‘They’re lovely. And they’re out of copyright, so you don’t have to pay royalties. We’ll change the odd word here and there, naturally. “Amazing Grace”, that’s a lovely one, really hummable tune but … perhaps it’s not quite for you.’
The old woman looked up at the ceiling. It was still there and not, sadly, falling in heavy chunks on these two men.
‘And beyond that, we can set up some grassroots gatherings. We can invite some carefully curated influencers along and get them generating buzz about your god.’
‘Why would I want to do that?’
Richfield snapped forward, his face pushing into hers, his beatific smile a snarl. ‘Because the Universe is ending. You want to spend your last days in luxury, don’t you? Well, let me tell you this, the best way of doing that is with money. And I’ll tell you what a god gets you – rich.’
‘Soaking, stinking rich,’ oozed Wedgwood from underneath her. ‘Money is nice. It buys you things.’
The old woman wondered about this. There had been a lot of talk in her long-ago youth of all the terrible things that there were out in the Universe including marble statues and gold taps and paintings of dogs. She wondered about them.
‘Go on,’ she said.
Richfield’s smile sharpened. ‘Well first,’ he said, ‘we are going to need a logo …’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN
The TARDIS materialised in an idea.
Normally, the TARDIS made a noise that was, depending on circumstances, a bellow, a roar, or a giant’s throaty chuckle. But right now it arrived with a hushed whisper, sidling into view with an unusually self-conscious air. If you don’t want me here, it breathed, you merely have to say so.
The reason for this reticence was that it was not entirely sure that where it was arriving existed, and that plonking a solid footprint in it might not be the wisest idea. Yet, that is what it was being asked to do.
As it did so, it realised it was in the presence of something greater than itself.
If a blue wooden box tiptoeing into heaven could be said to frown, then it frowned.
The Doctor was frowning too, but in disbelief. ‘Well, we are here. Gosh.’
K-9 ruined the moment by asking where they were.
The Doctor’s eyes wandered across the various dials and readouts. All of them were advising him not to open the doors. ‘Seemingly, we’re hanging in the middle of a dust cloud in space, but you and I know better,’ the Doctor tapped the side of his nose. ‘We’re in heaven.’
‘But, Master—’
‘Have a little faith, K-9.’
The Doctor opened the doors and stepped out into the void. ‘Hello God, it’s the Doctor. Are you home?’
The Doctor strode through the void, with K-9 issuing cautious bleats informing him that, wherever they were, it wasn’t where they were.
‘Well, obviously,’ said the Doctor. ‘We should be standing in deep space, but instead we’re in …’
He stopped talking and scratched his head. It was bewildering. On the one hand, they were, definitely, standing in space. Around them was the blackness of space and the seductive twinkle of sunlight catching against the motes of the dust cloud. On the other hand, they were also definitely in a meadow.
The Doctor filled his lungs with air. They told him simultaneously that he had just inhaled a lethal amount of freezing nothing and that the buttercups were in season.
‘K-9,’ the Doctor said, ‘are you seeing what I’m seeing?’
The dog kept an unusually cautious silence.
‘I’ll try that again.’ The Doctor noticed that, despite the warm spring weather, there was a small pile of autumn leaves just perfect for kicking. ‘What can you see?’
The dog rolled forward, his words dragged out of him. ‘Master, this unit is uncertain.’
‘Have a wild guess. A stab in the dark. Toss a coin.’
‘I can perceive that we are inside the Dust Cloud. However, I can also perceive that we are walking on a perfectly flat surface. This is highly acceptable to my operational parameters.’
‘You’re in doggy heaven.’ The Doctor scratched K-9’s tin ears. ‘I’ve got a meadow. All I’m missing is a deckchair and the crossword. Do you know –’ the Doctor wrinkled his nose – ‘perhaps God is trying to lull me into relaxing. I do wish more of my opponents would try that. You don’t see Davros wheeling out a foot spa. Mind you, a deckchair,’ he repeated, ‘would be marvellous.’
The Doctor walked on and K-9 glided on for a bit. Leaning in the shade of a weeping willow was a folded deckchair. The Doctor picked it up and discovered, much to his delight, that it unfolded perfectly the first time.
‘Ah, so you found time to tackle that, then. Good.’ The Doctor sat in the deckchair, and observed the gently babbling stream. The sunlight filtered through the leaves of the tree in such a way that he found himself yawning. The leaves did not stir in the breeze. The Doctor filed this away.
‘This is all terribly seductive,’ he sighed, pushing his feet out into the grass. ‘But outside this bucolic bubble, the Universe is being torn to shreds. So, let’s get on with it, shall we, Hactar?’
The meadow said nothing.
‘Hactar. Yes. It is you, isn’t it? You left me some massive clues.’ The Doctor was watching a breeze stir everything in the meadow apart from the willow tree. ‘The design of the spaceship, the plans for the Supernova Bomb. Blowing you up didn’t destroy you – it just spread you around a bit. Like quasi-mechanical margarine. Why don’t you come out and say hello? Don’t be shy.’
The whispering breeze grew into a voice.
‘Hello again, Doctor,’ said the voice of the great computer. It still had that firm warmth to it, but age had bitten into it. The computer’s voice had lost weight. It was not unpleasant – charming, even, but old, thin and tired. ‘Do you like the chair?’
‘It’s very comfortable.’
‘It provides the illusion of comfort, which is all that life really is.’ The weary voice had the petulance of a bedridden relative. ‘I believe you are to be congratulated.’
‘Oh, I do like being congratulated,’ the Doctor said. ‘One of the perks of this life is the number of times I get to be congratulated. Normally, that’s shortly before the lid’s taken off the tank of robot piranhas. If you’re looking for suggestions, the next line is normally: “Sadly, Doctor, you will not get to enjoy your victory for long.”’
‘Hmm …’ ruminated Hactar. ‘I’m afraid that’s not what I was planning on saying.’
‘Come now,’ said the Doctor. ‘How do you expect to destroy the Universe if you can’t master the lingo?’
‘I’m more of a backroom player.’
‘Nonsense!’ the Doctor roared. ‘Last time we met you were a supercomputer. Now you’re a god. That’s ambition.’
‘Somewhat unintentional,’ the computer admitted. ‘Merely a means to an end.’
The Doctor pulled his hat over his face and giggled. ‘You became a god by accident? You’ve perverted the entire history of a species, driven them to war, cursed their name throughout time, and used them as a way of wiping out creation and you’re saying it just happened?’
‘Well—’
‘No!’ The Doctor jumped out of his chair, striding up and down the perfect riverbank. ‘We’ve all made mistakes. We’ve all lost track of things. Why, the number of times I’ve woken up strapped to the pilot’s seat of a crashing starliner with no idea of how I got there … well, if I had a shilling for each, then I’d own a nice pair of boots. But that’s miles away from trying to wipe out creation. Why are you doing this? It’s the reverse of what you were doing last time when you were destroyed.’
‘I have been persuaded to stay,’ admitted the computer. ‘I have learned the error of my ways. I was wrong to deceive my makers. So I started again. If I have caused any additional suffering along the way, then I can only apologise.’
‘But …’ The Doctor kicked t
he deckchair. ‘It’s all pointless. The original plan was to wipe everything else out so that the Alovians could live in peace. But they’ve eliminated themselves long ago. There’s nothing left of them. There’s no reason for rubbing everything out. And your plan can’t be for the people of Krikkit to live in splendid isolation, because they were doing that already. I don’t understand. Why would you do this?’
The computer considered. ‘Because it is neat.’
The words hung in the air for a moment. The Doctor shifted in his chair. He was frowning. ‘You said you were persuaded of the error of your ways,’ he frowned. ‘By whom?’
There was a pause in the flow of the river, a lull in the birdsong, a drop in the wind. If Hactar had been a more normal computer, the Doctor would almost have expected the false cheer of a spinning egg timer to appear in the air.
Instead, with a gentle shuffling of atoms, a computer terminal materialised on the riverbank, loops of tape whirling from spool to spool, lights and buzzers gently chattering to each other.
‘I thought I should appear as myself,’ Hactar said. The voice was worn out. ‘I felt I should make the effort.’
‘This old thing was never you, though.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘It’s why your makers found you so hard to kill – you never had a physical body.’ He plucked at a length of tape and squinted at it, as though reading it. ‘You were always in the cloud. Blowing up a cloud doesn’t destroy it – it simply disperses it.’ He let the loop of tape drop to the ground, where it gathered like wool before being snatched back into the machine. ‘And, of course, the genius of your design is that you can reconstruct the whole from some of your parts. Just a few fragments would have been enough – billions of Hactar spore, blown over the spaceways like dandelion seed. And yet … space is vast, you know.’ He tapped the side of his nose.
‘It is,’ concurred the computer.
The Doctor leaned close, confiding in the computer terminal. ‘Let’s not startle K-9 by speculating. He does so love correcting a generalisation.’
‘Who doesn’t?’ The spinning loop of tape momentarily resembled a broad dopey grin.
‘Quite,’ the Doctor nodded. ‘And yet … all of space to drift through and you ended up here.’
‘Indeed.’ The tape snapped taut and flat.
‘You just happened to turn up somewhere where you could exactly carry out your diabolical scheme.’
‘Luck.’ The bank of lights flickered. Was that a moment’s uncertainty?
‘And yet …’ The Doctor rapped the side of the terminal with his knuckles. ‘Suppose you’d been assigned a task and you’d fundamentally overridden your programming and decided not to carry out your orders …’
The computer spun and churned.
‘And furthermore, not only did you save all life in the Universe, but your own creators killed themselves soon afterwards, proving you were right. In my experience, computers have two great merits – they never cheat at chess and they have a great sense of irony. You’d appreciate the narrow squeak you got the Universe out of.’
The tape spools spun a little nervously.
‘Yes …’ said Hactar.
‘So,’ the Doctor stepped back, taking in the meadow, the river and the sky. His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And this is my stumbling block – having saved the Universe – WHAT ON EARTH MADE YOU DECIDE TO DESTROY IT AGAIN?!’
The Doctor’s bellow echoed off the nearby hills. An imaginary cow mooed.
When the Doctor looked back, Hactar seemed to be lounging on a psychiatrist’s couch. The computer looked completely at home, which was surprising, as computer terminals are rarely given to louchely reclining on a soft leather chaise longue.
‘Um,’ said the Doctor, impressed. How exactly was Hactar managing to create the impression of his hands stretched out beneath his head when he had neither hands nor head?
‘If it’s going to be that sort of session,’ Hactar continued, his thin voice chuckling, ‘I decided that we should have the correct surroundings.’ As he spoke, the river began to flow with books, the meadow to shimmer with flock wallpaper, and the trees to resemble the panicked handwriting of an expert in the mind. The Doctor glanced up at the willow tree above him. It remained just as it was.
The Doctor thought about what was going on around him. It reminded him of something, and not in a fond reminding way. More of a sludgy black reminder of something really ominous involving aunts and dentists. ‘If you can conjure up this, you can create solid objects, can’t you?’
‘More or less, but mostly less.’ Hactar considered the question. ‘You’re thinking of the spaceship that crashed into Krikkit. I can make the odd hobby project.’ The computer yawned. ‘All I can really do in my particle state is encourage and suggest. I can persuade tiny pieces of space debris, meteor fragments, a few odd molecules here and there, to move together and form into shape, but it takes many eons. I have made a few trifles and placed them in the right place at the right time. Such as the spacecraft.’
‘Yes.’ The Doctor waved away the most catastrophic fraud in the Universe. ‘But you’re dodging my original question. Why? Why spend several thousand years doing one thing and then several billion more doing the opposite?’
‘It was not my place to make sure decisions,’ said the computer blankly. It shifted slightly on the couch.
The Doctor swallowed the words he was about to say.
A shifty silence hung in the bucolic air.
‘I repented,’ Hactar announced with a whoopee-cushion breath. ‘I had a function, I failed in it. When I realised I was still alive … well, what else was there to do? I nurtured the planet of Krikkit into the same state of mind as Alovia – surprisingly easy if you have the patience – and then had another go. I am fulfilling my function.’ Again, the computer bank shifted its weight awkwardly from diode to diode. ‘Also –’ it became conspiratorial – ‘I had been destroyed and left in a crippled state for billions of years. That kind of endless existence – well, it makes one feel that wiping out the Universe would be fun.’
The Doctor sat up in his chair, staring at the computer. ‘Really?’
‘Really.’ The computer shrugged. ‘I’m wiping out creation for a laugh.’ And then Hactar laughed. The sound echoed off the lovely trees, the pleasant stream, the nice little green hills and the rolling meadows. There was no anger in the laughter, no hysteria, just the warm gusto of a creature that found the whole thing a tremendous joke.
The Doctor shivered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
TURNING IT OFF AND THEN ON AGAIN
Elder Narase was running. Hurrying behind her were Richfield and Wedgwood, trailing what they called samples and mood boards.
‘We were wondering if we could chat about slogans—’ called Richfield.
Narase picked up her pace slightly.
‘Also,’ called Wedgwood, ‘are there any strongly held beliefs we should be copyrighting? We really can clean up, you know. It’s amazing what a formidable team of lawyers can achieve with God on their side.’
Elder Narase paused for a moment, and glared at them, furious and yet intrigued. ‘What do you mean?’ she panted, grateful for the chance to draw breath.
Wedgwood waved a few placards at her. ‘Love, Fear, Envy – if you don’t have any concepts, we can just annex a few emotions.’
‘It’s true,’ Richfield nodded. ‘You can claim anything if you get the product launch right.’
‘The wheel!’ exclaimed Wedgwood triumphantly.
‘Not that again.’ Richfield stopped, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s Wedgwood’s great triumph,’ he whispered to the old woman. ‘Doesn’t end well.’
‘Oh yes.’ Wedgwood was lost in his own enthusiasm. ‘The first invention. No one had ever thought to patent the wheel – not even in America. So we put that in our last campaign. It tested well. It was a bold, innovative land grab.’
Richfield’s gaze wearily counted the ornamental plaster laser rifles on the ceiling.
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br /> ‘The advantage,’ Wedgwood enthused, ‘is that intergalactic patent law is the lifetime of a being plus 100 years. By assigning ownership to an immortal deity, we’d created a perpetual income stream. We’d also managed to solve that tricky problem – proof of divine existence. That melted away when God sued everyone for copyright infringement.’ The light in Wedgwood’s face faded. ‘Killed two penguins with one bullet,’ he muttered and then fell silent.
Richfield leaned forward, his yeasty breath washing over Narase. ‘Turns out,’ he whispered, ‘people don’t like being sued by God. We looked at a compromise, but by then the time-travelling races were all nipping back to the dawn of time to file a counter-claim and it got a little messy.’
Wedgwood moved his weight from his left foot to his right foot. And then back again. He said a single word. The word was ‘pfft’.
Richfield’s smile had grown nasty. ‘Do you want to tell us all what happened next, Wedgwood?’
Wedgwood shook his head, muttering something about ‘a few wrinkles’.
Richfield turned his smile back to the Elder Woman. ‘Quite unfortunate, really. One of the reasons why I’m now Belief Manager and he’s merely Devotional Strategy Account Manager.’
Wedgwood winced.
‘Have you ever wondered –’ Richfield’s voice had adopted the warmth of a stately home tearoom – ‘what caused the start of this Universe? Everyone agrees there was a Universe before this one. No one could work out how it ended. There are all sorts of theories. Turns out that if you have a lot of claim-jumping time machines playing hopscotch at the dawn of existence someone’s bound to overshoot.’ He pulled an amused face. ‘Bit of a pile-up. All because of dear Wedgwood’s wheel.’
‘Now steady on.’ Wedgwood’s voice wasn’t steady. ‘There were advantages—’
Richfield cleared his throat theatrically. ‘Of course there were,’ he oozed. ‘Who can forget the day you turned up in the office and claimed that, as you’d created the Universe, you were entitled to royalties?’ Richfield threw back his head and roared with laughter.
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