Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  CHRISTMAS ON A RATIONAL PLANET

  AN ORIGINAL DOCTOR WHO NOVEL

  ‘An end to history. An end to certainty. Is that too much to ask?’

  December, 1799. Europe is recovering from the Age or Reason, the Vatican is learning to live with Napoleon, and America is celebrating a new era of independence. But in New York State, something is spreading its own brand of madness through the streets. Secret societies are crawling from the woodwork, and there’s a Satanic conspiracy around every corner.

  Roz Forrester is stranded in a town where festive cheer and random violence go hand-in-hand. Chris Cwej is trapped on board the TARDIS with someone who’s been trained to kill him. And when Reason itself breaks down, even the Doctor can’t be sure who or what he’s fighting for.

  Christmas is coming to town, and the end of civilization is following close behind...

  Lawrence Miles feels that the back cover will feel a bit empty if he doesn’t say something interesting about himself, especially now they’ve taken away the ‘previously unexplored realms of space and time’ bit. He has a finite number of cats.

  ISBN 0 426 20473 5

  CHRISTMAS ON A

  RATIONAL PLANET

  Lawrence Miles

  First published in Great Britain in 1996 by

  Doctor Who Books

  an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd

  332 Ladbroke Grove

  London W10 5AH

  Copyright © Lawrence Miles 1996

  The right of Lawrence Miles to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ’Doctor Who’ series copyright © British Broadcasting Corporation 1996

  Cover illustration by Mike Posen

  ISBN 0 426 20476 X

  Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  Mackays of Chatham PLC

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Contents

  A Prologue

  PART ONE - STATE OF INDEPENDENCE

  1 - Waifs and Strays

  2 - A Fistful of Timelines

  3 - Thought About Saving the World, Couldn’t Be Bothered

  4 - Moment of Catastrophe

  PART TWO - MADNESS, MADNESS, THEY CALL IT MADNESS

  5 - Directory Enquiries

  6 - Non-Interventionist Policy (Yeah, Sure)

  7 - The Edge of Distraction

  8 - Various Gods Out of Assorted Machines

  PART THREE - DAMAGED GODS

  9 - Bogeywomen

  10 - Obligatory Chapter Named After Pop Song

  11 - Great Executions

  12 - Infinity, Shut Up

  An Epilogue: - One Way or Another, the World Will Be Saved

  Dedicated to the usual suspects.

  ‘All great myths are inspired by the organic life-cycle. The hero’s quest to find his perfect mate, his struggle to build a better world for his children, his willingness to give up his life for the next generation... but Time Lords do not reproduce organically, and all their young are born from the gene-looms. What other conclusion can we draw? Time Lords have no understanding of myths, no understanding at all. And they have very little time for fairy-tales.’

  – Gustous Thripsted, Genetic Politics Beyond the Third

  Zone, appendix LXXVII

  A Prologue

  Necessary Secrets

  There were two kinds of darkness. It was one of those things that children always forgot, the moment they were old enough and big enough to reach the light-switch.

  The ordinary kind, the dull kind, came and went night-by-night; just a backcloth, big and black and wet, colouring in the sky and framing the city lights outside the bedroom window. It was the other kind you had to watch out for, the kind that lived at the back of the cupboard and in the mystical dimension behind the sofa, the kind that kept secrets, that swallowed lost toys and hinted at futures you could only ever half-understand. True darkness. Monster darkness.

  And when Roslyn Forrester looked up, that was the colour of the sky.

  There was a sun, somewhere up there, but it was black, an impossible fluorescent black, turning the desert into a great bruise-coloured shadow that stretched all the way to the horizon and vanished over the edge of the world. Only under the rocks, where the sun couldn’t reach, was there any kind of illumination. Pools of sticky yellow light.

  The world’s been turned inside out, she thought. Shadows where the light should be, light where the shadows should be.

  Arizona. That was the last place – the last real place – she remembered. After the TARDIS had left Mars, the Doctor had started poking and prodding at the console, as if that’d make the machine go faster. There were things to do, he’d said.

  ‘Yemaya,’ he’d added.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Loose ends. After we paid our last respects to SLEEPY, Bernice asked if we should pop back and see how the whole thing started. SLEEPY ‘s progenitor had telekinetic powers. He vanished just after you dropped in on him. All research records of the Dione-Kisumu Company spontaneously erased themselves once we’d left Yemaya 4. An impressive feat, even for the most influential of corrupt megalomaniacal corporations.’

  Roz had raised a quiet eyebrow ‘What are you suggesting?’

  The Doctor had waved his hands in an agitated fashion. ‘Nothing. But I hate loose ends. I hate feeling that there are things I don’t know about going on behind my back ‘

  ‘Liar,’ Roz had mumbled.

  So he’d kept on prodding, and had spent the next few days shifting the TARDIS from one end of creation to the other, looking for leads no one else would have recognized. Showing his face at seances, having tea with black magicians, poking his nose into the psychic nooks and crannies of human history. He’d had an audience with Madame Blavatsky, and shuffled through Nostradamus’s drawers while the great man had been out on the razz.

  ‘He won’t mind,’ the Doctor had assured Roz. ‘I’ll leave a note for his wife. She’s the practical one in the household, you know.’

  Finally, they’d visited Arizona during the last days of the American empire, where the Doctor had expected to find a convention of half-crazed telepathic UFO abductees. But there had been no convention. Just a desert. Not like this one. A normal desert. A proper desert.

  With a body in it.

  Then she heard it, the sound of raw, wet flesh grinding against rock, and realized that the creature – the alien – the monster – was following her up out of the ravine. She’d hoped that it wasn’t capable of climbing, but by the sound of it (and she wasn’t going to look back to make sure), it had scaled the ravine wall faster than she had.

  She kept running

  She remembered the first time she’d seen one of the creatures, as a corpse, lying out in the Arizona sun; the Doctor stumbling across it, standing over its body like the judge of the dead, a look of disapproval erupting across his face.

  Roz looked up, squinting at the landscape ahead of her, and felt something sharp and ugly scratch her optic nerve. Looking at the sun was like staring into an eclipse. She gritted her teeth. Nothing up ahead, no buildings, no exits, definitely no TARDIS. Just a few rocks, nightmare-coloured sand and t
he occasional gully. She heard the thing slipping over the dust at her heels, and tried not to think about what it looked like.

  She failed totally.

  It had just lain there, pockmarked and sand-blown, its big, bloated body expanding and contracting, like a sea creature washed up on a beach and gasping for water. Quite dead, the Doctor had insisted, though he couldn’t tell the cause. Its movement had been some kind of automatic function, the thing constantly adjusting and re-adjusting its shape even after death, still uncertain of the exact form it should take.

  He’d poked it with the end of his walking-cane – he’d been trying to wean himself off the umbrella – and the body had split open like a ripe peach.

  There was no sign of the Doctor now. She was on her own again, by accident or design, with just the Doctor’s parting gift for company. She glanced down at the little shining sphere, cradled in her left hand. The amaranth. Goddess, why didn’t they give these things proper names? ‘Blasters’, ‘Tenser guns’, ‘neuro-whips’... you knew where you were with that kind of technology. What the hell was an ‘amaranth’ supposed to do?

  ‘Useful,’ the Doctor had said, five minutes before the world had opened up and dragged her down into its shadow. Just that, as he’d pressed the sphere into her hands. ‘Useful.’

  Cwej had been fascinated by the alien corpse, of course. Sure, he’d made ‘yeuch’ noises, but underneath it all he had a kind of morbid curiosity that a fourteen-year-old would’ve been proud of. Roz had glanced into the split in the thing’s body, but only briefly. Coils, cords, knotted tissues, liquid pathways. It had been like looking into the workings of a visceral computer, but the patterns wouldn’t stay still, the connections constantly splitting and re-arranging, breaking off to form new circuits and new systems.

  ‘Is it an android?’ Cwej had asked, eager to be part of the Doctor’s investigation. Roz had rolled her eyes. It hadn’t looked like an android at all, no face or hands or joints, nothing to identify it as the work of a humanoid species.

  The Doctor had shaken his head. ‘Gynoid.’

  ‘Gynoid?’

  Roz stumbled as she made her way down a slope, regaining her balance but feeling something twist and pop in her ankle. The thing was gaining on her. Had to be.

  ‘Did you ever stop to think about the word "android"?’ he’d said, addressing himself as much as anyone else. ‘Did you ever stop to think about what it means?’

  Cwej had shrugged. ‘Robot. Machine that looks like a man, right?’

  ‘No.’ The Doctor had turned away, and the split skin of the dead thing had sealed itself up in seconds. ‘Android. From the Greek "Ana-, Andros", meaning "man". "Oid", meaning "like".’

  Cwej had looked confused, which was hardly a novelty. ‘A machine that’s like a man. That’s what I said.’

  ‘You said a machine that looks like a man. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Er, what?’

  There was a moment’s silence as the thing hit the bottom of the slope behind her, and for a moment Roz wondered if it had broken its neck; but a second more and it was whispering to her again, bright coppery syllables that licked at the nerves along her spine. Should’ve known better, she thought. Gynoids probably don’t even have necks. ‘Gynoid’. Stupid name. Like a make-believe alien out of an Imperial propaganda simcord. ‘Earth Versus the Gynoid Menace!’ Goddess, it’ll look bloody awful on my headstone.

  And then, with almost cinematic timing, she tripped.

  ‘... the witch-skulls of Peking, a perfect pentagram burned into the forehead of every one. Our investigators believe that their owners were still alive when the marks were made, no doubt being involved in some long-forgotten pagan rite. Here, the Clockwork Fantastique, found in the ruins of an eleventh-century village, yet inexplicable even today. And here, a set of Egyptian manuscripts, found by our own Cardinal Scarlath, describing a world built by one-eyed supernatural horrors...’

  Absently, Cardinal Catilin realized that he should have been enjoying this more. In all the years he’d been custodian of the Collection, this was the first time he’d had the opportunity to show the curiosities to anyone from outside the church; at the very least he should have been showing off his encyclopaedic knowledge of the ‘exhibits’, explaining the Satanic rituals described in the Borianu tapestries, pointing out the heretical hidden messages in the da Vinci portrait of John the Baptist... but the French woman seemed unresponsive, somehow unconcerned, as if she’d seen it all before.

  Which wasn’t very likely, Catilin reflected.

  The woman stopped in front of one of the larger glass-fronted cases, and Catilin risked a good long look at her. She was a tall woman, her body not so much thin as somehow pained, her spidery limbs cloaked by a mud-coloured chemise, dark hair trickling down her back Her sharp, wide-eyed face had that haunted (some would say ‘scared’) look that Catilin had noticed in many survivors of the French Revolution, the skin interrupted by a circular red mark set into her left cheek. Catilin briefly wondered what had happened to her. The mark looked like a burn, about the same shape and width as a decent-sized coin. A thin layer of make-up just failed to disguise it.

  He was about to turn away when he noticed the way she was standing, back curiously crooked, fingertips against the glass. She looked like she was in pain.

  ‘Mademoiselle? Mademoiselle Duquesne?’

  The woman snapped into an upright position.

  ‘Cardinal? There is, ahhh, a problem?’

  ‘You look... unwell. If there’s anything wrong...?’

  ‘No. No, not at all. Please, continue. It’s all most interesting. Please.’

  She attempted a smile, and Catilin noticed her hand reach for the base of her spine, as if to scratch it. Something about the movement was familiar –

  Ah. Of course.

  ‘If I might ask a question, Mademoiselle,’ he said, before he had a chance to think about what he was saying, ‘were you at all familiar with, ah, Cardinal Roche?’

  ‘Roche. No. No, I don’t believe so.’

  ‘The previous custodian of the Collection of Necessary Secrets. My predecessor here.’ Catilin indicated the hall around him, moving his small and crumpled frame in a complete circle, as if to embrace the whole of its undusted majesty. ‘Cardinal Roche was... "gifted", shall we say. He possessed a certain "gift" which he believed to be a boon from the Higher Orders of Creation. A blessing, perhaps.’

  He caught Duquesne’s eye. ‘I believe that pagan peoples would call it "The Sight",’ Catilin went on. ‘A sense, a sixth sense one might say, for the uncanny and the improper. To me, the Collection is merely a building full of oddities. To Roche, it was much more. He claimed he felt a burning in his spine whenever he grew close to certain objects, as though his body could sense the very strangeness of them. He once told me that he could often hear whispers from the skeletons and the fossils, and wondered if they wished to relate their peculiar histories to him.’

  He’d been watching Duquesne as he spoke, and he’d seen her hand involuntarily shoot back to her spine. That was it. The woman was sensitive, just as old Roche had been. Probably the only reason why her employers had sent her here. The French weren’t in the habit of using women as agents.

  ‘How fascinating,’ she said, flatly.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Catilin, deciding not to tell her that Roche had gone quite mad and cut his own throat open with one of the Collection’s sharper ‘exhibits’.

  ‘What do men do?’ the Doctor had asked, turning his back on them.

  The question had been directed at Cwej, which was a pity, as Roz had thought of about half a dozen smart answers in no time at all. ‘Er,’ Cwej had said. ‘Er, give up.’

  ‘The same things as women,’ Roz had muttered. ‘But without wiping the sick off the furniture afterwards.’

  There was a furrow, a tiny indentation in the ground, and Roz had run right into it, catching the toe of her boot against the lip and losing her balance. Instinctively she threw her arms
out in front of her, realizing that it probably didn’t make much difference how you fell if there was an alien monster breathing down your neck. She felt the amaranth slip out of her grasp.

  ‘No. Not the same at all.’ The Doctor had paused, as if he had difficulty getting to grips with this subject himself ‘The male and female of the species, of every humanoid species, have completely different psychologies. Evolution made sure that their brains were suited to very different tasks. Usually the two perspectives lock together, and no one even notices the join. Nobody spots the difference. Usually, that’s how civilizations are made.’

  Roz had folded her arms impatiently, wondering what this had to do with dead aliens, and Cwej had looked like he hadn’t been following any of it.

  ‘Men build,’ the Doctor had continued, his Gaelic inflection becoming more noticeable by the second. ‘Their fundamental purpose is to act as architects. Towers. Pillars. Bridges. All men’s things. In a man’s world, everything has to be defined, named, planned with precision. Things have to be conquered, not accepted. No patch of earth is complete until it has a building on it. An orderly, precise, geometrically exact building.’

  Roz rolled as she hit the ground, and realized that she was on top of another slope. Fine by her. She pushed herself over the edge, picking up momentum as she spun downhill. Once in every 360-degree roll, she could see the gynoid as a grey blur framed against the unnatural black of the sky. There was something else, too, a flash of gold, somewhere nearby.

  The amaranth. Obviously.

  ‘Towers and pillars. Right.’ Roz had remembered an Academy lecture on Freudian symbolism in the psychology of the serial killer, and remembered that she hadn’t listened to most of it. Routine procedure when faced with a serial killer was to blow his kneecaps off, so she’d never understood what his psychology had to do with anything. And women?’