Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  Chris nodded slowly. ‘Well, yeah...’

  – Good. Then here’s one for you. A game for the new universe. No blasters or aeroplanes this time, though.

  She indicated a space on the dune next to her. Nervously, Chris sat, glancing at the gynoids as they slithered in slow circles around them. ‘What am I supposed to do?’

  – Give birth.

  ‘Sorry?’

  – To a gynoid. It’s easier than you might think. Birth is, however, a painful experience, and you might find your sense of logic slightly bruised.

  She was grinning on the inside, Chris was sure of it. ‘How? I don’t know anything about making, er, things. Un-robots.’

  – Un-robots. She laughed. You don’t ‘make’ them, Chris, you just let them happen. Let go of your rational impulses, forget the conditioning of the Majestic Clockwork. It’s easier to do here, outside of Normal-Space. Go on. Try it.

  Another smile. For a second – no, not even a second – Chris had that old memory again, himself as a child at the Overcity Four Shoptronic Mezzanine. Then his attention was somewhere else, somewhere under the sand. The Carnival Queen had guided his thoughts there, leaving his concentration buried and lost in the blackness.

  Down in the dark, something began to blossom and uncurl. Something that might one day call him ‘da-da’.

  History went overhead. Roz Forrester ducked.

  There was the obligatory sound of mass carnage. Abraham Lincoln’s head fell to the ground in front of her, a hurt expression on its face. Shot from the rear, she noted.

  It all went horribly quiet.

  She looked up, shielding her eyes from the dirt that was blowing across the plain. The bodies – men, horses, machines – were being pulled down into the ground. Vestigial houses sprang up in their place, foundations chewing on the corpses, and New York forced its way back into the world, rolling confidently across the empty battlefield. Roz felt like she’d taken some kind of psycho-active race-memory drug, but it’d been fifteen years since she’d dropped any Instant Trauma.

  Daniel’s voice was in her ear, shouting incoherently over the sound of expanding societies. Roz saw something that looked like a scar across his chest, a thick red line where his shirt had been ripped open. One of the horsemen must have got to him, then, slashed him with its sword-stroke-gun-stroke-generic-weapon. Roz had ducked; Daniel had just stood there and faced it. Was that supposed to be important or symbolic or something?

  He was still shouting, shrieking about history and damnation and Revolutions, when the streets of America stretched under Roz Forrester’s feet and tugged her off into the future.

  Tourette bolted upstairs, ignoring the hideous screeching landlady who’d tried to keep him out of the boarding house. He pushed the door of his room open with his shoulder and leapt through it, unable to resist a touch of high drama even in this moment of crisis. He shut the door behind him, and started piling up the sparse furniture of the room against it.

  He’d run past the docks, where that Duquesne bitch’s ship had been rocking in the water. Someone had said that the arms and legs of the blacks in the hold had begun to knot themselves together, becoming one vast and dark-skinned jungle-god of rage and vengeance. He’d run past the church, where a priest was battling a commando of demons, each side claiming that the other shouldn’t exist. He’d run past bonfires around which people danced – yes, danced, as if they were actually enjoying this vile anarchy – naked in the black rain.

  He’d run, but the things were still following him. He’d first glimpsed them on Burr Street, where he’d spotted their leering faces reflected in puddles and broken windows. More and more of them had appeared, until a whole legion had been pursuing him through the town, rattling their sticks and their jawbones.

  And Tourette had recognized every one of them; the sorcerers, the mystics, the fish-headed monsters. They were the caillou, the ghosts of the ones that the Shadow Directory had hunted down and executed over the years. They had come for revenge. They had come to drag Tourette down into Hell.

  He tugged the metal box out from under the floorboards and started tapping out a message to his superiors, but something was already beating at the door.

  They weren’t there. THEY WEREN’T THERE.

  He looked into every shadow, tried to see sense in every corner of the screen. He felt clockwork fingers picking through the angles of his head, but the fingers were his own, and the angles wouldn’t stay still, and sometimes he thought he could hear the voices of the Watchmakers HEAR THEIR VOICES JUST LIKE ALWAYS even though the voices were just his own voice and they weren’t there because they had abandoned him ABANDONED HIM ABANDONED HIM ABANDONED HIM.

  ‘Ahem,’ said the Doctor.

  Catcher jumped. The Doctor – was that the creature’s name? – stood beside him, the end of his walking-cane pressed into the melted-cheese floor of the cellar.

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s me,’ said the Doctor hurriedly. ‘Agent of Cacophony, enemy of Reason, destroyer of worlds, poacher of eggs, et cetera et cetera. Really, you’re making a terrible mistake.’

  Catcher felt his head jerk spastically to one side.

  ‘TheY have ABANdoneD mE,’ he said.

  The Doctor frowned. ‘Oh dear. Has it reached that stage already? Tell me something, Mr Catcher. When you scuff your right shoe against a paving-stone, do you have an uncontrollable urge to turn around and scuff your left shoe against it as well, just for the sake of symmetry?’

  Catcher nodded enthusiastically.

  ‘Thought so. You’re just the type.’ The Doctor shrugged and approached the dais, his cane remaining wedged into the floor. ‘Now. Let’s see if we can clean up some of the mess.’

  CLEAN IT UP!

  ‘CleAN iT ALL up,’ intoned Catcher.

  ‘We’ll see.’ A piece of the ceiling plopped onto the man’s shoulder, and he brushed it off nonchalantly. ‘As I thought. Modelled on the TARDIS console room. The amaranth has taste. The little gold ball, Mr Catcher. Where is it?’

  Their eyes met, and Catcher thought he saw machinery turning inside the creature’s pupils. Surely, he couldn’t be a...

  ‘STO!len by CAcoPHony,’ Catcher told him.

  ‘Oh.’ The Doctor plunged his hands into the dais, feeling around for the pulpy remains of the powder-blue switches that had sunk into its surface. ‘Well, let’s see what we can do. In the real TARDIS, this would be the synchronic feedback circuit. Even in this deteriorated state, I should be able to achieve some kind of... ah.’

  The dais made a tiny burping noise, then began to solidify. The Doctor nodded. ‘There. The Stattenheim-Waldorf technique. They knew a thing or two about TARDIS configuration, Stattenheim and Waldorf. Which some might think was odd, seeing as they came from sixteenth-century Berlin. Still, there are patterns...’

  He looked around the room as he said it. Catcher followed suit, and felt himself jump again. The sticky walls of the cellar were folding in on themselves, revealing harder, sharper surfaces on the other side.

  ‘Do you know what they call this kind of procedure, where I come from?’ pondered the Doctor. ‘They call it "the flower that never dies". Order blossoms from chaos. Charmingly pretentious, I always thought.’

  Catcher shook his head, and it rattled. He had no idea what the man was talking about. And he still hated flowers.

  She sat at a small table in the corner of the saloon, head resting in a puddle of spittle and alcohol. The pianola was thumping out a tune with a dumbity-dumb, dumbity-dumb rhythm, but the high heels of the dancing-girls were clacking against the floorboards to a completely different tempo.

  When the doors of the saloon swung open, Doc Amaranth was standing on the far side. His head was a spinning golden sphere the size of a soccer ball, and his stetson hovered several inches above the shiny surface. They said Doc Amaranth was the heart of this town, wherever this town was, and that everything that happened here revolved around him.

  ‘The shootin’ tootin’ Falardi broth
ers are back in town!’ he squealed. ‘Lock up yer wimmen!’

  Falardi. Roz Forrester looked up, wiping the phlegm-flavoured beer (or was it beer-flavoured phlegm?) from the side of her face. Falardi, Falardi, Falardi. She knew that name. She’d heard it before, centuries ago, in the days before history had carried her away from New York and dumped her in this louse-ridden two-horse town. Falardi. There was something about the name she didn’t like. Doc Amaranth was supposed to know all about history, but she couldn’t help feeling that he’d messed up this time.

  The doors swung open again, knocking the Doc across the room and causing him to land on top of a card table that shattered with the appropriate sound-effect. One of the Falardi brothers stood in the doorway. The pianola, knowing a dangerous customer when it saw one, stopped playing.

  ‘Ah’m here to see th’ sheriff,’ Big Jim Falardi said, drooling from two sets of grey-lipped prehensile jaws. ‘Whar is she?’

  Nobody spoke. Nobody moved. Roz hiccuped.

  ‘Youse all deaf?’ demanded the Falardi, waving a six-shooter in one of his six shooting hands. ‘Ah said, whar’s Sheriff Forrester?’

  Roz jumped. Sheriff? How long had it been since she was a sheriff? She was an outlaw, now. Why, back in New York, they’d even had posters printed up. WANTED: FOR THE ATTEMPTED MURDER OF SAMUEL LINCOLN AND VARIOUS OFFENCES AGAINST HISTORY.

  ‘You looking for me?’ said the other Roz Forrester.

  She was standing on the far side of the creature, out in the street, and black light was glinting off her silver badge, illuminating the sigil of the Adjudicators. The Falardi turned, its claw tightening on the trigger-stud of its gun.

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Forrester-2. ‘Make my standard Imperial rotational period.’

  But the next thing Roz Forrester knew – the real Roz Forrester, the one who sat in the saloon and dribbled sarsaparilla onto her shawl – the streets of the town were full of dust-clouds, a phantom posse rolling into Repentance on a wave of tumbleweed and horse-flesh, all guns blazing. At the head of the posse was an old man with white hair, a black hat on his head, a machine-gun in his arms. The real man with no name.

  Both Sheriff Forrester and the Falardi turned their guns on him, but nobody was fast enough on the draw when the enemy had industrial-age weaponry. Old Father Time and his gang had ridden into Repentance, and they had history on their side. The machine gun rattled, and the town was promptly cleaned up.

  11

  Great Executions

  The ground stopped moving. America got fed up with growing and decided to just sit there instead.

  Daniel Tremayne looked around. He was in a desert, like the ones he’d heard you could find deep in the heart of the country, and the sky was still dark, darker than he’d ever seen it. A few yards away, there were men in uniform; Daniel knew the militia when he saw them, even if they did have shiny faces that looked like they’d started melting. There were other men amongst the soldiers, people with white coats and high foreheads. They were nodding, holding slabs of paper covered in ticks and crosses.

  Cautiously, Daniel walked towards them. He became aware of people at his back, watching but not moving. A million witnesses. Something was going to happen in this desert, then, something important.

  ‘Test number one,’ said one of the soldiers, and tried to force a pair of dark-lensed spectacles into Daniel’s hands.

  ‘Nothing wrong with my eyes,’ said Daniel. ‘What’s happening?’

  The soldier looked surprised by his curiosity. That’s all right, thought Daniel, I’m surprised by it too. ‘We’re ready for the first test,’ the man said. ‘Bomb’s all set to go.’

  ‘Bomb?’

  ‘Three, two, one, hit it,’ said a whitecoat, and there was a flash of light that seemed to stick Daniel’s eyeballs to the back of his skull. Oddly, the explosion didn’t make a sound. A fist of fire pounded into the desert up ahead, turning the sands to glass. A cloud the shape of a mushroom sprouted from the burning earth, towering over them and raining poisonous dust down onto their heads.

  The audience applauded. Daniel wondered how they could just sit by and watch as something like that happened. That thought seemed alien to him, somehow.

  ‘Cool,’ said a soldier with lots of stripes up his ann. ‘Prepare for live test.’

  Live test? Daniel Tremayne shook his head. ‘People,’ he said, and thought of the soldiers he’d seen in the Revolution, wondering what they would have looked like if the English had used the Bomb instead of bullets. ‘What does it do to people?’

  ‘Like I said,’ murmured the soldier, lighting a cigar and stuffing it into an appropriately sized hole in his face. ‘Prepare for live test.’

  No.

  Daniel grabbed him by the collar of his uniform. ‘Why don’t they stop it?’ he demanded. ‘Why doesn’t somebody stop this?’

  The soldier shrugged. ‘Who’d want to get involved?’ he said.

  A sharp-winged flying machine landed nearby. The Bomb was loaded into its bay, and the machine took off again, buzzing happily. An expectant hush fell over the audience. Daniel Tremayne made a decision, and the world turned accordingly.

  Christopher Cwej concentrated...

  No he didn’t. Christopher Cwej stopped concentrating, and let himself just be instead of trying to be something. Every now and then his brain tried warning him that this was stupid, that this was dangerous, that this was no different from what had happened to him on Yemaya. Even the way that all his senses were blurring together, with new ones occasionally popping up unexpectedly inside his nervous system...

  Without warning, a gynoid erupted out of the ground with an almighty blunch. Chris jumped. The thing stretched, turning into a rectangle of quivering flesh with a protoplasmic limb at each corner. A stubby lump pushed itself out from its surface. Two deep, featureless pits were set into the lump, and the pits were staring at him

  – Not bad, said the Carnival Queen. – You’re still trying too hard, though. Trying to force your children into shapes you can understand, oui? Look. Two arms, two legs, and a face.

  ‘Er,’ said Chris. The gynoid bowed gracefully, turned, and floated off across the desert, lifting itself off the ground like a kite.

  – How do you feel?

  ‘Um... fine. Kind of funny.’

  – Ahh, well. That’s only to be expected. The Carnival Queen closed her eyes, and sighed happily. – After all, you have just done something that’s scientifically impossible.

  ‘Oh,’ said Chris. ‘I wondered about that.’

  Roz was running again. Not running away, though, not this time. She was wearing a uniform – she wasn’t sure where she’d found it – and there were others like her, men with flags and guns, covering her rear. Doc Amaranth was still with her, but he’d lost his body, and now he was just a little golden ball drilling a hole in her khaki pocket.

  Roz wasn’t sure where she was running to, but she knew that wherever it was, the enemy would be there. She was in front of the U.S. Army, pushing back the frontiers again. She wasn’t even sure what country this was, but she could see a city up ahead, sparkling in the sticky yellow sunlight. Not an American city. The enemy capital, maybe?

  There were explosions at her back. Instinctively, Roz ducked. Seen from outside space and time, the bangs and crackles would be spelling out messages, each detonation a dot to be joined to form the words ‘HELP, I’M A PRISONER IN A HISTORY FACTORY’. Behind her, the army had been decimated, torn apart by a moral minefield. She saw the last of her boys running towards her, but one false step and he was gone, blasted into tiny obsidian splinters.

  For a second, Roz couldn’t remember which of the two Roz Forresters she was.

  The sharp-winged flying machine passing overhead made her duck again, but it was marked with her army’s colours, the red, white, and blue of democracy and Reason. The plane turned above the shining city, dropped something, sped away. Roz watched as the heavy metallic shape of the bomb – the Bomb – fell towards the
enemy capital.

  In the silent moments before it hit, Roz found herself wondering exactly where the Bomb would land. Everybody knew the name of the city that the first atomic weapon had levelled, natch, but the detail... had it landed in a park? A square? On the roof of a corner-store? Had it dropped onto somebody’s home, or into somebody’s yard? Had the owner looked up and wondered what was happening just before the device had detonated and their atoms had been –

  The Bomb hit its target. A wave of heat and silence knocked Roz off her feet.

  The room had a curious exotic smell that Daniel Tremayne couldn’t place. The walls were covered with circles of brass, and everything was lit with a cool, creamy lamplight.

  ‘I can hear whispering,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Naturally,’ said one of the brass circles, as it erupted into a mouth. ‘This is the place where history is remembered. You’ve heard the sounds before?’

  Daniel nodded. ‘Ever since... down Catcher’s cellar.’

  ‘And that was the first time?’ asked the room.

  Daniel had to think for a moment. ‘No. Even before that. Sometimes I get... memories. Dreams.’

  ‘About what, may I ask?’

  ‘Things. The Revolution. I can see men, marching in snow. Fighting. Dying.’ He shook his head. ‘If I think about them hard enough, I can hear the voices. Telling me about history. But I don’t care about history.’

  ‘You seemed very concerned about the Bomb.’

  Another shrug. ‘They were going to drop it on people. Kill people. Lots of people.’

  ‘Not as many as died in the Revolution.’

  Daniel didn’t know what kind of answer the room wanted.

  ‘Listen to me. Please. The human race is a gifted species, Daniel Tremayne. A long time ago, certain... powers... conspired to ensure that your species developed special skills. Special instincts. In the future, those instincts will be called "psychic", but not yet. Now they’re just feelings. Not scientific phenomena, just... possibilities.’