Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  ‘Fornication,’ he heard Erskine Morris mutter. The man’s voice was unusually quiet, and Monroe noticed that he wasn’t wearing his hood. He frowned. Bad form. Didn’t look like a rationalist at all.

  The interview was long, irrational, and went round in circles. Eventually, Catcher asked for the hall to be cleared, and was surprised how quickly the council complied. Isaac Penley had been the last out, shutting the doors behind him and apologizing all the way into the corridor.

  ‘You could try beating it out of me,’ said a voice with a slight Highland accent. ‘A shame to waste the opportunity, now you’ve disposed of all the witnesses.’

  Catcher’s attention snapped back to the little man who was tied to the chair, an agent of Cacophony bound by the forces of Reason. Flippant even now. Chillingly typical.

  ‘I know you,’ said Catcher. ‘I know who you are.’

  The prisoner regarded him curiously. ‘Really? Good. That saves half an introduction. Of course, I usually just say my name’s "Smith", if anyone asks, but I’ve been thinking about finding another pseudonym. It’s getting dangerously close to becoming my real name. And you are...’

  ‘Catcher,’ replied Catcher, without thinking He felt something click inside his head, as if the Watchmakers were tightening the springs to stop him saying too much.

  ‘Catcher. As in "rat". And am I to understand that you’re the leader of the local scientific alcoholics society?’

  Catcher felt himself nod before he even understood the words. The springs tightened further.

  ‘Interesting.’ The man was staring right into Catcher’s face, as though looking for some small but significant detail. ‘You know, for the leader of a cult, you’re not terribly charismatic. Your oratory style seems rather mechanical, if your addresses to the council are anything to go by. I wonder what the appeal is?’

  ‘Reason is with me,’ Catcher announced, but somehow the words just didn’t sound majestic enough.

  ‘Hmmm. More likely that your followers are finding it hard to adapt to this century’s change in attitude, and you’re exploiting their vulnerability. Even so, I’d say there’s more to you than meets the eye. I wonder what your secret is?’

  Catcher felt his muscles stiffen. He experienced a sudden and irrational impulse to hit the man, to take him up on his suggestion of beating the truth out of him He suppressed it. I AM RATIONAL. I AM IN CONTROL.

  ‘You’re not in control,’ said the prisoner, casually. ‘And why did you want me alone, I wonder? Afraid of the impression I might make on the council?’

  ‘Cacophony must be isolated,’ Catcher said. He was satisfied with that. For a moment, he felt the springs in his head loosen, but then the man was staring at him again. Staring at him with eyes of an irrational colour.

  ‘Who are you working for?’ the diabolist asked.

  They were walking through the maze of paving-slabs that had once been the cloisters, past an enormous collection of mounted insect specimens that had become embedded in a marble fountain. There was a hollow ticking sound from beneath their feet, suggesting that something was trapped under the stones and scratching its way towards the surface, but they were trying to ignore it. Occasionally a chunk of masonry would float across their path, and they’d stop to let it go by. Duquesne was deliberately keeping to Cwej’s left.

  ‘The TARDIS is supposed to have defences that stop this kind of thing happening,’ Cwej was saying, like a man apologizing for an untidy house. ‘There’s something that takes the ship out of space and time if anyone tampers with it, and there’s something else that’s meant to stop us materializing in the middle of volcanoes or in the paths of aeroplanes or anything. I don’t know if it’s still working, though.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Duquesne, flatly.

  ‘My guess is, there’s some kind of extra-dimensional thing at work here. It’s probably kidnapped Roz and the Doctor. It probably wants to take over the universe.’

  Duquesne looked alarmed. ‘You sound very casual, Christopher.’

  ‘Do I? I dunno. After a while, it all seems kind of natural.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Anyway, whoever’s behind this, they’ll probably show themselves soon. There’s going to be a face-off. There always is.’

  ‘You no doubt know best,’ said Duquesne, without any apparent humour.

  ‘So, I think we should be armed. The only working weapons on board that I know about are in Roz’s quarters. That means we’ll have to go through the parts of the ship where the life-support’s broken down, and that won’t be easy.’

  They paused as a broken balustrade drifted past. Wolsey the cat sat perched on top of it, licking his backside as if the break-up of the TARDIS was unimportant compared to the state of his furry rear end.

  ‘I was going to ask you –’ began Cwej.

  Interface felt its personality lurch and skip. In that moment, the data it had requested from the Matrix was pushed into its human-shaped memory, flooding the make-believe synapses. The experiences of dead Time Lords, and of those few who had been touched by the Matrix while they still lived. Interface found itself developing new perspectives by the second.

  Frame one. It was watching a film in a secret screening-room. The film was scratchy, in black and white. The camera had been unsteady. The film showed the interior of a warehouse, where corpses of a hundred different species were suspended in plastic containers. Alien bodies riddled with bullets, disembodied organs sealed in transparent bags by their sides. A group of humans – in twentieth-century military outfits, Interface noted – were sealing up the body of something half-reptilian, half-piscine.

  Frame two. Interface was in a room, surrounded by the twin scents of blood and ethanol, the area cluttered with primitive surgical tools. It was watching an autopsy, two men hacking into a bleached humanoid on a blood-flecked table. The men were making notes; the body had two hearts and a respiratory bypass system, not to mention an enormous gaping wound in its right leg. They occasionally turned to Interface and asked questions.

  What Time Lord had witnessed this, it wondered?

  Frame three. Interface was in a darkened office, searching a filing cabinet by torchlight. It found itself flicking through documents labelled ‘majestueux’ reading reports of monsters and anomalies, most of them dated between 1790 and 1840. Two words kept reappearing throughout the reports, the name of the organization that had been involved in all of these operations.

  Shadow Directory.

  In a corridor on another level of the TARDIS, one of the roundels frowned.

  ‘– was that true, what you told me before?’ said Cwej. ‘About just, y’know, wandering into the TARDIS?’

  Marielle Duquesne paused. ‘No,’ she admitted. ‘It was not. Your ship called me here. At least, it attracted me in a way I could not resist. Pardon me, Christopher. I am... embarrassed by such things.’

  Interface watched her, observing the tiny tell-tale movements she made, revealing that she was still hiding something. The concept of body language was new to the software, but it wasn’t hard to get to grips with.

  Secret societies, thought Interface. Shadow Directory. It wondered if it should tell Cwej, and if so, then how.

  Something was happening in the town. Something big, and brutal, and unexpected. There were weird stories, rumours about violence and witchery. Daniel Tremayne didn’t know how he knew all that; he just felt it, like everything the town experienced had been filtered through his body first.

  He tried telling the woman, but he couldn’t find the right words. Whenever he tried to speak, she just nodded, and said they should stay out of sight. They were moving through the alleyways now, slowly and cautiously, heading for Catcher’s house without using any of the main streets.

  And why in the name of God are you going back there, Daniel Tremayne?

  ‘Because it’s the only thing you can do,’ said the woman, though Daniel hadn’t realized he’d been speaking aloud. He watched the African out of the corner of his eye. Wasn’t she a
little too friendly, for one of her kind? She acted with a kind of authority as well, like a councillor or a watchman would have done; but it was like she hadn’t used her authority for a long time, and kept forgetting how she should talk to him.

  ‘Didn’t mean to say anything,’ said Daniel.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said the woman. Forrester. She’d said her name was Forrester. ‘You don’t like talking, do you? Funny. You seemed conversational enough the first time we met.’

  ‘Everything’s different now.’ He slipped out onto a side-street, Forrester right behind him.

  ‘You just want to get on with your life, is that it? That strikes me as odd. It’s not like your life seems that great.’ She clenched her teeth. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean it to sound that offensive.’

  Daniel Tremayne shrugged. ‘Don’t want to get caught up in any of this. Don’t want to stick my head up so as I get noticed. You in the War?’

  There was a moment’s silence from Forrester. ‘No. Not the one you mean.’

  ‘Saw what happened to them when they fought the War. Got hurt. Killed. Should’ve seen them, covered in sick and dirt.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The ones who fought the English. You can’t go up against things like that, things like the English. Like going up against the weather.’ He was pleased with the way he’d put that, but the woman didn’t look impressed. As they slipped into another alley, he caught a puzzled expression on her face.

  ‘They won, though, didn’t they?’ she said. ‘Someone told me that the Americans beat the shite out of the British. I think those were the words he used, anyway.’

  ‘That’s what the soft people say, that they won the War and changed everything. World still looks the same to me, though.’ Again, he found himself wondering how he knew what the world had looked like before the War, but he decided to keep the thought to himself. ‘The English. The Revolution. People, people like me, we can’t do anything about them. They do what they like, the Presidents and the Kings and all. They make the world, we just live in the cracks. Got to keep our heads down or they get shot right off.’

  Forrester sniffed. ‘When history goes overhead, duck.’

  ‘Hahh. That’s right.’ Daniel nodded to himself. He was starting to get a grip on this witch-woman.

  And maybe she caught that thought, because she said: ‘You don’t believe in witches, though, do you?’

  ‘Don’t believe anything. Don’t believe in God. Don’t believe in the Devil.’ He shook his head. ‘Or maybe I do. The Revolution, that’s just like a God. Can’t understand why it does what it does, can’t do anything about it. The Devil, the English, what’s the difference?’

  Forrester went quiet after that. Daniel wondered what she was thinking

  Just like home, just like the thirtieth century. The whole universe run by an Empire. Not by people, just by an Empire, and no one can do a damn thing about it. We don’t believe in gods and demons. He’s got the English to be scared of, I’ve got the Empress.

  Goddess, and I used to believe in the Empire, didn’t I? Right up until the point when the Empire tried to kill me off. Right up to the point when the Doctor showed his face in Overcity Five.

  I’m going to have to go back, sometime. Aren’t I?

  Don’t think about that now.

  And the kid’s right. Something’s happening in this town. Not like the Doctor said, not some maniac re-building the world with the amaranth. The amaranth I lost. No. The town’s going mad on its own. Outside the church, they were talking about all kinds of garbage. Mad scientists. Satanists. This town’s making its own monsters.

  Maybe it’s because it’s almost 1800. People go crazy when the numbers change. Like in 2000, when they started launching the old space stations, and there were those riots across Asia and South America. Heard about that the last time I had to stay in the USA, three hundred years from now. And what about 3000? Yeah. Just before me and Chris left, the day we packed up and moved into the TARDIS, the news reports that were coming in... civilization falling apart, rioting in all areas. Uprisings on Solos and Murtaugh. There was that footage from Spaceport Twelve Overcity, whole neighbourhoods on fire, and some of the undercity suckers had started a carnival in the ruins. A carnival. The end of the world comes, and they just want to party. Maybe it’s the same in 4000, and 5000. Didn’t the Doctor say something about World War VI? People dancing in the ashes of Reykjavik or somewhere?

  Who starts the carnivals? Who makes the music?

  Prendeville Silkwood had policed Woodwicke for most of his adult life, but he had never, not even in the days of the Revolution, seen anything like this. There were perhaps half a dozen of the men, all dressed in day-to-day clothing, all with ridiculous grey hoods pulled over their faces. The townspeople that stood at a discreet distance around them – a crowd, despite the fact that it was getting on for eleven – should have been laughing, but they actually seemed to take the overblown (and, in some cases, overweight) figures seriously. As he’d reached the top of Eastern Walk, Silkwood had listened to the whispers that laced the crowd, and heard words that he never thought he’d hear outside of some morally questionable supernatural romance.

  ‘Mr Catcher has already informed the council,’ one of the fat hooded men was now telling him. ‘We have special powers to deal with this, this special situation.’

  Silkwood looked around. Somebody – not even one of the hooded men, just an ordinary, God-fearing inhabitant of Woodwicke – was having an argument with John Ormond the banker, hissing and cursing in low and dangerous tones. Ormond was defending himself by babbling hysterically.

  ‘There is no situation.’ Silkwood poured three decades of authority and experience into his voice. ‘Whatever happened at the church, sir, is over. It’s Christmas Eve, and we should all be at home with our families. I want to see everybody here indoors and off the streets.’

  His words were forceful, direct, and spoken with absolute conviction. And he was alarmed to realize that nobody was listening to him.

  ‘We have reason to believe that diabolists are at work among these attractions,’ the fat man continued. His spluttering voice suddenly sounded familiar.

  ‘Monroe? Walter Monroe? Is that you?’ Silkwood let out a deep and throat-rattling laugh, then tried to pull the man’s hood off. Monroe caught him by the wrist.

  ‘Special powers,’ he repeated.

  There was the sound of a struggle. Silkwood turned his head, his hand still in Monroe’s grip. Evidently Ormond had attempted to leave; someone had tried to stop him, and now a few of the townsfolk were clustered around the man, blocking his way. He looked terrified.

  ‘What?’ Silkwood heard someone ask. ‘What is it you’re scared of?’

  ‘Let the man go,’ Silkwood demanded. He turned back to Monroe, forced his wrist out of the fool’s grip. ‘In the name of the Lord, Monroe, what is it you think you’re doing?’

  But Monroe didn’t answer. All around him, Silkwood could hear the sounds of stalls and tents being pulled and poked, searched and dismantled. He felt the crowd move in around him. There was a sharp exclamation from Ormond.

  ‘Why’s he trying to get in the way?’ someone asked.

  The next thing he knew, there was the brief sound of violence. Ormond fell silent.

  Someone threw something at the back of Prendeville Silkwood’s head.

  Matheson Catcher’s muscles felt as if they were about to give up entirely, strung taut as mainsprings between his joints. The man had kept asking him questions, and he’d kept answering them without knowing quite why, the Watchmakers occasionally punishing him by tightening the springs a little.

  ‘Tell me about the rituals,’ the man said.

  ‘Rituals?’ Catcher tried to relax, then realized that he’d never relaxed in his life and didn’t know how. ‘There are no rituals. Only scientific procedures.’

  The man scoffed. ‘Whatever you want to call them. How do you tear holes in the rational universe?’

&nb
sp; Catcher suppressed the urge to throttle him. ‘You are being absurd. I merely reduce physical matter to its simplest form, allowing me to reconstruct the material cosmos according to the patterns of the Wa... of the new order.’

  The captive sighed. ‘Oh, very well. How do you do it?’

  ‘Intonation.’

  ‘You mean, you chant?’

  ‘Chant! Monks and women chant.’ The man frowned at his turn of phrase, but Catcher ignored him. ‘The rational order of the universe responds to the harmonics of the intonations –’

  ‘Which are?’

  Catcher, determined to win this battle of wills, looked the diabolist straight in the eye and said:

  ‘Io Ordo Ordo Io.’

  For a second, a tiny corner of reality by the prisoner’s left ear twitched expectantly.

  ‘Ah. I see.’ The man was nodding. ‘Chanting in binary. The numbers disguised as simple "magic words". A shut-down code for reality. Quantum mnemonics, but without the lethal finesse. Typically human. Everything reduced to the basics.’

  Catcher’s mouth clicked open, ready to protest at the word ‘magic’. The man interrupted him:

  ‘But the codes are too complex for you to have just stumbled across them. I was right, then. Outside assistance. Who are you working for?’

  The big hand of the Great Clock of Time was ticking towards midnight. At least, that was how it felt to Catcher.

  ‘The Watchmakers,’ he said, sure that the agent of Cacophony would understand, and be afraid.

  Instead, the man just pulled a stupid face.

  ‘The Watchmakers!’ screamed Catcher.

  ‘You’ve been touched,’ said the diabolist.

  ‘Yes! Yes!’ At last, he was understanding. ‘Touched by the glory of the Watchmakers. The Great Architects of the universe. The majestic clockwork –’

  ‘No.’ The man shook his head. ‘Touched by something very powerful and extremely irrational. And I’ve never got on well with Great Architects anyway. Look at yourself, Mr Catcher.’