Deceit

by Peter Darvill-Evans

  The arrival of Francis, apparently a trusted friend and obviously a gentle and intelligent young man, had augmented the therapy. While the Doctor stalked about the room, or fiddled with the door, or argued with the guards, the three others had sat on the floor and exchanged their stories. Elaine was now chatting happily with Francis, and Bernice had learnt more about the strangely anachronistic civilization of Arcadia.

  She gave Elaine a hug and a smile, and stood up. ‘Doctor!’ she called softly, and walked towards him.

  He made no reply until she was standing next to him. ‘It’s up there,’ he said, still staring at the ceiling.

  ‘The sky? Freedom? The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?’

  ‘The TARDIS. And whoever or whatever has taken it. Only a few miles, but it might as well be the other side of the galaxy.’

  ‘The TARDIS? Oh – the shuttle we heard. A few miles?’

  The Doctor turned to her at last. ‘A space station, probably. It’s hardly likely that the people in charge would want to share the fate of this unfortunate planet. It’s getting less arcadian by the hour. Everything important is up there. And we’re stuck down here.’ He gazed upwards again.

  ‘Doctor, I’ve been thinking about this planet. Did you know that everyone dies young? In their thirties, mainly. Elaine says that her sister was murdered by the Counsellors – the androids. And according to Francis, the Counsellors officiate at every death, and look after the bodies. Elaine keeps saying that they cut a hole in her sister. I’m going to try to get her to tell me more, but it all sounds dreadfully nasty. What’s it all for? Doctor – Doctor, are you listening?’

  ‘Damn and blast!’ The Doctor jerked his head as if to avoid a blow. ‘I still can’t get through. Sorry, Benny; I’ve been trying to communicate with – with whatever it is that’s up there. All I can detect is great size and power. There’s a lot of data processing going on. A sense of yearning. But what is it? What does it want?’

  Bernice folded her arms. He needed a talking-to. ‘Doctor, while I can appreciate your academic enjoyment at finding an intellectual equal, I really think you might do better to devote at least some of your attention to the lesser mortals who have been caught up in –’

  The Doctor suddenly smiled broadly. ‘At last!’ he said.

  The door opened. Two androids could be seen waiting outside. Stiffly, they beckoned the prisoners.

  ‘We’re off to see the wizard on a magical mystery tour!’ the Doctor announced, and while Benny was trying to untangle the references from mid-twentieth-century popular culture, he strode out of the room. ‘Come along!’

  Bernice sighed, shook her head, and turned to shepherd Francis and Elaine through the doorway.

  She was on every screen. On some a small figure, seen from a distance, almost dancing across the platform at the back of the bucking hoverspeeder, spraying arcs of laser light that burst into explosions along the top of the perimeter wall, pausing only to hurl grenades that widened the hot smoking breach in the stonework. On others in close-up, her long pony tail swinging, laughing and shouting, eyes dark and glittering.

  Britta glanced up at Lacuna. The tall woman’s eyes swept from screen to screen. Britta shook her hair free of the long fingers and their slow stroking.

  ‘Isn’t she superb?’ Lacuna hissed. ‘Such vigour. Such excitement. It seems a shame to call off the droids. It’s such fun to feel her passion as she destroys them. But we must let them through. We must let them steal the shuttle we’ve prepared for them. All the pieces are falling into place.’

  ‘Oh,’ Britta said. ‘So you can feel her feelings too, can you?’

  Lacuna laughed, and pinched Britta’s ear. ‘Not as keenly as I feel your jealousy, pretty one,’ she said. ‘But Pool is aware of everything in the Net. All thoughts and concepts; at least, except for the stranger and his blue box. And so, through the link, I receive an impression of Ace’s thoughts, if Pool channels them to me.’

  She’s called Ace, Britta thought. Stupid name. ‘Try to tell me again, Lacuna,’ she asked, attempting to divert attention from the battle on the planet. ‘What exactly is Pool?’

  ‘Look! They’re through the wall. The man and the other woman have survived, unfortunately. No matter. The shuttle is theirs. They will join us soon.’

  The screens blanked one by one. Lacuna sat beside Britta, and lifted the girl like a doll on to her lap. Britta hung her head, so that Lacuna had to brush aside her golden hair and turn her face with cold fingers. It made Britta feel like a child. She hated it. She loved it.

  ‘Pool, my little baby, is the collective brains of the Corporation. At first, centuries ago, they were a research team. The Corporation’s most senior scientists. They conducted an experiment, using semi-organic material to link their minds.’ Lacuna giggled, shockingly. ‘It must have looked like something from an old-fashioned horrorvid. All those thick cables, and helmets with lights and flickering displays. And it worked. They were able to merge their thoughts. Six very intelligent and powerful minds became one. And the whole was greater than the sum of its parts.’

  ‘Oh.’ Britta had been expecting something more exciting. Neural linkage, brain to brain and brain to computer, was old science, had been pushed to the limit in the years before mankind had reached out for the stars. ‘I can see that it would help to run the Corporation more efficiently,’ she said, ‘although I’m sure there are artificial intelligences that would be as powerful. But some of the things I’ve seen are – well, that doesn’t explain them.’

  ‘Of course not, you silly. That was just the beginning. They added to themselves over the years. They abandoned their bodies, and became Pool. They grew continuously, for centuries. And now they have mental powers that allow them to surpass physical laws.’

  Britta still had no image of Pool. ‘So – where is it?’

  ‘Not it – they.’ Lacuna stood, cradling Britta in her arms, and turned in a circle before setting the girl down. ‘They are here. They are all around us.’

  Britta felt dizzy. Suddenly she didn’t want to know any more. But the walls of the circular chamber were changing, fading away, becoming transparent.

  ‘There!’ Lacuna said. ‘Behold the physical reality. You have already been allowed to enter an abstract model of Pool. Now you see them as they are. They reach almost to the ceiling. They are at maximum capacity, optimum power.’

  At first Britta could see nothing. The wall was as transparent as glass, but it was as if it revealed only another wall of uniform greyness. She turned in a complete circle. She was enclosed in grey, all round and from floor to ceiling.

  She, saw that the greyness was not quite opaque. She made out thick bundles of fibres. Some were pulsing regularly. Lumps of darker grey. Slight movement in the depths. It was a thick soup. Congealed.

  Lacuna closed her eyes. Britta squealed: something was in her mind.

  Hello, Britta, said a voice inside her head. Don’t be alarmed. We are Pool. We know you well, and we are grateful to you. Now that you have seen us, you can imagine that we enjoy little in the way of sensory awareness. We exist in pure thought. Lacuna’s pleasure in you provides great pleasure for us. When we calculated that we lacked aesthetic sensibility, we created the link. We have come to depend on Lacuna even more than we did on her predecessor, who was unfortunately unable to join us.

  ‘But what are you?’

  We are the collective brains of the Corporation. We, were only six at first, but many hundreds of individuals have joined us since. All of the Corporation’s ablest intellects. And, of course, we harness the cranial material of the descendants of the colonists. We erase the memories, disrupt and reconnect the synapses, and use the material for routine calculations. You have seen some of the things we can do with our power.

  Cranial material. Of course. Britta was too amazed to feel shocked, or sickened. Lacuna’s chamber was surrounded by a vat of human brain cells.

  Part Five

  POOL

  Be
rnice could hear the Doctor’s voice. At first he sounded distant, as if he was calling to her from the basement of a big house, but he came nearer very quickly and suddenly he was shouting in her ear.

  ‘Do try to snap out of it, Professor Summerfield. I’d like to think that at least one of my travelling companions had a functioning intelligence.’

  He sounded tetchy.

  Bernice opened one eye. She couldn’t identify what she could see. The main thing was, it wasn’t rotating. She was lying on her back. The floor wasn’t moving. Maybe she wasn’t going to die, after all.

  ‘To experience one transmat journey may be regarded as a misfortune,’ she said. ‘To experience two within the same day is no less than a catastrophe. If I try to sit up, do you promise that you’ll keep the world still?’

  She closed her eye again before she levered her body upright, reasoning that the movement of her head would produce more than enough sensory input for her brain to cope with.

  She still wasn’t going to die. In fact, sitting upright, she almost had a sense of balance. She opened both eyes.

  Francis and Elaine were sitting in front of her, huddled together. It wasn’t clear who was comforting whom. Elaine was pale, her eyes rolling independently. Francis sat clutching her, rigid with fear.

  The Doctor had wandered along a shadowy corridor. Bernice could see him tapping his umbrella on the floor, pretending to study the walls, and glancing back impatiently as if he couldn’t believe that his companions were still unable to follow him.

  ‘Where are we?’ Francis said, in a desolate voice.

  ‘Doctor,’ Bernice said, standing, ‘why don’t you come back here and answer some questions while I make sure no bits of my inner ear got left in the transmat.’

  ‘We’re on a space station, Francis,’ the Doctor said.

  As he stepped back into the circle of dimming green light issuing from the door of the transmat booth he looked for a moment like some bizarre demon that Francis had summoned. ‘An artificial world, in the sky above your planet.’

  ‘Are you sure, Doctor?’ In Bernice’s experience, space stations were constructed from prefabricated metal units, bolted together and strung with bulkhead lights and systems ducting. The corridor that led from the transmat booth had a tiled floor, and plastered walls covered with a mural that Bernice felt she might be able to understand after three or four big glasses of strong rum.

  ‘You mean – like the moon?’ Francis said. His imagination had apparently overwhelmed his fear. ‘It’s as if we’re in the moon?’

  ‘Very good,’ the Doctor said. ‘In fact – what does the Arcadian moon look like?’

  Francis was perplexed for a moment. ‘It’s – it’s just the moon. Shiny. Sparkling. But not round like the sun. Jagged at the edges. Like a badly dented silver coin.’ He seemed pleased with the analogy. Elaine had recovered enough to nod her agreement.

  ‘That’s probably where we are then,’ the Doctor said, also pleased with himself. ‘We’re in the moon.’

  ‘Point of order, Mr Chairman,’ Bernice said. ‘That’s all very well, but why isn’t there anyone here to meet us and take us into custody again?’

  The Doctor pointed along the corridor, and set off in the direction indicated. The others followed him into the darkness. ‘I imagine, Professor Summerfield,’ his voice floated back to them, ‘that it’s because we are under surveillance, and in any case we can only go in one direction – oh.’

  He had emerged into another pool of dim light at the far end of the corridor. Bernice, Francis and Elaine found him there, standing indecisively at the centre of a crossroads of corridors.

  ‘This way,’ Bernice said, taking the right turn. She strode confidently along a featureless corridor and followed it round a bend. ‘All these passages must lead to the same place.’ She stopped. ‘Then again, a good archaeologist is always receptive to alternative interpretations.’ In front of her the corridor divided again, running to the left and the right. In the wall opposite her was a landing from which concrete steps spiralled up and down.

  She turned to find that the Doctor, Francis and Elaine had followed her, and were staring glumly at the fourfold choice of paths.

  The Doctor took his hat off and placed it on the floor in the centre of the junction. ‘Right again,’ he said, pointing with his umbrella. ‘I have a nasty feeling that getting anywhere might take some time.’

  In the deep of the space station, Lacuna was staring at a screen.

  On the planet, unaware of being watched, Ace was laying explosive charges.

  On other screens, the big Dalek Killer was drawing fire, hurling the damaged hoverspeeder towards the centre of the Landfall complex through a lattice of laser beams, attracting attention away from the Agent from External Operations, who had broken into a shuttle hangar.

  But Lacuna barely glanced at the other screens. She was watching Ace, sharing with Pool her enjoyment of the grim smile on Ace’s face and the anticipation of the impending explosions.

  Ace kept moving, jogging round the inside of the base’s perimeter wall, programming one mine after another as she ran. Some she placed by hand at the bases of the silver towers; others, with instructions to seek out metal structures in locations shielded from radio interference, she launched into the air.

  ‘Very clever,’ Lacuna said, without checking whether Britta was listening. ‘Pool can read the coding, of course, and could defuse the charges. But she’s getting round most of the planet-based scrambling systems. It would take them hours to deprogramme those instructions. Very clever. Pool won’t help them. Let’s all enjoy the fireworks.’

  On screen, in close up, Ace’s face was tense and excited. She had placed enough mines. Her smile turned into a feral grin as she glanced at her wrist computer. As she ran towards the shuttle hangar, the explosions started.

  Landfall was suddenly ringed with volcanoes of metal. On every screen, thin silver towers were spouting flames, sections of stone wall were bulging and bursting like balloons.

  ‘Magnificent,’ Lacuna breathed. ‘Pool enjoys you, Auxiliary Trooper Ace. Come to me quickly.’

  Britta stood apart, staring unseeingly at a three-dimensional display of the space station. She felt cold. She felt ridiculous and awkward in her flimsy tunic, with her hair damp and unbrushed. She despised herself for caring. She wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t look at Lacuna.

  It’s just a job, she told herself, jabbing at the display controls.

  ‘Britta, my pretty,’ Lacuna said. Britta shivered. ‘Is the blue box unloaded? Has the transmat party arrived?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She didn’t care if Lacuna, was angry. ‘I can’t tell. There are areas of the display that are unclear.’ She pressed another button. The tiny image of the blue box, and all around it, dissolved into a grey mist.

  ‘Let me see.’ With two long strides Lacuna was standing beside Britta. She put an arm round the girl’s waist. Britta pulled away.

  ‘Well,’ Lacuna said. ‘We are going to have some fun when Ace joins us, I can see that. Pool will be very entertained.’

  Britta hated her. Britta hated herself for wanting the arm to encircle her again.

  ‘Pool has been altering the topography of the station again,’ Lacuna said. ‘Or part of Pool. While we were concentrating on the troopship and the fighting on the planet. We can’t afford to divert this much processing power.’

  Britta didn’t understand, but she was reminded of her mind-trip inside the simulacrum of Pool. She remembered the dark movement she had seen just before the link had been severed. Disturbances in the depths. Something like a shark, lurking among the sea-bottom rocks.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lacuna decided. ‘The transmat party must be on the station. We will find them eventually. The box is more important. Pool wants to learn its secrets. Concentrate on finding the box.’

  Britta filled her mind with thoughts of grey blankness, and kept her finger on the button she had pressed. ‘I haven’t f
ound it yet,’ she said. ‘But I’ll keep looking.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Lacuna said absently, and returned to sit at the bank of screens. Over her shoulder, Britta could see coils of smoke. Tongues of flame. The hoverspeeder. A shuttle, taxiing. Ace’s face.

  I hate you! Britta hurled the thought at Lacuna’s back. Lacuna laughed, but didn’t turn round.

  It was sheer spitefulness, Britta knew that. Pool and Lacuna knew about everything she did, anyway. Didn’t they? But Britta didn’t care. She did it anyway. It took only a few seconds to order six droids and a goods transporter to the 65th level cargo bay. A few seconds more to instruct them to move the blue box.

  Britta almost wanted Lacuna to notice. That would show her. But the double-domed head remained craning towards the screens. The red light of fires reflected from the hairless cranium.

  Francis had lost count of the junctions and side-passages they had crossed. Bernice, the Doctor’s rather overbearing friend, seemed fascinated by the paintings on the walls. Francis didn’t like to study them too closely: they were even more disturbing than the strange plants that seemed to be growing everywhere on the planet. And even Bernice, for all that she was a Professor and obviously very learned; seemed unable to read any meaning into the convolutions of colour.

  ‘Distasteful subject matter,’ she had said, more than once. ‘Bosch’s Garden of Delights meets Picasso’s Guernica in a pointillism cum blood-splatter style. But the workmanship is incredible. The detail. The materials. Images that fill the corridor, packed with images too small to see with the naked eye. The painting incorporates tiny imperfections in the building materials. It hardly seems possible.’

  ‘It isn’t,’ the Doctor had said, looking up from his notebook, ‘humanly.’

  The Doctor was trying to make a map of their journey., Francis guessed, by the way that the Doctor’s head-scratching and pencil-licking increased with every junction they reached; that the task was proving difficult.