by Doctor Who
‘I really don’t want to watch this!’ said Rose, as the sculptor held up a knife. ‘Oi! You! Stop!’ She was halfway into the shrine before the Doctor could react. No cute farmyard animals were being slaughtered on her watch. . .
The knife hung in the air as she charged forward. It dropped, lower, lower. . . Rose felt as if she was in slow motion.
She was in slow motion. The goddess was looking at her with those unearthly, shining eyes, and she wasn’t able to run any more.
She was dimly aware of the Doctor and Vanessa following her into the temple.
She was dimly aware of the painful, heartbreaking final bleat of the lamb as its lifeblood ran on to the floor, and of Ursus’s triumphant cry.
But all she could see was the goddess, blood pooling around her feet.
And then – horribly – the blood began to vanish, as if the goddess was a sponge, soaking it up. Then the body of the lamb, already tiny, began to shrink. Its essence was liquefying, puddling where the blood had been and being sucked up in its turn until there was not a woolly fragment left.
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Rose stared at where the lamb had once been. She felt sick.
‘Don’t be upset, Rose,’ Minerva said. ‘Even gods must eat. It is no different from you consuming –’ she paused, as if searching for the right words – ‘a lamb chop or a kebab.’
‘Right,’ said Rose, dazed. ‘Er, I think maybe I won’t be doing that any more.’
‘Come forward, Doctor, Vanessa,’ the goddess continued. ‘No harm will befall you here.’
‘Are you sure?’ said the Doctor. ‘Because your follower Ursus there has been going around doing quite a lot of harm actually.’
Ursus stepped forward. ‘Watch your tongue when you speak to the goddess!’ he snarled.
The Doctor frowned. ‘I think that would make speaking rather difficult,’ he said. He stuck his tongue out and crossed his eyes to look down on it. ‘Therterly inghockigal,’ he said.
Ursus growled, and the Doctor shrugged and spoke normally. ‘Are you denying you’ve been doing harm, then? Because I really think you have been. You know, with all that turning people to stone and so on. Call me a philistine if you like – although actually the Philistines 117
weren’t as bad as all that. They might not know a good painting if they saw one, but they knew how to throw a classy party. . . Where was I?
Oh, yes – call me a philistine, but I can’t quite see the justification of the petrification-as-art business.’
‘Art justifies everything,’ Ursus said simply.
‘Er, no, it doesn’t,’ the Doctor replied. ‘One nil to me. Next?’
‘Without art, life would have no meaning!’
‘Hmm. Actually don’t entirely disagree with you on that one, believe it or not – but, and I think this may be the point at which we part company, there’s already quite a lot of art in the world. Mosaics, paintings, music – even rather a nice lot of actually-carved-from-stone statues. So, lots of meaning, life is happy, no need to go around zap-ping people with your magic fingers.’
Ursus pulled off his gloves and held up his hands, showing those stubby, clumsy digits. ‘Do you know what it’s like,’ he said, ‘to feel that you’re in the wrong body?’
‘Well, actually. . . ’ the Doctor began, wiggling his own fingers in front of his face.
‘I was supposed to create art,’ Ursus continued, and Rose suddenly had a flash of memory, of the words he had spoken as the world turned dark around her.
‘So you made offerings to Minerva and asked her to –’ she struggled to remember – ‘give you the ability to make beauty in stone?’
He nodded. ‘Minerva answered my entreaties, allowed me to do what I was born to do, be what I was born to be.’
‘Bet it was a bit of a shock for you when you discovered her take on the matter,’ said the Doctor. ‘On the one hand, you’ve got the real craftsmen toiling away with their hammers and chisels, and on the other, you’ve got a serial killer carrying out assault with a deadly finger. By the way, did she give you the magic gloves too? I mean, imagine what would happen every time you picked your nose other-wise.’
‘I just can’t believe a. . . a god would do something like this!’ said Rose. She turned to Minerva, hardly able to believe she was standing up to a deity. ‘Are you really happy that he’s going around killing 118
people like this?’
That unearthly smile shone out again. ‘But of course. He does it to glorify me. And brings me many offerings in return.’
‘Roman gods were in it for the offerings,’ murmured the Doctor.
‘They don’t mind what you get up to, as long as you observe the rites correctly. And they have a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”
relationship with their worshippers. You give them a pig, they’ll smite your enemy for you. That sort of thing.’
‘But all the people. . . ’
Ursus looked puzzled. ‘They were only slaves bought for the purpose. Men are bought to be slaughtered in the arena. Surely becoming beauty is a better death than being hacked to pieces in a gladiatorial show?’
Rose opened and closed her mouth a few times, each argument failing on her tongue. Funny how places on Earth could sometimes be more alien to her than other planets. ‘Optatus wasn’t a slave,’ she said finally, abandoning the whole ‘killing is wrong’ subject altogether.
Ursus snorted. ‘That stupid fool Gracilis kept on about a tribute to his pathetic son. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. Hadn’t wanted to know me when I was a failure, a no one. All over me as soon as my name was spoken of in Rome.’ He smiled, amused. ‘Besides, he offered me so much money, how could I refuse?’
‘Well, you know, if it’d been me I’d have found a way,’ Rose told him.
‘What you’ve been doing is just. . . evil. All those people are dead!’
‘Actually,’ the Doctor interrupted in a stage whisper, ‘I’m going to bring them all back to life in –’ he looked down at his wrist, as though consulting an imaginary watch – ‘about two days’ time, remember?
Using the amazing miracle cure. . . ’
The Doctor trailed off. Rose turned to look – he was just standing there with a smile on his face; a smile that she knew well. A smile of discovery.
‘What?’ she said.
‘There seem to have been a lot of miracles round here, don’t there?’
She agreed. ‘Yeah – but that’s what gods do, isn’t it?’
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‘I’ve seen a lot of strange things in my time,’ the Doctor said. ‘Things that most people don’t believe exist. Abominable snowmen. Were-wolves. Demons. Vampires. But Roman gods with mystical powers? I don’t think so.’
Ursus stepped forward. ‘Watch your mouth!’
‘There you go again!’ replied the Doctor. ‘Always asking me to do things that are at least pretty uncomfortable, if not physically impossible. Look, let me get this straight. The goddess Minerva just appeared to you one day, did she?’
Ursus nodded smugly.
‘After years and years of your worshipping her, making offerings and all that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Doctor, be careful,’ hissed Rose. ‘She’s standing right there.’
‘Not saying very much at the moment, though, is she?’ said the Doctor loudly. ‘Just standing there looking deific, In fact, she only seems to speak when she’s spoken to. Which doesn’t sound a particularly godly way to behave.’ His eyes were shining as bright as the goddess’s. ‘Vanessa!’
The girl hurried forward. ‘Yes?’
‘2375?’
‘Yes,’ she said, puzzled.
‘Sardinia?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Bureau Tygon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Salvatorio Moretti?’
‘Yes.’
‘In that case. . . ’ The Doctor turned to Minerva, who still stood there, beatific and regal. ‘I wish I could see what you really looked l
ike.’
Rose thought she heard a sound, something crashing in her ear. And then Minerva vanished. Just vanished, just like that, as if she’d been switched off. On the floor where she’d been standing was a cardboard box, with ‘SM’ on the side. And out of the top of the box was peering a 120
small, scaly creature, a cross between a baby dragon and a duck-billed platypus.
It all happened so fast.
Ursus shouted – almost shrieked – ‘What have you done?’ He pulled out his still-bloody sacrificial knife and ran straight at the Doctor.
Vanessa cried out, ‘That’s the box! From my father’s study!’ and hurried towards it, getting in between the Doctor and the furious sculptor.
The Doctor leapt forward, calling, ‘Vanessa! Stay back!’
He reached them both as Ursus lunged at Vanessa.
The Doctor knocked Ursus’s arm, deflecting the knife away from the girl, just as Ursus pushed her to one side. Vanessa fell to the floor, solid stone.
Rose dived for Ursus, yelling, ‘Noooo!’ She jumped on his back, trying to keep out of the way of his hands, and he overbalanced, falling on to his face. She waited for him to try to throw her off, try to grab her – but he didn’t. And then she saw the crimson puddle spilling out from under him.
He’d landed on his own sacrificial dagger. And he was quite dead.
She slowly, carefully, got up, hoping it had all been a dream, hoping she’d imagined what had happened in the heat of the moment.
But she hadn’t. There was the Doctor, hands outstretched, desperately trying to save Vanessa. His handsome face was determined, his head held high. This was the Doctor at his most Doctorish. And he’d be like it for ever.
Rose choked back a tear as she searched for the phial the Doctor had given her, the miracle cure he’d used to bring her back to life. She found it. It was totally, utterly empty.
She pulled out the stopper anyway, held the glass tube over his unmoving stone head. But there wasn’t a drop of liquid remaining.
She couldn’t stop the tears then. ‘Doctor!’ she cried. ‘Oh, Doctor!
Why did we have to come here! It’s all my fault! All my fault you’re here. All that stuff about modelling. . . I wish you hadn’t listened to me. I wish you’d never come here. I –’
She turned, startled. She’d heard that sound again – something like. . . thunder? But the sky outside seemed calm and clear. She 121
listened carefully, but didn’t hear it again.
When she turned back, she had the briefest of impressions that something was missing.
There was what appeared to be a statue of a girl on the ground.
There was a peculiar beaked thing in a cardboard box. And there was the dead body of a man. This was. . . not good, but she knew they were supposed to be there. There was nothing – no one – else.
There never had been anything else. She’d obviously been mistaken. There was nothing missing at all.
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Rosehadaheadache. Shewastryingandtrying,butshejustcouldn’t think exactly how she’d got to be in a ruined shrine in second-century Rome.
She was Rose Marion Tyler, from twenty-first-century London. She used to live in a flat on the Powell Estate with her mum, Jackie, until she’d met up with – of course, with the Doctor! The Doctor, the last of the Time Lords, who travelled through time and space in his ship, the TARDIS, which was bigger on the inside than the outside! So was that how. . . ? No. She hadn’t come back here with the Doctor, she knew that for a fact. The last time she’d seen the Doctor was in London, when they’d gone to the British Museum and seen the statue of Rose as Fortuna. So how had she got to ancient Rome? Teleport? Matter transmitter? Must be something like that. Or had she been hijacked by aliens? Yes, that had to be it. It wouldn’t be the first time that had happened to her. And what had been going on here? She had hazy memories of Vanessa – yes, that was Vanessa, petrified on the floor –and Ursus, the sculptor, who had fallen on his dagger and died, but quite how it had all come about she really wasn’t sure. Hang on. That thing in the box, that must be the alien that kidnapped her! No. No, 123
it wasn’t, it was something else. . . A god. . .
Rose’s brain began presenting her with a plausible picture. If she didn’t think too hard about things, everything made sense.
But she was Rose, and she was going to think hard if she wanted to. Think, think, think. . .
‘Oh, I wish I could remember how I got here!’ she said.
There was a crashing sound in her head. ‘Oh, all right, if I must,’
said the dragon-like creature.
And suddenly the last few minutes became as if a dream. Rose knew how she’d got there and why she’d got there, and most of all she realised that the Doctor wasn’t there any longer. . .
She stumbled backwards, shocked and wary. The Doctor. . . was gone. There was no sign that he’d ever been here.
‘Doctor!’ Rose shouted frantically. ‘Doctor!’
There was no response.
So distracted was she that it was a few moments before she noticed what was happening to Ursus’s body.
It was the sacrificed lamb all over again. As she watched, sickened, she could see the sculptor’s once-deadly hands begin to bubble and melt as though made of wax. Finger bones showed briefly as the flesh dripped away, but then melted in their turn. Eyeballs lost their substance, began to seep down pallid cheeks, but were then sucked back through the sockets to combine with the facial soup that was now forming. Empty blood ‘vessels, muscles, withered lungs and a decaying heart all flashed into view, like a series of diagrams from a biology textbook, before they too melted away. And then there was just the puddle curdling on the floor, first expanding and then decreasing as the liquid was sucked away; a tide that kept turning.
All being absorbed by the little scaly creature in its cardboard box.
The last of Ursus vanished with a noise like a straw sucking up the dregs of a milkshake. Rose had seen death far too often, but still she found herself clapping her hands over her mouth to try to keep in the bile that was rising in her throat.
‘I’m much obliged to you,’ said the creature. ‘That should keep me going for a while.’
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Rose tried to put the sight out of her mind, tried to concentrate on something more important instead. ‘Where’s the Doctor?’ she said.
‘What have you done with him?’
‘The Doctor?’ said the beaked dragon. Its voice now was very different from the tones it had used in its Minerva guise, more androgynous and tinnier. ‘There’s been no doctor here.’
‘Yes, there has!’ Rose insisted. ‘You called him by his name. You must know who he is.’
‘I think you must be mistaken,’ said the creature. ‘I have done no such thing. No doctor was ever here. Ask anybody.’
Rose laughed disbelievingly. ‘There’s no one to ask! The Doctor’s gone, Vanessa’s been rockified and you’ve just slurped up Ursus like a cat with a saucer of cream! Look, who – what – are you anyway?’
The little creature clacked its beak. ‘I am a GENIE,’ it said.
Rose gaped. ‘A genie?’
‘Indeed. A Genetically Engineered Neural Imagination Engine.’
‘A what?’
‘A GENIE.’
‘Do you mean – you can’t mean – I mean, you’re not a being that grants wishes. . . ’
‘You are incorrect. I am not not a being that grants wishes.’
‘Pardon?’ said Rose.
‘That is to say, I am a being that grants wishes. That is the function for which I was designed and built.’
‘By Vanessa’s dad?’
‘Salvatorio Moretti was my primary creator, yes.’ Rose was starting to piece it all together. ‘And so when Vanessa wished she lived in ancient Rome. . . ’
‘I granted her wish. Placed her in the correct time frame, gave her appropriate language abilities and clothing. It took a considerable amount
of power to do so, but I was lucky enough to be at that time in a place which possessed extensive energy reserves. It is fortunate that she never sought me out and required me to return her to her previous abode, as I fear I would have had some difficulty acquiring the necessary energy.’
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Rose was still trying to take all this in. ‘I don’t think Vanessa knew anything about you. She had no idea how she got here.’
‘Ah,’ said the GENIE, suddenly sounding slightly embarrassed. ‘Al-though I had to accompany my wisher in order to facilitate the transfer in time, I fear a slight miscalculation on my part led to us being separated on arrival in this era. However, considering the fact that I had succeeded in forming a working theory of time-travel and then almost instantaneously engineered a way of putting it into practice and transporting us not only over two millennia in time but several hundred miles across space, I think such an occurrence barely even counts as an error.’
‘Yeah, the Doctor tries to claim that too,’ said Rose. ‘It doesn’t wash with him either.’ A lump suddenly came to her throat, thinking about the Doctor. She tried to distract herself again. ‘And Ursus!’ she said.
‘He wished something about creating beauty in stone. He probably even mentioned wanting to use his hands to do it. But he didn’t mention anything about sculpting or skill with a chisel, so you went ahead and sorted it however you liked.’
‘It’s hardly my fault if people fail to be sufficiently specific. Anyway, he didn’t seem to mind,’ commented the creature.
‘Well, no, because he was obviously a psycho-nutter,’ said Rose.
‘But, you know, just because someone says “I wish” doesn’t mean they expect a totally literal interpretation of –’
And then her stomach dropped as a scene from earlier forced itself into the front of her brain. Her legs threatened to give way and she hastily sat down. Then she realised she was sitting on Vanessa and stood up again.
‘I said. . . ’ she began, but couldn’t bring herself to go on. She took a deep breath. ‘I said, “I wish you’d never come here.” I said it to the Doctor and you. . . ’ She shook her head fiercely. ‘What am I talking about? This is mad. Genies are myths, something from the Arabian Nights, and I don’t believe in you or your wish-granting thing.’