Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  He held the weapon against his chest, clinging to it, cherishing it. The Watchmakers would lead him to the witch, and everything would be returned to its usual order. CLEAN IT UP! CLEAN EVERYTHING UP!

  Paris Street was busier than it had ever been in the whole of its seventy-year history. An argument had become a dispute, a dispute had become a fight, a fight had become a made, and a mêlée had become a riot. All part of the natural process, thought the Doctor, stopping in front of a spot where a man’s head had been cracked against the ground until the road had been sprayed pink. From nought to apocalypse in under fifteen minutes. He cleared his throat. How many people? Two dozen? Three? A quick word or two should be enough to quieten them.

  ‘This –’ he began.

  Then something glinted in the darkness between a yellow– stained brick building and a wrecked grocer’s store. Glinted, in the light from a bonfire where fantasies by H. H. Brackenridge and Charles Brockden Brown were being ‘sterilized’. Glinted, in a way that seemed suspiciously significant.

  The Doctor closed his mouth. There was a man in the darkness. Probably. The dim outline of a figure in a wide cape, a head topped by an extravagant stovepipe hat. The shape was entirely black, the man obviously having a good working knowledge of shadows and how to use them. The blackness was interrupted by four patches of fire-tinted light.

  Two lenses. The figure was wearing spectacles. Ovoid. An affectation?

  A smile. Teeth. Glinting teeth. The Doctor frowned. A good knowledge of shadows, and a good sense of aesthetics, too.

  A tool of some kind, in his left hand. Gun barrel? No. Jagged. Knife-related. A scalpel, perhaps. The Doctor was reminded of twentieth-century depictions of Jack the Ripper, a shadow with a smile and a surgeon’s knife. Faceless and unknown. The killing silhouette.

  The shape moved forward. The light shifted around him, but he kept his head down, and the fire failed to illuminate his features. There was just a smile, sweeping across the street, hooded rioters – and even their victims – moving aside for him without even seeming to notice that he was there. Impressed by this manoeuvre, the Doctor very nearly missed the fact that the shape was heading straight for him.

  Two. Three. Four. Five. Two. Three. Four. Five.

  They were marching. Erskine Morris couldn’t remember when they’d started marching, or why, or even whose idea it had been; but it seemed entirely natural now. The rhythm they made, the beat of leather soles against muddied roads, seemed somehow comforting. Marching was easy. Hellfire and sodomy, you didn’t even have to think about it.

  Two. Three. Four. Five.

  So they kept marching, a handful of Society men and a dozen others who’d tagged along for the hell of it, the rhythm only interrupted by the irregular slap-slops of the prisoners’ feet as they were dragged along the streets. The prisoners were all Negroes, taken from their neighbourhoods when the trouble had started and the fires had been lit. Some of them – the stronger, younger men – were still struggling, shouting slurred curses in some Christ-forsaken language no one understood.

  Two. Three. Four. Five. Slip-slop. Slop.

  The prisoners were being taken for interrogation. Erskine wasn’t sure exactly where they’d be interrogated, or by whom, but it was quite clear that asking them questions was what the Renewalists should be doing. They were clearly guilty of something; why else would they have resisted, for bastard Saint Michael’s sake?

  Damnation, Erskine, isn’t it funny how things transpire? Just this morning you would never have believed that diabolism was so widespread in this town. By Jesus Christ’s little Chinese brother, you wouldn’t have believed in it at all.

  Don’t think about that just now, though. Just keep marching.

  Two. Three. Four. Five.

  ‘They can’t do that,’ said Daniel, and his voice sounded as hollow as a Drahvin’s defence at a war-crimes trial.

  Roz turned to see what he was looking at. He was staring into the shadows – at least he was blinking normally, Roz noted – his eyes probing the collapsed masonry in the corner of the old pub. Roz looked down at the amaranth in her hands. It was spinning faster now. Was it doing what the Doctor had said, trying to reorder everything? And if so, why?

  ‘Did you hear me?’ whined Daniel. ‘They can’t do that.’

  ‘Daniel –’ Roz began, and she was going to tell him that it was all right, that he didn’t have to worry. Then she realized what he could see.

  The shadows were moving in ways that shouldn’t have been possible, growing and flickering regardless of the illumination from the few lamps they’d managed to light. The silhouettes were congregating around an archway in the corner that led deeper into the building, an entrance that must once have led to some kind of storage area.

  And there was a shape at the centre of the darkness. The shadows were spiralling around it, and Roz was reminded of the way water dances around a plughole, just before it disappears. It took her a few moments to realize the simple truth of what was happening. It wasn’t some multi-dimensional thing materializing out of the darkness, it was just a man, stepping out from the archway. He wasn’t particularly tall or short, wasn’t particularly slight or well-built, wasn’t particularly attractive or ugly. His skin looked grey even in the orange lamplight, and his clothes looked as if they’d just been pressed, despite the fact that his jacket was caked with dirt and his white knee-length socks (very fashionable in this time, for some stupid reason) had been splashed with large quantities of mud.

  It took Roz’s ‘instinct for law-enforcement’ a mere nanosecond to notice the weapon the man was carrying. It didn’t take the rest of her brain long to catch up. The man blinked, a loud, clicking blink.

  He aimed the gun at Roz. Her muscles tensed.

  ‘Catcher,’ she hissed.

  ‘Clean it up,’ said Catcher. ‘Clean everything up.’

  She looked into his eyes, glassy pebbles pushed deep into his shapeless face, and saw right through them. Disintegrating machinery on the other side. In her own time, she might have mistaken him for a robot, one of the illegal ‘fraudroids’ that had been built to mimic human speech and movement; but Catcher was flesh and blood, she was sure of it. Human, but drawn so far into this mess that he was unstable right down to his soul. Or whatever he had instead of a soul. The amaranth was spinning, faster and faster, trying to come to terms with the madness the man had brought with him. The shadows solidified, until Roz could see metallic joints and clock-faces there in the corners of the pub. Bogeymen. Products of Catcher’s distressed mind. WATCHMAKERS.

  Now, where had that word come from?

  She remembered that Catcher had owned the amaranth, and that part of him – or part of his UnTARDIS – was still in contact with the Doctor’s own ship. She wondered if there were clockwork ghosts in the corridors of the TARDIS as well, taking her quarters apart with their razor-fingers. She even imagined Chris, lying still on the marble floors, Catcher’s phantasms opening him up to see what made him tick...

  All these thoughts took less than four seconds, by which time Catcher’s finger was on the trigger of his gun.

  A quarter to midnight.

  Samuel Lincoln couldn’t remember the exact details of what had happened on Paris Street. He kept remembering that one simple sensation, the bottle breaking against his face, tiny pieces of glass sticking in the corner of his eye. He vaguely recalled lying in the rain, trying to swear at Hatchard. Shouts. Samuel had looked up, and seen the hooded Renewalists approaching. More shouts. More broken glass. Fists.

  He’d crawled away from Paris Street, and he was still crawling, though he couldn’t be sure where he was or how far he’d come. There were alley-ways around him, but one eye was gummed up with blood and splinters of glass, and the other was thick with tears. He tried raising his head, then tried standing. It hurt, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway.

  The woman stepped out in front of him and smiled.

  Samuel felt himself drop to the ground again.
The woman’s face seemed to shift and slide as he watched, perhaps a side– effect of his blurred vision. Even her smile refused to stay in one place for more than a second.

  Then she was gone. Samuel didn’t know where. In her wake there was just dust and music.

  Music?

  The music was real, he was sure of it. His ears were ringing, but even through the din he could hear the rhythm, beaten out on barrels and drums. Dancing-music. Who would play dancing-music at a time like this?

  Samuel Lincoln forced his body up onto its elbows, and began to drag himself in the direction of the noise. He didn’t think to stop and ask himself why he cared.

  There was just darkness. Marielle Duquesne would never have thought that possible; a place where there was just darkness, with no hope of the morning ever arriving. It reminded her of her childhood, when there had been monsters in the nursery. Being young. Knowing exactly what it means to be afraid of the dark.

  And were there monsters here, crawling out of the blackness? No, perhaps not; there were only possibilities, and you could see anything amongst the possibilities, if you looked hard enough. Sometimes, the things she saw (or thought she saw) broke the laws of nature, or the laws of physics, or the laws of time, or laws there weren’t even names for. Whenever she caught a glimpse of something impossible, her spine would burn and she’d spasm like a dying animal.

  Perhaps if she found the right way of looking at this terrible place, she’d see something she recognized. Perhaps she might even find Christopher Cwej, as a man-shaped set of possibilities hidden in the shadows.

  She concentrated. The world remade itself around her, and suddenly, she was standing in a suburb of Hell.

  He had tried a simple distraction, producing an ersatz dove that had fluttered from his sleeve and vanished into the smoke.

  The man with the scalpel hadn’t flinched.

  He had tried a spot of hypnosis, a minor suggestion, staring through the spectacle-lenses and telling his opponent to look the other way for a second.

  The man with the scalpel had just smiled a little harder.

  He had even tried a touch of Venusian Aikido (because the old ways were often the best).

  The man with the scalpel kept coming.

  It was unthinkable. It was inconceivable. But it was happening.

  The Doctor was running out of ideas.

  He hurried along Paris Street, ducking whenever a fist was aimed in his direction. For the most part, the locals were too busy hitting each other to get in his way, but he realized – with some irritation – that nobody was accosting his pursuer at all. They didn’t even notice the man as he swept along the street after the Doctor, a silhouette with a Cheshire-cat grin.

  The Doctor batted away a low-flying brick with the end of his cane, and muttered an ancient Miasimian curse that contained an almost obscene number of ‘X’s. His usual repertoire had quite simply failed to work. He’d followed his usual procedure, adopting the basic thought-processes of a human – albeit an exceptionally gifted human with an unfeasibly large hat collection – so he could understand the psychology of the enemy, while still retaining the edge. He’d slipped into ‘ephemeral mode’ easily enough, remembering to think in three geometric dimensions and to perceive time as a linear experience rather than any of the more exotic alternatives. He’d analysed every move, calculated every chance. The man with the scalpel should have been left standing by now. It was almost as if –

  – no, that was just silly –

  – as if the man had been built to be Doctor-proof.

  The Doctor reached the end of Paris Street. Oh, very well. There was obviously no other way. He’d have to change his perspective again, alter his perceptions, turn his thought processes into something more Time-Lord-ish. He’d have to develop a more advanced solution to the problem.

  Ching, went the scalpel as it embedded itself in his back.

  Step one. Identify the weapon.

  The gun was the same shape as an eighteenth-century rifle, if elongated at the snout. It was silver in colour, the same tone as the My First Blaster weapons that had been popular the year before Roz had left her own century, low-intensity energy weapons designed for young children. Yeah, that was what Catcher’s gun made her think of. Toy weaponry. Right down to the chunky plastic trigger-guard and the zigzag of lightning carved into the handle.

  Step two. Surrender.

  Roz raised her hands. Catcher hardly seemed to notice. The trigger was a millimetre away from the point where it would (probably) activate the gun.

  Step three.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Roz heard herself say.

  The finger froze. Then relaxed. A little.

  Catcher snapped his head to one side with a nasty snapping sound, and Roz was sure she heard words clicking between his ears. AGENT OF CACOPHONY. YOU KNOW IT. REMOVE. OR SOMETHING.

  ‘The Watchmakers are very happy with you,’ she continued, wondering who in the name of the Goddess the Watchmakers were. No, don’t think about that. It doesn’t matter. He knows, or thinks he does, and that’s good enough.

  CACOPHONY. AGENT. WATCHMAKERS. WHAT?

  ‘I know who you are,’ Catcher insisted.

  Roz nodded, hoping he’d think the sweat on her face was rainwater. ‘Good. Then you know you can trust me.’

  That had been a risk. Catcher prodded the air in front of him with the end of his gun. TRUST. NOT RATIONAL. ‘You are an agent of...’ he began, then trailed off.

  Roz tried to make out the voices that were buzzing around inside his head. In his present unstable state, she wondered whether there was a brain in his skull at all, or just a cavity filled with words. ‘I was an agent of Ca... Cacophony?’ she guessed, and saw his trigger-finger itch again. ‘But then I saw the error of my ways. I work for the Watchmakers now.’ She had no idea what she was actually telling him, and she briefly wondered how much of it might be true.

  WATCHMAKERS. WATCHMAKERS. The voices were mechanical and sounded like echoes in a metal-walled room, but she recognized the tones of Catcher’s own voice behind the distortions. That settled it. There were no Watchmakers. There was just Catcher. Catcher the raving loon.

  ‘You are a woman,’ Catcher finally said.

  ‘Well spotted.’ Roz became aware of movement behind her, and guessed that Daniel had got to his feet. He was probably making for the doorway. Catcher didn’t seem to notice. ‘Yes, I’m a woman. Look, maybe I should explain.’

  EXPLAIN. RATIONAL. Roz lowered her hands, and Catcher made no move to stop her.

  ‘Incidentally, that’s a very nice gun,’ she continued, hoping to change the subject. It had worked for the Doctor often enough. ‘Where did you get it?’

  ‘It is an electro-static galvanistic rifle,’ Catcher announced.

  ‘Oh. That’s nice.’

  A thought seemed to strike him. ‘If you were working for the Watchmakers, you would know. The gun was a gift from the Watchmakers. From their temple.’ And the voices were saying REMOVE, REMOVE, REMOVE.

  The gun was pointing at her again. A gift from the Watchmakers, was it? More likely that it had been created along with the other material in his basement, an invention of the amaranth, probably based on some exotic piece of technology lying around in the TARDIS.

  ‘Of course,’ Roz explained, hurriedly. ‘But I had to ask. It’s all part of the test.’

  ‘Test?’ TEST? DID WE SET A TEST?

  ‘A loyalty test. To see if you could stay... rational... in the face of Cacophony.’

  ‘Test? I am devoted to the cause of Reason.’ IS DEVOTED A RATIONAL WORD? ‘The Watchmakers have known me since I was... since I was a child.’ SOUNDS A BIT RELIGIOUS TO ME.

  ‘Well, yeah. Which is probably why you’ve passed the test. With flying colours.’ She started backing towards the doorway, noticing Daniel out of the corner of one eye. He was right behind her, moving in the same direction, trying to stay quiet. ‘You can give the gun back to the Watchmakers now, Mr Catcher.’


  Catcher paused. Roz felt the breeze from the doorway against her back. GIVE THE GUN BACK. DO YOU WANT TO USE THE GUN? REMOVE. DON’T REMOVE. DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.

  The snout of the gun was lowered.

  ‘Give back the gun,’ Catcher repeated.

  His eyes dropped to the ground. Roz edged towards the hole-cum-doorway. Daniel was right beside her. She turned – and suddenly, she was face-to-face with somebody she half-recognized. Two blue eyes set into a fat face, looking up at her. Startled. Startled and short. Standing in the doorway.

  She jumped back. Daniel froze. The man made a shocked gargling sound.

  ‘Witch!’ he shrieked.

  Roz became aware of two things at once. Firstly, she’d seen the man before; he’d visited her tent less than six hours ago, asking about the future and whether it had anything to do with cannibalism in Africa. His name was Isaac. Isaac something.

  Secondly, there was a gun being pointed at her back. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder. A half-decent Adjudicator knows that kind of thing instinctively.

  WITCH WITCH WITCH WITCH WITCH WITCH WITCH WITCH

  She saw Daniel turn, and saw him throw himself to the floor. She heard Catcher’s voices panicking, and heard the insanely quiet sound of a sweating finger closing on a plastic trigger. She felt her legs give way underneath her.

  She was only half-way to the floor when the air cracked open over her head and a tongue of lightning leapt across the pub, igniting the space where her back had just been. The tongue swept across the wall of the building, the scientifically dubious electro-static galvanistic beam skipping from the snout of the gun and scorching the timbers by the doorway. There was a sound like the screech of fast-flowing water. A smell of burning.

  The next thing Roz saw was the man called Isaac Penley – yeah, that was the name – as a silhouette in the doorway, surrounded by light and fire. His shape was only there for a split second, and his scream was the shortest the planet Earth had ever heard.

  Then he burst open.