Doctor Who: Transit (17 page)

Kadiatu was asleep in his lap; at least she wasn't asking about the moneypen any more. Her right hand rested on his leg by her face, the knuckles were black and swollen. 'Try not to get her angry,' Old Sam had told him when they separated at Kings Cross.

The train pulled into the station with great bursts of steam. Blondie gazed in astonishment at the column of dirty white smoke that rose from the smokestack. Half the machine seemed to be external: pistons and rods driving big spoked wheels. It was the dirtiest, ugliest and most magnificent piece of technology Blondie had ever seen.

As the Doctor helped him get Kadiatu into the carriage a young man handed Blondie a pamphlet on the golden age of steam.

Adisham Station (European Heritage Trust: Dover Line)

Kadiatu was dreaming of the shadows that flickered under the corrugated-iron roof of the house in Makeni. Her eyes invented transitory images from the moving lines cast by the rafters. Big adult voices spoke around her, booming down from high above.

'You should have destroyed it.'

'It's not an it, it's a she.'

'Oh, that makes all the difference.'

'In some ways she's a normal child.'

'You saw the Imogen specs, Yembe. Her geneset's riddled with all sorts of deep-level conditioning. God knows what's going to happen when she hits puberty. You want to try dealing with an adolescent who can rip your head off?'

'There are suppression techniques.'

'You're going to use drugs?'

'On her metabolism? No. I was thinking of psychological techniques. Imogen was planning a lot of indoctrination. Without that she'll be almost normal.'

'You'll have to keep her away from the doctors.'

'That's not a problem. My main concern is that Imogen may reinitiate the project.'

'That is not a problem.'

It must have begun to rain then. Kadiatu heard it rattle on the iron roof. It was a heavy tropical downpour, battering down in rhythmical, lulling waves. The noise made it difficult to hear the voices.

'I suppose you've already given her a name.'

She strained to hang on to the voices but they were getting lost in the rain and blattermg sound of the house's methane generator.

'I named her after my great-grandmother ...'

The house began to sway with a rattling mechanical motion.

'Kadiatu.'

Hot sunlight in her eyes when she opened them. The noise and swaying remained outside of the dream along with the familiar drag of a train decelerating into a station.

'Wake up,' said the Doctor. 'This is our stop.'

Kadiatu looked around. They were riding in what she recognised as an antique railway carriage. Blondie was sitting next to her on a long fabric upholstered seat that ran the width of the compartment. The Doctor sat watching her from the opposite seat. Through the window green countryside moved past at an absurdly slow rate.

'I was dreaming,' she said.

There was a shrill whistle from the front of the train and another lurch as they pulled into a station made of brick and grey slate. A white sign on the station wall said 'ADISHAM' in black letters. Underneath was a logo and the words 'EUROPEAN HERITAGE TRUST'. The train gave a final lurch and stopped.

There was no handle on the inside of the compartment door. The Doctor had to stand up and slide the window down to use the exterior handle. He held the door open as Kadiatu and Blondie alighted. A man in a blue serge uniform leant out from the rear carriage and waved a red flag.

Behind the shunting sound of the engine Kadiatu could hear birdsong.

'Where are we?' she asked but the Doctor's answer was half lost in the gunshot sound of the carriage door closing.

'The Garden of Eden?' asked Blondie.

'Kent,' said the Doctor. 'The garden of
England.'

It reminded Kadiatu of the countryside around Makeni during the rainy season. The plants were different but it had the same lush greenness, the same gently rolling hills and clusters of neat whitewashed houses with truck gardens in the back. Blondie took her hand as they followed the Doctor along a lane that wound between tall hedgerows.

She picked a plant from the verge. It was dark green and topped by clusters of pale cream buds. 'What's this?' she asked the Doctor.

The Doctor looked back over his shoulder. 'Cowslip,' he told her.

Kadiatu ate the top of the plant. It tasted bitter like cassava leaf. They continued down the lane, occasionally Kadiatu would sample some bit of green that looked tasty. She didn't eat any grass though, she wasn't that hungry.

Nothing vestigial about her appendix, thought the Doctor.

The house was still there and largely unchanged. Part of the Victorian greenhouse had succumbed to rust and fallen in. The satellite dish he had mounted on top was long gone. The grave! drive had been scattered by the overgrown lawn. The stables had been mended and there was a muddy trail leading away from the doors. Horseshoe shapes baked into the ground by the sun

The windows of the house were still paned and someone had painted the frames blue sometime in the last ten years. The Doctor loved the house because it was solid and immovable Unlike the TARDIS the same landscape greeted him every time he opened the door. It had occurred to him that during the gaps between his visits the house was inhabited. Furniture changed positions, holes in the plaster were mended, lightbulbs replaced It gave the house a haunted quality.

Mind you, he thought, it could be me.

He walked around the back of the house and tried the handle on the kitchen door. It wasn't locked. He would have been very surprised if it had been.

'This can be your room,' said the Doctor, opening a door at the top of the house.

Inside, half the ceiling sloped down towards the floor; a window was inset into a kind of alcove in the ceiling. Blondie thought that the architect must have been crazy to build a room shaped like that: you lost a third of your usable floor space.

'Why is it such a weird shape?'

'We're in the attic,' said the Doctor. As if that explained everything.

Most of the space left over was taken by a kingsize bed made of brass tubing welded together into a grille shape at each end It looked very old. There were cotton sheets on the bed and the duvet was neatly fumed back. They had a fresh smell of sunlight and lavender. Blondie wondered who had prepared the room he'd seen no signs that anybody lived in the house and certainly no cleaning drones.

A purple bathtowel was draped over the bedstead.

'I expect you'll want to bathe,' said the Doctor. 'The bathroom's down on the landing, third door on the left.' He left the room and padded down the stairs.

Blondie had never seen a room so bare of electronics before. Even in the Stop the projects had been hardwired for multimedia, infrared I/O ports or sockets to run consoles and noiseboxes. There was only a single light fitting dangling from the flat bit of the ceiling, terminating in a cylindrical paper lampshade. The light was a blown glass bulb with a coil of tungsten filament inside. Blondie thought that the design was probably illegal.

He took his armour off while standing up; he didn't want to dirty the pristine sheets. As the breastplate came away he was assailed by his own ripe smell. There was nowhere to hang it up, so he settled for piling it neatly in the comer.

The Doctor paused in front of the larder. 'Old mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to fetch her dog a bone,' he said and opened the door. 'But when she got there the cupboard was bare, except for a sack of onions, three kilos of tagliatelle, two tins of chopped tomatoes and a bottle of cod-liver oil.'

He removed the items and placed them neatly on the kitchen table. At least nothing was mouldy. 'And today's special is
pasta a la Dottore.'

The fridge was the colour of dirty cream and massive, with rounded comers. Since he hadn't returned to the house for ages, the Doctor had deliberately searched the larder first. The stainless steel handle hummed in his palm. 'This fridge,' said the Doctor, 'will be bursting with all manner of good things to eat. I will remember to go back and fill it especially.'

The fridge door unsealed on the Doctor's third pull. A river of freezing air flowed out over his knees. Waving away the vapour he peered in at the empty shelves. So I forget, thought the Doctor. There's never a temporal paradox around when you need one. Right at the back of the bottom shelf were a pair of grey deodorant spray cans. The Doctor didn't try to take them and closed the fridge door gingerly. He wasn't sure what the sell-by date for nitro-nine was.

The Doctor returned to the kitchen table and amused himself by chopping the onions into transparent slices.

A sound came to him as he bent over the kitchen table. It floated down through the wide rooms of the house, picking up reverbs and random echoes. The Doctor smiled when he heard it. It was the sound of children laughing.

Kadiatu chased him up the narrow stairs to the attic. Blondie just managed to keep ahead of her, one hand stretched out for balance, the other holding up the bath towel. He'd stepped out of the bathroom and met her on the landing. They'd faced each other for a moment, a big grin spreading across her face, and then Blondie bolted for his room.

He wasn't fast enough to get the door closed before Kadiatu burst in. She stood in the doorway looking him up and down, her eyes filled with a kind of lazy wickedness.

'Not bad,' she said and grabbed him.

She kissed him straight on, African style, black eyes boring into his. Making it a contest to see who would blink first. She pushed her hands under the towel to grab his buttocks. Blondie grabbed at her T-shirt and they broke apart so he could pull it over her head. They fell towards the bed, twisting to come down on their sides. Kadiatu made pedalling motions with her legs, trying to kick off her jeans. Blondie heard the belt buckle thump on to the carpet, the touch of her skin against his chest and thighs was as shocking as the sea.

The old springs in the bed creaked as she moved astride him, one hand reaching down to guide him in. They stayed motionless at fust getting used to the feel of each other. From the window rectangles of sunlight were texture mapped around Kadiatu's body, turning her skin a golden brown. Blondie traced the edges with his fingertips, letting them wander up her side and across the top of her breasts. She laughed.

'Do you always look so serious?'

'I'm a serious kind of guy.'

Kadiatu grinned down at him and rocked her hips from side to side. 'Too serious by half.'

&nbps;

The water in the gallon saucepan on the stove was beginning to boil nicely. 'Not complex enough,' muttered the Doctor as he poured an exact amount of salt into the water. He was used to being underestimated, in fact it was almost impossible for him to be overestimated, but not complex enough? It was insulting.

He emptied two kilos of pasta into the boiling water. One of them was bound to be very hungry tonight.

Would Benny have killed him? He'd sensed hesitation on her part; perhaps he should have waited to find out. As an experiment it had a certain validity. If it had been Ace would he have waited to find out? Perhaps not.

Complexity, thought the Doctor, is a matter of scale. Not seeing the wood for the trees. Individual people, snowflakes, that sort of thing.

The onions went into the black iron frying pan. It didn't need oil; years of grease had created a slick patina on the iron that was far better than Teflon.

A machine intelligence? Even the Cybermen would make a differentiation between individuals, if only on the basis of potential. A computer or patterned energy intelligence would probably do the same. Since it was exploiting human beings, it must be aware of them but without differentiating between them.

The Doctor held up a tin of tomatoes, concentrated for a moment and banged his index finger against it. The lid popped off and fell with a clatter on to the kitchen floor. He repeated the process with the second tin and put them back on the counter. Then he stooped down to pick up the lids.

The problem with alien intelligences, thought the Doctor as he put the lids in his coat pocket, is that they're alien.

It uses and modifies human beings, it operates within the confines of the transit system and displays tactical awareness. It was working towards definite goals and ambitions, the Doctor was sure of that despite his lack of supporting evidence, and yet it didn't regard him as a threat even with active intelligence of his capabilities. So how intelligent was this intelligence?

And by what scale of complexity did it judge things?

The tomatoes went into the frying pan. The Doctor stirred for thirty-two seconds and began adding meticulous doses of herbs from the row of earthenware pots on a shelf above the counter.

Unbidden the map of the transit system floated into his mind. A maze of tunnels and stations, branches and loops. The trains shuttled people from point to point, setting off a chaotic array of interactions. It reminded him of something.

All the world is silicon, thought the Doctor, and all the people on it merely packets of information. Doomed to fret their time upon the CPU.

The Doctor picked a strand of tagliatelle from the boiling water and tasted it. Ready in about 53 seconds, he decided.

To a free electron the pathways of an integrated circuit must be as vast as a transit tunnel. The electron doesn't know why it travels, has no inherent potential of its own - the information is contained in its path. Where it goes, not what it is.

Software, thought the Doctor, I'm facing hostile software.

At least it's not in my head this time.

Kadiatu stood at the open window and looked out over the grounds. The daylight was compressed into a narrow band across the horizon. The lawn was an overgrown tangle of competing species, wild flowers in a fierce struggle with the weeds and grass. Fruit trees of various ages were scattered randomly across the lawn. An advance guard parachuted in by the orchards waiting on the hills to the west. Kadiatu imagined the seasons spinning by, the orchard marching down the hill to lay siege to the house. Branches battering at the red brick walls, roots burrowing into the foundations with vegetable patience. The long slow agony of death by tree.