Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  As he worked the Doctor said, ‘I don’t, however, believe that we’re going to find all the answers we’re seeking from this amateur autopsy. What we need is to get back into that ice moon and engage not with dead Dolls, but the living. And find out what’s behind them. These Dolls are clearly artefacts, Zoe. Conscious to some degree perhaps, but artefacts nonetheless, and clearly modelled on the human form, and specifically on the very first human they encountered.’

  ‘Which happened to be little Casey Laws.’

  ‘Yes, as we learned from Phee – thanks to that foolishness by the brother. Which is why the Wheel appears to be infested with toddler-sized alien-technology androids. Of course they’ve now seen human adults, and have experimented on them, and indeed have captured one, whether dead or alive. Perhaps they’re developing a new design… Anyhow, now at least we can lay the artifice bare. Help me.’

  He had completed his incision. Now he and Zoe dug their gloved hands into the long cut, grabbed flaps of skin, and peeled it back. It came away with a sucking noise, to reveal a mass of blue-purple tissue. It wasn’t like opening up a human body to reveal a chest cavity, with ribs and organs, Zoe thought. It was more like peeling a fruit.

  ‘Aha,’ said the Doctor. ‘Just a mass, can you see? No differentiation into specific organs, and so forth. A highly distributed structure. Hand me a specimen glass, would you?’ With his scalpel he sliced away a thin section of the internal tissue, and laid it out on the glass dish Zoe handed him. He took this to a bench where an electron microscope stood among other equipment. With a little tinkering, and only a few frustrated curses, he soon had a magnified image of the tissue’s structure projected on a wall screen.

  It was something like a wiring diagram, torn and crumpled by his crude cutting.

  ‘Why, it doesn’t look biological at all,’ Zoe said. ‘It’s like circuitry.’

  ‘Yes. And can you see the blockier lumps embedded inside? Some of those will be processor units or stores, I’m sure. And some of these other components must be micromechanical impellers. Tiny engines, doing the job of muscles. It’s clearly artificial, but a very advanced design, Zoe.’

  ‘And highly distributed.’

  ‘Yes. With no specific centres, no equivalent of a brain or a heart or musculature – not even anything as straightforward as a blood supply. Instead there is this flexible mass of components, with the body’s functions distributed throughout its volume, down to the level of these microscopic components – and further down to the nanotechnological level and beyond, I shouldn’t wonder. That’s why it’s so flexible in form and posture. And resilient; you could slice this creature in half and it would continue to function.’

  ‘Yet it was killed by a blaster shot. I mean—’

  ‘Yes. Not killed. Terminated. I suspect it was the powerful electromagnetic scrambling that the blaster fire delivered, as much as the physical damage, that shut down this creature. It’s not invulnerable.’

  ‘And clearly an artefact.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Look here.’ He returned to the body and dug deeper into the mass of tissue, with quick, brutal slices of his scalpel. He revealed a kind of structure, a layering. ‘It’s like a Russian doll,’ he said. ‘One inside the other. Can you see? And that, Zoe, must be a relic of the manufacturing process.’

  ‘It might have been made in a matter printer,’ Zoe said. ‘Like the ones here on the Wheel. Built up layer by layer. That would give you this stratification.’

  ‘Yes. A highly advanced version of the human technology here. Quite so, Zoe.’

  ‘Have you ever come across this technology before, Doctor?’

  He scratched his sideburn with the handle of the scalpel. ‘As a matter of fact, I have. In a museum of ancient times. An exhibit rather overshadowed by displays of the worlds of the Great Vampires, and so forth… There was once a race called the Kystra, as I recall. During their Era of Embodiment they had a technology like this, in fact ultimately rather more advanced, based on the manipulation of matter right down to the level of quantum functions. The Kystra were traders, happy to sell their wares to the highest bidder. Thus, just because this is Kystra technology it doesn’t mean that the Kystra necessarily used it. But this is long ago, five or six billion years back.’

  ‘Their “Era of Embodiment”. What came after that?’

  ‘Why, an Era of Disembodiment, of course! But that’s another story.’

  Zoe looked down at the splayed-open Doll. ‘So this is very old tech. But nevertheless, here it is.’

  ‘Yes. Which suggests, does it not, that what we’re dealing with at the heart of the moon must itself be very old. As we had already begun to suspect.’

  ‘But now it has gone beyond producing Dolls with its matter printer technology. These attempts it is making to transform human flesh—’

  ‘Yes, we mustn’t forget about that. We may be able to find out how it is done in the course of this autopsy. Contact with the skin perhaps, the transference of some kind of replicator. Or injections through the teeth – there may be some analogy to venom sacs.’

  That idea made Zoe shudder, and she thought of how the creatures had crawled over her, deep in the ice moon.

  The Doctor said, ‘I suspect it is experimenting. It – our mysterious central mind. Trying things out, to see what works, to discover the most effective strategy to handle the problem it faces.’

  ‘It all seems rather makeshift.’

  ‘Slapdash even, yes. We may be dealing with an entity that is very powerful, but not terribly competent, Zoe…’

  ‘Old and confused.’

  ‘Well, possibly.’

  A communications console chimed, and a screen lit up with Jo Laws’ face. ‘Sorry to disturb you.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ the Doctor called.

  ‘We’ve got the preliminary results of deep-radar scans of the moon. No sign of Sinbad Omar, unfortunately. But we have found a concentration of the Dolls.’

  ‘What kind of concentration?’

  ‘In an upper chamber. It looks like another nest, Doctor. A big one this time.’

  The Doctor turned to Zoe gleefully. ‘Then that’s where we must go next.’

  Zoe protested, ‘But the last time we went into the moon it ended up in a firefight. One of the Dolls was killed, and one of us was taken!’

  ‘We’ve no choice but to go back, Zoe. We’ve known that from the beginning. The mystery of this place is lodged at the heart of that little moon, and we have to keep on going back until we’ve penetrated its heart. And the place to begin is with the Dolls – especially if we can locate their leader, of which we’ve had a few tantalising scraps of evidence.’

  ‘But how can we gain the trust of the Dolls?’

  ‘I’ve an idea about that. But we’ll need to get hold of some of those fancy animated flags they have here. I imagine Jo Laws could arrange that. And, Zoe, when was the last time you spoke to your friend MMAC?…’

  27

  ONCE AGAIN JAMIE was woken up by a row. He pushed his way out of the little private shelter he’d made for himself, his old tartan blanket hanging from a handle on the dome wall. Yawning, he stretched and looked around.

  Every day started with a decision: which end of the makeshift colony’s shabby little recycling plant to visit first. The plant was a rough row of hoppers and processing machines, white boxes joined end to end by pipes and ducts, all the components pinched by Sam and his cronies from Utilities up on the Wheel. You did your personal business at one end, and then let the engines process the waste, extracting nutrients and adding Titan meltwater and tholin chemicals to flavour. And out the other end came breakfast, things like biscuits that weren’t biscuits, bowls of stuff like mushroom soup that wasn’t mushroom soup. It was a little factory with a cludgie at one end and a soup dispenser at the other. Charming.

  The morning decision on which end to visit first – whether you were going to go for input or output – depended on where the biggest crowd was gathered. There was n
ever any queuing. Nobody queued in Tartarus, kingdom of Sam Laws. Instead there was always just a kind of mob around the recycler, one lot crowding to get at the cludgie end, the rest at the soup tap. And already this morning people were pushing and shoving, Jamie saw.

  The shabby dome stretched low over all their heads, the interior space divided up into little tumbledown shacks by blankets and tarpaulins. People were moving everywhere, sticking tousled heads out of improvised tepees, checking over bits of kit. They never looked younger to Jamie than first thing in the morning, their faces puffy with sleep, those big wide pupils making them seem oddly bewildered.

  He didn’t underestimate them; these weren’t kids, they were young adults. Some of them had paired off into couples. He supposed it was impressive that they had managed to survive at all, that after such an improvised getaway they had managed to put together a functioning colony on an ice moon – and they’d planned it all ahead, of course, stealing and stashing the equipment they’d need weeks or months ahead of the eventuality of needing to escape. It said a lot about the harshness of the regime on the Wheel that they even thought that way. And you had to admire the way they had rejected the life they had been born into, in a Wheel that was one huge labour camp, and were out here on this hostile moon trying to find their own way.

  But even so, from Jamie’s lofty age, he couldn’t help but feel responsible for them all.

  And as the days went by things were fraying. This was a very small dome for the seventeen of them, and it was hard to walk away from an argument. The way the stinks were gathering, despite the recycling machines and the air scrubbers, wasn’t helping the mood. And nor did the fact that some bright spark had figured out how to induce the waste-processing machines to produce a kind of vodka. Jamie tasted the filthy stuff once, out of curiosity, and since then had tried to keep the youngest ones away from it. Now everybody woke up with a hangover, which only made things worse.

  Even when you went outside there was no escape. The light was never better than dim, like a murky winter afternoon in the Highlands. Oddly, Jamie kept expecting the dense smog that covered the sky to clear, but it never would, not for five thousand million years, Phee had told him, not until the dying sun heated up and blew away Titan’s clouds for ever. No wonder the inhabitants of Tartarus were driving each other crazy.

  Mind you, Jamie had been impressed by the name Sam had given his colony. Phee said Tartarus was a deep layer of Hell where Zeus, king of the gods, had once hurled the Titans, giants of Greek myth. Jamie suspected that if Sam knew about stuff like that he wasn’t quite the hardened ignoramus he pretended to be, or indeed the C-grade he’d been labelled. Well, Tartarus seemed a good name for this place, for a lot of the time it did feel like a pit into which they’d all been flung.

  And this morning the fights and pushing seemed a bit more serious than usual. When a fist was thrown, and there was a splash of blood, Jamie hurried forward.

  The fight had started at the middle of the recycling chain, near something called a Sabatier furnace, where solid human waste was broken down under intense heat to yield usable chemicals and water. But the process wasn’t perfect, there was always a residue, and somebody, every day, had to clean out that residue and dump it in a hole they’d dug in the ice outside. It was one of the worst jobs in the little colony, and had been a cause of friction from the start.

  And now Sam Laws and Dai Llewellyn were coming to blows right beside the furnace. Their supporters were gathered around them shouting, and the usual idiots who just liked a barney had come crowding around to make things worse.

  Jamie barrelled into the middle of it. He was shorter than these gangly space kids but stockier and stronger, and he pushed the main protagonists apart, a hand on each of their chests. ‘Hey, hey, hold on now.’

  Sam and Dai faced each other, breathing hard. Dai was the boy Jamie had pulled out of the methane lake on the day they arrived. He was supporting himself on the improvised crutch he’d been using ever since that accident, when a tiny flaw in his skinsuit had let the cold of superchilled methane-ethane mix get to one of his legs, and he had suffered bad frostbite from the knee joint down. But it was Sam who had the cut over his eye, Sam who had what looked like a nasty bruise coming up on one cheek.

  They were still shouting, so Jamie grabbed their tunics and shook them. ‘Shut your geggies, the pair o’ you. What’s this all about? Sam?’

  ‘Dai didn’t do his shift,’ Sam said. ‘On the furnace. So it got overloaded, it shut itself down, and now the whole process is backed up.’

  Jamie was horrified. ‘D’ye mean there’s no breakfast?’

  Phee pushed her way through now: Phee, the only A-grader here, controller of the rotas, popular with nobody, but on the other hand not particularly disliked by anybody either. She said, ‘Sam’s right.’

  Dai snapped, ‘Ah, you always back him up.’

  ‘It was your turn, Dai. You didn’t show up.’

  Dai snarled, ‘Then let somebody else do it. You do it, A-girl rota queen.’

  ‘These jobs have to be done,’ Sam said. ‘To keep everything functioning.’ His voice was reasonable, so were his words, but Jamie could see how angry he was getting, how frustrated, how humiliated.

  Dai snapped back, ‘We might as well go back to the mine if it’s going to be like this. What are you going to do, Sam, kettle us? Have your pet goon here cut my toes off?’ And he pointed at Jamie with his thumb.

  Jamie gave him a warning shove. ‘Less of that, sonny.’

  Dai faced Sam. ‘If you want the grunge slopped out of this furnace, do it yourself. Go on.’

  ‘It’s not my turn.’

  ‘Not my turn,’ Dai echoed, in a childish singsong. ‘Not my turn. What are you going to do today? Oh, I know. You’re going flying over Vesuvius, aren’t you? That’s good enough for the great leader, isn’t it? While the rest of us slop crud out of the furnace. Is it because I’m a C?’

  ‘I’m a C myself, you rockhead.’

  ‘Not for much longer, though, eh, Sam? You planning to be the only A in Tartarus? A super-A, a super-duper—’

  ‘Shut up. Just do the job.’

  ‘Do it yourself.’

  And Sam hesitated.

  Go on, Jamie thought, silently urging Sam. Say you’ll do it. Say you’ll stay here and get the furnace sorted out. That’s what a true leader would do, in a situation like this. Lead by example. Show that you’re not above doing the menial stuff with everybody else – give up your latest playtime, get your hands dirty. That way you’ll shame Dai back into line. But the rebel was warring with the leader in Sam; he was used to being the one who broke all the rules, not the one who enforced them.

  In the end the rebel won. Sam snarled and shook Jamie’s hand away. ‘I’m going flying. It’s my turn. And you, Llewellyn, you do what it says you’ve got to do on the rota.’ And he turned his back and walked away.

  The crowd he left behind shouted angrily. Dai’s thin voice called after Sam, ‘Or what? How will you make me, Sam? What will you do?’

  Sam didn’t look back.

  The crowd broke up, and soon only Jamie and Phee were left by the dormant machines.

  ‘He came so close,’ Phee said. ‘So close to getting it right.’

  ‘I know. But you’re all still very young.’

  ‘Tell me about it. Sometimes being sixteen drives me crazy.’

  Jamie laughed. ‘Make the most of it.’

  ‘Look at us, Jamie. I suppose we ought to be proud we’re surviving here at all. But what if we had a real emergency? You know what my nightmare is? Suppose somebody got pregnant. How would we handle that?’

  ‘Umm.’ Jamie scratched his chin. ‘I’m nae midwife, that’s fer sure.’

  ‘And that idiot Sam has shut down the comms and cut us off even from the possibility of asking for help from the Wheel.’ Her small face was pinched with worry.

  ‘Hey, hey. We’ll get through this. You’re not much of a rebel yersel’, are ye?�
�

  ‘I only came to look after Sam.’

  ‘I know.’

  And I only came, Jamie thought with a stab of cynicism, to make sure that that pendant around your neck gets to the Doctor, one day, somehow. But then he thought back to those brutal few hours of the kettling, when these kids, maddened by fear and betrayal, started to plan the breakout that could have killed them all, and Jamie had to decide whether to stay with them or not. No, he decided, looking into his own soul. He’d have come with these kids anyway, amulet or not. They were brave and resourceful but they were always going to need a bit of help, a wise head. And in the absence of any wise heads, he thought ruefully, James Robert McCrimmon would have to do.

  And maybe these strange Saturn children reminded him of other youngsters, back in Scotland, youngsters who had fought for their own dream, and had been maimed, imprisoned, transported and killed for their trouble.

  He patted Phee’s shoulder. ‘Ye an’ me together, eh?’

  She forced a smile. Theatrically she threw her rota over her shoulder. ‘So what do you know about Sabatier furnaces?’

  ‘Less than ye can possibly imagine.’ He rolled his sleeves up. ‘Show me where to start.’

  28

  THE SECOND EXPEDITION that Zoe joined into the heart of the ice moon was more purposeful than the first. They had proper maps now, for one thing. And, rather dismayingly, the expedition was heavily armed.

  The Doctor went in empty-handed, as ever relying on nothing more dangerous than his wits. Zoe herself carried only a neat fold-up display flag in a backpack. But the squad of Bootstrap guards who went in with them wore body armour, and had blasters at their hips, and two of them carried a larger weapon, like a bazooka.

  And once again Florian Hart, as heavily armed and armoured as her guards, insisted on accompanying them.

  The Doctor grumbled as they worked their way through the corridors and crevasses of the moon’s interior. ‘Do we really need an armed guard, Florian?