So Vile a Sin (21 page)

the Doctor wondered.

‘The ship’s technically not under the jurisdiction of any solar system,’ said Roz. 'It’s hard to enforce Imperial law here. People come here for cheap duty-free and for peculiar drugs, or to get their faces and fingertips modified.’

‘Does it rain?’ the Doctor asked their guide.

‘Only on special occasions,’ said the bagbot. ‘The meta-ship’s food is produced hydroponically, with no need for precipitation.’

‘So it’s sunny all the time?’

The bagbot said, ‘The tourists seem to like it. Except the Lacaillans. Apparently on their homeworld it rains all the time.’

‘How bright are you?’ the Doctor asked.

‘I haven’t been formally rated,’ said the bagbot. ‘I flunked the Turing – no human talks about luggage all the time.’

The Doctor crouched down by the robot again. Roz glared at anyone who gave him a funny look, sending them on their way.

‘Can you run an errand for me?’

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‘Sure,’ said the bagbot hesitantly. ‘What did you have in mind?’

Chris looked at his watch. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go.’

The Doctor and Iaomnet followed him down the ramp, looking around. They were almost the last ones off the liner – there were only a few other passengers trailing off the ship, and some uniformed staff.

Customs was miles away, down a long grey hallway. They trudged along, past holograms for the Heart of Darkness Discothèque and the Lord Jim Shopping Centre.

Iaomnet looked pissed off, but she’d looked pissed off for a month. It had stopped being a do-something-violent kind of pissed off about a week ago, gradually changing into a who-cares-anyway pissed off. They were all in this together now, the Doctor kept telling her. Maybe she was starting to believe it.

She’d even stopped trying to contact Imperial Intelligence every chance she got.

‘Why’d we have to wait?’ she said. ‘Why didn’t we just tell customs they were twins?’

‘That was wearing pretty thin aboard the liner,’ said Chris. ‘It would have been a bit easier if you didn’t both insist on wearing the same clothes.’

The Doctor straightened his lapels. ‘I need some way of hanging on to my identity,’ he protested.

It had been a hell of a trip. They could have got here in a week, but the Doctor had insisted on travelling slowly. He was too spread out, he said – he didn’t know what would happen.

‘So,’ Chris asked the Doctor, ‘is this going to work all right, then?’

‘I hope so,’ said the Doctor. ‘We need to work out exactly how that copy was created. I can’t do it without the TARDIS.’ He smiled. ‘It’ll be good to see her again, but I’m glad I left her here.

Goodness knows what proximity to… what’s on Iphigenia would have done to the poor old girl. The first thing is to get settled in, make sure no one’s got their eye on us, or indeed their double-eye.’

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Chris realized he couldn’t remember whether this was the original, or the copy. It didn’t seem polite to ask.

‘How long are we going to be here?’ Iaomnet was saying. ‘You know they’ll be looking for me.’

‘I’d say it’s rather unlikely they’ll come looking for you here,’

said the Doctor. ‘It’s taken us a month to get here. If anyone’s interested in us, they’d have done something before now.’

The bored-looking customs officer didn’t give the second Doctor a second glance. Chris grinned. They were safe, for now.

All they had to do was get back to the TARDIS and let her sort the two Doctors out. And make sure Iaomnet didn’t get away.

‘I don’t think I like the look of the buffet,’ said Roz. Chris had already started loading food on to his plate. ‘What is that, anyway?’

‘Come on, Roz,’ he said. ‘You must’ve eaten lots of alien food as a kid.’

‘I don’t remember,’ said Roz. The hotel’s restaurant wasn’t crowded, which only added to her worry.

‘There were heaps of sim ads for alien stuff when I was little,’

said Chris. ‘I used to always want whatever looked grossest.’ He stuck a fork in something which wriggled.

Roz said, ‘Maybe I’ll get something from the menu.’

She glanced back at the table. The two Doctors were sitting side by side, Iaomnet on the opposite side of the table. The identical Time Lords weren’t talking, for once. The last month had been a non-stop discussion of everything from probability physics to Roy Lichtenstein, and on one especially garrulous occasion, both at once. But they’d seemed to wind down over the last week or so. Maybe they’d talked about everything they knew.

The five of them had been crammed into the same room aboard the liner for the last week of the trip. She and Chris hadn’t had many chances to talk; they had to constantly keep one eye on Iaomnet. She’d almost succeeded in getting a message to a double-eye, twice. After the second time Roz had wanted to keep her sedated, but both Doctors had objected.

‘The copy,’ said Roz. ‘Do you think we can trust him?’

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Chris looked up from the desserts. ‘He’s just the Doctor, isn’t he?’ he said. ‘I mean, he hasn’t done anything suspicious for the last month. Besides, I keep forgetting which one is which.’ Roz decided not to let on she had the same problem. ‘I’m more worried about Iaomnet – what’re we going to do with her?’

‘I’m not sure yet. We can’t keep dragging her around behind us.’

‘Good thing we’ve had so much experience at escaping,’ said Chris. ‘We know all the tricks.’

‘Messy situation.’

‘The Lacaillian stuff’s pretty safe,’ said Chris. ‘Kind of bland, though.’

Iaomnet was eating breadsticks, snapping them into little pieces. She hardly noticed when one of the Doctors got up to hit the buffet table. She ground a piece of breadstick into powder with her fingernail.

‘I can help you escape,’ said the other one.

Iaomnet stopped mangling the breadstick. She carefully didn’t look up. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘How?’

‘I have almost entirely regained control,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s becoming difficult to maintain this façade. We must both get away.’

‘Regained –’

‘This form… attached itself to me when the Nexus was disrupted.’

It was like finding the missing part of a jigsaw puzzle under the bed. ‘Emil?’ she hissed.

‘We’ll wait until we have only one or two of them to deal with,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll immobilize one of them, and you take care of the other.’

‘Why didn’t you say something on the liner?’

‘I was still reintegrating my own personality,’ said Zatopek.

‘And if we had escaped, where would we have gone?’

She looked at him. He was still absolutely identical to the other Doctor – as though he was wearing this body like a suit of clothes. ‘How –’

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‘Perhaps later,’ said Emil, quickly. Iaomnet glanced over to the buffet. The others were on their way back.

The bagbot was waiting for them at the door to the hotel room.

‘Hiya,’ it said. The Doctor patted it, absently. ‘Your package is right where you left it. Almayer’s Storage reopens at eight thirty tomorrow morning.’

The Doctor fed the little machine credits and sent it rolling back towards the lifts. Roz was unlocking the door. ‘We’ve got two rooms, joined by a connecting door which stays open at all times,’ she said. ‘I’ve asked them to take out the Centcomp terminal.’

They went in. Roz locked the door and slung the key around her neck. The room was small, clean and grey. She told Iaomnet,

‘Just chill. We ought to have sorted ourselves out by noon tomorrow. After that you’ll be free to go.’

Iaomnet nodded, but didn’t say anything. Roz didn’t think the double-eye believed her.

Chris announced, ‘There’s one bathroom between the two rooms. If nobody minds, I’m going for a bath.’ The Doctors plonked themselves down on the curved lounge, switching on the 3D and flicking around until they found the news.

Iaomnet sat on one of the beds, and took out the book she’d filched from the liner’s library. Roz stretched out, put her arms behind her head, and let out a long sigh.

The evening dragged on like that until Zatopek grabbed hold of Roz’s heart and made it stop.

Roz had got up to get a drink out of the bar fridge. She had read the price list and had decided to drink the most expensive thing on it. She had just uncorked a miniature bottle of Dargolian Jus de Claymore ’56 when one of the Doctors said her name.

She turned around. One of them (the copy? the real one?) was looking at her, and the other one was looking at him.

Her heart stopped.

She felt it, felt the muscle fighting against the sudden violent grip that was crushing it. She dropped the bottle. For two seconds, she thought she was having a heart attack. It took two 160

more seconds to realize it was some other kind of attack. It took two more seconds for her to lose consciousness.

The grip was gone as she hit the floor. She heard shouts as she went under, wondering if her heart had started again.

Chris heard the Doctor shouting. He exploded out of the bath and ran into the other room without stopping.

Roz was on the floor, a pool of liquor spreading out from a bottle near her head. The two Doctors were struggling with each other. Iaomnet was standing next to the door. She kicked him in the stomach. The breath woofed out of him as he fell back and collided with the bathroom door.

Chris rolled to his feet as Iaomnet pulled the Doctors apart.

‘Which one are you?’ she said.

‘It’s me,’ said one of the Doctors. ‘Let’s get going.’

Iaomnet grabbed the other one. She had Roz’s pistol, jamming it into the Doctor’s collarbone. ‘He’s coming as well,’ she said. ‘I have to have something to show for this whole disaster.’

‘Yes,’ said the other Doctor. ‘But he’s coming with me. You both are.’

‘Excuse me,’ said the original Doctor.

Iaomnet shook her head. ‘Orders. Right from the top. He’s mine.’

‘You ought to listen to her, Emil,’ said the Doctor. ‘You don’t want an angry double-eye pursuing you.’

‘He’s Zatopek?’ said Chris.

‘How long have you known that, Doctor?’ said the copy.

‘You slipped when you started arguing the nuances of Retro-Objectivist philosophy with me. You knew more about it than I did.’

‘For God’s sake shut up, all of you,’ said Iaomnet. ‘Zatopek, you try anything, and my finger might just tighten on this trigger.

And then where will you be?’

‘We’ll argue about it later,’ said the copy Doctor. ‘Come on.

Chris hovered, not willing to tackle them while Iaomnet had that nasty little gun. Instead, he knelt down beside Roz. He couldn’t hear her breathing. He rolled her over and pressed two fingers into her throat. The door slammed.

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‘Oh thank Goddess,’ he said. He lifted her, cradled her in his arms. ‘You’re all right, you’ll be all right.’

Zatopek left Iaomnet to guard the Doctor in the transit lounge while he went to buy their tickets.

Iaomnet had bought a long coat and a cowboy hat. She leant against the metaglass of the viewing wall, watching the area. It was 02.00, and the lounge was empty, except for a Ybarraculan curled under one of the plastic seats, homeless or hopelessly delayed.

The Doctor sat on one of the uncomfortable seats, watching the occasional landing and takeoff. Iaomnet kept looking at her watch. Five minutes, ten. It would take Zatopek a while to find a flight at this hour.

Roz had seen a momentary projection of one of his possible selves, but the alternative that had encountered Zatopek had
stuck
, surviving. He was learning more about what the Nexus could do all the time.

It was just possible that the Nexus could do anything.

Iaomnet seemed to come to a decision. She edged her coat open slightly, so he could see the needler. ‘It’s time for us to be leaving,’ she said.

Ah. ‘How do you know I’m the real me?’ he said. ‘For all you know, I could be anybody. Maybe you’ve just let the real Doctor escape.’

‘I’ve got what I want,’ said Iaomnet. ‘If you’d just like to step this way…’

She was far too professional, he noticed, to gesture with the gun or nod her head or do anything that might break her concentration, even for a moment. He sighed.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a plan you’d care to share with me?’ he asked hopefully. ‘I wouldn’t want this situation to be a complete loss.’

The next day.

Roz and Chris stood at the ticket machine. ‘Where should we go first?’ said Chris.

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‘It doesn’t matter, so long as it’s away from here,’ she said.

‘We’ll worry about our search when we’re clear. Somewhere on the way to Earth.’

‘Not a liner,’ said Chris. He gave her a worried look.

‘I’m fine,’ she insisted, ‘just a bit sore.’ The whole left side of her chest felt as though it was bruised, but the hotel’s autodoc claimed she was fine. She nodded at the ticket machine.

‘Something slow. Definitely nothing Imperial. Iaomnet will have reported in by now.’

She had contacted Almayer’s, guessed the Doctor’s password on the third try, and arranged to have the TARDIS shipped somewhere safe. Shame they couldn’t fly it themselves, but there you are.

Chris’s finger hovered over the selections until he found something that met all the criteria. ‘There’s a Hith transport leaving in half an hour,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t say if they’re accepting human passengers.’

‘They will once we hit them with a few credits. We’ll have to go and talk to them.’

Roz always carried her old Adjudicator ID with her. Chris had thought it was just a memento, but she’d used it to bully a spotty guard into showing them the last day’s worth of visual records of the spaceport.

A few pattern searches through the data, and they’d found the Doctor once – and then again. The copy Doctor, looking furious, searching the spaceport before boarding a flight. Iaomnet and her prisoner had obviously got away from him.

‘Are you sure we’re following the right one?’ said Chris, following her as she headed in the direction of the Hith Spacelines desk. ‘I mean, is the wrong one the right one to follow?’

‘The real Doctor can take care of himself,’ said Roz. ‘He’ll probably just get Iaomnet to take him to her leader, or something.’