Forget Remember Forget

See? I’ve forgotten already. I’m not as forgetful as I seem; for a guy who suffers with amnesia every time I regenerate, my memory is positively eidetic. But this I must forget. I recorded the whole thing so it won’t be lost. It might be important… but it is important for me never to remember. It could destroy me.

Knock yourself out. Listen to the recordings. Preserve them; hide them somewhere safe – somewhere I’ll never find them. If I ask you about them, don’t answer, or, if you must, then lie to me.

First Recording

I sent Nyssa and Tegan on a long shopping-and-museum spree in mid-22nd-century Paris. My friend Aristide will watch after them and see that they have everything they need. What I need is to be alone so I can go into a trance of the sort I don’t want anyone to witness, as I know I am going to remember something traumatic. I hope I am at least coherent or this recording will be a mess and of no use to anyone. I don’t know yet whether I will listen to them once I’ve finished all of them, or as I go along, or never. I’m nervous. No, let’s be honest. I’m terrified.

Is this still running? All right then. I am in the garden. I am sitting crosslegged under my magnolia tree, Maggie. She is singing to me as usual. I don’t know this song but I have asked for something soothing and it is soothing. It is making me very sleepy. I am allowing this to happen. I must not be afraid. It’s only Maggie.

I think I’m floating. I can’t feel my legs. I feel okay. Maybe I’m sinking. It’s hard to tell. Don’t analyze. Go with it. Come on. Let it happen. Stop resisting.

Down. Down. Down in time. Down to the first thing I remember. I’m young, small, cold, lost. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know where I’m supposed to be. I think I’ve fallen, but this isn’t where I fell. Somehow, I’m somewhere else now, waiting to die. I’m afraid, but distant. I’m aware of my fear but I can’t feel it. I know I’m going to die here, wherever here is, all alone. I wait and wait, and nothing happens, until suddenly something does: a woman is staring at me. “Little girl,” she says, “what in the world are you doing here?” So I’m a little girl now. When I fell, I’m not sure but I think I was a little boy. It doesn’t matter. Maybe this woman can help me. I don’t really care. Well, maybe I do, a little.

She picks me up. No one has picked me up except to fling me away in a very long time. She doesn’t hug me or speak sweetly to me but she doesn’t hurt me; she holds me out in front of her to see me clearly, cocks her head, perhaps wonders who or what I am, and then she puts me back down and squeezes my limbs carefully, somewhat roughly examines my face, my mouth, my eyes, and that hurts a tiny bit. Then she says, “Follow me, child,” and I walk behind her, a long way from the gateway where I have been sitting, dazed, waiting to die, and my legs are tired but she doesn’t slow down or look back, just trusts that I am still behind her.

Then suddenly I am no longer behind her; my little legs have given out. She makes it all the way to her small ship before she turns and sees me lying on the paving block where I have fallen. I can hear her frustrated sigh even from the distance. Then I feel her picking me up, not appreciably more gently than before, and I fall asleep in her arms.

Second Recording

I am in school, the Shobogon Academy, which is one room in a private home. I like school because I get to be with other children, but I also dislike school because my mother, Tecteun is the science teacher, and she pretends I am the worst student in her class. She knows that’s not true; it can’t possibly be true. The other children’s parents are farmers, laborers, carpenters, spellmakers, most of whom have never traveled more than a few miles from their homes. They don’t like me much. I try not to raise my hand, try not to call attention to myself, but Mother always calls on me, not to show me off but to show me up. The other children laugh when I get an answer wrong. When I get an answer right, they hate me. I have not raised my hand but Mother has just asked me, “What is the most important planet in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy?”

“Earth,” I reply promptly, and everyone laughs.

“Hardly,” snorts Mother. “Damon?”

“Jupiter,” says Damon, a bit regretfully. We’re not friends but he has not bullied me.

“Correct! Why?”

Damon shakes his head. Mother turns back to me. “Well?”

“It supports the biggest moons. It affects the most other planets. It is….”

“And what is its address?”

“Jupiter, Solar System, Orion Spiral Arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo Supercluster, Laiakea Supercluster, Observable Universe.”

“So you’re not completely ignorant. Good.” She turns away.

At the edge of the playground, during a break, I sit quietly on a boulder and wait to be called back into the school room. The other teachers treat me kindly. I like their classes. As I wait, Damon approaches me, followed by a girl about my age. “Hi,” he says, a bit shyly.

“Hi,” I respond, equally shyly.

“This is my sister, Danya,” he continues, pushing her toward me. “She wants to tell you something.”

“I do not,” Danya disagrees.

“Go on,” urges Damon.

Danya whispers, “I like your hair.” My hand flies to the ribbon my mother has tied into my curls.

“Thank you!”

Mother comes out and says, “We’re off. Come on.” Never mind that it’s the middle of the school day, or that she has other classes scheduled; when Mother gets the urge to fly away and explore, we fly away and explore, no questions asked. She talks to me, as we fly throughout the universe in a tooth-rattling ship, visiting uninhabited planets, which she tirelessly charts, but she never talks to me about myself, or about herself. I learn about breathable atmospheres, liquid water, acid ice, extinct species, supernovae, but nothing about what Mother wants, likes, expects of me. I have learned that if I remember to ask questions, Mother either asks me to try to figure out the answers, which can be a welcome challenge or intensely embarrassing, or she answers my questions, but if I don’t ask anything, then she grills me mercilessly. I am not permitted to withdraw into myself. I ask everything, anything. It’s self-defense. The one thing I don’t ask is “Where are we going?” Well, I also don’t ask, “Must I?” Of course I must. So off we go, and I wish I could ask that, because I appear to have made a new friend, and I wouldn’t mind staying home and finding out what it is like to have a friend. When we get home, she says, “I have a surprise for you.”

She has said this before. The surprise is never anything good. She wants me to respond. “What is it?” I reply, dully.

“We’re going to a place of special interest to you.” I feel my eyes widening. No, it can’t be. It will be some icy planet in the middle of nowhere and I’ll have to be careful not to fall into a hole or trip over a ridge. “You have such an interest in Earth, we’re going to visit Earth.”

Third Recording

Damon and I are playing with one of my toys while Mother keeps half an eye on us as she collects rocks at the edge of a Gallifreyan cliff. She warns us to be careful but play becomes battle, the two of us struggle for the toy, and suddenly I am falling, falling, endlessly falling, and then my body is smashed. I am irreparably broken. Mother is in the canyon, horrified that I, alive one moment, am dead in the next, but she says not a word, not even my name! It occurs to me that she never even asked my name, or gave me one. I am always “child” to her. For a long moment I am gone; I don’t exist. What a relief! I don’t have to feel anything ever again. Then I am back, in a blaze of light, alive, unharmed, but I can see myself in Mother’s eyes: I am different. She takes me in her arms as she once did but doesn’t put me down; she carries me home and is surprised to see that I don’t need healing or tending. The mirror tells me I am a different person from the one who died, and yet I am the same. I don’t understand it and I can see she doesn’t either, but I can also see the gleam in her eyes. I am her new project. We need never fly about the universe again. Her adventures now will be a matter of invading and exploring me. I can see all this and it frightens me. I don’t want to be invaded. I don’t want to be explored. Oh, please, don’t! Please don’t!

Fourth Recording

The last session was very painful. I don’t know if I can go on. I think I should. I think it’s important. I am not sure why it’s important; do we have to know everything about ourselves? Is this just my curiosity getting the better of me? I know better than to stick my hand into a flame to see if it hurts; I have independent evidence that it hurts. This, too, hurts. Do I have to see it through? If I don’t see it through does that invalidate all I’ve done so far? Have I done this for nothing? Must I continue, then, not cut my losses, but keep betting that this is vital, that I need to do this regardless of consequences? Maggie thinks so. She is singing. All right. Relax. Relax into it. Let it happen. Let it wash over you. I don’t want to. It hurts….

Fluid from my eyes. Fluid and mucos from places I didn’t know I had places, snot and clot. Teeth. Blood, sweat and tears, literally. Enemas, today with only cold water, yesterday with something that made me scream. (“Vinegar,” she explained.) Skin scrapings. Spinal tap. Ear wax. Fingernail and toenail clippings. Will there be anything left of me? I hope not. Why can’t I just die already? Being dead was so peaceful. She is pulling me apart, snippet by snippet, and that’s not all. She is stretching me, compressing me, spinning me, stopping up my nose so I have to breathe through my mouth, gagging me so I have to breathe through my nose, seeing how far she can choke me without killing me, seeing whether samples are different if I am hung upside down, and yes, blood pressure does change; I can feel that in my ears. She is curious that I have two hearts, just like a Shobogon, and yet clearly am not a Shobogon. She stuffs me so full of food that I puke, and collects the puke. She starves me but learns nothing from that. She talks to me sometimes about what she is doing and why; right now, as she pulls some of my head-hair out by the root, she is silent, her teeth in her lip, concentrating. No matter what she does, I don’t burst into alien flame and become another person. I know she wants me to, and I know she wants to know why I do. I am no longer her daughter – as if I ever was. I am her project. “You are my life,” she says, and she means it. She has quit her teaching post. She doesn’t travel. She barely sleeps. She is always here, breathing on me, doing things to me, taking parts of me away. I am a jigsaw puzzle solved not by putting pieces together but by pulling bits apart. Yes, Iamher life. Please, please stop. There is no part of this that doesn’t hurt.

“Tomorrow,” she says, heading for bed, “I am sorry…” (this is the first time she has ever said this) “… but it might hurt a little. I need to see your reaction to some substances.” She shows me the needle. “Tomorrow.”

I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.

Fifth Recording

Mother injects something into the back of my hand. I don’t know what it is, but I am dead almost immediately. “Air embolism,” she declares, as I am reborn, this time as a boy. I don’t know right away that I’m a boy; I’m not thinking about gender, or skin tone, or anything at all except that I am still in my mother’s power and she can and will do anything she wants to me. I am, therefore, terrified. Why couldn’t I have stayed dead? It’s all I want now. I just want to die and stay dead.

Now Mother reinjects me. Is it the same thing that killed me or another substance? It is probably the same substance, but without the air bubble. It is agonizing.

Sixth Recording

My throat is sore from screaming. I don’t want to do this. Can’t I take a day off? Maggie, I don’t want to go there today. I just want to sit here and try to make sense of what I am doing, what I am reliving. I just want to be me, here, now, just a little while longer before I have to go be… well, me, there, then if I have the strength. I am afraid that reliving all this will actually kill me. I am afraid that if I regenerate I will regenerate into Mother’s power again. That makes no sense; how could that even happen? But I feel as if it could happen, as if itwillhappen. I’ll be lost. I’ll be lost forever. Look at me, crying like a baby, and into the recording, too. All right, come on, get a hold of yourself. You’re a grownup man, you’re over eight hundred years old, you have had a few lives, you’re all right. Right?

I am not all right. I am not all right at all. That’s why I have to do this.

All right, Maggie, sing to me. Help me get through this. I got through it in real time. I can do it again, can’t I?

I’ll be all right. I’ll be all right.

I am old enough to fight back but she has refined her methods and knows which samples are useful. I am even allowed to go out and play. I’m outside, alone, and I don’t remember how to play. I climb inside of the long disused little spaceship, wondering if I should just try to rev it up and fly away, but all I do is sit there. Where would I go? Who would accept me? I wouldn’t even accept myself, if I met myself. I’m not even a person. I’m a source of genetic material. I am a sack of effluvia. I go back inside but Mother doesn’t care whether or not I am there; she has what she needs. She is synthesizing like mad. “I think I have it,” she mutters, not caring whether she is heard. I gather some blankets and carry them outside. There is nothing out there. I wrap myself up and lie down in the red grass, and hope that the wind will blow me away.

Then it does. It’s as if I’m fast-forwarding past something hidden far more deeply than all of this has been. I’m back in the garden and only observing now, but there’s nothing but a blur to observe. There are layers of secrets, and some layers I cannot penetrate. Should I even try? If these memories are so well buried, they must be even more painful than the ones I just dug up. Could I bear it?MustI bear it?

I’m being pushed away. Maggie stops singing. What is pushing me away? It’s a memory. I was in a trance. There’s no one here to push me away. I must have pushed myself away. Why did I do that?

Sing, Maggie. Sing me back into a trance. I hate it. I don’t want to do this anymore, but I’m committed. I’ll breathe slowly. I put myself in your hands. I mean branches. Sing me down.

I’m spinning. Is Mother spinning me again?

No, I’m just spinning through time. I’m… where am I?

I am being squeezed. This, too, I have experienced, but even Mother can’t squeeze me the way I am being compressed right now. First my head – I can feel it changing shape; it is malleable but it still hurts to be pressed this way – and then little by little the rest of me. I want to cry out but my lungs are all clogged up. I can’t tell what else I feel; it’s all happening so fast. I don’t even have time to be afraid – well, I am afraid but not nearly as afraid as I have been. I’m being pulled free, no longer squeezed, but I must be near a sun, as I am nearly blinded. “Oh, si mignon!” I’m being passed around by giants, then pressed against the warmth of a bosom, I recognize the smell of my birth mother, and I am breathing now. Before I can even quite process the fact that from that bosom emanates the crazy, irregular beating of a single heart, I hear “Code CIM zero-sept-deux” and a general hubbub as I am whisked away from that bosom and that warmth, and I begin to cry.

Maggie has stopped singing once more, I am curled up tightly beneath her branches, and I am still crying.

Seventh Recording

I don’t know how much time has passed since I began this investigation, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t slept at all, nor eaten. I don’t think I’ve moved from this spot, although I have moved within it. I’m sitting up now and I want to stretch but I am afraid to walk away. I don’t want to do this anymore but I want to beableto do this, and I’m afraid if I walk away I won’t be able to come back. Would that make me a coward? I think it would.

What good is any of this doing when all I remember, after reliving this, is the pain, and nothing of use, no details, no revelations, not even faces – not even myownfaces? I keep meaning to give myself a post-hypnotic suggestion (or would it be called a pre-hypnotic suggestion?) to remember and I keep forgetting to do it. Maggie, sing. Sing me down. Sing me down all the way, all the way down, to where I need to be. Remember, when you come back up remember, oh I hope it works, down I go, remember, don’t forget what happens next, I dread what happens next, whatever it is, down I go, breathe, breathe, try to see….

“I can’t keep dragging you all over the universe,” he grumbles. “You’re in my way. You hold me back.”

“I’m sorry.” He hates me but he’s all I have.

“Not half as sorry as I am.” We materialize but not on a planet, not on a body, just hovering amid the dust and the colors and the brightness and the darkness. A huge gateway looms within arm’s reach of the TARDIS door, which he has opened. It’s like a mouth, and it’s about to swallow me. He picks me up – I’m small; it’s easy – and chucks me out of the TARDIS door and through the gateway… almost. I landinthe gateway, and it’s nebulous, spongey, squishy, yet slippery. On my butt, I slide through and land, with a thump, on the dull paved pavilion on the other side of the gateway. Shocked, I sit, without even looking around. I sit and wait to die. I can’t even hear the groan of his TARDIS but I know he has dematerialized again and is gone. Everyone is gone. Everything is gone. I am almost gone. I’ll just sit here patiently, quietly, like a good girl. I wonder how long it takes to die if you sit very still and try not to think about anything?

I recognize this woman! She is Tecteun. She will become my savior, my mother, my torturer, my murderer and ultimately another adult who abandons me. Wake me up, Maggie! I want to remember this while awake! I can’t think while I am trudging after her, toward her ship, trying to keep up, falling….

That was my father, wasn’t it, who literally threw me away? Yes, I can think about this coldly now, although I am shuddering. He kept telling me that I killed the only woman he ever loved, just by being born. I believed him. No wonder I wanted to die! I wasn’t just unloved and unwanted; I was guilty. I killed my mother. But that’s ridiculous. Babies can’t help being born. She must have died in childbirth. How long have I carried around that guilt? Forever. My whole life. More than eight hundred years. That’s not so old. That’s not so old for a Time Lord. Wait, he threw me out of a TARDIS. My father was a Time Lord but there were no Time Lords when I was born… unless I was born in the future. Now I am confused. I’ll just lie down and close my eyes. It’s all right to stop recording, for now. I was born in the future. I can’t possibly exist.

Eighth Recording

I have just listened to the first two recordings. I wasn’t going to but I thought I remembered something. Mother took me to Earth. I have no memory of that, though. Where did she take me and why? I won’t ask when; the Shobogans didn’t have time travel. Everyone knows that. Omega gave the Time Lords time travel at the cost of his own life, or life as he knew it, anyway. So she took me to Earth as it was before the Time Lords. I’m not remembering that; it’s just logical.

If my universal history is any good at all (and I think at the Academy it was mediocre at best) then we visited Earth around the time Claudius or Nero would have been the Emperor of Rome.

I can speculate any old time. I need to go there, now. Maggie?

Mother, a respected aurifaber, is hammering on a golden disc she’s been commissioned to create for a Roman general. She understands Neo-Brittonic; I don’t. Gold is much valued here, unlike on Gallifrey, where the stuff is plentiful and not especially sought-after. I am learning her trade as well, since (she says) we’ll be staying about half a year; today I am watching listlessly, as my mind is elsewhere. It’s a lovely spring day and I long to go outside of the fort, Venta Silurum, and run through fields of exotic grass – green! – and fennel, so different from Gallifrey! It all smells impossibly enticing; it’s like living in a perfume bottle.

I ask Mother, in Gallifreyan, if I might please go outside and play. “Speak Brittonic,” she growls, in that language.

“How do I say it?”

She tells me. The General, waiting even though it will still be a while before his disc is ready, smiles at me and murmurs something to Mother. “General Emilius will take you outside while I finish up his medal. Go. And don’t be a nuisance.” The General smiles more broadly and holds out his hand for me to hold. I take it and we walk together, a little more rapidly than I would have liked, to the wall, and the gate, and out into the fragrance of springtime Brittania. I let go his hand and run into a field of fennel, masses of green leaves and tiny yellow flowers, smelling of licorice.

General Emilius follows me, casually, slowly, smiling and even laughing as I roll around like a puppy in the flowers. He sits down in the flowers too, just to my right, watching me. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. The sun, yellow like the flowers, beams down onto my face and my arms. I feel happy and safe. Then General Emilius reaches over and puts his arm across my chest in order to rest his hand on my left elbow. I stop rolling and freeze. I don’t know how old I am but Mother says I am eleven. I don’t know why the General is putting his arm across my chest or his hand on my elbow but it feels wrong. He is bending over me, and his body blocks out the warmth that delighted me a moment ago. Then he is thrown to the side, off of me, and I can see a gold disc go flying up to the sun and a hammer coming down twice on the General’s head. I cry out; his blood is all over my face, my arms, my drab but until that moment clean white tunic. Mother drops the hammer, grabs my hand and drags me not back into the fort but into a nearby wood, where she has hidden our ship.

As we fly away from Brittania, from Earth, from that solar system, from the Orion Spiral Arm, from the Milky Way Galaxy, from the Local Group, from the Virgo Supercluster, from the Laiakea Supercluster, Mother doesn’t say a word to me. She doesn’t ask me if I am all right. She doesn’t tell me I am safe, or a good girl, or a bad girl. I might as well not be there, but I know I have ruined something for her. I have no idea what I have ruined, why she had planned to stay on Earth so long (and why as an aurifaber) or why we were there to begin with. All I know is that I have ruined everything and Mother is unlikely ever to forgive me.

Recording Nine

Now I have listened to the third recording and I realize that my little friend Damon is probably the same Damon I met, neither of us realizing we’d met before, at the Time Lord Academy, who became a technician in the citadel, and who is to this day a trusted friend. I want to iterate that it is in no way his fault that I went over that cliff and that he must never, ever hear these recordings, especially in light of what I have just remembered: as we were awkwardly tussling for the toy, as children do, I am sure we made more physical contact than we were accustomed to making, and at one point his arm flew across my chest. It didn’t mean anything; he was reaching for the toy. The thing is, Mother and I hadn’t been back from Earth for long, a week at most, and Damon’s arm across my chest, however briefly, however unintentionally, surely not even consciously, made me pull away from him. That’s how I happened to go over. It wasn’t his fault. He is completely innocent, but even so, he must never hear this recording.

I also realize, upon reviewing the third recording, that at this point I did not know my name. Is this possible? Is it even possible that I had no name at all? Did everyone else have a name and just not me? I have given up trying to understand why Mother did or did not do things… wait, that’s not so. Let’s say I havenearlygiven that up. Since I don’t know why I am doing this, don’t know what I am looking for, only know it’s important and that I feel… how do I feel? I thinkdesperateis the word I’m looking for. Since I feel desperate to find whatever it is, I can’t completely dismiss my Mother’s motivations, but I realize I am not likely ever to know them. But why would anyone adopt a child and not give that child a name? And how does a child, no longer an infant, not know for itself a name? Could Ireallynot have had one?

I know my name. I shan’t say it here, but I have it and I know it. I knew it long before I chose to be the Doctor, and I knew better than to tell it to anyone, too. I don’t need to explain that here, or anywhere, or to anyone.

What bothers me is that I don’t know how I came to have my name, orwhenI came to have it. That shouldn’t even be an issue; no one remembers being named. You’re born, you’re given a name, you’re called by that name, you grow up being that name, or changing it, depending on circumstances, but it was always there; there is never a moment when you acquired it. It got attached to you before you were old enough to question it. I don’t know, though, if that is true of me. It’s not that I have forgotten my original name. It is that I’ve remembered not having one.

Again, I am impossible.

I’m not going to go down into myself right now. I need to sleep again.

Tenth Recording

I started to listen to the fourth recording and immediately stopped. I can’t go through that again.

My voice, even before I go down into my memories, is that really my voice? It frightens me that I can sound like that. No, it frightens me that I canbelike that. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to have been that person.

I’m not tired. I rested. I’m frightened of what I will remember next but that’s a given. I’m committed. I’m ready. Sing me down, Maggie.

I am being torn apart. I’m burning. I can’t survive this. I’m not screaming. I’m too tired to scream.

“Push!”

I’m too exhausted to push. Everything is draining out of me. I know I’m not just passing out. It’s been a while, and death changes its face as often as I do, but it doesn’t come in disguise.

It does come bathed in light, and I awaken, stunned to find my newborn resting on my chest. I, her mother, am now also one of her fathers. Her other father, reaching for her, is a little taken aback, but this is by no means a new phenomenon in the Citadel. The Shobogans have become Time Lords, thanks to Mother and her gift: the results of my suffering. We all regenerate now. It doesn’t always happen during childbirth, but spouses are widowed all the time, then find themselves suddenly married to a stranger, perhaps of the same sex as the departed and perhaps not. The High Council have been discussing some workarounds, some new ways of reproduction, some new family structures. This is not foremost on my mind at the moment. I am a stranger to myself, too. Once more I have to figure out who I am. I hand our child over and sit up, no longer in pain but fatigued, not from having given birth (and died in the effort) but from the process of regeneration. It never gets easier.

As I climb back up into the present I remember that it took me twenty-eight years to find my daughter. (Apparently, she moved around a lot, first with her other father, who had changed his name, then with her husband, whose name I had no way of knowing, always on Gallifrey, but still, the odds were against me. In slightly less time than that, Tecteun found me. I want to rest again; I have relived death and regeneration and this is no less exhausting than it was the first time. I lie down at Maggie’s roots but force myself to speak, as you can hear. I hope you can hear. I know I am speaking very softly and even that takes such great effort, I hope this is not all just an incoherent blur. If I don’t get it out now, I’ll forget. I have already forgotten a good deal of what came before the birth of my daughter, and that is so deeply buried I doubt I’ll ever find it again. I think I’ve lost a lot of time. I am pretty sure I don’t have the strength to relive that part of my life.

The universe is a huge place even without time travel. With time travel, it is impossibly immense, and there are other universes as well. Nonetheless, it was easy for Tecteun to find me; I had stayed on Gallifrey. She’s the one who had gone gallivanting about, exploring once more, now with the advantage of that newly accessible dimension.

I’d graduated from the Time Lord Academy, where I was a Prydonian, and become the Doctor. None of this is secret. Everyone knows this – even me. As a young man, perhaps two hundred and fifty or so, I had set up house with three other people. I fathered a son – oh!ThatI had forgotten. Maybe I should sort this out. I forget what happened to him. I forget a lot. Maybe I should go back down. No, it’s too hard. I can’t do too much at a time. I think….

Eleventh recording

No, I….

Am I asleep or awake?

Mother is standing at the foot of the bed, not my own bed, the one I have borrowed for the night in a Drylands cottage. I’m following up a lead but it’s the middle of the night, and there she is, like a ghost, grinning at me, and she’s not alone. “Like a bad sestertius,” she declares, “you always come back.”

“What do you want?” I am in no mood to deal with Mother. It’s been a long time and she is behaving as if we’ve never been apart. She’s making me feel that way too and it’s unsettling me, as if I am still small and she can still control me. I’m a grown man, I’m a father who’s been searching for a daughter he doesn’t even know, whose only memory of her is that as a newborn she lay quietly on his bare chest for less than a minute, and here comes Mother to shake things up. I don’t need this.

“The same thing you want.”

“I doubt it.” I sit up. I can just about see her in the darkness. “I want you to leave.”

She ignores me. “I have someone here I would like you to meet.” A young man steps forward. I can see he recognizes me as his father. I can also see that he doesn’t recognize me quite the way I recognize him: he ismyfather.

If Maggie could wrap her branches around me, I know she would. I wish she could. I wish she would. Maybe I wouldn’t feel so very, very alone.

Recording Twelve

Do I have to go down again? If I do it will be the last time. Maybe I don’t even have to. I remember finding my daughter. She was divorced and living as an artisan of some kind in the Drylands with her own six-year-old daughter, Susan. Mother found her first. I had forgotten that part. She taunted me with her plans for my granddaughter, the granddaughter who was a stranger to me, as my own daughter was. I couldn’t let that happen – I couldn’t letMotherhappen – to Susan. It had to stop. I made it stop. I took the child by the hand, stole an old type 40 TARDIS from the livery and ran. I am my mother’s child, to be sure. We ran across the known universe and back before settling in Britannia – well, England, now, not even Wales, where I’d been learning to be a goldsmith, but the same island, anyway, crowded enough for us to get lost for a while.

I never expected to get socompletelylost that I lost who I was, who I’d been. Now that I have recovered some of it, I don’t want it. Stop recording.

My dear TARDIS, my best friend, my protector, preserve these recordings; hide them somewhere safe – somewhere I’ll never find them, deep in the Matrix, locked away in some secret place. No one must ever find them; no one must ever hear them. I am forgetting already and I don’t want to remember. I found what I was looking for and I don’t want it. Let me be who I am now until it’s time to be whoever I will be next. That’s all I can do. That’s all anyone can do. If I ask you about the recordings, if I ask you about their contents, if I ask you what, who they reveal, don’t answer, or, if you must, then lie to me. That will help to preserveme.

THE END