The Planet on its Side
Title: The Planet on its Side
Author: Prairie Dawn
Characters: Ten, Alex Caron, a buncha other people
Timeline: After Voyage of the Damned (DW), after The Elephant in the Room (Alex series)
Summary: Another installment of the Doctor Who as written by Judy Blume thing, in which Alex and the Doctor go on a field trip to a planet with an 80 degree axial tilt and extreme seasons.
Rating: K+
Disclaimers: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC, Alex is mine.
Warnings: Gratuitous scenery, gratuitous climate technobabble, homeschooling
The Doctor peered into the laptop screen attached to the TARDIS console, his lips pursed thoughtfully. "Doctor?" Alex said quietly, not wanting to break his concentration if he were doing something important. "You're not watching lolcats on YouTube again, are you?"
"You should never have gotten me started on those," he admonished with a sly grin, "but no, not this time. Are you done with your work?"
Alex made a disgusted face. "My new online account had me doing math and English placement testing all morning." Her online access had been stuck on the day she had left Earth with the Doctor. She had been dutifully logging on to her online school account every day to keep up with her work until yesterday, when it had denied her access with a prim notice that she was not to share her account with other people. Apparently she'd used up all of the hours in that day and had started crossing her own timeline. Unfortunately, the Doctor had solved the problem for her by creating a new account that logged her in under an alias in 2006 and ratcheted forward a day every time she logged on. "You owe me a weird planet."
He grinned. "One weird planet, coming up! Strap yourself into the jumpseat, would you?"
She hopped up onto the battered yellow jumpseat and strapped herself in. "Where are we going?""
"Field trip. Like I said, we'll do science and history in the afternoons. Can't have you relying on that 21st century Earth curriculum, half of it's flat wrong."
"At least it's only half wrong," she said.
The Doctor ran around the console, manipulating buttons, dials, and switches in a manner that looked entirely random to Alex, talking all the while. "Temporal physics, all wrong, particle physics, mostly wrong, and they don't discuss quantum observer bias at all! How can you interpret experimental results without a handle on QOB, tell me that? Relevant to you, that is, Alex, but more about that later, and here we go!" He punched one more button to punctuate his speech, and the floor dropped out from under Alex.
There was one hard lurch to the side, some bit of technological debris clattered across the floor to lodge in a corner, and then the TARDIS wheezed, shuddered, and parked itself. Alex swallowed and wondered just how long it would be before her stomach would get used to time travel vertigo. "Now, this is a weird planet," the Doctor said. "Bring your pack, we're going to do a bit of astronomy."
She unstrapped herself and climbed gingerly out of the chair, then stood a moment with her hands braced on her knees until the room stopped spinning. She jogged back to her room for her backpack and checked to be sure that the electronic notebook was inside. With a locator beacon keyed to the doctor's sonic screwdriver, dimensional pockets big enough to hold a complete change of clothes, and a waterproof, mostly fireproof (don't throw it in a volcano to test it, Alex) particle screen, the pack was her new favorite possession. She could chuck it in the ocean and her belongings would be safe.
The Doctor opened the door on a world with a deep blue sky laced with diaphanous pink and gold clouds, an Earth sky with a late afternoon patina, she thought, but she stepped out of the Tardis onto rich red and purple ground cover that was almost, but not quite grass. A surprisingly brisk wind whipped her hair into her eyes. The vegetation reminded her of shortgrass prairie, a low and windswept patchwork of scrubby plum purple shrubs, rust orange sprays, stiff scarlet stems with long red-gold leaves blowing behind them, and down by her feet, little plants with pink leaves and bright green flowers.
The ground looked like a rough sea caught in a photograph, complete with swells and breakers. It was pitted with craters, some lined with taller plants and shrubs, others, the deepest ones, lined with shallow ponds. "Did meteorites make the craters?" she asked.
"Good guess, but no. They're called kettle holes. They're made by melting glacial ice." He spread a blanket on the ground to sit on and gestured to Alex to join him. "Science is all about paying attention and asking questions. So today I want you to practice paying attention to what's around you. What else do you notice?"
Alex took a seat at the edge of the blanket and pulled a windbreaker that was only a little too big out of her backpack. "No trees." She dug her fingers experimentally into the ground and laced them through the tangled roots and rhizomes near the surface. "Tough vegetation. Reminds me of a prairie, except that the colors are all wrong."
"Not wrong, just uncommon," the Doctor corrected her. He sounded sad all of a sudden. "Only a few chemicals can synthesize sugars from sunlight and simple compounds. The most common are Earth's green chlorophylls and a red pigment similar to carotenoids in Earth plants. The red pigment generally only evolves on planets deficient in magnesium."
"It is pretty," she allowed, "just different." Why do the colors make you sad? She decided to keep that observation to herself. She took one more good look around. There were steps, cut into the side of one of the deeper holes and lined with flat stones. "Somebody made a stairway into that hole. So people must come here."
The Doctor nodded. "Don't just look. Close your eyes. What else can you tell me."
She took a moment to pull on the windbreaker, then concentrated on listening, smelling, feeling. Her hair plastered itself across her cheeks. "It's very windy. Smells damp and sharp, like a thunderstorm. And I'm..." She stood up, leaving her backpack on the blanket to jump up and down on the spongy ground. "I'm heavy!"
"Very good. That's ozone you're smelling, from lightning strikes. Gravity is 1.2 times what you're familiar with on Earth. Take out your notebook."
She sat back down to rummage in her bag, then passed the notebook to the Doctor. He turned on the holographic projector bound into her book. A globe made of light appeared displaying Earth's familiar continents, a red line marking the equator, and a green skewer marking the poles. "Here's Earth." He tapped a couple of keys. "This is Tempest." A new world appeared, with bluegreen water, purple tinged continents, and an enormous icecap on one side. The line girdling this world's equator was nearly straight up and down, while the green skewer of the planet's axis was nearly horizontal. "It has an eighty degree axial tilt," the Doctor commented. "Really crazy seasons." The image zoomed out to show the planet orbiting its parent star. "Summer and winter, one side of the planet faces the star, the other away. The equator is in twilight. In spring and fall, the habitable regions of the planet have twenty-two hour days, with direct sunlight falling on the equator and less light at the poles." As the image of the planet circled the sun, a huge icecap formed on the shadowed pole, then melted and reformed on the opposite side as the planet's orientation changed.
"It's like it has an ice age every year," Alex said.
The Doctor looked off to the left, startled by something. "Ah. You forgot a sense. Close your eyes and try again."
"I assume you don't mean for me to lick anything," she kidded, in part to disguise her discomfort with the new part of herself she was supposed to be figuring out. She rested her chin on her knees, obediently closing her eyes and thinning out her mental shield. "Sorry, must be out of my range...wait...is that smudge people? Like, four, maybe?"
"Five." He closed her notebook and tucked it into her pack, then took a couple of steps in the direction of the as yet unseen beings. She zipped up the bag and stood at the edge of the blanket, tucking her hair behind one ear. Four people came into view on a small rise behind and to the left of the Tardis, human people, or at least, human seeming. No, the Doctor had been right, there were five of them. The younger of the two women had a toddler slung on her back, its fluffy black hair and curious eyes just visible over her shoulder. They were all dressed in heavy pants festooned with pockets and faded long sleeved shirts with embroidery picked out on the collars and sleeves.
"Hoy!" the older woman hailed them, waving her whole arm in an expansive, friendly gesture. Both women approached, half walking, half sliding down the steep incline, while a middle aged man waited at the crest of the hill with a girl Alex's own age. They were all differing shades of caramel, with dark hair cut short in the case of the man and the older woman. The younger woman and the girl wore their hair in braids wound round their heads and bound with tie dyed headscarves.
The Doctor returned the wave. "We're just sightseeing for the day. Hope we're not trespassing."
She smiled warmly and extended a hand for the Doctor to shake. "Lila Donann," she said. "My daughter Mallena, and my grandson Ain." She reached behind her daughter to tousle the baby's hair. "Up the hill, that's my other daughter Carity and my husband Van. You got all that?"
The Doctor nodded. "Think so. I'm the Doctor, and this is Alex. My ward."
His ward. That sounded really funny, but he hadn't wanted to lie unless they had to, which had ruled out her claiming to be a niece. Alex's eyes kept straying up the hill to the other girl, Carity, was it? She hazarded a wave of her own. The other girl returned it.
Lila continued cheerfully, "Where's your ship? You'll want to be moving it. This whole area will be under twenty meters of snow and ice before long."
"That's it." He gestured to the Tardis.
The younger woman, Mallena, gave the Tardis a skeptical once over. "None too aerodynamic, is it?"
"Oi, that's my ship you're insulting there." The Doctor feigned offense, but poorly enough to make it clear that he was joking. He continued in a more friendly tone, "Really, though, I don't fly it much in normal space."
Carity was making her way down the hill to join her mother. Alex stood, brushing leaves off her behind. They each stayed behind their respective adults, peering at each other. Lila continued, "Well you're welcome to come to our place for supper. The settlement's a klick north of here. We're all busy getting ready for the migration. We left it a bit late this year, technical issues, you know." She glanced at Alex, then at Carity. "It's such a small settlement, only half a dozen children, and none near Carity's age."
"Oh, I don't know, I don't do dinner invites," the Doctor said. He spared a glance at Alex. She gave him her very best pleading look. "All right," he said to her, "you want to go, we can go." He turned back to Lila. "Technical issues, you say?"
Lila put him off, pointedly looking at the children. "Later. But you really ought to bring your ship with you. They don't call it winter for nothing, here. Comes overnight, several centimeters of snow an hour until the whole icecap moves to this hemisphere. If it starts tonight, you won't see your ship again until spring."
As if on cue, the wind picked up. Their blanket rolled over, caught a gust, and sailed off down the hill. Alex ran after it awkwardly on the unfamiliar ground, but Carity was faster than she was. She pounced to wrap both arms tight around it, then rolled it into a ball to tuck under one arm. She balanced on another ridge in the rolling ground, walking along it like a balance beam. "You can't leave something like that lying around without a weight on top of it, here," she said.
"I'll try not to forget again." Alex walked back to her backpack, checked her upended notebook for damage, and put it away.
Carity followed her. "Doesn't look much like a spaceship," she commented.
The Doctor overheard them and clarified, "It's a dimensionally transcendent timeship. It's all right, Alex, we're far enough downtime not to be cagey about time travel." Downtime? She made a note to ask about the term later.
"Your Dad, is he a Time Agent, then?" Carity said, lowering her voice a little in the vain hope that the Doctor wouldn't overhear.
Alex shook her head. "I'm not sure. And he's not my Dad."
The Doctor was still chatting with the adults, but he managed to overhear them anyway. He called over his shoulder, "Not a Time Agent, Alex. They're a different thing entirely."
Alex gestured down the hill with her chin. Carity nodded. They took a few more steps down toward one of the kettle holes. Carity picked a handful of brown seed pods the size of acorns and began to toss them down into the hole. Alex picked one up and rolled it between her fingers. The seeds inside rattled faintly. "How long have you lived here?" Alex asked, figuring that was a safe enough question.
Carity kept chucking seeds into the pond at the bottom of the kettle hole. "Four years. We don't get many visitors. My parents are studying the way life adapts to Tempest's seasons. We're trying to delay a terraform. What about you, have you always lived on a timeship?"
Alex shook her head. "I'm from pretty far in your past--uptime I mean. The Doctor picked me up...I don't know, exactly, but I don't think it's been two weeks. You still use weeks?"
"Why wouldn't we?" Carity folded down some tall grasslike plants to sit on and started to rake her fingers through a clump of low, rust colored weeds. "So are you an orphan or something?"
"No. Well I mean, I guess my parents have been dead for thousands of years right now," she said, "but I can go home the day I left as long as I don't cross my own timeline."
"And they just let you go?" Carity picked through the debris in her fingers, separating out a few small, reddish ovals. She popped a couple in her mouth and held out the rest to Alex.
Alex crouched down at the edge of the kettle hole next to Carity. "My mom practically threw me at him." She tipped her hand up to catch the seeds, kicking her shield up a notch at the same time. Their fingers touched, fleetingly, but she only got a little dizzy for a second.
"Um," she said, examining the seeds in her hand. "You are human, right?"
"Yeah. Aren't you?"
"Sure, I just know there are some people who aren't, but look it, and I didn't want to accidently poison myself."
"They won't poison you," Carity said. Alex popped a couple in her mouth. They tasted a little like peanuts and a little like cherries.
Lila beckoned the two of them with a wave. They made their way back up the hill, Carity pausing to shake more sweet seeds out of the low shrubs on the way.
"Can I walk back with Carity while you bring the TARDIS, please?" Alex asked.
To his credit, he did appear to think it through for a moment before saying, "No."
She put on her best cutesy pout face. "I promise I won't get into any trouble."
"I'm sorry, Alex, that's not a promise you can make. Yet." He turned back to the rest of the Donanns. "The two of us will meet you back at the settlement, if you could provide coordinates?" The older man, Van, passed a palm computer to the doctor, who made a pass across it with the ubiquitous sonic screwdriver before returning it. "Ready, then?" He said to Alex.
She decided to try one more tactic. "Could Carity ride with us, then?"
"Oh, could I?" Carity breathed.
The Doctor looked so conflicted that Alex almost wished she hadn't ambushed him. Almost. He pocketed his sonic screwdriver and shook his head slowly, then he smiled. "If her parents are all right with it."
"Of course Carity can ride with you, if you don't mind," Lila said to the Doctor.
"Yes!" both girls shouted in unison. Carity held up her hands in a sort of double high five gesture. Alex paused for a beat, uncertain, then returned the gesture and did not fall down in spite of another brief dizzy spell. She smiled at the Doctor a little smugly.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," he cautioned, then hiked the rest of the way up the hill to where the Tardis rested. Both girls followed. He led the way inside. Alex ran up to the console and turned around to see the look on Carity's face when she figured out she wasn't walking into a tiny closet.
Carity did not look as impressed as Alex had expected. "Well, I had been kind of wondering about the size," Carity said as she caught sight of the spacious interior. "Is it a nested manifold or a delocalization?"
The Doctor grinned. "Closer to the former than the latter, Carity." He called up an animation on the screen attached to the control console. "How much higher dimensional topology have you studied?"
"My mom's the expedition engineer," she said, as if that explained everything. Alex stopped in the control room doorway, watching them get all math geeky. She walked back over to the console screen and watched the warping shapes that were supposed to mean something. Leaving her twenty first century existence might have saved her life---jury was still out on that--but it had not done good things for her impression of her own intelligence.
The Doctor plugged in the coordinates for the Tempest settlement. "Alex, would you press the red button near the center of the panel in front of you and hold it?"
"Sure," she said. "Why?"
He scrubbed at his hair. "It's a steering override. The Tardis doesn't like it when I use it, but it makes sure we go exactly where I intend for us to." At her puzzled expression, he continued, "She has quite the mind of her own, you know."
Carity goggled. "Your ship's alive?" Anything else she might have said and any reply the Doctor might have made were swallowed up in the noise and turbulence of their transit.
Author: Prairie Dawn
Characters: Ten, Alex Caron, a buncha other people
Timeline: After Voyage of the Damned (DW), after The Elephant in the Room (Alex series)
Summary: Another installment of the Doctor Who as written by Judy Blume thing, in which Alex and the Doctor go on a field trip to a planet with an 80 degree axial tilt and extreme seasons.
Rating: K+
Disclaimers: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC, Alex is mine.
Warnings: Gratuitous scenery, gratuitous climate technobabble, homeschooling
The Doctor peered into the laptop screen attached to the TARDIS console, his lips pursed thoughtfully. "Doctor?" Alex said quietly, not wanting to break his concentration if he were doing something important. "You're not watching lolcats on YouTube again, are you?"
"You should never have gotten me started on those," he admonished with a sly grin, "but no, not this time. Are you done with your work?"
Alex made a disgusted face. "My new online account had me doing math and English placement testing all morning." Her online access had been stuck on the day she had left Earth with the Doctor. She had been dutifully logging on to her online school account every day to keep up with her work until yesterday, when it had denied her access with a prim notice that she was not to share her account with other people. Apparently she'd used up all of the hours in that day and had started crossing her own timeline. Unfortunately, the Doctor had solved the problem for her by creating a new account that logged her in under an alias in 2006 and ratcheted forward a day every time she logged on. "You owe me a weird planet."
He grinned. "One weird planet, coming up! Strap yourself into the jumpseat, would you?"
She hopped up onto the battered yellow jumpseat and strapped herself in. "Where are we going?""
"Field trip. Like I said, we'll do science and history in the afternoons. Can't have you relying on that 21st century Earth curriculum, half of it's flat wrong."
"At least it's only half wrong," she said.
The Doctor ran around the console, manipulating buttons, dials, and switches in a manner that looked entirely random to Alex, talking all the while. "Temporal physics, all wrong, particle physics, mostly wrong, and they don't discuss quantum observer bias at all! How can you interpret experimental results without a handle on QOB, tell me that? Relevant to you, that is, Alex, but more about that later, and here we go!" He punched one more button to punctuate his speech, and the floor dropped out from under Alex.
There was one hard lurch to the side, some bit of technological debris clattered across the floor to lodge in a corner, and then the TARDIS wheezed, shuddered, and parked itself. Alex swallowed and wondered just how long it would be before her stomach would get used to time travel vertigo. "Now, this is a weird planet," the Doctor said. "Bring your pack, we're going to do a bit of astronomy."
She unstrapped herself and climbed gingerly out of the chair, then stood a moment with her hands braced on her knees until the room stopped spinning. She jogged back to her room for her backpack and checked to be sure that the electronic notebook was inside. With a locator beacon keyed to the doctor's sonic screwdriver, dimensional pockets big enough to hold a complete change of clothes, and a waterproof, mostly fireproof (don't throw it in a volcano to test it, Alex) particle screen, the pack was her new favorite possession. She could chuck it in the ocean and her belongings would be safe.
The Doctor opened the door on a world with a deep blue sky laced with diaphanous pink and gold clouds, an Earth sky with a late afternoon patina, she thought, but she stepped out of the Tardis onto rich red and purple ground cover that was almost, but not quite grass. A surprisingly brisk wind whipped her hair into her eyes. The vegetation reminded her of shortgrass prairie, a low and windswept patchwork of scrubby plum purple shrubs, rust orange sprays, stiff scarlet stems with long red-gold leaves blowing behind them, and down by her feet, little plants with pink leaves and bright green flowers.
The ground looked like a rough sea caught in a photograph, complete with swells and breakers. It was pitted with craters, some lined with taller plants and shrubs, others, the deepest ones, lined with shallow ponds. "Did meteorites make the craters?" she asked.
"Good guess, but no. They're called kettle holes. They're made by melting glacial ice." He spread a blanket on the ground to sit on and gestured to Alex to join him. "Science is all about paying attention and asking questions. So today I want you to practice paying attention to what's around you. What else do you notice?"
Alex took a seat at the edge of the blanket and pulled a windbreaker that was only a little too big out of her backpack. "No trees." She dug her fingers experimentally into the ground and laced them through the tangled roots and rhizomes near the surface. "Tough vegetation. Reminds me of a prairie, except that the colors are all wrong."
"Not wrong, just uncommon," the Doctor corrected her. He sounded sad all of a sudden. "Only a few chemicals can synthesize sugars from sunlight and simple compounds. The most common are Earth's green chlorophylls and a red pigment similar to carotenoids in Earth plants. The red pigment generally only evolves on planets deficient in magnesium."
"It is pretty," she allowed, "just different." Why do the colors make you sad? She decided to keep that observation to herself. She took one more good look around. There were steps, cut into the side of one of the deeper holes and lined with flat stones. "Somebody made a stairway into that hole. So people must come here."
The Doctor nodded. "Don't just look. Close your eyes. What else can you tell me."
She took a moment to pull on the windbreaker, then concentrated on listening, smelling, feeling. Her hair plastered itself across her cheeks. "It's very windy. Smells damp and sharp, like a thunderstorm. And I'm..." She stood up, leaving her backpack on the blanket to jump up and down on the spongy ground. "I'm heavy!"
"Very good. That's ozone you're smelling, from lightning strikes. Gravity is 1.2 times what you're familiar with on Earth. Take out your notebook."
She sat back down to rummage in her bag, then passed the notebook to the Doctor. He turned on the holographic projector bound into her book. A globe made of light appeared displaying Earth's familiar continents, a red line marking the equator, and a green skewer marking the poles. "Here's Earth." He tapped a couple of keys. "This is Tempest." A new world appeared, with bluegreen water, purple tinged continents, and an enormous icecap on one side. The line girdling this world's equator was nearly straight up and down, while the green skewer of the planet's axis was nearly horizontal. "It has an eighty degree axial tilt," the Doctor commented. "Really crazy seasons." The image zoomed out to show the planet orbiting its parent star. "Summer and winter, one side of the planet faces the star, the other away. The equator is in twilight. In spring and fall, the habitable regions of the planet have twenty-two hour days, with direct sunlight falling on the equator and less light at the poles." As the image of the planet circled the sun, a huge icecap formed on the shadowed pole, then melted and reformed on the opposite side as the planet's orientation changed.
"It's like it has an ice age every year," Alex said.
The Doctor looked off to the left, startled by something. "Ah. You forgot a sense. Close your eyes and try again."
"I assume you don't mean for me to lick anything," she kidded, in part to disguise her discomfort with the new part of herself she was supposed to be figuring out. She rested her chin on her knees, obediently closing her eyes and thinning out her mental shield. "Sorry, must be out of my range...wait...is that smudge people? Like, four, maybe?"
"Five." He closed her notebook and tucked it into her pack, then took a couple of steps in the direction of the as yet unseen beings. She zipped up the bag and stood at the edge of the blanket, tucking her hair behind one ear. Four people came into view on a small rise behind and to the left of the Tardis, human people, or at least, human seeming. No, the Doctor had been right, there were five of them. The younger of the two women had a toddler slung on her back, its fluffy black hair and curious eyes just visible over her shoulder. They were all dressed in heavy pants festooned with pockets and faded long sleeved shirts with embroidery picked out on the collars and sleeves.
"Hoy!" the older woman hailed them, waving her whole arm in an expansive, friendly gesture. Both women approached, half walking, half sliding down the steep incline, while a middle aged man waited at the crest of the hill with a girl Alex's own age. They were all differing shades of caramel, with dark hair cut short in the case of the man and the older woman. The younger woman and the girl wore their hair in braids wound round their heads and bound with tie dyed headscarves.
The Doctor returned the wave. "We're just sightseeing for the day. Hope we're not trespassing."
She smiled warmly and extended a hand for the Doctor to shake. "Lila Donann," she said. "My daughter Mallena, and my grandson Ain." She reached behind her daughter to tousle the baby's hair. "Up the hill, that's my other daughter Carity and my husband Van. You got all that?"
The Doctor nodded. "Think so. I'm the Doctor, and this is Alex. My ward."
His ward. That sounded really funny, but he hadn't wanted to lie unless they had to, which had ruled out her claiming to be a niece. Alex's eyes kept straying up the hill to the other girl, Carity, was it? She hazarded a wave of her own. The other girl returned it.
Lila continued cheerfully, "Where's your ship? You'll want to be moving it. This whole area will be under twenty meters of snow and ice before long."
"That's it." He gestured to the Tardis.
The younger woman, Mallena, gave the Tardis a skeptical once over. "None too aerodynamic, is it?"
"Oi, that's my ship you're insulting there." The Doctor feigned offense, but poorly enough to make it clear that he was joking. He continued in a more friendly tone, "Really, though, I don't fly it much in normal space."
Carity was making her way down the hill to join her mother. Alex stood, brushing leaves off her behind. They each stayed behind their respective adults, peering at each other. Lila continued, "Well you're welcome to come to our place for supper. The settlement's a klick north of here. We're all busy getting ready for the migration. We left it a bit late this year, technical issues, you know." She glanced at Alex, then at Carity. "It's such a small settlement, only half a dozen children, and none near Carity's age."
"Oh, I don't know, I don't do dinner invites," the Doctor said. He spared a glance at Alex. She gave him her very best pleading look. "All right," he said to her, "you want to go, we can go." He turned back to Lila. "Technical issues, you say?"
Lila put him off, pointedly looking at the children. "Later. But you really ought to bring your ship with you. They don't call it winter for nothing, here. Comes overnight, several centimeters of snow an hour until the whole icecap moves to this hemisphere. If it starts tonight, you won't see your ship again until spring."
As if on cue, the wind picked up. Their blanket rolled over, caught a gust, and sailed off down the hill. Alex ran after it awkwardly on the unfamiliar ground, but Carity was faster than she was. She pounced to wrap both arms tight around it, then rolled it into a ball to tuck under one arm. She balanced on another ridge in the rolling ground, walking along it like a balance beam. "You can't leave something like that lying around without a weight on top of it, here," she said.
"I'll try not to forget again." Alex walked back to her backpack, checked her upended notebook for damage, and put it away.
Carity followed her. "Doesn't look much like a spaceship," she commented.
The Doctor overheard them and clarified, "It's a dimensionally transcendent timeship. It's all right, Alex, we're far enough downtime not to be cagey about time travel." Downtime? She made a note to ask about the term later.
"Your Dad, is he a Time Agent, then?" Carity said, lowering her voice a little in the vain hope that the Doctor wouldn't overhear.
Alex shook her head. "I'm not sure. And he's not my Dad."
The Doctor was still chatting with the adults, but he managed to overhear them anyway. He called over his shoulder, "Not a Time Agent, Alex. They're a different thing entirely."
Alex gestured down the hill with her chin. Carity nodded. They took a few more steps down toward one of the kettle holes. Carity picked a handful of brown seed pods the size of acorns and began to toss them down into the hole. Alex picked one up and rolled it between her fingers. The seeds inside rattled faintly. "How long have you lived here?" Alex asked, figuring that was a safe enough question.
Carity kept chucking seeds into the pond at the bottom of the kettle hole. "Four years. We don't get many visitors. My parents are studying the way life adapts to Tempest's seasons. We're trying to delay a terraform. What about you, have you always lived on a timeship?"
Alex shook her head. "I'm from pretty far in your past--uptime I mean. The Doctor picked me up...I don't know, exactly, but I don't think it's been two weeks. You still use weeks?"
"Why wouldn't we?" Carity folded down some tall grasslike plants to sit on and started to rake her fingers through a clump of low, rust colored weeds. "So are you an orphan or something?"
"No. Well I mean, I guess my parents have been dead for thousands of years right now," she said, "but I can go home the day I left as long as I don't cross my own timeline."
"And they just let you go?" Carity picked through the debris in her fingers, separating out a few small, reddish ovals. She popped a couple in her mouth and held out the rest to Alex.
Alex crouched down at the edge of the kettle hole next to Carity. "My mom practically threw me at him." She tipped her hand up to catch the seeds, kicking her shield up a notch at the same time. Their fingers touched, fleetingly, but she only got a little dizzy for a second.
"Um," she said, examining the seeds in her hand. "You are human, right?"
"Yeah. Aren't you?"
"Sure, I just know there are some people who aren't, but look it, and I didn't want to accidently poison myself."
"They won't poison you," Carity said. Alex popped a couple in her mouth. They tasted a little like peanuts and a little like cherries.
Lila beckoned the two of them with a wave. They made their way back up the hill, Carity pausing to shake more sweet seeds out of the low shrubs on the way.
"Can I walk back with Carity while you bring the TARDIS, please?" Alex asked.
To his credit, he did appear to think it through for a moment before saying, "No."
She put on her best cutesy pout face. "I promise I won't get into any trouble."
"I'm sorry, Alex, that's not a promise you can make. Yet." He turned back to the rest of the Donanns. "The two of us will meet you back at the settlement, if you could provide coordinates?" The older man, Van, passed a palm computer to the doctor, who made a pass across it with the ubiquitous sonic screwdriver before returning it. "Ready, then?" He said to Alex.
She decided to try one more tactic. "Could Carity ride with us, then?"
"Oh, could I?" Carity breathed.
The Doctor looked so conflicted that Alex almost wished she hadn't ambushed him. Almost. He pocketed his sonic screwdriver and shook his head slowly, then he smiled. "If her parents are all right with it."
"Of course Carity can ride with you, if you don't mind," Lila said to the Doctor.
"Yes!" both girls shouted in unison. Carity held up her hands in a sort of double high five gesture. Alex paused for a beat, uncertain, then returned the gesture and did not fall down in spite of another brief dizzy spell. She smiled at the Doctor a little smugly.
"Don't get ahead of yourself," he cautioned, then hiked the rest of the way up the hill to where the Tardis rested. Both girls followed. He led the way inside. Alex ran up to the console and turned around to see the look on Carity's face when she figured out she wasn't walking into a tiny closet.
Carity did not look as impressed as Alex had expected. "Well, I had been kind of wondering about the size," Carity said as she caught sight of the spacious interior. "Is it a nested manifold or a delocalization?"
The Doctor grinned. "Closer to the former than the latter, Carity." He called up an animation on the screen attached to the control console. "How much higher dimensional topology have you studied?"
"My mom's the expedition engineer," she said, as if that explained everything. Alex stopped in the control room doorway, watching them get all math geeky. She walked back over to the console screen and watched the warping shapes that were supposed to mean something. Leaving her twenty first century existence might have saved her life---jury was still out on that--but it had not done good things for her impression of her own intelligence.
The Doctor plugged in the coordinates for the Tempest settlement. "Alex, would you press the red button near the center of the panel in front of you and hold it?"
"Sure," she said. "Why?"
He scrubbed at his hair. "It's a steering override. The Tardis doesn't like it when I use it, but it makes sure we go exactly where I intend for us to." At her puzzled expression, he continued, "She has quite the mind of her own, you know."
Carity goggled. "Your ship's alive?" Anything else she might have said and any reply the Doctor might have made were swallowed up in the noise and turbulence of their transit.