Doctor Who (19 page)

Luis's fists clenched and unclenched. He went out, slamming the door behind him, unlocked. There was nothing left worth stealing.

He sat in his car for five minutes before he realised that he had no idea where Swan lived these days.

AND SO WE
were on the road again, leaving a trail of mayhem behind us. Around four hours later, we picked up Bob from his motel room. We could have used some rest, but the Doctor insisted we keep on the move. Peri drove while the Doctor navigated. They argued pretty much constantly about where we were and which road to take. Bob and I exchanged a smile; it was like being the kids of an old married couple, listening to them bicker from the front of the car.

I held the radio from the police car in my lap. The Doctor ran a cable from the cigarette lighter to power it. So far I hadn't heard anything to suggest our little encounter at the lookout had sparked a state-wide search: it was always possible that an embarrassed Officer Moustache had decided to keep the details to himself. I was still nervous as hell tooling around in such a conspicuous vehicle.

Exasperated, Peri said, ‘It would help if I knew what you were trying to find!'

The Doctor said, ‘Somewhere safe and private to hide away for a few hours. I have arranged a meeting with Sarah Swan.'

Peri slammed on the brakes. The campervan rolled onto the side of the road and stopped there, engine grumbling. We all looked at the Doctor.

‘Not out here,' he said. ‘Inside the world of the computer.'

‘Well what would have been wrong with Bob's motel room?' she said.

‘Peri. If it's at all possible, I'd like to be somewhere that no-one knows we are.'

She took a moment. ‘You're not thinking of breaking into a house or something, are you?'

‘Certainly not!'

‘I know electrical power isn't a problem, but we are going to need a phone line. And I think somebody might notice if you shimmy up a pole in the middle of town.'

‘Hmmm, yes. I'm afraid that publicly accessible computers are some years away yet.'

‘God forbid,' Bob sniffed.

‘Ah! Stop!' Peri startled and braked rather suddenly, jumbling us about. ‘Shangri-La!' he declared. ‘Utopia! Solla Sollew!'

We stared out the campervan's windows at the damp grey wreckage of a gas station. It looked like it had been abandoned for months, maybe years – long enough for weeds to carpet the concrete and a ragged forest of shrubs and shaggy trees to have sprung up in the wasteland around it. Patches of snow lay around, mostly melted by the cold rain.

Peri piloted the campervan around a pile of rusting rubbish and parked it in back of the building. With the engine off, the silence was deafening.

‘Some Shangri-La,' said Peri.

‘There should be a phone line somewhere inside.'

‘Come on, Doctor. There's not going to be a working phone.'

‘We only need the line,' said the Doctor. ‘Bob, your task will be to use a public telephone in the town to bring our borrowed line back to life.'

We hopped out of the campervan, stretching our legs. The back door of the gas station was shut with a padlock and chain. The Doctor fiddled with it for a few minutes, using an unbent paperclip and then a knitting needle. Then he sighed, stood
back, and stiff-armed the door. It popped neatly off its hinges. He caught it by the handle before it could fall backwards into the station, and laid it neatly beside the doorway. ‘A somewhat unorthodox entry. Remind me to repair that before we leave.'

Peri looked around the inside of the station. ‘Honestly, Doctor, I don't think anyone's going to care.' It was mostly empty, but trash was piled against the walls, yellowed newspaper plastered over the windows. An entire car engine had been left sitting where the cash register once must have been. The place had a rich smell of mouldy rags and oil.

We carried the computer equipment into the place in cardboard boxes while the Doctor ran a cable from the campervan's generator. ‘You know what would be cool to have,' said Bob, hefting a box onto the counter. ‘One of those computers you can fold up into a suitcase.'

The Doctor began to unpack the computer equipment, giving the deceased engine a look of annoyance. ‘Phone jack's right here,' said Bob, crouched on the floor behind him.

‘Very well. Young Bob, make me a miracle.'

Bob gave him one of his serious, frowning nods, and scooted out of the station. We were maybe ten or fifteen minutes' walk out of town. Privacy, just as the Doctor had ordered.

The Doctor fussed over the computer. Peri got bored and wandered out, and I followed her, in hopes of an uninterrupted smoke.

Behind the station, Peri sat scrunched in the open door of the Travco. She held the camp stove in her lap. ‘All right?' I said.

‘I'm fine,' she said, with an attempt at a smile.

‘I bet you kick a police officer in the garbanzo beans and torch some house every day of the week.' I pulled out my ciggies. ‘Got a light?'

Peri had to laugh at that. ‘I was kind of thinking of making
some coffee,' she said, turning the camp stove around. ‘Or maybe a cup of soup.'

‘Do we have any coffee?' I said.

‘No, and we don't have any cup of soups, either.' She turned and dropped the stove back inside the campervan. ‘What are we doing out here?'

‘Staying invisible, I guess,' I said.

‘It doesn't matter where we drive to, does it? Swan is always just a phone call away.'

She was right. The net was always there, in the same place. We could have dialled in from California and Swan could have called from Germany and the net would still have been in the centre. There's a Chinese proverb which says ‘Heaven's net may look loose, but nothing can escape getting caught in it'. For a moment I knew how Bob had felt, looking up at those stars: we were surrounded.

‘It's not gonna do any good, just talking to Swan,' Peri was saying. ‘The Doctor always thinks he can talk people out of things. If they'd only listen to reason . . . but they never do.'

‘Never?'

‘Pretty much never,' said Peri. She held out her fingers, absently, and I passed the cigarette to her. She took a drag and started coughing and wiping her eyes. I took the butt back. ‘I haven't done that for a few years,' she wheezed apologetically. She glanced at the station, like the Doctor might catch her smoking in back of school.

‘What is it with you two?' I said.

Peri broke up, half-laughing and half-coughing. ‘We are
not
a couple!' I back-pedalled like crazy, but she didn't seem offended. ‘I did have kind of a crush on him once. He was a lot younger then . . . but it was like the crush you get on your high school teacher.'

I already knew they weren't together; all those little touches and glances and familiar words that two people build up, none of those were present. It wasn't even like an intimate friendship – that also has that secret, shared vocabulary. But I said, ‘No offence. It's just that you sound kind of like my parents used to.'

Peri gave a little laugh. ‘I guess we do sound like an old married couple sometimes. But we're just good Mends.' She saw my quizzical look. ‘The Doctor is the smartest person I know. I have a lot of respect for him. The problem is, he's also the smartest person
he
knows.' She dropped into a gruff-voiced impression of the Doctor. ‘I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues.' In her own voice she said, ‘He just can't stand it when other people can't keep up. Mostly me,' she sighed. I nodded at her to go on. ‘You know, mom used to say that I wanted to be a botanist because I wanted to be alone. Just me and the plants. It's a lonely profession, she said. I think she was really talking about archaeology, though. Just her and the artefacts. Listening to dead people.' She took another puff from the fag and managed to keep it down this time. ‘She actually called it that once. Listening to dead people.'

‘I get the same impression when I talk to hackers,' I said. ‘They spend most of their time talking to computers. Sometimes they're not so good at talking to other people.'

‘Bob's like that, isn't he? He always gives me the feeling I'm wasting his time.'

‘They can be a little wrapped up in themselves. A little impatient with everybody else,' I said. ‘I think they get disappointed when the rest of us aren't as smart as they are.'

Peri took the fag out of her mouth, which was curling into her slow, wry smile. ‘I think I know somebody like that. You're writing an article about us or something, aren't you?'

‘I don't think the
Post
is going to be too interested in aliens
from Epsilon Eridani.' She handed the smoke back to me and I took a puff. ‘Mostly I'm just curious, though. I can't pin the Doctor down at all. I can't pin down your relationship. You seem distant and close at the same time.'

‘We are close. But more like . . . I know. Once mom and I got stuck in the subway in New York. The power went out, there were no announcements or anything, and we were there for about two hours with a couple dozen people who didn't know each other. We all ended up talking like old friends, though – we even sang “happy birthday” to an old lady who just turned seventy-eight. We were all best friends because we were going through a bad thing together.'

‘They call that “crisis syndrome”.'

‘Yeah. That's it. The Doctor and I are always going through one crisis after another.'

Bob rounded the corner and glanced at us. Peri looked awkward all of a sudden, but he didn't seem to register anything. We followed him inside.

The Doctor was saying, ‘We have a dialtone. Bless you, Bob,' and feeding a phone number to the modem. ‘The sun reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores is unpolluted in his beam,' he declaimed. ‘Now it's time to test that theory and wallow a little in the MUD with Swan.'

‘Doctor,' said Peri, ‘what are you talking about?'

I knew that one. ‘Multiple User Dungeon,' I told her. ‘It's a space inside a computer, like a map in a game of D&D. You can walk from room to room, look at what's there, and meet other people and talk to them. The mud program runs everything, like a Dungeon Master.'

‘Neutral ground,' said the Doctor. We watched over his shoulder as the Apple II's modem shook hands with another modem somewhere else in the States.

The first step was to create a ‘character' that would represent him in the miniature imaginary world. The Doctor didn't bother with details like appearance or even gender, just a code name, Merryman. The MUD was set up so that guests could appear as anonymous wraiths in the public areas of the game. Normally participants would go to great lengths to create their appearance. For Swan and the Doctor's meeting, play-acting wasn't necessary.

The Doctor's featureless character appeared out of nowhere in the imaginary world:

Welcome to the Dungeon of Doom. You are standing in a forest clearing facing north. In front of you is a cliff wall. In the wall is a large opening, the doorway to the Caves of Catastrophe.

‘Well, you obviously don't want to go in there,' said Peri. We all looked at her. ‘It was just a joke.'

‘I doubt there's anywhere else to go,' said the Doctor. He typed:

go north

A few moments later, the computer answered:

You are standing in the entrance cave. Passages lead off to the east and west. You can see daylight through a doorway in the south.

‘Well, this could take all day,' said Peri.

‘Ah, but I know a way to speed things up.' The Doctor typed:

Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!

The computer responded:

The genie appears in a puff of smoke. ‘Welcome, guest,' he says. ‘Where would you like me to take you?'

The Doctor typed:

genie living_room

And the program responded:

You enter a pleasant living room. There are comfortable chairs scattered about, rugs and lamps, and a roaring fireplace. Fionnuala is here.

The genie departs in a puff of smoke.

‘Fionnuala,' said the Doctor. ‘A woman changed into a swan in Irish legend. She's just where I asked her to be.'

From time to time, the net, even just the phone gives me a case of the profound heebie-jeebies. It's a feeling of being watched. Have you ever had a prank phone call, and been really creeped out by the fact that someone could just call you up like that, enter your home in a sense, and you had no idea of where they were or who they were? Worse still, have you ever had a call where someone said ‘I can see you through the window, I'm
outside your house?' I haven't, but Sally did once. We agreed it was probably bullshit, but she insisted on sleeping at my place for a week.

I had that feeling as the Doctor joined Sarah Swan for their little chat in the living room of the imaginary house. There was something unnerving about Swan waiting for him there, another pseudonymous, abstract creature. It could, in theory, have been anyone. We could have been anyone. It was only our agreement, our mutual acceptance that this was a place and we were going to meet there and talk, that gave any of it any substance, any meaning at all.

Imagine them sitting in that sketch of a room – the black, silent, empty space inside the network. Imagine the edges of walls and objects drawn in lines the same livid green as the writing on a monitor. Their chairs are luminous stick-figures. They are only outlines of words, a conversation punctuated by electrical lacunae, their shapes traced by the flicker of the cursor as it darts across the screen.

‘What is it you want, Sarah Swan?' asks the Doctor.

Between each line of their dialogue there is a pause, as if they are gathering their thoughts. It's actually the slow motion of the machines and the miles of wire that connect them.

Swan says, ‘I want to own something that no-one else in the world has.'