Doctor Who: The Also People (9 page)

The craze had already been abating when she'd submitted her proposals and had them turned down. The next big new fashion had been for concealed habitations; there was an entire city of three million people on the other side of the Endless Sea built along those lines. You could walk right through it and never know it was there. SaRa!qava didn't really mind; the idea that her redundant factory had never been built because the aesthetic it was based on had become redundant had a certain pleasing symmetry.

Still, it would have been nice to build the factory. She imagined it lurking in some lush secluded valley like a guilty secret, horrible mutant fish, cooked up especially to survive the pollution, playing in a stream below the steaming outflow.

This image of a pointless industrial landscape may have been what prompted her to hold the party at the Windmills, the actual control centre of which was an oblong lump of ridged plasticrete built half into the seaward slope below the crest. The lower four storeys were completely taken up by the hall containing the capacitors arranged in two lines of four. This was where saRa!qava would encourage the dancing to take place; the giant ceramic capacitors would loom nicely with the right lighting.

SaRa!qava had arranged a buffet on the lawn of the small terraced garden at the front of the control centre. God had promised her a clear night, average temperature twenty-one degrees centigrade, although it hinted it could accelerate a promising warm front if she asked it nicely.

Half a dozen remote-drones were ferrying in canapés, bowls of fruit, a punch bowl of a suspicious yellow dip that God insisted on sending to every party despite the fact that everybody avoided it, a selection of narcotic flowers, more food, crispy tortillas and a huge celebratory pie in the shape of a huge pie. Paper lanterns were hung from the branches of the severely ornamental trees.

SaRa!qava watched as a cargo-drone swooped low over the garden dropping a shower of metal cubes. Halfway down the cubes squirmed unpleasantly and transformed into a variety of wrought-iron garden furniture – memory metal of course – before floating the rest of the way down. This should be the last of the preparations; there were already cushions and comfy fields strewn about in the accessible nooks and crannies so there was somewhere for people to have sex. People tended to do that at parties; you couldn't stop them so they might as well be comfortable.

Actually aM!xitsa had tried once, creating a powerful sexual depressant that should have given anyone who ingested it the erotic drive of a strand of kelp. Only the stupid machine had put it in God's suspicious yellow dip which no one ever ate and so of course no one got dosed.

At least that's what aM!xitsa claimed to have done; the drone's mind was officially rated at 10.2, meaning that it was supposed to be at least ten times more intelligent than the average sentient humanoid, so it was difficult to believe that it hadn't realized that no one
ever
ate the dip.

Come to think of it, God was rated
x
number of millions times smarter than aM!xitsa and it
made
the dip that no one ever ate. It was probably one of those jokes, the kind that you had to be a machine to find funny.

Dep was waiting for her in the capacitor hall. Clumps of Dep's hair were twisting themselves into braids and then untwisting again – a sure sign that she was nervous.

'How do I look?' she asked and pirouetted. She was wearing
a symbiote
dress of silver scales, the living organism constantly shaping and reshaping itself across the contours of her body.

'I tell everyone that it's a historical fancy dress party,' said saRa!qava, 'and my own daughter comes as a fish.'

'This is historical,' said Dep. The dress shivered slightly and changed shape, extruding one long sleeve and raising the skirt above the knee.

'From exactly where and when?'

'Who knows,' said Dep. 'Someone's bound to have worn something like this somewhere at some time in the past.'

'Not if they had any fashion sense.'

'I'm trying to look barbarian.'

'You've got barbarian on the brain,' said saRa!qava. 'As if I didn't know why. Just remember that he is a barbarian and that they can have some pretty peculiar ideas about sex and such.'

'But, Mother,' said Dep, 'that's the whole point.'

SaRa!qava activated the terminal in her left earring and asked God whether Benny and her friends were on their way yet.

'They're on their way now,' said God. 'It took them a while to figure out how the tube system worked. Do you want to know what they're wearing?'

'No.'

'Go on,' said God. 'I'll give you a full cultural analysis.'

'No,' said saRa!qava, making her way to the lift egress at the far end of the capacitor hall. 'Why aren't they here yet'?'

There was a suspicious silence.

'God, what have you done?'

'Put them on the slow track.'

'Why?'

'They're having a real interesting conversation.'

'Bad God!' said saRa!qava. 'You shouldn't be listening.'

'Wanna hear?'

Technically you weren't supposed to eavesdrop on private conversations; not a law of course –

saRa!qava's society didn't have anything as crude as a legal system – but certainly not the 'done'

thing.

'Just get them here,' she told God.

'Your sternest command is my slightest wish,' said God.

SaRa!qava stepped forward as the lift doors opened. Seeing Bernice and her friends together saRa!qava was struck again by their physiological uniformity. Even the Doctor, whom God identified as belonging to a different species entirely, seemed to share the same detailed similarity as his companions right down to the number of fingers on each hand, the general arrangement of his eyes and ears. Behind her Dep gave a small squeal of delight as Chris stepped out of the lift.

He was dressed in a ridiculous furry loin cloth, his naked torso painted with spiral patterns of blue and silver. He was carrying a large double-bladed axe which he waved enthusiastically when he saw Dep.

There was a chorus of yells from behind him and he lowered the axe with a sheepish grin. Dep darted forward, grabbed his free hand and pulled him away. The small dark woman – Roz – glared after him. SaRa!qava wondered if Dep was stepping on the older woman's toes. Roz's costume seemed to consist of two ochre-coloured blankets and masses of jewellery. One of the blankets was wrapped around her waist, the other draped across her shoulders and knotted under her chin.

A dozen blue and white necklaces hung around her neck while her forearms and ankles were almost hidden under a sheath of matching bracelets.

'SaRa!qava!' Bernice swept out of the lift wearing the most impractical dress saRa!qava had ever seen. The skirt was bell-shaped and so large that saRa!qava was sure it had to be supported by a suspensor field. It pulled it in tight at Bernice's waist before erupting upwards in a confusion of layers and frills of cloth that gathered at her shoulders and bodice. An enormous blonde wig added half a metre to Bernice's height. How slim her arms looked emerging from the puffs of cloth at her shoulders. Her long elbow gloves were the same white satin as the dress. SaRa!qava made a mental note to bully God into giving her the pattern later. She hadn't dyed her eyebrows to match the wig, leaving them as dark arches framing those strangely old-looking eyes.

Bernice snapped open a fan, fluttering it in front of her face. 'What do you think of the frock?'

she asked.

'It's extraordinary,' said saRa!qava. 'What's holding the skirt up?'

'Petticoats,' said Bernice, 'lots and lots of petticoats. I think you should know that I don't normally dress like this.' Bernice glanced back at the Doctor. 'Unless I have to.'

The Doctor was boringly dressed in the same crumpled linen suit he'd worn that afternoon.

Bernice caught saRa!qava's eye and winked. 'There's always one that has to be different, isn't there?'

The Doctor smiled as if complimented by this.

'Not that he's ever actually out of costume,' said Bernice.

SaRa!qava took great delight in introducing the Doctor to iRama who regarded himself as a leading light in the sphere's Gallifreyan Interest Group. The man had made the mistake of arriving in God's best guess at a Time Lord's ceremonial robes and hearing the Doctor tactfully point out the inaccuracies in the costume; this gave saRa!qava her first really good laugh of the evening.

Despite his sartorial inadequacies the Doctor was turning out to be good value as a party guest.

Still, there was something about him that made saRa!qava nervous, a sense of depth that reminded her uneasily of the times she'd talked to the really smart machines. Not the ones like God, who was by design and inclination cheerful and unassuming, but the intelligences that ran the warships and had prosecuted the war. However friendly they seemed when you talked to them, there was always the sense of depth, as if an unsympathetic rationality was ticking away beneath the façade. Like those machines, she noticed, the Doctor tended to ask more questions than he answered.

Roz was not good value as a party guest although she had some collateral advantage as a conversation piece. Plenty of people had asked saRa!qava who she was, this strange woman with grey shot hair and angry black eyes. Such old eyes, like Bernice's, although God was adamant that in strict chronological terms both women were half saRa!qava's age. Life as a barbarian hero was tough; the Barbarian Emulation Interest Group was always saying things like that. Live fast, die young. SaRa!qava guessed that with such a truncated life expectancy people like Roz had to cram in as much as they could get. And Roz was going to relive most of it if she didn't lay off the
flashback
she was drinking. You were supposed to mix small doses of the memory enhancer with something mellower like
nostalgia
. Roz had had a whole glass of the stuff; if she finished it she'd be getting memory flashes for a week. SaRa!qava frowned. She had given specific instructions that
flashback
was not to be included in the drinks inventory – where had Roz got hold of it?

An antique landing module spun lazily overhead, manoeuvring with little spurts from its attitude control jets. The module was a metre and a half across and saRa!qava could see tiny faces peering out of its windows. There was a name stencilled on its side – S-LIONESS. Not a drone then, a remote drone from a ship. SaRa!qava frowned. She made a point of not inviting ships to her parties: they were too unpredictable. Having seen S-Lioness, saRa!qava realized that there were at least three other ships with remote drones at the Windmills that night, all of them having come as antique spaceships of one kind or another. All of them had VAS nomenclature, which explained why they were rude enough to gatecrash, and all of them were unobtrusively clustering within discreet sensor range of the Doctor. SaRa!qava didn't like it; she wished aM!xitsa was with her, but nobody knew where the old drone had vanished to.

She snagged a glass of
tranquillity
off a passing tray and quickly stuck her nose in the bouquet that floated in the pale amber liquid. The fragrance calmed her a little. Perhaps holding the party here at the Windmills had been a mistake when she considered what had happened upstairs in the control gallery. Tossing the bouquet aside saRa!qava drained the glass in one go. She refused to feel guilty about
that
; it wasn't as if she'd had any choice in the matter. The
tranquillity
helped but not as much as saRa!qava would have liked. She threw the empty glass over her shoulder where it was intercepted by a tray before it hit the ground.

Feeling the need for a distraction, saRa!qava went looking for Bernice.

She found her outside, holding court by the buffet tables. She was surrounded by at least four men and a drone that had come in costume as a small jet airliner. The costume was a dead giveaway: the drone had to be one of Dep's friends from the Weird Aviation Interest Group. Since that type of jet couldn't hover the little machine was trying hard to remain in 'character' by maintaining a tight holding pattern around the group. SaRa!qava thought that it would have been better served coming as something with VTOL capability. The men were slow about opening their ranks, reluctant, saRa!qava thought, to let her into the conversation. Bernice thwacked one of the men on the chest with her fan, forcing him to step back and create a gap for saRa!qava.

SaRa!qava watched how Bernice manoeuvred the big skirt to maintain her personal space.

Perhaps, she thought, she might have misjudged Bernice's costume; if the fan could be used as a weapon then maybe the enormous skirt was more than just ridiculous ostentation, perhaps it could be used to transport concealed armaments. That would certainly gel with what Bernice had told her about this Paris place. 'Light artillery in the war between the sexes', Bernice had called the dress. SaRa!qava thought she understood; intragender warfare was uncommon amongst humanoids but not that rare. If human females were smaller than the males then the skirt would help balance out the weight disadvantage. She wondered what it would be like to make love to somebody wearing a dress like that, peeling away the layers one by one, hunting out the hidden skin beneath the silk.

I've been overdoing the
tranquillity
again, thought saRa!qava.

A man, dressed as a space pirate in an improbably skintight hostile environment suit and fishbowl helmet, asked if saRa!qava had seen aM!xitsa recently.

'I heard he was down the coast,' said the small airliner, 'looking after some mad alien female.'

'And there was me thinking I was the only one,' said Bernice.

'Who told you that?' saRa!qava asked the drone.

'Vi!Cari,' said the Drone. 'Who else?'

'You talk to vi!Cari!' said another of Bernice's admirers. 'You must be the only person who does.'

'Say what you like about vi!Cari,' said the drone, 'it always knows what's going on.'

'You mean you don't know?' asked the space pirate.

'Know what?' asked the drone.