Doctor Who: The Also People (20 page)

The hut was a low structure built of fired mud bricks with a thatched roof. She had cleared the undergrowth from around the front entrance, built a firepit and earthen kiln. On the other side was a low frame constructed from branches lashed together with vines. It puzzled the Doctor for a moment until he recognized it – a drying frame. He'd seen the like all over Africa in the twentieth century; the women built them to dry cooking pots and plates after washing up. Why had she built it? She was from the late twenty-first, had grown up amongst energy efficient TVs and solar-powered dishwashers. Whose memory had she used as a template for this anachronism?

The entrance was a rectangle of darkness in the blind face of the wall.

There had once been a leopard that fell into a trap.

The deck of the ship had been treacherous, swaying in the Atlantic swell and slippery with blood. He'd been careful moving about the ship, picking his way through the cabins at the stern, checking the bodies and the bits of bodies. Too late now he'd seen them, too late to go back to before and stop the slaughter. He found chests full of trade goods in the minor hold, glass beads from Liverpool, cheap enamelled mirrors from Bradford, knives and flintlocks from Sheffield and Manchester. Manufactured trinkets to buy and bribe their way down the West African coast. And in the main hold the shelves and manacles would be waiting for the next cargo. A human cargo.

Stinking, crying, moaning and dying until their despair was etched into the very fabric of the bulkhead walls, to be danced each morning and hosed down with seawater, the sick thrown over the side with the dead.

How they must have laughed to see her. Licked their chops and calculated her price on the auction blocks of Port Royale or New Orleans. Counted up the profit in their heads and taken it as a good omen for their venture. And making that calculation they never thought to ask why it was she smiled so broadly as she was led in chains up the gangplank.

The Doctor ducked under the lintel of the hut and stepped inside. As the octagons in his retina took over from his night-blinded rods and cones – her shape seemed to crystallize out of the darkness. A shadow shape of curves and angles – the human body in the foetal position.

Do you think I haven't thought of it?
he didn't ask the sleeping woman.
Do you think I didn't
formulate a thousand schemes to end that particular injustice and a thousand like it? I could have
armed the coastal tribes, I could have used my influence to get Hitler that place at art school.

He reached out with his hand to touch her.

'Doctor,' said aM!xitsa, 'she's just gone into REM sleep.'

His fingertips grazed the curve of her shoulder.

'Big surge there,' said aM!xitsa. 'Alpha waves just went way out of line.'

She unfolded from the bed – insect fast. He easily turned her first blow with the heel of his hand, too easily – it was a feint. Her left hand lashed up, striking for his neck. Suddenly he was out of position, out of practice and out of luck.

Then, miraculously, the hut was a rapidly receding shadow below him, nightbirds scattering from their perches as aM!xitsa yanked him out of danger and carried him backwards to the safety of the rocks.

'Do you know,' he said conversationally as the drone put him down, 'I think she's actually got faster.'

He looked back over the rich darkness of the cove. His doubts clustered thickly about him like unwanted relatives.

I am what I know, he thought, to know is to act. To act is to change what you know. Therefore, to act is to change what you are. If I become something that I am not, am I bound by the rules that made me what I was? And since time is shaped like a jam doughnut, are my actions foreshadowed or disinpredestined and why does the jam always dribble down my chin? If the devil is in the detail is God in the overall plan?

The idea came suddenly, bursting in his head like a soundless, colourless, invisible supernova.

Like a great big neon sign that said – EMERGENCY EXIT.

Hyper-lude

1. The treaty below marks the solemn agreement between the High Council of the Time Lords of Gallifrey (hereafter known as the High Council) and the temporary representative (hereafter known as God) of the people living in, around and within the sphere of influence of the Worldsphere (said people to be referred to hereafter as The People). (See Appendix I (one) for precise Universal Co-ordinates and definitions of sphere of influence.) 2. The People shall recognize the rights, duties and responsibilities of the High Council with regard to the maintenance of the continuity of the fabric of the space-time continuum and the causality of the Universe providing that these rights, duties and responsibilities do not conflict with the provisions of this treaty. As the temporary representative and spokesman of The People the conscious machine entity known as God shall act as guarantor of this Treaty and shall be responsible for the enforcement of the provisions herein. The People also make the following undertakings:

i) The People undertake not to develop a mode of temporal transportation nor make direct investigation into the possibilities of technologies that lead to the development of a temporal transportation system.

ii) Any theoretical knowledge of temporal transportation, translocation, transmigration or transcendence that results from any other form of research must not be pursued as a technology.

iii) The People shall at no time and by no means threaten the physical security of Gallifrey, nor shall they make alliances, deals or agreements with the enemies of the High Council. Nor shall The People have dealings with supernatural, time-transcendental, multi-dimensional beings, superbeings or deities. Contacts with the above to be reported immediately to the High Council through the channels specified below.

iv) The People shall in no way impinge, probe or explore the galaxy designated as Mutter's Spiral and will undertake no activities of any sort under any circumstances in that area of the Universe. In addition The People shall create no
permanent
database, record or store of information relating to the physical, spiritual or metaphysical substance of Mutter's Spiral.

3. The High Council hereby recognizes that The People are, and will remain, the dominant political, cultural and military force within that galaxy that is hereafter designated the Home Galaxy of the People or Home Galaxy. In regards to the status of the People within this Galaxy the High Council makes the following undertakings:

i) That the High Council will undertake no activity that will interfere with the social, economic, political, diplomatic or historical development of The People or any other cultural, ethnic or biological grouping within the Home Galaxy, either in the present, in the future or the past.

ii) That all contacts between The People and the High Council will take place in linear time and that strict relativity shall be maintained between Gallifreyan standard time and the time frame of The People. (See Appendix II (two) for technical details.) iii) The High Council will undertake a policing role with a view to preventing unauthorized temporal travel within the Home Galaxy, the chronological parameters of this area extending from the Creation of the Universe (hereafter referred to as Event One) to the Present (see Appendix II (two)).

iv) The High Council will in no wise use temporal transportation in an attempt to alter, negate or undermine this Treaty or any other treaty made between the High Council and The People. Neither shall the High Council seek to alter, negate or undermine this Treaty or any other by use of agents, proxies or renegades, officially sanctioned or otherwise. The High Council shall be made responsible for the enforcement of this clause and any violation shall be regarded as a Treaty Violation. (See Appendix IV, V, VI and VII.) 4. Any act designated as a treaty violation by either the High Council or representatives of The People shall be regarded as a potential act of war and will result in the negation of all other provisions of this treaty.

Appendix VI (six)

The High Council of the Time Lords takes no responsibility for the actions, inactions, deals, schemes, plots or otherwise of the renegade known as the Doctor. Likewise the Doctor will not be deemed under the protection of the High Council while visiting or traversing such territories and time zones within the People's sphere of influence. The High Council will in no way seek to facilitate any action taken by the Doctor and will in no way seek to employ him as an agent of influence within the Home Galaxy. The High Council hereby gives
carte blanche
to The People, God or any other agent of The People to act in any manner they deem appropriate when dealing with the Doctor, up to and including the use of deadly force.

7

Screaming for Ice Cream

I scream, you scream

We all scream for ice cream

Traditional

It started with the sound of women laughing.

There was sand between her bare toes; it was familiar sand; she had been here before.

She heard the laughter again, floating over the long slow-motion snare drum sound of the waves breaking on the shore. Big ocean waves driven across the Atlantic by the actions of the moon and the wind to crash against the West African seaboard. The laughter was a light and joyful sound that filled her full of dread.

She snapped her head around looking for the source of the sound, the pupils of her eyes contracting to filter out the glare off the bone-white beach. She saw them four hundred metres away, two women, one dressed all in black, the other in white.

Their presence angered and frightened her. This was her place, they had no right to intrude.

She could cover the distance in less than twenty seconds. She felt her body tensing even before her mind made the decision.

It was too late, for the dead were already walking out of the sea.

This too was familiar, she'd had this dream before.

Except this time the dead were not dancing. The family dead always danced, even the first Grandfather, whom she'd always suspected would have mucked up a fox-trot, danced. They should have come dancing, their rotting feet stomping the sand, a subconscious reminder that it was more than genetics that chained her to the past.

The dead were not dancing, they were walking, graveyard fresh, from the waves. She saw the patched uniform of the
garde nationale
, the spiny carapace of a cake monster, the rotting sailcloth jerkins of the seaman, no one she had known longer than a few moments.

Six of the dead were carrying a long coffin-shaped box on their shoulders and at their head came the man with no name. He was bigger than she remembered or perhaps it was she who had shrunk. He loomed in front of her, his huge eyes like pits of freezing oxygen.

'I'm sorry,' said the man with no face, 'that it took me so long to get around to you. I probably would have let you run free if you hadn't made such a mess of things in Paris.'

The dead pall bearers unshipped the box from their shoulders and set it gently base first into the sand. It was brightly coloured and looked like it had been constructed from reinforced cardboard; indeed it even had the SolGov guaranteed renewable resource logo in the bottom left-hand corner.

'But now,' said the man with no name, 'it's time for you to be put back in the box.'

It was a doll's box like the one her old doll had come in, the talking one which came with sixty-eight programmable African languages and realistic braidable hair, the doll that she had slept with until, aged thirteen, she'd taken it apart to see how it worked.

She'd screamed at her mother when she'd first been given that doll. It wasn't the one she wanted, the one she had asked for in the months that crept so slowly to her birthday. She'd wanted the doll which did the karate moves and had a realistic gun that shot a real low-powered laser beam. She screamed and screamed until her father had come running into the house and raised his hand to her for the first and only time in her life.

She looked at the box. There was a picture of herself on the lid, wearing an impractically brief hostile environment suit and carrying a realistic gun that shot a real laser beam.

The lid fell open like a hungry mouth. The box was empty.

The man with no name was very close now, although she'd had no sense, no warning, of his approach. There was a syringe in his hand, its needle a metre long lance of stainless steel, its clear body filled with a liquid the colour of arterial blood.

'I can honestly say,' said the man with no name, 'that this will hurt me more than it hurts you.'

He reached out to grab her, his hand so large that his thumb and forefinger could encircle her waist.

And then she was running.

Running down tracks in the forest that were familiar from a thousand childish games. She'd run down these tracks with other children, a little ultrasonic generator braided into her hair to scare away the animals. But she hadn't liked wearing it because she could hear its low persistent whining sound.

Running down the main road, past the High School and the Transit Station, never mind that Mekeni was a hundred kilometres from the coast.

Running past the football pitch, still showing the burn marks from the Angel Francine's last visit.

Running to her street. To her house. To her parents' bedroom. To the vast white expanse of her parents' bed where her mother was sleeping off the effects of her medication.

And then, ever so carefully so as not to disturb her, creeping under the warm, mother-smelling blankets and curling close to her mother's body. Safe where the man with no name would never find her.

There was something in the bed with her. She could hear breathing in the darkness, long slow breaths. She could feel rough fur tickling her shoulder, smooth, slightly cool skin pressed against her side. There was an aroma of sweat, leaves, roasted fish and forest earth.

There was somebody in the bed with Roz and a voice said by her ear – 'If you want to live, don't move.'

Roz figured she could roll off the bed and be out of the line of fire in a moment, but then what?