Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  ‘Can I just take this opportunity to say something?’ Chris addressed himself. ‘You’re brilliant.’

  ‘I would point out, however, that all you actually did was put a plug in,’ said a voice.

  With a start, Chris looked up. The next roundel along had split in half across its centre, and the two halves were now quivering slightly, forming...

  ... a pair of lips?

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ asked the mouth.

  ‘Er,’ said Chris. ‘Er.’

  ‘What do you see?’ asked Matheson Catcher.

  Erskine Morris cast his eyes around the room, trying to avoid looking back at the horror lurking out in the corridor.

  ‘Whahhg?’ he heard himself say.

  Catcher fixed his little round eyes on his prey. Prey? Damnation, Morris, you’re letting the fornicating idiot get to you. ‘You are aware, of course, that the human species has reached a critical point in its development.’

  Erskine nodded dumbly. Catcher joined in with the nod. ‘The Age of Reason is the single most significant occurrence in the entire history of humanity, Mr Morris. For millennia, mankind has been bound by ignorance and superstition. We have been at the mercy of chaos. At the mercy of Cacophony.’

  ‘Cacophony?’ Erskine queried, without thinking.

  ‘Cacophony. The spirit of the irrational. The force that makes sane men believe in magic. That makes us as hysterical as women.’ Catcher was still nodding, like a machine that someone had forgotten to turn off. ‘But we have it in our power to end this tyranny of nature, Mr Morris. To bend the terrible forces of Cacophony to our will. We have a responsibility to make this world a world of Reason, built by rationalists, not by charlatans or jungle-gods or witch-doctors.’

  Erskine nodded again, but on the inside he was saying: Reason? Have you seen that, that thing out in the corridor? Christ, man, is that what you call Reason?

  And perhaps Catcher knew what he was thinking, because he turned and looked the monstrosity straight in the metaphorical eye. ‘A creature of havoc, Mr Morris. An agent of Cacophony. But by mastering the powers of Reason, the beast has been tamed. Subverted to the will of the... to our will.’

  Erskine was half-expecting the cursed man to shout ‘All Hail Reason!’ at that point, but instead there was just a moment’s silence. He suddenly realized that Catcher was expecting some kind of reaction.

  So he just nodded again.

  ‘This is the purpose of our group,’ Catcher concluded. ‘This should be the purpose of the Renewal Society, and of every other such society that this nation has produced. To make our Earth a New Jerusalem of science and stability. The world is balanced between Reason and the abyss of reasonlessness, Mr Morris. We have a duty to the future.’

  He made a mechanical motion with his arm, indicating the room around them. ‘This is what Reason can achieve,’ Catcher concluded. ‘And Reason will remake the world.’

  The thunderheads opened, spilling out heat and fire and bad fortune. More than light. A flash of fate. And had there been a gunshot? Duquesne could have sworn she heard a gunshot, exploding out across New York.

  There was a low groan from below her feet, or perhaps a hundred groans in chorus. She looked across the deck. There were two seamen to starboard, faceless and nameless members of the crew, engaged in a heated debate about the relative merits of prostitution. They hadn’t noticed it. The flashpoint had passed, and they hadn’t noticed a thing.

  But below deck...

  She slid across the boards as the first drops of rain began to fall, stopping before the hatch that led down into the cargo hold. She glanced back at the mariners. They weren’t watching her, hadn’t even noticed her. Duquesne tugged back the bolt and pulled open the hatch.

  She was ready for the smell. Ready enough that she didn’t have to cover her face, or shut the hatch again, or even turn away. Even when she climbed down the ladder, she kept breathing normally, determined to remain in control of her senses.

  There were perhaps eighty blacks in the cargo hold. Most of them were laid out along the floor, backs slick with spilled water and human waste, though a few of the smaller ones were loaded onto the shelves that had been bolted to the walls. The waves lapped against the side of the ship in perfect synchronization with the tides of heat and fever that washed across the hold, a living spectrum of body-scent and branded flesh. If the cargo made any sound, Duquesne didn’t hear it, but their lips moved in harmony with the rhythm of the blood, the sweat, the bile, the salt, the sea, the rain, the smell...

  Then her spine was alight again, tongues of ozone-flavoured heat forming tight spirals around her backbone. Every inch of her skin was damp with sweat, and every ounce of flesh could taste the rotting dampness of wooden walls that had been christened with splashes of blood and spit and piss.

  There was a woman chained to a shelf, five feet above the floor. Her eyes met Duquesne’s. They were white and empty.

  Medieval magicians had starved themselves, flogged themselves, exposed themselves to alchemical flames, thinking that it would purge their bodies and purify their souls. The pain and the hunger made them more receptive, more sensitive to the ebb and flow of the cosmos. Or so they’d said.

  There were perhaps eighty blacks in the cargo hold.

  The pain and the hunger. Scent of delirium.

  They could feel it. Just as Duquesne could feel it, corkscrewing up her back.

  She had once met the priests of the Temple of Hermes, who claimed descendance from the mythical King Priam and believed that their family line had been instigated by the gods themselves...

  ... she had felt it then.

  She had seen the High Lama of the holy ghanta in the foothills of the Kunlun Mountains, who could lift objects with the merest flicker of his will, a storm of stones levitating around his body like the seven planets around the sun...

  ... she had felt it then.

  She had heard the stories of Hsen Ling, the ‘mad Chinaman of Vienna’, who told of his abduction by the trickster-god No Cha, and how he beat the deity in an unearthly game of cards...

  ... and she had felt it then. Each of them had been a caillou, the word her employers in the Shadow Directory used to describe an individual around whom the world itself would shift and change, one so out-of-tune with the natural order of the universe that even history would warp and buckle around him. Caillou. Maker of distractions. Changer of rules. A pebble dropped into a pond.

  ‘Can you feel him?’ Duquesne asked the woman-in-chains, suddenly realizing that she was speaking in French, and wondering if the woman even understood English.

  Dead eyes looked back at her.

  ‘Caillou,’ Duquesne said. ‘He has arrived.’

  And the fire burned her spine like a fuse, reaching her neck, igniting every neural pathway, heightening every sense.

  And the smell was inhuman. And she passed out.

  ‘Attempted murder!’

  They were stomping through the wooded areas that bordered the town, those small expanses of green that marked the boundaries of the civilized world, where the planners and the architects lurked in the shadows and waited for their moment to come. It had taken them ten wet minutes to get this far. The Doctor pushed his way through the undergrowth like a force of nature, faster than his little legs should have been able to carry him, Roz maliciously trampling on the nettles as she kept up the pace.

  ‘Attempted murder, my arse. You were supposed to stop me.’

  ‘And what if I hadn’t been there?’

  ‘You’re always there!’

  ‘You couldn’t be sure of that.’

  ‘Yes I could. Because you had to protect the time-line. All right, so I got the wrong man.’ Not the first time I would have shot an innocent bystander, she thought, but she didn’t say it.

  ‘There’s no such thing as the right man. Not when you’re pointing a loaded weapon at him. Or doesn’t thirtieth-century legal procedure cover these little details?’

 
She was about to snarl her reply when the obvious question finally hit her. ‘Wait a minute. If you hadn’t stopped me, I wouldn’t have done any damage –’

  ‘No damage?’

  ‘No damage to the time-line. Samuel Lincoln isn’t important.’

  The Doctor didn’t say a word, didn’t even scowl.

  ‘So, if I wouldn’t have changed anything if I’d hit him, how come you turned up in time to stop me? What I’m saying is –’

  ‘Is irrelevant.’ He batted at an overhanging branch with his walking-cane, as much to punish the cane as to push back the branch, perhaps irritated that it couldn’t keep the rain off in the same way that his umbrella would have done. Even so, most of the rain seemed to be missing him somehow, as if the droplets knew that he wouldn’t grow no matter how much they watered him ‘You could have killed that man. Not even on the battlefield, not even in the heat of the moment. Killed him in cold blood. You had no guarantee that I’d be there.’

  ‘I did what I had to!’

  ‘What you had to?’ The words rolled out of his mouth in the same way that thunder rolls across the savannah, and Roz instinctively found herself looking up at the rainclouds.

  ‘Do you know what it’s like to be trapped like this?’ she demanded. ‘Stranded, for weeks on end, months on end, left in the middle of some dead-end no-hope planet with no way of getting away from it, and no way of even knowing if you’re going to be spending the rest of your life there?’

  ‘I have a place in mind,’ the Doctor muttered.

  ‘A planet where you fit in so badly that they take one look at you and decide you’re either a criminal or part of a freak-show?’

  ‘I have a place in mind,’ he repeated.

  Roz ignored him. ‘Listen, I’ve been through this kind of shit before, but this place is different. Do you know what it is that kills you? It’s not the way they look at you, or the abuse you get, or the bastards who want to know if you’ve ever eaten anyone. If I thought everybody hated me, I could live with it. I’m used to that by now.

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the not knowing. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act here, and neither do they. They can’t even decide whether I’m human or not. Some of them treat me like an animal. Some of them think I’m some kind of exotic mystery. Some of them, Goddess help them, actually talk to me. This place doesn’t have any rules, and I used to be a cop, I can’t live without rules. I’ve seen slaves dragged half-naked through the streets by their chains, I’ve seen black servants dressed in suits like they were pets, I’ve even met a few free Africans out in the slums They wouldn’t speak to me. They thought I was an Englishman’s whore.’

  She practically shouted the last word into his ear, and it was enough to stop even him.

  ‘It’s the not knowing. Not knowing whether the next person I meet’s going to feel sorry for me, or just try to kill me. And by now, I can’t remember which is supposed to be worse. OK?’

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the Doctor finally announced.

  ‘I have to get out of this place.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘I did what I had to.’

  He opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it, and just pointed with his walking-cane. Up ahead, Roz could see the trees thin out, the ground dipping into a steep slope, leading down to a low glade. ‘There’s a lot of truth in what you said,’ the Doctor told her as they walked towards it. ‘Historical truth. This is a brand-new nation. At the moment, the people here still think, act, and speak like the English and the Dutch. They don’t have a culture to call their own. America hasn’t decided yet whether it’s a nation of philosophers or a nation of barbarians.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I vote barbarians.’

  He frowned. ‘It’s never that simple. Soon, the Civil War will come. The guidelines of the society will be laid down, for better or worse, and everyone will know how they’re supposed to behave. The philosophers will act like philosophers. The barbarians will act like barbarians. Until then...’

  He trailed off, and shrugged.

  The glade at the bottom of the slope was unremarkable, a crater-like circle of trees carpeted by autumn’s left-overs. The moon was bright enough to illuminate the layer of dampened frost on the ground, interrupted only by the dark outline of a wooden-panelled police box.

  At the time, Roz thought nothing of the way the Doctor paused before he inserted the TARDIS key into the lock, nor of the strange patterns the rainwater made as it trickled down the surface of the door. It was only when he thrust the key into place that she noticed anything.

  The lock split wide open. He removed the key, and the lock sealed itself together again. Roz froze.

  ‘That’s not natural,’ she said.

  The Doctor tucked the walking-cane under his arm and reached out with his other hand, touching the surface of the TARDIS. Then he kept reaching. His hand sank into the exterior. The sides of the machine buckled as the split expanded, and the front opened up like a ripe peach.

  Like a ripe peach?

  Slowly, the Doctor raised his eyes to the heavens. Perhaps, up there in the night sky, he glimpsed the other kind of darkness, hiding behind the winter rainclouds. Or perhaps not.

  ‘Stop doing this!’ he shouted, but the sky refused to answer.

  Chris Cwej cleared his throat, wondering how one should address a disembodied facial feature. ‘Listen,’ he tried. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking this or anything, but... look, are you supposed to be just a mouth?’

  In response, yet another roundel opened, revealing a huge eye on the far side. It stared.

  ‘Oh, yuk,’ he said. ‘That’s gross.’

  The eye closed obligingly.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Chris said, suddenly realizing what he was talking to ‘Are you the TARDIS?’

  ‘Ah. I don’t believe it’s possible to communicate with the TARDIS, at least, not directly. Its thought processes are entirely alien to the organic psyche, and its mental capacity is beyond the comprehension of anything other than another TARDIS.’ The voice was cultured, metallic, male without being masculine. Almost mournful, but definitely not human. ‘In colloquial English, one might as well try talking to the whole of Birmingham. Not my own choice of metaphor, however. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.’

  ‘My name’s Chris. Chris Cwej. So, who...?’

  ‘I serve as an interface. A piece of software, nothing more. A ghost in the machine, perhaps. Created by one of the previous occupants of this craft.’ Was that really a wistful tone in its voice? ‘He suffered a period of some confinement here, and spent that time attempting to cultivate his understanding of organic cultures. He learnt a great deal from the ship’s systems, using me as his... pardon me, I have to locate the appropriate term. Go-between? Yes. I was his go-between. I was also responsible for the customization of several core systems within the TARDIS, acting on his command.’

  Confinement? Funny way of putting it. ‘This previous occupant. Was he, er, alien, at all?’

  ‘On occasion. His default form was cybernetic, however.’ The voice hesitated, as if wondering how much to tell. ‘It is possible that the Doctor is unaware of my continued existence. When I was engineered, I believe it was assumed that I would cease to function once my original user had departed...’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Chris. ‘You said "customization". You mean, you can shift the TARDIS around, any way I... er, any way the user wants it? All he has to do is say?’

  ‘I fear not. I may only report. Forge a link, as it were, between the user and the subconscious depths of the ship’s systems. Except for those protocols which determine my physical attributes –’ and the wall grew a temporary pair of nostrils, just to make a point ‘– alterations to the ship’s structure may only be made using the input terminal.’

  Chris looked down at the keyboard of the computer, an antique QWERTY job that someone had spilt coffee over at some point in its e
xistence. He nodded to himself. ‘So what happens if I do this, for instance?’

  He tried tapping an alpha-numeric sequence into the keyboard. Nothing happened.

  ‘That was fortunate,’ said the mouth.

  ‘Fortunate?’

  ‘Fortunate that we weren’t having this discussion in the Eighth Door section. You appear to have turned it inside-out and pushed it into Hilbert-space.’

  ‘Oh.’ Chris blinked a couple of times. ‘I kind of assumed you’d stop something like that from happening.’

  ‘Not within my functional parameters, I regret to say.’

  ‘Oh. So, can I put it back?’

  ‘No. I would advise, however, that you re-position one of the corridors to close the gap your command has created. The ship is beginning to lose its aesthetic integrity.’

  ‘Got it.’ Cwej peered at the tiny LCD screen that had been connected to the keyboard, but it just seemed to be displaying a series of telephone numbers, interspersed with random zeroes and ones. ‘Er, how do I do that?’

  ‘I fear it’s not my place to say. As I believe I mentioned, I may only report. It’s not within my functional parameters to understand the operating system.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Here it comes,’ said the mouth, quite calmly. And everything went black.

  3

  Thought About Saving the World, Couldn’t Be Bothered

  They were coming out of the walls, out of the floors, out of every nook or cranny that seemed dark and unimportant enough to spawn them. Fingers like razors, muscles of tin. Moving along the corridors with an awkward, lurching gait, like children’s toys whose batteries had run down.

  They fed from the ship’s structure in the boot-cupboards, and played dice with the universe in the cloisters. Creations, phantasms, aberrations...

  ... why be coy? Monsters. They were monsters, that was all.

  The ground was slippery with frost and rainwater.

  The ground was slippery with blood and gunpowder.