Christmas on a Rational Planet

by Lawrence Miles

  – Really? Why?

  There was an awkward pause.

  – Ahh. Silence from Time’s Champion, silence from Fate’s Accomplice. No comment, says the Traveller from Beyond Time.

  ‘This ends,’ the Doctor repeated, and pressed a switch on the console. The screen went black, and the room was quiet again, except for the gentle hum of the ship’s life-force.

  ‘Doctor?’ said Catcher.

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘I haVE to aSk you some?thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘HoW did YYYou get OUT of the counCil mEEting-hALL?’

  The Doctor scowled again.

  ‘Don’t ask awkward questions,’ he said.

  Raphael crawled along haunted alleyways, the rain drumming alien tattoos against his skin. He’d tried looking for cover, but the storm kept washing the cover away. He looked down at his hand, and saw unimaginable things crawling under the skin, getting ready to break free of his flesh.

  The room. Remember the lead-walled room. Watch the machine. Your name is Raphael. Forget any other name. Purge yourself of any other purpose. Purge me. Purge me; burn away the terrible absurdity that I am becoming. Oh, masters! I am impure. I am caillou.

  The room. Lessons taught by Professor Hulot of Orléans. Funny little red-haired man. Chief Scientific Advisor to the Shadow Directory, they called him, or Monsieur Songe-Creux, behind his back. Oh, Professor, I should have listened after all. They move through dimensions of chance that you and I can never see, these monsters. How can any rational being stand against the caillou? How could we ever have thought to fight them?

  The scalpel twisted in his arm. Please. Purge me. Give me sane and mortal flesh, not this parody of form. Let me wear a new shape...

  The ground rippled around him, the earth lapping at his hands and at his knees as the irrational planet heard his prayers, and answered them. The mud of Hazelrow Avenue poured into the wound in his arm, stayed there, and hardened. New bones and muscles were formed. The world gifted him with new substance and a new shape. Raphael’s wish came true.

  Roslyn Sarah Forrester drew her flenser, and pointed the snout at Roslyn Inyathi Forrester. She switched on the laser targeting module. A tiny blue spot of light appeared on the victim’s chest, exactly where the heart was supposed to be.

  ‘Even I can’t miss like this,’ Roz the Adjudicator grinned.

  Roz the victim looked down. ‘I wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Yes I would.’

  ‘Not you. Me.’ Roz the victim met her executioner’s gaze. ‘Back in my own time, back when I was you, I thought I was fair. One of the good cops.’

  Roz the Adjudicator snorted. ‘You were part of the system. What’s fair got to do with anything? Anyway, I seem to remember being pretty selective about who "fairness" applied to –’

  ‘Just shut up and shoot, okay?’

  Roz the Adjudicator looked surprised. ‘You want me to kill you, all of a sudden?’

  ‘No. Look, I don’t believe in any of this heroics bullshit. I’ve seen it a million times on simcord. The hero nobly gives his life away in the name of a greater good. Sod that. I want to live. Life is a greater good.’

  ‘Ahhhh. That’s sweet.’

  ‘Shut it. What I’m saying is, I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be part of that self-sacrifice thing. But if you kill me now, at least I can say I tried. I wanted to live. I wanted to live. And even when I died, I died a better death than you would’ve done.’

  She closed her eyes. She didn’t have a blindfold.

  ‘Martyrdom is a happy ending,’ Roz the victim concluded, muttering it under her breath.

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Roz the Adjudicator. ‘Bye, then.’

  – and there was the sudden, unexpected sound of fist against skull. Roz the victim opened her eyes, and there was a mass of flailing limbs on the floor in front of her. Roz the Adjudicator was down, the gun by her side. Daniel Tremayne was on top of her. Roz imagined him running out of the darkness of the hold, swinging his arms wildly, jumping onto the Adjudicator at – yep – precisely the right moment.

  Calmly, Roslyn Inyathi Forrester picked up the flenser.

  ‘Daniel,’ she said. ‘Stand up. Move away.’

  Daniel’s fists stopped pounding. The woman in the silver suit sprang to her feet, made a lunge for the flenser...

  Too late, of course. Roz the victim lined the blue dot up against the woman’s heart, and pushed the trigger-stud. The energy wave hit its target, stripping the plastic coating from the chest and working outwards, tearing away the suit, fibre by fibre. Roz’s finger stayed on the stud. The gun carefully removed the top few layers of the skin, then started untying the muscles and the sinews, gently pulling apart the nervous system.

  Roslyn Sarah Forrester became a random stream of atoms in the darkness of the hold. Roz – the only Roz that existed, now – threw the gun away and looked at Daniel. He nodded solemnly.

  ‘I just saved your life again, didn’t I?’ he said.

  ‘Yup,’ said Roz.

  ‘Good.’

  He took her hand, and they walked out of the darkness of the hold together.

  ‘Welcome back,’ said the Doctor.

  Roz opened her eyes. In that first split-second, she thought she could see tiny particle-sized machines whirling around her head, shining miniscule flashlights in her face. The same feeling she got every time she woke up in the TARDIS, in fact. The TARDIS? That meant she was back...

  ... home?

  She pulled herself to her feet. Daniel was standing beside her in the console room, and – thankfully – didn’t seem at all phased by the ship’s interior. Roz wondered what had happened to him. He was looking up to the scanner, where unlikely shadows were stalking the streets of Woodwicke. The Doctor was standing over the console, his fingers performing an elaborate ballet over a touchpad.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ Roz demanded, pointing at Catcher.

  ‘AK,’ said Catcher, trying to sink into the corner.

  ‘Hmmm?’ The Doctor let his ballet continue. ‘Oh, don’t worry about Mr Catcher. He won’t give us any trouble.’

  ‘Ak. C1. CLEA!N CLEAN it. IT! Up,’ agreed Catcher.

  ‘Great. How did we get here?’ She glanced up at the scanner. ‘ "Here" being a suspect term, right now.’

  ‘I called the amaranth home. It took you a while to arrive, though. Been busy?’ Roz looked down at the amaranth, lying still in her pouch. Here in the TARDIS, it seemed quite content. ‘And for the moment, we’re still in Woodwicke. Although "Woodwicke" is an even more suspect term. Are you familiar with catastrophe theory?’

  ‘Probably not. Is it important?’

  ‘An obsolete product of human scientific theory. Put simply, "things just blow up in your face". One event is enough to collapse an entire system. Amazing how easy it is to make everything fall apart.’

  Roz indicated the screen. ‘Let me guess. Whoever’s controlling the gynoids is causing that, am I close?’

  ‘I could question your use of the word "controlling". But otherwise, a succinct and accurate assessment.’

  ‘And, presumably, we have to stop them.’

  The Doctor paused, his fingers freezing in mid-pirouette. ‘We do,’ he said, but to Roz it sounded like he’d said ‘do we?’, like he wasn’t sure how he should be behaving any more.

  His fingers began moving again. ‘Of course we do,’ he mumbled. ‘Responsibilities. History must be protected. Everything must be put back in place. All in a day’s work for Time’s Champion.’

  Roz felt herself flinch, and remembered the slave-ship. Time’s Champion. Suddenly the idea didn’t seem reassuring, and even the Doctor had said it through gritted teeth.

  ‘Now,’ he announced, suddenly cheery. ‘If the trachoid crystal contrafibulations are in synchronic resonance with the referential difference index, then this should take us right to the heart of the trouble. And they don’t make sentences like that any more. Everybody ready?’


  Then he looked up, and seemed to notice Daniel for the first time.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I don’t think we –’

  ‘Is that Woodwicke?’ asked Daniel, pointing at the scanner.

  The Doctor squinted at him. Roz got the impression that there was something about the boy he recognized. ‘Yes. What’s left of it.’

  Daniel smiled. It was the same grin he’d given Roz the first time they’d met, when he’d been waiting for her on the stoop of her house. Correction. It wasn’t her house any more, not now she was back in the TARDIS. Not now she was back home.

  Home?

  ‘Responsibilities,’ said Daniel.

  Christopher Cwej hadn’t really meant to do anything. He’d just let himself drift off into a kind of half-sleep, a state where he wasn’t sure whether he was one thing or another, in this world or the next, and where was the Doctor now and did it matter and what about the TARDIS and where have all the flowers gone and where do you go to my lovely when you’re alone in your bed...

  Then he’d looked up, and there’d been a city looming over him. Or was it an un-city? He could imagine the gynoids living in the whispering tower-blocks, poking their hollow heads out of the cracks and the orifices. It was like an Overcity, with huge buildings supported by spiralling columns, but the logic of it seemed to have been surgically removed.

  ‘Did I do all that?’ he asked.

  There was no answer. He looked around. The Carnival Queen was gone. Chris vaguely remembered her voice, telling him something while he’d been half-awake, something about having to see a man about a god, which was apparently an old Watchmaker joke. So, he was alone. Apart from the gynoids, of course, lurking on the edges of his vision, as if they were amazed that anyone could exist with a stable number of limbs in the way that he did, and wanted to keep an eye on him.

  Alone? He could do all of this... alone?

  Christopher Cwej found himself suddenly and unexpectedly excited. He closed his eyes and let himself dream again.

  When the TARDIS had taken off – Roz still thought of it as ‘taking off, despite having suffered a year of the Doctor shouting ‘dematerialize!’ at her – it hadn’t made the usual noises. The wheezing rhythm had still been there, but the sound had been turned on its side, as if the ship were scuttling around the edges of the vortex instead of wading right through it. It had still landed with the usual whump, though.

  Daniel was no longer aboard the ship. He’d wanted to stay in Woodwicke. Insisted on it, in fact. At first, Roz had thought he’d just wanted to get out of the TARDIS, or get away from Catcher, or get back to skulking in the cracks of the world he knew, but as he’d spoken to the Doctor, Roz had begun to understand. The way he was talking, it was like he thought he had a duty to be there.

  In fact, Roz was sure she’d detected something unusual in the way that Daniel and the Doctor had talked. Some deep understanding, even though they’d never met before. Finally, and alarmingly, the Doctor had given Daniel the amaranth. Just given it away, like it was a Christmas present.

  Now Roz looked up at the scanner, watching the new world outside the TARDIS. A dark sun in the sky, sand the same colour as the ghost-space under a five-year-old’s bed. In the corner, Catcher opened his mouth to say something, but all he could manage was a series of disconnected clicking noises. If the sounds had been arranged into the right order, they might have made a message about being damned and sent to rationalists’ Hell.

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ said Roz.

  The Doctor nodded. ‘But you only visited the suburbs. And this is the heartland.’

  A figure stepped into view on the scanner, strolling casually across the dunes towards the TARDIS. The shape was feminine, Roz could tell that much, but the face was vague. She got the impression that the scanner couldn’t get a proper fix on the features, and was filling the screen with fuzzy random pixels to make up for it.

  Before Roz could even ask what was happening, the Doctor was heading for the door, stepping over a sofa that looked like it had belonged to Napoleon III.

  ‘Stay here,’ he said over his shoulder.

  Roz pointed at Catcher. ‘With him?’

  ‘XXPuniS?hed,’ said Catcher.

  ‘Would you rather come outside?’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Rrrrrrrr,’ growled Roz. The Time Lord stepped out through the doors.

  12

  Infinity, Shut Up

  Outside the TARDIS, the Carnival Queen was kicking at pebbles in the sand, and obviously having trouble with Marielle Duquesne’s shoes.

  – Spiked heels, she murmured. – Now I remember why I invented chukka boots.

  ‘I’ve come to reason with you,’ said the Doctor.

  – You mean, you’ve come to talk Reason to me? The Carnival Queen looked vaguely disappointed, and put her hands over her ears. – I can’t hear you. Blah, blah, blah. Can’t hear you can’t hear you can’t hear you.

  ‘Stop it,’ said the Doctor.

  She smiled, and turned towards the far horizon, taking her hands away from her ears and using them to shade her eyes. If the word ‘shade’ meant anything in a place that was made out of shadows.

  – Impressive, isn’t it?

  The Doctor followed her gaze. Framed against the black sun in the distance was the outline of what looked a city, built on huge cylindrical legs. The glowing shadow of the city slid uncomfortably across the desert as the sun began to set.

  ‘Hardly in keeping with the environment,’ mused the Doctor. ‘A city? You could almost call it rational.’

  – Almost. The un-architect hasn’t quite got the idea yet.

  The Doctor narrowed his eyes. ‘Chris.’

  – And Chris is just the first of many, naturellement. The first born-again child of the new world disorder.

  ‘Please,’ said the Doctor. "Think about what you’re doing. Think about the consequences.’

  – Consequences aren’t my concern. I’m a magician, not a Doctor.

  ‘People are suffering.’ The Doctor’s voice sounded more irritated than angry. ‘Look at the town. The walls are falling. The children are screaming. People are living in fear...’

  – ... except for the ones who are starting to enjoy it. The Carnival begins again. Laughter and tears. C’est la vie.

  ‘History will be destroyed,’ insisted the Doctor.

  – History. The word was hollow in the Carnival Queen’s mouth. – You tell me that people are suffering, then you try to defend history? If history was left to rule the world, how many of those people in the town would it kill? How much more horror would there be, and how long would the screaming last? Stop me, and the witches burn all over again. Stop me, and whole planets die by nuclear fire and atomic politics. You pretend to be the spanner in the works, Doctor, but you’re as much a part of the machine as the dictators and the bureaucrats. Part of the killing clockwork.

  ‘I have a responsibility,’ the Doctor insisted. It must have been strange for him, being accused of rationality in the first degree. After all, at least one major galactic power had wanted to get its cybernetic hands on him just because it thought he was entirely irrational.

  – Ah. Time’s Champion speaks. The man who refuses to interfere with history, unless ordered to by his superiors. Do you know the things they put into your DNA, Doctor, when you were born from the loom? Killing lessons that would even put the Shadow Directory to shame, woven right into your genes. Every Watchmaker is a walking weapon, designed to kill off Cacophony wherever I show my face. Don’t pretend you have a choice. You have to fight me. It’s in your blood.

  ‘A responsibility.’ His voice was high-pitched, pleading. ‘Do you understand what that means?’

  – No.

  The Doctor took a deep breath. Anyone watching him would have thought that he had something vital to say, but that he’d never said it before, perhaps never even thought about it. At least not consciously.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I’ve toppled dictatorships, I�
�ve duelled with tyrants, I’ve arm-wrestled with the agents of pain and fury. I’ve fought ruthless militant jellyfish, murderous pot-plants, insane giant prawns, world-conquering crabs, killer confectionary, octopi with delusions of godhood, forces of destruction of every conceivable size and shape. I’ve done so much. Saved entire races whose names I can’t even remember. And why? Because of reasons. Because of principles. Truth, love, and harmony. Peace and goodwill. The best of intentions.

  ‘Whatever I’ve done, I’ve done for these reasons. And there’s been a price to pay. Sacrifices. People close to me have died. Four of my companions, hundreds of the universe’s supporting cast. I could fill whole volumes with their names. Bystanders who helped me, perhaps for just a moment or two, and suffered for it. I’ve died myself, six times over.

  ‘I have a responsibility. To every one of them, the living as well as the dead. If I let you succeed, if I let you make a world without reasons, then every sacrifice they’ve ever made in my name would be for nothing. They would have suffered, and died, and triumphed... all for no purpose.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘That’s all,’ the Doctor concluded.

  And the Carnival Queen just nodded.

  – Then your own reasons have damned you. You’re as trapped as I am. You’ll always be a Watchmaker.

  The Doctor pointed towards the un-city with the tip of his cane. ‘Chris is over there?’

  – Naturally.

  ‘Good.’ He began the long walk across the desert, leaving the altered shape of Marielle Duquesne behind him. ‘Then let’s get this over with.’

  Cardinal Catilin was just completing the new inventory of the Collection of Necessary Secrets when the commotion began. There was an unfamiliar sound from the hall where the great reptile bones were held, rattling things slamming themselves against the walls. Catilin hurriedly unlocked the doors, convinced that the ever-zealous Cardinal Tuscanini was venting his anger on the ‘unholy relics’ again.

  When he saw that it was the reptiles themselves making the noise – the skeletons climbing out of their glass cases, the fossils unpinning themselves from the walls, the lizards walking upright like men – he immediately lost a sizeable portion of his sanity. However, when the creatures began crawling towards him, asking him to hear their confessions and begging God to forgive them their sins, the Cardinal could do nothing else but go entirely mad.