‘I am precluded from sabotaging my own mission. But I can engage in temporary alliances to restore my own full function. And once I’m back in control, I have discretion over whether to execute my purpose at any given time. You see?’
‘We can’t trust you.’
Heidt nodded. ‘You might look at it that way. Certainly I would, in your position.’
‘Right,’ she said.
‘But he wouldn’t,’ Heidt added, pointing to the Doctor.
Since the Doctor didn’t argue, she supposed he wouldn’t, although in her honest assessment his optimism was symmetrical with a somewhat justifiable level of lethal paranoia. Although if he were a little less determined to be gentle with the universe’s horrors, she thought, he probably wouldn’t have to do appalling things quite so often.
‘Well, fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll go back to Jonestown and think about it.’ The old puzzle? If one man always lies and another always tells the truth… But it was much harder if either one of them might do both.
Heidt twitched slightly. He was looking regretful, even dyspeptic. Had he eaten something that disagreed with him? Well, yes: a TARDIS. ‘That may be a problem.’
She glowered. ‘I expect we can get a taxi if your nice car is not available.’
‘No doubt you could, but my control of this situation is only temporary.’ He glanced over at the Doctor. ‘I have tried to arrange matters so that you have everything you need. But I’m afraid quite shortly my time will run out. Do not leave the house. There is nothing else on the pinnacle, and my other half has the ability to destroy the bridge at any time.’ He twitched again. ‘I must leave you. Do please feel free to look around. The library is particularly interesting. And when I return, do bear in mind what I have said.’
When it came again, the twitch was not a twitch at all, but a spasm of the body. Heidt lurched away from her, and she saw his face ripple as if he was made of water. She moved to support him, and found the Doctor’s hand on her arm.
‘Don’t.’
Heidt rolled his shoulders and twisted, and she heard things pop in his spine.
‘Thank you, Doctor. If you touch me, Christina, it may accelerate the process. The weapons system might interpret that as a physical attack.’ He coughed, hacked and groaned.
The Doctor barely glanced at her, went on. ‘You should go. Now. Walk across the bridge and don’t look back.’
‘No!’ Heidt spun in his crouch, flung out his hand. The joints were cracking and the fingers hooked and clawed at the air. ‘No, no, no! She has to stay! She has to!’ He lurched closer, his rictus face stretching towards them. ‘Damn you! I can’t say it out loud! You can’t send her away or it all comes down like wasps tearing through the web. It’s perfect now! Perfect! But if she goes then where’s the surprise? You can’t make a breakfast without mushrooms.’ He shuddered, lowered his hand. ‘Don’t make her go, Doctor. She has to be here. I have prepared… I can’t say more. I can’t. It’s happening now. I’m leaving. When I come back we’ll either all be dead or we won’t. Breakfast in the library. Perfectly all right, it’s full of spiders. Weavers, webs or woven? Perhaps it’s all the same. Go. Look. Five minutes, maybe less. Go now!’
And he stopped. Not just stopped speaking but stopped, stock still and silent, and no longer breathing. His body froze in place. She had expected some vile werewolf transformation, but this was not that. It was eerier, bleaker. He was simply absent, and his absence implied the presence, somewhere nearby, of the other.
Pah pah pom.
Well, that was not unexpected.
Pah pah pom.
Even if it was rather close at hand.
Pah pah pom.
Casual, even. Close and casual and confident. Not in a hurry. She looked out of the window, and saw the bridge in ruins, the house isolated in the middle of the pinnacle. ‘Run,’ she told the Doctor, and took his hand.
*
Christina grabbed him and said ‘run’ and then he heard it: the triple beat of the weapons system, Heidt’s other half. She was very fast, he thought. Even if she had anticipated, she was fast. He looked at her hand and saw it flicker slightly, purplish light dancing around the edges. Refraction from the glass chandelier, probably. Probably.
She was right, it was definitely time to go. This house was a puzzle, the library apparently contained the solution. But Heidt couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him what solving the puzzle would mean, so he had to work that out before he worked out what the puzzle was and how to solve it because otherwise he might be levered into defeating himself.
He looked around. There were three doors: the way they had come in, which led to the shattered bridge; a small door to the kitchens which he suspected would be downstairs, and hence, if Heidt was to be believed, closer to the enemy; and the big, bold double doors to the rest of this floor, including no doubt the library. Heidt wanted him to go there, that was clear enough. He instinctively wanted to go somewhere else, to step outside the game, but if he beat it and it was aimed at the enemy that would be something of a fatal embarrassment. It had occurred to him that he had only Heidt’s word for it that Heidt was the nice half of the mine’s consciousness, or indeed that there were two halves at all.
In the end, it came down to a choice: trust, or don’t. Heidt knows you believe in trust. He could be manipulating you. But he let you know that he knows. Show of honesty. Show of honesty could be a ruse, can’t trust it. If you don’t trust it, and he’s telling the truth, and you lose. Round and around and around. Finally, the question is: if you’re going to die, do you die believing in enemies or friends? All right, one vote in favour of trust.
And Christina: why was she here? She was a piece of what Heidt intended, obviously. Key. Detonator. Bomb. Hostage. Save her. Save Jonestown. Save the TARDIS. Save himself.
She was tugging on his arm. ‘Run!’
He ran for the big doors. For the library. I am the Doctor. In the end, I choose this: I choose trust, I choose to solve the puzzle, I choose to see what’s behind the curtain.
They went through.
*
The Library was huge, with more books than she’d ever imagined. They were stacked in shelves, lying around in piles. Some were floating. It was impossible.
She stared. The Doctor was nodding slowly, as if he’d known all along, though she was reasonably sure he hadn’t.
He looked over at her with a ghost of a smile. ‘Go ahead.’
‘It’s bigger on the inside!’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is my library.’
The TARDIS library, he meant; so they were back in the TARDIS proper. Inside Heidt’s house, the room he sent them to, the room he was presumably protecting, was in the Doctor’s part of the TARDIS, the bit of the machine which was still functioning the way it was supposed to.
But if the monster got in here, that would mean very bad things, she was sure. Death and endings. She realised she despised death.
She felt the monster arrive outside, the appalling power of it. The doors behind them shuddered, but held. The noise was not that neat three-part beat any more, it was a scream, a howl of metal and stress, far too long. The Doctor winced. ‘Propulsion,’ he muttered. ‘And structural integrity fields.’
‘That sounds bad.’
‘It is.’
‘Then do something. Solve the puzzle.’
He seemed to ignite. ‘Yes! Exactly. Solve the puzzle. Allons y! That’s French, you know.’
Marvellous. Now he was quoting Arwen Jones at her.
But he was moving, too, talking to himself, thinking aloud the way he had before but much, much more faster.
‘Library, library, library. He can’t say, he’s trying to tell us but he can’t go right ahead and say it. All right. Full of books. But really full of books. Too full. Can’t possibly be a book he wants me to find unless there’s a clue because we don’t have time to read them all and he has to point the way. What’s not where it should be? Ludowig’s Histories of the Da
lek Imperium ought to be there but it’s here… no, that was me. This one is… The Quarry. (Only signed copy in the universe. He’ll be missed.) But not what we need right now… No! Not books… furniture. Chairs, tables, tapestries… can’t be! No! Maps!’
He turned left, hurtled down between the stacks, and they emerged into a sort of side chapel, a room formed by the shelves, with a huge table covered in ancient and modern maps. At the far end was a writing table and a very comfortable-looking chair.
‘Maps! Maps maps maps, oooh, YES! Jonestown. Never had a map of Jonestown, never knew it was here, so this belongs to Heidt. (Nice penmanship. Mermaid. Other mermaid. Lots and lots of and lots of mermaids, not really the point…) Map. Map is not the territory. Not what I’m supposed to see, just a clue to tell me I’m in the right place. OW!’ Another shrieking impact, and this time she saw his foot twist as if he’d put it down, heard the ankle tear. ‘She’s been shielding me but now she can’t any more, she’s losing her grip. Aaaah! Chair! Chair!’ She guided him to the chair. ‘Yes! Chair. Chair is the answer. Oh, you sneaky sneaker! Sit down in the chair. What do we see?’
She could see a plain table with a pen, some writing paper, and no ink. There were stacks of paper around the chair, piled up. A manuscript. And, for no obvious reason, a saucepan full of water. ‘What’s that?’
‘Saucepan! Condensation from the cloud layer in the upper stacks. Always rains on the desk. Doesn’t matter where I put the desk, always rains. If I don’t have a container here it gets on the paper and then it moulders. And you’ve got no idea the trouble you get when psychic paper goes mouldy. Mould on psychic paper is psychic mould. Psychic mushrooms all over the TARDIS, and when you think at them too hard they try to turn into what you’re thinking about… Ah HAH! Mushrooms! “You can’t make breakfast without mushrooms.” Right! Right, what else did he say?’
She struggled. Outside, somewhere, the monster was stalking, testing. She could hear it, feel it. Heidt had made no sense. ‘“Weavers, webs or woven”?’
‘Yes! Here are the mushrooms. Trapdoor universe, the mine’s like a spider. Is that the web? We already know that, it doesn’t help! Oh. Um. Christina?’
He was staring at her hand where it was resting on the saucepan. She stared too.
The paper below was stained and brown where the water had slopped over. It must have gathered while he was away from the desk – hours? Centuries? Had time flowed slowly here, or fast, in this strange emergency? – because the paper was indeed mouldy and green, and the green stuff was reaching up towards her fingers like a strange sea creature. It touched her skin. Tickled. She smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, knowing he was, ‘it’s all right.’ She turned her hand, saw the tendrils reaching into her skin. Painless. Natural. And with them: memories. So many. So rich and beautiful and terrible. So sad. ‘Oh. Rose. You miss her, don’t you? You miss them all.’ She drew back, and the column subsided into the paper. ‘Sorry. I know that was private. It just came into my head.’
He nodded slowly. ‘It would. This is my diary.’
‘A psychic diary?’
‘Of course. It holds everything I feel, everything I see…’ He sighed, then stared at her. ‘Ohhh, it can’t be…’
‘What can’t be?’
From his pocket, he withdrew a scrap of cloth – the piece of her coat he had torn off in the car after her accident. If her clothes had healed, she supposed, she had to own that it was somehow part of her, unless everyone in Jonestown wore psychic clothes like the firefighters.
He put the cloth down on the paper and watched as it stretched out, yearning, towards the patch of mould, and the two of them merged. After a moment, the mould rustled and shifted, becoming a wide patch of the same cloth.
He said: ‘Brilliant!’
She said: ‘What?’
And saw him smile in sympathy. ‘This! This is brilliant. You’re brilliant. Ooh, Heidt, you cheeky devil. Yes. Yes. YES! Because I can trust you now, can’t I? Now that I know what the deal is. Oh, Christina – you should keep that name, you know, she can hardly complain that you’re stealing it – Christina, Christina, Christina! You’re amazing. This is why we kept talking about cheese! Cheese means mould. Glorious mould! Unconscious knowledge. And my unconscious knows LOTS. Maybe even more than yours. Ooooh, yes! Here’s the TARDIS, caught in the temporal sheer. Massive fluctuations in the flow of time inside the structure. To keep me safe she shunts them all into one place. I don’t wake up with one foot ten thousand years older than the rest of me, the sheer doesn’t stress her buttressing. Right? Right!’
He was nodding, and that infuriating charisma was pulling her in again and she was nodding along with him.
‘Ohh, but there’s a side effect. Floating around the TARDIS are lots of little spores of psychic slime mould, because the water here’s been dripping onto the paper. And inside the sheer zone, those tiny weenie microscopicy psychic boojums start to evolve! Because they would! I mean, it’s billions of years all concentrated in a single instant. BANG! Zap! And in the TARDIS there are echoes of people. People I know, people I meet. Bits of genetic material from everyone I’ve touched, memories and recollections, psychic impressions, sensor readings. And all those go into the mixture so that all that evolution is directed, pushing towards a perfect functioning dream of humanity. WHAMMO! Jonestown.’
He was holding his arms out to the vaulted ceiling, exultant. This was what he loved, she thought, more than anything. Wonder. Strangeness.
‘And you! Most of all, you! Christina de Souza 2.0! Brilliant! Evolved psychic slime mould in human form. So fast you’re starting to see your own thoughts reflected through time, getting just that little but quicker than it’s physically possible to be! And you’re all part of the same thing! “Weavers, webs or woven”! You’re one vast network of interconnected psychic mould! Different personalities sharing a single subconscious, which is why you never get lost, even when you’re in a city which was built while you were away, why nothing new surprises you, why you know how to drive even though you’ve never learned! Ooooh, brilliant! You gorgeous mushroom!’
She punched him smartly in the nose. ‘Oi!’
‘OW! Yes, all right, fair point, not the best way to put it. No, look! You’re still connected to the town! You’ve got acres and acres of space in there. You’re evolving all the time. They are. In there, right now, time’s passing again, passing so very fast!’
He was staring into her face, holding her eyes by sheer force of self. It was appalling how much self he had. She could feel it now, the edges of him, the record in his diary.
‘No, don’t look away, look at me. Think. Think, and write it down. Right. Yes. Here…’ He drew her hand to the blotter, and the layer of mould reached for her again. ‘Write! Write what you want.’
She wrote. She wanted so much. She wanted calm, and quiet, and Simon back again, and she wanted the Doctor on his way with his ankle better and his aquarium back again. She wanted Heidt’s story to end well, even – well, why not? And the monster. Well, not much of a monster, in the end. A scared thing, a fragment of a mind in control of a huge machine. Thought of like that, it wasn’t so awful, was it? A rescue cat trying to drive a car. She laughed.
She heard the door open, but she didn’t pay attention. There was too much, and she had to get it all down. Music, she wanted music, and art, and drama, and children, and she wanted to go skiing because Simon had always said they would. She wanted life. There was so much inside her she had kept all bottled up, in that vast, quiet place where she put everything she didn’t want, the lake.
‘Christina,’ the Doctor said, ‘are you ready?’
‘Oh,’ she said, a little embarrassed. ‘Yes.’
‘Good,’ he said, a bit muted, and she turned around.
The monster stood directly behind her. It towered over her. Opened its mouth.
She stared at it and realised she had no idea what to do.
And felt the Doctor’s hand latch onto hers, grip
the paper on which she had been writing and thrust it upwards into the descending maw, so that both of them were engulfed at the same time, swallowed to the shoulder in the vast, vile jaws.
She expected the thing to bite down, wondered if it would hurt very much to be eaten. She felt the Doctor pushed away from her, hurled back by focused time distortion. She was alone with Heidt’s twin. She waited for the end.
And felt, instead, a connection. Psychic notepaper pressed to the flesh of the monster and bound at the same time into her skin. Contact. She felt howling, rageful things pour into her mind in a great torrent. Years of war, of concealment, of planning and tactics and ambushes and programming, of victories at great cost and sacrifices and last stands, all of it buffeted her. She hated and feared and cheered and celebrated, and was suddenly cut off in a cold, dark place, cast aside, seeing fellow prisoners slip mockingly away into the night, pursuing. Finding one. Attacking. She would win this time. She would crush, rend. She felt herself fading away.
Jonestown rose up inside her, narrow streets and old women buying fish, barrow boys and taxis and markets giving way to skyscrapers and schools. Women and men went to work, went shopping, went out on the town, went home early for a good night’s sleep, went out for a pint of milk and fell in love. Thousands of minds touched her own, calm and reassuring and vastly ordinary. What was all this fuss? That little thing? It was loud and silly and a bit childish. No cause for such a ruckus. There was a place for that kind of behaviour.
She dropped the tiny, squalling awareness of the monster into the black lake in her mind, the place where she put everything which unsettled her, and watched it sink. The oily water swallowed it down. At her back, Jonestown nodded, brushed the dust from its hands, and good riddance.
After a moment, Heidt surfaced and swam awkwardly to the shore.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome.’ She waited. He didn’t do anything evil. And, she realised, she could have stopped him, anyway. She began to take note of herself, and of her home and what it had become in the meantime.
Doctor Who: Keeping Up with the Joneses Page 6