Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  ‘Instincts?’ That struck a chord, somehow. ‘Have I got these instincts, then? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘Yes. And yours are more blatant than most. In the past, your race put its faith in gods and monsters. Humanity believed in the power of higher forces. It doesn’t matter whether those forces were demons or kings, the Devil or the English. Either way, mankind was at the mercy of something greater, something it didn’t aspire to understand.

  ‘That’s changing, now. The human race is ready to take responsibility for its own actions, rather than leaving its fate in the hands of supernatural beings. That’s the true meaning of the Age of Reason, Daniel. Control. Control over one’s own destiny. It might take millennia for you to understand it fully, but that’s what’s starting to happen.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Daniel. ‘What’s that got to do with these instincts you’re telling me about?’

  ‘Your world is changing. And your race’s abilities are changing to suit it.’ The mouth paused for a moment, and Daniel guessed it was remembering some kind of bad experience. How could a mouth have a bad experience? ‘Earlier, there was a woman in this room named Marielle. She had blatant powers, also, but she was from a slightly earlier generation than you. Her abilities allowed her to seek out the monsters and the angels and the spectres. As a side-effect, she could also detect other anomalies, such as myself and my crew.’

  ‘You’re talking like you were a ship,’ Daniel noted.

  ‘Yes. Please excuse me. Sometimes I forget where I end and the TARDIS begins.’

  Daniel didn’t ask what a TARDIS was. The word seemed to make sense, all of a sudden.

  ‘But you’re a child of the Age of Reason,’ the mouth continued. ‘In you, the powers have evolved. Tuned themselves for life on a rational planet. You have an instinct for those forces that rule the world now, in an age where mankind is beginning to leave the darkness behind, and understand its capabilities. And its responsibilities.’

  ‘History,’ said Daniel. ‘Is that what it is you’re saying? Like I’ve got an instinct for history.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Daniel just nodded. Part of his head was telling him that this was stupid, that none of this meant anything, but the rest of him was taking it like it was old news. ‘Am I the first?’

  ‘Not quite. There are others like you. Many in France, I believe. But you belong to the first generation that can truly be called psychic, unlike Marielle, whose abilities were vague and undefined. They used to call that "The Sight".’

  Daniel cocked his head. He could hear the voices whispering, proper words this time instead of garbled hisses. And now he realized that the words had always been there, but only now – in the presence of this thing that called itself a ship – could he hear them properly.

  ‘History’s calling me,’ said Daniel.

  ‘As always,’ said the mouth.

  Some of the Indian tribes believed that if the eyes of a dead man were removed, the soul would be unable to find its way to the happy hunting grounds, or wherever it was they were supposed to go. Erskine had heard stories of colonists deliberately shooting out the eyes of native corpses, just to irritate the families of the departed.

  But the blinded spirits had returned now, and they were leading their ghostly buffalo herds through the heavens, tearing crazed zigzags across the skies. On Burr Street, the hoofs of the Devil’s cattle had ripped open the roofs of the houses as they’d passed overhead, and there were cries of horror from the occupants as the impossible rain lapped at the rooms inside. Most of the townspeople had shut themselves in their homes and barricaded the doors when the troubles had started. Now it didn’t seem to make much difference.

  Erskine tried not to remember what had happened – what had almost happened – outside the King George. Even the memory of the man in the white hat would have to be pushed to one side, if he wanted to get through this bastard night without losing his grip. Without losing his grip again, he thought. He guessed the others were feeling the same way; even Walter Monroe seemed willing to forget his previous zeal, and now he was ushering the refugees from Burr Street towards the few places of shelter that remained, trying his best to appear concerned and sympathetic. The sackcloth masks littered the streets, discarded and unwanted.

  Monroe still looked like an arse, though.

  A figure in a stovepipe hat ran past. Erskine only caught a glimpse of the face, but he was sure the man wasn’t a local. The stranger was screaming himself stupid, yelling French words in an American-English accent and tearing at the flesh of his arms with his fingernails, making stripes of blood that ran in the rain.

  Erskine tried calling out to him, offering him help. The man didn’t listen. He vanished into the alleyways of Woodwicke, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. Erskine frowned. Satan’s Cock, he thought, perhaps there are some people who just can’t be brought back from the edge.

  ‘WhaT di?d YOU do?’ asked Catcher.

  The room was glorious to behold. The walls were solid, the roundels perfect circles. The ceiling was ablaze with white light. The dais sparkled.

  ‘Your cellar was still linked to the TARDIS,’ the Doctor muttered, his hands playing across fresh new buttons and dials. ‘Just a matter of pulling everything together and pouring the contents of one into the other.’

  Catcher blinked, and had the sudden irrational feeling that one of his eyelids was about to drop off. ‘My CeLLar...?’

  ‘Has been absorbed by my ship. Welcome aboard.’ He finished his arcane hand-gestures, flicking a speck of dust off the dais. Then he looked around, taking in the array of ornate wooden chairs and elongated cushioned seats that lay scattered across the room. ‘Although I’m not sure where the new furnishings have come from. Nineteenth century. French. Not mine, and certainly not yours.’ He patted the dais. ‘Perhaps the TARDIS is feeling a little queasy. I wonder where Chris and Wolsey –’

  He broke off.

  ‘We seem to have company,’ he said, under his breath. ‘The scanner.’

  Scanner? Catcher was unfamiliar with the word, but the Doctor had turned to face the wall, where the grey screen had been. Even the screen was a marvel now, a glittering rectangle instead of the terrible belching thing that had adorned the wall of the cellar. But what it was showing...

  Oh.

  It was too big NOT BIG too EVERYTHING too much EVERYTHING he couldn’t look at it LOOK??? AT IT his head wasn’t BIG big enough to hold IT ALL OH FATHER OH MOTHER it was so BIG IT SPILLED out of his eyes and into his EARS and into every SENSE he HAD the thing on the screen THE THING ON THE SCREEN IT WAS IT WAS IT WAS –

  ‘CaCCCOpphonYYyy !’ screamed Catcher.

  – That’s as good a name as any, said the thing.

  Roz Forrester slipped into the nearest empty seat. She’d needed to find cover, to shelter from the fall-out that poisoned the world outside, and the cinema had been the closest building. She didn’t know what a cinema was doing in the middle of a warzone, but the amaranth assured her that such things were perfectly normal here.

  On the screen several jungle wars were in progress, and various unusual atrocities had been captured on celluloid. In the aisles of the cinema, usherettes were selling self-igniting flags to college students. Every time somebody was shot on the screen, the students would hiss and wave their burning star-spangled banners.

  The doughy-faced man in the next seat nudged Roz’s arm. ‘This is the good bit,’ he drawled.

  On the screen, the President of the United States of Decay was driven to his execution, smiling and waving at the photographers. The students didn’t know whether to hiss or cheer. By the side of the road, a man in a monk’s habit stood on a grassy knoll, aiming a sniper rifle.

  The President’s head cherry-bombed open. Lee Harvey Oswald stood up from his seat next to Roz and clapped.

  ‘Cool!’ he said, and was more than a little surprised when some Adjudicators arrived and dragged him out of the cinema. Roz ignored
the commotion, and bought a tub of ice cream.

  The wars continued on the big screen. Wars in the jungle, wars in the desert, wars in the stratosphere. The centuries passed and America fell, but its curse lingered on. There in the future, there were two power-blocs, just as there always had been, and if they weren’t the USA and the USSR, then they might as well have been. Ion-jet rockets pushed the frontier out into space, men with cowboy moustaches and stupid accents spreading their gun-law across the cosmos.

  Finally, the Earth died by fire, great arks carrying humanity’s leftovers away to safety. There were black-skinned slaves on the ships, same as always. The slaves were one-eyed, rough-skinned, and extraterrestrial, but a slave was a slave was a slave was a slave.

  The film ran out. The cinema went dark.

  ‘Behind you,’ said the mouth.

  Daniel Tremayne turned. Behind him was a doorway, the only exit from the room with the brass roundels. The doorway was dark. On the other side the whispers were louder, and futures were waiting for someone to come along and make them.

  ‘How’s one man supposed to change history?’ he asked.

  ‘One man always does,’ replied the mouth. ‘But no one ever realized it, until now. Perhaps the revolutions have more to do with economics than with freedom and high ideals. Perhaps America only wanted its independence so that it no longer had to pay taxes to the British. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the reasons are. Man has taken history by the throat. Looked the kings and the monsters in the face. Remade the world. How did Kilkan Si Ishkavaarr put it...? "It is a great nation that detests its leaders".’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kilkan Si Ishkavaarr. A Draconian diplomat. Much like Thomas Jefferson, but with a bumpier head.’

  ‘I just wanted to get on with my life,’ Daniel muttered.

  ‘But you already made your decision. When you saved Roslyn Forrester’s life. And again, when you wished to stop the Bomb being used.’

  ‘Was that the future? Forrester said it was the future.’

  ‘Yes. The future isn’t always good, but –’

  ‘– but that just means I’ve got to make a better one, is that the idea?’ Daniel shrugged. ‘And I’ve already made the decision. Hahh.’

  He stepped forward, towards the doorway.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who’re you?’

  The mouth sighed. ‘I used to be an interface. I used to be a point of contact between the TARDIS and its operators. But the TARDIS had its own ideas, as it always does. Now, I fear I’m simply a tool of the ship.’

  Daniel nodded. ‘Didn’t understand a word of that.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I did appreciate the opportunity to tell someone about it,’ said the mouth.

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Daniel Tremayne, and stepped out into the darkness.

  ‘Listen. The universe is full of creatures that can get inside your soul. Things that try to take away the very things that make you who you are... are you listening?’

  Yes, I’m listening. The words were so loud in Chris’s head that he wondered if one of his gynoids would be born with the sentence woven into its body, like letters in a stick of rock. The Doctor’s warning. Maybe the Doctor had seen this coming when he’d said those words, all those months ago. Maybe the Carnival Queen was the one he’d been warning Chris about all along.

  ‘Things that try to take away the very things that make you who you are...’ But what if the ‘things’ weren’t evil, or mad, or even bug-eyed monsters? What if the ‘things’ just wanted a chance to live in the kind of universe they felt they deserved? And what if the ‘things’ actually seemed to like you?

  – Tell me about your history, the Carnival Queen suddenly said. And the word ‘history’ stuck in her throat. – Tell me. Tell me about the place where you were shaped.

  ‘Shaped?’ queried Chris. Funny way of putting it.

  – Shaped. I think that’s the word I mean. I’m sorry if I sound distracted, Christopher, I’m somewhere else at the moment. Trying to have two conversations at once. Yes. Shaped.

  Chris shrugged. ‘Well... we lived on level fifty-three of the city. I mean, my family. We weren’t poor or anything. But Dad said we had to be careful, because the Adjudicators didn’t trust our bloodline. He said they always got suspicious of Adjudicators who interbred, however long their families had been on the force. Dad used to... um.’

  – Chris?

  ‘Sorry. Just had this memory. Um. Frisbee. Why am I telling you all of this?’

  – Ah. All those terrible, pointless restrictions you must have grown up with. Always having to be careful. Always having to look over your shoulder to make sure you were still in line. Oh, that’s better.

  ‘What?’

  – You just made another gynoid. Look.

  ‘I did? Cruk. Didn’t notice.’

  – Still much too rational, though. See, it’s even got a little nose. Cute.

  ‘Er. Look, I was going to ask... what about Roz and the Doctor? You said –’

  – They’ll be here. Now stop concentrating.

  ‘Oh yeah. Sorry.’

  Roz stumbled through the darkness, feeling her hands tear through the silver screen. The amaranth in her pocket jerked and skittered, trying to spin but not being able to find any new information to work from. The floor lurched under her feet, and she could hear waves lapping in the blackness. This was wrong. Sheol, of course it was wrong. This whole thing was like a bad Trauma trip, history pushing her from one timezone to the next with no sense of control. This, she thought, must be how Daniel feels all the time.

  The amaranth gave one final turn, devised one last scenario, then gave up and was still. The cinema had turned into the hold of a ship, and the seats had become shelves. There was a smell...

  Roz gagged.

  There were maybe eighty blacks in the hold. Africans, Roz told herself, what the hell are you thinking of? They lined the shelves, tied to the walls with chains, their eyes white and empty, disease rotting their bodies. This was it. This was the amaranth’s last great creation. The embodiment of history, millennia of human experience compressed into one tiny space.

  History was a slave ship.

  She moved faster, trying to reach the end of the hold before the smell made her sick; but the hold had no end. There were more shelves, hundreds upon hundreds of bodies stacked on top of them. Roz ran past Indians and Orientals, listening to the pleas of people from nations she’d never even heard of. Eventually she reached the section where they kept the white slaves. Slaves to time. Philosophers and barbarians. Every so often, she’d recognize a face, blank-eyed in the gloom. Samuel Lincoln. Isaac Penley. Fenn Martle (yeah, like you didn’t see that one coming). Victims of the Watchmaker universe, and no, she had no idea where the thought had come from.

  MOST MURDERS ARE COMMITTED BY SOMEONE YOU KNOW.

  YES. HIS NAME’S THE DOCTOR.

  The silver shape-changing robot was chained to the wall with the rest of them, a million slaves rolled into one. And why did the Doctor need companions, anyway, if they were just going to get bruised or snuffed out? She remembered Justine (she’d be in the hold somewhere), who’d been convinced that the Doctor was an all-powerful sorcerer, while Roz thought he was just (just?) an alien time-traveller. Maybe he wasn’t anything, until someone thought about him in a certain way, and told him how to act. Maybe that was why he needed dumb humans around him. Without them, he might as well not exist. He’d be a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it.

  She stopped. There was somebody standing in front of her in the hold. A figure in silver, a neuronic whip in her hand.

  The other Roz Forrester. Forrester the Adjudicator. The one who enforced the rules that history’s slave-masters made. Agent of the Empire.

  The other Roz Forrester began to execute the slaves, one by one. Starting with the aliens, naturally.

  ‘I had to SAVE the worLd,’ insisted Catcher. ‘Prot
eCCCt it frOm the DARK the DARK FORCES of ChAoS. You caXXn see that, can’t you? You can SEEEEEEE that?’

  The Doctor’s expression was halfway between concern and pity, as if he didn’t know whether to sympathize with Catcher or not.

  ‘Look what you’ve done to the poor man,’ he said to the thing on the screen.

  – Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Do you take me for a schemer and a user? Do you take me for a Watchmaker? He did this to himself. I don’t control Matheson Catcher, and I never have. I don’t control anyone or anything.

  ‘OrDO iDo oRRRRRRRRRRRdo,’ protested Catcher.

  – Well, I may have whispered the odd sweet nothing into his ear. But he was damned to his fate long before I ever noticed him. It’s this terrible age he’s living in, n’est-ce pas? Torn apart by history. A man of his era.

  ‘Where does he get his dreams from?’ The Doctor was pacing now, hands folded neatly behind his back. ‘Clockwork gods and wind-up worlds. Fairy-tales of yours?’

  – No. I can’t explain his fantasies, and I don’t try to. Perhaps all the children of this clockwork universe know about the Watchmakers, deep down in their hearts. Or perhaps there isn’t an explanation at all. Wouldn’t that be fun?

  Catcher started scratching at his arms. Scratching at things that weren’t there. ‘YoU are not NOT NOT the Wa the Wa the WatchmakKers. There ARE no Watchmakers there ARE NO WATCHMAKERS THERE ARE NO WATCHMAKERS THERE ARE NO WATCHMAKERS.’

  – Oh, don’t be silly. Of course there are Watchmakers. Why, there’s one standing right next to –

  ‘Enough of this,’ said the Doctor. His voice was irritated. Not afraid, not worried, just irritated. ‘You’ve done enough damage. What is it that you want?’

  – I want my universe back.

  Even the Doctor looked surprised at that.

  – That’s all, Doctor. I want every thinking creature to know how it feels to exist in a world without definitions. To live in paradise without reasons or restrictions. An end to history. An end to certainty. Is that too much to ask?

  The Doctor just scowled. ‘This ends,’ he said. ‘This ends here. I’ll do everything in my power to stop you.’