Return Of The Living Dad

258 Pages·2011·0.76 MB·English

by  Orman Kate

T H E N E W
A D V E N T U R E S

RETURN OF THE
LIVING DAD

KATE ORMAN
First published in Great Britain in 1996 by
Doctor Who Books
an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd
332 Ladbroke Grove
London W10 5AH

Copyright © Kate Orman 1996

The right of Kate Orman to be identified as the Author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

‘Doctor Who’ series copyright © British Broadcasting
Corporation 1996

Cover illustration by Mark Wilkinson

ISBN 0 426 20482 4

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any
Resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or
otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written
consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including
this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
For Jon Blum
Prologue

Once upon a time there was a hermit.
He never talked much about why he was one, but he
was. Some people said there was a woman... or a whole
bunch of weird sisters, depending on who you believe. But no
matter who or what brought it on, he knew he didn’t want to
live the life he was meant to. The life his name and address
had laid out for him long before he was born.
All he really wanted to do was wander the world, and
forget the responsibilities his name carried, and meet all the
people he could never get to see otherwise.
Well all right, he was a very social hermit.
But before he left home, he broke his name. Broke it into
thirty-eight tiny pieces. It made a lovely shattering sound, like
a wineglass tossed into a fireplace.
He swept up all the pieces of who he was and tucked
them away in an inside pocket. And over the years, as he
met people who ended up sharing the road with him,
travelling with him for a while, he would quietly give each of
them a piece of his name.
And once they went their separate ways, his name
continued to grow within them, and made them into
something better, something bigger, than they were before.
Or just something different.
Most of the time he didn’t think about what grew as he
passed. Most of the time he didn’t know. But he did know
that, with all the jigsaw pieces of his name scattered about,
they wouldn’t be able to get all of him when they came to
take him away.
PART ONE

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CALDWELL

The point of archaeology is to carefully recover the past —
not disintegrate it.

The Doctor, Battlefield
1 Find

The planet Youkali, 2587
‘Death has no name.’
Jason Summerfield-Kane looked up at his wife. She was
lying on the step above him, face pressed to the ancient
stone. ‘What?’
‘It says here, Death has no name. Very suggestive.’
Bernice Kane-Summerfield sat up, brushing the dust off
her denim jacket. Jason leant up and kissed her. She smiled
at him, hugging him awkwardly, her hands full of pen and
paper. He plucked a cobweb out of her long dark hair.
‘Look.’ Benny pointed with her stylus at the complex
hieroglyphs carved into the stone. Jason hunched, put his
face close to the ancient words. ‘Name not has Death,’
translated Benny, running the pen along under the words.
‘Therefore steals She ours. Death was a female figure on this
world. Also very suggestive.’
‘Are you just going to sit there making suggestive
remarks?’ asked Jason. ‘Or do you want to tell me what it
means?’
Benny sat up on the step and looked around the site.
The sun had come out from behind the clouds, poking orange
fingers down through the canopy, a mix of native and Earth
trees. Archaeologists and students buzzed around each
staircase or crumbled building.
‘Youkali witnessed the battle between the Osirans and
Sutekh,’ she said. ‘Over five and a half thousand years ago.
The planet was laid waste. Cities burned, economies
collapsed, cultures mutated... there are incidental similarities
between these hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian
language.’
Jason took the pad and pen off her. Benny had been
making painstaking transcriptions of the hieroglyphs. ‘So
what about the Egyptians? Did they have a name for Death?’
‘They had a couple of death gods,’ shrugged Benny. ‘But
that’s not quite the same thing... the Osirans influenced the
culture on hundreds of planets. And, thousands of years after
them, the Exxilons took their own version of Osiran culture
and spread it even further... But there were people before the
Osirans.’
‘So they were influenced by someone else before they
went off influencing everyone.’
Benny grinned at him. ‘I’m sorry, you’re getting a lecture.’
‘I like listening to you talk.’ He closed her notepad. ‘So is
this going to be helpful for your thesis?’
‘More than helpful.’ They Sit Above in Shadow, said the
notepad’s cover, Archaeological Echoes of the Universe’s
First People. ‘I wish I could have talked to the people of
Youkali. There’s so much guesswork. It’s like trying to get to
know someone by reading the phone book.’
‘Would the Doctor have taken you back?’
‘What?’
‘Back then, I mean?’
Benny ruffled her husband’s hair. Dark roots were
showing under the blond. ‘He might have, at that. He took me
to some amazing places, some awesome times. But it wasn’t
so much archaeology as tourism. I suppose I like the puzzle-
solving, trying to work out the picture without being given all
of the pieces.’
‘If you don’t like what you find, you can always make
something up,’ said Jason.
Benny frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘It was a joke. Sorry, it wasn’t a very good one. I’m no
good this early in the morning.’
Benny planted a kiss on the top of his head, and looked
up. An elderly woman, well-wrapped in a black coat and
scarf, was watching them from the base of the steps.
She couldn’t be a student no dirt — and Benny didn’t
recognize her from the seminars on board the Henrietta
Leavitt. A cold wind was suddenly blowing.
‘Hello!’ called the woman. Dried leaves blew around her
feet. ‘Is your name Summerfield?’
‘What can I do for you?’ said Benny, standing up.
‘Professor Truszkowski said I’d find you somewhere
around here,’ said the woman. ‘I knew a Summerfield once,
but it was a long time ago, a very long time...’ Benny started
walking down the steps towards her. ‘You didn’t have an
uncle or perhaps a grandfather named Isaac?’
Benny sat down on the steps, hard. Jason was by her
side in a moment. ‘Oh my dear girl,’ said the woman. ‘What
have I said?’
Jason squeezed his wife’s hand. Benny was staring
through the woman as though her eyes had stopped working.
‘Admiral Isaac Douglas Summerfield?’ she said.
‘He was my commanding officer,’ said the woman. ‘Forty
years ago.’
‘He was my father,’ said Benny. ‘And he disappeared.
Forty years ago.’
‘Your father,’ repeated the old woman. She squinted at
the young couple. ‘My name is Admiral Groenewegen. I think
you’d better come back to my tent.’

Benny sat on a box, looking at a photograph of her father.
Jason put his hand on her shoulder, just to let her know
he was there. She gave the hand a reassuring squeeze. The
Admiral’s tent was warm and cosy, a massive affair like
something out of a Foreign Legion movie, all poles and
cushions and interesting boxes.
Benny held the photograph in her hands. Sepiatone, a
wooden frame; genuine artificial antique, a craze half a
century out of date. Her face was dimly reflected in the dusty
glass.
She didn’t look anything like him.
He was standing next to Groenewegen in the photo, a
much younger Groenewegen, with short dark hair, her
uniform in disarray and her eyes twinkling above a smile.
He... wasn’t exactly handsome, but striking: strong jaw,
very pale hair, very grey eyes. The photo was different from
the holograms in Spacefleet’s records, real, alive.
Groenewegen had a mug of beer, while he was holding a
shot glass of dark fluid.
‘Turkish coffee,’ said the Admiral, handing her a cup of
tea. Benny stared at it in confusion. ‘He used to get through
endless cups of that stuff. I don’t know how he managed it. It
still gives me palpitations.’ Groenewegen’s eyes were misty
with remembering. ‘He had his own cezve, this pot with a
long handle to make the coffee. He used to carry it
everywhere. For good luck.’
Benny said, ‘When I was four, maybe five, Mum told me
that he didn’t drink. I laughed because I didn’t understand
what she meant.’
‘He was always stone-cold sober.’ Jason shook his head
as the Admiral waved a chipped mug at him. She poured
herself a cup. ‘How much do you remember about him?’