The Drosten's Curse

by A. L. Kennedy

  BACK AT THE FETCH Spa, David Agnew was disgruntled and tense. He hadn’t enjoyed his massage. And when he’d shouted at Brian the masseur, two very strong elbows had been pressed very hard up and down his back in a way that probably wasn’t strictly necessary.

  He’d taken a shower – which wasn’t the right temperature, somehow – and now, as a last resort – he didn’t notice the pun – he was going to sit in the hydrotherapy pool. No matter what, a nice dip in the pool never failed to relax him. He attempted to feel content.

  Agnew flip-flopped along the relentlessly calming corridor with its tranquilly scented incense burner, its photographs of placid lakes and its carefully positioned speakers softly playing the songs of whales who, if he could have understood them, were actually having a quite heated argument with each other about herring. He despised every simple-minded part of this imposed serenity, but told himself that the idiots and women who were usually in here must find it reassuring. He didn’t need this kind of nonsense to help him relax – he just needed to focus on really, properly hating someone and then imagining them being devoured, bit by bit. After he had relaxed, he would run through his plans for the future – the future of everywhere and everything and everyone.

  Emerging into the Hydro Room, Agnew came as close as he ever did to happy. He stepped out of his flip-flops and bath robe, revealing his strangely hairy feet and his checked polyester swimming trucks. Soft lights played on the bubbling surface of the large, warm pool – the room was currently green, the next shade would be blue, then red, then there would be a soft and flattering white light and then the coloured filters would cycle round all over again. A nice soak for a couple of cycles would be more than long enough to cheer him up. There was no one else around – no silly wives gossiping and flapping their hands, no morons boasting about their golf scores – there was only the wonder and the glory that was David Agnew, enjoying the presence of none other than David Agnew. Something told him – loud and clear – that he was the jewel at the heart of the universe.

  IN HER DELUXE COTTAGE Julia Fetch stopped reading a thrilling article about the way an octopus tastes with its arms. She thought this would be inconvenient for humans, because then everything would taste of blouse. Which would be boring – even though her blouses were of a very fine quality and handmade by Markham & Lancet of Jermyn Street. She decided she was slightly peckish and probably that meant it was time for tea…Or had she taken tea already? It was so hard to tell.

  OUT ON THE COURSE, Bryony was riding in the golf cart beside Patterson who was, as a result, practically writhing with joy and at the same time more depressed than he had ever been during a quite remarkably depressing life. She nudged him in the ribs, which meant he discovered a new bruise in one of the few places where he hadn’t noticed he was sore, but was also enormously delighted. He stared down at his mangled shoes. They’d had the little straps secured across their fronts for no clear purpose by tiny buckles. One of these was now flapping loose. The black plastic of both shoes – once weirdly shiny – was covered in vicious scrapes and something which looked suspiciously like greenish-purplish saliva. But that didn’t matter. The being Bryony knew as Ian Patterson gave himself time to be very, very delighted indeed. This would probably be the last time she would want to be anywhere near him, but for now – being delighted.

  She nudged him again. ‘Don’t thank me for saving your life, then.’

  ‘But I did, I mean I have, I mean…Didn’t I? I thought I thanked you both.’ He gulped down a breath. ‘I am grateful.’ He said this with the tone and facial expression of a person who thought that saving him would always be a terribly bad idea. ‘I just…’ He took the plunge. ‘I’m not called Ian Patterson. I’m called Putta Pattershaun 5, because I’m the fifth Putta Pattershaun – we were a batch of ten – and I’m…all the others have done things, and invented things and…I was going to head off into the universe and achieve…Only then I met you and…I got distracted…not that meeting you hasn’t been an achievement, it’s been the best…’ He made a noise like a ferret being held underwater and not liking it. ‘No, that’s not as important as me being from another planet. You should know that. I am. From another planet.’ He waited for her to scream. Or hit him. Or call out whatever Earth force dealt with alien threats, possibly by dissecting them and freeze-drying their bits for snacking later.

  ‘Yeah.’ She shrugged. ‘What I thought. OK.’

  ‘OK!?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Bryony had worked this all out already – this or something very like this – because she wasn’t a complete idiot. She was completely certain it was the coolest thing she’d ever heard of. She’d been eight years old when Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space and that had seemed wonderful, but the rocket she used to do so had also seemed a bit clunky and somehow unprofessional. Likewise, when the Apollo programme had actually put people on the Moon, it had filled her with all kinds of hopes and an amount of embarrassment that the spaceships weren’t…more stylish. When Bryony was a girl she could think of very few things more amazing than zipping about the solar system in a really well-designed spacecraft. Nevertheless, she was trying to look unimpressed now and managing well, even though she wanted to leap up and down and yell – A space man, I’ve met a space man. I am sitting next to a space man. Who will have a spaceship. Maybe with elegant lines and fins and outlandish equipment…I know a space man. I fancy a space man. And I think he fancies me. Take that, Mangold. Take that, Cardinal Richelieu. She shrugged again, nonchalant. ‘And…?’ She wanted to seem like a sophisticated woman of the galaxy and also needed to appear stern, because she didn’t like being lied to, or having things hidden from her by a potential boyfriend.

  ‘And?!? I don’t…that is…’ The golf cart juddered slightly less than Putta, but only slightly.

  Potential boyfriend? Where did that come from? Bryony tried not to look happy, or surprised, or whatever it was that she was starting to feel – she wasn’t quite clear right now but, whatever the feeling was, it felt pleasant. ‘Yes. And…?’ Thinking of Patterson, or Putta or whoever he was as a boyfriend suddenly made Bryony realise she ought to consider him in more detail…He was cute. In a mangled way. And he seemed scared of her, which could be fun. And maybe the solution to having found Earth men so disappointing was to choose someone from well outside the neighbourhood. She realised that Putta was staring at her with a kind of adoring horror.

  Putta waved his hands despairingly, ‘And…you’re an Earth person, a human being, and human beings are famous all over the…well, you would call it the Pisces-Cetus Supercluster Complex – famous for being…’ He sighed and then blurted out, ‘You kill everything you don’t understand and then sometimes you eat it. You don’t even like people from other continents on your own planet, you…’ He faltered, while the Doctor chuckled audibly.

  The Doctor was strolling easily next to the cart, covering the ground in that particularly light-footed, long-striding, tiptoeing way he had. ‘They also have very promising features. And there’s always evolution. They could improve endlessly. Almost endlessly.’ The Doctor’s large eyes shone benevolently. ‘If the blacktip sharks and fruit flies don’t get there first.’

  But Putta wasn’t paying any attention to the Doctor; he was meeting Bryony’s eyes and blushing. ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t intend to be rude about you.’

  ‘Not just rude about me, rude about my entire species…that’s a first.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Putta squirmed visibly.

  ‘Then next time maybe mention that we do…’ Bryony tried to think of anything human beings were good at. The 1970s hadn’t been inspiring so far – starvation in Biafra, nuclear testing, terrorist attacks and hijackings, Nixon being Nixon – they’d cancelled the Apollo missions…At least the war in Vietnam was over, but things in Cambodia didn’t look good…‘We do make a lovely shepherd’s pie. For example. Sometimes. Some of us. By which I mean we kill things we don’t understand and put them into pi
es…I don’t mean we would make good pies by being put into them as a filling, although I suppose we could…by a superior alien race…’ While Putta desperately tried not to look superior and absolutely managed, Bryony grinned, ‘We are a bit disappointing…And shepherd’s pie isn’t even a pie – no pastry. And it doesn’t contain any shepherds.’ She nudged him on an especially tender bruise. ‘You’re from outer space. How great is that? That’s just…’ And she thought about kissing him, but then reconsidered and acted cool again.

  ‘While I am glad that we’re all friends…’ The Doctor leaned in under the golf cart’s gaily striped canopy as they progressed across the turf and fixed Putta with an icy look. ‘Apart from the multiple treaties and byelaws you’re transgressing…Explain yourself, young Putta. What are you doing here so far from Yinzill? It is Yinzill, isn’t it? Your home world? Yinzill in the Ochre Period?’

  Bryony interrupted. ‘Never mind that – what happened to him?’

  ‘Which is also a good question,’ the Doctor admitted.

  Bryony continued. ‘And what happened to the bunker? I’m not a big fan of golf, but I do know bunkers aren’t supposed to reach up and grab people’s feet. Or Yinzillites’ feet.’

  Putta was, of course, aware that the proper word for a being from Yinzill was a Yakt, but thought it was sweet of her to make the effort and didn’t like to correct her in case she punched him. She seemed to be a very physical kind of Earth person and was quite possibly stronger than he was.

  ‘Well?’ And she was glowering at him in expectation of an answer.

  Putta tried to organise his information in a logical stream. ‘Well, I…that is…my family…several of the other Puttas have done very well as…I mean…’ He sort of knew this wasn’t going to go well. ‘I am a bountykiller.’

  ‘Wha-at!?’ The Doctor made the word sound much longer and more threatening than usual and suddenly looked completely furious. ‘Barging round the universe, collecting trophies for ultra-millionaires? Making the shells of barber sylphs into finger bowls…!?’

  ‘But I never—’

  ‘You criticise human beings and you’re throwing stun canisters into bandan nests!? Of all the idiotic…!?’

  ‘I haven’t…I like bandans…And sylphs…We only target predator species.’

  The Doctor’s whole frame was bristling with outrage and suddenly he didn’t look at all like an amiable fool, more like a formidable enemy of injustice and wasteful harm. ‘And who decides which species is a predator? You?! You think you have the right?!’

  ‘There’s a list…’ Putta scrabbled in his inside pocket, then in each of his pockets, with increasing levels of despair. ‘They give us a list.’ He couldn’t find the list. It was gone, along with his fusion lance. (His lance not-very-cunningly disguised as a golf club, given that he couldn’t play golf – he’d somehow put his real name in the Form section of the formatting instructions of the synthesiser unit and ended up with a putter…) And he no longer had his Model G50 Threat Detector, which had started leaking psy fluid after he dropped it on a hard surface – which you weren’t supposed to – so he’d had to throw it away before it dissolved his control panel. If psy fluid’s psychons weren’t taken up rapidly enough, by enough minds, or suitable devices, they could turn corrosive…Plus, it had given him (because his mind had provided an amount of take-up and got quite a big dose) this incredible feeling of soul-clenching and ultimate doom, it was appalling stuff, psy fluid…

  The Doctor raged on. ‘Is she a predator?!’ He pointed at Bryony who couldn’t help being slightly alarmed. She’d never seen him like this. ‘Is everyone who eats shepherd’s pie a predator?! Shouldn’t they be!’

  ‘I don’t…I’m not sure…That is, I’ve never…’

  ‘So many lives, so delicately balanced, so close to the abyss, so full of hope, and some greedy squad of imbeciles classifies them as a predator, as a resource, and you and your kind of destructive idiots come along and harvest them until they’re gone.’ The Doctor looked both furious and implacably sad.

  He seemed so alone in his grief that Bryony touched his arm. ‘I don’t think he meant any harm.’

  ‘His kind never mean any harm – they still do it!’ The Doctor stopped himself, quietened. ‘Very few species truly understand that actions have consequences. When you destroy something, that isn’t an isolated act.’ And for a second or so he looked like someone who had understood far too many consequences and who had been made very tired by that. Then he patted Bryony’s shoulder. ‘Our lives are connected. And other lives are connected to those lives and on and on. We are even connected…to Putta Pattershaun 5.’ He glowered at Putta.

  Putta responded with an apologetic babble. ‘I thought it would be a good idea, I mean I don’t like it, haven’t liked it, haven’t done it, not properly…I’ve never killed anything. I took aim at a Parthian mind wasp and I couldn’t fire. And they’re terrible. They can eat your whole personality and then lay their eggs in your face. But they have wonderful wings. There were colours in the wings that I’d never seen on any planet…I just couldn’t…’

  Bryony kept on with what she thought was a promising line of enquiry which would be much more use than additional shouting. ‘Patter- Putter, whatever your name is. Never mind all that – what happened to you? Did you do something? Did you bring some alien thing with you that ended up in the bunker? A whatsit, sense wasp? Something else? Or do your people have a problem with sand? Does it usually eat you?’

  ‘Which is what I would have asked. Roughly. What I would have asked if you hadn’t kept interrupting,’ nodded the Doctor. ‘Except for the sand part.’

  ‘Sand? No, we like sand,’ Putta bleated miserably. ‘Unless it gets into our shoes, or…elsewhere…Oh…I don’t know. I thought…My detector, just before it broke, it showed this, this signal that couldn’t even have been true, but I landed here to look for – no one has even heard of them, not for millennia, and I didn’t expect to find…but then maybe the detector was broken already, giving a false reading before I dropped it…and I was left, anyway, with no more detector, no more signal, no more…’ Bryony was glowering at him with such impatience that he gulped and steered himself round to the events of the afternoon. ‘There was this man, this human man and I met him in the bar.’ Bryony snorted with derision which would have made her seem slightly unattractive to anyone but Putta. He continued. ‘The man definitely…he lured me into that sandpit. I’d never even seen him before.’

  ‘Did you do something to him?’ Bryony asked, with a hurtful level of suspicion.

  ‘You are quite annoying, you know,’ confided the Doctor. ‘That could rub people up the wrong way. Not to mention your profession. Did you mention your profession – Bountykiller Putta?’ He pronounced the last two words as if they were a disease.

  ‘I didn’t mention anything,’ whined Putta. ‘I was being as human as possible and that appears to involve golf and sandpits.’

  ‘Bunkers,’ corrected Bryony and then disliked herself for it.

  ‘Bunkers. He was very angry all the time. I mean, so angry I could feel it on my skin somehow…’ Putta wrung his hands.

  ‘Can you usually feel other people’s mental states?’ the Doctor asked sharply. ‘And did you have a strange taste in your mouth?’

  Putta nodded and looked calmer, as if he now had the resident expert on his side. ‘Yes, a funny taste and, no, I can’t usually feel…well, my own feelings are a bit of a problem without anyone else’s…’ He caught sight of Bryony’s frown and got back to the main issue. ‘The man…I think he knew about the bunker and he got angrier and angrier as he walked me over there and then he made me play golf and got angrier still – only in a nasty, happy kind of way – and then the bunker got angry and then he left as soon as…once it started trying to eat me…he ran away.’ He looked a bit sickly as he remembered. ‘It grabbed my feet. If I hadn’t already got out my fusion lance…’ And then he didn’t want to finish the sentence.

&nbs
p; The Doctor tsked. ‘Running around showing off advanced technology to a less developed and very…emotional species…’ As if he’d never do such a thing himself. ‘You ought to be ashamed.’

  ‘Thank you for saving me.’

  ‘Well, it’s all part of a day’s work, really, I—’ The Doctor broke off when he saw Putta smiling carefully at Bryony and nodding.

  Bryony wasn’t currently that interested in gratitude. She thought she was on to something. ‘If he laid the trap…If Mr Agnew laid the trap, he must know how it operates and what it is. It must be his trap.’

  ‘Yes, you know, if you think about it, whoever laid the trap would understand what it is and be the one to use it,’ the Doctor added. In case anyone had forgotten he was a genius. He was already hypothesising about how a telepathic bond would react if it were partially corporeal and suffered pain, because – for example – someone had repeatedly fired a fusion lance at it…if the mild psychic abilities of a sandmaster had been somehow magnified and tamed…and if its governing consciousness had run away and abandoned it while it was injured…A feedback loop in that kind of situation could be extremely bad news for everyone concerned.

  Bryony burst in with, ‘Then we have to find Agnew!’ and looked pleased with herself. ‘I mean, shouldn’t we?’

  Doctor nodded absently, murmuring to himself, ‘My tracking skills are a bit rusty. I studied with the Miccosukee people for a while…’ He began to stare significantly at the grass. ‘It will take great skill…’

  ‘Or we could look in the Spa,’ suggested Putta.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘He mentioned he was going back to the Spa.’ Putta blinked. There was a pause.

  The Doctor boomed, ‘Why on earth didn’t you say so?!’