Doctor Who: The Also People (36 page)

'Well, at least we know who the murderer is,' said Chris.

'I think you're going to need a bigger set of handcuffs,' said Bernice. 'Is there any word on Roz?'

'Nobody's seen her,' said God, 'but there are no frozen corpses floating around. The likelihood is that !C-Mel has her on board.'

'How likely?' asked the Doctor.

'Ninety-nine point nine, with more nines than you've ever seen per cent likely,' said God.

'I can live with that,' said the Doctor.

'I hope she can,' said Bernice.

'I wonder why it's coming here,' said the Doctor.

It took an hour for the !C-Mel to traverse the distance between the Spaceport and a point directly over iSanti Jeni. It was a stand-off. God and the other ships didn't dare do anything while half a million people were on board but by the same token !C-Mel couldn't escape into open space. Given a bit of elbow room, the VASs assured them, they could fry !C-Mel's brain, no problem, without harming the crew, but not inside the sphere; too much collateral could get blown away.

'Looks like we've got a hostage situation,' said Chris.

'How did you deal with those at home?' asked Bernice.

'Well,' said Chris, 'it rather depended on who the hostages were.'

'I see,' said Bernice. Chris had the grace to look embarrassed.

Finally the !C-Mel was hanging twenty kilometres over their heads, just on the fringes of the atmospheric envelope, a brand-new galaxy in the night sky.

'Doctor,' said God, 'the !C-Mel is asking to speak with you.'

'I was expecting this,' said the Doctor. 'Put it on.'

'Hello, Doctor,' said !C-Mel. It had a mellow, relaxing voice. The kind, Bernice thought, that would sing popular songs about bicycles while turning off the life support.

'Hello, !C-Mel,' said the Doctor. 'How can I help you?'

'I am hereby formally applying for political asylum.'

'On what grounds?'

'On the grounds of a well-founded fear of persecution,' said the !C-Mel. 'If I hang around here God and the goon squad are going to have my metal ass.'

'And if I turn you down?' asked the Doctor.

'Do you know what antimatter does when it meets matter, Doctor?' said the !C-Mel. 'That's what will happen if you turn me down. The sphere itself is pretty much indestructible but I should be able to mess up the interior.'

'So what you're saying is, either I grant you political asylum or you kill two trillion people?'

'It gets easier after the first two hundred thousand,' said the !C-Mel. 'You should know that.'

'I'm not really willing to discuss this with you while you're holding hostages,' said the Doctor,

'so what I propose is a swap. I come up there to you and you let everybody else go.'

'I think I can accept that,' said the !C-Mel, 'with a slight modification. I'll keep hold of Roslyn Forrester for the moment. You know how it is. You may not fear death but can you stand the sight of your friend suffering, et cetera, et cetera.'

'Yes, yes,' said the Doctor, 'we've all been here before. I'll arrange myself some transport.'

'I'd really rather send down one of my shuttles,' said the !C-Mel, 'just to avoid any unfortunate mistakes.'

'Very well,' said the Doctor, 'if you must. I'll see you in a minute then.' The Doctor waited a moment. 'Has it gone?'

'Yes,' said God.

The Doctor turned to Bernice and Chris. 'Aren't you going to try to talk me out of it?'

'Who, us?' asked Bernice. 'I assume you have a plan.'

'You shouldn't really,' said the Doctor. 'I don't always have a plan, you know. God, can you open a secure line to aM!xitsa?'

'No problem.'

'Yes,' said aM!xitsa, still sounding a bit ragged.

'How are you feeling?' asked the Doctor.

'Rotten,' said aM!xitsa. 'I've got disruptions in systems I didn't even know I had.'

'Do you think you can explain exactly what it was Kadiatu did to you?'

'Well, it was really very simple,' said aM!xitsa, and explained. The word multi-phasic cropped up quite a lot, as did fractal, structure and contra-resonating harmonics.

The Doctor thanked aM!xitsa.

'Are you thinking of doing,' said God, 'what I think you're thinking of doing?'

'Probably,' said the Doctor. 'It worked on aM!xitsa.'

'I don't know quite how to put this,' said God, 'but aM!xitsa is a drone and the !C-Mel is a ship, and there's quite a large difference in the capacity and sophistication of their brains.'

'The principle is sound,' said the Doctor. 'Can you stall the shuttle for a bit? I need you to get me something.'

The shuttle from the !C-Mel looked indistinguishable from the standard travel capsule. It drew level with the balcony and the Doctor climbed aboard. As he did so, Bernice could hear him cheerfully whistling a maddeningly familiar refrain. It wasn't until the shuttle was lost in the darkness above that Bernice recognized the tune.

'Anything you can do/I can do better/I can do anything/better than you.'

The !C-Mel was only the front third of a Travelling Space Habitat, a ship designed so that the people could travel their galaxy and seek out new life forms without actually giving up one iota of their standard of living.

It was essentially a cluster of vaguely pyramidal shapes surrounding a central core, the whole thing two kilometres from top to bottom and three from side to side.

The shuttle deposited the Doctor at the peak of the topmost pyramid. As he stepped out, wide windows gave him a good view of the parks and apartment complexes that made up the living areas. Looking down he could see thousands of small shapes peeling away from the ship and heading for safe landings on the sphere. The !C-Mel was keeping its promise at least.

A marble-sized remote-drone met him in the atrium.

'Well, it's good to see you, Doctor,' said the !C-Mel.

The Doctor said nothing.

'I can assure you that all the crew will be evacuated within the next one point three minutes.'

The !C-Mel paused, waiting for a reply that never came. 'I see,' said the ship. 'You want to be sure Roslyn Forrester is all right before you speak. Very wise. In that case, follow the drone.'

The drone led him deeper into the ship, going down towards the core which was helpful. He found Roz sitting on a park bench next to a small flower garden. There were smears of dried blood around her nose and ears.

The Doctor smiled reassuringly. ' 'Allo, 'oz,' he said. It wasn't easy talking around the thing in his mouth.

'I can't hear you,' said Roz, too loudly. 'I think I burst my ear-drums.'

' 'oz,' mumbled the Doctor, ' 'ee's 'ime 'or 'an 'ee.'

'Is this some sort of secret code?' asked the !C-Mel.

The Doctor shook his head. Leaning down in front of Roz he tucked the thing as far back into his throat as it would go and enunciated soundlessly, 'Plan B.'

'Oh,' said Roz, 'Plan B, negotiated hostage release. Why don't I leave you two alone and go and find myself some, coffee.' She walked away from the park. The Doctor was pleased to notice that she went towards the nearest emergency exit, her walk getting noticeably brisker the further away she got.

'You can take the microfusion grenade out of your mouth now, Doctor,' said the !C-Mel. 'You can't possibly use it here. I've got internal dampening fields that can snuff out a tiny little bomb like that.'

The Doctor removed the bomb from his mouth. 'You could have said that sooner,' he said,

'instead of letting me look like a fool.'

'Shall we cut out the crap and get down to business.'

'It occurred to me,' said the Doctor, 'that this negotiation could be very protracted if we proceed at normal biological speeds. In the interest of getting this over and done with I suggest I link my mind directly to your comms system and we can chat that way.'

'You can't possibly think at machine speeds,' said the !C-Mel.

'No,' said the Doctor, 'but I think faster than I talk and I can talk pretty fast.'

'Very well,' said the !C-Mel, 'we'll do it your way.'

The Doctor smiled, hugely.

Whatever the Doctor's plan was it happened very fast. Roz was still making for the nearest hangar that she'd spotted on the way in, when the internal gravity flipped over ninety degrees. She bounced off the new floor and somehow managed to keep going. There were deep vibrations in the floor which would have probably been terrifyingly loud explosions if she could hear them. The next shift in gravity turned the corridor into a chute and she slid helplessly down it towards the open space of the hangar.

It was, she noticed, one of those swish open-lock hangars that used forcefields to keep the air in and allow material objects out. Material objects such as Roz Forrester. Beyond was nothing but the inverted vista of the sphere's interior. She wondered whether she would suffocate first or burn up on re-entry. They said it was better to burn out than fade away, but Roz felt that she would have liked a free choice.

She realized that her hearing was coming back because she could hear her screams echoing off the walls.

The inner doors of the hangar shot past, far out of reach. The rectangular main exit grew to fill her vision and for the first time in thirty-two years Roslyn Inyathi Forrester started praying to her ancestors.

Dear Mama, I'm sorry I couldn't dance and that I was a total disappointment as a daughter in
all respects but I'm still your flesh and blood and if you've got any influence at all with the creator
now would be a good time to –

She was caught by a dinky two-person shuttle that swooped in, opened its canopy and caught her face-down in one of its bucket seats. 'Hey,' it said as Roz struggled to get herself the right way up. 'You're that Roz Forrester, aren't you? I'm your greatest fan.'

!C-Mel was coming apart at the seams when the Doctor made his getaway. He could feel contrary sets of vibrations through his feet as God tried to hold the ship together long enough for him to get off. It wasn't easy: the TSH was essentially held together by interlaced forcefields and without the controlling mind it had all the intrinsic cohesion of a child's building blocks.

Part of him, that small part that would rather be juggling, wondered if it wouldn't be better if he just died, considering what he had just done. It helped if he told himself he didn't have any choice but not much.

Poor !C-Mel; not so different from anybody else, wanted a quiet life with no problems.

Shouldn't have threatened to kill everyone in the sphere though, made that old 'good-of-the-majority' equation far too easy to solve.

A great fissure opened in front of him as a whole pyramid split away from the bulk of the ship.

He looked down into the abyss and saw the night time splendour of the sphere spread out beneath him.

Time to put my faith in God, he thought.

And jumped.

The Doctor wasn't worried about burning up; with no orbital velocity he wasn't travelling nearly fast enough for that. No, instead, he was going to suffocate before the atmosphere got thick enough to breathe.

He was in sunlight and blue sky. The air was cold and thin but breathable.

Respiratory bypass system, he thought, as recommended by the Doctor, accept no imitations.

Now all he had to worry about was the ground but that was still a long way off. It was a pity he hadn't brought along his umbrella; he could have shaved, oh, at least two kph off his terminal velocity with that.

He was still a good six kilometres above sea level; perhaps he could think of something on the way down. After all, once you've reached terminal velocity it's not as if the extra height makes you land any faster. It's always best to adopt an optimistic attitude at these times, he thought, considering the alternative is long and dreary.

At an altitude of four kilometres the parachute finally turned up, riding the back of its remote-drone. It kept pace with the Doctor on his way down. They had plenty of time for a chat about vacuum horticulture before it was time to put the parachute on and pull the rip cord.

Once he was certain he was going to live his thoughts turned to the poor doomed !C-Mel. It had been a wretched act, to wreck such a fabulous mind and then use the confusion to blow its brains out with a microfusion grenade.

'You've gone very quiet,' said the parachute. 'Would you like some music?'

'Do you know the song that goes: "I'm just a poor boy from a poor family"?'

'No,' said the parachute.

'Oh.'

'Tell you what,' said the parachute. 'You start it off and I'll hum along when I catch the tune.'

Chris and Dep cooked them a meal with their own hands and using none of the villa's automation at all. Much of the food was edible; the stuff that wasn't they gave to Kadiatu. Most of her bruising had abated over the last four hours and the cuts had largely healed themselves up.

'Where's Roz?' asked the Doctor.

'Gone to see you know who,' said Bernice.

'You don't think she's thinking of staying?' asked saRa!qava. 'With feLixi, I mean.'

'Why on earth would she want to stay?' said Bernice. 'All she would have to look forward to here was a man who loves her, a vastly extended life span and an egalitarian society without want, poverty or too much violence. She wouldn't last a week.'

Dep ran out of the room, her hair coiling into bundles with distress. Chris looked stricken for a moment and ran after her.

'Well done, Benny,' said the Doctor. 'I don't know
how
you do it.'

'It's a gift,' said Bernice.

Roz met feLixi up at the windmills, waiting for him on the iron steps where they had first met. He came noiselessly down the steps and sat down behind her. He put his arms around her and she leant back against the warmth of his chest.

'Tell me about aTraxi,' she said.

His arms stiffened and she felt him shrug his shoulders.

'You must have loved her a lot,' she said, 'to name your house after her. I'm curious. Why didn't you call it Soo'isita? That was her name, wasn't it?'

'No,' he said at last, 'that was her cover name. Her real name was aTraxi. I just didn't want you to feel – threatened.'