Doctor Who: The Also People (6 page)

Joke jungle camouflage. A small hologram projected from the drone's nose, two dark dots above a horizontal line against an orange background. A human expression pared down to an absolute abstract: aM!xitsa's face ikon.

'Doctor,' said aM!xitsa, 'does God know you're here?'

'I told it last night.'

'That should give it something to think about.'

The Doctor nodded towards the figure in the water. 'How is she?'

'That's difficult to say,' said aM!xitsa. 'She catches fish and eats them, sometimes she even cooks them first.'

'High protein diet. She's building up her reserves.'

'She eats other stuff as well,' said the drone. 'Fruits, berries, leaves. Occasionally soil as well, about a hundred grammes a week.'

'Good to see she's getting all the food groups then.'

'She's built a hut on the other side of the cove, three metres back from the tree-line. Made it out of sun-dried mud-bricks.'

'She is an engineer.'

'The first one was washed away in a rain storm.'

'That's the trouble with mud as a building material.'

'So she built a kiln.'

'How long has she been here?' asked the Doctor.

'You should know.'

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'you know how it is. Time and relative dimensions in space. You can lose track.'

'Three months,' said the drone.

The Doctor removed his hat, stared into its depths for a moment and then replaced it on his head. 'I presume you've been scanning her?'

'Oh yes,' said aM!xitsa.

'And?'

'A grade thirty-six technology you said.'

'Thirty-five going on thirty-six.'

'Remarkable.'

'They're an inventive race,' said the Doctor, 'especially when it comes to weapons technology.'

'Do you want to see the details?'

'Yes, please,' said the Doctor.

AM!xitsa projected a discreet holograph behind the bole of a tree where it wouldn't be visible from the beach. It quickly filled up with complex three-dimensional shapes, spiky bundles of molecules that rotated slowly for inspection, phase space graphs on time/event axis. The drone's voice assumed a more studied, professorial tone. 'Most of the non-indigenous organic forms were broken down and expelled within the first thirty-six hours. I recovered some samples from her faeces and urine but the damn stuff wouldn't grow in culture.'

The hologram displayed the characteristic flat and undifferentiated cells of the ship's invasive cellulose. Even in abstract representation they were coloured a virulent and unhealthy green. The Doctor's hand drifted uneasily to his left shoulder, remembering.

'And the residual organic material?'

AM!xitsa displayed a flayed cross-section of the brain. 'A concentration in the hypothalamus, smaller structures in cerebellum and occipital lobe. I believe she may have assimilated the foreign material.'

The Doctor said nothing, remembering the pain. The lawnmower smell. The ship dying. Ace shouting out in fear and anger. All those minds going into the dark. Paris burning. A human body of animate mahogany veined with virulent green.

'I'm particularly interested in the nature of the design modifications incorporated into her original geneset,' said aM!xitsa. 'Normally when the technologically challenged build fighters they stress the amyglada, building for aggression you might say. The primary centre for modification in this one is not in the limbic system at all. The "kill instinct" is all in the forebrain. Damn unusual and very subtle. It's the cognitive perception of danger that triggers the response, not the emotion.'

The drone rotated until its forward sensor array was directed at the figure in the water. 'She's a stone-cold killer.'

'Does she speak?'

AM!xitsa wobbled its body from side to side, drone body language for 'no'. 'She displays no
social
behaviour at all when she's awake. She does vocalize during her sleep, sometimes complete sentences, but I can't translate the language. Would you like a recording?'

The Doctor shook his head, human body language for 'no'.

The woman standing in the water still hadn't moved. By now even the smartest fish would have ceased to see her as a possible threat. Piscine brains lulled into complacency by her world-famous rock impression.

'There's something very strange about her genetic structure,' said aM!xitsa. 'Even stranger I mean.'

'Yes.'

'Dormant sections in certain DNA strands that look as if they should be operating but aren't.

Other sections that look as if they are just there as temporary markers. As if there were pieces of the jigsaw still missing.'

'Yes.'

'Her cytoplasmic DNA shows multiple redundancies. Very strange stuff indeed. I couldn't decode them, even with God's help.'

'You didn't tell God what you were working on?'

'Of course not,' said the drone. 'I told it that the samples had been passed on by some friends in XCIG.'

'Did it believe you?'

'God's very smart. I think it's probably suspicious. Now it knows you're here it'll have this whole area under very tight surveillance indeed.'

'There was a lot of remote drone activity near iSanti Jeni this morning.'

'The coding in her cytoplasm,' said the drone, 'information encrypted by her designers?'

'No,' said the Doctor, more emphatically than he meant to. He'd hoped to keep aM!xitsa off that particular topic. 'That's from a different, far more ancient inheritance.' Time to change the subject. 'I'd like to thank you for looking after her. I hope it hasn't inconvenienced you.'

'Not at all,' said aM!xitsa. 'She's been fascinating company, if not a stimulating conversationalist.'

'I'm glad to hear that,' said the Doctor but he wasn't. He was beginning to wish he'd found some alternative guardian, one, and this was the real joke, with fewer 'human' qualities.

'It's terribly wearisome referring to her by an impersonal pronoun,' said aM!xitsa. 'Isn't it about time you told me her name?'

'Better that you don't know,' said the Doctor. Better that you think of her as a thing, an experiment, something dangerous to be studied and then, if it proves too threatening, made safe.

Neutralized. Terminated.

Murdered
.

There was a sudden flurry of movement in the water. The spear was jerked upwards. Impaled below the point thrashed a glistening silver shape. AM!xitsa and the Doctor watched in silence as the fish died.

Bernice walked on to iSanti Jeni alone. Roz having gone to sleep
again
. Whatever the orange and vermilion stuff in the glasses had been she was glad she hadn't finished hers. God knew what had been in the mushrooms.

That thought made her smile. In this place God most definitely knew. Could probably give her a complete biochemical analysis if she asked it for one.

She left the table strict instructions to keep the older woman in the shade, picked up her shoes and started walking up the beach. The sun was definitely getting hotter but the breeze from the sea kept her pleasantly cool.

There was a path over the headland. Nothing formal, just the line of least resistance between the tumbled rocks, places here and there where the sandy topsoil had been cleared by passing feet. That was assuming that the locals had feet and weren't gastropods or something equally weird. Not that that would bother Bernice; nothing wrong with walking on your stomach, some of her best friends had been gastropods. Nice people on the whole.

Providing the buggers didn't step on your head.

The headland she was climbing was narrower than it looked and the coast curved inwards quite sharply. As a result Bernice didn't see the town until she was almost on top of it. It was built up around a 'natural' harbour, complete with harbour wall, a pebble beach and waterfront esplanade. There were even a variety of boats drawn up on the beach, mostly compact-looking trimarine yachts but with one large wooden-sided tug. That one was single hulled and listed alarmingly as if it were about to topple over at any moment. There was a man on the beach painting a mural along the entire length of the harbour wall, a pretty moody piece judging from the subdued ochre tones and lurid oranges. As Bernice climbed onto the flat top of the breakwater and walked closer she realized that the man might instead be repairing an earlier work. Parts of the mural seemed to have been damaged, as if a giant hand had used a wire brush to clean the paint off the wall.

ISanti Jeni shone under the clear blue sky. The buildings seemed to be constructed out of crudely dressed stone and painted white with blue or magenta trimming. From the headland they had seemed to sprawl up the sides of the uneven semi-circle of hills that formed an amphitheatre shape behind the harbour. There was little differentiation between buildings, one flat-roofed structure merging into the next one along, and at first Bernice thought that any streets the town might have must be roofed. When she reached the esplanade she realized that the numerous narrow alleyways ran off it at seemingly random intervals. The buildings that fronted the esplanade had sun-faded awnings over openings the size of shop windows. Bernice peered inside the first opening she came to. As her eyes adjusted to the dim interior she saw tables and chairs laid out restaurant fashion but no people. After a moment a tray, very similar to the one that had served them at the beach-bar, floated up from one of the tables at the back and hovered a couple of metres in front of her. It managed to give a passable impression of polite anticipation, which was a neat trick for what was essentially a flat piece of metal.

Bernice retreated back into the hard sunlight on the esplanade, uncomfortable with the idea of spending more time in the company of machines. She looked around for some other sign of life.

All the windows she could see were closed up with slated wooden shutters. Along the esplanade the wind from the sea caught the awnings making them snap and rustle like horizontal flags.

A noise made her look up: the unmistakable rifle-crack sound of something small breaking the sound barrier. Sunlight flashed off something shooting out over the sea at a height of two hundred metres. There were two more cracks overhead. This time Bernice got a better look. Size was difficult to judge but she thought they might be a metre to two metres long, too small to be piloted that was for sure, ovoid in shape, flying on parallel courses to the first flying thing. They reminded her of the space-to-ground torpedoes used by orbiting ships during planetary assaults.

She shuddered, watching as both objects began zigzagging over the sea. Bernice recognized the movement as a search pattern. Within moments they were out of sight, lost in the hazy distance over the ocean.

She was halfway up one of the narrow little streets when she smelt the aroma of baking bread.

Perhaps she had been following it all along, unconsciously picking this particular street from all the others under the smell's subliminal influence. The street jinked unevenly between the whitewashed buildings and was paved with irregular slabs of some smooth white stone. Shuttered doorways were randomly placed along both sides, some of them below the level of the street, while others could only be reached via stone staircases built up against the walls. Occasionally there was no door, just the steps, as if someone had built the staircase and then gone away and forgotten why. There was even one door three storeys up with no staircase at all.

Of course, once Bernice had decided she was following the smell it became far more difficult.

She found herself standing at junctions absurdly sniffing the air before deciding which direction to go. After a couple of false trails she had almost given up when she stumbled on the source.

The street was near the rear of the town rising steeply up the base of the hill. On one side the tops of trees were just visible over a high wall, on the other was a terrace that rose in line with the street in a series of stepped levels. The shutters on one of the nearer ground-floor windows had been thrown open. Bernice could hear an arythmic thumping sound from inside. As she drew level with the open window the aroma of baking bread grew strong enough to make her salivate.

She looked inside.

A woman was stooped over a work surface kneading dough. She was very slim with narrow shoulders and her skin had the delicate yellow tint of ancient ivory. Her short hair was a strange silvery blue and the shapeless smock she was wearing had a V-shaped neckline at the back to accommodate a hairline that tapered to a point between her shoulder blades. Bernice watched her shaping the dough with long elegant fingers, noticing that the woman's elbow and shoulder joints seemed to move in a subtly non-human way.

Once she was satisfied with the consistency of the dough the woman shaped it into a rough oblong and with a single fluid motion tossed it into the air. An invisible force caught the dough a metre above the woman's head and it began to float around the room surrounded by a globe of heated air. Bernice realized that what she'd taken for light fittings were in fact other loaves at various stages of baking, bobbing around near the ceiling in individual spheres of oven-hot air.

When Bernice glanced back down from the loaves she realized with a slight shock that the woman had turned to look at her.

'Hello,' said the woman.

'Hello,' said Bernice. The woman had enormous brown eyes, like those of a
manga
heroine.

There seemed to be no malice in them, just curiosity, but Bernice knew better than to ascribe human emotions to an alien face. 'I was following the smell of the bread,' she managed lamely.

The woman smiled, displaying neat, white, reassuringly omnivorous teeth. 'The cooking field has to be partially gas permeable,' she explained. 'Otherwise the bread doesn't rise properly.'

'I can see that would be a problem,' said Bernice.

'My name is saRa!qava,' said the woman. 'Would you like some breakfast?'

She said her name was Dep and her eyes were the colour of emeralds.

She stood a couple of metres from Chris watching him with her head cocked to one side, one slim hand resting lightly on her hip. She was at least as tall as he was, narrow waisted with long arms and legs. Her green eyes were curiously round and slightly too large, her nose was small and flat. A smile played around a large mobile mouth. A cascade of thick, almost ropey hair hung down her back, falling as far as the backs of her knees. Her skin was the colour of dusty amber and she was stark naked except for a tiny pair of bikini briefs. A silver brooch was pinned to the strap over her left hip.