So Vile a Sin (20 page)

‘That’s right. I think it was the right decision. Of course, I also decided to go gallivanting about to every planet in existence, toppling evil empires and returning lost balloons to small children. Most of the decisions I could have made I did make –

somewhere.’

‘So you don’t exist in our world?’ said Simon.

‘Nor you in mine,’ said the Doctor. ‘No offence, of course, the timestreams are big enough for everyone. Think of me as a set of hypothetical situations.’

149

‘If you insist,’ said Simon.

‘One of you stays,’ said Genevieve, ‘one of you goes.’

‘Hundreds if not thousands of each,’ said the Doctor. ‘Some of me are killed in a prison cell by the Earth Reptiles and left to rot

– things weren’t so friendly then. Some of me have gone on to destroy whole worlds – always in a good cause, of course – and others don’t face anything more traumatic than a bad aphid infestation. Some of me aren’t me at all; at least one of me is a ruthless dictator with my picture up everywhere. In a sense we’re all just third-generation copies of the original.’

‘The original Doctor?’ said Simon. He was starting to get the feeling he got when he cram-viewed too many study sims in a row, carried away on a wave of input.

‘Time, as you say, has a way of changing our plans,’ the Doctor was saying. ‘Choosing the future Time wanted would have meant opening up the past. A real Pandora’s Box, crammed to the hinges with dark and fantastic secrets. I was curious, of course. But in time, as the knowledge filtered through, I would be changed. Changed in ways I couldn’t predict. I did know one thing.’ His ancient eyes were serious. ‘Whatever I would have become, I would have called it evil.’

There was a few moments’ silence. Simon asked, ‘You said you’d been here for a thousand years.’

‘Next Thursday,’ beamed the Doctor.

‘How? You can’t be human.’

‘After a thousand years of looking after this planet, I’d say I’m as human as I’m going to get. You could say I’ve gone native.’

A shaft of late-afternoon light shone through the window for a moment, the last before the sun disappeared behind the distant city. Simon had a strange urge to go to the window and see if the city was still there, if they’d been drawn inexplicably into the Doctor’s fantasy world like children into fairyland.

For a moment he could have sworn he saw an alien, an honest-to-God BEM with green skin and five arms and five legs, its ceiling-high anemone shape caught in the beam of sunlight. He glanced at Genevieve. She had seen it too – she was staring at the suddenly empty spot in the lounge, staring out of the window.

From the garden came the sound of children laughing.

150

It was dark by the time they finished dinner. The Doctor had done all the cooking himself, with the assistance of the kitchen machines. And probably with help from more of his invisible friends: organic vegetables, herbs from the garden, and a home-made wine that tasted like punch. In the head.

Simon still felt a bit foggy, the wine’s aftertaste like fuzz in his mouth. The Doctor had hovered upstairs and shown them the guest bedrooms, fresh sheets on the beds, towels neatly folded on the end. Simon’s room came equipped with a couple of cats, who were obligingly warming up the antique brass bed, purring.

Simon sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the fat, sleek animals. The room was oddly shaped, right at the very top of the house, tucked away under the sloping roof.

There was a triangular mirror hung on the wall. Simon looked at himself in it, wondering what Genevieve saw. He kept his sandy hair cut short. He had the usual tan and the usual slight fold to the eyelids. The fact that he looked so ordinary was a definite plus for a terrorist. Worked for Mr Jamey.

A window faced on to the garden, pitch-black. Simon wondered what was out there. The lights of the overcity, hidden by the Reserve’s thick forests? Or Doctor Smith’s world, populated by peace-loving humans and their friendly reptile friends? If he walked out of the door and headed away from the house, what would he see?

Nothing – he didn’t have a torch. He hadn’t meant to stay until dark. He certainly hadn’t meant to spend the night.

He reached out a hand and fingered the peeling wallpaper, wondering if Mr Jamey knew about the place. Of course he knew about it. He’d said something about intercepting another investigator’s Centcomp research requests.

The nondescript man (how can you describe someone as nondescript? – but it was just the right word for Mr Jamey) had warned him that his resistance cell had been broken. He’d just dropped it into the conversation, right there at the dance club, while Simon was handing over the stolen software from a particularly unimportant Imperial cleaning robot. Telepaths, Mr 151

Jamey had said over the roar of the music, probably. And something about Simon needing to see a Doctor.

Genevieve slammed the door behind him. Simon leapt off the bed as though it had been electrified, narrowly missed banging his head on the low ceiling, and glared at her.

She was naked under a white bath towel, her hair wet and falling in ringlets to her shoulders. There were beads of water on her arms and the slopes of her breasts. He was struck by sudden memory: Sibongile on the night before the day she died, light from the candles she’d placed around her dorm room reflected in her eyes. Simon looked away, towards the window again.

‘There’s a Venusian in the bathroom,’ she said.

‘How do you know it’s a Venusian?’ he said.

‘It said so.’ She got a firm grip on the towel and sat down on the bed. ‘What were you doing?’

Simon eyed the wallpaper. ‘Checking for gingerbread.’ It was her, of course, the one who’d been making the Centcomp requests. Jamey had just tapped into her information and sent him here. Partly to see what was here, partly to find out why she was interested. He wondered who she was working for.

‘What do you suppose this is all about?’ he said.

Genevieve shrugged. ‘Maybe it’s a sort of miniature amusement park, meant to accommodate people who get lost in the woods.’

‘Maybe he is the Doctor.’

‘A Doctor.’ She stroked one of the cats, which stretched luxuriously. ‘I want to know what’s behind all of this alternative-reality business. I can’t believe it’s just an old man’s fantasy.’

‘Because there’s a Venusian in the bathroom?’

‘I’ll wager that if I looked now, it would be gone. Just another hallucination brought on by whatever was in the tea.’

Simon got a sudden glimpse of long brown limbs as Genevieve shed the towel and slipped under the duvet. One of the cats grumbled as her legs pushed it out of the way.

She propped herself up on her elbow and looked at him. He stared back.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘are you coming to bed or not?’

152

He woke up in the darkness with his arm going numb under the weight of her head. Carefully he tried to extricate himself without disturbing her.

‘You can move,’ she said. ‘I’m not asleep.’

Simon shook his arm to get the pins and needles out. He felt Genevieve shift position, her arm slide over his chest, her breasts press against his side. Something else, warm, invisible and not Genevieve moved near his feet. ‘The cats are back,’ he said.

‘Tell them to stay at their end of the bed,’ she said. ‘Can you hear something?’

Beyond the soft rumble of the cats Simon could hear singing. A human voice, soft, ancient. ‘I think it’s Doctor Smith,’ he said.

‘Perhaps he’s singing the Venusians to sleep,’ said Genevieve.

He rolled over to face her, putting his hand on her hip, feeling the smoothness of her skin as it pulled over the muscles of her thigh, tentative in a way that he’d never been with all those countless others before Sibongile. They were face to face now but invisible in the darkness, her breath against his cheek.

There would have been a room, he knew that, a room with white surfaces, hygienic and stain-resistant. A routine autopsy performed by machines that ticked and murmured as they peeled back the layers of Sibongile’s body and invaded its secrets.

Killed stone dead by a non-lethal crowd-control weapon.

Something sonic.

He’d thought of that terrible room often enough, the minuscule
cracks
throughout her body, woken drenched in sweat with the dream smell of disinfectant in his nostrils.

And now her face was fading from his memory, the image losing its integrity like the winding down of a simscreen in a power cut.

‘Do you believe in love at first sight?’ he asked the darkness.

‘Don’t spoil this by talking,’ said Genevieve.

In the morning they walked up the hill together, towards Genevieve’s flitter. She glanced at Simon for a moment and said,

‘Asparagus balloon Constantinople.’ The car obligingly powered down its security systems and they got in.

153

Simon stared through the windscreen. At the ancient, ruined house, totally overgrown, the wood of its walls being converted to soil even as they watched. At the garden that was nothing more than an open space in the forest, covered in long grass and humus and weeds. Even the collapsed tool shed would soon be the beginnings of a shrub or an anthill.

‘Where to?’ said Genevieve.

‘A transit terminal, please,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting to get to. What about you?’

‘I have to get back to Callisto,’ she said. ‘The paperwork will have reached my office ceiling by now.’

When they’d woken up, the house was empty. They’d taken a long shower, and the hot water had lasted the whole time, and there was a fresh bar of soap.

When they’d walked out of the house, and then turned around and tried to go back inside, the front door had fallen off its hinges and plunged through the rotting wooden floor of the empty hallway.

‘Did any of that actually happen?’ said Simon.

‘I
hope
so,’ said Genevieve.

‘I mean, did we actually meet Doctor Smith, and see a Venusian in the lounge?’

‘Must have been something in the tea,’ said Genevieve, starting the flitter.

Simon nodded. ‘Must have been.’

Joseph Conrad
– 18 April 2982

They decided to disembark in two parties, separated by at least twenty minutes. ‘I’m finding it hard enough to cope with two Doctors,’ Roz said, as they packed the few things they were carrying. ‘Imagine what customs will think.’

The passenger liner docked with the metaship
Joseph Conrad
at 19.04 IST. The liner had been gradually changing its shipboard day to match time on the
Conrad
, so that its passengers would adjust as easily as possible.

Roz felt jet-lagged anyway. A combination of claustrophobia, dehydration from a month’s worth of pressurized environments 154

and the hot neon light of the
Conrad
. She squinted as she walked down the long ramp with one of the Doctors, carryall slung over her shoulder.

A bagbot whizzed up to them the minute they reached the grey carpet of the spaceport. It was a chunky box like a toaster on wheels, topped with a wide rack. The edges were padded, which was good, because the thing smacked into Roz’s legs twice trying to get her attention.

‘Take your bag, ma’am?’ it said. ‘Show you around? It’s a big metaship, easy to get lost. Take your bag?’

The Doctor crouched down and tickled the thing’s rim, as though it were a stray dog. ‘We don’t need a porter,’ he told it,

‘but we do need a guide.’

‘Sure thing,’ piped the bagbot. ‘Just follow me, no problems.’

Roz looked at the Doctor as the thing started nudging its way through the crowd, moving through the long, grey corridor that led to customs. ‘It followed me home. Can I keep it?’

He smiled. ‘Might as well make use of the facilities, now we’re here,’ he said. ‘We might be here for a while.’

‘I thought you said this was going to be simple.’

‘It ought to be simple,’ said the Doctor. ‘That doesn’t mean it will be quick, though.’

The bagbot waited patiently while they cleared customs. It kept up a constant babble of tourist information as it led them through the crowds to their hotel. ‘The
Joseph Conrad
was originally a colony ship constructed by the Listeners. Are you sure I can’t take that bag? No problem. Its route takes it from the Listeners’

original home, Viam, forty-eight light years from Earth, all the way out to the rim of the Empire and back again, in a continual two-year journey. It is ten kilometres in diameter, with a population varying between three and five thousand people. Two thousand are permanent residents, primarily merchants and their families. The metaship is designed to resemble an actual city as much as possible, with a dome and an artificial sky.’

‘Who were the Listeners?’ asked Roz.

‘No one knows,’ said the bot. ‘They fled their planet before the Empire reached it, leaving three unfinished colony ships in orbit.

Landing parties found numerous radio and hyperwave telescope 155

arrays. Apparently the Listeners had been listening to the human emission sphere, and they didn’t like what they heard. The Listeners’ planet was terraformed shortly after its discovery, but the remaining structures and artefacts were preserved for study.

The aliens left little information about themselves, or where they had fled to.’

‘And the colony ship got turned into a tourist attraction,’ said Roz.

‘Humans like to appropriate bits of other people’s cultures,’

said the Doctor. ‘The Draconians say it’s because humans like to be reminded of who they’ve dispossessed.’

‘Just between you and me,’ murmured the bot, ‘the word is that the Listeners grabbed the
Victoria
.’

‘The news reports said it was the Ogrons,’ said Roz.

‘Come on,’ said the bot. ‘Do you really think they could pull something like that off? Welcome to the
JC
’s main street, folks.’

Roz and the Doctor paused for a moment, looking around. It was like Fury, only a lot more upmarket; in fact, if you didn’t know you were on a ship, you might think you were under any old dome. ‘Why would anyone spend the money to come here?’