Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  Catcher found himself looking down. Everything seemed perfectly normal. His clothes were in place. His cravat was tied under his chin in a neat and orderly fashion. His body was trembling slightly, but that was all.

  ‘You’re becoming a walking anomaly,’ the prisoner told him. ‘Can’t you see it? Your entire biological structure has been affected. It’s nothing you could put your finger on, of course. Put your DNA under analysis and it would probably make no sense at all, but to the naked eye, everything seems to be in the right place. Don’t you understand?’

  Catcher realized that he was staring at his hands. Something crawled across his skin. A clockwork voice in his head told him to close his eyes.

  ‘At least there’s one good thing about us meeting like this,’ the man said with appalling cheeriness. ‘You must be the one who has my amaranth. Please can I have my ball back?’

  ‘So, why are you here? In America, I mean.’

  They were still in the ruined cloisters, trying to ignore the cracks and the clockwork fingertips. They walked past an overturned glass-fronted cabinet which, according to a small bronze plaque set into its base, contained the only stuffed specimen of a De Loys ape in existence. The animal inside was probably the ugliest thing that had ever lived.

  ‘Curiosity,’ Duquesne said, wondering how convincing she sounded. ‘I have heard that the architects of this nation have an interest in, ahh, unusual practices.’

  ‘Architects?’ Cwej blinked at her, blond eyebrows crumpling appealingly. ‘Sorry, I don’t know much about this time period.’

  Duquesne wished he’d stop saying things like that, even if they were true. ‘Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Paine. Even George Washington. It’s rumoured that they may have practised some form of... how may I put it?’

  ‘Er, witchcraft?’ suggested Cwej.

  Duquesne sighed. ‘If you wish. It is said they practised such things during their revolution.’ The word ‘revolution’ stuck in her throat, just as it always did. It reminded her of her own nation, and of the fact that her unusual talent was the only reason the French government put up with her. Too useful to be an exile, she thought, too useful for Madame Guillotine. ‘I came to America in order to discover more. My, ah, friends have been watching events here for some time ‘

  That had been a slip. Fortunately, Cwej didn’t ask who her ‘friends’ were. He seemed distracted, staring at a cracked wall of grey stone to the right. In those few seconds, his neck was exposed to Duquesne, and she focused on a large pink vein that ran from his jaw to his collar. It almost seemed to pop out at her. An obvious target. One little cut...

  She struggled to hold back her Directory training, trying not to remember lessons taught in a lead-lined room.

  ‘Christopher...?’ she made herself say.

  ‘Mmm?’ He turned back to her, flashing a brief smile. ‘Oh, sorry. I just thought I saw that wall blinking at me.’

  The stone heads seemed to be frowning. What’s the matter, they were saying, can’t you hold your information?

  Interface lurched drunkenly through the teleplasm, European history rolling across its memory. 1789. The Citizens of Paris began slaughtering the aristocracy, and Interface was there in the crowd as Louis XVI’s head fell from his shoulders. Then the mob turned in on itself, and Interface watched the revolutionaries fighting like dogs in a pit.

  1794. The original Revolution coughed up its guts and died. France was now being run by a group called the Directory –

  And suddenly, Interface was in a room that stank of mahogany, among the heads of that Directory. They were looking through the records that Citizen Robespierre had kept, reports that the old revolutionaries had tried to incorporate in Robespierre’s ‘rationalist religion’. The men gasped, horrified, at the descriptions of the weird and other-worldly things that had walked the Earth, evidence from every known continent, from as far away as Terra Australis. Interface watched from a corner, silently, again wondering what Time Lord could possibly have been present.

  This is terrible, the men were saying. Such things should not exist. The people must never know. They would panic, we would lose control... and in a matter of hours, it was agreed. They would seek out those things that went against reason, the monsters and the caillou and the visitors from beyond the aether. They would seek to control them, and if they couldn’t control them, they would exterminate them. Another organization was spawned, a secret society, under the Directory’s control. Its hidden underbelly. Its Shadow.

  With a sudden teleplasmic shock, Interface was back where it had started, watching Cwej and Duquesne walk through the cloisters, talking genially.

  ‘So you’ve been doing this a while?’ Cwej asked. ‘Just going from country to country, checking for any of these caillou people?’

  Duquesne nodded, hesitantly. ‘Perhaps it will give me some idea of my own abilities,’ she said.

  No, Interface wanted to say. She’s lying, Cwej. She’s not here for her own benefit. Ask her who she’s working for.

  Cwej thought for a moment. ‘So, am I one of these caillou?’

  A half-smile crossed Duquesne’s face. ‘Yes, Christopher. Yes, I suppose you are.’

  And if they couldn’t control them, they would exterminate them. Urgently, Interface began twisting the fabric of the TARDIS, creating a new mouth amongst the ruined cloisters...

  Then the big shock came. A pulse, like a surge of electrical energy, coursing through the whole of the ship and sending a shiver through every circuit. At first, Interface thought it was just another side-effect of the ‘alien interference’, but once the shock was over, it realized that the pulse had come directly from the telepathic circuits of the TARDIS.

  The ship had done this itself. Intentionally.

  Interface saw Cwej scratch the back of his neck. ‘It’s funny,’ he said. ‘I keep getting this memory. Something about frisbees. Something about bank robbers.’

  Duquesne looked at him in alarm. ‘Frisbees?’

  ‘Oh. It’s not important.’

  Interface finished making its mouth, and had just opened it when that particular part of the wall broke away from the cloisters and tumbled into the space where the Eighth Door section had once been.

  Roz Forrester had walked past the house before, usually very quickly. It wasn’t that the place was frightening, or ominous, or dangerous-looking. It was just generally unpleasant. The frontage had been stripped down so many times that the place seemed like a half-formed thing now, like a zombie of a building. Roz scowled at herself. Stupid metaphor.

  They stood in a tiny alley at the side of the house, half-lit by the gaslights of Hazelrow Avenue. The alley was full of bric-à-brac, if bric-à-brac had been invented yet. Daniel was standing by the cellar door, looking around furtively. A born sneak-thief, thought Roz. Someone had closed and locked the door since his last visit.

  ‘Can you open it?’

  Daniel glanced over his shoulder at her. His face looked more exhausted than a teenager’s was entitled to be, in Roz’s opinion. ‘I can still hear it. Not as strong, though.’

  ‘Can you open it?’

  ‘You’ll make it stop calling me?’

  ‘Let’s just get inside. Then we’ll see.’

  It took no time at all for Daniel to spring the lock, and Roz got the impression that some automatic function of his brain had done all the work. The door creaked open in the traditional melodramatic style. Roz listened. No movement inside.

  Daniel didn’t want to go in, of course, but she persuaded him with a well-placed poke or two in the back.

  The space behind the door was dark, but the darkness began to lift as Roz passed through the entrance, like someone was turning a dimmer-switch in the room on the other side. Or like she was walking through a fog, and the further she went, the thinner it got. All her senses went blurry for a second, and it reminded her of the way she felt whenever she used a transmat beam, or whenever she walked into the –

  She walked right into Da
niel’s back. He’d stopped dead, and Roz noticed how tense his body had become. Then she looked over his shoulder into the cellar, and her body tensed up, too.

  It was as though the normal architecture of the building had been forced aside, and replaced by something much larger and much more impressive; something with cream-coloured walls, indented with crater-like circles, and lit with an off-white glow that came from nowhere in particular. There was even a console in the centre of the room, a hexagonal surface supported by a metallic trunk. The place was darker than it should have been, though, much darker, shadows everywhere.

  Daniel started making tiny clucking noises in the back of his throat. Roz took another look around the room, feeling the vibration that ran through the structure, the atmosphere that practically buzzed in her ear. She knew. She didn’t know how, but she knew one thing for certain about this place.

  ‘This isn’t a TARDIS,’ she said. ‘It just looks like one.’

  She stepped forward, around the frozen form of Daniel, examining the walls, the floor, the corners. The TARDIS was a constructed thing, perfect in every geometric detail, but here... the angles were all in the right places, but there was a sense of randomness built into it. Effortless. That was the word. Effortless.

  She turned to Daniel. He stared at her with wet, uncomprehending eyes.

  ‘TARDISes are built,’ she told him, knowing he wouldn’t understand a word she was saying. ‘This one just happened.’

  The town was panicking. Erskine Morris had never seen that before, an entire town panicking.

  He couldn’t recall exactly what had taken place on Eastern Walk, though he was dimly aware that it had only happened five minutes ago. The watchman, Silkwood, had turned up. More rumours, more whispers. Someone had asked Erskine what was going on, and where the diabolists were, but he hadn’t even had the energy to swear at them. Someone else asked whether Silkwood was in league with the forces of Satan. Silkwood! Silkwood, for Christ’s sake, the man who’d once arrested a six-year-old child for showing its nipples in public!

  There had been brief flurries of movement. Scuffles. Fisticuffs. Things had been thrown. Erskine wondered if he’d been one of the throwers, then decided that it was an utterly ludicrous idea. By all the ravaged nuns in Hell, what was he, a barbarian?

  ‘She’s not here,’ one of the skinny Renewalists said. ‘The witch-woman isn’t here.’

  Erskine looked around, dazed. He was moving along Eastern Walk. No, he wasn’t moving, he was being moved. The people around him were creating a current of urgency, and he was letting himself be dragged along by it.

  ‘Witch-doctors. Didn’t I tell you? We should never have let the niggers get this close to the town.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘That’s what they call them in the south.’

  ‘Peter McLeod said there was a whole coven of ‘em.’

  ‘What’s a coven?’

  Damnation, thought Erskine, this was absurd. They were talking about witches and warlocks, things that didn’t exist –

  In the labyrinth.

  – why didn’t Monroe and the others do something, instead of breeding this pointless medieval hysteria –

  In the labyrinth, you walked right through it.

  – and where was Monroe, anyway?

  As if in answer to his question, a portly hooded shape drew up alongside him. The shape said nothing, just nodded as if they shared some secret understanding, and pressed a wad of sackcloth into Erskine’s hand.

  Erskine felt the current pushing him towards the ‘African quarter’ on the north side of town, where the blacks and the outcasts lived in their paper-walled piss-drenched houses. He saw the people, closing ranks around the Renewalists, looking at him with a mixture of fear and respect. He looked at the mask in his hand.

  He wondered if people would leave him alone if he put it on.

  6

  Non-Interventionist Policy (Yeah, Sure)

  The bodies of three young children had been found in an alleyway near Eastern Walk. Their throats had been slit, the blood drained from their bodies. One of them (or was it all of them?) had been ritualistically disembowelled.

  At least, that’s what they were saying on Paris Street. Nobody seemed to know who these children had been, or where the corpses were now. Those who lived on Eastern Walk might have been puzzled that they hadn’t seen any such bodies, or heard a single word said about their supposed discovery.

  One know-it-all from Hazelrow Avenue said he wasn’t at all surprised to hear about the horrific child murders. The Negroes did this sort of thing all the time back in Africa, he said. In fact, witch-doctors in the jungle regularly impaled youngsters and used their blood and intestines in their dark rituals...

  By eleven o’clock, the search for the witch-woman had become a little more urgent.

  Many things were taught in the lead-lined rooms. caillou artefacts would be revealed to the Shadow Directory’s students. On occasion, pain would be ceremonially inflicted on the initiates, as a test of character or a rite de passage. Agents would be given their new weaponry, and shown the basic arts of scalpel-wielding. The archons of the Directory would visit from their dioceses in Bayern or Philadelphia, giving the students the benefit of their experience.

  The most intriguing lectures were those delivered by Professor Hulot of Orléans. It was the Professor’s belief that many of the caillou existed in ‘more than three dimensions’, though how there could possibly be more than three dimensions, nobody but the Professor seemed to know. He claimed that the physical form of a caillou was a mere fragment of its vast ‘multi-dimensional’ form, and that – like the proverbial iceberg – most of it went unseen by the human eye, existing in a mysterious realm he liked to call ‘meta-space’.

  The Professor would point out (at great length, as any of his students would testify) that wherever a caillou was found, remarkable coincidences would occur. ‘When a caillou’s life is threatened, or it finds itself in a situation where escape seems impossible, curious episodes transpire as if by chance,’ he’d written in his treatise On the Habits and Occupations of Astral Personages. ‘Weather conditions inexplicably change, distracting the enemy long enough for the caillou to slip away. Mysterious third parties just happen to pass by, inadvertently saving the caillou from its fate. Even when they are put in a place of confinement, doors which are thought to be secure are found to have been left unlocked, and competent guards look the other way at precisely the wrong moment.’

  Professor Hulot would insist that these things weren’t accidents at all; the caillou’s invisible influence was at work in ‘meta-space’, he’d claim, pushing people and objects into convenient places, though its three-dimensional form might seem to be ‘sitting on its backside doing nothing at all’.

  The Professor would point to one well-documented case, of a caillou who visited Paris in 1791. The creature had appeared as a grey-haired old man, but at least three witnesses had seen him arrive in a miraculous metal box which had later transmogrified itself into a wooden barricade, as if to avoid detection. The old man had taken a great interest in the Revolution, and several of Robespierre’s agents – posing as common citizens, naturellement – had spoken with him. Transcripts of the interviews had fallen into the hands of the Directory, who had examined the man’s speech, finding it packed with pointless witticisms and atrocious English puns. ‘Something to draw me out of my shell, hmmm?’ he’d said at one point, when offered an egg sandwich.

  But though seemingly childish, the Professor claimed that these puns were in fact parts of complex equations that related to events beyond human perception. In the Professor’s terms, by making ‘verbal connections’ between events, the caillou was ‘completing circuits in meta-space’. ‘They seem uncommonly lucky, but that luck is merely a manifestation of their great and unearthly experience,’ Hulot wrote. ‘The older they get, the more extreme the coincidences that surround them become.’

  It is perhaps hardly surprising
that the Professor was considered to be something of an eccentric by his peers. It is surely significant, however, that mere hours after the joke about the egg sandwich had been made, the old man and his young travelling companion escaped from a Parisian military post using explosives from an artillery shell (the Professor always stressed the word shell) that had ‘accidentally’ been left in some dark corner of the building...

  The agent called Raphael had never particularly cared for Professor Hulot, but then neither had his other teachers. This is why Raphael had become a chirurgeon instead of a field agent, why he’d been given the sharpest scalpel the Directory had to offer, and why he was now sweeping into the town of Woodwicke like an elemental force with the killing lessons foremost in his head.

  ‘Reason,’ demanded Matheson Catcher.

  The Doctor sighed theatrically. Thirty-four-and-a-half minutes tied to a chair, and the interrogation was still getting him nowhere. He decided to try a different approach.

  ‘Very well. Let’s talk about reason. Sorry, Reason.’ Somehow, the capital letter seemed to change the entire tone of the sentence. ‘Would you like to hear a story?’

  ‘A story?’ The Doctor could have sworn he heard whirring, clanking sounds from inside the man’s head.

  ‘Once upon a time...’ the Doctor began.

  ‘A story?’ repeated Catcher. Obviously, something had got stuck inside that clockwork brain of his. I must have wound him up, the Doctor thought. ‘Fairy-tales. Not rational. No basis in scientific theory.’

  ‘That’s a pity. I was going to tell you about the Glass Eaters of the Anterides. The people who reasoned themselves to death. They moved in tighter and tighter circles of logic until they finally disappeared up their own Socratic methodologies. Perhaps you’d prefer a story with killer robots in it.’ Again, the whirring in Catcher’s head. No, thought the Doctor, I’m imagining it. It’s easy to imagine things like that around this man. ‘I want to know what you call rational, Mr Catcher. Why do you do what you do? What’s the reason behind your Reason?’