Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  ‘I do, my lady, I do indeed.’ Tourette bowed extravagantly, and for no immediately obvious reason. ‘For strange things are afoot there, and those of superstitious and irrational demeanours are claiming devilry is at work. These past nights, there have been dreams both weird and unfathomable amongst the townsfolk. A sensation of unease has swept across these harbours, like a great wind of... er... unease.’

  Duquesne gritted her teeth. The colonies were littered with idiot agents like Tourette, ‘expendables’ who knew nothing but were led to believe that they knew everything. Duquesne politely turned her back on him as she dragged her chemise over her shoulders. ‘Your last dispatch to the Directory mentioned the Renewal Society...?’

  ‘Indeed, my lady. And since that time, I have infiltrated the local lodge of that group, in the hope of hearing some rumour amongst the enlightened. My cover is faultless, as one might expect from an agent of my experience, and they have accepted me as a man of great learning and philosophical insight.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it, Monsieur Tourette.’ Duquesne tried to smile sweetly as she crossed the cabin floor, barefoot on the splintered boards.

  ‘Even amongst the rationalist minds of the Society, there are feelings of ill-omen,’ Tourette continued. ‘Many members have begun to discuss ancient and absurd magics as if they were founded in science, and secret meetings are held that smack of Freemasonry. Some in the town suspect the rationalists of being the cause of their ill-feeling, though they cannot seem to explain why. I, myself, have been spat at in the street.’

  ‘Ah, good.’

  ‘My lady...?’

  ‘Good that you have so, ah, successfully infiltrated the Society. But these secret meetings...’

  ‘I have not yet been invited to any of them, my lady.’

  ‘I see.’

  Tourette looked crestfallen, like the dog that had failed to bring back the bone. ‘But it is only a matter of time, my lady, I assure you. I have the trust of the Society.’

  Duquesne stepped out through the cabin door and on to the deck of the ship, Tourette at her heels. ‘I’m sure you do,’ she said, lips still forced into a smile. ‘I’m sure you do.’

  No one else on the street. No witnesses, thought Roz, crouching in the alley by the church. The nearest human sounds came from around the corner, where the man from the general store was having a loud argument with someone about the legality of his opening hours.

  Quiet enough.

  Abraham Lincoln. Born in the United States of America in... what was the year? Eighteen-hundred-and-something, going by the Empire’s version of history. Lincoln. Focus on that name, Forrester. Something about all men being created equal. Something to do with Civil War. Remember those simcords? Full of blood and guts and triumph and glory. Not the way the Empire would pay tribute to a loser. One of history’s heroes, then. Someone significant.

  Two minutes since the clock had struck nine, and Roz hadn’t breathed out since. She knew the routine by now. Samuel Lincoln would appear in the drawing-room window every night at around this time, cross the room, sit at his desk...

  But if Samuel Lincoln was going to die, then little Abraham would never exist. No more Civil War, whatever it had been about. No more Presidents with warts, no more simcord dramas. One bullet, one careful shot. Thick black marker-pen over the pages of history. ‘Roz Forrester was here.’

  Killing time. A mystic ritual to summon a Time Lord, involving the sacrifice of an innocent on the altar of history. Four-dimensional voodoo. The same method the Hellenic Atlanteans used to summon the Chronovores, but how the Sheol do you know a thing like that, Roslyn Forrester? What are you, psychic or something?

  She unexpectedly remembered her botched attempt to kill SLEEPY on Yemaya 4, and wondered what her subconscious could possibly be trying to tell her.

  A shadow appeared behind the drawing-room curtain, a human shape framed against the orange lamplight. Sitting target, she thought. Practice, she thought. She checked that everything was in place, that the ammunition was loaded properly, that there was no safety-catch she hadn’t noticed. One shot. No different from any other. She’d shot at people before. Mostly she’d missed, but this was different. Sitting target. Practice. No problem.

  The shadow of Samuel Lincoln moved across to his desk, and – presumably – opened one of the drawers. Roz levelled the gun. The American Way; remember when the Empire terraformed Mogar and Murtaugh and the Prion system? How they wanted everyone to remember the spirit of the frontier, showing westerns where the cowboys looked suspiciously multi-cultural and the Indians looked suspiciously non-terrestrial? The ghost of the Wild West, the spirit of liberty and gun-law nesting down in the foundations of the USA. Just another killing, just one of many.

  One bullet.

  One careful shot.

  Samuel Lincoln sat down at his desk, putting his head directly in her line of fire.

  Roz Forrester’s second-to-last thought before she pulled the trigger was: shoot first and ask questions later.

  Roz Forrester’s last thought before she pulled the trigger was: shoot first and don’t ask questions.

  Then her vision was filled with something huge and white, bigger than the flash of the gun-barrel, bigger than she could even imagine, filling up the whole universe and blotting out every sense she had.

  It was –

  It was just –

  Erskine Morris closed his eyes, and his vision was filled with a dozen fluorescent scratches and swirls that danced across the insides of his eyelids. He could feel something wrapping itself around his shoulders, and it was warm to the touch. He closed his eyes tighter, making the shapes leap and crackle like straws in a fire.

  A word was growing in his belly, like a magical incantation that would send the damned monster back to Hell, but however hard he strained he couldn’t force it up into his mouth. Astonishingly, he began to walk forward, feeling his face push against the beast’s soft underbelly. Trying to prove that it couldn’t possibly be there, perhaps. He felt liquid skin ripple in front of him, and heard the sound of gently tearing flesh, the layers of the thing’s body opening up for him Revolting notion. Ridiculous notion.

  It was just –

  It was just that –

  And he could have sworn that the flesh was closing up again behind him, the creature sealing him into its carcass. Absurdly, it was only now that he truly began to panic, and the whispering flooded into his ears. Music, like carnival music. A voice? A woman’s voice?

  It was just that it didn’t make sense.

  And finally, the word in his belly erupted out through his throat.

  ‘Buggery!’ he shrieked.

  Suddenly, his face was exposed to the air again, and he realized – with more than a little disgust – that he must have walked right through the monstrosity. Walked through it and out the other side. He opened his eyes.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Catcher, flatly.

  Erskine Morris blinked. He was still in the man’s labyrinth, but the corridors were behind him now, having led him to a wide room made up of the same indented walls. In the dead centre of the floor was some kind of table, its design peculiar and unsettling; it almost looked like a mushroom, an organic thing, a six-sided dais topped by a column of pure crystal. Catcher himself stood at the far side of the dais, still in his drab little jacket and brass-knuckled shoes, while all around him stood the other members of the ‘inner circle’, faces covered by their ridiculous hoods. Their heads were bowed. Like bloody monks, thought Erskine, and he found himself identifying them by their physiques. The fat one was Walter Monroe, the broker. William Beaumont the book-keeper, George Mistral the layabout. O’Toole. Van Owen. Grey, faceless people. He tried to picture them with fish-gutting knives, eyes blazing with Satanic fury. He very nearly laughed.

  Something brushed against his neck. With a start, he realized that the monster was still hovering in the passage behind him, squirming impatiently.

  Erskine met Catcher’s gaze.
The eyes were cold and empty. For a brief and fleeting moment, he thought he understood why.

  ‘You’ve proved yourself to be a man of Reason,’ Catcher said, as if that explained everything, and reached out to untie Erskine’s wrists. Erskine tried to tell him what he thought of him, but all that came out of his throat was a sickly spluttering noise.

  The harbour was a hundred yards across the water, a low wall of buildings that shielded the towns beyond from the sea. From here, all you could see were dim constellations of lamplight, forming imaginary patterns against the backcloth of the evening. On-off on-off. Signals in the darkness.

  What kind of darkness?

  ‘My lady?’ Tourette was still by Duquesne’s side, entirely incapable of knowing when he wasn’t wanted. ‘My lady, I wished to know if it were now your intention to enter the towns yourself...?’

  ‘I have already crossed the Atlantic to be here, Monsieur Tourette. Having done so, it would be a pity for me to remain on this ship and not see the local sights.’

  Tourette, however, had little or no understanding of sarcasm. ‘But there may be dangers, my lady. For one who is unfamiliar with the customs of the brutish American people –’

  ‘I appreciate your concern, Monsieur. However, you must understand that I possess certain talents that even a... professional... like yourself can lack. There may be a caillou here, non?’ This is his territory, Duquesne thought, and he wants to keep me away from it. He probably hopes he can get to the bottom of all this by himself and get promoted by the Shadow Directory. Shallow idiot.

  ‘I beg you, my lady –’

  ‘Tourette!’ She forgot the ‘Monsieur’ that time. ‘I promise you, should I have any difficulties, I shall be in direct contact with you. Or with another local agent.’

  That had put him in his place. For once, the man seemed lost for words.

  ‘If there’s anything else...?’ Duquesne prompted.

  ‘No, my lady.’ Tourette began to shuffle backwards across the deck, his back hunched as if he were unsure whether to bow again or not. By the time he reached the part of the deck to which his rowing-boat was tethered, he was practically bent double. ‘I wish you good fortune in your endeavours –’

  ‘Au revoir,’ Duquesne told him, dryly.

  She watched the rowing-boat drift off towards the shore. Once Tourette had vanished into the dark, and his gruntings and pantings had faded away – the sound of a man who finds it difficult to come to terms with a piece of machinery as complex as an oar, Duquesne thought – her gaze was drawn back to the lights of New York State.

  Dreams and ill omens. Rationalists and magicians. Out beyond the harbour, an accidental clockwork of secrets, a mechanism of plots and sub-plots, waiting to be wound; she could sense that much from here. The burning in her spine began again, the nerves tying themselves into ugly little bundles, and she felt like an animal waiting for a storm.

  Thunderheads in the dark.

  History waiting to happen.

  Bang.

  Roz Forrester didn’t feel the hand on her shoulder, pulling her off-balance as she squeezed the trigger. She barely noticed that her aim had been ruined, that the bullet had ripped open the sky above the balconies of the Lincoln house. Her senses only returned to her after she’d finished toppling over, back crunching against the ground.

  There were shouts from along the street, alarmed residents and passers-by, but nobody seemed to know where the shot had come from or where it had been aimed. She thought she heard someone shouting ‘the redcoats are coming’, but she could have imagined it. In his drawing-room, Samuel Lincoln pulled himself to his feet and hurried over to the window, entirely unaware that – in some other world – he’d just been assassinated.

  Roz saw the face hovering over her, and repressed the urge to salute.

  ‘Thought that’d get your attention,’ she said.

  The Doctor scowled at her. His hand was still on her shoulder, restraining her, as if worried that she might still try to kill someone.

  ‘That was stupid,’ he said.

  ‘No. It was a safe bet.’ Roz hauled herself upright, flecks of frost sliding off the plastic-coated undersuit of her old Adjudicator’s uniform. ‘Time’s Champion. You said you had to protect history, no matter how it went. Those were the rules. Remember?’

  The Doctor took his hand off her shoulder, but said nothing.

  ‘Suppose Samuel Lincoln had died,’ Roz explained. ‘President Lincoln would never have been born. Serious damage to the time-stream, or whatever you call it. You couldn’t allow that. You’d notice the damage, you’d have to come and try to stop it. You had to come here. And you did. This was the only way of letting you know where to find me. Where’ve you been, anyway? And where’s Chris?’

  Nearby, the man from the general store started shouting something about calling the police.

  ‘There’s just one little problem,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes.’ He got to his feet, his short frame seeming to stretch all the way to the moon. ‘Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, not New York. And his father’s name was Thomas.’

  There was a silence as big as the world.

  ‘It’s starting to rain,’ Roz said eventually. ‘We’d better get out of here.’

  Staying in the TARDIS, thought Christopher Rodonanté Cwej, was like spending a week in an Argolin holiday complex; you knew there had to be a million interesting things to do there, but it wasn’t until you got really bored that you realized you couldn’t remember what any of them were.

  Chris was no longer worried about Roz. Partly, this was because of the Doctor’s constant assurances – ‘She’s all right’; ‘She’ll be fine’; ‘She can look after herself – but mostly it was because the human brain can’t worry about something for weeks on end without just giving up and shrugging.

  No, scratch that. The human brain can’t consciously worry about something for weeks on end without just giving up and shrugging. He’d never admit it to anyone, of course, but some nights... well, he’d fall asleep and find himself searching for Roz in an ancient monochrome city. He’d end up running through endless identical alleyways, finally reaching a throne-room painted in the dull grey of eternity, where he’d meet a white-bearded giant of a man who never answered a single question; and he’d wake up with Roz Forrester waiting behind his eyelids again, ready to show her face whenever he blinked.

  But now – as long as he stayed awake, at least – he was no longer worried. He was just bored.

  Once the Doctor had disappeared through the doors on another of his secret expeditions, Chris had started exploring the TARDIS interior, poking his nose into the cracks and cupboards of what he called ‘the humans’ corridor’, where he and Roz had been quartered ever since the Doctor had got his old TARDIS back. There, he’d stumbled across a doorway that he was sure hadn’t existed in the ‘other’ TARDIS. The room beyond was unfurnished, as if its owner hadn’t needed the usual human comforts, and boxes were lined up against the walls with horrifying neatness and precision. The possessions of a former traveller, Chris surmised, so why hadn’t they been cleared out?

  Now he rooted through the boxes with a startling lack of shame, prodding at the contents and averting his eyes from the various ‘women’s things’ he came across. Then he found a number of ‘men’s things’, too, which struck him as odd. Was this room used by two people, or...?

  He suddenly found himself thinking of the few androgynous alien species he’d heard of, creatures that veered from male to female and back again in a matter of moments. The thought of one of them travelling in the TARDIS made him feel vaguely uncomfortable. Aliens in the TARDIS. No reason why not, he supposed, but the idea of the Doctor having an alien as a companion just made him feel peculiar, somehow. Like the feeling you get when someone you’ve known all your life gets a new and unexpected haircut.

  Most of the things in the boxes were human artefacts, but there seemed to be n
o connection between any of them, as if the owner had desperately tried to understand human culture (or to understand being human?) by collecting as many odds and ends as he/she/it could Finally, at the bottom of the very last box – beneath a mysterious catering receipt for 36,000 sandwiches, and a boxed set of coins celebrating the re-coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (the only re-coronation in British history, the accompanying leaflet said, though it diplomatically failed to mention why it had been necessary) – he found the most interesting item of all.

  Originally it had been a simple computer, light enough to hold in one hand; but so many foreign elements had been added that it was impossible to identify the design. The hardware must have come from a dozen different time-zones, and quite possibly as many different civilizations, but all of them had been tacked together with the same brand of micro-thin wiring.

  ‘Time-Lord technology,’ Chris told himself. ‘Has to be. If they can figure out a way to speak every language, they must be able to make a lead that fits any hardware. Makes sense.’

  What puzzled him, though, was the cord that led out of the stripped-down terrulian diode-charger at the back of the machine, a cord ending in an unusual hexagonal pin. Obviously the computer was supposed to interface with something. Chris wandered around the ship for a while, poking his nose into every door he came to and occasionally going ‘ooh’ or ‘wow’ at what he saw there, looking for a hole that the pin might fit. He tried everything, from the fault locator to the large box-shaped computer-bank labelled PRIME that sat in a corner just outside the console room. He even chased after the food machine as it trundled along the ship’s passages, inspecting it for unusual orifices. No joy.

  Just as he was about to give up, it came to him

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said aloud, determined that the world should hear his brilliant investigative mind in action. ‘If Time-Lord technology can fit any system...’

  Chris left the sentence tantalizingly unfinished. He held up the computer, pointing the lead towards the corridor wall outside his own quarters, finally touching the pin against the surface of a roundel. Slowly and gracefully, the roundel opened up like an iris. Something on the other side grabbed the pin and sucked it into the winking, blinking TARDIS systems.