Doctor Who: The Also People (25 page)

'Some anglers prefer to use live bait,' said the Doctor. 'Worms and maggots. Others use hormonal lures that are keyed to a particular species of fish. Personally I think they're missing the point.'

Somewhere, thought Chris, probably very near by, the sun is shining.

'On Scorbiski Major the fish go angling for the people,' said the Doctor. 'They throw floating lines on to the shore and bait them with mooncalves. That's why it's very important to carry a vibroknife on Scorbiski Major. Are you ready to try again?'

Chris held up his rod for inspection. The Doctor nodded his approval. 'That's an interesting choice of lure,' he said. 'You might just catch something worthwhile with that.'

Chris stood up and let the Doctor talk him through the cast. This time the line flew straight and true and not, as it had on previous attempts, straight into a bollard, a mooring hook or a low-flying seabird. Chris felt a little thrill of triumph when he saw the float bobbing just where it was meant to. Perhaps there was something to this fishing business after all. He sat back down out of the rain and waited for something to happen.

'So what else did you find out?' asked the Doctor after a soggy minute or two.

'The spaceport is a bit more lively than this place,' said Chris. 'Plenty of ships' crews and people who are . . . um, honorary people, rather than
people
people. Roz felt that our best tactical option would be to approach members of the S-Lioness's crew and see if they could help us clarify some points of ambiguity in the ship's statement.'

'Roz said that?'

'Not exactly like that, she was more . . . more . . .'

'Colourful in the use of demotic jargon?' suggested the Doctor.

'I think S-Lioness put her in a bad mood,' said Chris. 'Worse mood,' he added after a moment.

'Nobody we talked to was very clear about the incident vi!Cari was involved in but I'm certain a crew member died and that S-Lioness held vi!Cari responsible.'

'So we have a possible motive,' said the Doctor. 'Did you find out who the crew member was?'

'I was just getting around to that when Roz started hitting people.'

'Ah,' said the Doctor.

'I know she's done it before but usually she has to be provoked a little bit first,' said Chris.

'You're worried,' said the Doctor. A statement not a question. 'Don't be, she's just trying to reconcile who she is with who she
thinks
she is. Roz thinks that she's a bitter, short-tempered, bigoted cynic who expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. While
really
, deep down inside, Roz is a bitter, short-tempered, bigoted
idealist
who expects the worst and is rarely disappointed.

There's bound to be some mood swings while she sorts herself out.'

'Love's a funny thing, isn't it?' said Chris. 'I mean, there's love and there's
love
, like the difference between me and Roz, and me and Dep. I mean if they were both trapped in a burning building – which one would I rescue?'

The Doctor gave him a sharp, unsettling look. 'Well,' he asked, 'which one would you rescue?'

'Dep,' said Chris without thinking. 'No, Roz, both!'

'Come on, Christopher,' said the Doctor. 'They're in separate rooms, you only have time to save one and you have to make your decision
now
.'

'I don't know,' blurted Chris.

'Too late,' said the Doctor savagely. 'They're both dead.'

Chris stared at the Doctor, appalled. 'But that's not . . .'

'Fair?' asked the Doctor. 'The universe is rarely fair. What if it was Roz and Bernice, or Bernice and me?'

'What would you do?'

'That's easy,' said the Doctor. 'I'd put out the fire.'

'I didn't know that was an option,' said Chris.

'You didn't ask,' said the Doctor.

'How would you put out the fire?'

'Will you stop asking so many questions,' snapped the Doctor. 'You're scaring away the fish.

They hate philosophy almost as much as they hate mathematics.'

'Who?'

'The fish,' said the Doctor. 'No fingers to count on, you see. Drives them crazy. Except for dolphins and whales, who aren't fish of course and therefore count in base five.'

Chris determinedly didn't ask what a whale was.

They sat in silence for a while, watching their floats bob up and down on the restless waves.

Water dripping from the edge of the umbrella was creating a damp patch in the small of Chris's back. The rain had a dampening effect on any sound so that it began to seem as if he and the Doctor were sitting in a rapidly shrinking bubble of reality. He wondered if it were actually possible to die of boredom.

'Or was it
up
to five,' said the Doctor suddenly. 'I can never remember.'

The rain rattled on the windows of saRa!qava's house. It pinged and jumped on the metal surface of the lift that Dep used to get her flying machines on to the roof. Dep herself was lying in mid air, her hair twisting around her naked body as she daydreamed of constructing real wings and swimming through the falling water with Chris.

SaRa!qava, downstairs in her kitchen, ignored her screens with their complex problems of heat convection and biomotic growth parameters. No longer interested in the idea of baking better bread, instead she listened to the rain and the squeals of the children outside as they splashed in the puddles under the watchful eyes of House. She caught herself thinking about Dep's father and the way he reminded her of Bernice. It could never have been permanent between them, she knew that; they had spent as much time arguing as making love, but she still wondered if it had been right to steal Dep from him.

In his upside-down rocketship-shaped house, feLixi was seized by a sudden romantic melancholia. He instructed aTraxi to access certain prohibited datacores that only he, God and the Doctor knew existed. He needed the information for a translation analogue that would allow him to transcribe certain thoughts he'd had into a language Roz could understand. On impulse he turned off all his monitoring equipment while he was writing, leaving his listening room strangely silent except for the melancholy sound of the rain.

High up on the hill behind iSanti Jeni, the rain soaked the formal lawns in front of the power station and tap danced on the bare concrete roof of the control centre. The clouds were low enough to brush the tops of the windmills whose blades turned quickly in the strong wind. In the control gallery the antique analogue needles jumped and quivered as electricity poured into the capacitors below.

In the cove down the coast Bernice, wrapped up in slick yellow waterproofs, watched as a dark figure ran down the beach towards the shelter of her hut. She shivered, but she knew it wasn't with the cold. AM!xitsa hung beside her and watched both women with intense machine fascination.

In the cyclopean hexagonal pool of stars that was the sphere's spaceport, the ships were staying strangely silent. They had been making predictive calculations for three days but with each additional piece of data the future seemed only to become more uncertain. A void had opened like a black rose in their delicate analysis of space-time events. The actions of a single individual had thrown all their predictions out of sync. Quietly the ships opened areas of their memory that by treaty shouldn't have existed and began compiling contingency plans for a war that none of them wanted.

The Doctor wrung the water out of his hat and glared at Chris, who blushed. He hadn't meant to do it on purpose. The Doctor had quickly fallen into a doze hunched over his rod. Chris, looking around in the aimless fashion of the terminally bored, had noticed that rainwater had accumulated on top of the big black umbrella, creating a noticeable bulge directly over the Doctor's head.

Without really thinking, Chris shook the umbrella and accidentally dumped two litres of freezing water on the Doctor. The Time Lord had exploded out of his camp stool yelling something about slivey toths before collapsing back down again.

Chris apologized as the Doctor wrung out his hat.

The Doctor hurumphed, frowned, pulled out his pocket watch, checked the time and announced that he had an errand to run. 'Look after my line,' he told Chris, 'I'll be back.' Picking up his red-handled umbrella he marched off down the breakwater towards iSanti Jeni. It was only when he was out of sight that Chris realized the Doctor hadn't specified
when
he'd be back. With a gloomy sigh Chris readjusted the umbrella and turned back to watch the floats.

The Doctor walked into the first café he came to and used its lift to get down to the iSanti Jeni travel station. He walked briskly across the platform and stepped into the waiting capsule. 'The Spaceport,' he said tersely. 'Maximum priority.' Running silently on a contiguous impeller loop the travel capsule started off down the tunnel.

He began to pace up and down the length of the capsule.

'Cutting it a bit fine, aren't we?' said God.

'Timing is everything,' said the Doctor. 'You should know that by now.'

'Why didn't you tell me about Kadiatu?' asked God.

The Doctor started to swear in Gallifreyan before catching himself.

'Don't stop on my account,' said God. 'I've always got room for demotic Gallifreyan in my linguistic files.'

'That's a treaty violation,' said the Doctor.

'You're trying to change the subject.'

'I didn't know if she was salvageable,' said the Doctor. 'I still don't. If she is, then she becomes a free agent and you're welcome to enter into negotiations with her. If she isn't then she remains my responsibility. Either way she has nothing to do with the treaty, the Time Lords or you.'

'XR(N)IG is convinced that you're an agent of influence,' said God. 'They've been lobbying for pre-emptive defensive measures.'

The Doctor winced inwardly. He hadn't expected that. 'There has to be balance,' he said. 'A transtemporal society and a material one. Surely, you can understand that?'

'Hey, I'm on your side,' said God, 'remember? Many of the VASs still have long-term psychological problems from the war and that's no joke when you're as smart as they are. Some of them had to be coercively transferred to other ship classifications just to keep them out of trouble.'

'Are you saying that a large proportion of your war fleet is barking mad?' asked the Doctor.

'I'm saying,' said God, 'that tensions are high and your arrival is acting as a catalyst. We have what your favourite hominids call a
situation
here.'

'How long have we got before the war starts?'

'Twenty to twenty-six hours, unless you intervene now.'

'I bet you thought you'd never have to say that.'

'Don't get smug, Doctor. It's your least attractive attribute.'

'Don't worry, God. I've stopped more wars than you've had hot dinners.'

'Yeah, I believe you,' said God. 'And how many have you started?'

FeLixi came out to join him on the breakwater and Chris was glad to see him. The oddly nondescript man was wearing a transparent rain cape over a neat black suit, a small round hat with a forcefield brim which kept his face dry. FeLixi asked if Roz was in town, accepting Chris's rather bland explanation of the events at the Spaceport. Chris was careful not to tell him about the locked door to her room or the drunken screaming that went on during lunchtime.

FeLixi sat down on the Doctor's camp stool. 'I called up the whole sequence,' he said. 'It was very funny. Especially the bit where she fell over backwards.'

'I wouldn't tell Roz that if I were you.'

'You don't think that would be a good idea,' said feLixi.

'That depends,' said Chris, 'on how much time you'd like to spend in a regeneration tank.'

FeLixi made a sour face. 'I'm a martyr to aggressive women,' he said. 'If they can't beat me in a fair fight I don't want to know.' He looked over at Chris, who was surprised to see a whisper of real pain in feLixi's eyes. The pain was gone then almost instantly replaced by a sardonic expression of self-deprecation. 'It must be the romance of danger,' he said.

'I wouldn't tell Roz that either,' said Chris.

'She wouldn't be flattered?'

'No,' said Chris carefully. 'I'm not sure she'd understand.'

'Probably not,' said feLixi and turned his eyes to the grey swell as it attempted the long slow erosion of the breakwater.

Silence. There was something about fishing that promoted silence and the quiet half-whispered conversations that Chris associated with places of worship. The same sense of reverence and isolation, as if his thoughts were loud enough to be heard at a distance. He'd once found a handwritten monograph in the TARDIS broom cupboard: its thesis was that concentrating on a series of exacting tasks elevated the mind to a higher plane of consciousness. It had been titled,
Zen and the Art of Machine Gun Maintenance
and initialled with a single letter A. He thought he vaguely understood the concept but it was nothing like flying and the wild elation of the skies.

They started talking. Chris found it difficult to keep up his end of the conversation because of the Doctor's proscription of certain subjects. Since it was a safe topic they soon moved on to the progress of the investigation.

'I'm not so sure that God is right,' said feLixi, 'about it having to be a ship or a drone. I mean, it would be easier for a machine but I think God underestimates what an organic person could do with the right equipment. They'd have to know what they're doing though.'

'Why?' asked Chris. 'Couldn't they just get a non-sentient machine to help them?'

'But that would be a risk,' said feLixi. 'How could you be sure that the machines were non-sentient? You would have to use the most basic no-brain stuff and to do that you'd have to have at least a working knowledge of energy field dynamics.'

'That should narrow it down to a couple of billion suspects,' said Chris. 'Any idea how I could check who has that kind of expertise?'

'No,' said feLixi, 'sorry. What would you do back home?'

'I'd run an occupation search through centcomp,' said Chris. 'That's what our central information net is called. That wouldn't work here, would it?'