Doctor Who: The Also People (8 page)

'Slice,' said saRa!qava.

One of the floating loaves of bread instantly exploded into a shower of neatly edged slices. Roz flinched, the Doctor looked up curiously, Bernice carried on talking to saRa!qava. She'd already been through the exploding bread routine at breakfast. A cast-iron breadboard swooped off a shelf and intercepted the slices as they fell out of the air.

Chris was up on the lounge level playing a game with the older children and a young woman called Dep who had turned out to be saRa!qava's daughter. Her real biological daughter, mind you, not just a close cousin or some stranger who'd wandered into the household one day and never got around to leaving. If you overlooked the fact that Dep was a different colour, had independently mobile hair and a distinctively different elbow joint arrangement you could see they were related; something about the nose and mouth.

The breadboard made a soft landing on the kitchen table; it was followed in by a squadron of plates and a small flotilla of cutlery. The slices of just baked bread lined themselves up neatly and steamed gently. A butter jug waddled over on three stumpy legs and plumped itself down by the breadboard.

The Doctor nudged Bernice in the ribs. 'Disney would have loved this.'

'Just as long as the cutlery doesn't burst into song,' said Bernice. She looked at saRa!qava. 'I assume that House moves everything about?'

'Well, Mr Butter Jug is an old toy of Dep's,' said saRa!qava, 'but House does just about everything else. It's not too smart though.'

'Smart enough to lay the table correctly,' said Roz.

'Well, of course,' said saRa!qava. 'Otherwise what use would it be?'

'But not sentient?' asked Bernice.

For some reason this made saRa!qava laugh. 'Don't be silly. You wouldn't want a sentient machine running a house.'

'Why not?'

'Because it would get bored,' said the Doctor.

'Exactly,' said saRa!qava. 'It wouldn't be fair.'

Roz snorted and reached for a slice of bread. Mr Butter Jug waddled over towards her and tipped its lid expectantly. Roz glowered at the jug for a moment and then started spreading butter on her bread with small meticulous strokes of her knife. When she'd finished she handed the slice to the Doctor.

'
Enkosi, Rozi
,' said the Doctor. Thank you, Roz.

Bernice blinked. In that simple exchange, something shared and intimate had passed between the Doctor and Roz. Bernice wasn't sure quite what she thought about that.

SaRa!qava asked her some intelligent questions about archaeology; she seemed surprised at the idea of anyone actually digging anything up. 'Doesn't that rather disrupt the actual setting of the artefacts?' she asked. When Bernice explained that digging was the only sure way to find what was under the ground, saRa!qava laughed. Bernice, her professional pride stung, reeled off a list of alternative non-invasive techniques – resistance measurement, ground sonar, gravito-magnetic resonance imaging – but this just seemed to increase saRa!qava's humour.

A small baby girl floated over at head height suspended in a forcefield. SaRa!qava snatched the child out of the air and into her lap. There was a yell of triumph from the lounge area. Dep came over to tell them that Chris was proving to be an ace at Starmaster; where had he learnt to fly like that? Roz explained about his training as a pilot. Dep acted suitably impressed. SaRa!qava got up to fetch some more food for the children. She handed the baby to Roz who handled it as if she expected it to explode at any moment. Roz surreptitiously tried to pass it to the Doctor who quickly slipped his hands out of sight.

'Oh, give it here,' said Bernice, and relieved Roz of her small burden. 'Is this one of yours?' she asked saRa!qava.

'Is it screaming?' asked saRa!qava. An aerial convoy of food trays left their holding pattern and shot off towards the lounge. When Bernice said no, saRa!qava said that in that case she probably belonged to one of her neighbours. Bernice looked down at the baby in her arms; large violet eyes looked curiously back.

'What's her name?'

'She's much too young to have a name,' said saRa!qava.

'Oh,' said Bernice. 'How old does she have to be?'

'Old enough to think of one for herself.'

The baby girl grabbed at Bernice's finger and tugged at it. 'What about the machines – do they choose their own names as well?'

'Of course.'

'I don't suppose you use organic comp–'

There was a crash as the Doctor knocked his mug off the table; he made a desperate snatch for it but only succeeded in batting the mug into the air where it collided with a floating loaf of bread. The loaf spun off and hit another loaf which bounced off a wall and dive-bombed the table.

It took House a couple of seconds to bring it all under control. In that moment of confusion the Doctor caught Bernice's eye and frowned.

'So,' said Bernice, 'where does a girl go to have a good time round here?'

'Well, you must come to my party,' said saRa!qava.

'What kind of party?'

'Fancy dress,' said saRa!qava after a moment's hesitation.

'Is there a theme?'

'Oh, anything. As long as it's historical.'

'Oh, good,' said the Doctor. 'My favourite.'

Hyper-lude

To an unprotected human being space is a hostile environment. Step through an airlock and it's a one-way ticket to freeze-dried city: eyeball moisture boils away while your capillaries burst like firecrackers. And if that isn't bad enough, space is full of hard radiation, blasting out of those humungous out-of-control fusion reactors known as stars. Hang out near one of those babies and you're quickly reduced to crispy fried bacon pieces. In short, space isn't somewhere you want to live and a lot of hassle to visit.

So people created ships to get about in and because these people were
people
they made sure that the ships were people too. These people met other people on their travels and these other people were cool, so some ground rules were worked out and they all went exploring together: the people, the other people and the ships that were also people. The rest, as they say, is history.

At least that's the history that got written down.

The ships were big, designed by people who were designed by people who liked big technology.

They had brains with the same mean density as a pulsar. To call them computers would be like calling Einstein a tapeworm or Shakespeare half a kilogram of feta cheese. Their hulls were constructed from interleavened layers of forcefields and they were powered by engines that did horrible things to the fabric of the space-time continuum. These babies had go faster stripes on their toilet seats and thought warp drives were strictly for wimps. When they moved, the material fabric of the universe scrambled to get out of the way.

Their full names were full of clicks, pops and aspirated consonants, the quiet, confident macho that comes with being able to prune a rosebush from a distance of twenty light-years.

Thirty years before, the people had been involved in a war during which they had committed the sort of acts that people tend to commit during wars, although being people they had been very apologetic about it. Using a tiny fraction of their available resources they had completely rebuilt the twenty-six low technology civilizations that had been devastated during the fighting but there was nothing they could do about the fifteen planets, three rings and fifteen asteroid habitats that had got themselves blown away.

Or the twenty-six billion sentient individuals that had been killed, most of them, as the euphemism goes, were collateral casualties. The enemy, a race of insectoid religious fanatics, underwent as a consequence of their defeat a profound theological transformation. The Great Hive Mind of the Universe, they reasoned, had revealed through the medium of the war that the universe was vast enough to accommodate an abundance of cultures and belief systems. Large sections of the population embraced wishy-washy liberal pluralism with a speed that dismayed the Established Church. The megasmart intelligences that ran the people's spaceships and co-ordinated the activities of the Xenocultural Relations (Normalization) Interest Group had predicted this reaction and made arrangements for the enemy to become part of the people.

They knew something that had seemingly escaped the notice of the High Priests of the Great Hive Mind of the Universe. Namely that God really was on the side of the big battalions.

As a result of the war many of the ships chilling out at the sphere's gargantuan dockyard when the Doctor arrived were warships; in the terminology of the people: VASs (Very Aggressive Ships). Some of the more aggressive VASs had themselves mothballed until they were needed again, while others either transferred to a different class of ship or were refitted for civilian duties.

On the day that Bernice met saRa!qava there were four former VASs, four GPSs (General Purpose Ships), two VLR (Very Long Range) Drones and the six-kilometre front end of a TSH (Travelling Space Habitat) who'd had a major disagreement with the middle and rear ends of itself and flounced off for a good sulk.

If you listened very carefully to certain bandwidths of the electromagnetic spectrum and were capable of picosecond data-processing speeds, you could have heard the ships talking.

Mostly it was gossip, who's been where, done what and to whom. The GPSs had a crew complement, although population would be a better word, of sixty thousand each and that gave them a lot to gossip about. One of the VLRs, the A-Lain, was complaining because it had been asked to do a run to one of the lesser clouds. The detached front end of the TSH !C-Mel was bitching because God wouldn't build it a new rear section. Two of the VASs, S-Lioness and !X-Press, were analysing an interesting engagement from the war.

Underneath the normal chit-chat a current of unease ran through the ship to ship channels.

Although it was considered bad manners to extend active probes into the interior of the sphere all of the ships were aware that an unprecedented amount of God appeared to be concentrating on a single problem. Given God's limitless mental resources this was slightly unnerving.

The front section of the TSH the !C-Mel, who was at that time associated with the Interpersonal Dynamics Interest Group, persuaded two of its crew to travel into the sphere and find out what was going on. The third VAS, the T Di!x, used its supralight communications rig to contact some friends and get their advice. This set off a chain reaction as other ships called
their
friends until an ever-expanding volume of space was criss-crossed by supralight communications, all of them racing to develop probability projections that could handle the non-data they were receiving from each other.

To make matters worse God wasn't answering their calls.

3

Party Games

Night time is falling, the good times begin

I don't want to discuss philosophy, baby

I just wanna see your fins.
Reptile Beach
by Third Eye From the HvLP:
Outta My Way Monkey-boy

(2327)

Night falls.

Darkness advances across the interior of the worldsphere as God adjusts the opacity of the forcefield that englobes the sun. The line of occultation is irregular, some of the battalions of the evening outrunning the army of the night. Six kilometres up the coast from iSanti Jeni darkness is premature, a bridgehead of twilight that occupies a small cove and the hinterland downwind of the great waterfall.

It amuses God to give this microclimate a matching short tropical day.

The drone has been watching the woman all day, as it has watched her for the last three months. She has been roasting fish this afternoon, skewering them on straight green twigs and placing them over a fire outside her hut. She ate them during the short simulated twilight, white teeth ripping flesh off the bones with small economical movements. The drone's sensors are precise enough to determine the exact quantity of protein she has ingested. The drone has kept a micrometer accurate log of all her activities since the first day.

Now it is night and the light from Whynot is smeared across the water. The chatter in the rain forest alters in intensity as the nocturnal shift of insect life and small mammals clock on for the night.

The drone glides across the cove in total silence, a little oval patch of black against the broken shadows of the forest. It flies to the entrance of the hut and hovers for a moment to ensure that the woman is asleep. Satisfied that she is, the drone enters the hut and takes its accustomed place near the roof.

The drone has the capability to monitor the woman from the opposite side of the sphere but finds the close physical proximity agreeable, possibly comforting. It is aware that this behaviour is not entirely rational but rationality has never been its primary operating principle.

Later this night the woman will cry out in her sleep. Five words, the first the drone has been able to understand. They will come at sleep plus five hours and twenty-six minutes, at the peak of her third REM sleep cycle. The drone will register a level of neurological activity far beyond what she exhibits in her waking state. The drone will analyse the stress patterns in the words and run sophisticated acoustic and linguistic algorithms. It will find that the patterns are synonymous with a single overriding emotion, although it is difficult to determine which one.

It will frustrate the drone that the actual meaning of the words escapes it, without a detailed history, a context within which to frame them. It will hope the Doctor will explain but it calculates a ninety-seven per cent probability that he will not.

The woman will speak the same words again at sleep plus six hours and fifteen minutes, two and a half hours before dawn. The drone will still find them meaningless.

'I am not a machine.'

No one knew why there was a windmill complex above iSanti Jeni. Or if they did it wasn't on public record. God probably knew but that wasn't any help. God liked to keep its little secrets since it wasn't allowed to keep the big ones. It certainly looked dramatic, stuck up on the crest of the ridge overlooking the town. That could have been reason enough to put it there; it was certainly irrelevant as a power source. SaRa!qava supposed that its very redundancy could have been the underlying aesthetic behind its construction. She could remember a fashion for useless buildings from her youth, one of the many periodic crazes in micro-landscaping that swept the sphere. She herself had designed a fully functioning factory that would have ceaselessly dug over its own spoil tip, producing nothing but columns of acrid black smoke and toxic water pollution.