Christmas on a Rational Planet Read online

  ‘Do you know any of these people?’ the Doctor asked.

  Roz shrugged. ‘Some. A couple are customers of mine.’

  A look of absolute horror briefly crossed his face, but he hid it well. ‘Customers?’

  ‘I’m in the fortune-telling business.’

  He seemed to relax. ‘Ah. There’s no future in it, you know.’ A half-smile played across his face. ‘Hackney Empire, 1956.’

  ‘What about the amaranth?’ Roz insisted.

  ‘Time Lord technology. The first amaranth was designed by the maintenance engineers who tended to the Eye of Harmony.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘The Eye of Harmony. The power source around which all of Time-Lord civilization revolves.’ The Doctor sounded almost proud when he said that, throwing his arms wide and rolling his R’s. Or maybe he’s just taking the piss, Roz thought.

  ‘It’s our pet black hole,’ he continued. ‘No TARDIS could ever have got off the ground without it. But the thing about black holes is that they do tend to have unfortunate effects on the continuum around them. All sorts of things start happening when you mess about with that kind of energy. Ancient legend holds that when the Eye was first used, Rassilon himself was very nearly killed by a free-falling rhinoceros.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Yes. But you get the idea. The continuum becomes warped, frayed, ambiguous. The amaranth is designed to stop unpleasant things happening. It looks for parts of the universe that have become unstable in some way or other, and rebuilds them according to more... rational patterns.’

  ‘But there aren’t any black holes around here. Presumably.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m sure I must have one somewhere.’ He began fumbling in his pockets, but thankfully gave up the search before he managed to produce anything disturbing. ‘But I take your point. However, there are other things that can have distortional effects on the continuum.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Gynoids. And their friends and families.’ He stopped abruptly, and turned, pointing at the corner of a boarded-up barber’s shop with the end of his cane. Roz squinted in that direction, just in time to see something vanish around the corner.

  ‘Was that...?’ she began.

  The Doctor turned, pointed again, and again, and again. Each time she looked, Roz glimpsed something out of the corner of her eye. Each time, it disappeared before she could focus on it. None of the townspeople who passed them by seemed to notice anything strange, except, of course, for a peculiar man with a walking-cane who kept pointing at things.

  ‘We’re surrounded,’ Roz murmured. ‘There’s got to be dozens of them.’

  ‘No, just one. But it’s around every corner.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Very true.’ Casually, he slung the cane over his shoulder, and carried on walking in whatever direction he happened to be facing.

  The Watchmakers spoke to him from deep within the labyrinth, and he tried communicating with them in their secret language of noughts and ones, but they wouldn’t listen. They were criticizing him. Scorning him, for his lack of control.

  Matheson Catcher was thankful that the others had left him, Reason’s flock escorting Erskine Morris home after the glory of his initiation. He wouldn’t have wanted them to see this. One of the walls in the cellar was bubbling and cracking, as if the architecture had become bored and decided to try a host of new patterns. Chaos, blossoming out of purity. Cacophony taking advantage of his lack of vigilance.

  He reached into the crystal column at the centre of the hexagonal dais, and felt the ecstasy-smooth surface of the sphere under his fingers. He drew the globe out and into his hands, began turning it, filling it up with the cold will of Reason. The wall crackled and twisted, the power of the Watchmakers’ ‘gift’ forcing it back into shape.

  The Watchmakers nodded, satisfied. THIS CLOSE TO THE DAY OF REASON, they reminded him, WHEN THE WORLD IS READY TO BE FINALLY SNATCHED FROM THE JAWS OF CACOPHONY... finally and decisively? YES, FINALLY AND DECISIVELY SNATCHED FROM THE JAWS OF CACOPHONY... WE MUST ALL BE VIGILANT.

  Yes. And Catcher was prepared for that great day, as he had been ever since his childhood, when the Watchmakers had first reached out to him. Back then, he’d only caught glimpses, his young mind unprepared for their full geometric majesty; a reflection in the face of a clock, perhaps, or an alien word spelt out in sunbeams across the face of a mirror... but they’d been there, the architects of Reason, walking alongside him.

  His parents had thought the Watchmakers were the echoes of some curious fever-dream. Fever-dream. Catcher felt the sphere in his hands, the Watchmakers’ greatest ‘gift’ to the rational world. He let himself gaze upon the splendour of the place that had once been a mere cellar, its archways and passages remade by the divine NO, THAT ISN’T A RATIONAL WORD by the cleansing influence of the ‘gift’, just as the world would be remade.

  Fever-dream. The thought was almost enough to make Matheson Catcher smile.

  ‘Almost’, however, was a very big word.

  The TARDIS was changing; but ‘changing’ was such a little word, kind of drab and flat-sounding, and Chris was sure he’d be able to understand what was happening a lot better if he’d had a word to describe it. He’d look at a section of wall, and he’d see things in its design that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier. The wall wouldn’t change its shape or its size or its colour, it would just change, showing him new aspects of itself that he’d never noticed before.

  Not that he had much time for looking at walls. Not with a bunch of shapelesshideousalienmonstersAAAARGH at his back.

  The corridor was a long one, junctions and doorways leading off it at all angles. Some of the doorways were in darkness, a weird kind of darkness that reminded Chris of his kidhood, watching simcord holo-vid episodes of EarthDoom XV from behind the sofa. Some of the passages he passed didn’t seem to fit in with the architecture of the TARDIS at all, like he was looking into another ship, a mirror-image of the one he was used to.

  What you really need is a Frisbee, he told himself, but couldn’t for the life of him work out why he’d thought it.

  He made it to the end of the corridor, turned a corner, skidded, lost his balance, and tripped against a door. Pretending he’d done it deliberately – he was determined to hold on to his dignity, even if the only ones watching him were shapeless alien monsters – he grasped the door-frame and used it to swing himself around, looking back along the corridor at the ticking-tocking things that were breathing down his neck.

  ‘Ag,’ he said, then lost his grip on the frame and fell against the door. It opened at his touch, sending him sprawling into the hallway on the other side.

  I’m telling you, you need a frisbee. Remember when you were a kid? You had this really neat frisbee...

  As the door was swinging shut, he caught a glimpse of one of the monsters in close-up. It had been hiding just around the corner, not two metres away, waiting for him ‘Lurking’. That was the only word for it, ‘lurking’. The thing turned to watch him, its head clicking and buzzing on top of a copper-coloured neck. The last thing Chris Cwej saw before the door closed was the thing’s face; and the thing’s face told him that it was fifteen minutes to ten.

  It had taken Marielle Duquesne less than ten minutes to find the device. If ‘find’ was the word; in truth, the device had hooked her by the spine and dragged her to its door.

  It had begun the second she’d stepped off the ship, the sensation that told her a caillou had left his spoor behind, more powerful than she’d ever known it before. She’d moved like a sleepwalker, and the call had led her to a stretch of woodland on the fringes of civilization, where bugs chattered to each other in the nettles and everything stank of damp earth. Even before she’d reached the glade, she’d known that the device would be there, and now she was standing no more than three yards from its cool blue surface, shivering in the rain.

  It was just a box. Yes, it was the
most terrible and glorious thing she had ever seen... but it was still just a box, a simple construction of wooden beams and glass panels. At this distance, she could see the shapes that had been printed onto its sides, but she had to stare at the markings for at least a minute before she realized that they were nothing more than ordinary letters. Were they moving? Turning themselves into anagrams?

  No. Something was altering her perception – perhaps it was the box itself – so that the words became irrational and meaningless. They were in English, though, she was sure of that much. A ‘P’, an ‘L’... was that an ‘O’ between them? An ‘X’?

  Suddenly, Duquesne realized that she was stepping closer to the device, her arms stretched out in front of her. The letters blurred again, and it was only then, in that moment of true panic, that she noticed how the very angles of the box were wrong, as if geometry itself had ceased to function.

  Her fingers touched the front of the box. She felt nothing, but there was an impression of something vast and liquid hidden beneath the surface. She could only watch as the wooden veneer started to melt and flow, lapping across her fingers. Her hands began sinking into the shape. Absently, she remembered the stories she’d heard her superiors in the Directory tell, about those who had been captured by the caillou. They’d been taken to other worlds, said the tales, carried away in heavenly carriages, used as subjects in horrible and incomprehensible experiments...

  And there was no longer a box. There were just corners and spaces, rectangles that danced and holes that seemed to penetrate time itself. Marielle Duquesne let herself be dragged into the heart of the madness.

  They were making their way along Paris Street now, back towards the Lincoln house. Roz found herself grinning inanely at the few people she passed, in a kind of gunshot-I-don’t-know-nothing-about-no-gunshot way. The Doctor was still talking.

  ‘The amaranth also has an emergency function,’ he said. ‘If it finds itself in a place that it can’t make any sense of at all, it’s programmed to whisk its user off to a more stable part of the continuum. Which is how you arrived here from... that other place.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  Roz gritted her teeth. ‘I mean, where was it?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were being zen.’

  ‘Answer the damn question.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know the answer.’

  ‘Fine. Then tell me why the amaranth brought me here. Why not the TARDIS? Or anywhere, except this place.’

  ‘A good question. I’d guess that somebody here has been creating anomalies, which could well be why the gynoids are manifesting themselves. It might also explain why parts of the rational universe seem to be cracking open, hence your sudden departure from Arizona. The amaranth must have homed in the disruption. When it decided to leave you, it was probably just locating the heart of the disturbance. Find it now, and you find who’s been causing all the trouble. And vice versa.’

  He paused for a moment. ‘And we have to find the guilty party quickly,’ he added. ‘We can’t let them keep the amaranth.’

  ‘Of course we can’t. It’s ours.’

  ‘That aside. They know how to destabilize space–time. The amaranth can reconstruct destabilized space–time. Ergo, with the amaranth they can remodel the universe at will. It should take them a while to work out how to use it properly, and they’ll only be able to change a small part of the continuum at a time, but even so...

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘Don’t do what?’

  ‘Trail off in mid-sentence. It’s not sinister, it’s just irritating.’ Roz was still glancing at every corner they passed, looking for the omnipresent gynoid, though by now she couldn’t tell when she was seeing something and when she was just imagining things. ‘One more question. Goddess, I hate it when I have to say that.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What’s happened to the TARDIS?’

  ‘It’s been de-rationalized. Now, there’s one Doctor Johnson left out of his dictionary.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, well, you know, Doctor Johnson was a lot more parochial than most people seem to think...’

  ‘Why-has-the-TARDIS-been-de-rationalized?’ Roz hissed, through gritted teeth. This was the kind of conversation she’d often heard Bernice have with the Doctor, and Roz didn’t want to be the one that filled her shoes. Facetiousness didn’t come easily to her.

  ‘Ah.’ The Doctor nodded seriously. ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather ask me about Doctor Johnson? I’d probably find it much easier to answer the questions.’

  The witch-woman?

  The witch-woman, she’d know. If the Devil himself had come to Woodwicke, the witches and the fortune-tellers had to be part of it. Hah, but he didn’t believe in the Devil, did he? Why would anyone need to believe in devils when there were Englishmen in the world?

  Follow the witch-woman, follow her and the white magician she walked with, find out how to make the damned town leave him alone and let him sneak back into the cracks. Find out what bastard ghost was whispering at him, pulling him back into Woodwicke every time he tried to walk away from it.

  No one saw Daniel Tremayne when he crept along Paris Street. No one saw Daniel Tremayne when he crept anywhere.

  He was at one with the room. He was in every corner, stretched along every surface. Its angles were his angles, its purity was his purity. And he was content. Just for that one moment.

  Then one of the corners blistered again, ripples shaking their way across the wall. Liquid Cacophony crawling across his marble skin. He shivered, the cellar shivered, everything was falling apart –

  He was in the garden, surrounded by the seeds of chaos, shrubs and weeds enveloping his family’s estate. How old? Six? Seven? Tearing at the green, pulling the flowers and the grasses out of the earth, sick sappy stickyness against his clean white skin. Jungle-gods screeched and chattered in the woods and the wildlands beyond the garden. Creatures of Cacophony. He kept tearing, and somewhere in the high grass, one of the Watchmakers caught his eye. Nodded approvingly, the big hand clicking round to twelve.

  The wall burst open, vomiting madness into the cellar. He tried not to cry out.

  And inside the house, it was even worse. Wall-hangings that made no sense, painted faces leering at him from behind glassy prisons. Porcelain likenesses of dead and irrational gods, sculpted by foreign primitives. He was running into the house, dead grass-stems still clinging to his knees, but the house was just like the jungle, a wilderness of dirt and wood. Break everything. Tear everything. Leave the clocks and the mirrors – you can see the faces of the Watchmakers in those – get rid of the rest. There were looks of horror on the faces of his family. Stop it, please, stop it. CLEAN IT UP someone was screeching, CLEAN IT ALL UP Pinning him to the ground –

  – but he would not WOULD NOT let the chaos take him, and he was already forcing his will into the corner of the cellar, catching the madness in one hand, holding the spinning sphere in the other, pushing the nightmares back into the darkness.

  The walls were made solid again. Matheson Catcher opened his eyes, and all was right with the world.

  Chris moved in the general direction of the console room, slowly making his way through whichever corridors looked safest. The aliens were everywhere now, but not once did he get a good look at one; either they lurked in the shadows, stayed on the edges of his vision, or just crouched behind (or inside) parts of the architecture.

  He could imagine them pretty well, though. He pictured them lounging around in his quarters, scratching alien graffiti into the walls. Occasionally, a beam of light would glint off a half-seen face or a sinister talon – his imagination should have won awards for lighting effects – maybe falling across a set of razor-like clockwork jaws...

  Chris decided that this kind of thinking probably wasn’t getting him very far. Then again, neither was his attempt to reach the console room.

  ‘Right,’ he hissed, crou
ching in the corner of a junction that seemed mercifully free of alien interference. ‘Let’s figure this out. Disturbances. Interface said disturbances. What can do strange stuff to the insides of a TARDIS?’

  He looked around, but no one was there to give him any hints. ‘Uh. Gravity? The Doctor said extreme gravitational conditions could make bits of the TARDIS break up. Or something. Hang on.’

  He tried jumping up and down, but nothing seemed unusual. ‘OK, not that. What else? Er, maybe we’ve skipped a time-track.’

  He looked around again. Well, time seemed normal. Could you see a skipped time-track? ‘Maybe not. Come on, come on, think OK. Suppose there was some kind of dimensional glitch. Suppose the TARDIS doors had opened in mid-flight or something, and the resulting dimensional imbalance –’

  He was just getting to grips with this remarkable new theory when something walked along an adjoining corridor and turned down a side-passage. Chris hopped to his feet and flattened himself against a wall, waiting for the thing to pass.

  The shape was human. A woman, in her late twenties or early thirties, with a shapeless dress that trailed down to the floor. Dark hair, matted by rainwater and sticking to her shoulders. She was looking around with a dazed expression on her face, and Chris got the feeling that she didn’t know whether to be shocked or impressed.

  Then she vanished along the passage. Chris relaxed.

  ‘This is getting too much,’ he said, and went in pursuit.

  The Doctor was sitting on the dust-spattered floor at the far end of the nave, his back to the lectern. Breathing heavily, Roz slumped down onto one of the pews. The church was empty, but the atmosphere still managed to seem tense, somehow. Perhaps the building’s just excited, she thought. Perhaps it’s looking forward to midnight mass.

  The Doctor had insisted that the gynoid had been right behind them, though Roz’s senses still hadn’t managed to get a grip on it. ‘They have ways of not being seen,’ he’d muttered, and an image had popped into Roz’s head of a gynoid wearing a false nose and moustache, but before she’d been able to open her mouth and share it, the Doctor had been hopping up the stone steps towards the church door.