Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  ‘Not just celebrating Christmas,’ he told her from behind his polished counter, speaking slowly as if talking to a child. ‘It’s the anniversary.’

  ‘Really,’ she growled.

  ‘Ten years since they signed the Constitution. Give or take a few months.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ she said.

  ‘And sixteen years since we beat the shite out of the British.’

  She stuffed some of the food into her mouth, half-noticing that it tasted like apricots. ‘Sixteen. Not the kind of anniversary you normally celebrate. Ten, yeah. Fifteen, maybe. But sixteen...?’

  The man stared at her as if she’d just admitted to being a baby-eating devil-worshipper.

  ‘It’s usual enough in these parts,’ he said pointedly.

  She decided not to argue. These people just needed a reason to celebrate. Any reason, whether they agreed with the principle behind it or not. It’d been one of those centuries. Like that little fat-faced man, Isaac someone-or-other, who’d come to her tent just to ask if there was a future at all. End-of-the-century blues. There’s always someone who thinks the world’s going to end.

  Roz continued along the street until she came to the church, and squatted on the steps, concentrating on the building opposite. One of a dozen stone-faced pseudo-mansions on Paris Street, with narrow windows and whitewashed walls, fronted by a porch made up of unconvincing classical archways. She’d come here a lot, the past few days, watching the house from the church steps, concentrating on the routine of the man who lived there and trying to look like she was just a poor dumb foreigner basking in the glory of this fine monument to the Protestant faith. Just another stake-out, she’d tell herself.

  In her pouch, the cold thing pushed against her leg expectantly. She rested her hand on the lump.

  The house was owned by a man called Samuel Lincoln, who’d visited her tent a fortnight ago. She’d told him he’d have a fine family, offspring that’d go far in the world of politics, and he hadn’t believed a word of it. Well, that was his mistake, seeing as it was probably her one accurate prediction. Lincoln. She’d recognized the name almost immediately. And she’d known. She’d just known, that was all. Call it time-traveller’s instinct, call it whatever.

  Samuel would turn out to be the father of the legendary Abraham, the President who’d blah blah blah something about Civil War blah blah blah fathers of democracy blah blah blah wore a big hat and got shot...

  Roz had been born nearly a millennium after the fall of the United States, so her knowledge of Great American Heroes was based entirely on the historical simcord dramas that the Empire would show whenever they wanted to make a point about the proud heritage of the human race. But her certainty that Samuel was one of the President’s ancestors wasn’t based on her knowledge of history. Yeah, call it time-traveller’s instinct. That, and the fact that the TARDIS crew always seemed to end up around important people and events, for some reason even the Doctor didn’t seem to understand properly. There must’ve been hundreds of Lincolns, even in a half-grown nation like this, but she would have bet her sister’s fortune that she’d ended up in the same town as the most significant one.

  Besides, Lincoln senior had Abraham’s nose. A dead give-away.

  And the moment she’d met him in that tent, and he’d chuckled at her predictions, she’d known. She’d started to figure out the one way to get out of this God-forsaken millennium. She had a plan. She had an escape route. And Samuel Lincoln was the key.

  ‘Io Ordo Io Ordo Ordo.’

  Daniel Tremayne had been in Catcher’s cellar before, but back then it had just been a louse-ridden lumber-room, made up of stale air and splinters. Now it was different. He was sure it was bigger, for one thing. The walls looked like they’d been covered with marble, and there was some kind of platform in the middle of the baby-arse-smooth floor, muddy light glinting off the crystals that had been pushed into its surface. Daniel briefly wondered how much the thing was worth.

  ‘Ordo Ordo Io Ordo Io Io...’

  He didn’t recognize the words the men were chanting. Chanting, or whispering, or something between the two. There were half a dozen of them, standing ten, twenty feet away; their clothes were ordinary, shirts and jackets and shoes and pants, but their heads were hidden under crude sackcloth hoods, crumpled grey faces with tiny slits for eyes. Daniel should’ve been alarmed – alarmed, hah, was that all? – but the words that were spilling from their throats wrapped themselves around his spine, soothing his nerves until, God, what was the point of worrying? He must have stood there for ten minutes or more, tucked out of sight in the shadows around the cellar entrance. Just staring. Just listening.

  ‘Io Ordo Ordo ...’

  And in the middle of it all was Catcher, the only one whose face wasn’t hidden, standing next to the platform in his dull grey shirt and his high-collared jacket; and now Daniel looked at the thing in the middle of the floor, didn’t it remind him of an altar? He thought of the stories he’d heard around New York, about the warlocks and the diabolists who got together in old crypts and graveyards, summoning up the children of Hell itself, spilling unholy blood on Christian altars and defecating in churches (whatever ‘defecating’ meant)...

  Hah. But these weren’t witches, were they? In Dill Village, someone had once told Daniel that there were people in the world who did even stranger things than the Satanists. Freethinkers and scientists, not witch-doctors and mad monks. ‘Like Freemasons,’ he’d been told, but he hadn’t understood the word. He’d even heard that the ones who ran the world, the Presidents and the Prime Ministers and the mad Englishmen, belonged to groups like that. The news hadn’t surprised him at all.

  That was it, then. Catcher and his friends weren’t talking to bug-a-boos and hobgoblins. They were doing something else, something more modern, something scientific. Like what?

  And what are you doing here, Daniel Tremayne, down in the belly of the beast? Coming out of the cracks and getting yourself noticed. Just like the soft Revolutionaries, sticking their heads up so that the English could blow their brains out.

  ‘Listen,’ said Catcher. And the men fell silent, and there was a moment’s quiet –

  – no there wasn’t. Daniel could hear a kind of echo in the room, like parts of their words had stopped dead in mid-air, like they’d got stuck in the muddy light. ‘Ordo Io. Ordo Io Ordo Ordo.’

  ‘O,’ said the echo. ‘O.’

  ‘Io Ordo Io Io Ordo,’ said Catcher.

  ‘I O I I O,’ said the echo.

  One. Nought. One. One. Nought.

  Daniel Tremayne wanted to cover his ears, but couldn’t. Was this what he’d heard outside, the call, the thing that had dragged him here by the scruff of the neck? Was it just calling to him, or to Catcher, or to all of them?

  ‘Ordo Io. Ordo Io Io.’

  Nought one. Nought one one. Daniel Tremayne looked up, and saw that everything – colours, shapes, everything – was turning into the bastard numbers, blinking from nought to one and back again, Catcher’s words reshaping the world, giving the whole of creation a new program, chanted in ‘O’s and ‘I’s and noughts and ones. And somehow Daniel knew exactly what was going to happen, and in that brief moment of revelation he understood what had been calling him, and why he was here, and what it was he had to do, but a second passed and the thought was gone, pushed out of his head by ‘Io’s and ‘Ordo’s.

  I-SAID-WHAT-ARE-YOU-DOING-HERE-DANIEL TREMAYNE?

  ‘Ordo Io,’ said Catcher, and the words became the world, the world became the words, the air spasmed like it was giving birth and something arrived.

  It was a dead end. Erskine Morris uttered the second most obscene word he knew – he was keeping the worst until he was face-to-face with Catcher – and turned around, trying not to notice that his legs were trembling like Englishmen in a whorehouse. He could still hear words being hissed into his ear, and still had no idea where they were coming from. He was sure they were being spoken by human tongues �
�� thunder and fornication, what other kind could speak? He was letting this charade get to him, by Christ – but it was hard to say where the whispers ended and the low humming of the corridor began.

  ‘Catcher!’ he called out, stumbling back along the passage. ‘It’s no use hiding there, man, I can see you! Come out and show yourself!’

  That was a lie, of course. Erskine could only see flickers in the dim light, irritating shapes that lurked on the edges of his vision, hiding around the corners like giggling children.

  Finally, one of the shadows decided to step forward. Erskine Morris whirled around to face it, almost losing his balance and cracking his shoulder against a pillar.

  ‘Io Ordo Io,’ the shape said.

  ‘Hellfire and shite!’ Erskine immediately recognized the man from his clothes and his slightly portly frame; Monroe, the fool’s name was, one of Catcher’s arse-lickers from the Renewal Society. Monroe’s face was obscured, though, covered by a crude grey sackcloth mask which – in Erskine’s view – improved his appearance no end. ‘Good grief, man, do you not know that there are laws against this kind of thing?’

  ‘Ordo Ordo Ordo Io Ordo,’ said Monroe, no doubt coating the inside of his cowl with a layer of blustering spittle.

  ‘And you can stop that, as well –’ Erskine broke off in mid-complaint as he noticed several other forms, breaking away from the shadows and stepping out in front of him. Most of them were immediately recognizable, despite their hoods, as spineless and unimportant members of the Society. Men who couldn’t even hold a bottle and a half of Wilkeson’s and stand up straight. Catcher wasn’t among them.

  ‘All right, where is he? Where is the odious little absurdity?’

  ‘Ordo Io Io Ordo Io,’ the men told him

  ‘Damnation!’ Erskine took a few steps towards them, hoping that his sheer size would intimidate them, but they didn’t even flinch. ‘Enough of this. Where’s Catcher?’

  ‘Ordo Ordo Io.’

  In fact, not only were they not moving away, but they were moving towards him. Erskine felt himself take an involuntary step back.

  ‘Io Io Io Ordo Io Ordo Ordo.’

  ‘Of all the childish, irrational...’

  Another step back.

  ‘Ordo Io.’

  ‘Damnation!’

  And another.

  ‘Io Io Io Io Io Io Io Io -’

  Erskine Morris turned on his heel, and stalked away down another roundelled corridor. He refused to look back over his shoulder, telling himself that it wasn’t important whether the idiots followed him or not. They were trying to rattle him, that was all. Trying to stop him asking questions about their poxy ‘inner circle’. As if they could. Hah! As if.

  He asked himself why he was walking so quickly, and couldn’t think of a decent answer. Imbeciles and mystics. Nothing a good, sound, rational mind couldn’t deal with. And now that good, sound, rational mind just had to find the exit, a drink, and Matheson Catcher, in that order.

  Then he turned the next corner, and walked right into something large, alive, and impossible.

  The night she’d met Samuel Lincoln, Roz had dreamt of spinning golden spheres, of stovepipe hats and civil wars and witch-doctors and flowers that never died. By the time she’d woken up, every detail of the escape plan had been considered, calculated, and filed in her memory.

  The only way out of this place. The only way to let the Doctor know where she was. The only way to summon a Time Lord.

  The hardest part of the plan had been getting hold of the gun. There were simpler weapons, easier ways of killing someone, but a gun just seemed right, the only tool for the job. It was like preparing a magic ritual, thought Roz, where all the pieces had to be in place for the plan to work, and all the right props had to be used. Time-traveller’s voodoo.

  She’d mingled with the people from the other ‘attractions’, drifting from whisper to whisper until she’d found someone who knew where to get hold of firearms, no questions asked. It had reminded her of one of the undercover operations she’d been involved in during her former life, and their unwillingness to talk reminded her that she’d never been any good at them then. The job had taken her the best part of a week.

  The arms dealer had been a middle-aged man with vaguely Latin features, who seemed to talk to people without really noticing they were there. He’d struck Roz as the type who’d make a good narcotics dealer, a thousand years in the future, but the people of Woodwicke didn’t seem to understand the concept of ‘controlled substances’. Cocaine was legal, caffeine was legal, marijuana was not only legal but apparently used by the President – who did inhale – and vraxoin wouldn’t be discovered for another two hundred years (when some idiot junkie out on the Cygnus Rim would get wasted one night and say to himself, the way only a junkie could: ‘Hey, I know! Let’s snort dead alien!’).

  The gun had cost her everything she owned – which she had to admit was pretty damn cheap – plus a few odds and ends she’d taken from the house. It was a clumsy piece of machinery, even by eighteenth-century standards. ‘Army surplus’, she’d been told, a relic from the War of Independence. She’d spent some time practising out in the woods, using up most of what little ammunition she’d been able to afford, getting a feel for the weapon, learning how to fire the damned thing without being killed by the recoil.

  She’d also spent some time hanging around the Lincoln house, an address that had taken her several days to worm out of the locals. There, she’d found the convenient little alleyway that opened up directly opposite the building, right by the church. The perfect site. Not only did the alley give her good cover, it also had an excellent view of the drawing– room window.

  The clock in the church tower struck nine, listlessly, perhaps aware that no one cared about the time this close to Christmas.

  No one was around on Paris Street. Roz Forrester crouched in the alley, slipped the gun out of her pouch, and prepared to shoot Samuel Lincoln.

  2

  A Fistful of Timelines

  Daniel Tremayne was running. At last, he was running.

  Saw the alleyways flash past, saw the lights on Paris Street turn into yellow smears, saw a corner where he’d once been attacked by a drunken priest and a store where he’d stolen a whole pineapple, slipping it under his coat-of-rags, thinking, they don’t even notice me when I’ve got something this size bulging out of my shirt. Daniel Tremayne, running through the places he’d been before, and all of them he recognized, and none of them made sense. It was like something –

  – the thing hadn’t entered the basement, or even appeared in a magical puff of smoke. It had been born into Catcher’s house, kicking its way out of the very stuff of creation –

  – like something had reached into his head and pulled away all the strings that held his memories together. People were on Eastern Walk, people who stared, people who noticed him. He thought about calling out to them, warning them about the thing that was filling up Catcher’s house, but his head was already full of the whispers, and there was no room in there for putting words together any more.

  Saw that the stones of the street were closer to his face than they should have been. Didn’t think it mattered much. He kind-of-remembered feeling something under his foot, tripping up on some piece of garbage at the entrance to an alley. The pain that cracked across his forehead when he hit the ground might as well have been happening to someone else, and the splintering noise might as well have come from somewhere a hundred miles away.

  Suddenly he could see a picture of dirt-shrouded men in a field of snow, and Daniel recognized it as a memory, knocked out of the back of his skull and into the space behind his eyes. There was the sound of music, shot through with gunfire, like he was listening to the carnival at the end of the world.

  – he’d seen a million futures, worlds held together by webs of machines, mapping out civilization as a tapestry of noughts and ones. Everything in the known universe, converted into the simplest of pulses, on-off on-off
–

  All the sounds and all the pictures had melted down into the noughts and the ones. There was nothing else, except for something big and black and empty, but Daniel Tremayne didn’t know the word ‘unconscious’ so he didn’t know what to call it.

  Marielle Duquesne lashed out against the machine, jamming her fist into its cheek, and it was only when her knuckles failed to bleed that she knew she was dreaming. The cracks she’d made in the thing’s head formed a near-perfect circle, a flower of chipped plaster against the smooth surface of its face.

  ‘Knock knock,’ grinned the machine.

  Duquesne hesitated, fists still clenched.

  ‘Do I take it that this is my cue to wake up?’ she asked.

  ‘Knock knock,’ it repeated, and the dream fell to pieces.

  ‘Come in,’ said Duquesne, rubbing her eyes.

  Even before the cabin door opened, she knew the caller had to be her contact in America, the sentinel – some would say ‘spy’ – that her employers had set to watch over New York. She guessed it was nine o’clock, or thereabouts. She’d meant to sleep for only an hour or so after dinner, readying herself for her first trip into the towns, but the dream had pulled her deeper into sleep than she’d wanted to go.

  ‘My lady,’ said Tourette, removing his hat with an unnecessary flourish.

  She considered offering him her hand, then decided that he’d probably think she was flirting, and just sat up with the bedsheet wrapped around her torso. Tourette’s body was thin and angular, with a face to match, his chiselled features leading him to the false conclusion that he had some kind of regal charm about him. His wardrobe had obviously been designed to reflect this, his bright velvet jacket and oversized cravat making him the most conspicuous agent Duquesne had ever been forced to work with.

  ‘Good evening, Monsieur Tourette,’ she said, mechanically, as she slid out of the bed. Tourette didn’t seem at all intimidated by the fact that she was only half-dressed, which irked her slightly. He obviously felt that morality was for the peasants. ‘You bring news from the towns?’