boiled away into dust.’
She nodded.
He went on. ‘This thing has somehow escaped from that cheese and ended up back in ours, and now it’s broken, and it’s trying to do what it’s programmed to do. Sort of.’
‘Can you stop it?’
‘Definitely. Probably definitely. I’m the Doctor.’
‘How?’
‘Thhhhhat sometimes takes a bit longer. Comes to me in flashes.’
‘And what about Jonestown?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about Jonestown? What is it? Where did it come from? The mine’s broken. Well, old. Old and bit weird. It’s supposed to suck the TARDIS into a decohering singularity and shut the door for ever.’
‘Make another cheese and keep you there.’
‘No. Cheese. No, it’s… Yes, all right. A really nasty, terrifying cheese which is slowly consuming itself and everything around it until even the rind just boils away you’re left with nothing, not even the space where a cheese used to be. But that’s not what it’s doing. It’s trying to tear the TARDIS apart and implode her. You can’t do that with a TARDIS. There are safety features. Because if you did, you’d take about four per cent of the observable universe with you. So it’s like trying to open a jam jar with blancmange… except if you could get the interior space of a jam jar to start filling up with blancmange… sooner or later that would make a big bang.’ An actual Big Bang, but there was no point going into that. ‘So the question is, is Jonestown part of the attack? Which is why who you are is really important. Because if Jonestown is part of the mine, then so are you.’
He peered at her, and wondered whether she’d suddenly turn into something strange and terrifying.
She didn’t.
Still didn’t.
Didn’t.
Didn’t.
Apparently wasn’t going to.
Well, that was a relief.
And definitely not a disappointment, at all.
*
Of course she was the real Christina de Souza. She knew her own life perfectly. She had been born in this town, grown up, gone elsewhere and fallen unwisely and gloriously in love, lost her husband, and come home to be small and calm and to live through her days of sorrow.
Except that she couldn’t really remember any of it. She knew it, but she knew it like something she had read, and she was increasingly uncertain if it had ever happened, or happened to her. It didn’t feel real the way the Doctor did, the way today did. It felt… flat.
But if she was some part of an artificial intelligence, or a terrible time weapon, or something from his world… shouldn’t she understand what was going on? What if she’d just popped into existence somehow, and any moment she was just going to pop out, never knowing? Would he save her from that, at least? Would he fetch her back again? Could he?
She glanced over at him. He was pacing and muttering. He seemed to need to talk, not just to himself but to someone else, so every so often she asked a question. It evidently wasn’t important what she said so long as it was open-ended. If she said something blatantly irrelevant, he went off on a tangent. At the moment, because she’d wondered aloud if she’d ever see her goose-down duvet again, he was talking about the sectional structure of feathers and its relationship to something called Jaffey Curvation. She looked at the dial nearest to her, then the screen over to one side.
‘Is this a map of the town?’ she asked, looking at it.
‘Mm? Yes.’
‘Then it’s growing.’
He scampered over. ‘Growing?’ Took his glasses off, put them on again. ‘Yes! It is. Growing. How is it growing? That would mean that time in Jonestown… Of course! The TARDIS is functioning like a supersaturated liquid and the sheer is causing the formation of temporal crystals! Jonestown is a precipitate! That means time flows differently in there from out here. Very differently. Evolutionarily and unpredictably differently. In which case, that would probably mean…’ He glanced at her, stopped. ‘Never mind, no.