Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  ‘Different instincts. The female psyche has no need to construct, no need to control –’

  Cwej had giggled, but they’d ignored him.

  ‘– no need to define. The female psyche is adaptable, mutable. That’s why little boys dream of killer robots and little girls dream of faerie queens. A generalization, of course. In many cultures, men tend to see that difference as a weakness, which is probably why killer robots are always in fashion and faerie queens get such a bad press.’

  ‘They don’t see it as a weakness,’ a voice had said. ‘They see it as a threat.’

  There had been a moment of shocked silence. It had been Cwej’s voice, but Roz couldn’t believe that it had been Cwej speaking. This was Chris Cwej, for Goddess’ sake, Chris Cwej who’d had a bedroom full of toy anti-grav starfighters, Chris Cwej who’d once spent six hours in the TARDIS wardrobe trying on every single pair of sunglasses in the Doctor’s collection until he’d found the ones he thought were ‘neatest’. He’d been having these moments of inspiration ever since Yemaya, Roz had noticed, but where the hell had that little pearl of wisdom come from?

  The Doctor had looked as if he’d just been dealt a killing blow, as if the comment had been a personal attack on him. ‘Perhaps,’ he’d conceded.

  Her back slammed into something, and Roz realized that she’d rolled into a large rock, positioned right at the bottom of the slope. Whichever god or goddess put that there, she thought as the pain crackled up her spine, should be making Tom and Jerry cartoons. But the whispering was getting closer, and she looked up, towards the advancing gynoid, determined to face death head-on.

  It was a pathetic gesture, but it was the best she could do at short notice.

  "Android",’ the Doctor had repeated. ‘Meaning "manlike". Not because it looks like a man, but because it’s just like a man. Even if it looked like a woman, or a tiger, or a hairy monotreme, or a shapeless green blob, it would still be a man’s machine. Perfectly ordered artificial life. The ultimate creation of the masculine psyche. Whereas, by contrast...’

  ... and he’d pointed his cane at the corpse of the gynoid.

  The blur was rolling down the slope towards her, new orifices opening in its quicksilver skin every second. The whispers spilled into Roz’s ears until they filled every avenue in her head and turned the world into static.

  She and Cwej had both glanced back at the dead thing, still quivering in the sun. ‘Gynoid,’ Cwej had said, apparently back to normal. ‘It’s Greek, right? "Gyno". Like "woman". ‘

  ‘Yes.’ There’d been a strain in the Doctor’s voice, and he’d just failed to disguise it. And it shouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Uh-huh. You mean, they don’t build them round this part of the galaxy?’ Yeah, that was Cwej. Chief Inspector Cwej, determined to be on top of the case.

  ‘You weren’t listening.’ The Doctor had scowled, though not at anyone in particular ‘Gynoids aren’t "built". Only androids are "built". Gynoids just are.’

  They just are, Roz thought. Yeah, right. And now one of them just is about to bite my legs off.

  Then there was something else, a high-pitched chiming, as the amaranth hit the rock next to her and rang like a bell. Even without looking, she could tell that it was spinning in the dust, making the same sound a glass makes when you run your finger around the rim. Louder, though, loud enough to make her eardrums ache. The gynoid raised its many voices, trying to make itself heard above the screeching, and just for a moment Roz could almost tell what it was trying to say... then the yellow light under the rock crept out into the darkness, folded itself around her, and blotted out the world.

  The skeleton within the case was that of a huge, lizard-like creature, a row of dagger-shaped spines punctuating its back. Catilin wondered if the woman was really looking at it, or just using it as an excuse not to catch his eye again.

  ‘The bones were discovered in the great deserts of the New World,’ Catilin told her. ‘As you can see, they belonged to some behemoth which no longer walks the Earth. My fellow cardinals insist that its species was destroyed during the great flood, though there is, as always, talk of God releasing unto them a great fire from Heaven.’

  Duquesne nodded. ‘And His Holiness... God rest his soul... refused to let the skeleton be exhibited in public?’

  ‘God rest his soul. Yes. We have many skeletons like this one, or fragments of them. Shortly before his passing, His Holiness decided that all such relics should be interred here upon their discovery. The Collection is, after all, a repository for those things which we feel it would be... inappropriate ... for the general public to see. The discoverers of the bones are usually easy to pay off, their treasures brought here from around the world.’

  ‘I do not quite understand.’ The woman’s voice was strained, and Catilin guessed that she was trying to keep her ‘sensitivity’ under control. ‘Why such secrecy? Why should you keep such things from the eyes of the people?’

  Catilin frowned. ‘Those few men of reason who have examined them claim that the bones are older than one might expect. More than six thousand years old, which, according to the holy scripture, would seem to be older than the age of the Earth, as created by our Lord. In death, then, these creatures accuse the scripture of fraud. Naturally, it does not do for such accusations to be made public.’

  Duquesne was silent for a while, and Catilin wondered if he should continue with his half-hearted guided tour. And then;

  ‘This will not last forever,’ she said.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’

  ‘The Vatican cannot be in every place at once. Discoveries will soon be made that your "fellow Cardinals" will overlook. The public will see all these things, which you have hidden from them for so long. Reason dictates it.’

  ‘Perhaps. Though even reason would fail to answer many of the mysteries in the Collection, I’m sure. There is a skeleton of a man in our vaults that was found side-by-side with one of these great reptiles, while Cardinal Roche claimed to have seen the corpse of a creature that was half-way between man and fish, refuting both science and the book of Genesis.’ Catilin nodded contemplatively. ‘However, if there’s one thing I refuse to argue with, it’s the Age of Reason. At least, not with the French.’

  ‘A good Catholic not arguing with reason? Unthinkable!’

  Catilin had asked for that, of course, but he let out a loud sniff anyway, as if mortally offended. She’d touched a nerve, it was true. The Vatican couldn’t hold off the Age of Reason for much longer. Since His Holiness had died, the Church had been under the thumb of the bastard conqueror Bonaparte, and the world knew it; that was why the woman was here, come to survey the Collection for the ‘little Emperor’, just as they’d survey all the Vatican’s secret treasures, from the Library of St John the Beheaded in London to the living specimens of the Crow Gallery in Southern Africa. Something vast and raw and new was forcing its way into the world, Catilin reflected, ripping up the traditions and the establishments, replacing monarchies with revolutionaries and revolutionaries with short French megalomaniacs. New rulers. New religions. A new century on its way.

  Catilin suddenly noticed that the woman had moved on and was standing, frozen, in front of an ancient scrap of parchment, covered with tiny dancing figures.

  ‘Primitive art,’ Catilin told her. ‘Hundreds of years old, though the fabric is of unknown manufacture. The illustration is of Shango, a god of lightning. Thought to be the only pictorial representation of the deity in existence –’

  But Duquesne wasn’t listening. Her eyes had become glass baubles, her face flushed red as if she were about to burst into flames, her attention fixed on the little figure of Shango as he danced in front of the oblong ‘magic box’ with which, according to the parchments, he travelled a mystic triangle between the Earth, the sky, and the future.

  ‘Caillou,’ Duquesne said, her voice reduced to a croak.

  Catilin opened his mouth to ask her what she meant.

  But she’d fainted dead
away.

  PART ONE

  STATE OF INDEPENDENCE

  ‘The first century began with the year 1 AD and ended with the year 100 AD. Hence, the twentieth century began on January 1st 1901 and will end on December 31st 2000 AD. The first day of the twenty-first century and the "Third Millennium" will be the first day of 2001 AD, not the first day of 2000 AD as is commonly thought [...] yet when discussing such ideas as "millennial rites" and "thousand-year shifts", astrologers and numerologists consider December 31st 1999 to be the crucial date of change, thus getting their calculations wrong by a whole year. The conclusion is obvious. The actual dates are unimportant; it is our perception of the dates that matters. So-called "end-of-the-century fever" has more to do with human hysteria than with astrological significance... ‘

  – James Rafferty, Portents and Pathways (1978)

  ‘When we get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, we shall become corrupt as in Europe, and go to eating one another as they do there.’

  – Thomas Jefferson (1787)

  1

  Waifs and Strays

  New York State was celebrating. But that didn’t mean it was happy.

  The festivities had spread across the East Coast like a pox, taking Manhattan first, then Brooklyn, then Richmond; the smaller towns had been the last to fall to the fever, and when they’d fallen, they’d fallen with a kind of grudging contempt. When the garlands and the banners and the polished wooden angels had gone up in Woodwicke – a town the world in general had never really noticed, and probably never would – their colours were garish and aggressive, the people unwilling to celebrate without a snarl. During the War most of them had been loyal to the losing side, and even now, even after history had given them a hundred and one other things to be unhappy about, they still seemed to want a rematch. Christmas bled from the windows, dripped reluctantly out of the storefronts. The eighteenth century was in its dying days, and Woodwicke was a town that knew exactly what the President could do with his ‘new age of freedom’s glory’.

  But of course, the ‘attractions’ had opened for business even there. The craftsmen, the performers, the novelties; stalls run by middle-aged businessmen pretending to be gypsies and second-rate medicine peddlers masquerading as miracle-workers. Mystics and stargazers, showmen who turned the black arts into an almost-but-not-quite acceptable form of entertainment.

  So when Isaac Penley entered the fortune-teller’s tent on Eastern Walk, he instinctively glanced around to make sure no one was watching him. It was the very evening before Christmas Day, and for Isaac – esteemed member of the local council and upstanding pillar of the community, as he’d readily tell anyone who bothered listening to him – the holy festival was about to be laced with a touch of necromancy.

  ‘Sit down,’ said the witch-woman, and Isaac sat.

  The woman was a Negro (Negress, Isaac corrected himself), but she was alone in the tent, unsupervised and unattended. Her face didn’t seem to fit what he knew about the black species; the slave-ships that occasionally docked at Woodwicke carried creatures whose faces all seemed identical to Isaac, pitch-dark and lifeless, but this woman could almost have been fashioned from an entirely different material. Her skin was tinged with ash, her hair streaked with full-moon grey, and her bearing seemed almost aristocratic.

  Once, in New Orleans, Isaac had visited a carnival far grander than any that had ever been seen in Woodwicke. At one of the sideshows there had been a huge leather-skinned Negro on a great wooden throne, his half-naked body covered with smudges of red and yellow paint. The Negro’s attendants had informed the audience that this was Konga-Tchin, fearsome warrior-king of darkest Africa, who had slain tigers with his bare hands and destroyed entire armies on the battlefield. The audience had paid good money to hear the tales of Konga-Tchin, the attendants translating the answers he gave to their questions (’Have you ever wrestled a crocodile?’ ‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’). There had been something about his bearing, as well, a kind of nobility; as if he were lost in this land, but still determined to hold on to the memory of his past life and the dignity it afforded him.

  Except, of course, that Konga-Tchin had turned out to be a fake. A runaway slave, employed by a showman with a flair for the exotic.

  ‘Abracadabra, shalom-shalom,’ growled the Negress. Isaac found himself distracted by her costume, a rough shawl covering smoother, tighter garments that he couldn’t quite identify. ‘I see into the mists of time and stuff, blah blah blah. Anything in particular you wanted to know?’

  There was, but he couldn’t find the words, so he just shook his head. ‘Erm, no. Nothing. In particular. Um, the future?’

  The Negress leaned back in her seat, and Isaac got the impression that she really didn’t give a damn about anyone’s future but her own. ‘Yeah, well, there’s a lot of it, the universe is still in red shift. There’s a couple of good wars coming up, if you like that kind of thing. I can give you some dates, if you want. People are going to get born. They’ll go through the usual interpersonal shit. They’ll kill each other.’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Works for me,’ she said.

  ‘Well, yes.’ Isaac nodded seriously, as if to prove that he wasn’t confused by such profound thoughts. ‘But I was thinking of something a little more... personal?’

  ‘Personal?’

  ‘Personal. Um. My future.’

  The woman sighed. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘What?’ Isaac had a sudden vision of some monstrous jungle-god, scratching his name into the book of the damned. ‘Um, I’d rather not...’

  ‘Name?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘Penley,’ he mumbled. ‘Isaac Penley.’

  ‘Right. You’re not going to achieve anything of note in your entire life. If you were important, the Doctor would’ve claimed to have met you by now. He’s claimed to have met just about everyone else. Henry the Eighth. Cyrano de Bergerac. Everyone.’

  Isaac opened his mouth to ask who the Doctor was, then imagined a half-naked witch-doctor dancing before the jungle-god, talking with the spirits of the famous dead. His jaw snapped shut again.

  ‘All right,’ said the woman, misreading his expression. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know. You’ll lead a happy, prosperous life, move out to the plains, buy yourself a nice big house and a nice big flitter, or horse-and-cart, or whatever it is you have here, and your children’ll grow up to be lawyers or generals or something. You still won’t achieve anything much, and you’ll die of old age, probably in your sleep. Happv?’

  She didn’t so much say the last word as bite a word-shaped hole out of the air. Isaac nodded, for the simple reason that he couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  ‘Good. Any other questions?’

  Any other questions?

  Yes, thought Isaac. Oh, yes. Questions about the shape the world is being twisted into, questions about the mumblings I hear from the town and all the wars they seem to want to start, questions about Church and State and Heaven and Hell and politics and anarchy and everything in between. Questions that I can’t even fit into proper sentences.

  And he felt a series of words slide onto his tongue, and prayed that this would be it, that this would be the one question he desperately needed to ask, that just the right letters would fall from his lips and the Negress would understand what he really wanted and give him all the answers.

  He opened his mouth.

  ‘Is it true you eat people in Africa?’ he heard himself say.

  There was a silence as big as all outdoors. The woman’s expression was unreadable.

  ‘No,’ she said, emotionlessly. ‘But that isn’t going to stop me biting your face off.’

  Erskine Morris stared at the thing that was floating near the top of his drink, sniffed it, swore at it, then swallowed it anyway. He had no idea whether it was a vital ingredient of the cocktail or just a piece of flotsam that had accidentally fallen into his glass, but the liquid was powerful en
ough to make sure that his taste-buds never found out for certain. Besides, he was three glasses past caring.

  ‘Naturellement, I find the writings of Monsieur Jefferson most interesting,’ Tourette was saying on the other side of the pub. ‘His thoughts on liberation are most liberating. A-hahhah. Hah-hah.’

  ‘Hellfire and buggery,’ Erskine growled, and downed the rest of the drink.

  His chair made an ugly cracking sound under his weight. Erskine Morris was a big man; not fat, not muscular, just big, in some vague and indefinable way that the world’s furniture-makers were obviously unprepared for. When he sat, his legs would spill awkwardly across the floor, and his elbows would topple any table that was unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Furniture ‘disagreed’ with him.

  ‘As we say in my own country, gentlemen; liberté, égalité, fraternité.’ Tourette spread his arms wide, as if he’d just said something terribly profound and was waiting for a round of applause. His audience – three unfortunate members of the Society who’d been unable to escape the idiot Frenchman’s attentions – nodded dumbly, not knowing where to look.

  By all the sodomized choirboys of Pope Pius VI, thought Erskine, things are going from bad to worse around here. Back when he’d joined the New York Renewal Society, there’d been an unshakeable code of conduct. The Society had been a group of Deists, atheists and rationalists, with three principle aims: to advance the cause of reason; to annoy the hell out of the damned Papists; and to experiment with every alcoholic concoction known to science. But now?

  Erskine let his eyes wander around the old King George, getting used to the gaslight that lit the hollow shell of the building. There were men standing around in their Sunday bests, looking like blubbery children in stiff shirts, discussing a hundred and one half-cocked philosophies that were probably all the rage in Paris or Rome or London. Erskine’s gaze settled on one man in particular, surrounded by a small audience that seemed a good deal more interested than Tourette’s had been. The man was hard to miss. His shapeless, powder-pale face was hardly a face at all, just a collection of features looking for somewhere to happen, while his thin grey hair looked as though it had been painted onto the top of his head.