Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  – This was the world of the Watchmakers, Christopher. One of the first Great Races. Things of extraordinary power. Perhaps more power than they ever realized. See?

  Chris concentrated on her smile, and focused on the Watchmakers in their cities; grim-faced men in robes of grey, their hands busy at machines, turning handles and pressing switches. They looked ordinary. They looked drab.

  – The Watchmakers. Logical, masculine creatures. They rejected the possibility, and denied the world of wonders. Perhaps it scared them. They wanted existence to be precise, to be mechanical, so that they could live their lives to a solemn timetable. They wanted to understand the universe in the same way you might understand a piece of clockwork. As a cold machine. No room for cities of brass or dragonfly-gods. They invented rules, and tied creation down to those rules.

  ‘Rational,’ Chris heard himself say.

  – Yes. They were beings of Reason. They proved that horses couldn’t fly, so horses didn’t fly. They proved that cities couldn’t dream, so cities didn’t dream. The shadeling gods, the children of the Pythia... one by one, they all died, pushed out of a cosmos that was too rational to let them live. The Watchmakers took away the glamours and the mysteries, then built machines in their places. They became kings of Reason. Masters of space, lords of time

  And there they all were, in the folds of her face. The monsters and angels and impossible things, retreating into the darkness as Chris watched, vanishing into the whirlpools of her eyes. Everything strange and magical dropped out of the universe. The Watchmakers held creation in a hard grey fist and squeezed it dry.

  The Watchmakers. Something clicked in Chris’ head.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘What did you call the Watchmakers? Masters of space and lords of -’

  But then the Carnival Queen changed her expression, and Chris was looking into a vast hall, a throne-room painted in the dull grey of eternity. There was a man seated in the hall, a large, powerful man, his face wreathed by a great white beard and moustache, his head topped by a conical crown. His throne was made out of the crushed bones of things that looked suspiciously like gigantic bats.

  Two other men sat at his side. One carried the tools of an engineer; the other’s position was less obvious.

  ‘I dreamed about this place,’ breathed Chris. ‘I was looking for Roz, and... I mean, how? How could you know about this?’

  – Been there, done that.

  ‘Now, See What We Have Created,’ the bearded man said, and his voice was living thunder. ‘We Have Built A World Of Reason Triumphant. And It Is Good.’

  – The greatest of all the Watchmakers, said the Carnival Queen. The first King of the Majestic Clockwork. Watch.

  So Chris watched. Watched as the man lifted an arm, placed a hand against his chest. Watched as he sank his hand deep into his own body, and pulled something out from his torso. Chris thought it might be his heart, but then he saw the thing, wriggling in the man’s hand; it was shadow-coloured, slippery, its shape changing from second to second.

  The other two men in the hall reached into themselves as well, and pulled out similar objects. Chris took a step back. Across the planet of the Watchmakers, grey people in grey robes were reaching into their bodies and pulling out their...

  ... their what?

  – Nobody is entirely rational, Christopher. Not even the Watchmakers. They wanted a universe of Reason, but to get it, they had to give something up. Those little irrational parts of themselves. Those small corners of their souls that believed in the superstitions, that wanted the world of wonders back. The mutable parts. The changeable parts.

  Across the Watchmaker world, the people were grasping their irrational shadows and hurling them away. The shadows shrieked into the sky, screaming, crying. Forsaken. They congregated in the upper atmosphere, becoming one great cloud of unreason.

  ‘Go,’ said the King.

  And the cloud went. It shrieked across the skies, exiled from its homeworld. It screamed through galaxies, unwanted and alone, until the rational universe opened up and it vanished into the darkness on the other side of existence.

  ‘There,’ said the Watchmaker King. ‘Now We Are Things of Reason Absolute. Our... Demons... Are Safely Confined, Beyond The Reach Of Man Or Machine. We Are Perfect. We Are Whole.’

  Chris let his attention wander across the galaxies, briefly wondering how much of this was supposed to be real and how much of it was just a fairy-tale. He found the point where the great shadow had vanished. There. There, in a little corner of creation cut off from the rest of the universe, in the dark places on the other side of Reason. The shadow had been trapped there, in the prison-realm of the Watchmaker King, for... for how long, now? How long since the time of the Watchmakers?

  – About three-and-a-half billion years, said the shadow. Chris jumped. He tried to focus, tried to pin his attention down, but all he could see was the Carnival Queen’s face.

  ‘It’s you,’ Chris said. ‘It’s you.’

  – Who else? said the Carnival Queen.

  I am not a Godless man. You could not call me a Godless man.

  Isaac Penley was lost. The whole town looked different in the rain, and besides, the streets didn’t always stay in the same places, the way they used to.

  Dear Lord, when I joined the Renewal Society, I did not do it to spite you. To spite thee, I mean. I am not like them. I am no Catholic, but I have never made fun of His late Holiness the Pope as the others have.

  He tried to remember the way back to the council hall, but couldn’t. There was a splinter, right in the middle of his head, and it was stopping some of his memories getting past. He’d tried asking passers-by for directions, but they didn’t seem to want to talk. Most of them were running, screaming about things hiding in shadows and the spawn of Baalzebub falling from the skies. Some of them had seen him and screamed even harder, which seemed peculiar.

  I merely wanted assurance, Lord. For the world seemed to be falling to pieces, with all this talk of the age of reason and the death of religion, and anarchy abroad all across Europe. I trusted the rationalists to provide us with the answers. That is why I joined them, Lord. That is the only reason, I swear.

  He continued along the street, dragging his limp left leg behind him, listening to the scrapings of the nails that held his muscles together. This was wrong, very wrong, but he couldn’t quite say why.

  I may never have really trusted in you, Lord... trusted in thee... but I am not a Godless man even so, and I am sorry and I am in the land of the mad and I want to get OUT -

  – then, suddenly he was face-to-face with the man in the white suit. The man was covered in mud and rainwater, his face wrinkled and concerned. Cautiously, he tipped his hat.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said.

  ‘Goo’ e’eing,’ said Isaac, and was surprised by the way the splinters caught in his throat. ‘I wonn... wonnered ifh you knoo ... wha... what was goinng on?’

  The man frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘If you know what was... go-ing... on.’ Isaac looked up at the sky, and his brow furrowed, ‘I wonn-dered... is this... wha’ it’s like? Is this the fu... the fu... the future?’

  The man looked grave, but didn’t reply.

  ‘Everything see... seems changed,’ Isaac continued. ‘Theyy said everything would be differ... different... in the future. Is this wha’ it’ll be like? Is this it? Only... it woub... would... be nice to know. For a change.’

  The man in the hat thought for a moment.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  Once, the stones that made up the walls of the old King George had been used as burial markers by the American Indians. Nobody remembered that now, of course. The Indians were either dead or moved to far-away places, and the men who’d taken the stones hadn’t known (or cared) what their purpose had been.

  But the stones remembered. The storm called to them, singing them back into wakefulness.

  Comecomecallinguscallawaybacktotim
ebacktotime, sang the stones. Firstwewereburiedfirstwewereneededfirstwewerefound.

  ‘Sodomy,’ Erskine Morris was shouting. ‘Sodomy!’

  Walter Monroe turned to the other members of the Renewal Society. Only a handful were left now, huddled outside the ruined pub, many having run from the scene of the carnival when the sky had opened up. Not worthy to wear their hoods, Monroe had thought.

  ‘Cacophony,’ he told them. ‘It’s an illusion. An illusion, that’s all. They’re just trying to put us out.’

  Firstwewerefoundintheearthinthewetnessthewheelgoesonturning.

  ‘Who are?’ one of the others asked. His voice was shrill.

  ‘Them. Them. Get a grip on yourself, man, you’re shrieking like a woman. The Cacophonists.’ Monroe nodded, pleased with the new word. ‘Some truths are self-evident, mmm? This proves Mr Catcher had the right idea all along. The sky opening up, you see? Quite clearly, this is what we’ve been waiting for.’

  There was a silence. Except for: thewheelgoesonturning.

  ‘The final battle,’ intoned Monroe, his throat full of spittle. ‘The forces of superstition want to take this town from us. Well, by Go... by my word, they’ll have a fight on their hands. We’ll protect the people of Woodwicke from Cacophony, or die trying.’

  Withleversandbuttonsthewheelgoesonmoving.

  But the men weren’t listening. They were staring, focusing on the shrill-voiced Renewalist at the back of the group. He was backing away from them.

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’

  Monroe’s jaw dropped open. He raised the wooden end of his rifle, a broken weapon that had been recovered from the home of an obvious diabolist, now being used as a club. ‘Agents of Cacophony. We might have guessed they’d even walk among us.’

  ‘What?’ shrieked the man. ‘What did I do?’

  ‘Your forehead,’ growled Monroe.

  The man froze. Raised his hand. Touched his forehead and winced, his fingers prodding the pupil of the eye that was growing there. The eye blinked in unison with the other two.

  ‘No,’ he squeaked, but the Renewalists already had him surrounded.

  Monroe raised the rifle, swinging it over his head with one hand. The flesh of the hand was bubbling and shifting, and raw new fingers were sprouting from it like saplings, but no one noticed it, not even Monroe himself. On the pavements outside the old King George, blood mingled with the rain.

  Running again. A few weeks earlier, Daniel Tremayne would have said that running was a good policy. Now it hardly seemed to matter. You could run. You could stay and hit people with rocks. The world was falling apart, what difference did it make?

  He looked back along the side-street. Forrester – the other Forrester, the one with the gun – was nowhere to be seen. But then, the Forrester he knew was a sly creature, so her twin would probably be the same. Skulking in the shadows, maybe.

  ‘Who is she?’ he shouted above the roar of the storm.

  ‘She’s me,’ said Forrester, not looking back.

  ‘She can’t be you. You’re you. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah, okay. She’s me like I used to be. Before the Doctor carried me off and started working on my head.’ She might as well have been talking Chinese, thought Daniel, and she probably knew it. ‘I’d forgotten what a complete and utter bitch I was.’

  ‘She really wants to kill you?’

  ‘Yup. Hard-assed law enforcer, that was me. Of course, she’s got the gun. The Doctor would never let me carry one of those. Not a flenser.’

  There was a shout from the other end of the street, like the kind of official warning the militia might use. Daniel Tremayne could see a shape up ahead, a Forrester-shaped shape, and wondered how the double had managed to overtake them.

  Something small and metallic flew through the air, embedding itself in a wall. Before Daniel could say anything, it exploded, and the atmosphere was filled with a thick brown miasma that seemed to cling to everything it touched.

  ‘Or slither-caps,’ he heard Forrester-1 mutter. ‘I’d forgotten about the slither-caps.’

  It was hard to know what to say, really.

  ‘You’re the one the Watchmakers... I mean, you’re the thing that...’

  – That they couldn’t live with. They don’t remember me at all now, and don’t even let themselves dream of me. On their homeworld, buried in the deepest archives, there are books that only the Highest of the High are ever allowed to read. The only books that describe the old time before the days of the clockwork universe, locked away from the eyes of the world. There’s one in particular...

  The book opened up in front of Chris, and he wondered whether it was really there or just an illusion written across Marielle’s face. The pages shone like glass, and one paragraph, penned in ink the colour of rust, had been underlined.

  ‘For there was Time before this; and there was Being before this; and there was Space before this. And there were Things Damned in that place, and there were Things Remarkable.’

  – The Watchmakers, being rational monsters, never understood that passage properly. They take it all very literally, these days. They think it means that there was another universe before this one, and that it was destroyed in the Big Bang. Ask the Doctor, and that’s what he’ll tell you. Naturellement, it isn’t true. The ‘Space before this’ was just this universe, before the Watchmakers sucked all of the glamour and the strangeness from its bones. Ohh, yes, there were those of the old time who escaped. A handful of baby godlings and ‘great intelligences’... but they were such weak, unimaginative creatures. Too ready to obey the Watchmakers’ order. Too ready to give themselves up to Reason.

  – Not like me. Not like me at all.

  Chris gawped. Tried to say something. Gawped some more. Then he looked around, at the desert, at the sky full of un-light.

  ‘And this is your prison? This is where you’ve been trapped all this time?’

  – My prison. My home. But not for much longer, Christopher.

  And across her face, aeons of history played themselves out. On Minyos, the heliomancers were cast out of society, the machines of the Watchmakers replacing them and turning the planet to cinders. On the fringes of the Scrampus Federation, the Witches of Enderheid were tried, sentenced, and burned at the stake. On planets whose names had long been forgotten, whole races tried to master the sciences of the older races, turning themselves into sick things with sick ambitions... and the curse of the Watchmakers touched every corner of creation.

  The scalpel was hungry. Twice already, it had fallen from Raphael’s grip. It had lain in the dirt of the backstreets, twitching like a fish out of water, hungry for caillou blood. Raphael had fallen to the ground, forgetting all the rules of stealth and posture, scrabbling to pick it up.

  Then, movement at the far end of the street. Raphael stood, the scalpel quivering excitedly between his fingers. People approaching. Five, maybe six. A mob? Possibly. Usually, people didn’t notice the chirurgeon when he was at work, but Raphael had been careless. Terrible things were happening; perhaps the people thought he was to blame? An understandable error, surely?

  The scalpel jerked in his hand, almost wrenching itself out of his grasp. Raphael swallowed, panicking for the first time since his training in the lead-lined room. The scalpel had detected a caillou. A powerful one. A true mutation. Perhaps one of this mob had been so changed by the rain that –

  The scalpel flew from his hand and embedded itself in his arm. Raphael howled, then looked down, and saw how the blood was gurgling out of the wound, how the flesh shifted around the blade. His body. His body was changing. He was becoming...

  ... no. Oh, no. That was too horrible to even consider.

  The mob closed in. The scalpel still sucking the blood from his arm, Raphael turned and ran, every terrified step erasing a month of Directory training.

  The rain was beating at his face, turning his hair into seaweed. Erskine Morris didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. They were tying him to a t
rellis, piling firewood around his feet, and the only thing he could think about was the weather.

  ‘In the name of Reason,’ chanted Walter Monroe.

  ‘In the name of Reason,’ replied the other Renewalists. Erskine couldn’t see how many of the men there were left; there seemed to be more than he remembered, but the heavy raindrops in his eyes made it hard to see properly, and some of the shapes on the edges of his vision might just have been shadows. Shadows that chanted, though.

  There were two other bonfires-to-be outside the King George, each topped by a Renewalist who’d fallen from grace. One of them had begun to sprout two extra pairs of arms. The limbs were pink and stunted, ending in blunt, misshapen digits. The other was the man with the third eye. They were struggling as Monroe called forth the men with the torches. Struggling? Damnation, what was the use of struggling?

  ‘Reason has made its judgement,’ gargled Monroe as the first of the torches was passed to him. The fire was brighter than faith, and the rain didn’t seem to diminish it at all. ‘These ones bear the mark of Cacophony. They have been judged unfit to lead the world into the new and glorious age of science.’

  The congregation began to sing a hymn in binary. Erskine found himself singing along.

  ‘We give up these unworthy souls in the name of the future,’ chimed Monroe. He bent down, and Erskine noticed that he’d grown an extra finger on his right hand. That used to be the sign of witchcraft, didn’t it? Still, no one else had noticed, so it probably wasn’t important. The torch touched the bottom of the trellis.

  ‘Stop! This! At! Once!’ said a voice, and everything stopped. Everything but the rain.

  Erskine looked up. Two figures stood there, in the very centre of the Renewalist congregation. One of them was a man in a horribly dirty white hat and jacket, his hands outstretched, his face the very image of the wrath of God. The other...?

  Erskine felt the bile rise in his stomach.

  ‘I’m the Doctor,’ said the man. ‘And this is my friend, Isaac. I think we’re just in time to stop you doing something extraordinarily stupid.’