by Doctor Who
‘And what are you gonna do now? Kiss me?’
The Doctor considered. ‘That’s an idea.’ He frowned. ‘But not the one I want right this second! How about this?’
He hauled her over to the chair and laid her down on it, at the same time reaching for a long coil of wire on a nearby trolley that was littered with surgical tools. Quickly he looped the wire around her body and the chair.
‘Oh, they’re coming out now. . . and I’m putting my hand in my pocket for some reason. . . ’ He gripped the sonic screwdriver and its reassuring shape and solidity sent a fresh wave of ingenuity through him. He looked at it for a second. ‘Oh, it’s this. . . ’ A couple of seconds passed as he tried to work out what he could do with it. ‘Right, got it!’
he cried exultantly, and switching it to a particularly arcane setting he welded the loops of wire to the chair, trapping Chantal.
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‘Ingenious,’ she said, seemingly unconcerned. ‘I can’t wait to take a look at your brain. It must have all sorts of defences I didn’t know about.’
The Doctor tried to formulate a witty reply, but this power was lost to him. So he just said, ‘Tough titty!’, waved his finger ineffectually and walked out of Chantal’s examination room.
He emerged onto the main street of Osterberg and started clicking his fingers anxiously. ‘Come on!’ He stared about blankly. ‘One useful thought every thirty seconds, that’s rubbish,’ he said despairingly.
‘Come on. . . ’ He banged his hands against his brows aggressively, treating it like an old TV set, and the thought of an old TV set triggered a thought of. . .
‘Quilley! Find Quilley!’
After another thirty seconds remembering who Quilley was, why he was important and where he might be, he raced off.
The Doctor burst into Quilley’s hut. Quilley was going over some work notes at the table. He looked up and smiled. ‘Hello, Doctor.’
The Doctor smiled back. ‘Found you. Great.’ He walked over and gave Quilley a pat on the shoulder. ‘But was that it?’
‘Anything I can do for you in particular?’ asked Quilley.
The Doctor thought. ‘Nope.’ His eye was caught by Quilley’s old settee. ‘That looks comfy.’ He sat down and shuffled about. ‘This is in fact the comfiest cushion in the universe.’
‘Thanks.’
The Doctor drummed his fingers idly. ‘That was all I had to do today, I reckon.’ He stretched out on the settee and yawned. ‘Nap ahoy.’
Just as his eyelids were descending, he caught sight of something stuffed into the ancient washing machine in the corner. It was a long blue coat and it made him sit up again. ‘Rose. Something about Rose. . . ’
‘Rose is nice,’ put in Quilley.
‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor. ‘I like Rose. I like Rose. . . Rose. . . yeah, but I like Rose. . . ’
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He shuddered as a series of images flashed through his mind – Rose smiling. Rose taking his hand. Rose in danger.
‘Whoah, what was that? There was something else. . . Find Rose.’
A surge of glee possessed him. ‘ Escape and find Rose! Come on!’
He leaped from the settee and grabbed Rose’s coat, tying it round himself as an aide-mémoire, then jostled Quilley out of the door. ‘Oh yeah, you won’t need that!’
he cried, grabbing the popper pack
marked TERRY on Quilley’s chest and ripping it off. ‘And neither will I.’ He ripped his own off.
They hurried back into the street.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Quilley mildly.
‘Good point,’ said the Doctor, drawing to a halt. He patted Rose’s coat. ‘What would Rose do? Come on. . . ’ He clenched his fists and he saw Rose saying. . .
‘Antidote!’
A few minutes later they were standing in the town’s supply centre, one wall of the shack taken up by a wooden rack containing refills for the popper packs. The Doctor searched along the labelled columns of drugs.
‘Gotta be an antidote. Something I can use. . . ’ He stopped and turned slowly to Quilley. ‘Hold on a sec. This project – it was supposed to last forty days and you’ve been here forty-nine, yeah?’
‘Yes,’ said Quilley.
He remained dazed and acquiescent, though the effects of the popper pack were fading a bit, and a little of the pomp and fire was returning to his face.
The Doctor roughly pulled the rack away from the wall and shook the contents out. There were only about five or six refills left.
‘Then you’ve run out,’ said the Doctor. ‘Used it all up. Pretty soon this’ll be a dry town. Everyone’s gonna be normal.’
‘Oh.’ Quilley blinked. ‘Isn’t that a good thing?’
Chantal waited patiently, strapped to the chair, for the Osterbergers 110
to come looking for her. She knew they would. They were only interested in pleasing her, after all.
The zoo-tech called Tom popped his head round the door of her examination room. ‘What are you doing there, Chantal?’ he asked.
‘None of your business,’ she said politely. ‘Untie me. Use the cutter on the trolley.’
Tom walked over. Chantal noted the unusual expression on his face. He was registering disquiet. Instinctively he reached up and dialled a reassuring combo into himself, but the disquiet remained.
He wouldn’t know the popper pack was nearly empty. It was Chantal’s concern to supply refills and as there were almost none left she’d stopped doing it. It didn’t matter any more, anyway, not now the Hy-Bractors were about to emerge.
Tom picked up the cutter, switched it on and hesitated. ‘I’ve got a wrong-feeling about this,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wrong-feeling about you, Chantal.’
‘The sooner you release me, the sooner I can stop the wrong-feeling,’ Chantal pointed out.
That sounded reasonable to Tom, so he cut carefully through the coils of wire.
Chantal sprang to her feet, adjusted her suit and took him by the arm. ‘Let’s go and sort it all out,’ she said.
Chantal led Tom to the Grey Door. ‘Just stand there, darling,’ she told him, positioning him right opposite it.
‘I don’t want to,’ said Tom, looking anxiously over at the skeleton on the floor a few feet away.
‘I’ve got a surprise, to stop the wrong-feeling,’ Chantal reassured him.
She knocked on the Grey Door and called ‘X01! It’s Chantal!’
The Grey Door swung slowly open.
‘Yes. What?’ said a rasping voice. ‘Is there more food?’
‘I’ve had to bring things forward,’ Chantal called in. ‘There’s an alien here, the one you spoke to, and potentially he could mess things 111
up. Now I know you’re not quite ready, but I’m sure you’re up to it.
Come on.’
‘But is there food?’ said the voice.
‘I’ll show you.’
The first Hy-Bractor lunged out from the Grey Door, its tail flicking rapidly about.
Tom screamed. He couldn’t move for the sheer amounts of wrong-feeling pumping through him.
The Hy-Bractor blinked and pointed at him. ‘Are you human?’
‘Yes, he is,’ said Chantal. ‘Get it?’
‘And can I eat him, Chantal?’ asked the Hy-Bractor.
‘No,’ blurted Tom.
‘Yes,’ said Chantal.
As Tom started to run, the Hy-Bractor lunged, grabbing him round the waist in its massive lumpy grey hand. Then it tore his arm off and munched on it thoughtfully. ‘The humans are inferior, you’re right,’ it said through chomping, bloody mouthfuls.
‘As I told you,’ said Chantal, ‘I’m always right.’ She rapped harshly on the door. ‘Come on, all of you, out! Time to deliver! Time to inherit the Earth!’
Week 3
Das ’s Journal
This was the week I began to understand something very important.
Humans do a thing called lying. It’s a kind of deliberate mistake. I’ll try to explain
.
One night, Jack told me that there weren’t any crisps left in our cupboard. But later on I went to the cupboard for some jaffa cakes and I saw that there was a family bag of assorted crisps. I told Jack he’d been mistaken, but he got slightly angry. He said he’d told me there were no crisps even though he knew we still had some, because I was eating badly and he was trying to stop me eating badly.
I tried to hold the thought in my mind. It took me a few goes. A 112
lie is when a human doesn’t want another human to know the truth and instead makes them think a mistake is true. Jack says I will be able to grasp it if I keep thinking about it. To help me, he told me about something called quantum physics. Apparently, humans don’t understand that a thing changes when you’re looking at it, which is obvious. They have to really think to make it clear in their heads until they accept it, the idiots. And the same holds for me and lying.
To help me out, Jack made me tell a few lies. I told him he had fair hair and he was a woman. It’s quite easy. I got the hang of it quickly enough. Of course, the trouble now is that Jack thinks he has fair hair and is a woman because of my lies. I’ll tell him the truth soon, but it’s funny to think my lies have fooled him. Funny is something else I am just discovering. It means you know something other people don’t. It isn’t really cruel, because everybody here has so much stuff they don’t need to be so loyal to each other any longer.
I’ve realised a lot of the tribes on television are liars. Footballers and news and Trisha are telling the truth, but nearly everybody else is pretending, to amuse people. I was very relieved to discover this.
People laugh at the Grace Brothers, for example, because they know they are liars.
It was important to learn about lying, because this week I went out and had some job interviews. I need to work so that I will get money to spend on food. Jack told me about different tribes I could join and I decided building was the best. I went to a building site and lied to a man that I was from Romania and that I had worked on building sites before. I start next Monday. It’ll be nice to have something to do and everybody there seems very friendly. And I can laugh at them because I know something they don’t.
One night we went to a nightclub in London, which Bromley is only a part of. Instead of cola, Jack and I bought cans of beer. You have to be very careful with beer because it brings you closer to the happiness of the gods, and if you drink too much the gods resent it and punish you with head pain. So I only had two all night. It made me realise that some human females can be very attractive, and Jack told me to go for it and woo them.
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I wooed a very nice woman – she wasn’t very pretty, far too thin, but she spoke of many strange and wise things, and warned me of wasps. Jack didn’t like her and steered me away from her. He said it was for my own good and there would be too many complications.
She did seem to be a very complicated person.
Later on we were queuing up for a taxi to go home and we got talking to some women who liked Jack a lot. (That’s funny, because of course at the moment he thinks he himself is a woman, thanks to my lie!) One of the girls was rather left out. I don’t understand why, as she was by far the prettiest. She is short, has the fat of a good hunter and a lovely big nose, and even some hair on her cheeks and mouth. She smells of sweat and the forest. She doesn’t laugh as much as other humans either, which is a relief. Her name is Anna Marie –her friends call her Big Fat Anna Marie No-Mates, as they revere her –and she gave me her telephone number. I’m looking forward to seeing her again and starting my job.
I love this world of plenty and boredom.
Captain Jack Harkness’s Data-Record
I’ve finally got through to Das about lying. I reckoned that it was a concept he could imitate, even if he never quite understands it.
It reminds me of when I tried, a few years back, to sell tickets to watch the horse racing in second-century Rome to a party of humanoid Cephalids. Cephalids are the most notorious gamblers in space and love sporting occasions on their own planet. But they evolved so they can see the universe in nine dimensions simultaneously, so the kinds of sport they play at home are weird events like the Ratio Acceleration Derby and Atom-Boarding. To us three-dimensional folks, that just looks like staring at an accretion of invisible gas particles for seven years, but boy do they get worked up about it – and the money that changes hands is off the scale. I knew I had to lift some of that, so I took some back to the Circus Maximus and drew up a slate.
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But to the Cephalids the horse race must have looked as weird and boring as Atom-Boarding did to me. It was a big letdown for them, but not for me. My slate was so baffling to them they paid up millions right away out of embarrassment. Anyhow, a year later they realised what I’d done and sent a battle cruiser after me. But being Cephalids, their lame multi-dimensional weapons kept firing at where I’d been and where I was gonna be or where I might have decided to go in some kooky alternative universe rather than where I actually was.
The point of that little tale is that eventually the Cephalids got it – they unravelled a concept, horse racing, that was completely alien. And I figured that Das, who is nearer to Homo sapiens than the Cephalids ever were, would get lying and fiction if I really spelled it out to him. And he’s gonna need a bit of evasion if he’s gotta stay here.
And I think I’ve cracked it. Took him through slow, step by step.
Das has sure taken to lying. He went for a job interview at a building site and walked it. So I’m feeling proud of my boy right now.
I had to do some lying of my own on our night out. We went uptown a little and Das got talking to a pretty cute older woman – I listened in on my Wristo-Matic to make sure he was coping. ‘Wasps will dive-bomb certain brands of hairspray,’ she was saying in an accent just like Rose’s. God knows how the conversation had ended up there. ‘And bright colours. I was wearing a vivid lemon gilet and had my hair up to here and I got three stings in a day. I was like a wasp magnet.’
Something about that voice, something about her face, sounded too familiar. I ran a quick micro-genetic check and the Wrist-o-Matic flashed up a close correspondence. She was only Rose’s mother. So I grabbed Das and got him out of there. There’s just too much syn-chronicity in the universe as it is, and from what I hear she’s not the kind of woman who’d appreciate any more Doctor-related weirdness in her life. I told Das she was part of a warrior tribe he should keep away from.
But later on in the taxi queue he struck lucky anyway. If there is any trace of Neanderthal genes left in the human race, well, he found it all right.
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‘We’ve got this tradition in my tribe, the Tylers, right?’ said Rose, shivering in her flimsy wedding skins. ‘Before she gets married, a girl has to walk out and face the sun alone, to appease the mighty god. . . Ooh-la-la. If we don’t, then the god will take away the hunting and dry up the river.’
She hoped she sounded more convincing to Nan and Gual than she sounded to herself.
‘That sounds sensible,’ said Nan. ‘You’d better go and do it. We don’t want some goddess we ain’t never heard of punishing us, do we? Our own ones are tough enough to please. I’ll come and keep you company.’
‘No, sorry, Nan. I have to do it on my own,’ said Rose.
‘Why?’ asked Gual suspiciously.
‘It’s part of the Tylers’ holy ritual,’ said Rose.
She glanced anxiously over at the cave entrance. Tillun was in there now, being prepared. She was pretty sure he wouldn’t swallow her unlikely story.
Nan waved her off. ‘Don’t take too long about it. It’s a quarter past two.’ She told the time by looking at the sun’s position in the 117
sky. ‘Though we’ll never be ready at this rate.’ She turned to her son.
‘Who’s had the Great Fish of Matrimony?’
‘I’m going to get it in a minute,’ said Gual through gritted teeth, in the tone of voice people res
erve for members of their family.
‘Well, go and get it now!’ Nan shot back in much the same way.
Rose did her best to saunter out of the camp, without looking back.
The workers in the observation room were beginning to feel a bit strange anyway and were waiting for Chantal to come and put them right. None of them wanted to be the first to say anything about the worried, sweaty way they were feeling, but the haunted looks they gave each other and the anxious atmosphere were building up. The tiny non-verbal signals made by humans, suppressed from birth in these people, were returning to them.
They realised something was definitely wrong when the door of the room crashed open to reveal four Hy-Bractors. The first was the one encountered by the Doctor and Quilley, the remains of Tom dribbling from its heavy-jawed mouth. The others were another male and a female, all dressed in sharp business suits, their tails flicking over their heads.
To the humans the Hy-Bractors were practically indistinguishable.
To the Hy-Bractors the humans were practically indistinguishable.
‘Are you humans?’ asked the female, sniffing.
‘Of course they are!’ snapped the first male.
They advanced into the observation room, and then there was a lot of screaming and eating.
In the storage room the Doctor heard that screaming and cursed his fuzzy head. He had almost beaten off the massive amounts of drugs Chantal had pumped into his body, but it was still hard to think quickly. And every half a minute a wave of some relaxant passed over his muscles, making him long to ignore everything and just find a place to take a seat and chill the day away.
‘OK, right, focus,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some focus.’
There were more screams.
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‘Quilley, we’ve gotta move everyone out of here. Are you getting that?’
Quilley was slumped against the wall, staring off into space. ‘What’s the big panic? Can I just lie down for a second?’ He started to slump towards the floor.
The Doctor, galvanised, hauled him to his feet and almost spat in his face with sudden purpose. ‘No! Listen!’ He shook Quilley as the screams echoed round the caves. ‘Those creatures behind the Grey Door, Hy-Bractors, I don’t know why, or what they are, but they’re gonna kill everybody, and the people here will go meekly to their deaths like lambs for Chantal because they’re not like you and me!
