Doctor Who: Transit (8 page)

He opened a file at random and had a look. Pages of non-linear mathematics relating to tunnel installation. Kadiatu seemed to be striving for a localized self-generating field around a capsule that would allow it to travel faster than light in real space. It was an elegant piece of work, the main flaw being that if you changed the initial conditions of the field generation the capsule would be flung off at a dimensional tangent.

And that was time travel.

Buchannan Station - Pluto Ninety-Five

Mariko carried the board down the ramp and on to the platform.

She was particularly pleased with the way the board had turned out. She was certain no one else had a board like that. She had to be careful though, even with her new hands the razor-sharp edges had to be handled with respect. The half-metre spike on the front was a nice touch too.

Naran's new mouth stopped him from talking but Mariko didn't regard that as a disadvantage. Naran had never had anything interesting to say even when he could speak. It accentuated his high cheek bones nicely and gave him a rakish air. The look on his face when the prehensile tongue had shot out for the first time had been priceless. He'd tried to squint down his nose at it: it was a third of a metre long, had a rough abrasive texture and was pink. It also had five little stubby knobs on the end like a handful of thumbs.

Mariko threw the board out on to the track where it hovered over the friction field. Static plumes crackled over its underside, creating harsh atinic flashes. She knew it was the fastest thing in the system, faster even than the
data-bus
itself. Naran and her were
razvedka
now, half reconnaissance, half spy, half assassin - all bad. There would be others, she knew that, many others, but they were the first and there was pride in that.

Something tickled her neck. It was Naran, using his tongue to probe the joint between chitinous backplate and helmet. 'Cut that out,' she chided. The tongue whipped back into Naran's mouth with a wet sucking sound.

'We've got things to do,' she told him. 'People to see.'

Naran's eyes were bright as stars.

The Stop

'Don't you have anything with flat heels?' asked Benny.

Zamina looked around the bedroom pulling up the mound'. of clothes that covered every surface. Benny sat on the bed trying on Roberta's shoes. Roberta stood in the doorway wit;" a sour look on her face as her wardrobe was looted. They'd started with Zamina's working clothes but Roberta was more Benny's size. Most of the stuff Benny rejected out of hand before settling on a pair of rose-coloured skintight legging-and a suede button-down shirt. 'At least', said Benny, checking in the mirror, 'you can't see my nipples.'

Zamina held up a pair of slingback sandals. 'What about these?'

'You call that flat?'

'They're low.'

'We've got to look business, I can't look business if I'm falling over my heels,' said Benny, 'can I?' She pointed at a pair of calf boots. 'What about those?'

'Not my boots,' groaned Roberta as Benny fished them out. They were made of black patent leather with solid heels. 'They're too high for you.'

Benny rapped the toe with her knuckle. It rang, and she grinned and pulled the boots on. 'It's a question of balance,' she said, 'balance and attitude.'

Zamina watched the woman testing her weight in front of the mirror. She looked good and it was hard to believe she was as old as thirty.

'Not bad,' said Benny. 'Where's the gun?'

Roberta handed her the pistol and the shoulder holster. 'This is crazy you know,' she said.

Benny buckled on the holster. It was an old military design that hung high on the chest. Someone had cut away the flap and the trigger guard to make it easier to draw. 'You want to stay poor?' asked Benny. 'How long have you and Zamina got on the streets? Two, maybe three, years and then what?'

Zamina stopped listening. She loved the way that Benny handled the pistol. The gangbangers carried their guns as status symbols, using them as a threat to puff up their egos. Zamina doubted they knew how they worked. Benny treated the gun with the respect due to a dangerous tool, she didn't wave it about to frighten people - if she pointed it at you, you were as good as dead.

Benny checked the LCD on the butt, bolstered the weapon and shrugged into Zamina's second-best leather jacket. 'Let's go,' she said.

'What now?' asked Roberta.

'You got an appointment?'

Roberta shook her head.

The jacket had 'Better off Dead' picked out in brass studs on the back. Chains decorated the sleeves and pockets. When Benny moved they chimed in time to her footsteps like ghost spurs. 'Come on,' she said from the doorway.

Out on Williamsberg the remaining skylights had brightened up for the day cycle. The broken lights created a lizard skin pattern of shadows down the street. Benny paused and took a deep breath.

'What we want is a gang,' she said. 'Not too big, not too small - but ambitious.'

'This is crazy,' said Roberta.

'The Dixies,' said Zamina.

'Where's their turf?'

'End of the street,' said Zamina, 'going back as far as Enoch and the shops on Norman.'

'Mean?'

'Stupid,' said Zamina.

'Boys,' said Roberta.

'Sounds perfect,' said Benny.

They followed Benny up the street, trying to copy the way she walked.

Lunarversity

The Doctor was knee deep in opera. Something he'd done while rummaging through Kadiatu's files had expanded the screen on the ceiling into a half-scale hologram. Now the bed floated over the orchestra pit with child-sized singers silently stamping around a stage level with his kneecaps. He still hadn't found the volume control and the way the violinist's bows kept poking up through the eiderdown wasn't improving his temper.

Nor was poking around in Kadiatu's database. She was, he estimated, six months from finishing the theoretical basis for a working time machine.

And it was all his fault, sort of.

Sensitive dependence on initial conditions -
the butterfly
effect.

A butterfly fans the air in Dakota and next year the people of Pontefract have to wade to work. An impossible causal chain that happens all the time
but you never know which butterfly started it off.
Such a small ripple in the Brownian motion of the molecules, such a drastic effect at the other end. And then there's me, thought the Doctor, dropping into human history with all the subtlety of a road accident. Someone was bound to notice sooner or later.

Simple to spoil her work, introduce a false premise into the complex chain of equations. Nothing too subtle, just enough to send Kadiatu running down a blind alley for fifty years or so. The human race wasn't due time travel until the botched sigma experiments of the thirtieth century.

He called up the passage dealing with flux instability within the containment field of the capsule. A minor change in the premise of one of the transposition matrices. It would make that avenue of enquiry look like a dead ringer for transtemporal propagation. The Doctor put his finger over the exact place. Push and it would interact with the sensor field which would send signals to the unit's CPU which would make micro-modifications within the lattice of suspended molecules that made up its memory storage. Do that and all of future history is secure.

Unless Kadiatu was supposed to discover time travel. In which case his interference could do things to the timestream that even a Daiek would think twice about. Perhaps time-travelling humans would be
useful
in some way.

Decisions, decisions.

Without taking his eyes off the screen the Doctor reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a coin. He flipped it into the air and caught it without looking. 'Heads you win,' he said and slapped the coin on his wrist. When he looked down it was at the profile of the young Queen Victoria complete with bun. The Doctor sighed and put the file back into memory. He examined the coin again. Inscribed below the queen's head was the legend
Three Pennies.
On the other side was another profile of Queen Victoria, only this one was grinning.

The Stop

The Dixie Rebs had their clubhouse in a disused health centre on Mississippi Plaza. Thirty years ago the projects were planned as a series of modular communities grouped around a central cluster of shops and amenities. The Plaza still had a general store but all the other units had long become a series of impromptu squats and catfood houses. A couple of skinny little boys were playing on the patch of razor grass that fronted the health centre entrance. The boys had transmitters wired into the collars of their Tshirts.

'Lookouts,' said Roberta.

The boys stopped playing and watched as the women approached. One of them touched a stud on his collar and whispered. Benny squatted down on her haunches so that her face was level with the boy's.

'What's your name?' she asked.

'Who wants to know?' asked the boy.

Benny slapped him once. Hard enough to rock the boy's head back. 'What's your name?' she asked again but the boy was crying.

'You shouldn't have done that,' said the other boy.

'He was rude,' Benny told him, 'and rude boys get slapped.'

'Billy won't like it.'

'Who's Billy?'

'Billy's the boss.'

Benny turned back to the boy who was still crying. 'You see,' she said sweetly, 'it always pays to be polite.' She stood up. 'Now why don't you two run along and play, before something bad happens to you?'

The second boy took the first by the arm and drew him away. 'Don't worry,' he said to his friend, 'Billy'll sort them slots out for us.'

The entrance to the health centre was a pair of sliding doors made from high-impact glass. The outline of a flag had been laboriously etched into the surface and then tinted with polychromatic polymers.

'That's a dead old flag,' muttered Benny, 'even for this century.'

The gangbanger on the doors had the same flag spray-painted on the chest of his flak jacket. His blond hair was razored into a crew cut and his blue eyes were lazy with drugs. As front man to the clubhouse he probably wasn't geared up too tight but the Dixies had a reputation for random violence.

'What do you want, slots?'

Benny looked the boy up and down. 'One moment,' she told him and turned to Zamina. 'What's a slot?'

'You know, a girl.'

'Not very respectful is it?'

'I guess not,' said Zamina.

Benny turned back to the gangbanger, drew her gun and jammed it under his chin. 'Now,' she said, 'I want to talk to Billy.'

Lunarversity

The opera had frozen solid and the lead singer was vomiting data into the room. It spewed out of his mouth in coils of damp blue green. As the data streamed out the unit tried to rectify the singer's image, causing his head to balloon outwards to twice normal size. The surface of the construct glistened with fractals as the data took up a convoluted three-dimensional shape. Alphanumerics in white neon formed stage left obliterating part of the chorus with the words 'STONE MOUNTAIN, PP-HIST ANALYSIS 234 - SHIRL'.

The unit finally gave up trying to sustain both images and the opera blinked out. The data construct hung alone in the notional centre of the image and began to rotate slowly. It reminded the Doctor unpleasantly of the fungus on Heaven. It was a phase portrait, he could see that now. A non-linear system turned ninety degrees and mapped out in three dimensions. There were chunks bitten out of its coils, wounds ragged with random pixels caused by an insufficiency of data.

Doctor Livingstone, I presume, thought the Doctor.

'Very clever,' he said out loud.

'I suppose breakfast in bed is out of the question,' said Kadiatu from behind him. Her voice was muffled by the eiderdown.

'And the opera?'

'
Il Dottere Va in Viaggio,
by Marconi Paletti,' said Kadiatu. 'There's a MIG coffee-maker at the end of the bed.'

The Doctor reached through the projection field and switched on the Russian coffee-maker. He heard Kadiatu sit up and stretch her arms. 'What's the straight bit in the middle?'

'That's the nineteen-seventies which is what I'd call a data-rich environment. It's straight because there's a continuous linear progression for five years. You were stuck, weren't you?'

'Exiled.'

The MIG made a series of explosive gurgles.

The Doctor could hear her extensions falling one by one over her shoulder as she twisted her neck. There was a faint musk made of human pheremones and perspiration as warm air escaped from under the covers. 'You were looking for me?'

'I was tracking your movements through history. I wasn't expecting to run into you on Kings Cross station.'

'Something of a coincidence.'

'Isn't it just.'

'Could you turn that off,' said the Doctor. 'I've just seen somewhere I haven't been yet.'

'Screen off,' said Kadiatu and the construct vanished. 'Minscreen; newscan; lookfor; badnews.'

The Doctor turned to face her. 'You're expecting bad news?'

'You do have a reputation,' said Kadiatu. 'What are you here for this time?'

'Does there have to be a reason?'

'Trouble follows you around.'

'I was with King Tenkamenin at Kumbi Selah, he offered me kola nuts and a place to sleep in the Royal Compound. We stayed up all night speaking of philosophy and the old gods. When I left the sun was breaking over the hills and the society women ran the initiates down to the summer stream to wash.'

He caught Kadiatu's black eyes and held them. 'Nobody died that day.'

'They died yesterday,' said Kadiatu. 'And here you are.'

'History happens,' said the Doctor. 'Even when I'm not around.'

'Only by accident,' said Kadiatu as the room filled up with the aroma of coffee.

Reykjavik

Ming the Merciless ate cod sushi and pickled herring in a small bistro off Constitution Avenue. The bastard Rodriguez, the acting Transport Minister, had invited her for an informal discussion about the current 'situation'
vis-d-vis
the transit network.