Slow Decay

table.

Rhys’s face, when he turned his head and saw her in the doorway, put paid to the ‘trick of perspective’ theory. His eyes widened, and she saw — she actually saw — the colour drain from his face. He pulled his hand out from underneath Lucy’s and the girl looked surprised for a moment. Then she turned her head to follow Rhys’s horrified gaze, and she saw Gwen in the doorway.

And she smiled.

Gwen was surprised to find that a sudden flush of anger was powering her legs to carry her across the restaurant to the table. For a moment, when she arrived, she wasn’t even sure what she was going to say. Rhys, on the other hand, seemed pretty sure that he wasn’t going to say anything until he knew what tack she was going to take.

‘I don’t mind you eating my food,’ she said to Lucy. ‘But don’t think you can do the same to my boyfriend.’

Rhys, to his credit, smiled, although it was a cheesy, uncomfortable grin. Lucy’s face creased into an exaggerated look of concerned horror. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I can see how it looks, but no! No, I was just telling Rhys about the problems I’ve been having with my boyfriend.’ Her gaze dropped theatrically to the table. ‘It’s been terrible. Rhys was just comforting me. You’re lucky to have him. He’s very sensitive.’

Gwen was torn. On the one had, she didn’t believe a word of it. On the other hand, she wanted to. Partly because, after the events at the nightclub, she just didn’t have the energy for a fight. And partly because, if she and Rhys ended up having a heart-to-heart about the state of their relationship, lots of stuff was going to come spilling out. She just about had the moral high ground now, and she didn’t want Rhys to feel that he had a genuine grievance.

So she decided to do something that was, she had realised during her time with Torchwood, a defining human characteristic. She was going to pretend she hadn’t seen anything.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s been a long night. I need to get to bed. Lucy, can we put you in a cab?’

‘It’s OK,’ she said, forestalling Rhys who had opened his mouth to make some gallant offer to walk her home, or offer her use of the spare room for the night. ‘I parked round the corner. I’m OK to get back.’

She got up, and put her coat on. Looking at Rhys, she said, ‘Thanks for letting me talk. I needed someone to listen. See you in the office tomorrow?’

‘Er… yeah. Goodnight.’

And with that, she headed for the door. Rhys, to his credit, didn’t watch her elegantly skinny arse wiggling in her too-tight jeans as she went. Instead, he turned to Gwen and said something that gained him several brownie points in her eyes, and saved him from a night on the couch.

‘I feel like a man who’s just been pulled back from the edge of a cliff.’

‘You know, you really don’t want to be thinking about “going down” right now. Even in passing.’

He laughed, and it was a genuine laugh, not a forced one done for effect. ‘Gwen-’ he started.

‘Rhys, we don’t have to talk about it. We really don’t.’

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said. ‘Which is probably why we need to talk.’

They moved toward the door together with the kind of sub-telepathic harmony that partners get after a while. ‘Lucy is cute-’ he continued.

‘You mean “hot”.’

‘No, you’re hot. She’s cute. And she’s got some real problems with her boyfriend. He’s doing heroin, and he’s stealing her stuff to pay for it. And she’s never sure what kind of mood he’s going to be in when he gets home, which is becoming more and more infrequent. She’s been reaching out for sympathy, and I just happened to be there. That thing with her holding my hand — I didn’t know she was going to do it, and I was trying to work out how to get my hand back when you walked back in. I’m really sorry it happened. So — are we OK?’

Gwen reached out to take his hand. ‘No, we’re not OK, and it’s my fault. I’m never home. I don’t spend enough time with you. And when we are together, it seems like all we do is argue. Rhys, I don’t want it to be like this. I love you, and I don’t know how things got like this.’

He squeezed her hand as they left the restaurant, walking into the humid, petrol-scented air of Cardiff’s city centre. Behind them, the waiters set to work like worker ants, clearing the restaurant in record time. ‘I love you and you love me. That’s what’s important. Anything else is a trivial problem that we can sort out with enough chocolate and massage oil.’

‘Rhys, I really love you.’

‘I know. Oh, by the way — is it OK if Lucy comes to live with us for a while?’

Owen gazed, fascinated, over Toshiko’s shoulder. ‘That can’t be a face,’ he breathed. ‘I mean, it just can’t. Can it? Tell me it can’t.’

But it was. At least, it was something approximating a face. Not even as close as the Weevils got, but the same basic shape, the same proportions, the same general relationship of features.

Toshiko was whistling to herself: a tuneless lament that grated on his nerves. He tried to ignore it, and process what his eyes were telling him.

As a biologist — or, rather, as a trainee doctor with a solid knowledge of human anatomy — Owen had assumed that life on other planets would follow a completely different course from life on Earth. Not that he’d thought about alien life on a regular basis before he joined Torchwood, of course, but it was the kind of thing that occasionally bothered him in those stretches of time, late at night, somewhere between the fifth bottle of San Miguel and the tenth, when his mind could raise itself from thinking about sex and consider some of the deeper mysteries of the world. Evolution meant that everything from bilateral symmetry to five fingers and five toes was the result of random mutation that, by sheer fluke, conferred a slight advantage over other random mutations, which meant that their possessors would have a slightly greater chance of not dying, and therefore a slightly greater chance of passing their mutated genes on to their offspring. And that advantage was entirely down to local conditions: the chemistry of Earth, the geology, the weather, the predators, everything. Take any alien planet — assuming there were such things — and any or all of those conditions could be different. And that meant other, different, random mutations would confer a slight advantage, and get passed on. Radial symmetry might be the preferred design option: an entire ecosystem of creatures that looked like starfish, perhaps, with eight, or ten, or fifteen arms. Or no symmetry at all: protean creatures with eyes located at random locations all over their bodies. The chances of two arms, two legs, two eyes and all the rest occurring as a random evolutionary outcome on an alien planet were infinitesimally small.

At which point, Owen usually stopped thinking about evolution, and random mutations, and alien life, and started worrying about whether he was going to get the chance to pass his own genes on that night.

Since qualifying as a doctor, and then later joining Torchwood, Owen had discovered that the basic human form was more like the norm across the universe than the exception. Not exclusively — there were creatures out there that were about as far from human as it was possible to get — but there were more beings that could pass for human in a dark alley than not. Which, for a biologist like him, raised the question: why? What was it about the universe that favoured a human-like design?

And now, as he looked at a picture of a form of life probably never even seen before by humanity, encoded somehow into a series of alien electronic circuits, all those late-night undergraduate thoughts came back to haunt him.

That lonesome whistle was really beginning to grate on his nerves. He wanted to say something to Toshiko, to suggest that she shut up, but Owen worried about the way Toshiko reacted to things sometimes. She internalised a lot. Not like Owen, who let everything out as often as possible. She pondered. Brooded. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her withdraw even more. It wasn’t that he cared, particularly, but she was a key part of the team. Owen didn’t want to be blamed if she went over the edge.

The face that looked back at him and Toshiko from inside the alien device was differently proportioned to humanity: shorter and wider, something like a hammerhead shark. There were two eyes — at least, there were things that might have been eyes — placed at extremes of the head. A vertical slit right in the middle of the face could have been a mouth, or perhaps a nose. Or something completely different. The image finished at the neck, but Owen would have bet a lot of money on the probability of there being arms and legs somewhere beneath the head, all joined up with a central torso.

Scale was impossible to ascertain — that head could have been the size of a house, or the size of a microbe