Doctor Who (30 page)

The police radio we had ‘borrowed' let him broadcast a phony message about the roadblock on the bridge. (In fact, the slow traffic was quite normal.) He had hoped to channel Swan's movements until she was as isolated as possible – it hadn't been his plan to end up in a tourist attraction. But at least, in the depths of winter, there hadn't been that many people around.

The Doctor admitted, with a mixture of humility and grouch, that he had overestimated his own ability to withstand the Savant's mental onslaught. ‘I deal with brainwashing and other such nonsense all the time,' he said, with a dismissive wave of his hand. ‘This was different. It was far more invasive, far more physical. The more I fought, the more I
thought,
the more it was able to turn my own mind against me. Bob's diagram bought me a moment of grace. For just an instant, I wasn't thinking at all.' Bob looked equal parts chuffed and puzzled, but he was happy to accept his role in saving the day.

Peri kept giving the Doctor hugs. She even made a cup of tea and brought it to him, while they both joked about it. She looked more relaxed than she had since I had first met her, and not only because the crisis was over: she had made up her mind about where she wanted to be.

We saw Mr Ghislain once more. The Doctor pulled some strings to get us access to the rest home where Swan and Luis had been placed for observation, and perhaps a few more so that I could come along for the visit. I don't know what strings he pulled to allow Mr Ghislain to bring his parrot.

I don't know for sure who Ghislain or the Eridani really were. I prefer my initial guess: Russian agents whose technology – a supercomputer with organic components, possibly
intended for space exploration – had got loose, perhaps after a deal with a double agent went sour.

Swan and Luis had been moved to a little patients' lounge for our visit. They sat side by side on a faded brown sofa, next to a shelf full of tattered paperbacks and National Geographics. They were a pair: both quite relaxed – none of the stiffness of a victim of catatonia – both staring at nothing. Waiting for input, for instructions.

Mr Ghislain sat before them for a long time, consulting a device he held in his lap. His parrot perched inside its cage on top of the bookcase.

At last he said, ‘Events have repeated themselves. At the moment you sent the interrupt signal to the Savant structures inside Mr Perez, it acted in self-defence by creating another copy of itself.'

‘I should have realised that would happen,' said the Doctor. ‘Luis copied himself – copied the Savant – into Swan.'

Ghislain said, ‘However, the interrupt signal then shut down the new Savant as well. Evidently it was unable to copy itself to your mind.'

The Doctor admitted, ‘If I hadn't been distracted at the crucial moment by Bob's bit of scribble, I'd be sitting on that sofa beside them.'

‘Is there hope for them?' I asked.

‘We may be able to reverse some of the changes to their neural pathways,' said Ghislain. ‘But I regret neither one will be restored to their original state. I propose you permit me to take them to our ship.'

‘No,' said the Doctor.

‘They can no longer function in this society. We offer to care for them.'

‘And do a little experimentation at the same time? No,
Ghislain. Do what you can for them, but they're not leaving Earth.'

‘The Eridani regret this outcome.'

‘Regret it? A successful test of your new weapon?' snapped the Doctor. Ghislain looked at him placidly. ‘The “supercomputer” these devices combined to create. It was a cuckoo's egg all along – designed to infiltrate a society, no matter what technological level it might have achieved. It could adapt itself to any network, from a highly advanced computerised net to organic brain structures. Create a version of itself for any environment, and then spread itself like so much viral payload.'

‘It is truthful that the slow package was unintended for Earth,' said Ghislain. His face was blank as ever, but his grammar was breaking down in the face of the Doctor's onslaught. I thought of Operation Sea-Spray, a biological warfare experiment in the early fifties. The Army sent aloft a bunch of balloons carrying a supposedly harmless bacterium,
Serratia
, then burst them over the Bay Area. That harmless little bug lodged itself in lungs throughout the city, causing a steep rise in pneumonia.

‘Intended for a rebellious colony? Or any medium-tech civilisation that would gratefully accept your “gift”?' The Doctor planted his hands on his hips and loomed over Ghislain. ‘I expect you not only to do your best to restore the minds of these people, but of all the people touched by your technology. Do you understand?'

I don't know what power the Doctor had over the ‘Eridani': presumably he had threatened to expose them. But they seemed happy enough to do as they were told. And why not? Each victim they examined would render more valuable data on their trial.

The Doctor arranged for Ghislain (and his parrot) to visit
Ritchie, and went along with them to keep an eye on things. Ghislain brought yet another device, one that could unpick the mental knots left behind in the unknowing victims, snipping out the time bomb of hundreds of Savant programs nestled in nervous tissue, waiting to hatch.

They walked the streets for a day and a half, letting the device pick out men and women and children who had been affected, getting close enough to them to let it do the rest of its work. Ritchie's zombies knew no more about the cure than they did about falling ill. It wasn't perfect; the Doctor suspected a lot of people would be left with small, odd gaps in their memories, perhaps even occasional, minor speech or concentration difficulties. ‘The small but noticeable scars of neurosurgery at a distance,' he said, with a mixture of sadness and sourness. But the job was done; in the end, there were only two people Ghislain couldn't restore to pretty much normal.

Once upon a time there was a young princess who lived by the seashore. And God, her life was dull. She couldn't strap on armour and ride a chariot into battle, like her brothers the princes. She would never be a great king or a master sailor, just a prize to be fought over. She had nothing to do but sit in a field near the ocean, picking flowers with her ladies-in-waiting. Until one day they were approached by a huge white bull. The young women were badly frightened, but the princess knew she had found her ship, her chariot. She climbed on the back of that bull, ready to ride.

Maybe that's how the story goes.

So where are they now?

Bob's out there riding the new frontier. ‘Power,' he explains, ‘is something you can borrow. The alchemists knew it. The first
cavemen who stuck horns on their heads were trying to borrow the power of the animals.' He knows from first-hand experience as sysop that the law isn't interested in people breaking into computers; that's fantasy land. They want real break-ins to investigate. All that computing power is there for the taking.

So Bob skips from system to system inside the growing network. There's a chart on the wall of his office; every few weeks he finds a new computer that's been caught in that giant fisherman's net. He's still his dad's good little boy, kind of: he never breaks anything and he never takes anything. He just travels, late at night when no-one's using the machines, following the route traced out by the blinking cursor, mapping the human race's brave new world. Like Dean Moriarty, he only steals cars to take joyrides. To him, the network is like a single, huge computer.

Somewhere in safekeeping – he wouldn't tell me where – he has the Eridani's remote control device. The Doctor handed it over to him, he said, in case the Eridani ever decide to visit Earth again. One day Bob hopes to be a sysop for NASA.

Mondy is now working somewhere in the telco. Heaven help us.

You know where Swan eventually ended up. She vanished from the rest home about a month after the Doctor and I paid our visit. The contacts I now have at the theme restaurant helped me track her down at the Bainbridge Hospital. I've been officially denied permission to visit her three times. Luis managed to escape the CIA's attentions and is being cared for by his family in Puebla. I'm told they both have lucid periods, as though waking up out of a long sleep; they can speak and write and seem quite normal, if a little slow and distant. On the anniversary of our last meeting, I ordered some flowers for both of them, over the net.

* * *

Peri had been ready to give up the ride and wade back to shore. But somewhere along the way, she changed her mind. Maybe it happened all at once when she paced my apartment, knowing she ought to be by his side; maybe she got there in a lot of little steps. In any case, I reckon she's going to keep holding on loosely.

The day she and the Doctor left, I visited them at the hotel. For the first time, I got to see the Doctor in his ‘ordinary' clothes. The black suit was gone. Instead, he was wearing the coat I had glimpsed in the hotel closet – an old-fashioned coat that came down to the tops of his calves, big lapels, big pockets. One lapel was orange and the other was pink, with a Bill the Cat badge pinned to it. All those patches – tartan, red, big blue and white checks – made it look as though it had been repaired over centuries by a dynasty of blind seamstresses.

Somehow I could imagine him trekking through the dust of Nepal or Morocco or even striding up Tottenham Court Road, looking utterly unselfconscious even as the natives stared. Customs officers and government ministers would take him seriously. No-one else could have got away with it. ‘What seems extraordinary in one place seems utterly ordinary in another,' he pronounced. ‘What's fashionable in one era seems ludicrous in another.'

‘Yeah, and disco's gonna make a comeback,' I said. He just raised an eyebrow at me.

I waited with him and Peri in the lobby, while the concierge ordered them a taxi to take them back to their boat. They looked comfortable together, standing closer than friends but not as close as a couple. When a bellhop stared at the Doctor's coat, Peri first looked down in embarrassment, then stared back until the bellhop hurried on his way.

They were both vague about where they were going next. ‘So
are you gonna write a book about us?' said Peri, changing the subject.

‘Oh, yeah,' I said. ‘I'm not getting much out of east-coast journalism. I think I'll write me a bestseller and then hang up my typewriter for a while.'

‘Will you put
everything
in it?' she said.

‘Everything.' Peri looked at the Doctor, a little panicked. ‘Don't worry. Names will be changed to protect the innocent.'

‘Very well,' said the Doctor.

Peri touched my elbow, shyly. ‘You're gonna be OK?'

‘Thanks for your concern, little lady.' I pecked her on the forehead, making her blush. The taxi was pulling up in front of us. ‘I'm more worried about where your life is going to lead you. You take care of each other, now.'

I looked at the Doctor over the roof of the taxi. ‘You're never gonna tell me
everything,
are you?' He just shook his head, with a wicked smile. ‘Oh well. Can't blame a guy for trying.'

And me?

Once the final draft of this manuscript is in the hands of my publishers
¹
, I'm heading back to the city of Angels. Maybe, from there, it'll be a plane back to Sydney. I'll make up my mind as I go. Maybe I'll even find somewhere I like between one side of America and the other, and stop there for a while. I've bought a little Citröen, in honour of the one I destroyed on my way out of California, all those years ago. I put my typewriter in the trunk, but then thought better of it. By the time I feel like writing again, I'll probably be using a computer to do it.

Will computers of the future have biological components,
maybe modified human brains? It's a nightmarish concept, and yet there must come a point at which the computer can't get any faster without also speeding up the lump of cold porridge that's trying to interface with it. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is us.

Maybe the story goes like this:

The princess cried out as the bull plunged into the ocean, his skin the colour of the foaming surf that surged around him. She was terrified he would drag her beneath the waves. But instead the bull swam in powerful strokes, further and further from the shore, deeper and deeper into the ocean. Soon the shore behind was just a shape, then a line, and then it was lost to her.

The sea was rough, but the bull's strong swimming kept them safely afloat. Slowly the princess let go of her frightened grip on the bull's neck. She eased herself up until she was sitting, her knees holding his muscular back in an easy grasp. Soon she was riding the bull without difficulty, her eyes fixed on the blue curve of the horizon, eager to see what would emerge from the waves.

‘Well, what do you know,' said the princess. ‘I was a cowboy all along.'

¹
An Australian, writing an American story for British readers. I pity the poor copy editor who has to cope with my spelling.

 

 

C
HICK
P
ETERS
would like to thank his interview subjects, especially Peri, the Doctor, and Ian Mond, for giving so much of their time to talk to him.

K
ATE
O
RMAN
would like to thank Nicola Bryant, Mark Bernay and Evan Doorbell, the denizens of alt.folklore.computers, Kyla Ward, Lloyd Rose, Lance Parkin, Greg McElhatton, the Infinitas writers' group, Alryssa and Tom Kelly, Mum and Dad for the loan of the loft, and Geoff Wessel for FLEX YOUR HEAD. And, as always, her busy bee Jon, without whose help this book simply could not have been written. Forgive me, all of you, for all the good advice you gave which I didn't take.