Doctor Who: The Also People (24 page)

Far out to sea a multi-hulled schooner reached into the wind under full sail. Its wake was a smear of phosphorescence across the darkening swell.

A tension that he hadn't been aware of unkinked in his shoulders. It wasn't Paris, but for this one evening iSanti Jeni would do. Selecting a café at random he took a seat at an outside table near the wall where he could sit and watch the people pass by. He snapped his fingers to summon a tray and ordered a glass of pure water. When it became dark enough to see the sphere's interior he looked for the tiny hexagon shape of the Spaceport. Roz and Chris would be there by now, trying to interrogate a spaceship. The thought made him grin.

On an impulse the Doctor reached into his left pocket and retrieved the three round objects that had floated to the top. He placed them on the table: juggling balls. He felt in the right pocket and a slim oblong shape seemed to slip into his palm of its own volition. He placed it next to the balls: a pack of cards. On a whim he looked up and down the esplanade and found a suitable site, a place where the beams of two public illuminators formed an accidental spotlight.

Humming 'I am the very model of a modern UN General' he walked over into his makeshift spotlight and started to juggle. 'Look,' he heard a child say. Using one hand to keep the balls moving he used the other to take off his hat and place it upside down at his feet. It didn't matter that the only place these people had heard the word money was at school, it was the symbology that counted. When he felt that his audience had reached a critical mass he stopped juggling and faced them.

'Ladies, gentlemen and machine intelligences,' he said, 'I am the Doctor, righter of wrongs, defeater of the dastardly and foe of the phantasmagoric.' He produced the cards, shuffling them as he continued his spiel. 'I am here tonight, all the way from the Hackney Empire in the heart of the scenic East End to render to you such a display of prodigious prestidigitation that you shall doubt the very verisimilitude of your sensory apparatus.'

The Doctor spread the cards into a one handed fan and held them up.

'Now for my first trick I need a volunteer from the audience. Yes, you, sir, float right up. Now have I ever worked with you before? Of course I haven't. What's your name? Ki!Xatati? All right, ki!Xatati, in a moment I want you to pick a card, any card and show it to the audience but not to me. But first I want you to scan this deck of cards. Are they marked, tagged, smell-identified or in any way anything other than a sequential series of designs printed on rectangular paste board?

Would you tell the audience that? Thank you so much.

'Now,' said the Doctor, 'pick a card.'

Hyper-lude

Extract from the external memory datacore (subjective) of vi!Ca-pin-go-ri
Omicron 378, mining habitat, built into an asteroid in an unremarkable but strategic system, it had a population of two hundred thousand sentient individuals. An unremarkable people from an adjacent star system built it three hundred years before to burrow out the valuable cores of the surrounding asteroidal material – the remains, according to ship, of a sub-gas giant that had broken up sixty-two billion years previously. The plan was that a couple of the crew would go over and have a little scout round to see if the Insects were using it as a forward base. R-Vene stayed out of sight, hidden in the upper atmosphere of a nearby gas giant during the operation. Nobody asked me to go despite the fact that I was the best qualified drone, word of what had happened on Tipor'oosis having spread as far as the rest of the fleet by then.

I regret not having gone, not that I would have made any difference, but at least I would have ceased to exist.

The infiltration party was made up of two organics and a drone, the standard composition for what had become almost a routine by that time of the war. According to R-Vene the drone was killed first upon entering the airlock, the two organics died a couple of minutes later as they tried to get back to the safety of the shuttle.

Fifteen seconds later R-Vene dumped six kilograms of antimatter into the centre of the Omicron 378: there were no survivors.

Less than a second later the seventy-eight drones on board severed R-Vene's control links and assumed control of the ship in a perfectly executed machine junta. It took the organic crew ten minutes just to figure out what was going on. There were a few arguments but none of the rest of the crew asked us to put R-Vene back on line.

R-Vene never explained why it had blown away the habitat and murdered two hundred thousand people. The consensus amongst the crew was that it was suffering from machine combat psychosis, a hitherto theoretical condition and as meaningless a bit of psycho-babble ever to issue from the minds of IDIG.

I understood perfectly why R-Vene had done what it did but nobody bothered to ask me and I certainly wasn't going to volunteer the information.

On Tipor'oosis, when I was one point two picoseconds too late to prevent one of my organic partners being disintegrated I almost levelled the nearest town. I read her pain in the burst of cherenkov radiation and for a moment a hole appeared in my mind, a singularity of darkness that opened like some hideous vacuum flower to engulf me. All the power, all the capabilities I had been gifted with at construction had failed to save the life of my companion and for a sickening instant all I could think about was destruction.

We machines are so powerful, so smart, so
capable,
that failure is a kind of little death to us.

And if it was like that for me, a mere drone, then how must it have been for R-Vene, a ship, not just any old type of ship but a VAS, the top of line, go anywhere, tackle anything warship.

For a moment the darkness claimed R-Vene and in that moment a lot of people died.

8

Gardens of Stone

I scream, you scream

I've seen the future and it scares me to death

I've seen the starships burning all alone

I've got no reason to believe in this mess

Or watch you building up your gardens of stone

I've heard the propaganda and all your lying crew

I've seen the glory and I know it isn't true.

Seen the Glory
by Comes the Trickster

From the HvLP:
All The Way From Heaven
(2465)

When she was drunk enough Roz threw a bottle at the screen. An empty bottle because she wasn't
that
drunk yet but she was working on it. The screen disappointed her, the bottle passing through it with no more than a slight ripple. House caught it before it hit the wall beyond. Roz wanted an explosion, sparks, breaking glass, something to show that when she hit out in anger something got broken.

'People used to give me some respect,' she snarled at the screen. 'Hell, there were perps, big deals in the razorbacks who would go in their pants at the sight of me.'

She was on the screen trying to hit that smart-mouthed alien-shagging shithead barman. Only she couldn't because the damned Bar, not even a real person but the machine that ran the bar, had activated some kind of restraining field. Nothing macho or passive-aggressive – Goddess knew she would have preferred that – instead it just robbed her punches of power so that she might as well have been handing out love taps.

'I used to have respect,' she mumbled, looking for another bottle. To drink? To throw? She wasn't sure.

The screen Roz tried to hit someone again, then she looked at her fist, the image zooming in to catch every nuance of the comic bewilderment on her face. There were symbols in the corner of the screen. The number of people who had watched the sequence since the central entertainment network had made it available. She couldn't read the symbols but it looked large. 'Very popular,'

God had told her. 'Best piece of reality entertainment in years. Especially the bit where you try to kick someone, miss and flip over on your back.'

'I bet you liked that, you egotistical bit of silicon,' said Roz. To a God that, if it was listening, wasn't answering back. 'Beneath your bloody dignity.' She shook her fist at the ceiling. She stumbled over to the table.
Table
, that was a joke, a flat piece of rose-coloured hardwood that hung unsupported at waist height. Arrest that table, she thought. 'Legless in the presence of an adjudicator.'

There were bottles on the table, mostly empty. Her hands clattered amongst them as she searched for something to ease her thirst. Goddess, she thought, I want a cigar. I want to be back on Earth, in my own apartment on level 505. I want bitching messages on my service from my sister about how I don't call. 'I want my life back!' She knocked over a bottle, watched it with gormless fascination as it rolled off the edge of the table and landed with a hollow thud on the carpet. The room tilted alarmingly to the left and she leant heavily on the table until it righted itself. Stupid alien-loving, machine-buggering bastards couldn't even maintain an even G field.

Now, I was over here for a reason.

One of the bottles was still full. Roz squinted at it, thinking: pink, why is it pink? She remembered vaguely that she wasn't supposed to drink the pink stuff – something about it affecting the memory. All the better; doing something about her memory seemed like a damn good idea right now.

The room started shifting like the cabin of a maglev, no, like iStimela, a steam train. Clattering on iron rails through the drizzle grey landscape of France. Chris trying to explain to all those backward primitives that he wasn't her master. Getting bits of hot burnt stuff in your face if you were stupid enough to stick your head out of the window.

Little boy making monkey gestures when she walked past. People's eyes sliding past her face as if she were some crukking BEM.

She got the bottle, turned, caught her balance and made it as far as the sofa before falling over. She had a bit of trouble getting the bottle of pink stuff open. Must be drunk proof. Now what was the point of a drunk-proof bottle? You are under arrest for resisting an adjudicator in the execution of her duty.

Bastards.

She got the bottle open and drank.

'Respect,' she mumbled. 'And if sumovabitch didn't give it, I damn well made them.'

She was crying and she hated herself for it.

Forrester?

'Yessir.' Light in her eyes, dust in her mouth. Dust that got everywhere, in your eyes, in the equipment, down the back of your armour. Caked the sides of the bodged-up flitter, turned the sky pink.

Finding the face in the water, the little girl's face, little girl's body. One part of her mind remembering her training enough to see that the parasites hadn't got to the corpse yet so it had to be fresh. Novice Adjudicator Roslyn Forrester, naked and shivering because she has skived off from her duties to bathe in this sheltered pool of water and didn't expect to find an alien corpse waiting for her amongst the yellow rushes.

'And just what were you doing in the pool in the first place, Forrester?'

Oh Goddess. Adjudicator 'I am the right arm of Justice' Konstantine. A face etched by wearing the same frown for sixty years. An ugly man. Ugly gone bone deep and into his soul.
You better
hope you don't get squired to Konstantine – they say he eats novices for breakfast.

And behind him the flat lopsided face of the plantation manager, Edward Shuster, murder suspect but never proved.

They'd found a bar in Spaceport Facility, near where the S-Lioness was berthed. Roz had wanted to track down some of the ship's crew and get Chris to charm some facts out of them.
Look for
the words that are unspoken
, so sayeth the Codex Adjudicatas,
for therein shalt thou find the
truth
. Everybody lies to an adjudicator, so sayeth Roz Forrester, even people with nothing to hide.

Chris was good at charming people, not like her. She was good only for intimidation. People talked to him, told him about a place called Omicron 378 and a planet called Tipor'oosis. They activated terminals and called up holograms of friends and family. Roz asked about feLixi and they showed her a hologram.

Shortly after that she tried to break the man's nose.

The little alien girl had too many fingers. It was practically the cause of death.

In her bedroom at the villa Roz Forrester clutched the bottle of
flashback
to her chest and began to moan. Outside a grey landscape of stratocumulus was jockeyed into a precisely calculated position and told to turn on the taps.

Heavy rain splattered on the roof and windows. According to the general domestic weather bulletin issued by God, the rain would continue in the iSanti Jeni area for twenty-four hours or until someone gave it a good reason to turn off. The villa took the opportunity to change the water in the roof pool.

Butterflies had nothing to do with it.

'It has to rain sometimes,' said the Doctor, 'or all the vegetation would die.'

Chris said nothing and went back to trying to untangle his line from the bait box. The sea, the colour of old steel, washed lethargically at the base of the iSanti Jeni breakwater, a darkened reflection of the clouds above. The earlier downpours had given over to an irritating drizzle but the clouds looked heavy with the promise of more to come. The Doctor sat in an experienced slouch on a canvas camp stool, his fishing rod held loosely between his hands. The nylon line was almost invisible against the grey sea; the bright red float bobbing on the surface was the only splash of real colour in sight.

Water dripped from the edges of the big black umbrella and dribbled down Chris's back. He considered asking the Doctor whether they couldn't come back and do this another day but he had a sneaking suspicion that the Doctor would just tell him that being damp and miserable was all part of the fishing experience. He sighed, opened the bait box and selected a lure from the small trays that unfolded from the bottom. The lure was constructed from a couple of beads and two bedraggled feathers, one green, the other bright blue. A fish, thought Chris, would have to be pretty stupid to think of it as food. He managed to prick his finger on the sharp end of the hook while attaching it.