“Daddy, here’s another one,” Vicki called out and The Doctor looked around to see her holding a plum coloured fruit the size of a coconut. She dropped it into the collecting bag. The Doctor smiled. This was a LOT easier than picking tiny fruits off the trees on Earth. They’d have enough to make a year’s supply of home made jam in minutes, even considering how much of it Vicki and Sukie got through on a daily basis.

“Why couldn’t Peter come with us?” Sukie asked as she, too, put a huge fruit in the bag.

“He’s too young,” The Doctor answered. “He wouldn’t be able to pick fruit.”

You could make him big,” Vicki said. “Like I got big.”

“Don’t you remember how much that hurt?” The Doctor looked at her solemnly. HE remembered vividly how horrible it was when he was hit by the aging beam of a dreadful, obscene weapon. He had felt her being robbed of her years as she lay beneath him, crying with the pain.

But now she seemed to have forgotten how much it hurt and only thought of how good it was that she and Sukie were now the same size and could play together so much better.

“I wouldn’t do that to Peter. Besides, I love him as a baby. I want to watch him grow up. And you, Vicki Katarina, can STOP growing up any more for a little while. I love you the age you are right now.”

“When we get back to the TARDIS, will you tell us again the story about the girl you named me after who married a prince?”

“I want to marry a prince,” Sukie said.

“You can marry a Time Lord,” Vicki said. “Time Lords are called Princes of the Universe.”

“No I can’t,” Sukie answered with perfect logic. “There are only two Time Lords left who aren’t married and they’re both my brothers.”

The Doctor laughed at their chatter as they headed back to the TARDIS carrying the bag of fruit between them. He was enjoying spending the time with them both. He’d raised a son in his first chance at parenthood, and then a daughter in Susan who had been in his care from an early age. Then he had spent so much time with the twins in their formative years that it had felt like a fresh chance at all the things he got to do with Christopher at that age. And now he had girls again.

If somebody asked him which was best he would have had a hard time deciding.

But right now he was a happy father of girls. And nobody was pedantic enough to point out that he wasn’t, actually, Sukie’s father.

“Put the fruit in the kitchen and go and wash your hands and faces, he said as they came into the TARDIS. He went to the console and got ready to set their course home to Earth.

The girls were running back to him as he began to initialise the temporal drive, ready to enter the vortex.

“Sit down and hold tight,” he said. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride. We’ve got ion storms in the vortex.” Vicki and Sukie both went and sat on the sofa and he turned on the gravity cushions that gently and invisibly held them in place. He made sure they were safe before he completed the manoeuvre into the vortex.

It was one of the worst ion storms he had experienced in many years. The TARDIS was being buffeted about and the vortex itself, visualised on the main viewscreen, was a chaos of swirls and arcs that distorted the usual ‘tunnel’ of accelerated time. The ion particles seemed to be honing in on the TARDIS, like white corpuscles surrounding a foreign body in the bloodstream. The power charge was registering on all of the TARDIS’s systems in the zone between dangerous and critical.

He glanced at the girls. They were safe, and they were calm, trusting his skill as pilot of the TARDIS. But he was starting to worry.

Then he REALLY worried as every dial on the drive console suddenly shot to the far end of ‘critical’ and the engines screamed in pain. He screamed, too, as the door inexplicably opened. The forcefield and the gravity cushions protected them all from decompression, but they didn’t stop the ion particles streaming into the TARDIS. He reached towards the switch that closed the doors again, and managed to do that before he was hit in the chest by the uncontrolled energy. His hearts jolted as he was hit by what felt like a lethal electrical charge.

And then he felt nothing at all.

“Daddy!”

“Granddad!”

Vicki and Sukie both screamed and ran to his side. Vicki cried out loud as she saw her father lying so still on the floor and Sukie was very forcefully reminded that Vicki WAS really only a four year old in a nine year old body. She reacted as a four year old would.

Sukie reacted as a nine year old child genius who was also a super-telepath would. She knelt beside her great-grandfather and read his vital signs telepathically. He was alive – just. His hearts were beating irregularly and struggling at that. His breathing was shallow, and his brain activity was minimal.

“He’s not dead,” she assured Vicki. “But he’s sick. Give me your hand. Let’s try to reach my brothers. They’ll know what to do.”

They did that. Chris and Davie both responded to their telepathic message and immediately realised the urgency of what had happened.

“We’ll be there as soon as we can,” Davie promised his little sister. You just hang on in there.”

“Please hurry,” she cried. “I think he’s dying.”

She reached out to her great-grandfather, putting her hands either side of his face. She tried to make mental contact with him but he was very deeply unconscious and he wasn’t even aware that she was there. She looked up at the viewscreen. The vortex looked normal now. They were moving through it easily. Her brothers would find them. But she didn’t know if they would be in time. Or what they could do when they got there.

“Daddy,” Vicki sobbed. “Don’t die. Please don’t die.” Sukie put her arm around her shoulder. They comforted each other as they knelt beside The Doctor’s barely alive body.

Neither of them were sure how long they were there, but Sukie looked up as she felt a change in the way the TARDIS was moving. Then there was a soft clunk and she gave a cry of delight as the door opened and Chris stepped through from the Gothic TARDIS that he piloted by thought control so much faster than any other TARDIS. She ran to him and he hugged her comfortingly before going to The Doctor’s side. Davie came quietly after him and went to the console.

“Vicki, Sukie,” he said. “Come and help me. We materialised around granddad’s TARDIS and I’ve got them working in tandem. It's harder.”

“Good thinking,” he told his brother telepathically as he found tasks to occupy the girls. He knelt by The Doctor’s side and examined him quickly.

It didn’t look good. His hearts were both damaged by direct contact with the ion energy. He was hanging in there, but only just.

Chris concentrated hard and put him into a fourth level meditative trance, where all of his organs were slowed right down. At that level the weakened, damaged valves of his heart could just about keep going.

“He needs help, Davie,” he told his brother. “Medical help…”

“Who?” Davie asked. “Who knows about Time Lord hearts?”

“There is somebody,” Chris said. “Set our course for San Francisco in the early 21st century.”

“Why…” Davie began. Then he remembered. “Oh… yeah. Her…”

Doctor Grace Holloway was just finishing up a report in her office. She looked up as the door opened and was surprised to see a little girl with dark hair and brown eyes standing there.

“Are you lost?” she asked. “Where should you be?”

“My daddy is hurt,” she answered. “Please come and help him.”

“But I’m not an emergency doctor,” she began. “It’s not my job to…” She stopped. She was a doctor. It was always her job. She stood up and reached for the child’s hand. “Where is your daddy? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s just this way,” she said. “His hearts are hurt. Please come…”

“Hearts?” Grace looked at the little girl and wondered about the plural of a word she would usually use in the singular.

Except with one man…

She ran with the child, only slightly surprised to find herself taken into a linen closet that wasn’t a linen closet, but a dimensionally transcendental space ship. She was still less surprised to see that there was an English police telephone box inside it. She stepped through the door into the second dimensionally relative space inside and saw another little girl with similar hair and eyes and a young man with dark hair streaked with blonde.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Medical room,” he answered. “Come on…”

“You’re one of the twins?” she said as she followed him quickly. “I remember you at the wedding… But it was only a year ago…and that little girl… HIS daughter?”

“Time works different for us,” Davie told her. “We’re Time Lords.”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Time Lords.”

Davie opened the door to the medical room. Grace stepped inside. She ran the last few steps to where The Doctor was lying. Her own heart sank as she saw how ill he looked. The other boy, the twin with long dark hair in a pony tail showed her the body scanner and she studied the damaged hearts carefully.

“I thought his body was able to mend itself?” she said. “I’ve seen him do it.”

“It doesn’t seem to be working. Both of his hearts at once… and he absorbed a lot of ion energy. I don’t think his body is coping.”

“Then I’ll have to operate,” she said. “He needs…” She breathed in deeply. “Oh, my. He needs a transplant.”

“A heart transplant?” Chris asked.

“Yes,” she said. She looked around the medical room. It was well equipped. But not for major operations.

“We’re going to need to get him to a proper cardio theatre, I need my team,” she said. “It takes at least twenty people to perform even an ordinary transplant operation.”

“Call them,” Davie said. “I’ll bring the TARDIS to the operating theatre. Get him ready.”

“Where do I get a donor heart?” Grace asked and wondered why she hadn’t thought of that first.

“Me,” Davie answered. “I’m a Time Lord, too. I have two hearts.”

“Me, too,” Chris said. And by the time he had said it Davie had run back to the console room. They felt the very slight change in the vibration of the TARDIS and Chris pushed up the sides of the moveable examination table and kicked off the brake. He looked at her and she took a hand to wheel it out of the medical room and along the corridor, through the console room and the other console room and out into the cardio theatre itself.

Grace began to page her emergency team as she looked around and saw a store cupboard with a ying yang symbol on it that managed to look perfectly natural and not at all out of place in the cardio theatre.

At the door the two little girls stood, holding hands and looking fearfully at all that was happening. She wondered if they were Time Lords, too. Did THEY have two hearts each?

Whether they were or not, they were two very frightened little girls.

“Come here, you two,” Grace said to them gently. “Give your… The Doctor… give him a kiss. And then you both go and sit quietly in the waiting room across the corridor. We’re going to make him better. But it’s best you aren’t here.”

They went out of the room as the first of Grace’s medical team began to arrive. They began to prepare themselves and the patient for the operation, none of them appearing to be curious about the presence of the two young men who were there with Doctor Holloway.

Grace looked at the two boys. She remembered meeting them as children who adored The Doctor. Now they were both very earnest young men, ready to make a great sacrifice for him.

Grace thought she knew the meaning of love before. But it had just been redefined.

“Which of you…” she began. “I’m sorry, I was going to ask a question like ‘which of you loves him more’. But I think that would be stupid. But I need one of you to be the donor.”

“Davie will donate,” Chris told her. “We already decided between us. I will look after them both. You know our species don’t tolerate anaesthetic?”

“Yes, I know that,” Grace answered.

“I’m going to monitor them both, telepathically,” Chris added. “I’ll tell you when it’s all right to begin.”

“Ok, then you get scrubbed up, too. Davie… you get changed into this.” She handed him a disposable gown and plastic hair cover to wear before she turned to watch the nurses preparing The Doctor for the operation that would save his life. Without his leather jacket, dressed in another disposable gown, a breathing tube attached to maintain his respiration, he looked so vulnerable. It shook her to see him that way. She was used to him being strong and capable and in control.

She was far too emotionally attached to him, of course. He was far more than a patient to her.

He was the biggest mistake she ever made in her life. When he asked her to come with him, and she said no.

As happy, as successful as she was in her chosen life, that decision, that no, came back to haunt her now and then.

The could have been… The what if…

But she had to put all of that aside now as she prepared to do the second most incredible operation in her entire life. The last time, he gave up one of his two hearts to save the life of her then fiancé, now her husband, Simon. This time he needed a new heart and his grandson… she thought that was the relationship, she wasn’t sure… was prepared to make that same sacrifice for him.

“Ok,” she said after taking a long deep breath and preparing herself mentally as far as possible. She looked at the two operating tables side by side. The Doctor’s vital signs being monitored by machines that weren’t REALLY intended for his anatomy. Davie, still awake yet, was being attached to a second life support system, his two beating hearts creating very unusual results on the monitor.

“It’s all right,” Chris said in a very calm voice and Grace saw all of her cardio team turn to look at him, their questions silenced. “This is a perfectly ordinary procedure just as you have done many times before. Afterwards, you will remember nothing unusual, only that you did a good job and saved a man’s life.”

Grace was astounded. Just with a calm, quiet voice Chris had hypnotised them all into believing that they were about to perform a perfectly routine operation.

But this was FAR from usual. It wasn’t even going to be a normal heart transplant operation, and nobody would call that ‘routine’ – not in her century, anyway.

What they were preparing to do, the operation the two boys had told her to perform, was anything but routine.

“You ok, Davie?” Chris asked his brother telepathically as the surgeon got ready to open his chest. Davie’s eyes flickered. “You could go into a level three trance. It would be less traumatic.”

“Want to be awake,” he answered. “Need to know… if he doesn’t make it, I want to be awake. I want to know.”

“If YOU don’t make it, mum will kill me.”

“Mum’s going to freak anyway when she finds out.”

“I suppose there’s no way of not telling her.”

“Not tell her that I’ve had major surgery?” Davie thought about it for a moment. “I think it will be tricky. Never mind. I’ll worry about it afterwards.” Chris felt him steel himself against what was to come. He reached out to him in the mental equivalent of a hug.

“Just remember, you’ll always be the better half of my soul, Davie.”

“Chris, you’re a bit of a girl, you know that.” They smiled at each other then Davie took a deep breath and blocked his pain receptors as he had learnt to do.

Chris watched the surgeon make his incision at exactly the same moment Doctor Holloway made hers into The Doctor’s chest. Davie’s eyes flickered but he didn’t register any pain. Or if he did, he didn’t show it. He turned and reached mentally towards The Doctor. He was too far gone to know what was happening to him. He felt nothing.

The surgeon completed the incision and cracked Davie’s chest, opening up the cavity within the ribcage where the most vital organs were. He matched what Grace was doing, both using razor sharp scalpels with precision cuts that detached the left hearts from their respective patients.

“You might want to close your eyes, Davie,” Chris told his brother. “Unless you really want to watch them take your heart out.”

Davie blinked but kept watching, saying nothing as the surgeon lifted his heart from his chest cavity. He turned and passed it to Doctor Holloway, and she, in turn, passed The Doctor’s damaged left heart. This was the bit that she found incredible, the bit that both Chris and Davie believed was possible. As she attached Davie’s healthy heart to The Doctor’s cardio vascular system the surgeon put The Doctor’s damaged heart into Davie’s chest cavity and micro-sutured the arteries. The cardio nurses monitored vital signs and swabbed excess blood in the cavity.

The theory was that Davie’s healthy right side heart would keep going while his regenerative process mended the damaged left one. At the same time Davie’s healthy left heart would work in The Doctor while HIS regenerative process mended his still damaged right heart.

The theory half worked.

Chris watched as Davie’s body began to repair itself. When he held his brother’s hand and concentrated he could see inside his body, see the damaged and weakened valves of The Doctor’s heart begin to regenerate themselves. At the same time his ribs began to close up and slowly the flesh that had been cut into began to knit together again.

It took nearly an hour. It seemed a long time for Chris, but to Grace as she watched the young man’s body recover completely, without even a scar to show for the major surgery, it was nothing short of incredible.

Her own patient was not doing quite so well. His body HAD accepted Davie’s heart and that was working. But the regenerative process was not beginning for him.

“Why isn’t it working?” she asked, looking to Chris who stood by his brother’s side.

“I don’t know,” Chris answered. “Maybe…”

“Take out the other heart.” For a moment Grace didn’t even realise who had spoken. Then she looked down at her own patient. His eyes were open and he was looking at her.

“What?” she said to him. “What do you mean?”

“The ion energy…” He spoke slowly, breathing carefully and slowly. Considering that he still had a cracked chest and his hearts and lungs were exposed it was a wonder he was speaking at all. “It is inhibiting my regenerative genes. My body can’t self mend while the faulty heart is in place. Take that out, the rest of my body will mend.”

“He’s right,” Davie said as he sat up on the other operating table looking perfectly healthy and surprising even the hypnotised cardio team. “My body was able to overcome the ion energy still in his heart, but he’s riddled with it at the moment. It will dissipate in a few days, but he doesn’t have a few days with a deteriorating heart in him.”

“Do it,” Chris told Grace. “Davie, lie down and rest. You’ve just had major surgery.”

“I told HIM that once,” Grace said. “Made no difference. You Time Lords are a stubborn lot. Or is it just your particular family.”

“We’re actually quite reasonable people compared to some of them,” The Doctor answered her.

“You be quiet,” Grace replied. “You’re supposed to be near death.”

The Doctor smiled. He was in safe hands, anyway. If anyone could help him, it was Grace Holloway.

“Granddad!” He heard Davie’s voice in his head. “I’m looking after you. Just reach out to me. You’re in a lot of pain still. Your pain receptors aren’t blocking. You should be screaming in agony.”

In his head, he was. It hurt like hell. He could feel his opened chest cavity. He could feel Davie’s heart beating, keeping him alive, but he also felt pain such as he had rarely felt even in his dangerous life.

Then he didn’t. He was still feeling pain, but it wasn’t so overwhelming. It wasn’t an unbearable agony.

“Davie…”

“Yes,” his great-grandson replied. “Yes, I’m taking some of the pain from you. I’m all right. I have two strong hearts beating. And I’m here for you all the way.”

“Davie, you…” The Doctor sighed mentally. He had no choice. He didn’t have the energy to block him out and stop him doing it. He looked up at Grace’s beautiful eyes as she worked quickly, assisted by her cardio team, to remove the damaged heart and seal the arteries. He had loved her briefly. He had cried alone in the TARDIS after he had left her behind in San Francisco. He had gotten over her simply because there was too much else to think about. But he had often wondered what their life would have been like if she had said yes.

Who knows. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked. Maybe they wouldn’t have loved each other enough and they would have parted bitterly. And maybe he would have been so wounded by it that he never would have given himself a second chance when he met Rose.

And then so much else wouldn’t have happened. He wouldn’t have Vicki and Peter for one thing, his beautiful children, his new chance at being more than just a Time Lord, more than just a homeless wanderer in time and space caring for the whole universe but without anyone special to comfort him when it was all too much.

Someday he should thank her for saying no.

First he had to thank her for his life. He felt the difference almost immediately. He knew he had an uphill struggle. The ion energy would take months to fully dissipate. He was lying even to himself about it taking a few days. Until then his body could only slowly repair. It was working overtime already preventing his cells from breaking down at molecular level.

He should have regenerated. It was something like this that had caused his third regeneration, and in the other reality that they knew of, he had won the battle against the Daleks on the Gamestation only at the cost of this, his ninth life. Ten had once told him all about it, how traumatic a regeneration it had been, with his brain going into neural overload at one point.

If he hadn’t given up the gift of bodily regeneration that was what would be happening right now. He wondered if he would have become a duplicate of Ten or would the two of them somehow have merged, become one soul again. Or would he have changed into a different body entirely?

“Granddad,” Chris said to him. “We’d all still love you no matter what you looked like.”

“Course you would,” he conceded. “But would you want to explain it to Rose?”

“Not sure I’m looking forward to that bit anyway,” Chris answered. “Or explaining this to mum.”

“Yeah, we’ve got some music to face,” he said with a laugh. A telepathic one. His body wasn’t quite up to anything else yet.

But they were winning. Grace was helping. She had wired his rib-cage back in place the old fashioned way, just as it was done for her Human patients and begun to suture the wound. It was beginning to repair itself, but slower than she knew it ought to do. When she was finished a nurse bandaged his chest. He wasn’t QUITE as good as new. But he would live.

The operation was over, and both patients were not only alive but awake, lying quietly on the operating tables. They were both transferred to trolleys and moved to the recovery room. As soon as she was changed from the surgical gown Grace went to see them. The Doctor was still lying quietly, but Davie was dressed in his own clothes, his black jacket and jeans and t. shirt and sitting on the edge of the bed. Chris came in after her with the two little girls. They looked anxiously at The Doctor and Chris allowed them to go to his side and kiss his cheek once then Davie took them beside him.

“We’ll get going soon,” he said. “As soon as the cardio theatre is clear and we can get back to the TARDISes.

“You’ll stay right there,” Grace ordered him. “And, lie down. I’m your doctor. You are going nowhere until I tell you.”

Davie looked at her with a sort of half smile that startled Grace. It was an expression she knew. One that she couldn’t argue with.

He had The Doctor’s heart inside him now. She told herself that it was merely an organic pump that pushed blood around his body. The transplant did not transfer anything of The Doctor’s personality to Davie.

But she wasn’t sure about that.

“Is my daddy better now?” Vicki asked her anxiously. Grace knelt and hugged the little girl, The Doctor’s own daughter, and felt a lump in her throat for those “what ifs” and “could have beens” of her own life.

“Yes, he is,” she assured her. “He won’t be able to play games with you for a while, and he’ll need to be looked after and loved. But he is better now.”

“Thank you,” Vicki told her.

“Your daddy is a very special man. The universe needs him.” She stood and turned to the twins. “He is NOT himself yet,” she told them. “He HAS to rest. Tell Rose from me to be firm with him. Don’t let him try to run before he can walk.”

“When she finds out, she won’t let him WALK!” Chris said with a grin. “He’s going to have a REALLY miserable time of it.”

Chris landed the two TARDISes in tandem in the hall of Mount Lœng House. His own one disguised itself as a grandfather clock with distinctly a ying-yang symbol in the middle of the face. The Doctor’s stayed stubbornly as a police telephone box. The girls stepped out first, carrying the bag of fruit that seemed to have been picked a very long time ago.

“Go on down to the kitchen,” Chris told his sister and Vicki. “Mrs Grahams is waiting for the fruit to make jam. Tell her we say you can help.”

That got them out of the way. He and his brother took hold of their great grandfather. He was still recovering from the operation. His ribs hurt and he had to breathe shallowly. He walked with the slow steps of an invalid.

“What happened?” Rose demanded as they stepped into the drawing room. Susan and Jackie both stood up, too, but it was his wife who reached him first. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Let him sit down,” Chris said and helped him into an armchair. Rose knelt by him, holding his hands, as the twins told the story between them. Davie had to make his mother sit down when they got to the bit about the operation and it was all he could do to persuade her that he was as healthy as he ever was, that he didn’t even have a scar on his body and that both of his hearts were beating just fine.

“But you only have one heart?” Susan said to her grandfather. “DAVIE’s heart.”

“Yes,” he told her. “I didn’t have any say in that. HE made the decision. The two of them went and got Grace and had her perform the operation. They wouldn’t let me die. Kind of wish they had. How I feel right now.”

“Don’t be silly,” Rose snapped at him. “You’re alive. Don’t ever be sorry for THAT.” She looked around at the boys. “IS he all right? He doesn’t look it.”

“Grace said she thought he’d have the symptoms of any ordinary Human heart surgery patient,” Chris told her. “He’ll feel weak and he won’t be able to do much for a while. HE says he’ll be ok in a day or two and that he’ll grow a new heart in about three months.”

“Well until he does…” Rose reached in his jacket pocket and extracted his TARDIS key and his sonic screwdriver. She passed them to Davie. “You’re in charge of the universe from now on. HE is going to stay right here and REST.”

“I’ll be fine in a few days,” The Doctor protested. “You expect me to sit here for three months?”

“Yes,” Rose and Susan both said.

“And even when your new heart DOES grow back,” Rose continued. “It’s time we seriously examined the meaning of the word RETIRED.”

The Doctor smiled sheepishly at her. Right now he WAS too weak to argue. Later, he knew, he was going to feel very frustrated. But she was right. It WAS time. Besides…

“Davie,” he said, and he reached out his hand to his great-grandson. He came to him and he, too, knelt by his chair. The Doctor ruffled his hair as he used to do when he was a little boy and pressed his hand against his cheek. “Davie, you’ve got my heart beating in your breast now. You ARE me in so many ways. YOU are The Doctor now. The universe is yours. Your legacy. Take care of it.”

“I will,” he promised. “But what will you do?”

The Doctor wasn’t sure what he was going to do. A week later, the pain was gone. He was only slightly aware of the surgical staples that had bound his ribcage back together. The scar had mended. He was beginning to feel the strange butterfly sensation that told him his new heart was starting to grow. Rose had relented enough to allow him to sit outside in the garden for a few hours a day, but even the joy of watching his children play was starting to lose its novelty.

“Here.” He looked startled as his eldest son put something on the garden table in front of him. A laptop computer. He looked at it, then at Christopher.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asked just a little tetchily. “Write my memoirs?”

“Yes,” Christopher answered. He sat down opposite him and poured two glasses of the cool home-made lemonade that was in a jug by his elbow. “Yes, it’s time you did. You’re the eldest Time Lord, the last of the ancients. There is only so much you can tell the young ones orally. Start at the beginning. Write it all down. From the day a baby boy was born into the House of Lœngbærrow with an Earth mother and the Mark of Rassilon.”

“I didn’t know you KNEW about the Mark,” The Doctor said.

“Rose told me about it. When she was expecting Peter. She said she wondered if HE would inherit the Mark from you. I didn’t. And nor did Susan or any of her children.”

“I think maybe Davie has it on his SOUL,” The Doctor said. He smiled and turned on the laptop. It was already set up with a word processor document open. It had been labelled as Chapter One. And a line had been typed. He smiled as he recognised the opening line from one of the best novels of his favourite Earth author.

“To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born …”

The Doctor flexed his long fingers and finished the sentence.

“….in the Rassilon Era, year S?35O7 under the sign of Orion.” After that his fingers flew so fast over the keys and the page filled so rapidly that even Christopher felt his eyes start to water and he sat back and sipped his lemonade. Even at that speed, though, it was going to take a good few months to get through 1,000 years of the sort of life his father had lived.

It ought to keep him out of mischief until then.