Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  A strip of paper was hanging from the device, presumably a message from the Directory. If Tourette had been taken from this place by force – and it seemed likely – then he might not even have seen it before he’d been dragged away. Duquesne knelt down to read it.

  SSM14GTOU AGENT TOURETTE PROTOCOL CODING LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING VERIFY LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING VERIFY LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING

  Love-Lies-Bleeding. A Directory code, meaning that a situation had got out of hand, that the system had broken down. Usually it was an order for an agent to leave the site immediately, cleaning up... destroying... any loose ends they could find. The message went on:

  END ASSIGNMENT WITH DISCRETION NO FURTHER AGENTS TO ENTER NEW YORK SSMMDUQ AGENT DUQUESNE RETIRED SSM14EN

  And then Marielle Duquesne was standing, spinning around, falling over a broken card table, stumbling against the door-frame. Retired. Retired. The sign that an agent was no longer effective, that she might have been contaminated by a caillou. Such things happened. Of course they happened. Why, if the Directory learned that a whole town had been poisoned by a caillou’s madness, the first thing it would do was make sure that any field agents in the area were retired, so that their ‘abilities’ couldn’t be compromised, so that their secrets were kept safe. Retired. Retired. Retired by chirurgeon.

  Marielle Duquesne ran out of the room, ran down the stairs, and ran out into the streets. She kept running, well aware that she’d probably never be able to stop.

  Christmas. One of those little superstitions...

  Erskine Morris was out on one of his long walks. Every Sunday and every holy holiday, he did the same thing, strutting through the town and making sure that the world could see how far away he was from the church. Of course, this was a walk like no other. There was broken glass under his boots, for one thing, and many of the familiar roads had been declared out-of-bounds by the militia. Still, he tried not to let it change anything. It was Christmas Day. A day for walking.

  But he stopped when he reached Eastern Walk. Most of the debris had already been cleared away there, and the more courageous locals were beginning to return to their homes. Erskine’s eye was caught by a single tent, erected at the side of the road, the only survivor of the ‘attractions’ that he and the other Renewalists had –

  Ho hum, ho hum. Think about something else. The weather. The birds and the bees. The mating habits of the average Catholic. Ho hum, ho hum.

  He approached the tent hesitantly, but it wasn’t until he reached the flap that he really recognized it. It had been pulled down the night before, but someone had knotted the torn fabrics together and put it back up again. The tent was made from a grubby scarlet material, painted with stars and moon-signs. Erskine took a deep breath, and walked in.

  ‘Sit down,’ said the witch-woman.

  Erskine sat. He’d never seen the woman before, but Christ knew it wasn’t hard to guess who she was. He’d been scouring the town for her, not twelve hours ago, back when he’d worn the sackcloth mask of Reason and... ho hum.

  ‘Didn’t think you’d still be in town,’ Erskine mumbled. ‘After what we... you know. After what happened.’ It was the closest thing to an apology that he could manage. The witch-woman just shrugged.

  ‘This is going to be my last day here,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Isaac Penley anywhere this morning? I heard he’d... recovered from his injuries. Do you know him?’ Erskine swallowed, and shook his head. ‘I thought I owed him one last reading. There was something I thought he should know. About the future.’

  Penley. Erskine wanted to tell the woman about the Doctor and his abomination, but... hellfire, where would he find the right words? He imagined Penley, with his pinned-together face and his bits-and-pieces body, sitting here in the tent asking his usual moronic questions. Just like always. Asking witches, priests, stargazers, charlatans... anyone who’d talk to him.

  Erskine suddenly felt like crying.

  ‘The future,’ he said. ‘By Christ, yes. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Yesterday, I called myself a rationalist. Wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this. Look at me now. Look at all of us. Us poor buggering human beings, doing things we never thought we were capable of, in the name of gods we don’t really believe in. Us and our revolutions and our witch-hunts and our bloody scientific reform societies. That’s what old Isaac was worried about all the time, isn’t it?’

  The witch-woman sighed. ‘It might be like that,’ she said. ‘The future might be any number of things. But history’s made by people, not by gods and monsters. If there was ever a time to change it...’

  She sighed again.

  ‘The future’s not what it used to be,’ she said. ‘That’s all I can say. The rest, you’ll have to work out for yourself. If you see Isaac, can you tell him that?’

  The Doctor had slipped into a new suit, but it was identical to the old one. Chris didn’t know where the replacement had appeared from. He hadn’t watched the Doctor get changed, either; he reasoned that there were some things no human being should ever witness.

  Now they were taking the longest possible route back to the console room, clearing up the mess on the way. The Doctor found Interface’s control unit in the ‘human’s corridor’, removed a few vital components and ‘accidentally’ lost them down the back of a sofa in one of the guest rooms. He also poked his head into the library to make sure that the hallway was in one piece again, picking up a copy of A Passage to India that had been left on the floor.

  The Doctor flipped through the book, and Chris looked over his shoulder. Every page was a space, the mouth of an impossible meta-dimensional tunnel. Every page led to a different location in the TARDIS. The ultimate secret passage.

  ‘Nothing like getting lost in a good book,’ said the Doctor, and smiled. ‘Hackney Empire, 1957.’

  ‘That’s what I said,’ replied Chris. ‘Hang on, you’ve talked about the Hackney Empire before, haven’t you? What was it? I mean, was it anything like my Empire?’

  ‘Ah, the Hackney Empire. A ruthless intergalactic superpower, conquering whole civilizations with appalling puns and jokes about dogs with no noses.’

  ‘No noses? How did they smell?’

  The Doctor paused, as if trying to resist a terrible temptation.

  ‘Do you know, I don’t believe the question was ever satisfactorily answered?’ he said eventually.

  At last, they reached the console room. Within seconds the Doctor was back at the controls, furiously jabbing at the switches. ‘So much to do,’ he muttered. ‘Yemaya... we still haven’t found out... the SLEEPY project...’

  ‘Doctor?’

  ‘What did she say? Killing lessons... the Shadow Directory... too many coincidences... probably means something...’

  ‘Doctor,’ I wanted to ask you a question. About the Carnival Queen.’

  The Doctor looked up, but his fingers kept moving. ‘The who?’

  Chris didn’t know how to respond to that. Was the Doctor just trying to change the subject? He did that a lot, whenever anyone made him feel uncomfortable. Perhaps that was one of the reasons why Chris didn’t trust him any more...

  The thought made him start. Since when had he not trusted the Doctor?

  ‘Oh yes, her,’ said the Doctor, hurriedly. ‘Don’t worry about her, Chris. She doesn’t have any power over us now. It was never her place to force the irrational universe on us, you know. She could just offer the possibility...’

  ‘That’s what I wanted to ask about. The choice I made. I didn’t... I mean, it was the right choice, wasn’t it?’

  Which is when the Doctor started staring. One of his long, dark, Paddington-Bear stares. ‘There wasn’t any right choice,’ he said, almost under his breath. ‘If it helps, you made the same choice we made.’

  Chris blinked. ‘You mean... what she told me about the Watchmakers... it was true?’

  Aeons seemed to pass.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ the Doctor finally announced, brightly. ‘That wouldn’t mak
e sense. Now. I thought we might pop back and have a word with Doctor Johnson, see if we can get him to include "derationalized" in his dictionary. I’m tired of not having the vocabulary to describe my enemies properly...’

  Matheson Catcher hid in the undergrowth, too terrified to move, too terrified even to breathe, lest he breathe out of rhythm and bring the whole world crashing down around him. The blue box remained in the glade, solid and unchanging, but Catcher wasn’t fooled for a minute. He didn’t know how long he’d been watching – hours, probably – but he thought it was probably about time he blinked. He couldn’t even recall why he was watching the box, or where he’d been before that. Perhaps –

  – there! It was happening! The box was shifting, shimmering, fading into thin air. Cacophony! The chaos was taking its creation back into its unholy bosom and slither went the plants and the shrubs and slither and slither and before he knew it, Catcher was running, because the undergrowth was alive, because the vines and the creepers were reaching out for him, grabbing at him and trying to pull him down into the filthy earth, and he tripped over a root, and it laughed, dancing to the wheezing, groaning sound of Cacophony’s engine...

  But he was back on his feet in an instant, and hurtling through the woods, trampling the evil weeds underfoot and snapping off the branches as they tried to molest him. There. There in front of him, in the shade between two of the taller trees, was the silhouette of a man. The thorns on the branches (were branches supposed to have thorns?) were drawing blood from his hands, but the man was mere yards away, and then Catcher wouldn’t be alone any more, he’d have another being of Reason with him, an ally against nature’s darkness.

  The man stepped out from under the trees.

  ‘Cah... hurrr,’ the man groaned. ‘Catch... errr!’

  Catcher stopped running. It wasn’t a man. IT WASN’T A MAN IT WASN’T A MAN IT WAS A IT WAS A IT WAS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

  ‘Whyy... di’ you... do thisss?’ the appalling thing asked.

  And Catcher felt the things of Hell reaching up out of the ground, wrapping their sticky shoots around his ankles. They were dragging him down, down into the abyss, down into the dark, and there was a flash of green as his head hit the ground, and then blackness, just blackness, nothing else.

  There was a tree on Paris Street, newly planted in the dirt near the smoking corpse of the church. Marielle Duquesne regarded it suspiciously from the shelter of the alleyway. It was a fir tree, but its branches were decked with shiny baubles and silver stars. Was the tree part of the madness, or just some strange American custom? It was hard to tell. Without the Sight, she had no way of knowing what was normal and what was the spoor of a caillou.

  ‘I used to like alleys, too,’ said a voice. ‘Good places to hide. Don’t need them any more, though.’

  Duquesne heard herself cry out. She turned, imagining the horror that might be standing behind her. A chirurgeon, no doubt, come to enforce her retirement. She pictured a shadow in a black hat, a scalpel in his hand...

  ... instead, she came face-to-face with a boy. No, a man. No, something between the two. He was covered in dirt, and his clothes were all but shredded, yet his eyes were bright and there were traces of a smile on his face.

  ‘Where are you going?’ the boy asked.

  Duquesne shook her head. ‘I do not know. Please. Leave me. I must not be seen.’ But as she said it, she wondered why she was even bothering to hide. I might be able to avoid the first assassin they send to me, she thought, or the second, or the third... but the Shadow Directory has all the hired killers of Napoleon’s kingdom at its disposal. And I am alone. And one person cannot fight an empire.

  ‘Depends. Depends whether the one person knows what she’s doing.’

  Duquesne coughed, the way ladies were supposed to cough when they were embarrassed. The way her parents had taught her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I must have been thinking out loud, I...’

  Then she saw the thing in the boy’s hands, and she recognized it, without knowing how or why. And there was something spreading through her nervous system, filling up the space where the Sight had been, almost as if it were flooding out from the boy, through the sphere in his hands, into her spine. The sensations were the same ones she’d been feeling since her adolescence, but somehow less painful, more controlled, more... rational?

  ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘Dieu. I understand.’

  But the boy just kept smiling ‘What can I do?’ she asked him ‘What should I do?’

  ‘We’ll think of something.’ The boy’s attention was caught by something over her shoulder, and he stepped out onto Paris Street. ‘Roz’s idea,’ he said, pointing at the fir tree. ‘She said it’s how they mark Christmas, where she comes from. The Doctor had it in his TARDIS. And all the decorations. They put it up first thing this morning.’

  ‘Doctor...?’ queried Duquesne.

  The boy reached out for one of the few branches that wasn’t already dripping with stars and angels. He balanced the golden sphere amongst the fir needles, and it stayed there, quite happy to remain on the branch in spite of the laws of gravity. Seen from a distance, it just looked like any other bauble.

  ‘You’re leaving it there?’ asked Duquesne, stepping out of the shadows and joining him by the tree. The boy nodded.

  ‘Won’t be needing it any more. World’s ready to make its own rules. You’re from France?’

  ‘Ahh. Yes, yes I am...’

  ‘You going back there? You’ve got a ship?’

  Duquesne hesitated. ‘I don’t... there are problems. It may not be safe...

  ‘Like I said. We’ll think of something.’ The boy set off along Paris Street, and Marielle Duquesne found herself walking with him ‘I want to see France,’ he said. ‘There’s supposed to be some people there that I’ve got a lot in common with...’

  And, together, they headed for the docks.

  February, 1800.

  Cardinal Pontormo finished reading the reports of the so– called Woodwicke incident’, and realized that he was no wiser than when he’d started. He rubbed his eyes, slipped the records back into their bindings, and returned them to the shelf, where – amongst other things – they joined the Secret Travelogues of the Khan-Balik Caravan and the only surviving copy of Preslin’s thesis On Co-incidence as a Disease.

  Of course, he reminded himself, the French wouldn’t have told him anything about the incident at all, if they hadn’t wanted the Crow Gallery to look after their ‘live specimen’. It was said that although the skies of America had been thick with demons on Christmas Eve, only two of the abominations had survived the dawn. One was the oft-sighted ‘forest monster’ that now haunted the woodlands outside the town, a source of much amusement in the New York press. The Shadow Directory – and the Special Congress as well, no doubt – had tried to capture the animal, so far without success.

  But the other creature... Cardinal Pontormo remembered the first time he’d seen the thing, when it had been brought to South Africa in the belly of a French cargo ship. Pontormo was used to atrocities by now, but the beast had seemed grotesque even by the ‘usual’ standards of the Gallery. The way the sinews had writhed inside its limbs, the way little pools of shadow had danced over its body, the way parts of its blackened skin had almost looked like clothes, clothes that had been welded to its flesh... even the lump on its head had reminded Pontormo of a stovepipe hat, and its glass eyes could almost have been spectacles.

  The Cardinal wondered what the life expectancy of such a beast would be, down in the vaults on the lowest level of the Gallery. He found himself wishing that it would die soon, then prayed God forgive him the thought.

  He was happy. Yes. An unfamiliar word, but not an irrational one. After all, hadn’t he felt this way before, when he’d been in the little room and the Watchmakers had sent their messenger to him? But now there wasn’t even a room, there was just the essence of a room, a realm of pure, hard Reason. He was cast into a grey cube as firm as concrete
, his intelligence seeping into the structure until he was nothing but angles and lines...

  Happy. Yes. That was the word.

  The doctors looked at each other, shook their heads, and walked away. The same thing they did every morning, in fact.

  Richmond Hospital’s newest patient had been found out in the woods near a neighbouring town, and his bed had been paid for by the local council, even though the town didn’t seem to want anything more to do with him. One newspaper claimed that the man had been ‘the first victim of the forest monster’, but of course everybody knew that was rubbish; there wasn’t a mark on him. Some kind of psychological damage, the doctors thought. The patient’s breathing was regular, but his muscles were rigid and there were no signs of brain activity. Oddly, his closed eyelids kept twitching, for no reason anybody could ascertain. Twitching. Once every eight seconds.

  Whatever the condition was, the doctors agreed, it was probably incurable.

  Deep in the TARDIS, there were places where the halls and the corridors and the boot-cupboards seemed to lack all logic and proportion. If anyone had asked the Doctor, he would have said that these were the undigested remains of Catcher’s UnTARDIS, little corners of Cacophony, locked into the solid body of the ship, trapped like flies in amber.

  Christopher Cwej sat in the middle of a shifting courtyard, surrounded by gothic archways set at ridiculous angles and phantom corridors that didn’t lead anywhere. The place was much like the TARDIS cloisters, but the artificial sky above his head was dark, and there were things he couldn’t name seeping through the cracks in the floor. Wolsey the cat was curled in his lap, purring softly, and the walls rippled gently to the sound.

  – Ahh, Christopher, whispered the room. Poor Christopher. If you could only have seen the destiny that history has chosen for you... if you could only have understood the curse of the Watchmakers, and who its victims really are...