They had done everything they could. The townsfolk had been evacuated from Burr Street, and dozens of people had been escorted to the outskirts of the town; a mass exodus, in a place the size of Woodwicke. Rain-sodden families with bawling children, confused and frightened as they’d been forced out of their neighbourhoods. A few members of the Renewal Society had formed a kind of military-style escort, brandishing flaming torches to hold back the wolf-headed things that were rumoured to be at large in the woodlands.
The remaining members of the Society – the core of the group, Erskine Morris among them – had been on Eastern Walk when the Corpse Children had arrived, picking through the smoking (and, in some cases, melting) ruins, looking for any of the wounded who might have been trapped under the rubble. None of the men had seen where the first of the monstrosities had come from, but now the damned things were crawling out of the woodwork on all sides. Literally, crawling out of the woodwork. Like huge beetles, cowled by thick black shells that clicked and clacked as they moved.
They were surrounded. Erskine wasn’t in the least bit surprised. Half a dozen or so men, trapped by a circle of damnable shell-backed horrors, waved burning sticks in futile gestures of defiance. Erskine saw Walter Monroe, his fat face lit by torchlight, grumbling at the monsters as if they were inefficient store-tenders.
‘Surrender,’ the Corpse Children buzzed, grinding their mismatched teeth together with a crunch-crunch-crunch. ‘Give up what you believe. Surrender.’
They had done everything they could.
He was missing his umbrella again. It would have kept the cold sun off his back, and shaded his eyes from the black lightning. He would have been able to flap it around a bit, too, and that might have scared off the gynoids. They were jabbering around him, diving in and out of the ground in a way that reminded the Doctor of frolicking dolphins. Some of them gurned at him in five dimensions.
Not just gynoids, he noted. Other things were lurking behind the dunes now, waiting for their moment to come. Blank-eyed machine people and monsters with eye-stalks. If history was wiped away, these might be the things that replaced the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Quarks and the Sontarans, new predators for an irrational universe. Not that the Cybermen were particularly rational in the first place, thought the Doctor. Creatures from Earth’s twin planet, sucked out of its orbit and left to wander the universe... scientifically dubious, to say the least. A futurist fairy-tale. Then there was that gold allergy, and their aversion to plastic solvents. Gold bullets instead of silver ones, chemical cocktails instead of holy water. Cryogenic freezers instead of coffins. The Doctor briefly wondered what irrational forces might have been at work on Mondas, all those years ago.
And the Daleks? He remembered the research papers he’d seen in the vid-archives on Riften-5 when he’d been taller and blonder, genetic tests that had been run on captured Dalek specimens after their ‘War of Sharpened Hearts’. When the Kaled mutants had been scooped out of their metal shells and examined, it had turned out that every single one had been grown from male tissue. What had Davros done with the female survivors of the Kaled race, the Doctor wondered? Experimented on them’? Crashed their chromosomes together to see what kind of noise they made? He imagined them being probed, dissected, and cast aside. ‘Not suitable,’ Davros would no doubt have said, in that nasty little croak of his. ‘Minimal desire for conquest. Inferior genetic stock. Of no value to the Dalek race.’
Stop me, the thing that called itself the Carnival Queen had said, and the witches burn all over again... The Doctor grimaced and kept walking, muttering mantras of faith and determination, trying to ignore the giggling of the gynoids.
In China, the trickster-god No Cha descended from his house-outside-of-time and challenged Emperor Yung-Yen to a game of dice, with the accumulated souls of his ancestors as the stake. In France, the gargoyles of Notre Dame revealed themselves to be the Lords of Misrule, and began hurling rocks at Parisians on the streets below, pausing only to rip the throats out of passing pigeons. Across Eastern Europe, fresh graves opened, the Nosferatu returning from the silent lands to dance with their families one more time. The dead had carnival celebrations of their own.
The Corpse Children were close enough to touch, close enough to smell. Erskine realized, as the nearest of the bastard monsters lurched towards him, that their skins were made from the wings of dead beetles, stitched together like patchwork quilts.
He considered closing his eyes and waiting for the end, but every time he brought down his drooping lids, he saw the same thing; the eyes of the little scientist – sod it, the little magician – called the Doctor. Asking him that one simple question, over and over again.
Erskine stared into the insectoid face of death.
‘Bugger off,’ he told it.
Even as he said it, he became aware of a sudden calm along the street. The Renewalists were standing like statues, blinking in the torchlight, trying to make out what was happening. Erskine thought he detected a sound on the very brink of his hearing, high-pitched and strangely comforting. He could almost have believed that the Corpse Children were listening to it as well, heads cocked attentively, their mandible-teeth twitching to an unfamiliar rhythm.
Suddenly there were no monsters. There were just empty sacks of mud and insect skin, splitting open and falling to the ground. The last of the Corpse Children twitched in the dirt, legs up in the air, carapace turning to powder.
Somebody stepped into the torchlight from the direction of Eastern Walk. A boy, seventeen, maybe eighteen. Clothes torn. Slashed by tendrils of mud and madness. There was a metal sphere nestling in his hands, and at first Erskine thought that it was the sphere making the sound, singing as it spun; but it was the boy who made the noise, and the globe was just his tool. His instrument.
Erskine suddenly realized where he’d seen the object before.
‘I don’t like this future much,’ said the boy. ‘Let’s make a new one.’
The un-city loomed over him The Doctor walked on, occasionally fabricating tiny little duplicates of himself from the raw matter of the desert to chase the gynoids away. Shango the lightning god ran in ever-decreasing circles of logic with Tsuro the Hare. Dr John Smith swapped jokes with a three-inch-high version of the Ka Faraq Gatri. The Valeyard was sulking because no one wanted to talk to him.
A pygmy-sized copy of his sixth self was running around his legs, kicking his shins He didn’t remember creating it, but then a subconscious was a dangerous thing once it was riled. For God’s sake, the teeny sixth Doctor squeaked, how many more of us are you going to have to kill before you’re happy?
Eventually he reached the gates of the un-city. A gigantic shadow guarded the entrance.
‘Good morning,’ the Doctor said, raising his hat politely. ‘I’m collecting on behalf of the Watchmakers’ Retirement Home. Would you care to make a donation?’
Hsssssssssss, said the big sister of all gynoids.
He sighed, and let his consciousness seep out into the ground. BUT I AM. He imposed his will on the desert, resisting the temptation to relax and let his concentration slip away. NOT. Soon, hard lines were scratching themselves into the sands. I AM NOT. Pure angles were intersecting. A WATCHMAKER.
The android tore its way out of the darkness and into existence. A true android, the Doctor reminded himself; not just a simple machine of positronic circuits and mechanical parts, not like those awful robots the Lamerdines and the humans and the Banjaxi made. It had no shape, because it was shape. A creature of absolute order. Geometry incarnate.
Even the Doctor was impressed by the size of the thing.
The android and the gynoid were at each other’s throats in seconds, each tearing chunks out of the other, but neither ever coming any closer to winning the fight. Like the lion and the unicorn, thought the Doctor. Or like yin and yang. The android was familiar with every rule of combat, while the gynoid made up its own rules as it went along.
The Doctor tipped his hat to them and p
assed through the gate. ‘I’ll let myself in,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re busy.’
The streets of the un-city shifted like the nonsense circuitry of the gynoids themselves, but it didn’t take long to find Christopher Cwej at the heart of it all. The pathways arranged themselves into regular patterns as the Doctor passed by, almost as if they were scared of what he might do to them if they didn’t comply. Chris was sitting cross-legged on a node of shadow-matter that didn’t look altogether unlike a giant bean-bag, staring with wide eyes at the claw-like pylons and minarets that were sprouting up around him. The Doctor cleared his throat. Chris blinked twice and met his gaze.
‘Oh,’ said Chris. ‘Hi.’
‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ said the Doctor, nonchalantly.
– And what makes you think he needs rescuing? said a voice from up above. The Doctor frowned. Chris looked up.
The Carnival Queen was with them. Not the interface of the Carnival Queen, not the possessed body of Marielle Duquesne, but the Queen herself, growing out of the shadowy sky like a polyp, hovering overhead as if poised to swallow the un-city, faceless and unmeasurable and big enough to blot out the sun.
Earth, of course, wasn’t big enough to contain all the possibilities. A few emerged on Venus, where the wind sang a funeral lament for a lost civilization, the song becoming a living, chuckling thing that looked for a new home amongst the stars. On Mars, the red sands parted to make way for canals of purest springwater, platinum fish swimming in the cracked helmets of long-dead warriors. More than four light-years away, on the seventh planet of the Alpha Centauri system, the thirty-six-legged demon Trama-Tayn-Ku-Ku-Ro sprang from its ancient tomb, and it rained liquid copper across an entire continent.
The form – the silhouette – the thing – that hung there in the sky was every shape that could possibly exist, plus twice as many that couldn’t. She’s a window, thought Chris, and however stupid it sounded, it was the only thing he could think of. The Carnival Queen was a window, and everything strange, dark and unimaginable was there on the other side. Chris had never been religious – not since Jallafillia, anyway – but he knew, at a glance, that this was the thing which priests were terrified of, the thing which lurked in the darkness behind every school of faith and philosophy. Creation’s shadow.
– But there are as many Devils as there are stories of Devils, as there are people to be afraid of Devils. The Carnival Queen was laughing, yes she was, yes I am. And am I the bringer of despair, the harbinger of doom, the creator of machiavellian evils? Non. Am I the fallen angel, Heaven’s first rebel, the one God weeps for in the middle of the night? Non. Am I the serpent in paradise? Non. Am I the voice of the jungle, the one who dances in the cracks of the clockwork...?
Chris was sure the Carnival Queen blushed.
– Well, maybe.
‘Pepperoni and balderdash!’ exclaimed the Doctor, dramatically. ‘Your claims are nonsensical, and your stories are riddled with contradictions.’
– I like contradictions.
Chris levered his attention away from the Carnival Queen and focused on the Doctor. ‘Listen to me, Chris. Nothing she’s told you is true. Nothing she’s told you makes any sense.’ Chris wondered how the Doctor knew what the Carnival Queen had told him, but he didn’t press the point. ‘She’s a phantom. She has no place in this universe. She’s a refugee from a lost continuum, a leftover from another time, summoned by psionic resonances between the material world of the eighteenth century and the non-linear matrices that exist on the periphery of the vortex. That’s all.’
Chris frowned. So did the Doctor. Somehow, the Time Lord didn’t sound as if he’d been convinced by his own words.
– He’s making this up, said the Carnival Queen. None of that made scientific sense. It just sounded scientific. Typical Watchmaker trick. If you want to save the day, Doctor, why don’t you just reverse the polarity of the –
‘Enough!’ snapped the Doctor.
– You see? Space monsters he can handle, but anything outside his own little clockwork universe... it’s all Daleks inside that brain of his. Daleks gliding up and down corridors, Daleks coming out of rivers, Daleks burning down jungles...
‘Enough,’ repeated the Doctor.
-... invisible Daleks, Daleks from parallel universes...
‘I warn you now –’
– ... Daleks being pushed out of windows...
‘I’ve already told you my reasons,’ the Doctor fumed, and Chris wondered what he meant by that. ‘The universe has decided on its path. You have no right to do this. You have no right to change any of it.’
– Decided? The Watchmakers are hardly democratic. The ‘universe’ never decided. Christopher never ‘decided’. Look. All this... and she gestured towards the curious majesty of the un-city, though it wasn’t entirely clear what kind of limb she was gesturing with... – all this is his.
The Doctor whirled around to face Chris. Who blushed.
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking away guiltily.
The Doctor’s fingers drummed the silver handle of his cane. He looked up at the Carnival Queen again, staring straight into the centre of her ever-changing body. Chris wondered how he could do that without his head hurting.
‘Very well,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’m sure we can reach an agreement.’
– Agreement? And the Carnival Queen’s voice was amused as much as it was suspicious.
‘You claim that given the choice, the people of the universe will choose your way instead of mi... instead of the way things are. True?’
– If they understand what the choice is.
‘And Chris understands?’
‘Er,’ said Chris.
– Yes, yes. She sounded impatient. – Chris has already made his choice. I told you.
‘Er, well,’ said Chris. ‘I wouldn’t say I’d made a choice. I just... you know... let things happen.’
The Doctor looked smug. ‘There, you see?’
– What are you suggesting, Doctor?
‘One question. We ask Christopher one question. If he sides with you, the irrational universe is yours. I won’t interfere. If he sides with me...’
– Ah, don’t be too confident. He’s seen so much since he came here. Enough to change the shape of his whole life. If you’re counting on his loyalty to you...
‘Then you accept the suggestion?’
– Life would be much less interesting if I didn’t.
‘Just a minute,’ said Chris, suddenly irked. ‘You’re trying to guess what my answer’s going to be, and I don’t even know what the two of you are talking about. What question?’
All eyes turned on him. Two of the Doctor’s, an infinite number of the Carnival Queen’s (and she had an infinite number more to spare).
‘Who do you trust?’ asked the Doctor. ‘Me or her?’
Chris looked at him as if he were mad. Then he looked at the Carnival Queen as if she were mad. He wasn’t sure which of them made his head hurt more.
‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me that what I say now is going to change the whole history of the universe?’
The Doctor smiled weakly. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘What you say now will decide whether there is such a thing as history.’
Chris went white.
‘Right,’ he squeaked.
Aeons in the past, on a planet very near the centre of the galaxy, ancient automatic defence systems spontaneously activated themselves, and around the Capitol six hundred Time Lords simultaneously claimed to be possessed by the ghost of Morbius. In her office, the Lady President experienced an unexpected epileptic fit, during which she signed an order for three hundred prisoners to be released from a prison asteroid. Dragon tattoos snapped like flytraps on the arms of the convicts as they stepped out of stasis, and leading them was the ‘voodoo priest of the House of Lungbarrow’, the one they called Grandfather Paradox, who – according to popular fable – had only escaped execution because everyone was more afraid of him dead t
han alive. An embryo in one of the gene-looms began scratching the blueprints of a demat-gun into the semiotic fluid that surrounded it. Murder was etched across the face of the planet. The Eye of Harmony winked.
‘Chris?’
Trust. Trust, that was the thing. What had his parents told him about trust? Or was it something about a frisbee? No, forget that. This was real life. Did he trust the Doctor? Of course he trusted the Doctor. The Doctor always did the right thing. The Doctor had saved his life hundreds of times, but then again, it had always been the Doctor who’d got him into trouble in the first place. Was that how Reason worked? Correction. The Doctor did the right thing eventually. Sacrifices along the way. Detrios. Sheol, Detrios. ‘You’re a liar and a user and quite possibly a murderer...’
– Chris?
The Carnival Queen. How long had he been here? Just an hour? Less? Time, no longer an important factor. Was that the real difference between her and the Doctor? Chris hardly knew her. Couldn’t know her. She was a vast and incomprehensible alien intelligence, yeah? Yeah, right. Like the Doctor wasn’t. Her face. Marielle’s face. She’d shown him how to let the gynoids happen, and while his consciousness had been there, nestling under the sand, something had gone pop and the world couldn’t ever be the same again. Even the Doctor hadn’t seen the universe the way he was seeing it, right? That was it. That was why he didn’t automatically trust the Doctor this time. Because the Doctor just didn’t know.
‘It’s all right, Chris. Concentrate.’
Concentration. Seeing the world through squinted eyes, like the Doctor saw it. History rolling along. Joy and pain. Watching them building the concentration camps, watching them kill the red-headed children, because this was history and history must not be interfered with, no matter what. Even if people died (Kat’lanna died) and worlds were burned (Kat’lanna died) and the walls caved in (Kat’lanna died, probably), that was the way of the Doctor. He had his reasons. He had his Reason.
Christmas on a Rational Planet Page 27
