Doctor Who: The Also People (22 page)

'Yes, we are,' he heard her say, 'although a beating-the-truth-out-of-the-doctor-with-a-handy-blunt-instrument stage could be arranged very easily.'

Good, he thought, she's still rational, she still has some trust left. He made himself turn in his seat and look at her; he owed her that much. Her eyes were suspicious, hurt even, but there was an ounce of curiosity in them.
She still has some trust left, despite everything.

'Why?' she asked.

The Doctor felt a sudden surge of pride. Be vague, let your conversational opponent frame the question for you, you never know, it might be the question that you would have asked if you'd known to ask it. 'Why is she here,' he said, 'or why are we here and are they connected?'

'Start with the first.'

The Doctor glanced at the black rose; it was still in full bloom. 'I found her,' he said, 'on a British slaver drifting off the coast of Sierra Leone in the spring of 1754. Everybody else was dead, including the ten-year-old cabin boy and the ship's cat. She was feral by that stage and if she hadn't been starving to death I never would have got near her. As it was I had to shoot her with 60cc of teterodoxine just to bring her down. I got her on board the TARDIS and hosed the blood off. Then I came here and dropped her off at a small cove down the coast.'

'Just like that?'

'An old friend of mine agreed to look after her.'

'And where was I when all this was going on?'

'Asleep in your room,' said the Doctor. 'It was just before we met Chris and Roz.'

Benny didn't ask him whether he'd made side trips without telling her before – he knew she knew he did. 'Ace said that Ship had changed her.'

He shuddered despite himself. 'Ship tried to make her part of itself, just as it tried to do to me.

It was a – violation. Ship put knowledge into her head and tried to use her as a slave. No, worse than a slave, an appliance, a
peripheral
.'

'Is Ship still trying to use her?' asked Bernice. 'Is Kadiatu all that's left of Ship?'

'Oh no,' said the Doctor. 'Ship is deader than a dormouse and good riddance.'

'Oh good.'

'It's much worse than that.'

'Oh.'

'She's become very dangerous.'

Bernice laughed. 'I don't remember her ever being exactly what you'd call safe.'

'It's what's in her head that makes her dangerous,' he said. 'She's already designed one time machine just as a school science project. With the knowledge the Ship downloaded into her brain she's probably the most competent temporal engineer this side of Gallifrey.'

'Should we be talking about this sort of thing' – Bernice made a vague motion with her hands, indicating the rest of the sphere – 'out in the open. I got the strong impression that you didn't want God to know about certain things.'

The Doctor glanced at the black rose; it was still in bloom. 'We're safe for the moment,' he said. 'It'll take God at least five minutes to penetrate my jamming signal, after that we'll have to be careful.'

'Will we be able to talk about this again?'

'Not until we're back in the TARDIS.'

'Which is currently –?'

'In a defensive picosecond forward displacement.'

'You don't trust God then?'

'Let's just say I'd rather not put temptation in its way.'

'What an interesting theological concept. We must discuss it some time,' said Bernice. 'But not right now. How dangerous is Kadiatu?'

'Very, very dangerous.'

'To what?'

'I'm trying to think of a way of explaining this without getting too metaphysical,' said the Doctor. 'People who travel in time are not like other people. To travel in time is to step out of the normal course of history and by doing that you become vulnerable, let's say, to the influence of the other things that also exist outside of linear time.'

'Gods,' said Bernice, 'you're talking about Gods, aren't you?'

'I prefer to think of them as extremely powerful transtemporal beings,' said the Doctor primly.

'Because of their
extreme
nature it's actually quite difficult for them to intervene in the mundane day to day world so they're always on the look-out for suitable agents.'

'Like Kadiatu?'

'Time travel is a form of power and power without responsibility is very dangerous.'

'So what are you planning to do about her?' asked Bernice.

'I don't know,' he said. 'She may have to be put to sleep.'

He forced himself to watch her face change. Interest giving way to shock, to anger, to betrayal and then, most painful of all, to an expression of profound disappointment. All these emotions, the entire course of the conversation up till now, he had predicted the night before as he stood with aM!xitsa looking out over Kadiatu's cove, but that didn't make it any easier to bear.

There would have been a time, long ago, when Bernice would have asked him if he was joking, or assumed that he meant 'put to sleep' in a literal sense. A time when she would have made enquiries about stasis capsules or jokes about spinning wheels. Since then, he knew, she had lost most of her illusions about him.

Bernice was looking at him with something close to loathing, unconsciously shrinking back from him in her chair. He wanted to reach out to her and explain what it was he was trying to achieve but that would ruin everything. If she were to do the job for him he needed her in precisely the right frame of mind – it was an imperative. He waited for her response.

I don't believe it, thought the Doctor. What gives you the right
et cetera
–

'No,' she said, 'I won't let you.'

He gaped at her.

'I've had enough, Doctor.' Her voice was calm, matter of fact. 'I won't stand by and let you murder someone just because they don't fit into your cosmic plan.'

'That's not –'

'Shut up, shut up,' said Bernice, 'I'm tired of your damn excuses, your justifications and your bloody lies. If you do this thing, you and I are
finished
, understand me?'

'All right,' said the Doctor, 'you decide.'

'I mean it, Doctor,' said Bernice.

'So do I,' said the Doctor. 'I'll let you decide whether she lives or dies.'

'There's no decision to make.'

'In that case you won't mind if I explain. Will you?'

She subsided back into her chair, glaring at him suspiciously.

He opened the suitcase and turned it round to face her. He showed her the ring folder, the hypospray and the two cartridges. Both cartridges were filled with a red liquid and labelled with little white sticky-backed squares. On one he had drawn a crude picture of a butterfly, on the other a skull and crossbones.

Bernice looked up from the case, still angry, still suspicious but interested now.
Yes
– he had her, hook, line and rusty three-speed bicycle.

'The one marked with a butterfly contains a retro-DNA tailored to Kadiatu's unique genetic structure. Once injected it will modify sections of her own DNA creating an analogue of the symbiotic nucleatides in my own blood. In short, it will give her roughly the same capabilities as a Time Lord – enhanced temporal perception, a certain resistance to chrono-instability and a few other things.'
Things that I can't talk about, even to you.

'Will it stop her from killing people?'

'If I could do that, Bernice, we wouldn't be having this conversation.'

'And the other cartridge?'

'Death,' said the Doctor. 'Fast, painless, humane.'

'And I make the decision?'

'Yes.'

'Then I choose to let her live.'

'No.'

'You said it was my decision.'

'I mean don't give me your answer right now,' said the Doctor. 'I want you to think about it for two days.'

'Why? I'm not likely to change my mind.'

'Then you can afford to wait two days, can't you?'

Bernice shrugged. 'Will she be all right for two days?'

'I think aM!xitsa can probably stop her from killing too many people in the meantime.'

'She's not that bad, Doctor.'

'No, she's worse,' he said. 'But it's not my problem now, it's yours.' He pushed the suitcase across the table towards her. 'You might find the contents of the folder useful. I downloaded it from the Imogen database in Zagreb.'

'What is it?'

'Kadiatu's user manual.'

Bernice glanced once into the suitcase and then gingerly, as if she was wary of touching it, snapped the lid shut. 'How long have we got?'

The Doctor checked the rose again; it was beginning to contract. 'Thirty seconds,' he said.

'My decision,' said Bernice, getting up.

'Your decision,' said the Doctor.

'Just you remember that,' she said and walked away.

The Doctor watched the black rose as its petals crumpled inwards. When it had become a tight bud he picked it calmly from the vase and ate it. He estimated that it would take just over two minutes for his gastric juices to break it down. Just let God try and figure out how it worked after that.

He fervently hoped that Bernice would be enough to tip the balance.

Otherwise he was going to have to kill Kadiatu after all.

The travel capsule was a flat-bottomed cylinder six metres long and two metres high. Comfy-fields ran the length of each side, coffee tables with scrolling menus were spaced between them. The capsule itself ran through a network of evacuated tunnels built into the foundation material of the sphere. Every house had its own lift down through the bedrock to a station below. So far, there had always been a capsule ready and waiting for them when they arrived at a station. It was just another aspect of the sphere's insane efficiency.

Roz and Chris sat next to each other with their feet up on the coffee table. Although they had decided against wearing their armour they had dressed similarly in dark blue trousers and padded jackets of black silk. Both of them had felt the need to look just a little bit official that morning.

'How long do you think this is going to take?' she asked.

'Depends on how fast we're going,' said Chris.

'How fast are we going?'

Chris glanced at the screen at the front of the lift which displayed a row of constantly changing symbols. 'Seventeen kilometres a second and accelerating,' he said.

'It's going to take ages to get to the Spaceport this way,' said Roz, 'especially if we have to go all the way around the circumference. We should have got hold of a shuttle and taken a short cut.'

She saw Chris's eyes light up at that thought. He'd wanted to use the biplane for the trip but Roz had pointed out that the flight would have taken six months to complete. Some sort of personal transport would have been good though. She'd never liked public transport; she preferred at least the illusion of control.

'I wonder why they don't use transmats? I can't believe they haven't got the technology.'

'Maybe they don't like them,' said Chris. 'They seem to like things that are real.'

'This is an entirely artificial world. You
can't
get much more unreal than that.'

'Yes, but it's unreal in a real way.' Chris thumped the side of the capsule. 'I mean you can touch it. You know what a transmat is like: you go in the door at one place and you step out in another. It's not like travelling at all.'

'Damn convenient though.'

'Dep says that travelling is part of the experience. If you don't travel, how can you know you've arrived?'

'Usually,' said Roz, 'because someone starts shooting at me.'

'That's not true,' said Chris. 'Sometimes they threaten you first.'

'How are you getting on with Dep?' asked Roz.

Chris blushed. 'Fine, fine,' he said vaguely. 'How are you getting on with feLixi?'

'He's interesting,' said Roz. 'Not that there's anything going on between us of course.'

'Of course,' said Chris. Roz glared at him. 'What?'

'Never mind.'

'How do you think we should handle this?' asked Chris.

'I haven't got the faintest idea,' said Roz. 'I've never interrogated a spaceship before.'

The Spaceport was a vast hexagonal hole cut into the side of the sphere and open to space. Roz and Chris got a really good look at it because shortly after Chris asked how they should handle things the travel capsule took a short cut. It shot out of a concealed tunnel in the landscape and went ballistic across the interior of the sphere at a moderately significant fraction of the speed of light. Chris pressed his nose up against the transparent side of the capsule and swore that he could actually see the relativistic effect on the colour of the lights ahead.

Roz just swore.

It wasn't that she had any objections to flying, it was just that she would have preferred some form of notification in advance. Several days in advance in fact. She managed to get the shakes under control just as the capsule was beginning to decelerate.

Because the capsule had artificial gravity it was uncomfortably like diving head first into a huge pool of black water. Uncomfortable for Roz anyway; Chris was too busy pointing at things and making excited noises.

The spaceport facility was three thousand kilometres across and hung in the exact centre of the open hexagon like a green and white starfish. As the capsule approached Roz saw that the side facing the sun was entirely covered in a landscaped park with its own weather system, a range of hills and a small inland sea. Points of light moved to and fro from the edges of the facility, marking the passage of ships and drones as they shuttled between it and the vast docks that lined the edges of the hexagon. What looked like a second, much smaller city floated off the facility's port side; later they learnt that this was in fact the TSH !C-Mel, a spaceship the size of a city.

The travel capsule touched down on the edge of a park where others of its kind were lined up in neat rows in the rain. As they stepped unsteadily onto the wet grass a machine voice welcomed them to Starport Facility: 'The most unimaginatively named city in the sphere,' it said proudly.

They got directions from an information centre disguised as a small dripping conifer tree and ran for a cluster of grav lifts nestling amongst some trees to the west. The doorfield on the lift sucked the water from their clothes and hair as they stepped inside.