Doctor Who: The Also People (31 page)

'AgRaven,' said kiKhali's voice, 'are you awake yet?'

'What is it?' she asked peevishly. 'I've got company.'

'I know,' said the drone, 'I was there.'

'How was I?'

'Same as usual.'

When am I going to learn? she asked herself. Quality not quantity.

'If you can bear to tear yourself away for a minute,' said kiKhali, 'I've got something to tell you – IDIG business. Meet me in Gossipmongers, it's dockside on the thirty-third level.'

'I know where it is,' said agRaven. Gossipmongers had the best privacy screening in Starport Facility. If kiKhali wanted to meet her there then it must be something important. 'I'm on my way,' she said, 'and make sure something stimulating is waiting for me' – agRaven staggered to her feet – 'and a measure of
purge
while you're at it.'

!C-Mel wanted to know where she was going. 'Just out for a wander,' she told the ship.

'Thought I'd walk off my hangover.'

'What shall I tell your guests?'

'Make something up,' said agRaven. She reached the entrance to the main umbilical. 'I don't care what it is as long as it's plausible.'

'You wouldn't be keeping secrets from little ol' me.' !C-Mel was making its voice particularly winsome.

'Chance would be a fine thing,' said agRaven, and legged it off the ship.

KiKhali was humming with excitement when agRaven joined it in Gossipmongers. 'Can you still do that trick with the bugs?' she asked it as she sat down. KiKhali had picked up a particularly sneaky ECM package from the Insects when they were mopping up at the end of the war. There was a fifty/fifty chance that !C-Mel couldn't shield its bugs from it.

'You're clean,' said kiKhali. 'I had a visit from one of our barbarian friends – the one that eats raw meat.'

'You dragged me out of a warm bed for that?'

'She was surprisingly polite, and she wanted to know about Omicron 378.'

'Oh.'

'And information on the crew of the S-Lioness.'

'Vi!Cari's ship,' said agRaven. 'That makes sense at least. Why all the secrecy?'

'She seems to think that the ship that blew away Omicron 378 is still alive,' said kiKhali. 'If that's true, and the R-Vene wasn't disassembled, then God is going to be well and truly pissed off with XR(N)IG.'

'Oh shit,' said agRaven. 'You don't think it's docked here now?'

'How would we know?' said kiKhali. 'And I found out something else as well. Vi!Cari was actually on board the R-Vene at Omicron 378. It was actually there when the place got wasted.'

'Can a machine recognize another machine even if it was in disguise?' asked agRaven. 'Could you?'

'Not me,' admitted kiKhali, 'but I'm willing to bet my right dorsal impeller that vi!Cari could have. Did you know we were on war alert for two hours yesterday?'

AgRaven looked sheepish. 'I think I must have slept through it.'

'Time Lords always bugger up the ships' predictive assessments because they can step out of the normal chain of causal events. What really got the wind up the VASs was that someone discovered another transtemporal being on the sphere.'

'Another Time Lord?'

'Not according to the Doctor; human, he says, the same species as the other barbarians but souped up. But get this – who do you think is nurse-maiding this renegade?'

'AM!xitsa,' said agRaven. 'Has to be.'

KiKhali's face ikon flashed a big happy grin. 'I knew there was a reason why I was your partner.'

'AM!xitsa, the Doctor, God – that's half the original negotiating team.'

'Exactly,' said kiKhali. 'And what happens when they get together? The first unsolved machinacide in six centuries.'

'Yes, but what does it all mean?'

'I don't know,' said kiKhali, 'but I do know that if the High Council of Gallifrey ever finds out about this we can kiss the treaty goodbye.'

'God must know that, surely?'

'The way I see it,' said kiKhali, 'is that there are three possibilities. One: it's all a gigantic coincidence, unlikely but possible. Two: God is using the murder as an excuse to uncover XR(N)IG's nefarious past by letting the Doctor and his friends do all the dirty work. There's a lot of speculation that the Doctor is effectively the High Council's only deniable intelligence asset, hence the special provision in the treaty.'

'Now that's obscure.'

'Trust me, agRaven,' said kiKhali. 'The smarter you get the murkier everything becomes, and God's the smartest person I know.'

'What's the third possibility?'

'That God has tossed the Doctor into this whole situation in the hope that he'll get himself killed.'

10

Unsmiling in the Darkness

We all make our choices on life's highway

My mama, she always told me that

But I'd sure feel much better doing it my way

If someone would just let me see the map.

'What My Mama Told Me' by Jesse Palmer

From the LP:
Rode From Nashville
(1976)

Bernice dreamt that she was sharing a couple of bottles of Dom Perignon 2597 with Kadiatu, a Dalek, a Cyberman and a Sontaran officer named Grinx. So far the evening had gone reasonably well if you excused Grinx's unfortunate habit of belching after every glass. At least, no one had tried to exterminate anyone else.

'It's a question of moral choice,' said the Dalek. 'How can somebody be evil if they have no free choice over their actions?'

The Cyberman nodded sagely. 'Tinhead here is right,' it said. 'If a person is programmed to exterminate then they are effectively incapable of exercising a moral choice not to exterminate.'

'QED,' said Grinx and belched.

'It's you humans,' said the Dalek, 'that are capable of true evil because you have a choice in the matter.'

'And let's face it,' said the Cyberman, 'your track record is pretty shitty.'

'What about me then?' asked Kadiatu. 'It's all right for you guys, you all belong to cultures where ruthless and efficient termination of an enemy is acceptable behaviour, glorified even.'

'Oh yeah,' said the Dalek. 'Humans are famous for glorifying their peacemakers, well known philanthropists like Alexander the Great, Julius Cæsar, Napoleon Bonaparte, Tshaka Zulu. These are the humans that get all the glory, the guys that get all the column inches.'

'There are others,' said Bernice. 'Gandhi . . .'

'Shot,' said the Dalek.

'Martin Luther King?'

'Also shot,' said the Cyberman.

'Nelson Mandela,' said Bernice. 'He wasn't shot.'

'Oh no,' said Grinx, 'they just locked him up for twenty-seven years.'

'I thought he was the one that got nailed to a cross,' said the Cyberman.

'That was Jesus Christ,' said Kadiatu.

'Whose side are you on?' Bernice asked her.

Kadiatu shrugged. 'I don't know,' she said. 'I thought that was what we were talking about.'

'At least we don't go around,' said the Dalek, 'saying, "We come in peace, shoot to kill".'

'Yes you do,' said Bernice. 'You do that sort of thing all the time.'

'Yes, yes, yes,' said the Dalek. 'But we
know
we're lying.'

Bernice poured another round of Dom Perignon. She became distracted by trying to work out how, exactly, the Dalek was drinking. The champagne just seemed to vanish whenever she wasn't looking. 'What about Davros?'

'Davros, Davros,' moaned the Dalek. 'Get into an argument with a human and they always bring up Davros. Look, do you think we
like
the misshapen little monomaniac? We've tried to do away with him more times than the Doctor has. He's our crukking creator – you want an argument about moral culpability, talk to him.' The Dalek lurched away from the table. 'I'm doing a bar run, does anything want something?'

'See if they've got any peanuts,' said Grinx. 'The dry roasted type.'

'What's your excuse then?' Bernice asked the Cyberman.

'I'm with tinhead,' said the Cyberman. 'It's a tough universe out there and it's only logical to get your licks in first. You'd be better off asking fatface there what his excuse is.'

Bernice turned to Grinx. 'Well?' she asked.

'Sorry, what was the question?'

The Dalek came back with the drinks. Grinx took his peanuts and ate the lot in one go, plastic packet and all.

'This is getting sodding nowhere,' said Bernice.

'It's your dream,' said Kadiatu.

'How do you know it's
my
dream?' asked Bernice.

'Because I have a better class of portentous dream,' said Kadiatu.

'How do you know it's not one of us having this dream?' asked the Dalek.

'Because –' began Bernice.

'We don't dream,' said the Dalek. 'Are you sure of that?'

Grinx stood up. 'I have a dream,' he said, 'that little Sontarans and little Rutans will one day walk through the streets of Mississippi, hand in tentacle . . .'

Everyone shouted at him to shut up and sit down. 'More of a nightmare really,' admitted Grinx.

'Will you guys chill out,' said the Cyberman. 'Seems to me the issue is whether the customized human here' – it indicated Kadiatu – 'has free will or not? If she has then you have to let her live; if she doesn't then she belongs with us and you can exterminate her with a clear conscience.'

'AM!xitsa says that she's been modifying her own brain chemistry,' said Bernice. 'Perhaps there's some kind of drug therapy that could "help" remove these antisocial tendencies.'

'You mean change her personality?' asked the Cyberman.

'Er, yes, I suppose so.'

'Make her into something she is not?' asked the Dalek.

'Tinker with her soul,' said Grinx.

'Just the bad bits,' said Bernice defensively.

'And they say we're bastards,' said the Cyberman.

'I'd rather die,' said Kadiatu.

'That is a distinct possibility,' said Bernice. 'You know that.'

Kadiatu laughed. It was a harsh, unnerving sound. The Cyberman and the Dalek were arguing about something in short bursts of compressed data. Kadiatu banged her palm on the table to get their attention. 'Bernice here,' she said to them, 'is having trouble making the correct decision.

Hands up all those that think she should kill me.'

Grinx and the Cyberman raised their hands.

'Is that a yes?' Bernice asked the Dalek.

'No, I'm crukking birdwatching, what do you think?'

Bernice sighed. The Cyberman, the Dalek and the Sontaran wandered off and left her alone with Kadiatu. A few minutes later there were screams and the sounds of gunfire and explosions as the three of them tried to exterminate each other.

They had also, she noticed, stiffed her with the bill.

'Well?' she asked Kadiatu. 'What do you want?'

The big woman shrugged. Bernice saw metal and crystal glinting in her eyes. 'I want to be free.'

'And if I let you live, what then?'

'The Doctor will kill me,' said Kadiatu. 'He has no choice.'

'He told me it was my decision.'

'And you believed him? I don't think you understand the stakes that the Ka Faraq Gatri plays for. If our roles were reversed, do you think I would hesitate?'

'Do you want to die?'

Kadiatu said nothing.

Roz sat up yelling in anger, elbowing feLixi in the chest as she tried to scramble away. 'Roz,' he shouted, 'wake up, wake up, you're having a nightmare.' She was practically invisible in the darkness, only the whites of her eyes showing. He put his arms around her trembling shoulders and drew her back under the blanket. She clung to him, her face buried against his neck – he could feel her heart banging against his ribs, the rhythm gradually slowing down to normal.

'Cold,' she said.

FeLixi adjusted the thermostat on the blanket and held her tighter. Whynot was in crescent, darkness having swept down the coast of the Endless Sea while they slept – it was night in iSanti Jeni. The meadow would see the morning first; some time in the next couple of hours, he estimated. There was a dull throbbing pain against his ribs where Roz had elbowed him. He stroked her head, gently running his fingers through the rough curls of her hair, too frightened to say anything in case he broke the moment.

Frightened of what the morning might bring.

'Do you want to go home?' he asked.

Roz shook her head. 'I was dreaming,' she said.

They lay back down under the warm blanket.

A bird woke up in the tree above them and started to warble cheerily.

Bernice brushed her hair and watched her face in the mirror. There were dark lines under her eyes, faint creases at their corners that threatened crow's-feet in the not too distant future. Her diary was open on the dresser, a pen laid across an empty page. The yellow edges of sticky memo sheets poked out from between the pages at the front of the notebook. A pair of figurines faced each other over a line of unopened cosmetic jars: a scowling Roz was jabbing her finger at Chris's chest. An untouched bottle of something industrial stood next to two standard issue medical hypospray capsules. A coffee mug rested on top of a heavy six-ring folder.

It was just a dream, she told herself.

Bernice put down the hairbrush and picked up the hypospray capsules. The skull on the hand-drawn skull and crossbones was smiling but that meant nothing: skulls grinned, it was a well-known cliché. The butterfly was much less detailed: an elongated oval for a body, two single lines on each side, drawn into double curves for the wings, two thinner lines for the antennae.

'You and your big mouth,' she said to her reflection.

A memory reached out and put a hand upon her shoulder; so vividly did she feel it that she unthinkingly dropped the capsules and reached to take Guy's hand in both of her own.

Nothing. She felt nothing but her own skin, her own bone and muscle.

'Pull yourself together, Summerfield,' she said. 'Now is not the time to get maudlin. It wouldn't have worked out and you know it. You're a star-hopping adventurer and he was an ex-Templar. It would have taken you six months just to explain how to operate the vacuum cleaner and another three years to explain why it was his job.'

What would Guy de Carnac say if he could see her now, crying in front of the mirror like a teenager.