by Gary Russell
Keri slumped back in her chair, gripping the big arms in her little paws, trying not to yell at him. After a moment she just smiled. ‘You know what you could do for me?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Buy me another glass of water. Dash of lemon.’
The Doctor stood up. ‘I’m not here to buy you drinks.’
‘Is that because you don’t carry money, or because you’re just mean?’
He looked shocked. ‘Of course I’m not mean. It’s just that right now I have better things to do than stand around in bars on Legion, playing servant. To someone who broke their own leg. Being clumsy.’
‘I wasn’t being clumsy. I was ice skating, yeah.’
‘You told me you’d been ice skating before. You said you knew how to ice skate. In fact, you said you were a champion ice skater! So it wasn’t my fault you fell over.’
Keri closed her eyes – took a deep breath – then quietly repudiated his facts one by one, counting them off on her claws. ‘I told you I went ice skating, yes. I told you I knew enough not to fall over on an ice rink, yes. I actually told you I won a school certificate for ice skating when I was a pup. And yes, it was your fault I fell over because you forgot to tell me that the place we went ice skating wasn’t a rink but a living, breathing animal that looked like an ice planet. So when it had a coughing fit I, and everyone else, fell over.’
‘I didn’t fall over.’
‘You were the one making it cough! Of course you didn’t fall over.’
The Doctor started walking around the armchair and hen leaned over the top, so Keri had to look straight up, craning her Pakhar neck as best she could. ‘Well, that’s certainly one way of looking at it and I accept your right to look at it that way, of course.’
‘I should have known something was fishy when you told me the planet was called Torvalundeen. How did I not see through that, yeah?’
The Doctor pointed at her. ‘Ha! I knew you’d like that. Not many other people there that day got the joke.’
‘Not many other people there that day have studied Earth history, so of course they didn’t. Who named it Torvalundeen anyway?’
‘I did. I mean, you didn’t think anyone else out there would make that kind of pun? Its actual name is K-174-B but that’s really boring. Well, I think it’s boring, so I called it Torvalundeen. It seemed to like the name. And it wasn’t coughing, it was laughing.’
‘Why was it laughing?’
‘Because I told it how I’d given it that name to amuse you.’
‘How did it know who Torvill and Dean are? Were? Whatever? It was an alien in another solar system.’
‘TV.’
‘What?’
‘Human TV signals. They go out, into space, for ever. Somewhere in the Kraxis Nebula someone’s watching an episode of Juliet Bravo. Somewhere a bit closer a couple of Weave are probably watching the first ever X-Factor final. And wondering what is going on. So a couple of Olympic ice skaters, well something that clever, that stylish and technically proficient, that gets noticed in the greater universe. Mind you, somewhere out there is a planet that currently thinks The Wurzels on the Christmas Day 1976 Top of the Pops is the height of human cultural achievement, so swings and roundabouts.’
Keri looked like she wanted to bang her head on the chair hard, maybe enough to knock herself out. But she didn’t, probably because her leg was hurting.
The Doctor reached down and scooped up Keri’s tablet that was resting at her hip. He tapped and swiped a few times. ‘You have some nice Get Well messages here, very artistic, very…Oh, that one isn’t so much artistic as rude. Oh, and I see your Litter Matriarch is still blaming the Pakhar Emperor for everything. Including your leg.’
‘She thinks I tripped over a paving slab outside work. That seemed significantly easier than “Yeah, I was on another planet, on an ice rink that was actually a laughing ice monster!” Funny that.’
The Doctor replaced the tablet beside her. ‘Never understood Get Well Soon cards. I mean, what are they for? No one’s going to send a “Stay unhealthy, please die quickly” card, are they?’
Keri just sighed. She waved the postcard again at him, trying to change the subject. ‘So anyway, what did you mean in this card, yeah?’
‘What card?’
‘This card!’ and Keri tossed it at him. Being a postcard, flight was not a skill it possessed naturally, and it merely spun a couple of times and fell limply to the floor in front of him.
‘Physical postcards. How quaint.’ He picked it up.
Hope the leg is getting better. On our way soon from the depths of outer space and inner time. Just had tea with Charlie at his investiture.
He looked at the postmark. From 1969. Postage 4d. ‘Those were the days.’ He sighed. ‘So what’s with all the space and time stuff?’
Keri bared her teeth. ‘Oh, there are times when I could throttle you quite easily. I. Don’t. Know. You sent it.’
‘Did not.’
‘It’s your handwriting.’
‘How do you know that’s my handwriting? That looks nothing like my handwriting.’
Keri reactivated her tablet and swiped to a GalWeb mails server page and tapped her account.
The Doctor leaned over again to look, started swiping through, muttering as he did so.
‘Gas bill. Electric bill. Credit card bill – what do you spend your money on? Council Tax. Water. Polling Card – don’t vote for any of them, least of all her! Would You Like To Receive Galaxy Five’s Reader’s Digest For A Year? The last bastion of print media and no, Keri, you won’t have won ten thousand credits. A private email. Oh, and another.’
Keri put down the tablet, scrabbled round and produced two more postcards.
‘Two more physical postcards, you are lucky.’
‘Read them, yeah.’
The Doctor flipped them over a few times. ‘Nice photos,’ he said, but the dark eyes of the Pakhar shrank even more than normal and, had she had eyebrows, they too would have narrowed, so the Doctor opted to read, as instructed. He picked the first:
Hey you. Coming to visit soon, just as soon as we can get the right time stream, don’t want to end up in a parallel reality where everyone has a horse’s head. Mind you, everyone here is wearing fluorescent shell suits. 1991 is a bad place to be!
And then:
Don’t worry, not forgotten you (or your poor leg). Picked up a nice box of celebratory chocolates from the big new just-opened-yesterday Westfield in Shepherds Bush, hope you like dark, milk, white and tomato chocolate.
PS: Not sure that *is* tomato chocolate. Not sure tomato chocolate is actually a ‘thing’. But you never can tell in these primitive times and places.
‘Do you like tomato chocolate?’
‘I don’t know what tomato chocolate is and, to be honest, Doctor, I don’t think I want to try it very much.’
‘Wise move.’ He looked back at Keri. ‘Why are you showing me these anyway?’
‘I want to know why you sent them.’
‘And you’re wondering where your chocolate is, yes?’
‘No, not particularly. It just seems…’
‘Yes?’
‘Odd. Odd is what it seems. Physical postcards. From. You. When you have the TARDIS. And just where is this Scunthorpe place?’
‘I’m really not sure I’ve ever actually been to Scunthorpe, you know,’ he said. ‘And whilst that looks a little bit like my handwriting, it isn’t. I don’t cross my “t”s like that and I can’t bear doing little curvy bits under “y”s.’
‘So if you didn’t send me those postcards, who did?’
‘Your Matriarch?’
‘If my Matriarch had sent them, they’d be about suing paving stone layers. And they wouldn’t have come from Earth.’
‘True. How about your lovely old grandad? He’s a bit whoop-whoop-whoop…’ The Doctor tapped his temple. ‘He probably thinks he lives in outer space most days anyway.’
‘Oil’
‘Yes?’
The Doctor stared at Keri for a moment. ‘No, no, I’m sure it’s nothing.’
‘Doctor?’
‘Well, I have this friend…’
Keri sighed. ‘I can see the quote marks around “friend” from here.’
‘No, no, she really is a friend. An old friend. Well, not old like your grandad – no one’s that old – but a friend from a long time ago. And that might be her handwriting. I actually think you’ve met once or twice. I don’t recall how well you got on.’
‘I rarely get on with your friends Doctor. More often than not they try to kill me. Or, in the case of your old tin dog, shoot me.’
‘Well, to be fair to K-9, you were possessed by the ancient spirit of the Kortha Gestalt. Sarah Jane and Luke did explain to me that you weren’t best pleased, though…’
‘Anyway, moving to the here and now, just how did this particular “old friend” know I’d broken my leg, yeah?’
‘Ah yes, that might have something to do with Gal-Tube.’
‘And my leg-breaking incident was on that, I’m guessing. Humiliation on a universal scale.’ Keri paused. ‘Who uploaded it, Doctor?’
‘Anyway, so it’s possible that she saw it and decided to make her way here, to see you. And maybe me. It’s been a lot of years and faces since we last met up. Well, I’d better head off.’
‘Oh no you don’t. If someone I don’t know from your past is coming here, you’re sticking around too.’
‘I am?’
‘You are. But before she gets here, you’re also going to explain why you uploaded footage of me falling on my bum to the entire universe, yeah?’
The Doctor smiled. ‘Fizzy water, yeah?’
3
Be My Icon
The human colony of El Diablo was established in the late forty-ninth century, on the outskirts of the Vadim solar system, right at the heart of the human empire’s trade routes. El Diablo was named because of its dichotomous sulphurous atmosphere and volcanic polar regions, which put a lot of settlers off – its distance from its sun didn’t help.
But enterprise can be found everywhere and one of the fledgling power companies, a small mom-and-pop family operation, decided to invest in the dwarf planet, seeing if it could contain the unpleasant lava seas and turn that into self-perpetuating power to keep a colony going, rather like being a planet and sun all in one.
After many years of planning and experimenting and some very hard-sought patents, the company succeeded and began selling plots of terraformed land on this exciting, potentially prosperous new world.
And that’s when the big corporations moved in – not worried about the dwarf planet itself, but terribly interested in the technology and patents owned by the family business. Without too much concern for the people involved, one of the bigger companies, Bolen, simply absorbed the company in a hostile takeover, sacked the family, and owned El Diablo outright.
Within a hundred years, with the technology having proved functional and successful, Bolen began populating El Diablo with businesses – mainly banking, securities, and a few satellite offices of the bigger cosmo-nationals. And a lot of coffee shops.
But as always when you mix big business with financial institutions (and a ready supply of coffee) the less-than-honest types move in. Not exactly crime lords and gangsters, but a significant number of small time grifters and con artists who saw an opportunity to make a quick buck out of shady transactions, then move on, perhaps to the gallery world of Rembrandt or the jewellery world of Sappho–lots of easy pickings from the celebs, aristocracy or other delusional inbreds with a shared IQ of six that populated such places.
Bolen, however, wanted to stop these stings occurring, so they went to the Church of the Papal Mainframe and signed up for their security and other services.
Thus it came to pass in the early summer of 5064 that a man as wide as he was tall (and he was quite tall) called Cyrrus Globb arrived on El Diablo. Globb probably wasn’t his real name – rather as Al Capone had been called Scarface or George Nelson was called Babyface because of physical characteristics, so Globb had become known as exactly that thanks to his impressive bulk. He also, it had to be noted, moved very fast and quietly for a man of said shape and size.
So Globb became a grifter, a conman and a rogue. There’s often a charm, a slight admiration of someone who can steal millions of currency by swindling someone more stupid and gullible and rich and (usually) unpleasant. They become sort of modern Robin Hoods (although not so much redistributing the wealth to the poor as redistributing it more through their own tax havens).
The drawback for someone like Globb was that people often don’t like being swindled, especially if, along with the money or the goods (or both), they also lose face with their peers and family.
The result of a successful criminal career is often an equally impressive bounty placed upon them, and in Cyrrus Globb’s case, the emphasis was on the DEAD part of WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE.
Enter a slim, muscular lady from the planet Spyro, famed for her ability to always get whatever she was paid to get, and also for having hollow telescopic bones, which meant she could usually get in and out of places few others could. She was known universally as Kik the Assassin – if that was her name, no one knew. She was a weaponista, meaning that there were no weapons in the known universe, past and present, that she didn’t have an instinctive ability to use to absolute perfection. As a result, she was very highly regarded and very highly paid. Most people were also utterly terrified of her – it was said that if a lean, powerful reptile lady with turquoise skin, a short silver Mohawk and pupil-less yellow eyes was standing before you, you were probably already dead and your brain hadn’t registered yet.
And that falling sensation, that sound in your ears of a roar like the sea, and that blur of movement as the ground seemed to be reticulating was your brain finally going, ‘Oh, damn, I’ve just been killed by this corner of the universe’s foremost weaponista, Kik the Assassin.’ Although to be honest, the brain only got as far as ‘Oh damn, I’ve—’ before shutting down.
Therefore when one of the small but respected-in-dodgy-circles cartels on El Diablo took umbrage at Cyrrus Globb casually relieving them of two years’ profits in exchange for a suitcase not of neutron plasma tubes but of common-or-garden bricks, they paid Kik the Assassin handsomely to rid the universe of Globb.
Globb, perhaps sensibly, rarely stayed put for long and it was actually 5066 before Kik the Assassin (now quite rich because her monthly retainer was nothing to be sniffed at) tracked Globb down.
He was on Mason’s World, a popular casino and leisure planet and he foolishly stopped for one last whisky one night, offered to buy one for ‘the pretty blue-ish lady beside me’ and found himself facing the wrong end of a number of weapons.
Ironically for Globb, rescue arrived in the form of the Church – a Verger-led troop took out the door, the windows and a significant number of tables and chairs while entering the bar to arrest him. And Kik the Assassin, not possessing a death wish, surrendered immediately.
Six weeks later, the swiftest judgment ever came back from the courts of El Diablo: Globb was sentenced to life and Kik the Assassin, who was a bit cleverer at covering her tracks that night, got a three-month sentence for carrying an unlicensed firearm – the rest were all licenced, because she was too good at her job for them not to be. Almost. She was pretty sure this was a frame-up, but what’s three months when the average Spyro lifetime is 450 years?
Thus it came to pass that the Church of the Papal Mainframe saw fit (or maybe some governor with a delicious sense of humour and irony) that Cyrrus Globb and Kik the Assassin were placed in adjoining cells. And, like all the cells on this Stormcage facility, the walls were merely force fields and the two could sit and glower at one another all day long.
One day, salvation presented itself in the form of a Headless Monk who came bearing a letter – a real, honest to goodn
ess paper, handwritten and sealed with candle wax letter – for each of them.
Kik the Assassin read hers, written in the finest Spyro fractal fonts, with a huge grin on her face.
Globb read his, written in block capitals in green ink, with a scowl.
When they looked up, the Headless Monk was gone, his task done.
A moment later, their cell doors deactivated and they both walked out. Two guards were in the corridor, chatting about wives, dinners, cricket – who knew or cared? The important thing was that although they saw their two prisoners escaping, they did nothing about it. This was probably because of the wad of cash the Headless Monk had given each of them a few moments earlier.
Outside the Stormcage was a small two-person shuttle. Wordlessly, they got into it, Kik the Assassin expertly gunning the propulsion unit, and off they soared into space.
Only then did Globb speak. ‘It says you aren’t allowed to kill me, and this contract negates and invalidates all and any others you have regarding me.’
Kik the Assassin smiled and nodded. ‘I understand that too. It also stated that when this is over, I am to return you here, alive and unharmed and if I do, I get a pardon. If I don’t, they’ll kill me.’
‘I thought no one could kill you,’ Globb said.
She smiled again. ‘If a Headless Monk tells you he’ll kill you, I have little doubt that his order are the only people in this galaxy that can do exactly that. I have no desire to die or remain in captivity, so we’re doing this job, getting back here with you safely in tow, and then I go home.’
‘And what if I don’t want to come back with you? What if I decide that a life on the run is better than a life back there?’ He thumbed in the general direction of the Stormcage.
Kik the Assassin passed over her letter. ‘Paragraph three.’
Globb looked at it. ‘I can’t read this gibberish.’
Kik the Assassin sighed, snatching the letter back and pushing it against a small screen on the systems console of the ship. Immediately a hologram of the letter appeared in the air. ‘Earth English. For beginners,’ she snapped.