Doctor Who: The Also People (37 page)

'And the meadow by the river with the tree,' said Roz. 'That was her place too?'

'Yes,' said feLixi, 'but it was also my place, something that I wanted to share with you.'

She stood up, suddenly unable to bear the touch of him. He followed her down the stairs and she could feel the pain and confusion radiating from him, his eyes like a mute accusation against her back.

'Vi!Cari kept a diary,' she said. 'Did you know that?'

'No, I didn't,' he said. 'Roz, if something's wrong shouldn't you just tell me?'

'Vi!Cari messed up, didn't it? It saved you but failed to save aTraxi and you never forgave it for that, did you?'

'I tried to forget about it,' said feLixi.

'It was you who told !C-Mel that vi!Cari knew the truth about what happened over Omicrom 378,' said Roz.

'Of course I told it,' said feLixi. 'It had a right to know what vi!Cari was up to. But believe me I never thought !C-Mel would disassemble the drone.'

'If you thought !C-Mel wouldn't kill vi!Cari you were right,' said Roz. 'Vi!Cari might have been damaged goods but he'd had too many decades in the field to be caught like that in a thunderstorm with its sensors looking down and its shields inactive. But it'd have gone out into that storm for you, feLixi, its old shipmate and only friend. Gone looking for traces of the device that kicked up the
micro-tsunami
.'

FeLixi drew back from her. 'What device?' he asked. 'Everyone knew that vi!Cari did that to get back at beRut.'

Roz made herself look feLixi in the eyes; such warm, brown, lying eyes. 'Of course everyone knew that,' she said. 'Everyone except for vi!Cari, that is. The poor bastard must have been desperate to clear its name. And why get back at beRut? For what? Vi!Cari wasn't an art critic. If beRut wanted to cover the whole town with paint, what was that to vi!Cari? We know it was a force-bomb, we have an eyewitness. At first I thought the idea was to set beRut up as a patsy but the man is all piss and vinegar. Then I got to thinking about why vi!Cari was out in the storm that night and it all made sense. Knowing it was there meant you could take all the time you wanted to line up the shot, using a controller made from etched silicon that !C-Mel made and programmed for you. A controller that was too primitive to show up on God's general scans.'

'What's etched silicon got to do with anything?'

'Don't give me that innocent schoolboy act, feLixi. Etching silicon is the old-fashioned way of making thinking machines. The windmills' control systems are all made from valves and transistors and it didn't take a genius to patch in a microprocessor just for one night.'

'You can't make smart machines from etched silicon.'

'It didn't have to be smart. It just had to be programmed by someone smart, someone like !C-Mel. Someone who thought they wanted vi!Cari dead as much as you did. You went up the hill, switched on and put thirty thousand amperes right through vi!Cari's brain pan. You figured even if God got suspicious it would go after !C-Mel, not you. You knew God would assume that a ship was far too bright to be manipulated by a mere
meatbrain
and everyone knows that some VASs are unstable with no war to fight. But then you found out that the Doctor was in town and panicked.

You knew he was a meddler and you couldn't take the risk that God wouldn't put him on the case for its own devious reasons. So you needed someone close to the Doctor you could feed all those false leads you'd been keeping under your hat: beRut, saRa!qava. All the secrets you'd ferreted out with your "listening room" and your contacts in XR(N)IG, the same contacts you used to get the low-down on the Doctor's companions, maybe even the secret stuff about Mutter's Spiral and Earth. So you made sure I was drinking
flashback
that evening to get me all good and confused and sidled up to me on the stairs. Just to make sure I was receptive you had the extra thumb taken off your hands and your eye colour changed. With all your experience as an agent in the proxy wars you figured I'd be a cinch to manipulate.'

'Yes,' said feLixi suddenly. 'No! It wasn't like that. It was your eyes, Roz. I saw myself reflected in your eyes and I knew you'd understand.'

'Yeah, I understood all right, better than you think. Where I come from, for what you did they'd strip your mind right back down to your birth trauma and rebuild your personality from scratch. In this place I guess they'll just stop inviting you to parties. At least you'll get to find out what it felt like to be vi!Cari.'

Roz watched it sinking into his mind, watched the wheels, spinning in his face and that's when she knew for certain.

'You're not . . .?'

'Yes, feLixi,' she said. 'I'm turning you in or whatever it is you guys do in this place.'

'You can't be serious.'

'I'm real serious, feLixi, you're taking the fall.'

'I thought we had an understanding,' said feLixi, 'but now I see I was just another suspect all along. You might as well be a machine, Roz. You don't have any human feelings at all.'

Roz shrugged. 'Think what you like but I'm not going to play the fool for you.'

'You know it's not like that,' said feLixi.

She was angry now, angry because she was still listening to him. Angry at herself for that tiny bit of hope that he might have a reason she could believe in. 'Have you ever told me the truth, feLixi?' she snapped. 'Have you said anything to me that wasn't just another manipulation? Even this' – she waved the poem under his nose – 'and the night we spent by the river – nicely timed to get me away from the Doctor long enough for !C-Mel to deal with him.'

'The poem was real and you know it,' said feLixi. 'You know that my feelings for you are real.'

'You can't even say it, feLixi, can you? To you, love is just a word you looked up in a linguistic database.'

'I love you, Roz, and you know it.' There was hurt in his eyes and perhaps she did know it but it was too late now.

'I don't care who loves who!' she said. 'I won't play cover-up for you, feLixi. I won't walk in aTraxi's footsteps and I won't step out into the lightning. You killed vi!Cari and you're going down for that.'

'Vi!Cari was
a robot
, Roz. What's a machine to you?'

Roz turned away then and fixed her eyes on the windmills. 'Listen,' she said, 'this won't do you any good, you'll never understand me but I'll try once and then shut up. People don't live alone, never have, never will and when you live together you need rules – call them laws, traditions,
ukuzila
, taboos, whatever you like – because sometimes right for you is wrong for me and we've got to live together because chaos is always waiting just beyond the light of the fire and the darkness doesn't knock politely on the door of your hut. I've stood both sides of that line, feLixi, I've been places where they'd slit my throat for being an adjudicator and places where they'd kill me for being the wrong colour.' She ran a finger down the skin of her face, remembering France and the stories of her grandmother. 'Yeah, that's right, on my own planet too, a hierarchy of contempt based on melanin production. Is that stupid or what? What it comes down to in the end is that someone's got to walk the line between order and chaos because we all want to live in the light of the fire. A long time ago Roslyn Inyathi Forrester chose to walk that line and what she
wants
doesn't matter. So I'll have some bad dreams for doing this but that'll pass.

'And if all I've said doesn't mean anything to you then forget it and we'll make it just this: I'll do it because I've got to look in the mirror every morning and I don't want vi!Cari staring over my shoulder as I comb out my hair and I'll do it because you counted on my prejudices just as my superiors on Earth did, just like the last man I loved did. So I'll pack up your poem and a few good memories and take them out when I get lonely late at night and maybe, just maybe, I'll cry myself to sleep and wish that I'd stayed here with you but at least when I wake up I'll still be Roslyn Forrester.'

She still couldn't look at him but she knew he was staring at her. The windmill blades slowly turned, slicing power out of the wind. God controlled the wind, the movement of the air, the passing of the seasons, the energy from the sun. It regulated the existence of two trillion people and all it asked for was a bit of conversation and the chance to make suspicious yellow dip. And the Doctor, what did he ask for, what memories did he unpack in the dark of the night and what did he see when he looked in the mirror?

'Did you get all that, kiKhali?' she asked out loud. 'I know you've been listening.'

With a whisper of displaced air the machines arrived. KiKhali first, its expression ikon set in a resolutely abstract frown, aM!xitsa following. Lights from the windows of the control section flickered off fast-moving shapes the size of marbles – subcomponents of !X automatically establishing a defence perimeter. !X was there for feLixi, Roz reckoned, to be his gaoler until the little machine got bored and handed over to another volunteer. FeLixi sat on the steps, hands on his face, kiKhali and aM!xitsa giving him an unnecessarily wide berth, their main sensor strips flickering here and there, everywhere but at the man.

And so it begins, thought Roz, the exclusion from society. He can't even exile himself from the sphere because no ship would want him on board.

'Not bad for a meatbrain,' said kiKhali, 'not bad at all.'

Roz shrugged. 'When did God figure it out?'

'About a second after you did,' said aM!xitsa.

'As long as that?' said Roz.

'It had a lot on its mind,' said aM!xitsa. 'Can I give you a lift?'

'No,' said Roz, 'I want to walk down – on my own.'

'Are you all right?'

Roz glanced back at the man who was sitting alone on the steps.

'I've been worse,' she said.

12

Travelling Man Blues

My baby won't do as I say

An' my father figure. He gone away

Gone to fight the righteous fight

Goin' to do what's right

Goin' wear another hole in my shoes

Get myself the travelling man blues

(Break it down, aM!xitsa)

(Oh yeah, that drone can play)

Travelling man blues

Yeah! Hit me!

Travelling Man Blues,
singer unknown

Recorded: Mama Stanley's Chicken

Shack, Clanton, Alabama (1937)

The sun was a pitiless furnace burning in a cerulean sky, a cyclopean eye that baked the landscape and sucked the moisture from her skin.

'The heat,' croaked Bernice, 'it's unbearable.'

So this was what it was like to die of thirst.

A tall glass floated in front of her eyes like a mirage, white with frost and brimming with lemonade, its sides wet with condensation. Bernice reached out and gratefully wrapped her hand around it. 'Cheers, aM!xitsa,' she said and sat up, the top half of the beach bed automatically tilting to keep her back supported. 'Shade, please.' A forcefield parasol snapped into existence overhead. Bernice sipped her drink and watched aM!xitsa as the drone turned back to its sand city, parts of which had now reached a height of two metres. The drone was also keeping a sensor eye out for any intruders that might wander into Kadiatu's cove, especially ones with exterior genitalia.

'It's a human custom,' Bernice had explained to a bemused saRa!qava, the idea of a girls' day out having little meaning to people who could change their gender at will.

That morning, just as God was turning the sun up, Bernice, Roz and Kadiatu had sneaked out of the villa and flown down the coast in a scarlet open-top flitter convertible. AM!xitsa came with them, having been declared an honorary female for the duration. It was still early enough when they arrived for the air to be chilly. Shreds of mist drifted through the forest, driven by a stiff breeze from the sea. The women spread a blanket in the lee of the flitter and opened the hamper that House had packed for them. AM!xitsa made itself useful by using one of its many weapon systems to heat up the coffee.

'Who wants a ham roll?' asked Roz.

'Are you sure it's ham?' asked Bernice.

During the course of their stay each of them had spent some considerable time trying to teach House to cook familiar dishes, with the occasional notable disaster. Although Bernice was willing to admit that perhaps her description of Crab Claw Gumbo may have been a little bit too vague.

She certainly wouldn't like to come face to face with the crab that had supplied the sixty-centimetre claws and she probably should have specified that the king shrimps were supposed to be dead. The little pause as everyone checked exactly what it was they were about to eat had quickly become part of the holiday routine.

Roz sniffed the roll. 'Ham-
ish
,' she said.

'Give it here,' said Kadiatu. 'I'll eat anything as long as it's not fish.'

Bernice settled on a roll stuffed with cottage cheese and tomatoes the size and sweetness of spring peas. For later there was mushroom pâté, loaves of saRa!qava's bread, pickles, slabs of cheese, a collation of cold meats, vacuum flasks of lemonade, upside-down pie and the Doctor's very own version of sideways pudding. AM!xitsa served them coffee and fussily chased crumbs off the blanket.

Bernice watched Kadiatu. The tall woman, dressed in a shapeless grey pullover, looked deceptively relaxed as she lounged against the side of the flitter. There was a small scar on her right cheek where she had cut herself with a knife and applied the butterfly serum.

'What are you going to do next?' asked Bernice.

'A bit of industrial espionage here,' said Kadiatu, 'then build myself a new time/space machine, something like the TARDIS only with more style and go-faster stripes.'

'And after that?'

'Fight monsters, right wrongs, stick my nose in and generally interfere with the course of history.' She looked at Roz. 'Maybe break Nelson out of Robbin Island in 1964 and arm the ANC

with plasma rifles – what do you think?'

'I hope you're joking,' said Bernice.

Kadiatu grinned. 'Actually I thought I'd bum around for a bit, see what's what, maybe pick up an irritating mannerism and cultivate an air of flippancy in times of crisis. Works for you know who.'