention.

Was it a boy or girl? He couldn't tell.

'Love you,' he whispered happily as the Doctor put the squealing infant tenderly into the red giant star.

The rescue ship drove down into the heart of Belannia XII. It screeched like an animal, hunted and ripped by the storms girdling the planet. Lightning crackled. Bolts of life, smashing out of the sky with the force of colliding worlds. The atmosphere was a soup, dense, almost metallic. It dragged at the ship, clawed ropes of liquid air grasping at the vessel, fingers piercing the hull and peeling it greedily away.

Thunder boomed, emotion-twisting subsonics. The hull sang a contrapuntal rhythm of imminent doom. Sam screamed with the ship. It was a scream of joy, of exultation, of terror, of invulnerability.

Down. Pedal to the metal all the way. It was a wild ride.

Denadi grasped the already tightened seat restraints. Liquid air under hundreds of atmospheres' pressure smashed in boiling waves against the vision ports.

The hull popped. It screeched. Sam did too.

Denadi was voiceless, speechless, almost mindless with the experience. Nothing in his life had prepared him for something so totally overwhelming. He had no idea. None. He had never ridden a roller coaster. Never driven a car. The nearest he had ever come to this wild ride was a few hours' tobogganing down a shallow hill beside his mother's house one year when he was very small.

There was simply no comparison. No words. Just inarticulate noises as the ship jagged this way and that, battered by the storm, battered even further by Sam's relentless urge to test her new belief to the limit...

He managed to turn his head against the force of motion. Sam was grinning. A predatory expression better suited to an animal. Primitive pleasure/satisfaction, no higher function at all.

Almost.

Noticing his look, Sam shouted above the infernal howl of the drive engines, 'Here's my thing: we're gonna crash, right? Smash into the Hoth. It's going to eat our flesh, drink our blood. It's going to live for ever. It's going to save us in return. Symbiosis right? Life for life.'

Denadi struggled to speak.

'Listen,' Sam went on, 'I know you want ham, right? Sorry. It'll have to wait. The future's at hand, Father. And it's you and me.'

Denadi found a second to wonder what would happen if things went wrong. Would they consciously experience being smashed flat by thousands of atmospheres' pressure? Would they live for ever, a consciousness smeared together and trapped at the bottom of a gravity well they didn't have the strength to escape from? Would they die when the planet died, consumed as its sun turned nova? Of would they live, in some altered form but with continuous memories? What of the universe? Would they see its end too?

Wasthat h.e.l.l?

Denadi had no time to ponder these questions.

A living form as big as a small country emerged from the mist.

The Hoth.

It billowed, glowing with colour, bright against the nacreous atmosphere.

Sam increased the engines to maximum power and drove vertically down to meet it.

Aellini moved very slowly along the pa.s.sage. Very, very slowly. He listened, the suit mikes turned up to full gain.

The conversation he could hear was interesting. Very, very interesting.

There were two voices. Both he recognised. The Doctor and Surgeon Major Conaway. They sounded drunk or drugged. Or happy.

Very, very happy.

Under the circ.u.mstances this was very, very suspicious.

He unb.u.t.toned the safety flap on his sidearm holster, turned on the suit's voice recorder and moved closer.

Conaway worked on automatic. She rose, examined herself, found no broken bones, only the memories of a lifetime. She was sweating, her body racked with fatigue. It was as if she'd lived that entire alien lifetime in a few moments.

She looked around. The Doctor lay beside her on the ground. She moved to him, her muscles protesting wildly at even this simple action. She touched his skin. It was icy cold.'Doctor, come on, wake up!' He stirred, his eyes wandering unfocused, in several different directions. 'Are you all right? Look at me! How many fingers am I holding up?'

The Doctor blinked rapidly. He looked at her fingers. ""The Ride of the Valkyries" was a commercial gimmick designed solely to garner publicity for Wagner'sRing cycle during performances considerably shorter than its own epic length,' he p.r.o.nounced with utter authority and absolutely no relevance whatsoever.

Conaway looked at her fingers once just to make sure he wasn't seeing something she wasn't, and then shook her head. She placed her fingers at his neck, searching for a carotid pulse. She found three.

The Doctor threw back his head at her touch.'My baby! Where's my -'

The sound of her slap echoing in the cavern shocked Conaway as much as it must have shocked the Doctor.