Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  ‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Duquesne asked, looking down as another crack appeared in their island.

  ‘Er. We’re floating the right way, I’m sure. OK, what about psychokinesis? That’s a good one.’

  Duquesne shot him a dark glance. She was trying to keep on good terms with him, but he was starting to irritate her. If he keeps this up, she thought, I’ll have to do my job.

  The idea made her grimace. I do not wish to be like a chirurgeon, she thought. I do not wish to put my faith in the killing lessons. I do not wish to let the Directory steal my soul away.

  ‘What about the secret passage?’ she asked, trying to distract herself.

  ‘Oh. That.’ Cwej shut the dictionary. ‘I don’t know. The Doctor said once that every good library should have a secret passage. It’s kind of traditional. I suppose there must be one in the TARDIS library. I suppose that’s what Interface meant.’

  Duquesne still wasn’t sure who this interface was, but she pressed on. ‘And you don’t know where in the library to look for it, I take it?’

  ‘No. And if I did, we probably couldn’t get to it.’ He indicated the other islands floating alongside them with a wave of his hand, inadvertently throwing the dictionary over the edge and into the darkness. Duquesne was sure she heard mechanical jaws start chewing on it down below. ‘And even if we could find it and get to it, we don’t know if it’d still lead anywhere. That’s the trouble with all this multi-dimensional transcendental stuff –’

  He broke off.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Duquesne asked, patiently.

  ‘Can I just take this opportunity to say something?’ Cwej grinned. ‘I’m still brilliant. Think about it for a second. Suppose you’re a Time Lord. Suppose you can build things like TARDISes, right? And you’ve got a library. Where d’you put the secret passage?’

  Duquesne sighed. ‘Not knowing what a "Time Lord" is, Christopher, I couldn’t say.’

  ‘Pick a book.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Go on. Shut your eyes. Reach into that stack of books over there, pick one out at random. It’s just a hunch, all right?’

  Anything to keep him happy, Duquesne thought. She did as he said, letting her fingers find a large but surprisingly light novel which bore the title A Passage to India. She thought she felt her fingertips prickle slightly as she touched the cover.

  ‘Open it,’ Cwej beamed. Duquesne shrugged, opened the book, looked down at the first page.

  Except that there was no page. There was just a space, a hole that seemed to stretch into infinity. A tunnel.

  Alarmed, she studied the edges of the book. On the outside, it seemed perfectly normal. But on the inside...

  ‘Where in his library would a Time Lord put a secret passage?’ said Cwej. ‘Answer: in one of the books.’

  Duquesne just stared at him. Cwej stood, walked over to her, indicated the book.

  ‘After you,’ he said, politely.

  The island was empty. It had carried two people, but now they were gone, leaving only an untidy pile of reference books and second-hand paperbacks.

  Satisfied, the force that held the TARDIS together released its grip on the island. The cracks blossomed across it, until there was nothing left of the platform but a hundred marble shards that fell away into the darkness.

  There was the sound of splintering wood. Wet scraps of fabric, some painted with stars and moon-signs, drifted past on the night breeze. From the crowd, there wasn’t so much as a shout; just a murmur, like the roar of the sea. White noise.

  ‘Sheol,’ whispered Roz.

  She and Daniel were hiding behind the corner of the town records office. Or, rather, she was hiding. Daniel was just standing behind her, tugging at her sleeve.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Not this way.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know. Come on. They’re going to notice you.’

  Notice me, Roz thought. Not us. Thanks, partner. She pointed towards a part of the street where a tent had once stood. ‘See that? I used to work there. If you can call it work. Looks like somebody’s got a grudge against fortune-tellers. Probably someone I gave a bad reading to.’

  She watched the people tearing down the remaining stalls. They’d started by venting their anger on those attractions that seemed ‘philosophically corrupt’, the conjurers and the ersatz gypsies. Now they were attacking anything they could see. Twenty feet away, a man in a colourful waistcoat was being pinned to the ground and repeatedly kicked by four serious-looking middle-aged men who’d probably been accountants or clerks or something earlier in the day.

  Then she saw the man in the hood. He stood at the very heart of the crowd, waving his arms like a conductor, determined that if this madness was going to become a riot, it was going to be a damned well-ordered riot. He was short but muscular, his entire head obscured by grey sackcloth. Roz narrowed her eyes. The behaviour of the townsfolk was odd enough, but this one looked downright weird.

  She stared into the twin slits of his eyes, and suddenly realized that he was staring back.

  Slowly, carefully, he raised his hand. A pointed finger.

  Daniel stopped tugging at her sleeve. Roz turned, started to run, and saw that he was already running. The adrenalin burst triggered off a memory, and she saw herself tearing across a desert full of shadows... but there were worse and angrier things in the universe, she reminded herself, than gynoids.

  As if to prove the point, something hard and heavy promptly cracked against her neck. There were peculiar pink-and-orange lights exploding inside her head as she fell to the ground.

  ‘He’s mad,’ said Mr Wolcott. ‘I always said he was a bit on the peculiar side.’

  ‘When did you say that?’ inquired Mr Van DeVanter.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Always. He tried to force me to read this scientific paper he’d written, once. About how you could build a machine to travel through time using mirrors and electricity. Said he was a century ahead of his time. I mean to say...

  Isaac Penley’s eyes danced nervously around the hall. The other three had forgotten about him again. He considered leaping to Mr Catcher’s defence, then remembered that if he’d been able to defend anyone properly, he’d still be practising law and probably an awful lot richer.

  ‘If I might bring this meeting to order?’ trilled Mrs Wilson. Mrs Wilson had no official position on the council, but her husband seemed to be perpetually sick (and so would I be, Mr Wolcott had once said, if I’d married her), and she never missed the chance to stand in for him. Her seemingly permanent position on the council was acknowledged by most of Woodwicke, though Mr Catcher always seemed to treat her with suspicion. Perhaps she was a diabolist, Isaac thought. In disguise. ‘Thank you, gentlemen. If we could discuss the question of what action we should take at this difficult time...

  Isaac felt himself deflate. He’d trusted Catcher, hadn’t he?

  ‘What’s to discuss?’ asked Wolcott. ‘We’ve made a total balls-up of the whole situation. Old Silkwood’s had his head dented by some idiot flinging rocks about. Half of the watchmen don’t want anything to do with the situation, and the other half are siding with the troublemakers. If they are troublemakers. For all we know, the town might honestly be under siege from Satanists, and the rioters might be the only ones saving our immortal souls from the oncoming darkness.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You never know,’ he concluded.

  ‘So, what do we do now?’ asked Mr Van DeVanter.

  What do we do now? The dread question. Isaac glanced at the door. He could easily slip out of the hall, run after Mr Catcher. I mean, yes, he’d seemed a little upset when the diabolist had vanished...

  ‘We could call in the militia,’ suggested Mr Wolcott.

  ... but he had a right to be, surely? Besides, at least the man seemed to have some idea of what was going on. Unlike the council.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ cut in Mrs Wilson. ‘If we could remember tha
t this is a democratic council. If we could have suggestions in an orderly manner, then the four of us can vote on the outcome...

  She looked along the table, noticing the empty seat at the end.

  ‘The three of us,’ she said. ‘The three of us can vote on the outcome.’

  There was a light at the end of the tunnel. It was a very attractive light, covered in an elaborate paper shade that had been hand-painted with a scene of oriental gods hunting huge wild cats. Marielle Duquesne blinked. The room was much like any other she’d seen in this TARDIS complex, though the roundels in the walls were fashioned from brass instead of marble or wood, and there was the scent of incense in the air. It reminded her of the ashrams of India, or of the temples she’d visited when the Directory had sent her to Egypt to investigate the Amarna Graffito. The floor was unfurnished and tiled with copper plates, but the walls were lined with stacks of childhood leftovers that touched the ceiling, heaps of model boats and rag dolls and broken toy drums

  Behind her, Cwej tumbled out of the tunnel. Stray books with titles like The Catcher in the Rye and Black Orchid 2; This Time It’s Personal flapped down the passage behind him and landed in an untidy pile.

  ‘Talk about getting lost in a good book;’ he said, annoyingly.

  ‘Where are we?’ Duquesne asked.

  Cwej looked around, sniffing the air. His attention was caught by a large bottle, mounted on a stand in one corner. There were shapes moving inside the glass.

  ‘Oh, wow,’ said Cwej. ‘Look, it’s a little universe in a bottle. You can see all the tiny people.’

  ‘Christopher!’

  ‘Hey, that one’s got a TARDIS just like the Doctor’s. Maybe it is the Doctor. I wonder what he’s doing in San Francisco?’ He looked up from the bottle, but his gaze didn’t focus on Duquesne. ‘Oh. Hello, Interface.’

  Duquesne spun round to follow his gaze. In the far wall, one of the roundels had opened up, revealing a huge and bloodshot eye. Then another opened, and another, and another. Eyes. Ears. Mouths, both horizontal and vertical.

  ‘Help me,’ said Interface, with a dozen sick voices. ‘Help. Personality. Please. Invaded. TARDIS.’

  Cwej looked concerned. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘TARDIS. Big. Too. Personality. Invaded.’

  ‘The TARDIS has had its personality invaded?’ Cwej guessed.

  ‘No. My. Personality. My personality. Invaded. TARDIS.’

  ‘The TARDIS has invaded your...?’ Cwej’s eyes opened wide. ‘I don’t understand. What should we do?’ We, noted Duquesne. Good. He was starting to trust her, then.

  ‘It. It. It. Communicating. With you. Talk. Don’t trust. Don’t trust. Talking to. Trying to. To talk to you. The TARDIS. Is. It is.’

  ‘The TARDIS is trying to... no. You said it couldn’t do that. You said it’d be like talking to New Birmingham or something.’

  ‘Talk,’ squealed the interface, and something rippled through the room again. Duquesne gasped. The burning wasn’t just in her back now, it had torn through her nervous system and shot straight to the top of her spine, opening up like a flower inside her head. As the ripple touched the walls, the mouths were sealed shut, the eyes imploded violently, and the ears collapsed in on themselves.

  Then it was over. Duquesne shot a glance at Cwej, but he didn’t look back at her. His jaw was hanging open, and his eyes were glazed over with memories.

  The slits were staring down at her, and Roz could see a water-grey pair of eyes on the other side of the sackcloth. There were hands around her throat. Her back was flat against the road, and something hard and bony was pressing down on her chest, stopping her from moving.

  She suddenly remembered that she wasn’t breathing, and was disappointed that she couldn’t scream.

  ‘Io Ordo Io Io,’ the hooded executioner was muttering. Like an exorcism in binary. Forcing the life out of Roslyn Inyathi Forrester, the witch-woman of Woodwicke. All sounds became one sound, all sensations became one sensation. The man’s chanting. The roar of the crowd. Everything was fire. Everything was the colour of flame.

  She was in a cave. In a cave on a planet of fire. There was a machine with her, a robot, but its silver skin was as delicate as porcelain and it changed its shape at will. Its voice was cultured and it spoke fluent English.

  ‘This is how it ends for us all,’ the robot said, mournfully. ‘Lost. Abandoned. Far from home. Exiled from our own times and cut off from the TARDIS.’

  Roz wanted to speak, to tell it that she wasn’t going to die, but in some other world a man was throttling her and she couldn’t find the breath.

  ‘He shot me,’ the machine continued, its body bathing in the bright orange fire. ‘At point-blank range. Not that the range makes much difference, of course. A mercy killing, he would have said. Certainly, he felt less guilt about me than he did about his human companions. But then, we machines have no souls. And what are ghosts, but manifestations of guilt? We make terrible ghosts.’

  Then it began to shrink, its precious silver body folding in on itself until it was no bigger than a child’s doll.

  ‘This is how it ends for us all,’ it said, in a high-pitched and squeaky voice. ‘Now the last surviving part of me is invaded. Help me. Help. Personality. TARDIS. Don’t trust her. Don’t trust her, Cwej.’

  New sounds pushed their way up out of the fire. The syllables became real again.

  ‘Ordo Ordo Io Ordo,’ said the man. There was no longer any pain in Roz’s neck. There was no room inside her for pain any more. She’d forgotten what breathing was like. The flames tried to drag her back under, and she knew she couldn’t stop them.

  Just as she was about to die, everything changed.

  A heavy shape fell on top of her, then rolled aside. The hooded man had dropped to the ground, sticky half-words bubbling up in his mouth. Air rushed back into Roz’s lungs. Her neck started to ache again.

  She looked up. Daniel Tremayne was standing over her, a rock in his hands, a vacant expression on his face. Roz turned her head, and it hurt like Sheol. The hooded man lay on the ground next to her, a dent in the back of the cowl, a dent that ran right through the fabric and into his skull. She couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead.

  ‘He was going to kill you,’ said Daniel.

  Roz forced herself to her feet. The other rioters were all around them, but most were caught up in struggles of their own. As she stood, eyes began to turn in her direction. Somebody shouted something about a lynching.

  ‘I saved you,’ Daniel said, and he didn’t sound pleased with himself, not in the slightest. He looked down at the rock in his hand, his face utterly blank. Roz watched him drop it by the motionless form of the hooded man, and knew exactly what he was thinking.

  Daniel Tremayne, getting himself mixed up in someone else’s fight. Getting himself involved, in the most violent way imaginable.

  Now the crowd was closing in, shouts turning to war cries. This time, it was Roz who pulled at Daniel’s sleeve, tugging him away down the first side-street she saw.

  ‘I’m damned,’ she heard him say as they ran. ‘I’ll never get out now. I’m damned.’

  7

  The Edge of Distraction

  A man in a grey mask was standing on the corner of Burr Street, demanding answers from Beth-Ann Wolcott, the councillor’s daughter. The man was determined to find out why she’d never married. There was something deeply suspicious about that, apparently, especially at her age. The door of the Wolcott house was open, and there were other masked men inside, peering under the beds and pulling up the floorboards.

  None of the men were members of the Renewal Society. They were just ‘concerned citizens’. Half an hour earlier, the sackcloth of their masks had been used for storing potatoes.

  As the rationalists moved from street to street in search of ‘evidence’, the rumours spread in a manner that was almost viral. More children had been butchered, it was said, though no one seemed to be able to name the children that
had died. A shrine to Baalzebub had been located in the ramshackle home of a Spanish family, but nobody was sure how the place had been identified as a shrine to Baalzebub. A woman living in Eastern Walk had been unmasked as an anarchist witch – again, the method of detection seemed unclear – and was now awaiting trial by the Renewalists.

  Twenty-five minutes after the church bell had tolled eleven, a man named Samuel Lincoln took shelter in the doorway of a grocery store in Paris Street and, seeing the smoke rising from the ‘African quarter’ of town, made disparaging comments about the behaviour of his fellow townspeople. A local priest, a wiry and wide-eyed man by the name of Hatchard, took him to task and insisted that ‘the flock of Satan must be purged’. An argument ensued, with Samuel Lincoln calling the priest a ‘fanatical buffoon’ and the priest calling Samuel Lincoln a ‘mollycoddler of the Beast’. The dispute ended when Hatchard hit his opponent in the face with an empty whiskey bottle.

  Within minutes the grocery store was surrounded by other citizens, including masked representatives of the Renewal Society. The dispute escalated.

  Evidently, the Age of Reason was in full swing.

  The night was full of crawling, blasphemous things. They hid behind the trees and the bushes all along Hazelrow Avenue, watching Catcher walk back towards the house, ticking in the greenery, reminding him of his mistakes. He’d let the man in the irrational white suit trick him. The Watchmakers resented that. If they hadn’t been such Reasonable beings, Catcher would have thought they were jealous.

  FOR ARE WE NOT THE WATCHMAKERS? they were saying. ARE WE NOT THE GREAT ARCHITECTS? DID WE NOT MAP OUT EVERY INCH OF THE COSMOS, AEONS BEFORE MAN EVEN CHARTERED HIS OWN DOMAIN? TO US, ALL OF SPACE – ALL OF TIME – IS NOTHING MORE THAN A CLOCKWORK, AND WE ARE THE ONES THAT HOLD THE WATCH-HANDLE. REMEMBER WHAT WE TAUGHT YOU, BOY.

  Yes. Catcher remembered tearing through the halls of the family home, being pinned to the floor by his parents, being carried away on the back of a cart. His family had paid the surgeons to lock him in a little grey room, where they’d watched him and fed him and scrubbed him and stuck instruments into him. It had been meant as a punishment, he’d been sure, but it had felt more like a BE VERY CAREFUL AS ‘REVELATION’ IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC TERM more like something he couldn’t really name.