Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Is that all? Anything else?’

  To her surprise his crumpled face assumed a gentler expression. ‘Actually, yes. Mayor, we need to talk about your own children…’

  And he told her what he had seen in Casey’s bedroom, of Phee and the Blue Doll.

  13

  BY THE TIME Enceladus swam into view, Jamie was dog tired, and starving hungry despite the little nipples in the suit neck that fed him some kind of liquid food.

  Enceladus was a globe of clean cold ice. At first it looked like a billiard ball, round and white and perfect. But as they approached, Jamie started to make out detail. The northern hemisphere was pocked by craters; it looked as if it had been blasted by a musket shot. But the south was smoother, just as white but lacking craters, and textured with sheets and soft mounds of what looked like snow. That lower hemisphere was scarred by long, straight blue-white cracks, a network of them reaching up towards the equator. They must have been hundreds of kilometres long.

  About a third of the globe was in shadow, from Jamie’s point of view, and he saw no lights gleaming on the dark side. No people down there, he guessed.

  Sam swept down in front of him from out of nowhere, the nozzles on his electric-blue scooter squirting exhaust. ‘How’s it going, granddad?’

  ‘Ah, clear the road. Ye scared me half tae death. And dinna call me granddad.’

  ‘What do you think of Enceladus?’

  ‘I’d tell ye if ye’d get oot ma way.’

  Sam laughed, but he twisted his scooter gracefully up and around to settle in alongside Jamie. ‘Look away,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look away from the moon and shield your eyes.’

  Grumbling, Jamie tried it, cupping his gloved hand before his visored face. He had spent enough nights hiding out on the Scottish moors to know that he needed to give his eyes time to adapt to the dark, and he waited patiently.

  And he saw a kind of glowing corridor, misty, sparkling, stretching ahead of the moon, and behind it. A ghostly ring, in which Enceladus was embedded.

  ‘Och, it’s bonny.’

  ‘Nothing but ice,’ Sam said. ‘Just like the main rings. Nothing but ice crystals, and sunlight.’

  ‘Where does it come from? Yon moon?’

  ‘Yes. It’s hot inside, liquid under a thick ice crust. Something to do with the tides – keeps it warm. See the tiger stripes?’ He pointed at the cracks in the southern hemisphere. ‘They’re fissures. Breaks in the crust. The liquid stuff from inside comes up in geysers and fountains. Some of the stuff snows out, back on the moon.’

  ‘Ah, and buries the craters.’

  ‘That’s it. And some of it gets thrown away from the moon and it’s created this band of ice, all the way around the moon’s orbit. Listen, granddad. When we go in just follow me, me and the others. Don’t bother about Phee. Go in right after us. And when I tell you, press that button there, on your right-hand controller.’

  ‘What, this big red jobbie? What happens? Do the bristles shoot out o’ this witch’s broomstick?’

  ‘And I’ve got a present for you.’ It was a package wrapped in a translucent blanket; he pulled it free of his scooter’s main strut and tossed it across open space to Jamie.

  Jamie inspected the package by Enceladus’s silver-white light. ‘A bagpipe!’

  ‘Think you can play it?’

  ‘Och, I could play a haggis skin if you stuck a few drones on it… Where’d ye get it? Oh. From that museum ye talked about, I’ll wager.’

  ‘It’s the only set of pipes in the Saturn system. Well, they were doing no good stuck in a box in the museum, were they?’

  Jamie was dubious about being drawn into this. But still – pipes! It didn’t look like much of a make, what he could see through the packaging, but he longed to try it out.

  There was a sound like a chiming bell.

  Sam tapped a dial on his scooter. ‘That’s it. Approach trajectory locked in. Cowabunga, granddad!’

  ‘Your cow’s – what?’

  But Sam had already peeled away. He had his friends lined up in a tight, narrow formation, all save Phee who hung back, and swept down towards the shining face of Enceladus, a swarm of fireflies before a Chinese lantern.

  Hastily Jamie attached the package of pipes to his scooter’s upright. He clenched his fists around his scooter’s controls and drove it forward as fast as he could, arrowing straight at the white face of Enceladus.

  It was a world, looming out of the dark. It filled his field of view and seemed to flatten out, becoming a great dish of sculpted white, those craters like burst blisters in the north, and the snow fields of the south cut through by those long, nearly straight tiger stripes.

  Now the scooter swarm ahead of him swept upwards, and Jamie hastily followed suit. Enceladus tipped over, and suddenly he was flying over a landscape of hills and canyons. Still they dropped, the features shooting under the prow of his scooter with bewildering speed. Everything was white, the world a mask of ice and snow, with not a single splash of rock or vegetation, and the sky above was an eerie black over the brilliant white of the ice plains.

  And still they dropped. They passed over a mound of huge, tumbled boulders, the ground fell away beneath them, and they descended into a crevasse, a valley cut deep into the ice. The walls were blue-white, the deep ice trapping the light. The whole feature was no more than a kilometre or so wide. This must be a tiger stripe, one of those long valleys.

  With the walls whipping past him, the sense of enormous speed was suddenly overwhelming.

  Sam whooped. ‘You still with us, granddad?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘That button. Hit it now!’

  Jamie didn’t let himself think about it. He thumped the button. With a jolt, two flat slats popped out from the side of his scooter’s main body and levelled out to either side of him, beneath his feet.

  And then the scooter dropped, just like that, and suddenly he was on the ice, scraping along the surface. His scooter’s main rocket nozzle swivelled so it was firing behind him, hurling him forward, and he had to lean forward to keep his balance. The rough ice surface was carpeted by a layer of loose grains that were thrown up in a plume behind him. Every bump and hummock jolted Jamie’s bones.

  Now everybody was whooping on the comms channel. Sam yelled, ‘Isn’t this what life is for, granddad? Skiing on a moon of Saturn!’

  Jamie risked a glance upward. He saw a single spark hanging high above the valley. That was Phee, keeping out of trouble – or waiting for trouble to happen.

  Somebody yelled, ‘Beware vent!’

  The swarm of fireflies was lifting up from the surface again, rising high into the blackness. Jamie had no time to react. The ground rose up in a kind of natural ramp, and the scooter on its skis hurled itself forward and up, and Jamie was flying over a huge circular hole in the valley floor. The ramp he’d climbed had been a rim of raised ice. The whole feature looked like the remains of a burst boil.

  ‘Tell me how it can get better than this!’ Sam yelled again, almost hysterical. ‘Tell me, granddad!’

  Jamie felt like he’d left his stomach down there on the ice.

  The ski run came to an end at last at the far end of the tiger-stripe canyon, amid another heap of giant ice boulders. Jamie got off more cautiously than the rest; he felt as if he’d been beaten black and blue all over.

  The youngsters stacked their scooters together and started unloading their packs. One boy had a kind of sheet of translucent material, folded small into a backpack, that spread out a remarkably long way over the ice. The youngsters anchored it with gadgets like guns that fired spikes into the ice. Then they unfolded poles, and started crawling under the sheet to fix it like a tent.

  Jamie tried to help, but he floated around like a soap bubble in the impossibly low gravity, and was clumsy as a young ox. After the third time he’d fallen over, and the second time he nearly shot himself through the foot with a spike gun, Phee gently took his
arm and pulled him away from the action.

  ‘Of course it’s not really skiing,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not?’ Nobody in Jamie’s time had used skis. But he had seen skiing in Tibet once, though he and the Doctor had been too busy running from robot yeti for him to take much notice. ‘I dinna understand.’

  ‘On Earth your skis slide over a slick of slippery melted ice. Here the ice doesn’t melt, it’s too cold, so the scooters’ skis have to be treated with a frictionless surface to make them work. And your rockets have to push you down onto the ice to stop you flying off all the time.’

  ‘Aye, well, whatever it was, it was too much excitement for me…’

  He thought he felt a tremor. A tremble deep in the ice ground of this little moon. Phee said nothing about it. Probably his imagination – or his stomach trying to unknot itself after that ride down.

  ‘Come on. I think they’ve got the dome ready.’ She led him to the erected tent.

  There was a simple fold-out airlock stuck on the side of the dome, and inside everybody was climbing out of their skinsuits and dumping them on a rolled-out groundsheet. But Jamie noticed Phee kept her suit on, though opened to the waist, revealing the jet-black amulet she always wore at her neck. That seemed a wise precaution in case this tent thing failed, so Jamie followed her example.

  Their bits of lightweight equipment were soon functioning remarkably effectively, providing air, warmth, light, water to drink; there were even cooking smells. The youngsters in their customised clothing lounged around, talking, messing with musical instruments, drums, harps, a kind of mouth organ. Some seemed to be calming down, even climbing into lightweight sleeping bags. But others, suited up, were still coming and going through the airlock, which dilated with a sigh each time.

  Phee seemed to want to take charge of Jamie. She sat him against the wall, and while he unwrapped his bagpipe she fetched him a bowl of soup.

  ‘Nobody lives here, on this moon. Not permanently. It’s one reason we like to come here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She shrugged. ‘Officially because there might be life in the water ocean under the ice crust. I think it’s just because the corporations haven’t got around to mining it yet. There are easier targets.’

  ‘Like Mnemosyne.’

  ‘Yes. You’re quite safe in here, you know. The tent is made from skinsuit fabric. It doesn’t look much but it’s very tough, self-repairing, and resistant to magnetosphere radiation—’

  ‘Whisht ye.’ He touched her hand. ‘Phee, I’m fine. You dinna have to reassure me.’

  She flashed him a grin that lit up her face. ‘If you say so, granddad. How are you getting on with those pipes?’

  He fingered the kit, unscrewing drones. ‘Och, it’s a bit of tat if truth be told. These drones are plastic! Made in some factory in England, probably. But I daresay I’ll squeeze a note out of it.’

  The others were getting more seriously into their music now. Little huddles of two or three played snatches of song. None of it was familiar to Jamie, but some of the tunes were engaging. So he tried out the pipes. The tone was thin, the fingering clumsy, but he soon coaxed a tune out of the set. And when he played an old Jacobite air, ‘The Wearing of the Green’, the reaction of the kids surprised him. They stopped their own playing, and listened intently. It seemed to him it was almost as if they knew the tune already, but hadn’t known they knew it. Self-conscious, he packed it in when the tune was done.

  The others resumed their playing, but soon the music grew more languid, restful. Maybe the kids were settling down at last, as excitement waned, and fatigue from the long journey cut in.

  Sneakily, to work his way to doing the job he’d been given by the Doctor, Jamie said innocently to Phee, ‘I like your locket.’ In the time he’d spent with her it was the one accessory she’d worn constantly, and he and Zoe had agreed it was the best candidate for the Doctor’s pedleron-particle time-travel anomaly.

  She fingered the black pebble at her neck. ‘Oh, it’s not a locket, it doesn’t open. We call it the amulet, in the family.’

  ‘Ye’re always wearin’ it.’

  ‘It’s a kind of heirloom. My mother gave it to me when I was sixteen, and she got it from her mother. Been in the family a long time. Always passed down the female line, mother to daughter or granddaughter.’

  ‘Is that right? There must be quite a story to go with it.’ He tried to act as if he was only casually interested, but he was no spy, no actor.

  She looked at him curiously. ‘Well, there is. Sort of. My great-great-something grandmother is supposed to have found it in a fossil.’

  Now Jamie had an excuse to be intrigued. ‘No! Why don’t ye tell me about it? I always liked bedtime stories.’ He pulled a couple of lightweight blankets out of a pack, passed one to Phee, and snuggled down under the other.

  Phee smiled. ‘You’re just like Casey. All right then. Once upon a time…’

  INTERLUDE

  AMULET

  I

  ‘Fossil, miss? Fossil for a penny…’

  Josephine Laws had been hanging back on the platform, unwilling to follow her father into the train carriage. This was Sir Iain Laws’ proudest moment, in this year 1890, his forty-eighth year, her sixteenth. The very day of the opening of the City and South London Railway, the world’s first deep-level underground railway, on which her father had served as chief engineer. Here was the line of carriages by the gas-lit platform, ready to go deep into the brand new tunnel; here were the journalists, the cheering crowds, dignitaries from city and country. There was even a minor prince, a nephew of Queen Victoria.

  And here was Josephine, Sir Iain’s only daughter, and his only family companion since her mother had died four years ago. Yet she could not bear to enter the carriage. The carriages had been built small and tight to fit into the narrow tunnels. With their high-backed, cushioned seats, even their designers called them ‘padded cells’. And inside this cell Josephine was going to have to enter a tunnel dug into the clay beneath the river Thames itself!

  Her father, chatting, had not noticed her reluctance. And nor would she allow him to. She just needed this moment to gather her strength.

  But now she was distracted by a tugging at her sleeve.

  ‘Fossils, miss?’

  The woman cradled a tray of what looked like bits of rock. She might have been forty, with grimy lines in her skin, pox scars on her cheeks. Her dress was shapeless and shabby, a poor contrast with the layers of fine-spun cotton and silk Josephine wore.

  Josephine recoiled, then felt ashamed for doing so. Her father, a great reader of Dickens in his youth, had always impressed on her the need to eschew snobbery. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  ‘Fossils, miss. Have one. Souvenir of the opening. You’re his daughter, aren’t you? Sir Iain’s. Good man, my Jack always says, and a fair one when you step out of line. Have a keepsake. Fossils, dug out of the ground while they was building the tunnels. A lot of them there was, and the gents from the Kensington museums took most of ’em, but not all. From deep down, deep in the clay and under it. Penny piece each.’ She smelled of coal dust and baby milk.

  Josephine could not help but look at the woman’s shabby wares. Some of the ‘fossils’ looked like so many bits of rock, but others had some appearance of authenticity, pieces of bone embedded in masses of clay. They could have been bones of dogs or rats for all she knew. But here was a tooth, as long as a cigarette.

  ‘You say your husband worked in the tunnels.’

  ‘That’s so.’

  ‘Then why must you—’ She should not use the word ‘beg’. ‘Why must you sell these trinkets? The pay was good for the labourers, my father says.’ So it had to be, for the conditions in the tunnels had been foul and dangerous.

  ‘Drinks it away, doesn’t he? My Jack. Found these pieces in his pocket and his bag, and why shouldn’t I profit? Look.’ The woman produced a lump of hardened clay bigger than her fist. ‘Dinosaur bones, on my life.’<
br />
  Josephine took it curiously. There were bones trapped in the clay. Bones almost like a hand, or at least a paw, with long fingers and a thumb – but the thumb had a savage claw. And inside the paw –

  ‘This is a clumsy fraud.’

  ‘What do you mean? I swear I never—’

  ‘Inside this, this paw. Can you see what it is holding?’ It was difficult to see in the dim gaslight. The skeletal fingers were wrapped around a slab of some dark stone, that looked shaped, polished. It was like a pendant, of a heavy, clumsy sort. An object clearly finished by human artifice. ‘A dinosaur claw,’ Josephine said heavily, ‘wrapped around a piece of polished semi-precious stone? What kind of fool do you take me for?’

  The woman seemed to think fast, fearful, desperate. ‘But how could it have got inside the clay, miss?’

  ‘A magician could mock this up, I daresay…’ But somehow Josephine couldn’t believe even the famous Li H’sen Chang could fabricate this piece.

  ‘A curiosity,’ the woman breathed. ‘Not just a fossil. A curiosity. And a souvenir of the day.’ She smiled, showing brown, gappy teeth, and held out her hand.

  In the end Josephine gave her her penny.

  Slightly ashamed of herself, feeling grubby from the whole encounter, Josephine was aware of the lumpy mass in her clutch bag throughout what seemed an interminable journey under the river in the brand new train.

  That night, in the privacy of her bedroom, she took out the fossil. Some of the clay had rubbed off in her bag, dirtying it. Carefully, using nail file and scissors, she chipped away at the object, removing the clay, and then the enclosing bones, which she set aside. The pendant, revealed, was seamless, heavy, perfectly proportioned, a neat rectangle with rounded corners, about the size and shape of a playing card.

  Something obviously artificial. And held in a dinosaur’s paw.

  Suddenly, soundlessly, it lit up, gleaming like an Edison light bulb. She screamed and dropped it on the carpet. It did not break; its flare did not diminish.