Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  Daniel Tremayne crouched in an alleyway off Burr Street, pulling the soaking blanket tight around his stick-thin body, letting the rain spit in his face. He couldn’t remember where he’d found the blanket, but then he couldn’t remember much about anything; not where he’d run to, not where he’d been. He guessed he’d spent most of the last hour here in the alley, down in the shadows, with a big bloody gash across the top of his head.

  Columns of soldiers, diseased bodies rotted and falling to pieces as they marched through the winter.

  When he’d fallen and cracked his head on the ground, when he’d heard music in his skull and dreamed of the carnival going past, when he’d seen the soft people in their carnival clothes...

  The soldiers’ uniforms were covered in dirt and vomit. ‘Up the Revolution,’ one of them had said, and his comrades had laughed. They hadn’t thought it was funny, but they’d laughed.

  ... it’d been a warning. Like he’d needed one. Should’ve been out of the town by now, Daniel Tremayne. Should’ve been a dozen, a hundred, a thousand miles away.

  Daniel Tremayne had been only so-high when the War of Independence had ended. Smaller than so-high, no bigger than a baby. The War, when all the soft people had decided to stick their heads up and get involved with the way the world was run, making their own bloody laws, inventing their own bloody taxes.

  Blood and gunpowder.

  And most of them had gotten themselves killed, because, God, what else can you expect if you get yourself noticed like that? What else do you get, Daniel Tremayne, for sticking your head into other people’s cellars, and are you listening to what I’m telling you?

  Diseased and rotted.

  They said they’d won the War, the soft Revolutionaries and the men whose souls they’d bought to fight for them. Daniel thought of the half-people he’d seen, skeletons dressed in mud and diarrhoea. Hah. And they called that winning, did they?

  Dirt and vomit.

  He’d been so-high, or less. He remembered so much of it. How come? Shit. Did it matter?

  Daniel dropped the blanket, started moving along the alley, heading God-knew-where. Anywhere, anywhere that wasn’t near Catcher’s house. But the call was in his head, and he could still hear the whispers in the dark, trying to lure him back. And he knew they’d never leave him alone.

  There were many questions. All of them seemed perfectly sensible, until they were spoken out loud, when they suddenly became pointless and insignificant. For example:

  ‘But... Catcher, where in the name of the old bastard King is this place?’

  ‘This is my house.’ A note of surprise in the man’s voice, as if he didn’t understand why anyone would have to ask.

  ‘What? It’s... well, it’s smaller on the outside.’

  ‘With the correct tools, a man of Reason may even bend the mundane dimensions to his will.’ Catcher seemed convinced of the logic behind his words, despite the fact that he was quite obviously talking gibberish. ‘Naturally, it is well within the power of the Watchmakers to supply such tools.’

  Watchmakers? Erskine opened his mouth to ask, but it hardly seemed worthwhile. Why question any of it? Good God (there, he’d thought about the G-word), he was in screaming doo-lally Hell. What could he expect? Coherency?

  ‘Are you a man of Reason?’ Catcher asked.

  Yes, thought Erskine. Yes, by Saint Buggery, but this isn’t a Reasonable world anymore, not like it was an hour ago. He glanced at the monstrosity, slithering in and out of the shadows on the far side of the room. But I am a rationalist, by Christ, and rationalism tells me –

  It tells me –

  Hades and copulation, what does it tell me?

  And he realized – in a moment of terrible, all-consuming horror – that he couldn’t remember, that he’d probably never be able to remember ever again.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, flatly. ‘I’m a man of Reason.’ And he tried to ignore the abomination as it giggled like a little girl.

  ‘What about Chris?’

  They gazed into the abyss; the abyss gazed back and giggled stupidly. Every now and then, a piece of furniture – a tea-chest, a Louis XV chair, or a hatstand – would drift past the fissure that had, in a previous life, been the TARDIS doorway.

  ‘I said, what about Chris?’

  Roz’s fingers dug into the Doctor’s shoulder. He looked up abruptly, and her face became paralysed in mid-scowl.

  ‘He’ll be fine.’

  ‘ "Fine"?’ Roz shook her head, shaking off the feeling that he’d been trying to hypnotize her. ‘What do you mean, "fine"?’

  ‘Look.’ He returned his gaze to the wound in the side of the police box, which he’d jammed open with his walking-cane. ‘The architecture’s been scrambled, but the important systems are functioning. Oxygen, power and the laws of physics are still in evidence. Mostly.’

  ‘That’s what you always say, isn’t it? "He’ll be fine"; ‘They’ll be fine"; "Don’t worry, they can look after themselves". Is that what you say to Chris about me, when I’m off in some bloody hole somewhere? "Oh, she’ll be fine..." ‘

  The Doctor gave her another one of his looks.

  ‘All right.’ Roz forced herself to relax. ‘Do we go in?’

  ‘No. It might be dangerous.’

  ‘Dangerous? You just said –’

  ‘Amaranth.’

  ‘What?’

  He held out his hand. ‘Amaranth.’

  There was an embarrassed silence.

  ‘Ahhh,’ said Roz.

  Another look.

  ‘Stop it! I haven’t got it, OK? It wasn’t around when I woke up here. It got lost in transit.’

  ‘Didn’t we all?’ The Doctor’s brow automatically went into ‘wrinkled’ mode. He grasped the walking-cane, and pulled it out from between the lips of the opening with an unpleasant popping sound. The side of the TARDIS immediately re-sealed itself.

  ‘Back to civilization,’ he muttered, turning and stalking back towards Woodwicke.

  ‘You’re sure Chris’ll be fine?’ Roz asked as she followed him.

  ‘Ah,’ said the interface.

  Chris experienced a moment of total paranoia, during which he managed to convince himself that there were monsters hiding in the darkness. He performed what he took to be a 360-degree turn, checking for any sign of movement, but the blackness was absolute and he wouldn’t have been able to see a Chelonian if it had been standing two feet in front of him and waving (an image which stuck in his head, for some reason).

  When he’d finished the turn, he was surprised to find himself still spinning, and realized that his toes were no longer touching the ground. The computer slipped out of his grasp, but he never heard it crash against the floor.

  ‘Now what?’ he demanded.

  ‘A localized gravity failure,’ said the voice, nonchalantly. ‘Your interference has created minor disturbances in certain systems. First lighting, and now gravity. One moment, please.’

  There was a pause, while the interface rooted around inside the bowels of the TARDIS. Chris kept spinning

  ‘Interesting,’ it finally announced.

  ‘It’d better be,’ said Chris.

  ‘Something else is creating disturbances. I don’t believe all of this is your doing. Ah. The artronics have cancelled themselves out. Wait. Yes. Yes, we’re safe for now. Can you hear me, Chris Cwej?’

  ‘I can hear you. Look, is there anything you can do to stop me spinning? I’m getting sick.’

  ‘No. But listen, please. There’s something wrong with the basal structure of the ship, an unknown element has entered the core systems and... excuse me. This current syntax has difficulty describing the concepts involved. Changed them.’

  ‘Changed the core systems?’ Chris didn’t even know what the core systems were, but he guessed they were a damn sight more important than little things like gravity. ‘Changed them how, exactly?’

  ‘The systems no longer make sense. They’ve been "de– rationalized", if you’ll e
xcuse my atrocious misuse of the English language. The TARDIS was keeping the problem under control, at least until the Eighth Door section was removed. Now the structure has become unbalanced, large sections of the interior are falling apart. Oh.’

  ‘What?’ In the experience of Ex-Adjudicator Cwej, there was no word in the English language more sinister than ‘oh’.

  ‘We seem to have lost life-support.’

  Life-support. It was one of those things Chris always took for granted when he was on the TARDIS, that there’d be enough air to keep everyone alive. He tried breathing in. It suddenly seemed difficult and painful. ‘The problem is localized, however,’ said the interface, when Chris was three-eighths of a second away from sheer panic. ‘I would therefore suggest an immediate evacuation of this section.’

  Right, thought Chris. Moving in zero gravity wouldn’t be a problem; he just had to push against the wall and float away. But he was still spinning, and had no idea which way he was facing. He tried stretching out an arm. His spin seemed to slow, but he felt no solid surface under his fingers.

  ‘The walls have gone!’ he squawked.

  ‘Fortunately not,’ said the interface. ‘The walls are still existent, but surface friction is partially non-functional. If it helps, you’re currently in contact with the ceiling.’

  ‘Uh. Right.’ Chris put his hands out in front of him, until he was sure that both palms had to be flat against the ceiling. Then he pushed, with a forward-and-upward motion. Gently, he started to float off down the corridor.

  ‘Good luck,’ said the interface, not sounding like it particularly cared what happened to him.

  And then, all of a sudden, there was light. Light, and air –

  – and gravity.

  ‘Ow,’ said Chris as he hit the floor. He found himself lying at a T-shaped junction, surrounded by the familiar roundelled walls and ion-blistered atmosphere of the TARDIS. The corridor behind him was dark, absurdly dark. One metre away, the ship was lit with the usual creamy glow; one metre beyond that, there was just a wall of blackness, cutting off the corridor. Weird. Chris pulled himself to his feet, considering his best course of action.

  It didn’t take long.

  ‘Find the Doctor,’ he decided, and set off down another passage, in the hope that he’d be able to reach the console room.

  Recalling the incident later, Christopher Cwej was unable to remember exactly what the things that lurked in the passageway had looked like. He vaguely remembered the sense of shock as he practically walked into the nearest of them, and occasionally recalled small details; half-finished clockwork limbs, shapeless mechanical heads, metallic fingers scratching and grinding in the corners. But he found it impossible to build a coherent picture of the creatures, as if he’d only really seen them out of the corner of his eye.

  The next lucid memory he had was of running, running along the one corridor from the T-junction that wasn’t blocked off by darkness or populated by monsters of any description. Aliens, he was thinking. Aliens in the TARDIS!

  ‘Tell me about your childhood,’ smiled the machine, and Duquesne could have sworn that its voice was the voice of a woman. She regarded the creature suspiciously, noting the fracture lines that her blow to its cheek had created.

  ‘I have nothing to say,’ she told it. ‘I was a sensitive child, and a sickly one. There is little else of importance.’

  The machine nodded. "’Sensitive", yes. But sensitive to what, exactly? Psycho-sensitive? Time-sensitive? Surely not.’

  Duquesne sighed. ‘I have never yet been able to answer the question. My spine burns when a caillou is near, or when I come close to the things a caillou leaves behind. Whenever any force or agency threatens the natural order of this world, I feel it, with a kind of sense I have never been given a word for.’

  ‘Hence your current employment. You must be the world’s most psychic civil servant.’

  Duquesne was about to tell the thing that she didn’t discuss government policy with strangers, let alone hallucinatory automata, when she noticed the alien word.

  ‘Psychic?’ she queried.

  ‘Not a word you’d be familiar with, and hopefully one that you’ll never learn. We can discuss this later. But tell me, how long have you had this... condition?’

  Duquesne shrugged. ‘When I was nineteen, I visited England. My family was quite determined that I should see the world.’ That was a lie, of course. When she was nineteen, Duquesne’s family had been driven out of France by the Revolution, and she was fairly sure that the machine knew it. ‘I saw the church at Hodcombe, designed by a man named Inigo Jones. A great Englishman, according to my tutors, though it was a small church, and not the architect’s greatest work. But that was when it came to me, for the first time. The burning. It caused me to faint, and no surgeon could ever find reason for it, putting the incident down to female hysteria.’

  ‘The church at Hodcombe?’ The machine raised its clockwork eyebrows, causing small parts of its (her?) face to flake away. ‘I understand it’s supposed to be haunted.’

  ‘As I later learned. That was when I began to understand my... condition. As you call it.’

  ‘In an earlier time, they’d say you had "the Sight".’

  ‘I do not understand the term,’ Duquesne lied.

  ‘The talent of a witch. The Vikings spoke of the blood-of-the-wolf, the curse handed down through the generations, which gives those it afflicts an understanding of the part they play in destiny’s chess-game. In Europe they say there’s a gift of nature that’s only bestowed on the seventh son of a seventh son. But you don’t seem to fit into either category, do you?’

  Duquesne shrugged again, and there was a prickling sensation as her shoulders tugged at her backbone. ‘But this is the eighteenth century, bête noir. Very nearly the nineteenth. We live in an age of reason, and I do not believe in such enchantments.’

  ‘Non?’

  ‘Non.’

  The automaton considered this for a moment.

  ‘Perhaps you’d better wake up,’ she said.

  ‘I concur,’ said Duquesne, and opened her eyes.

  The warped wooden smell of the bed was unpleasant, by usual standards, but after the cargo hold it was like a panacea. She was back in her cabin, and her body-clock hadn’t lost more than half an hour. No doubt the crew had found her below deck and dragged her back up here, thinking ‘female hysteria’ had claimed her. The captain would doubtless have complained about the bad fortune that woman passengers could bring.

  This was not a pleasant ship, Duquesne reflected, nor a fast one; but it had been the first vessel leaving from Europe that went everywhere she needed to go. Africa, where she’d spent a few days at the Vatican’s Crow Gallery and the cargo had been loaded, then on to New York. It didn’t ordinarily serve as a passenger ship, but she was an envoy of the French authorities, and the captain – a dog-faced man called Longfoot, who began every sentence by reminding the world that his family had been on the ocean for eight generations – obviously felt that it paid to be in Napoleon’s good books.

  Besides, there were worse ways to travel. As cargo, for one.

  Almost in response to her thoughts, there was a low rumble from beneath her feet. Marielle Duquesne pulled herself out of the bed and prepared to venture into New York State.

  Twenty years ago, the Europeans who’d visited the town had treated the King George pub as if it had been the centre of civilization. One revolution later, after the tide of dust and gunpowder and rhetoric that had purged the eastern states of everything with English blood in its veins, the George was a burned-out corpse of a building, a dirty monument to the glory of Independence. Most of the townsfolk avoided it, as if it were some kind of shrine. Which was why the Renewal Society, with their customary contempt for superstition, had taken to using it as their meeting-house.

  The rain beat at the broken timbers of the roof, slid down onto the muddied floor. Erskine Morris watched spontaneous and mystical shapes form in the pud
dles in front of him. They reminded him that he needed a drink. Everything reminded him that he needed a drink.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ said Monroe. His voice was gruff and laced with phlegm, giving Erskine the impression that, over the years, whole sentences must have got themselves lodged in the sticky web of mucus at the back of his throat. ‘Mr Catcher knows what he’s doing. Menace of Cacophony and all that. Only thing that makes sense.’

  Erskine didn’t reply. An hour ago – less – he would have got up and screamed at the ridiculous little man: what do you mean, makes sense? For the Great Non-Existent Entity’s Sake, none of it makes sense.

  But now –

  ‘Responsibility to history,’ Monroe continued. ‘Obvious, really. Don’t know why it never struck me before. Three cheers for Mr Catcher, mmm?’

  – but now, the words wouldn’t come. As if, after everything he’d seen in the labyrinth, any rational argument he could come up with would just sound hollow.

  He let himself glance around the ruins The Renewal Society had broken up for the night, leaving the building as an empty shell once more, littered with broken bottles and the corpses of various tobacco products. There were just four men in the place now, Erskine and those of the ‘inner circle’ who’d accompanied him from Catcher’s own little pocket of Hell.

  ‘Funny thing,’ Monroe mused. ‘You could say the Catholics had the right idea all along. Witch-burnings and all that, hmmm?’

  Erskine met Monroe’s gaze. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the man looked wrong somehow, changed in a way he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Then he looked down, and examined his own body. For some reason, he wasn’t at all surprised to find that it looked exactly the same.

  ‘Yeah, but what is an amaranth? What’s it supposed to do?’

  Another damp hike had taken them to the top of Paris Street, where the thoroughfare met Eastern Walk and the roadsides were littered with medicine-booths. A few of the ‘attractions’ were still open, small crowds gathering around them, made up of those townspeople who were determined to spend Christmas Eve as far away from their families as possible. Nobody was taking much notice of Roz or the Doctor. There was no reason why they should, Roz remembered. The world doesn’t know I tried to kill Samuel Lincoln. It just feels that way.