Doctor Who: The Also People (7 page)

'You're a barbarian,' said Dep, 'aren't you?'

Chris wasn't sure how to answer that.

Dep took a couple of steps towards him. As she did so her hair twisted itself into a single braid that coiled itself around her waist in an unsettling manner. Chris took an involuntary step backwards.

'What's the matter?' asked Dep.

'Er. Nothing,' said Chris hastily. Trying not to flinch as the braid uncoiled from around Dep's waist and wrapped itself around her left leg. The tip of her braid, he noticed, was careful to stay out of the water.

'I'm going to come closer,' said Dep. 'You no be afraid, I not harm you.'

Chris glanced back across the beach to the bar. He could just make out Roz slumped in her seat; of Bernice there was no sign. Dep stepped slowly up to him. Something, her hair, caressed the back of his thigh. He was close enough to see the tiny drops of perspiration that beaded her forehead. Her disturbingly mobile braid of hair looped itself companionably over his shoulders.

'Now,' she said. 'What's your name?'

It took Chris a surprisingly long time to remember.

Bernice watched the toddler making his break for freedom. The boy had cunningly detached himself from the older children by pretending to wander aimlessly around the lounge. Then having looked around to make sure that the other children were too engrossed in some kind of holographic entertainment to notice him, he made a dash for the kitchen. Pounding along on his sturdy little legs he headed straight for the short flight of stone steps that led down from the lounge to the kitchen.

He's going to fall down those and hurt himself, thought Bernice. She opened her mouth to warn saRa!qava who was sitting with her back to the lounge. Before she could speak the boy bounced against an invisible barrier at the top of the stairs and sat down hard. The toddler's small face screwed up in an expression of intense concentration –
Am I hurt? Should I cry? Should I just get
up? If I cry will someone come and give me some attention?
The boy opted for a bit of attention-seeking behaviour and opened his mouth to get a good big lungful of air in preparation. By this time saRa!qava had noticed Bernice's distraction and had twisted in her chair to look. The boy started to howl impressively.

One of the older children, a boy of about eight or nine, walked over and scooped up the toddler with practised ease. Interesting, thought Bernice; she'd half expected one of the house drones to take care of the child. They're not really machine dependent at all. If she remembered it correctly the older boy was saRa!qava's nephew and the toddler was her grandson. It was hard to keep track because all the children seemed to refer to saRa!qava as 'Mama', even the ones that had just popped in from next door.

It looked like a loose
super-extended
kinship set-up – the family integrated horizontally and vertically. Except the textbooks said that that form of social organization was strictly pre-industrial; faster communications were supposed to break the family group into smaller components. Then again the textbooks had been remarkably scarce on references to societies advanced enough to build functioning Dyson spheres. She should remember to take notes; there could be a bestseller in this for her.

'Beni?' said saRa!qava.

'Sorry,' said Bernice. 'Mind wandering. Just thought I saw a gap in the market.'

'Ah yes,' said saRa!qava. 'Markets. I remember them from school. Third most inefficient method of resource distribution ever invented.'

Roz watched the water for a long time before taking off her armour. This far up the beach she could no longer hear the sound of the children playing. Chris's laughter in particular had followed her along the sand, the girl's lighter tone fading much faster. She should have introduced herself after she'd woken up and seen them in the water. Just strolled over and –

What exactly?

Instead she slipped away from the beach-bar and marched back up the sand until she couldn't hear them any more. At this end the sea had scooped a shallow depression out of a line of big dunes, hidden from the main part of the beach and the hill path inland. The surf broke on a sandbar further out and the sea water that filled the depression was relatively still and perfectly clear.

Roz did a three-sixty turn to make sure no one was in sight before removing her cloak. She folded the heavy fire-retardant material in half and laid it down flat on the sand. Then she reached up and snapped open her shoulder catches. The one on the left gave her trouble. She slapped it hard with the heel of her hand, an automatic movement perfected over twenty years, and it sprang open. The cuirass cracked apart down its side seam, giving Roz access to the catches that anchored the pauldrons to her shoulders. The cuirass and pauldrons eased off as one unit. Roz reached inside the cuirass and switched off the battery pack before placing the pieces carefully on the folded cloak. There was a discoloration on the cuirass where it had been caught by a Kithrian fifty-megawatt laser and then relaminated by the Adjudicator's artificers. Roz idly scratched at the corresponding point on her chest, a patch of skin under her left breast that always itched in hot weather. Purely psychosomatic, the medics said, all the nerve endings having regenerated seamlessly. It's all in your mind.

She knew better; the body always remembered.

With the top half of her armour off it was easy to free her legs from the tasset, cuisse and greaves. She piled them neatly next to the cuirass making sure all the buckles, straps and studs were tucked away in the recesses provided. Then she unsealed the padded undertunic and slipped it off her shoulders and over her hips. Roz folded the tunic in the prescribed manner and placed it on top of the cuirass. She reached awkwardly behind her back to unclip her sensible goretex bra top and shrugged out of the straps. They'd been a present from an admirer, the manager at the local branch of Drop Dead Gorgeous on Overcity Five. He'd showered Roz with underwear for two months until she'd gone round to the boutique and threatened to arrest him for attempted bribery. Most of his gifts went unworn, slight items of silk and Martian lace that spent their days wrapped in tissue at the bottom of Roz's wardrobe. Mind you, there had been a swimsuit made of skin-sensitive micropore that would have come in useful right now. She considered leaving her briefs on but changed her mind and slipped them off, figuring that she'd only have to dry them out later.

Roz walked naked down to the edge of the pool. Cautiously she tested the water with her toe; it was cooler than she'd expected.

Roz had once read of a ritual like this. An adjudicator would strip themselves of their armour and bathe themselves in a pool of clear water. Afterwards one of the Untouched would clothe the adjudicator in a surplice of pure white lamb's-wool. The ritual's purpose was to cleanse the supplicant of the taint of sin following a line-of-duty killing. The custom had been discontinued at least fifty years before Roz had joined the service. Instead, every seventh day of duty an adjudicator got sprinkled with holy water, usually during the morning briefing. It made sense to Roz; if she'd had to do that every time someone got killed she'd have spent half her life washing the blood off. They'd have had to organize a shift system. Besides, she had a sneaking suspicion that the lamb's-wool must have itched horribly.

Roz waded in up to her thighs and ducked under the water. Coming up fast again she shook the water from her hair. Felt the hot sun quickly drying her skin. Caught sight of her reflection. A second Roslyn Forrester, rippling and foreshortened across the surface of the water. She stretched her arms out and looked at them. She realized it was a long time since she'd really looked at herself. How fragile her fingers were, long and delicate. Pity that the nails were ragged and bitten down to the quick. The skin below the wrists was pale, a long time since they'd seen the sun. A dark line of scar tissue cut diagonally across her left forearm: vibroknife wound. She touched herself on the shoulder, feeling along her collarbone until she came to the tiny ridge that marked where the fracture had been reset. She traced the outline of her breasts, too small for her mother's liking, and down to her belly. Feeling the ridges of the muscle under her fingertips, the barely perceptible line where some nameless BEM had made a spirited attempt to disembowel her.

Been in the wars, Mama. Got the scars to prove it.

Scrawny, she thought, feeling over the sharp points of her pelvis. Mama always said I was too scrawny. Holding me up to some idealized reflection of the perfect Xhosa maiden. A figure made up entirely of curves that walked gracefully across a veldt long gone to the Undertown and urban decay. It really pained you that I didn't fit. This ugly, scrawny kid with her too long legs and frizzy hair. It must have hurt you to know that I'd come out of your womb, hurt almost as much as that premature birth out in the badlands. Out where the medical facilities were basic and rescue twenty minutes too late.

I ruined you coming into the world and you never forgave me for that. Ruined you beyond the skill of any reconstructive surgery. You with your stupid obsession with the past, your sunshine emulator and your twice yearly trip to the bepple clinic to get your skin darkened. You'd have beppled me from-birth, twisted my DNA to suit your own aesthetic if Grandma and Father hadn't stopped you. You looked at me and you saw something different, but when I looked in the mirror I saw only myself. And you wondered why I ran away to look for the truth.

Truth, justice and the Terranian way of life.

You must be laughing at me now, now that the truth has found me out.

And the dumbest thing of all is that I wanted that heritage too. Wanted the ochre-coloured cloaks that hung on the walls, the ancient strings of multicoloured beads, the cow-hair necklace to ward off evil spirits. I dreamed of being a worthy daughter of the Xhosa, the Angry Man. I found things, Mama, that you never dreamed of, the stories of Nomgqause, Mandela and Mbete. People who fought for the things I thought I was fighting for.

I had to go forward, Mama; if I'd looked back I'd have seen the chain of small compromises and moral lapses that was dragging me down with its weight. Had to keep thinking that I was making some kind of difference, however small. That where I passed things were, if not better, then at least not as bad as they were before.

I should have just stayed with you on Io, Mama. Inherited the Baroncy. Then I could have held a big reception on my ascension, invited all your aristo friends, the Pontiff Seculares, the heads of the big corporations and the entire upper tier of the Overcity. They'd have come to pay their respects to the new Baroness Io. I could have poisoned the lot of them. Something nasty and biological in the punch, a nightmare recombining cocktail that ate away their flesh so that it fell from their bones and slopped all over the deep pile carpet.

It would have done more to clean up the world than everything I've done in twenty-five years on the streets . . .

Someone was watching her.

Roz spun round, the water dragged at her thighs and she almost fell over.

The Doctor was standing on the dunes with his back to her, next to where she'd piled her armour. His stance was so theatrically courteous that she could read the artifice in his back – a gentleman preserving the proprieties in front of a lady.

'Molo ntombazana
,' called the Doctor.

'Molo mhlekazi
,' replied Roz, surprised that she could remember the correct response in Xhosa.

'So formal?' said the Doctor. 'Surely we're friends?'

Roz waded back to the beach and started putting on her clothes. 'The only other title I could think of was
utat'omkhulu
.'

'Grandfather,' the Doctor chuckled. 'I haven't been called that in a long time.'

'And I haven't been called a young woman for at least twenty years.' The undertunic felt sticky as she pulled it over her wet skin. 'And I haven't spoken Xhosa since I left home.'

'Does it feel strange?'

'Very,' said Roz. 'You can turn round now; I'm decent.' She pushed at the pile of armour with her foot. Wearing it suddenly seemed such a childish idea.

'Leave it,' said the Doctor. 'No one will take it.'

'What if the tide comes in?'

The Doctor used the heel of his shoe to scratch a design in the sand, a couple of angular symbols like those on the beach-bar's table and an arrow pointing to the armour. 'God will spot that and send a drone to take your things back to the villa.'

He proffered her his arm. '
Sahamba
,' he said; let's go.

Roz turned her back on the armour and took the Doctor's arm. They started back down the beach.

'
Wafunda isiXhosa ngapi
?'

'I was stuck in a prison and one of the prisoners taught me to speak it,' said the Doctor. 'He taught me a lot about patience too. And how sometimes being without power is a form of power.'

'
Kwenzikani
?'

'He stayed in prison until the people who put him there finally broke down and started negotiating with him. He refused to be released until they acceded to his demands.'

'Did he win?'

'Yes and no,' said the Doctor. 'He got what he wanted but the price was high. He was absent from the weddings of his children and the funeral of his mother. All the rights, privileges and duties of a man were denied him. He found himself a stranger in a brave new world.'

'Was it worth it?'

'He thought so,' said the Doctor. 'Or at least he thought it was necessary. Somebody had to make that sacrifice, if only for the sake of the children.'

'Jeez, Doctor,' said Roz, 'sometimes you're a real fun guy to talk to.'

'And such a beautiful day for it too,' said the Doctor. '
Uphi uKhrisi leBeni
?'

'Benny was gone when I woke up,' said Roz. 'Chris was playing in the sea. Found himself a friend.'

'Oh yes,' said the Doctor. '
Intombazana
perhaps? Pretty?'

'From what I could see.'

The Doctor laughed; it was a delightful, innocent sound. 'Oh, to be young and resilient again.'