There was a forest in the box, and it was not the forest outside it. It stretched under a blue sky as far as Chris could see, until everything was blotted out by a dense haze of trunks and green. It wasn't a forest you could enter, though— Chris gazed at it through the concrete slats that ringed round the TARDIS console room like bars.
"I don't like this," she said to the Doctor, who was bashing some wooden buttons with her fist. "I liked how your box was on the outside, all broken and smashed in. It reminded me of my school. But in here feels" – she searched for the right word – "a bit like a waiting room."
"Ha! Well, I suppose it is a waiting room," said the Doctor from her console all slatted with concrete and pine. "Where we wait 'till we reach somewhere unimaginably exciting. Your house, in this case."
"My house isn't exciting, Doctor."
"Seemed it to me. It had wi-fi. No wi-fi in here; gets eaten by the trees."
The Doctor had said she wasn't an adult, and Chris had believed her. But suddenly she seemed like a very adult alien indeed: telling her what she should find interesting in a boring room, while all around them lay a forest she wasn't allowed to play in. For the first time she seemed a bit like the wrong kind of doctor, and Chris felt slightly less sad about going home.
"Here we are!" said the Doctor as an ancient wheezing filled the room. "Your house, the present day." She bounded over to the TARDIS doors recessed behind Chris in the concrete. "Now, to make up for the bit where you've not had any adventures, you can have this." She produced a grimy square of paper from her pocket. "Psychic sick note. Give it to a teacher when you need a few days off; they'll accept it no questions asked."
"But you're a qualified doctor. You could just give me a real sick note."
"Can't do that. Wouldn't be ethical. Anyway, here we are!" She thrust open the doors. "Home sweet–" she paused. "Oh, hell."
Chris frowned.
"I say 'Oh, hell!' now," came the voice of the Doctor from beyond the doors. "It's sort of my thing. I used to say things like 'Fantastic!' or 'Geronimo!' to convey the vast wonder of the universe. But these days the universe has gone a bit wrong, so now I say 'Oh, hell!' instead."
"You shouldn't swear in front of a ten-year-old," said Chris. "My gran says it's irresponsible."
"Oh, it's the most responsible thing in the world, when I try to take you home and end up— here. Which is not home. Very not home."
Chris tried to adopt a neutral expression as she ran towards the doors, hoping the Doctor wouldn't notice she was excited. She burst out to see an unearthly sky, a vast expanse of blackness above a rocky plain. A cold breeze blew through the lifeless world, whipping uncomfortably against Chris's uncovered arms.
"This is space," said Chris. "Are we in the future? I suppose they had space in the past as well," she frowned, "but this all seems quite futurey to me."
"Yeah, it's the future," said the Doctor. "Or one of them, at any rate. But it shouldn't be here, not now. This should be your house back on Earth, not–" she snapped off a bit of a nearby rock and started to chew it "–the Great Plain of Ipsico9."
"You eat rocks?" said Chris, startled.
"Salt's a rock; so do you. But this–" the Doctor tossed a blue-grey crystal into Chris's hands "–it's just sugar. Bit treacly. Ipsico 9 was full of sugar creatures once; these rocks are some of their fossilised remains. Whole world runs on sugar, like your one does on oil. Demerara towers, bridges made from paradise. Bit of a paradise, all said and done. Except of course it's not," she sighed, "because it's all been destroyed."
She looked at the sugar-strung wasteland as Chris munched away on her rock.
"And of course it shouldn't be destroyed," said the Doctor said to the sky, "and it certainly shouldn't be here. This bit of space and time's in the wrong bit of–" she waved her hands "–the thing that space and time sits in."
"Are you sure it's not just your TARDIS?" said Chris. "It doesn't look like it's very new."
"It isn't! It's very, very old. But they can be brilliant, old things. No, you can have the best plane in the world – and the best pilot – but that's no help getting to America if New York switches places with–" she frowned "–Inverness."
"Does this mean I can't get home?" said Chris, excited and afraid. "Or that home never existed? Will we just be stuck here eating rocks forever?"
"Don't worry," said the Doctor, smiling. "I'm a genius; I can read a map even when the places all change. I'll just need to get some readings with this–" she pulled what looked like a spoon with a frowning face out of her pocket "–and I can septangulate the coordinates of the dimensional shift. Once that's done, we'll recalibrate the TARDIS, and get you home in time for buns and scones."
"I don't," said Chris, "really eat—"
"Well, you should! They're extremely unhealthy." The Doctor looked off into the distance. "I should be gone a few hours, so you'll have to keep yourself busy. There's some Harry Potter fan fiction in the console drawer that's mostly appropriate for someone your age—"
"You can't leave me alone in your house!" said Chris. "I'm a child. That's against the law."
The Doctor sighed. "Thing is, Chris, something's gone wrong here. There's been an apocalypse, and it shouldn't have happened. Out here isn't safe, but I'm not quite sure of how. It's not the sort of place to take a child."
"You might think that," said Chris, "but you don't get to make the law, even if you do live in a police box. I'll call the police on you, while I'm away. I'll tell my mother."
She stared upwards at the uncomfortable looking alien, who slumped her shoulders and sighed.
"Don't go out of my sight," said the Doctor in the end, "and no eating anything, okay? This place is murder on the teeth, and I'm a psychiatrist, not a dentist."
"It's okay," said Chris. "I didn't much like the rock. It tasted all burnt, like fudge that costs too much money."
"Great!" said the Doctor. "Good teeth, no dying. Perhaps there'll be some other ways–" she looked at her frowning spoon "–that this isn't a total disaster."
YOU ARE READING
Sweetness and Light
FanfictionIn classrooms after the end of a world, children teach their adults how things can come back again. And under the ruins of a city made of sugar, the Doctor faces down her bitter foe. (This is the second in a series of stories about a different Thirt...