Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  ‘Indeed.’ The man was human, then, certainly not sent by the same intelligence that controlled Catcher; Raphael was too well organized. ‘You’re remarkably observant, Raphael. I assume that isn’t your real name?’

  ‘You assume correctly. But my abilities are less remarkable than you may think. The human form can perform the most extraordinary acts, if it is applied to one specific task. For five years now, every waking moment of my existence has been spent preparing for confrontations such as this. As you may have surmised, this has been done at the expense of my personal identity. If it’s any consolation to you in your final hour, I have absolutely no social life.’

  The Doctor narrowed his eyes. ‘But who were you, Raphael? What was your name, before they turned you into an assassin?’

  ‘A-ha. You are attempting to re-awaken my buried individuality, in the hope that I might rebel against my conditioning.’ The Doctor felt a sliding sensation between his shoulder blades, the scalpel retracting. ‘I would like you to know that I appreciate these efforts. It is good to have this opportunity to put my training to the test.’

  ‘You’re not scaring me, you know,’ muttered the Doctor, lying ever so slightly. ‘The Great Beast of Tara is scarier than you are.’ As soon as the blade left his body, he rolled over, ready to make his move. He soon realized that there would be little point. Raphael was leaning over him, the scalpel in his hand drawing the eye away from his face so that the only thing you could concentrate on was the blade. A good trick, the Doctor thought. Some form of energy seemed to buzz through the blade, and the object ended in a stubby handle, covered in tiny silver bumps that looked almost like –

  – no. No, that kind of technology wouldn’t exist on Earth for another four hundred years, surely?

  ‘Do you like it?’ Raphael asked, sounding genuinely curious. ‘In a sense, you could say that your kind supplied it.’

  ‘The Time...?’ the Doctor began, then bit his tongue.

  ‘Perhaps not your exact species. There was a caillou visitation in my native land, over a century ago. Fragments of aethereal machinery were found in the wreckage that the visitors left behind. My employers went to considerable lengths to hunt down the relics.’ He waved the scalpel lazily. ‘This is the result.’

  ‘You can’t possibly understand the full potential of the technology you’re playing with,’ hissed the Doctor, and was out of breath by the end of the sentence.

  ‘I agree,’ said Raphael. ‘Not that it makes much difference to you, of course. Now. My superiors in France are quite keen on the ideals of fraternity and equality, as you may know. And you do seem to have more than your fair share of hearts.’

  He leant closer. ‘Let’s see what we can do to rectify that,’ he concluded, and the scalpel glinted in a way that was so sinister it just had to be deliberate.

  Drums of chaos. Howling gods of the jungle. Shadows were reaching up out of the ground, fingers of tar wrapping themselves around the flailing limbs of the Renewalists, and the men were gurgling like children as the hands of ancient, impossible things dragged them into the dust. All around them, the jungle was laughing hysterically.

  Daniel tried to concentrate on their prisoners. Savages, they’d been called, but the anarchy of Africa was no anarchy at all, just a slice of a pattern so deep and different that he’d never be able to understand it properly. The little golden ball (or was it brass?) was twirling and singing at the heart of Woodwicke’s jungle, reading their alien patterns, remaking a corner of New York in the image of a far-away place that Daniel Tremayne would probably never see.

  And Forrester stood in the middle of it all, in a jungle of her own, lined with concrete and lit with a kind of light that wasn’t meant for the eyes of the eighteenth century. She seemed oblivious to it all. She was scratching at her wrist again, gritting her teeth, swearing curses that hadn’t been invented yet. What was wrong with her? What was wrong with everything?

  ‘This was your home, wasn’t it?’ asked the clock, quietly. 11:57 was written all over its body.

  Marielle regarded her coldly. (Her? How long had clocks had genders?) ‘Paris. It was once my home, it is true. But I was forced to depart.’

  ‘I know. Most of your mother’s bloodline died on the guillotine, or in the violence that surrounded it. You saw some of them die. Cracked ribs. Broken necks.’

  ‘Mademoiselle, please –’

  ‘I’m sorry. I just thought it was curious, that’s all.’

  ‘Curious?’

  Christopher ran past again, from the other direction this time. He was followed by a horde of shapeless alien monsters, plus a number of hard-faced mechanical men with glowing red eyes. Childhood nightmares, Duquesne thought. The uniforms were the same as ever, though many of the beings wore armbands marked with the ‘crooked cross’ emblem of the eastern mystics. The armbands were red, and the crosses were a striking black in colour, surrounded by a circle of white. Duquesne wondered what the significance of the symbol was.

  ‘Curious that you’d want to return here,’ elaborated the clock. ‘Curious that of all the possibilities in the darkness, you’d choose this one.’

  ‘It is the one I know best,’ said Duquesne, with a dash of what she hoped was defiance.

  ‘But there are infinite worlds in this realm, Marielle. Why choose one at all? Why tie yourself down to a single flavour of reality? Why not live with the possibility of all of them?’

  Duquesne shook her head. ‘We all need something to hold onto, Horloge. We cannot live our lives in the dark.’

  ‘Ahh. I think I see.’ The clock nodded, and Duquesne saw a few of the Roman numerals fall from its face, a V and an I dropping into the bowl of soup that rested on the table between them. ‘You mean, you’d rather live in this place of suffering and bad memories than live with the darkness of not-knowing-for-certain? Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t...?’

  Duquesne shook her head. ‘We need some order in our lives,’ she said. ‘We need some reason in our existence.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  Another horde of ‘people’ hurried past. There were dozens of them this time; faceless Revolutionaries, spiky-headed machine-creatures, even some of the clanking things Duquesne had glimpsed in the TARDIS. At the very centre of the crowd was Christopher, his arms and legs restrained by ropes and tendrils. Those of the creatures that had shoulders were carrying him away on them.

  ‘Marielle !’ he shouted as he vanished down the street.

  Duquesne stood, preparing to leave. There was a clockwork hand on her arm, restraining her.

  ‘I asked you a question,’ smiled the clock. ‘Why?’

  Duquesne looked from the disintegrating face of the machine to the crowds outside, as they formed a grim procession along the street. ‘I cannot answer,’ she said. ‘Please. I must go.’

  The clock lowered its arm. Duquesne ran out of the restaurant.

  The head had been more or less intact, though Catcher had supplemented the neck with a few old nails. The awkward spaces in the chest had been neatly filled in with rubble, and one of the legs had been beyond repair, so he’d replaced it with a fallen girder. Splinters of wood had been inserted into the arms in those areas where the bones had gone missing.

  All in all, the operation had been a success. The body of Isaac Penley was hardly complete, but all the important pieces seemed to be in place. Catcher added a final finishing touch – a large stone, found in the corner of the King George, to fill the sizeable hole in the right side of the skull – and tried to ignore the way his fingers sank into the skin behind the man’s ears.

  Finally, Catcher stood, his entire body coated in a dark paste made up of sweat, ash, rain, and dust. He looked up at the sky through the gash in the ceiling, offering a quick prayer – no, no, not a prayer, a formula – to the Watchmakers.

  That done, he waited, watching the body for the first signs of life. The ribcage would heave with breath. The wooden fingers would twitch. He was sure tha
t was what would happen. By all that was Reasonable, he was sure.

  The concrete jungle had crumbled back into the earth. The amaranth had done its work, erasing the madness that Catcher had infected the Renewalists with, and now the men lay in the dust, their masks by their sides. Some of them were weeping. Some of them were staring blankly up at the sky, the rain beating down into dull, empty eyes.

  Roz tried to ignore the itching in her wrist. It was getting worse, though she still had no idea what was causing it. Maybe some kind of allergy, something from the eighteenth century that her highly civilized metabolism wasn’t prepared for? The African prisoners, meanwhile, were breaking their bonds and slipping away into the night. A few remained where they’d been dropped by the rationalists. One of them was staring at her.

  ‘No trust of you,’ the man said in broken English. ‘Witch lady. Work of the Devil.’

  ‘What?’ She hadn’t expected that. She’d expected it from the Renewalists, sure, but not from the ones they’d dragged along in the dirt. ‘What are you talking about? I just saved your skin, didn’t I?’

  ‘Bad magic.’ The man was reaching for something that hung around his neck. A cross, Roz realized, carved out of wood. ‘Better get beat up than saved by Devil’s magic. Jesus says.’

  Then he was ushered away by one of the others. Roz gritted her teeth. Every now and then, she had to ask herself why she bothered staying with the TARDIS. It wasn’t as if she was participating in heroic all-singing all-fighting adventures. That was how the Doctor liked to describe their exploits, sure, but only once they were safely back in the TARDIS and the scars had started healing. In truth, she was just being pushed around from scrape to scrape, getting throttled, shot at, insulted, and stranded. No job satisfaction. Seriously. No roots.

  She thought about going home again. Just for a second.

  ‘Oh, God,’ squeaked Daniel.

  Roz followed his gaze. He was staring at... her wrist?

  Her wrist. Oh God. Oh Goddess. It was pulsing, bulging, and the veins started burning. Something was under her skin, pushing at the flesh from the inside. The itch was growing worse by the second, finally turning into something that could only be described as pain, and the amaranth was still spinning

  ‘What the hell is this?’ she asked nobody in particular.

  Christopher Cwej was being led to the place of execution by the monsters, led up a stairway of bones and broken timbers, down which blood and rainwater trickled as if it were a decorative fountain. The machine at the top of the steps reminded Duquesne of a guillotine, but there was a leather chair in the centre of the contraption, through which some form of galvanistic energy crackled and sparked.

  Christopher was shouting something about not having had a fair trial, about how even Roslyn would have been fairer on a suspected criminal than this. The monsters weren’t listening. They prodded him on with guns and sticks.

  ‘Stop them,’ Marielle was telling the crowd. ‘He isn’t an aristocrat. He isn’t one of us. You don’t have to do this to him.’

  ‘I thought you’d be happy to see him dead,’ an old woman in a shawl chimed.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s a caillou. You’re an agent of the Shadow Directory. Do you want me to draw a diagram?’

  There was a wave of laughter. Duquesne shook her head. ‘It is not so simple any more. I have other... oh, I don’t know. I am not a chirurgeon. Stop them. Please.’

  The woman dropped her shawl, revealing a body of broken springs and rusted cogs. 11:58, almost 11:59. ‘This is your world,’ the clock said.

  ‘My world? But...’

  ‘You pulled this scene out of the darkness. Only you can get rid of it. All it needs is a change in perspective.’

  ‘Perspective?’ Christopher was being strapped into the chair with leather restraints, something rubber forced into his mouth. ‘Wait. Wait, I think I understand.’

  Duquesne closed her eyes, but the sound of the crowd refused to go away. She concentrated. Tried to think of something else. Somewhere else.

  When she opened her eyes, the place of execution was still there, and wires were being attached to Christopher’s head. On the far side of the scaffold, a queue of two million other potential victims was forming, the two million who were about to die of that rare and contagious disease called Napoleon.

  ‘There’s one thing you should understand, Marielle,’ said the clock. ‘This isn’t my doing, and I don’t find it any more entertaining than you do. Unfortunately, I can’t stop it. My realm, but your world.’

  ‘Please, Mademoiselle!’

  ‘You were the one who demanded stability and logic. You wanted Reason. This is the end product of that Reason. Spilt blood and staged executions. Lights, camera, history. I don’t have any power in this version of the world. Humanity makes its own Hells.’

  Something was raised above Christopher’s head, something sharp and sparkling and metallic. ‘What can I do?’ Duquesne was saying. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Are you a woman of Reason?’ enquired the clock, its hands ticking towards noon.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Do you have the Sight?’

  ‘No!’ Duquesne shook her head, feeling tears of panic fly away from her eyes. ‘I told you. I am an agent of the Directory. I am not a superstitious peasant. I just –’

  The metal thing reached its zenith above Christopher’s neck. He began to scream.

  ‘Yes?’ said the clock. Thirty seconds to midnight.

  Silence fell across the crowd.

  ‘I have seen Tibetan monks move pebbles with their minds,’ said Duquesne, a sudden hush in her voice. ‘I have seen the witches of Europe summon the Goat of Mendes itself.’

  The executioners paused.

  have seen the works of the Beautiful Shining Daughters of Hysteria, and received no explanation for them. I have visited the ageless creatures the Vatican keeps in its Crow Gallery, and heard the mad things speak of matters that follow no logic.’

  The monsters turned to face her.

  ‘I have been told that there are rational explanations for all of these things. I have never been told what they are.’ Christopher looked up, mud-coloured tears of fury running down his face. ‘I have been pushed from one country to another, from one world to the next. I have been told to be reasonable. I have been told to be rational. I have never been given a choice of the world I should live in.’

  Duquesne faced the clock. ‘I do not know what to believe in. And this is not my world. It is the world that was forced on me by men who spoke of "revolutions" and "rationalizations" and "renewals".’

  The clock nodded. The hands reached the top of its dial.

  ‘Yes,’ Duquesne admitted. ‘Yes. I have the Sight.’

  A roar from the crowd, so small and far away that Duquesne could have laughed, and suddenly there was no longer a place of execution, because there was no longer any reason for one. Monsters screamed, howled, demanded equality and fraternity, then vanished amongst the dunes. Christopher Cwej started blubbering stupidly as Paris withered and died in front of them.

  The clock let out a sigh, a sigh that seemed to fill the whole of history. The tension that held its face together was gone, and what was left of its countenance fell to pieces. The last of the springs snapped, the clockwork came apart, and Duquesne found herself looking at the form within, the thing that had been imprisoned inside the machine for as long as the sentient universe could remember.

  The thing – the intelligence – looked out at her. Looked out without eyes. And Marielle Duquesne understood.

  The thing had no face. She provided it with one.

  Screaming. Roz Forrester decided to give up everything else and concentrate on screaming. She felt the thing in her arm eating through the flesh, squeezing between tendons and bones, worming its way to the surface. Daniel was tugging at her shoulder, and then her wrist split open, split open like a ripe peach, yes another ripe peach, Sheol it hurts, dark flesh pushing out of the split
, raw and wet like a new-born baby, out of her arm, out of her arm –

  The sky opened up above Woodwicke, and the heavens were rent asunder with a sound like ice cracking on a frozen pond. The night sky had vanished, replaced by pure monster darkness; no stars, no smoke, no space. Just the dark.

  Then Daniel started screaming. Then the whole of Woodwicke started screaming, too. Elsewhere, a clock struck twelve. And stopped.

  The scalpel was hovering in front of the Doctor’s face. Was it really hovering, or were the hands that held it just cloaked by Raphael’s shadow? Still thinking like a human, Doctor. Stop that, stop that now. Let go. Lower the façade. Pieces of the cosmic clockwork will fall into place. Circuits completed in dimensions of thought. A pocketful of chance.

  ‘There’s one thing you haven’t thought of,’ he declared.

  ‘Oh?’ Raphael sounded genuinely interested, but the blade still came closer.

  ‘There’s one way out of this that you haven’t considered.’

  ‘Really? What’s that?’

  The sky cracked open. Something huge and meaningless flooded into the world. Raphael looked up. For a split second, the Doctor saw his face, and there was an expression of absolute horror upon it.

  ‘Deus ex machine,’ said the Doctor.

  Erskine Morris looked up, and the sky was no longer there. There were a hundred thousand possible skies, each one jostling for pride of place in the darkness.

  Hellfire

  Erskine looked away. Beside him, he saw Walter Monroe, and William Beaumont, and George Mistral, and all the other Renewalists, all of them staring up into the impossible aether, slits turned upwards to a Hell-coloured Heaven. Rainwater was slithering down their masks. The raindrops looked like tears.

  and

  And the carnival – what was left of it – had fallen silent. The survivors were staring up in shock, wide eyes in ebony faces. Even the bloodied heap of humanity at Erskine’s feet, whom he briefly recognized as a man called Samuel Lincoln, stopped his hysterical whimperings and raised his eyes. It was as if the end of the world they’d been waiting for had finally arrived, and Woodwicke had at last understood the lesson that this evening had been trying to teach it; that every civilization is just one night away from armageddon.