Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  ‘It’s a clear matter of duty,’ Monroe concluded, reaching into the inside pocket of his brass-buttoned jacket. Erskine realized that he was reaching for his hood, the scrunched-up sackcloth unfolding like a handkerchief.

  ‘The African,’ Monroe announced. ‘The so-called witch-woman. She was seen running from the church. Reason dictates that she must be a diabolist. Agreed?’

  There were shapes in the orange-tinted darkness.

  ‘Ben, what are we going to do?’ Polly was saying. ‘We can’t just leave the Doctor there.’

  ‘Him? The Doctor?’ replied Ben.

  ‘Well, that’s who came through the doors. There was no one else outside.’ There was a pause. ‘Ben, do you remember what he said in the tracking room? Something about... "this old body of mine is wearing a bit thin".’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said the Doctor. ‘One never forgets one’s first regeneration.’

  He opened his eyes. A room resolved itself, somehow grandiose without being impressive. Four people behind a table, a fifth standing beside them. The hairs on the back of the Doctor’s neck told him that there were at least two others behind him, probably the ones who’d clubbed him down. He tried to turn, but couldn’t. He concluded that he was tied to a chair. The knots were biting into his hands.

  ‘Is he awake?’ whined a woman’s voice. One of the seated.

  ‘About bloody time,’ mumbled another.

  ‘You’re sure this is the man who’s responsible?’ A third.

  ‘I’m usually the man who’s responsible,’ said the Doctor. ‘Except, of course, when I’m the man who’s irresponsible.’

  There was a shocked silence.

  ‘I’d like to call this interview to order –’ began the woman.

  ‘Never mind that. Is he a diabolist? Ask him if he’s a diabolist.’

  ‘Diabolist?’ The Doctor made sure that he sounded offended. ‘I was under the impression that this was the age of reason. Is this supposed to be a witch-trial?’

  Suddenly, there was a tangible sense of embarrassment in the room. ‘Umm,’ said one of the men. ‘Umm. It might be.’

  The Doctor tutted. ‘Human beings have two notable characteristics,’ he muttered, recalling a lecture he’d once attended. ‘One, they’re extremely intelligent. Two, they’re very very stupid.’

  ‘Are you a servant of the Devil?’ the woman trilled, formally. She spoke slowly, as if talking to a child. Or a foreigner.

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor, cheerily. ‘But I may be a relation.’

  And as he spoke, the fifth man stepped forward, his shoes tick-tocking on the not-really-marble floor. The Doctor peered up at him suspiciously.

  ‘Our course of action is clear,’ the man said, and the air turned grey on contact with his voice. ‘We have a responsibility to Reason.’

  The Doctor frowned.

  The boy’s name, as far as Roz could gather, was Daniel Tremayne. He crouched behind the stack of crates – Roz made sure that neither of them could be seen from Paris Street – with his face cradled in his hands. He wasn’t crying, he was just trying to cover his face, as if he had an instinctive desire not to be seen. Not to be noticed.

  ‘Still in my head,’ he was saying. ‘Can hear it. Like it’s singing. Won’t let me leave.’

  ‘Daniel?’ Roz crouched down beside him ‘Daniel, I want to help you. Do you understand me?’

  His head snapped up, and suddenly he was staring right into her eyes. ‘Don’t trust you,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But you’re a witch.’

  Roz sighed. This was as much as she’d been able to get out of him in ten minutes. The problem with Adjudicator interview techniques was that they only worked on people whose heads functioned at thirtieth-century speeds. ‘If you say so.’

  Then, unexpectedly, Daniel began to laugh. A nervous, coughing laugh that somehow sounded older than the rest of him ‘Don’t believe in witches,’ he said. ‘But you’re a witch. Help me.’

  ‘All right, let’s start at the beginning. What is it that won’t let you leave?’

  ‘Thing.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘In Catcher’s basement.’

  Catcher. Roz clacked her tongue, remembered the name. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Tell me what it looked like.’

  ‘Can’t. Didn’t look like anything. Just felt it.’ Daniel’s eyes began to water, and Roz realized that he hadn’t blinked in over a minute. ‘Felt. Like whispering. All over my body.’

  Something clicked. Roz reached over and took Daniel’s arm, gently tugging him to his feet. He looked puzzled.

  ‘Come on,’ said Roz.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  She put a forefinger to her lips. ‘To reclaim some lost property. Now, shhh.’

  Find the Negress. Find the witch-woman.

  The whisper stretched along Paris Street, and out into the alleyways. Where the Renewal Society walked, people watched, hearing the word of the lore. Erskine Morris felt the crowds staring at him as they marched onto Eastern Walk, and felt like screaming at them, what in the name of bloody Christ are you looking at?, but he didn’t have the energy even to glare. He wanted to be somewhere else. He couldn’t even recall why he was here. He guessed this state of mind had something to do with ethanol deprivation.

  When Monroe had pulled the hood over his face – and the other Renewalists of the ‘inner circle’ had followed, like sheep or madmen – Erskine had expected the crowds to laugh, to walk away, to throw things at them. They hadn’t.

  They had a mission. And all of Woodwicke knew it.

  Find the Negress. Find the witch-woman.

  There was Hell to pay.

  PART TWO

  MADNESS, MADNESS,THEY CALL IT MADNESS

  ‘... but when examining the early history of UNIT we still tend to focus on the "big two" invasion attempts; the now-famous London Underground episode, and the Cyberman landing of the following year. Those of us interested in UNIT’s media liaison may even note the importance of the so-called "Wakefield Affair", while those who have studied the records a little more closely might know that UNIT had its roots in the Intrusion Counter Measures Group, which – as we shall see in chapter 3 – played a major part in the Shoreditch Incident of 1963... [but] we tend to forget that secret government departments are by no means a new phenomenon, and are not unique to our own age. Espionage agencies and military intelligence groups have thrived in Europe since the Elizabethan period, and if one wishes to understand the true origins of UNIT C19, the ICMG, or even wartime groups like LONGBOW one has to look to the eighteenth century, not the twentieth...’

  – K. S. Lethbridge-Stewart, The Zen Military – A History of

  UNIT (2006, unpublished)

  ‘I saw the cover of a pornographic magazine, a picture of a half-dressed woman and the caption, "I’M NAKED INSIDE".

  And I thought, yes, aren’t we all?’

  – Claire Tennant, A Practical Change of Perspectives (1987)

  5

  Directory Enquiries

  The rumours began on Hazelrow Avenue.

  They’d been talking about the ‘happenings’ in the church, they’d been talking about the menaces of witchcraft and necromancy and Satanic science (and in this day and age, too, someone had said), they’d been talking about the things that had been seen and the guesses that had been made. Somebody had started explaining the dark rites of the diabolists, describing a series of bizarre blood-rituals that they’d read about in a book somewhere. They drank the blood of babies, these witches, sacrificed infants on unholy altars.

  And a passer-by had heard that, heard just a snippet of the conversation. He’d walked all the way up Hazelrow Avenue, telling everybody he met. Dead babies. Drinking blood. By the time the story arrived at the end of the street, most decent, right-minded people thought they understood the situation perfectly.

  By half past ten, keys were turning in the locks of children’s rooms, bolts were being drawn acros
s doors, and parents were anxiously standing guard at windows. And so the rumours spread.

  The boarding-house was a grubby, tick-infested pit, but the average American brute would doubtless have called it luxurious. Tourette crouched by the side of his malodorous bed, tugging at the floor, ignoring the screeching protests of the ignorantlandladypeasantbitch from downstairs. The loose board by the card table came away easily – Tourette had done this enough times in the last few months – and the metal box slid smoothly out of its hidden nesting-place in the floor. The box opened at his touch, as ever. Diabolically clever technology, worthy of a top-ranking secret agent.

  Tourette turned the crank on the device inside, keyed in a coded sequence of letters, then began to tap out his report. The machine turned the words into galvanistic impulses and dispatched them across the Atlantic at unimaginable speeds. Tourette had no idea how it was done – the device had no wires or cables, and the replies usually arrived within minutes, sometimes seconds – but his superiors at the Directory claimed that the device had been salvaged from one of the ‘visitations’ of the monstrous caillou, which no doubt explained everything.

  Not the Directory, he corrected himself. Napoleon was running the show now. The real Directory was gone, and only its Shadow remained. Tourette had heard his superiors mumble that Bonaparte had no idea how powerful the Shadow Directory was, or he would never have allowed it to survive when he’d grasped the whole of France in his ugly midget’s talon.

  Tourette was immensely proud of that metaphor.

  The machine clacked and juddered, spewing out strips of paper marked with inky black letters. The reply. Another coded sequence, then words.

  SSM13GTOU AGENT TOURETTE REPORT RECEIVED AND INTERPRETED DO NOT MOVE DO NOT ACT CHIRURGEON IN PHILADELPHIA ALREADY ALERTED CHIRURGEON ON HIS WAY REPORT LATER SSM13EN

  Tourette gaped. But gaped heroically, of course. They were sending a chirurgeon? His fingers tapped at the machine again, informing his superiors that there was no need, that he was quite capable of looking after the situation on his own. The reply took mere seconds to arrive.

  SSM13GTR REPEAT CHIRURGEON ALREADY ALERTED CHIRURGEON ON HIS WAY REPORT LATER SSM13EN

  He shook his head. Not a chirurgeon. Surely not. That would be terribly messy, wouldn’t it? And unnecessary –

  The device chattered again.

  SSM13 LA VERITE EST LA DEHORS SSM13EN

  Tourette sighed. Dramatically.

  ‘La vérité est là dehors,’ he repeated, formally.

  ‘You’re a psychic?’ the user called Chris Cwej was saying. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  The woman who had identified herself as Marielle Duquesne looked puzzled. ‘I do not recognize the term. Earlier this evening, I... heard someone else use the word.’

  ‘Psychic. It means sort of, um, gifted. That’s what we call them in my time. "The Gifted". Like you can read minds and make things move just by thinking about it.’

  ‘I cannot do any of these things, Christopher. Surely, you would think them impossible?’

  The TARDIS interface watched the exchange carefully, with an eye that it had surreptitiously planted in the ceiling of one of the cloisters. While the interface was active – and the Cwej individual had never unplugged it, of course – it had a duty to warn its user of any threat within the TARDIS environment. Cwej was its user now, it had concluded. The disruptions to the ship’s structure were a threat. That much was simple.

  But this Duquesne woman. What was it supposed to make of her?

  Interface decided that there was some kind of complex social interplay between Cwej and Duquesne that it hadn’t been programmed to understand. It had a good working knowledge of human culture, plus a decent facsimile of a human voice, complete with a full range of sighs and nervous ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’, but beyond that... it didn’t have human perspectives, human thought-processes, human priorities. It didn’t have a human personality.

  So it decided to make itself one. That wasn’t difficult, really. It seized a few spare strands of the TARDIS’s intelligence and began knotting together the loose ends, using its observations of previous TARDIS occupants as neural knitting-patterns.

  ‘How far have you travelled?’ Duquesne asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ Cwej answered. ‘I mean, it’s not just distance, it’s time. How do you measure how far you’ve gone in time? You kind of lose your grip on the universe, when you’re a drifter in the vortex.’ Oh, very deep, Interface thought. Very profound. What do you do for an encore, ponder on the senselessness of existence in a basically uncaring universe?

  Yes. This personality was working out quite nicely.

  ‘You said you were from a thousand years in the future,’ prompted Duquesne.

  Prompted? Interface narrowed its eyes, roundels squinting all over the ship. The woman was pumping Cwej for information, often in subtle and roundabout ways. Parts of the new personality had been modelled on the former TARDIS user called McShane, so Interface knew a thing or two about manipulation.

  It closed its eyes. It needed information. Much more information. Interface let its consciousness waltz through the suburbs of the ship’s psychosphere, occasionally peeking into the various data storage facilities that littered the systems. The ‘data banks’? No, no good. Just glorified encyclopaedias, really, compiled by Time Lords and largely inaccurate. The ‘data core’, then? Emergency procedures and technical specifications for the TARDIS, nothing interesting there. ‘Information banks’? Out-of-date stellar data. ‘Memory store’? Full of historical records, but records of the way the Doctor thought history should have happened, rather than the way it did happen. Accounts of his adventures with fictional characters like Old Father Time and Abslom Daak. Hopeless.

  Interface drew closer to the heart of the TARDIS, realizing that if it wanted real information, it would have to go deeper, into those parts of the ship [Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here] that were beyond simple physical electronics. Suddenly, it was floating through [Don’t Let The Sun Set On You Here, Program] a teleplasmic minefield, telepathic messages exploding against its [If You Can Read This, You Are Too Close] consciousness. Warning messages; the core systems had [Turn Back! Turn Back!] surrounded themselves with defences like this, designed to keep out alien intruders, or perhaps [No Entry To Unauthorized Personnel] just to keep out the Doctor and stop him fiddling. But Interface had been here [Trespassers Will Be Eaten] before, and it knew a thing or two about...

  ... ah. It was over. Interface found itself floating before a ring of sub-intelligences – to the new personality, they looked almost like faces in the teleplasm, like stone heads that had been waiting there since the beginning of time – and at the centre of the circle was an intelligence so gigantic and abstract that Interface could only bear to look at it out of the corner of an imaginary eye. And even that huge sentience was just a tiny sliver of the Matrix, a point of contact between the TARDIS and the repository of all Time’s wisdom.

  ‘About a thousand,’ Cwej was saying, but he seemed a universe away now. ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you about that kind of thing, though.’

  ‘I understand.’

  Politely, Interface addressed the guardians, asking them for an audience, and part of its new personality told it not to be such a crawler. The guardians replied in words that defied language, asking Interface what it wanted, and making it clear that it had better be good.

  Psychics, Interface told them. Tell me about psychics. With particular reference to Earth, Europe, France. Second millennium AD, if you know what AD is, and let’s face it, you know everything, don’t you?

  The request was such a small one, so insignificant on the cosmic scale perceived by the Matrix, that the intelligence hardly even noticed as the stone heads turned inwards and sucked the relevant information out of the system.

  Walter Monroe squinted at the world through the slits of his mask. There were people following the Renewalists along Eastern Walk, at a respectful distance, so
as not to appear too curious. He caught the look in the eye of a medicine-peddler, and it looked almost like fear. Damned funny thing. Hadn’t he ever seen a man in a mask before?

  Irrational impulse. As Mr Catcher had expected. Well, they’d soon learn.

  There was a stall in front of him, a wide wooden cabinet engraved with crude astrological symbols, meaningless stars and planets, unrestrained by constellations. A man in a pointed hat and a gaudy waistcoat looked up, saw Monroe coming, jumped. Then smiled.

  ‘Evening,’ he said, nervously.

  Monroe indicated the stall. ‘This is your, your thing, is it?’

  The man – Ormond, that was his name – looked at the stall, and coughed. ‘Yes, it’s mine. Well, sort of mine Me and Mr Wieland from the bank, we thought it would be fun –’

  ‘What does this mean?’

  ‘What, the symbols?’ The man looked lost for words. ‘Well, I don’t really know. Sort of mystical, isn’t it? Stars and planets. We do conjuring-tricks. Just in the evenings. Bit of fun.’ He produced a single playing-card from his pocket, and attempted to make it vanish into thin air. It resolutely failed to disappear. Ormond smiled sheepishly.

  Monroe grunted. God’s teeth, did the man not know the consequences of what he was doing? ‘You know what happened at the church, presumably?’

  ‘What? Oh. Yes. Peter McLeod said –’

  ‘Diabolists.’ Monroe was sure the background noise of the town diminished as he spoke the unholy word. ‘Don’t suppose you know anything?’

  ‘Who, me?’ Ormond looked entirely put out. ‘Well, no.’

  ‘Do you know the wi...’ Monroe bit his tongue, and cleared the spittle out of his throat. ‘The so-called witch-woman?’

  ‘The African? Well, she... I don’t know her, no. I mean, I’ve spoken to her. That’s her tent there. That one. Look.’

  Monroe turned. One of the other Renewalists already had his head inside the tent, searching for some trace of the Negress. Turning back, Monroe noticed the way the rest of the townspeople were slowly moving away from Ormond’s stall. As if the symbols had suddenly taken on a whole new significance.