15: Ace Falling
The escape pod whipped around Heaven in descending orbit, little flares of atmosphere skidding off its casing. It was skipping on the edges of the air, bouncing across the sky. But in the end, there was only one place it could go. It would fall into Heaven's stratosphere and plummet towards the planet. If its retros fired, it might make a soft landing. Inside the pod there was something strange. It was Ace, lying curled, her knees up to her chin. She was quite unharmed. Something terrible had happened. Her eyes were wide, the darkness of space reflecting in them. The tiny fires from outside flashed across them every now and then, but they didn't react. Something terrible. When she was a child, Ace had woken in the night to hear owls, hooting in the distance of Perivale Park. The little girl had listened, scared, for a moment. Then she ran into Audrey's bedroom, hurtling under the covers. That was a dangerous thing to do, because Audrey wasn't always alone. All those bitter excuses and barriers. But that night, the owls had woken Audrey too. She just turned over and cuddled her daughter, and the two of them fell back into sleep. Audrey was dead now, in this far future. And who was out there who ever cared for Ace? Sabalom no, he never did. The Doctor? Could he care for her? Was it something he was able to do? Or was she just a piece in his games? She didn't want to think about him. Jan loved her. He really loved her. His love- making had been so complete, so concerned so full of desperate needing. He was the only person who'd ever needed like she needed. Needed love, needed strength, needed some. one to say everything was always gonna be okay. That was why he was a warrior too, because sometimes you had to keep kicking. Something terrible. Ace didn't know what. There was a big piece of her brain that knew something that she didn't want to know. She'd seen something that she shouldn't have seen, that she didn't want to see, and the sight was running away down deep inside her. This time, she wasn't going to run after it. This time, never mind fighting it, she'd let it go. There were some things that you shouldn't fight, some times when you just had to curl up and say yes to death. She really believed that, as the fires grew darker around the capsule. Not a muscle in her body moved, except her heart, and she'd have stopped that if she could. Just death, quiet death, up here without any fungus, up here away from people. Stupid people, stupid little clowns, and he'd sucked at her breast like a little child, a little boy they could have had together and it would have been okay, a family in the TARDIS, a family, a family —
People came and talked to her in the capsule.
The Trickster was in a clown costume, and he had a completely different face. He told her that Jan was one of his, and it had all been a joke, couldn't she see? Ace cramped and twitched until he went away.
Christopher came to her and said that he'd been jealous of the living, that he'd sacrificed himself again, and didn't see why Jan couldn't return that. Ace had punched his face in, hitting it and hitting it and hitting it - a clench of the teeth, a shudder and a gasp that stopped her on the edge of insanity - there was just a skull in the black cloak. Just a silly monster. Just a clown.
In the capsule, as it fell, Mother Mary came to her. Or it was Diana, with her owls on her arm. The Huntress told Ace that she was loved, and that this wasn't the end. There was more life yet to come. A man, no matter how loved, couldn't drag down and end the life of a woman warrior. She'd always whispered in her ear, the goddess told Ace. She'd seen her in the Land Under The Hills. The Trickster was just a stupid little boy and she shouldn't listen to him. Don't run away, Diana told Ace. You already grabbed the rose once, already took reality instead of fantasy. You're much too important to lose, the steward of Time's Champion. But Ace didn't want to be somebody's something. She wanted to be Ace. And at the moment, that wasn't possible, 'cos Jan made her Ace now.
And Jan was dead. So she wanted to be dead too. And if death wasn't going to come and see her, madness would look after her for a while. This is all flowery nonsense, an old English teacher told her. You're not talking to gods and things, and madness won't just pop up and take you. You'll bite your own tongue, and run spirals into yourself, and never talk normally with anybody else again. Madness isn't about gods, it's about shivering outside Centre Point with a cardboard box and a begging cup.
Well, Christ, then just death, just let me die. I keep on surfacing for a second, and thinking that I can go on, that everything can be fairly all right. And then I get dragged back under, and every thing's such shit. I can see the next wave coming too, I can feel that I'm about to fall, and I'm never gonna reach land again. This is all there's ever gonna be, lots of pain, special pain, pain made for me. This is hell, isn't it, over Heaven? He was right out on the margins, Jan was. This is an obituary. He didn't want to submit, to the government or to death. So death came out to the provinces and took him by force.
He never even got to be a hero, never even got to run at something with his sword.
The flames were building around the capsule now. Smoke was roasting off the hull, and colours were blasting across Ace's eyes, still oblivious. Another shooting star had bloomed over Heaven. Ace knew that, way down there below, somebody was watching it go. Maybe they were happy to see it, thought she was pretty. Maybe they knew it was another death they were watching. Maybe the people watching it were already dead, an army of corpses already shuffling towards the towns, ready to grab the living and shove spores into them. Billions of dead beings, the whole ground swelling with death, the air full of white spores. Maybe she was falling into that. Good.
She'd been to Heaven and hell, without ever having a choice.
Straight out of the womb into the grave, and it was only the TARDIS that had mixed it up, shown her everything in between, all in the wrong order. Without time travel, maybe she could just have had a normal life. It wouldn't have been like she'd seen in the Doctor's head that time. She'd have been a chemist, or an actress, or maybe she'd have chucked the whole thing and gone off to travel herself. 'Course she would. Those thoughts had taken her out of the despair again.
Her eyes had begun to notice the beautiful colours that were blazing past the window. Colours born out of gases being ripped apart. That was where most elements came from. Out of supernovae, out of the death of stars. One day, the whole universe would probably end, and then everybody who was left would die. Did anything mean anything at all, then? Clarity let her exhale, finally, and relax the muscles of her mouth. Ace found that she was tasting blood from where she'd been biting her lip. The first gesture of his that she'd seen. Biting his lip at her beauty. Ace closed her eyes as the capsule shuddered. She wanted to remember. It was going to be hard, but they'd been up there together, way up there. They'd been great. Like the universe, like everything, it had come to an end. She wanted to know how. What goes up 'Must come down!' The Doctor shouted. Ace jumped, 'cos she thought she'd got her dreams under control now. But she'd heard it. She opened her eyes just in time to see a strange cube drop on to her lap. Remembering how the muscles worked, hat- ing how the mere act of moving reminded her of him, muscles, moving against her, she reached out and took the cube. It was silver and transparent. It was like . . a door, or a crystal ball. She could see things in it. What she wanted to see . or.
She couldn't stop herself thinking of it now. His finger hovered over the button. His other hand was scratching his neck. He was scratching his neck because he'd been infected, a long time ago. A spore had con- nected itself to his neck jack, the hole that she'd run a finger around and teased. With an effort, he seemed to steady himself, and looked down the telescope. That's when he realized, and, in a second, accepted it. She had been watching the creatures making themselves out of human flesh, like it was a dream. 'Can't push the button,' he said. He hadn't given them an inch of victory, hadn't let them see any pain at all.
"I love you,' she said. 'I love you,' he said.
And then something terrible happened. His body, that beautiful human body, had filled with fungus as the spore in his neck blossomed. His face had gone almost instantly, so there hadn't been any final expression. His head had burst into a bundle of grey nodules. And then the door slammed shut in front of Ace, and the escape pod blasted out of the ship on explosive bolts.
Ace fell, staring, down towards the planet Heaven. Ace still fell now, clutching the cube tight to her chest. If she started crying, she thought, she'd never stop. But she could cry, and she would. And sometime in the future, she'd be able to start living again. There it was, land on the bloody horizon, far away. The sky outside the viewport had become blue. The shooting star fired its retros, and changed course suddenly, leaving a jagged trail in the skies of Heaven.
