The Roots of Evil

by Philip Reeve

  Ratisbon sniffed irritably. ‘What now?’

  The door opened. Aggie burst in, shouting, ‘Chairman! There are … things! They are coming up out of the Heartwood! They are everywhere!’

  More shouts behind her, then a strange noise, like someone dragging a big bundle of sticks. Ratisbon flapped his hands, waving the annoyance away. ‘Then deal with it, Agony-Without-End. I daresay it is just some trick by the Justiciar. She hasn’t the stomach to let real justice be done …’

  But even as he spoke, the floor behind him bulged and split, its ancient planking splintering upwards as a great blow struck it from beneath. The Chairman’s followers scattered as something large and spiny squeezed up into the chamber. Others were rising too, all around the room. They reached out tendrils to seize struggling and screaming men. One snatched Ratisbon, wrapping roots around him, dragging him backwards towards the hole it had emerged from.

  The Doctor, forgotten by his frightened guards, ran to the Chair and broke off the arm that held the biggest, sharpest blade. By the time he turned back, Ratisbon was vanishing through the floor. The Doctor ran to him, slashing at the roots that held him. He grabbed one of the Chairman’s flailing hands and shouted, ‘Hold on, man!’ and ‘Aggie, help!’ But Aggie was battling against another of the creatures. Roots wrapped around Ratisbon’s throat and tightened, squeezing and crushing. His fingers slipped limply from the Doctor’s grasp; the thing dragged his body down into the darkness under the floor.

  The Doctor ran to help Aggie. Defending herself with her spear, the girl was managing to hold at bay the monster that was attacking her. When the Doctor joined her it retreated, waving its roots and tendrils threateningly, making fierce rustling noises, which sounded like wind in treetops.

  ‘Come on!’ the Doctor shouted. He and the other survivors fled from the chamber, and Aggie slammed the door behind them. The corridors outside were full of rustlings too, and shouts and shrieks, which told them that more of the creatures were loose all through the maze of the Heligan Structure.

  ‘What are they?’ asked Aggie.

  ‘I should say they are some kind of mobile spore,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s how Heligans reproduce, normally. They should be setting off on their own to turn into new trees. But they’ve been altered, re-programmed if you like. Turned into warriors …’

  Aggie nodded slowly, stupid with shock. ‘The tales tell how when the Doctor comes, the tree itself will defend us from him. But why would its warriors attack us? We too are the tree’s own children!’

  ‘Well, I should imagine it’s me they’re after,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s the trouble with plants – they aren’t always very bright. I expect we all look the same to them. They just grab anything that makes a sound ...’

  ‘Kill him, Agony-Without-End!’ shouted one of the men nearby. ‘He is in league with the monsters!’

  ‘No!’ said Aggie angrily. ‘He helped me. He fought bravely, and tried to save the Chairman.’

  The door behind them creaked, bowing outwards under the force of some heavy weight. They could hear the root-tips of the angry spores scrabbling against it. From the other direction more noises came – quick, furtive scufflings. Shadows moved where the corridor twisted. Aggie gripped her spear.

  ‘No …’ said the Doctor.

  Around the turn of the passage came, not a spore-warrior, but another group of frightened human beings. Among them the Justiciar, Ven and Leela, who ran to the Doctor and hugged him tight. ‘I knew you would escape! I came to save you! There are things, creatures …’

  ‘We know, we know,’ he said.

  ‘They are everywhere!’ said Ven.

  ‘We must make our way to the Hall of Justice,’ said the Justiciar. ‘That is where our people gather in times of danger. Together, perhaps we can hold them off.’

  She pointed down a broad corridor. They ran along it, pausing once in the shadows at an intersection while a cluster of spores went rustling by. When they reached the big double doors, Ven and one of the men heaved them open.

  The spores did not yet seem to have found the Hall of Justice; it looked just the same as it had looked for all Ven’s life, the same as it had looked for all the nine hundred years that there had been people in the Heligan Structure. There was the seat where the Justiciar would sit, the benches for the observers, the dock where the Doctor would stand, and behind that, towering over everything, the great statue, which the founders had carved so that their descendants would never forget their ancient enemy.

  ‘Who’s that supposed to be?’ asked the Doctor, glancing up at it.

  ‘That is you,’ said the Justiciar, but she sounded uncertain. She looked from the face of the Doctor to the face of the carving, trying to detect a similarity. She said, ‘That is how the Doctor appeared to our ancestors, nine hundred years ago.’

  ‘It looks nothing like him!’ said Leela.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘There is a certain resemblance. Two eyes, two ears, one nose – I suppose you could call that a nose? – and it’s true that I’ve changed a bit over the years. But I’m certain I’ve never looked like that.’

  ‘He’s so young!’ said Leela. ‘And so handsome!’

  ‘I mean, he’s wearing a bow tie!’ the Doctor explained patiently. ‘Ridiculous objects! I wouldn’t be seen dead in a bow tie!’

  ‘The Doctor told our ancestors “Bow ties are cool”,’ said Ven.

  ‘Cool?’ The Doctor blinked at him. ‘I would never have said … Oh, wait! Hang on! Ah! I think I see what’s happened. That fellow must be one of my future regenerations. These things you blame me for, the revolt of the Thara, your exile from Golrandonvar … they haven’t happened yet. Not for me. And you can’t hold me responsible for something I haven’t done yet. Would that be justice, Justiciar?’

  ‘I suppose not …’

  ‘We should kill him anyway!’ said one of Ratisbon’s men. ‘Then he will never be able to betray our ancestors and help the Thara.’

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor, ‘that wouldn’t do any good. If you kill me now I won’t be able to visit Golrandonvar, the Thara may never revolt, this Heligan will never exist and you won’t be here to kill me. You would all vanish instantly in a puff of paradoxes.’

  Another great quake shook the hall; shook the whole wooden city. Carved panels dropped from the roof. The statue of the future Doctor swayed drunkenly.

  ‘This tree is angry,’ blurted Leela.

  ‘You’re right,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Am I?’ She blinked at him. ‘Are you not going to say that I am being unscientific?’

  ‘These tree-quakes, the way the spores are behaving …’ said the Doctor. ‘Justiciar, I don’t think your founders were being honest with you. Your Director Sprawn didn’t really trust his descendants to bring me to justice. He knew he couldn’t rely on you to stay angry all those years. He knew you’d grow too reasonable, too merciful. He just needed you to keep the tree alive. To do a bit of light pruning and keep an eye out for greenfly until I returned. Then it would take its own revenge. Even if that means destroying itself – and all of you.’

  There were moans and cries of woe from his listeners. ‘What can we do?’ asked the Justiciar.

  The Doctor smiled that wide, delighted smile of his. ‘Oh, we’ll think of something! Now, an organism as complex as a Heligan, especially one this big, must be controlled from somewhere. There must be a central brain of some sort, which sensed the arrival of the TARDIS and triggered the release of those spores.’

  ‘The root ball?’ suggested Ven. ‘It’s down in the Heartwood, beneath the digestion chamber, at the very centre of the tree.’

  ‘Can you show me the way?’

  Ven looked at his mother, then back at the Doctor. He nodded.

  ‘I am coming with you!’ Leela said.

  ‘No, Leela, you stay here; they’ll need you if the spores attack. Don’t worry; I’ll be back in two ticks!’

  ‘Doctor …!’


  But he was already gone, loping after Ven to a small door on the far side of the hall and vanishing through it into shadows.

  Leela turned to the others. ‘How long is a tick?’ she asked. But they didn’t know, and hadn’t time to answer anyway. The Hall of Justice was suddenly full of the sound of spore-roots battering against the doors.

  6

  The Heligan Structure was shuddering constantly now, as if the ancient tree were trying to shake off all the elegant wooden buildings that had been attached to it. The groaning of the thicker branches as they heaved and thrashed had a tuneless music, like the bellowing of huge animals. And down through it all Ven led the Doctor, hiding now and then from passing spores, down past the chamber where the TARDIS was embowered, to deep places where even he had never been.

  ‘It is forbidden to go any further,’ he warned, peering down the last passage that led into the root ball. Cobwebs hung like curtains, stirring softly in a wind that seemed to come from the heart of the tree. A faint, silvery light showed at the far end.

  ‘Oh well, rules are made to be broken!’ said the Doctor cheerfully, and then, seeing how afraid the boy was, added, ‘All right, you stay here. Shout if any of those spores come poking about, eh?’

  He went on alone, using his hat to sweep aside the cobwebs. The light grew brighter. He emerged into a space whose walls and floor and roof were made of ancient, interwoven roots. Tangled among the roots was machinery torn from the guts of an old starship; one of those twenty-fourth-century computers with the big dials and buttons, controlling the flow of chemicals through the Heligan’s boughs. Wires and coloured flexes led from the machines, wrapped around the roots like strands of ivy leading up into the ceiling. The Doctor followed them, looking up into the shadows above his head.

  Among the twistings and knottings of the wood, two eyes were watching him.

  ‘Ah!’ said the Doctor. ‘Director Sprawn, I presume?’

  He could make out a face around the eyes now, ancient, mutated, scarcely human, sprouting twigs and tendrils like a carving of the Green Man in a country church. There were the suggestions of a body, spreadeagled on the ceiling, almost engulfed in the web of roots. So that was how Sprawn had made sure the Heligan would do his bidding, even after all these years. He had become a part of it.

  They barred the doors, but the spores burst through them. They piled up benches, but the spores shoved those easily aside. And then it was all fright and confusion and the hack and thrust of spears, the screams of the people snatched by the spores, the shouts of their comrades as they fought to tear them free, the squeals of children hiding behind their mothers at the far side of the hall. And Aggie and Leela sap-spattered, fighting side by side, spear and knife and desperate courage against the spines and tendrils of the spores …

  ‘So, Doctor!’ growled the face in the ceiling, root-muffled. ‘We meet again!’

  ‘Well, we’re meeting for the first time, technically, Sprawn,’ said the Doctor, looking quickly around at the machinery. ‘Though we will meet again, nine hundred years in the past. Your past: my future. That’s the trouble with time travel, you never know whether you’re coming or going …’

  He reached over and turned one of the knobs on the nearest control panel. It seemed to do nothing but draw an angry hiss from the face above him.

  ‘The Heligan will tear itself apart rather than let you escape, Doctor! We shall be avenged at last for what you did to us all those centuries ago!’

  The Doctor nibbled a fingernail, his eyes still on the controls. Absent-mindedly he said, ‘Ah yes, about that. I can just about accept that I might, one day, in a moment of weakness, wear a bow tie, but there is no way I will ever take up arms against anyone unless they thoroughly deserve it. I don’t think you and your fellow colonists on Golrandonvar were innocent victims of the Thara rebellion at all. I think you were vicious tyrants.’

  ‘The Thara were vermin!’ shouted the face in the ceiling. ‘They opposed every improvement we tried to make to their benighted world!’

  ‘Improvements like altering their atmosphere?’

  ‘Golrandonvar had to be terraformed: turned into a world fit for people, not those methane-breathing swamp-monkeys. We had no choice but to exterminate them!’

  ‘Now that’s a word I’ve never liked,’ said the Doctor, starting to sound quite stern. ‘I can see why my future self is going to help them to get rid of you. Just as I’m going to have to help your own people now, to save them from your suicidal rage.’

  ‘Let them die!’ screamed the mad face above him. ‘What have they to live for? For nine hundred years they’ve scraped a living in this wretched weed, imprisoned by your moralistic meddling!’

  ‘Wretched?’ asked the Doctor. He tried another dial, and chuckled delightedly when it produced a beeping noise and a bubbling of amber fluid in a glass container buried deep among the roots. ‘Oh, I think they’ve done rather well with the place, all things considered. They’re ready to move on. Except you didn’t exactly play fair with them, did you? This tree should have had offspring, a forest of Heligans that would have made the world below us habitable. But you didn’t want that. If they’d had a new world to build, your descendants might have forgotten all about their vengeance. So you made some changes to the genome, didn’t you? Stopped the Heligan producing spores at all, until now …’

  ‘Doctor!’ There were scrabbling sounds from the passage outside. Ven came hurrying in, bearded with cobwebs, still scared of the forbidden chamber, but more scared of what was outside it. ‘There are spores coming!’

  ‘I have called them here to kill you, Doctor,’ said the head in the ceiling, and it began to laugh. Saliva pattered on the brim of the Doctor’s hat.

  ‘And that’s another thing,’ the Doctor said, while his hands went spidering over the controls and the machinery beeped and burped. ‘Heligan spores aren’t normally aggressive. You must have tampered with the chemical messages that control their behaviour …’

  ‘Doctor!’ Ven fled to the far end of the chamber as the first spore came pushing its way along the passage, reaching out with woody limbs.

  ‘It’s all right, Ven,’ said the Doctor. ‘The only things that Heligan spores naturally attack are parasites that threaten their parent tree. Now I’ve adjusted the chemical balance, they should start to behave normally again …’

  The spore reached past the Doctor. Its tendrils took hold of the roots that formed the wall. It climbed awkwardly, like a land crab. Other spores entered, and also started climbing. The thing that had been Director Sprawn watched, wide-eyed. He tried to struggle free of the ceiling, but his limbs were roots, his flesh was wood, the stuff of the tree was woven through him. He shrieked as the spores clustered around him. Stone-hard root-tips rose and fell like axes, hacking and hewing, splattering thick sap. The shrieks did not last long.

  ‘What are they doing to him?’ asked Ven.

  ‘He’s being pruned,’ said the Doctor. ‘Cut out …’ He felt sorry for Sprawn. In many ways it was a wonderful achievement, this great tree that he’d created. If only he had been able to enjoy it for what it was, instead of poisoning it with his need for vengeance.

  ‘Will the Heligan be all right without him?’ asked Ven.

  ‘Oh, I should think so,’ said the Doctor.

  Some of the spores had now turned their attention to the machinery, driving their roots through the old computer casings, ripping out spaghetti-tangles of electronic innards in fountains of dazzling sparks. Blinking away the after-images of the explosions, the Doctor started to lead Ven back up the passageway towards the outer branches and the others.

  ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I should think it will be a great deal better off …’

  In the Hall of Justice the spores had stopped attacking all at once, suddenly going still, as if they had forgotten what they were supposed to be doing – or remembered.

  ‘It’s the Doctor!’ said Leela, wiping the sap from her knife as she turned to
the others. ‘He’s done it!’

  Her comrades were not so sure. They watched warily, holding their spears ready. When the spores all suddenly shuffled into life again a few moments later, they leaped hastily back behind their barricades of piled-up benches.

  But the spores were not returning to the attack. Ignoring the humans, they rustled their way to the hall’s huge, misty windows. The cellulose tore as they leaned their spiny shapes hard against it. They clustered on the windowsills, tensing their many legs, and then, one by one, they sprang out, releasing jets of pent-up gas to help thrust themselves free of the Heligan’s gravity.

  ‘There!’ said the Doctor, sauntering in with his hands in his pockets, Ven close behind him. ‘Look at that! Another ten years or so and that world we’re orbiting should start to be quite habitable.’

  ‘Ten years, Doctor?’ The Justiciar turned to look at him. She still felt faintly that she was failing in her duty by not making him stand trial, but so much had happened since his arrival, so much had changed … ‘What shall we do in the meantime?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, you should branch out!’ the Doctor said with a grin. ‘Think about advertising this place. A tree of this size, surrounded by its own floating forest – it must be one of the wonders of the galaxy! You should try luring tourists instead of Time Lords …’

  From every window of the Heligan Structure now the spores were taking flight, unfurling their first young branches as they spread across the sky. The humans stood wonderstruck, gazing at the airborne forest that they had seeded. Ven took Aggie’s hand. The Doctor tapped Leela on the shoulder and nodded towards the door.

  ‘So,’ the Doctor asked, a while later, when they had managed to cut a way through the woody stems to the door of the TARDIS. ‘Seen enough trees for a bit?’

  ‘I do not care if I never see another,’ said Leela.

  ‘Excellent! Because I was thinking the sand-reefs of Phenostris IV might be worth a look. I haven’t been there since …’