Doctor Who: The Also People (2 page)

The woman told him about the Leopard whom she had released from the trap and how it was planning to eat her for supper.

'Hmm,' said Tsuro after hearing the story. 'What you have told me may very well be true. But I must hear what the Leopard says about the matter.

'Leopard,' called Tsuro. 'I've been told that you fell into this trap. Is that so?'

'Yes, it is true,' agreed the Leopard, flexing her paws so that each of her claws extruded one after another. The woman, seeing this, edged behind Tsuro.

'O clever Hare,' she whispered, 'I hope you know what you are doing.'

Tsuro ignored her and asked the Leopard whether it was true that she had promised not to harm the woman.

'Yes,' said the Leopard, 'but there is no reason why I should keep my promise. After all, her brothers dug the trap into which I fell. And they are the ones who always shout at me and then try to kill me when I am anywhere near their village.'

'I see,' replied Tsuro, scratching his head thoughtfully. 'So it was the woman's brothers who dug the trap into which you fell. And you were lying there, right at the bottom of the trap when the woman came and let you out. Now, I would like you to show me how it happened.'

'That's easy,' said the Leopard, happy to find someone who understood her situation. She jumped down into the trap. 'I was lying like this . . .' Scarcely had she begun when, quickly, Tsuro pulled the branches across the top of the trap.

'Let me out, let me out,' cried the Leopard. 'If you let me out of the trap I promise not to harm anybody ever again.'

Tsuro turned to the woman.

'Well,' he asked, 'are you going to let her out?'

1

Delete Where Applicable

I get so weary following this old road

It don't go nowhere but damnation

When I turn around what do I find?

Got evil in my bones and bad luck following behind.

'Travelling Man Blues', singer unknown

Recorded: Mama Stanley's Chicken Shack, Clanton.

Alabama (1937)

The man is standing on the roof of the villa which itself is built on the crest of a hill overlooking the sea. A storm is racing in from the ocean, black streamers of cloud are unfurling towards the coast. The wind has become brisk, filling the man's nostrils with the stink of ozone and salt. He opens his arms wide as if to embrace the oncoming wind, as if the storm has been laid on for his entertainment alone. The air is heavy with the promise of lightning. Growing stronger now, the wind plucks at the man's robe and lifts strands of his blond hair. He is smiling, a wide infectious grin that exposes white teeth that are just slightly too sharp for comfort.

Around him he senses but cannot see the great sphere of the world rising all around him.

Above him an immovable sun dims in accordance with a strict timetable, its gorgeous twilight hue a precise and machine-modulated bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. He knows that people have built this world, have chained the sun to do their bidding. Knows that people built the planet that hangs blue, green and impossible over a horizon that doesn't exist. That the horizon is in reality only a sensory illusion, a DNA-encoded perception, a legacy from the first things to crawl up that Devonian Beach and look at the sky.

The storm is real, he can sense that. Even the people who built this place, people whom he has not yet but is dying to meet, know that life can be made too comfortable. That without the sublime, without danger we will grow sickly and die by degrees. So they have let this storm boil itself up out of the endless ocean and have watched it roll in from the sea like some fantastic Krakan, its belly rumbling with enough static potential to illuminate a small planetoid.

It comes, a solid wall of air twenty kilometres high and hundreds deep, ready to break against this artfully rocky coastline where a man stands atop a villa that stands upon a hill that overlooks the sea. Ready to roll inland and die stranded amongst the sculptured hills of this manufactured continent.

The man tries to open his arms wider, spreading his fingers to grasp at the wind. He is imagining the air as it streams around his limbs, the complicated mandelbrot shapes of the pockets of turbulence that trail behind him, the same partial vacuum that had lifted him into the cold sky over the English Channel. No null gravity units or clever avionics on the biplane, just the simple differentiation of air pressure, the ancient principle of flight, the physics of a gliding bird.

He remembers struggling with the controls, those unpowered contraptions of wooden levers and piano wire. No power assistance, no autopilot; his strength alone against the thousand vagaries of the wind.

He is leaning forward now, into the rising gale and over the edge of the parapet. He peers down the side of the building calculating the fall, his chances of survival if the wind fails. As he dares himself forward he feels the tightening in his stomach, the speeding of his heart, the strange scrunching sensation of his scrotum shrivelling up. He is waiting for the hit, the sweet rush of his own adrenalin. The wind is singing to him now, singing of the joy of falling and the ecstasy of fear. His urge to jump frightens him more than anything else. He seizes the fear and as the storm approaches raises his head to stare straight into its blazing heart. His eyes are full of lightning and dangerous ideas.

Bernice slept for most of the day in a room filled with sunlight and the scent of the sea. She woke once to find the Doctor watching her from the doorway. He was smiling but his hat brim cast a dark shadow across his eyes. She wanted to ask him something but she was too tired and the bed too comfortable. She slipped back into a dream of the endless summer afternoon of her early childhood. Of herself skipping through the checkerboard shadows on the road-grass, a small figure between her mother and father, holding tight to their big hands. Safe in the grip of the long-since dead.

She woke again to the smell of fresh coffee and the insistent pressure of her bladder. The room was narrow and tall with walls and floor of polished hardwood and a ceiling that was three-quarters glass skylight. The quilt she was lying under was stitched together from scraps of cloth, all different materials and shapes. She decided that she liked this rag-quilt. Liked the randomness of the colours and shapes. For reasons she couldn't define it made her think of home.

She lay still for a while, snug under the quilt. She tried to ignore the coffee smell and the demands of her body. There wasn't any reason to get up yet. The Doctor had said so. So it must be true.

Then she remembered where she was.

Remembered the Doctor turfing them out of bed in the middle of the night. Stumbling out of the TARDIS into the warm darkness of the clearing in the forest. Trees rose all around them, silver grey in the moonlight. Insects clicked and popped amongst trunks as straight as telegraph poles.

Summer, thought Bernice sleepily, somewhere at the warm end of a temperate weather latitude. Could be somewhere along the coast of the Mediterranean – Greece perhaps?

She flinched as a huge moth floated past her face and started to lazily circle the Doctor. Its wings were pale blurs in the dark, each as big as Bernice's hand. The Doctor stretched out his arm and let the moth alight daintily on the tips of his fingers.

'Where are we, Doctor?' asked Chris.

'Somewhere you've never been before,' said the Doctor.

'Oh, good,' said Roz. 'That will make a change.'

And that was when Bernice looked up and saw that the world curved over their heads.

Bernice had only seen a night sky like that once before, on the remnants of the Dyson sphere at DM+39 4567 on the fringes of the stellar cluster known as the Varteq Veil. That sphere had been broken apart by gravitational asymmetries, the massive fragments forming a slowly expanding globe around its sun. The same catastrophe had destroyed the civilization that had built it, an entire race broken on the wheel of its own ambition. Bernice remembered standing on the surface of one of the fragments during an eclipse caused by a smaller fragment occluding the sun.

In the sudden darkness the thin atmosphere gave the sky a cold hallucinatory clarity. The other fragments were bright with reflected sunlight, carving up the sky into crazy-paving shapes.

Bernice could see surface features on the closer ones. An ocean that had survived the break-up, shrinking in from its artificial shoreline as it evaporated in the thinning atmosphere; a city bisected by the edge of one fragment. Bernice looked further on to find the other half and there on the next fragment was the rest of the city, glittering under a mantle of frozen oxygen. The nearer fragments appeared as flat as tea trays, the curve of the sphere being so gradual that it was only visible on the most distant fragments.

The geophysics team had constructed a computer model of the break-up and ran a book on the results. The whole archaeology team had put money on their own time estimates. The crew of the freighter they were using for transport refused to bet. They thought the whole idea was distasteful; for them a catastrophic failure in life support was too serious, wherever it happened.

They didn't have the same perspective on life and death as the archaeologists. Bernice put her bundle on ten years, give or take six months.

With a flair for the dramatic the geophysics team announced the results on the 'night' of the eclipse. All the surface-based archaeology teams gathered for a party. A bonfire was built with an oxygen feed to help it burn in the thin atmosphere. The palaeobotany team jury rigged one of their bio-reactors to brew beer and the xenobiology team roasted a couple of quadrupeds which they swore blind weren't sentient. They were more evasive about the animal's general edibility.

Everyone lost their money. The computer model estimated that the break-up had taken two hundred and fifty years, from the first instability to actual disintegration of the outer shell. As they drank the passable beer and carved off sections of roast meat an argument broke out over whether it was actually possible to build a functioning Dyson sphere. Geophysics thought not and produced reams of statistics to back themselves up. The ethnotechnologists thought that someone somewhere was bound to have a go. The group sociologist, the only Indigenous Terran amongst them, said it was unlikely that a species that had evolved on a planet would ever feel completely comfortable on an artificial world.

The local clan of Builders, perhaps a couple of medium-sized family groups, came to observe the archaeologists from a safe distance. Occasionally Bernice would catch glimpses of firelight dully reflected off the curve of a carapace or flickering in one of their large, mournful eyes. She wondered exactly when their ancestors had realized it was all going horribly wrong.

Two hundred and fifty years.

It was a long time to know you were dying.

The Doctor led them up a narrow path through the forest. Roz and Chris, smug in their adjudicator's armour, simply flipped down their nightscope visors and followed easily. Bernice cursed and stumbled until she thought to surreptitiously grab the hem of Chris's robe and let him guide her between the trees. She had little sense of how far they walked, mostly uphill, although the path occasionally switched back and forth as if following the line of a ridge. There were occasional glimpses of wooded skyline silhouetted against those sections of the sky that were still in daylight. Once she thought she saw a trio of wind turbines on a distant hilltop, their slowly turning blades floodlit with eerie brightness. She tried to use them as a landmark but the path soon twisted and she lost sight of them.

Finally Bernice had to get out of bed. There was no sign of her clothes so she made do by draping herself in the rag-quilt, and made a spirited lunge for what she hoped was the bathroom, her bare feet slapping against the floor as she crossed the room.

No Dyson sphere in human space, thought Bernice, not in my time anyway. She remembered the lovingly painted model spaceships in Chris's bedroom. Not in the thirtieth century either, she was sure Chris would have said something. So, not someone we've ever met then, maybe not even humanoid. She hoped that whoever they were their plumbing was compatible. The bed was a good sign but one should never make hasty assessments about alien physiology, even when one is bursting to go.

'I think each of the bathrooms is different,' said Roz later. They were sitting on the first-floor balcony and drinking Turkish coffee from heat-resistant glasses. 'Mine had this enormous sunken bath, solid marble, gold taps, the works.'

'If you don't mind,' said Bernice, 'I think I'll use your bathroom in future. I'm not sure I like bathing in mid air.'

'My parents had a bath like that. Suspensor pools were very fashionable fifty years ago' – Roz frowned – 'my time.'

'At least we know they must be humanoid,' said Bernice. 'My "human waste disposal interface"

was completely compatible.'

'I've never heard it called that before.'

'It's what my father used to call toilets.'

'Your father was in the Navy, right?'

Bernice sipped her coffee. Why was she thinking of her father now? 'Outer System Patrol,' she said. 'He was a sucker for long complicated euphemisms.'

'At least the toilets round here don't try and wipe your arse afterwards,' said Roz. 'I hate the ones that do that.'

'Tell me about it.' Good old Roz, you could always rely on her to get the conversation down to ground zero reality point. 'I wonder what they're like? The people that built this place.'

'They're certainly very advanced technologically; it's all very slick,' said Roz. 'But don't count on them being even remotely human. Some of the worst scum I ever dealt with in the Undertown looked just like you and me. On the outside at least.'

Bernice knew better than to let Roz get started on
that
particular subject. There seemed to be very few alien races that Roz hadn't personally insulted, bashed, shot or arrested, frequently combining all four actions in a single encounter.

'This place has an interesting aesthetic,' Bernice said quickly, 'don't you think?' Actually the villa didn't seem to have any unifying aesthetic at all. It sprawled on the crest of the hill like a tumble of children's building blocks. Five storeys high, the top floor was wider than the ground floor but the third floor protruded ten metres at the back. Sections were built of wood, others of concrete, glass or irregularly shaped bricks. Inside it was worse; although each room was furnished in a different style, they were curiously undifferentiated in purpose. The room behind the first-floor balcony had, by consensus, become the living room but Bernice felt that it would have served just as easily as a bedroom, or for all she knew a kitchen or another bathroom.