So Vile a Sin (34 page)

‘I know the name,’ said Walid. ‘Are they real, then? I thought they’d been dreamt up by some of the more paranoid investigators.’ There’s that word again, thought the Doctor. The 257

Adjudicators have been assuring the Court for years that the Brotherhood don’t exist.’

No wonder Armand had been let off so lightly. ‘Oh, they exist.

It’s my belief they were behind the attack on you at my trial. The second expedition to Iphigenia was a secret mission for the Brotherhood.’

Walid consulted his DataStream again, running his thumbnail across the top of his moustache. ‘I see we had an Imperial agent aboard. She seems to have disappeared.’

‘Find her,’ said the Doctor. ‘She’ll confirm what I’m telling you.’

‘Doctor,’ said Walid, ‘if I’m going to keep the Empire safe from this threat, you’re going to have to tell me what it is. I need to know everything you know about it.’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said the Doctor. ‘Not precisely.’

‘Doctor,’ said Walid again. ‘I need to know everything you know about it.’

The Time Lord looked up from the fern he’d been examining.

Professor Martinique was standing a little way down the path, hands clasped in front of him, his face perfectly blank.

‘Good grief,’ said the Doctor.

Walid was looking at him with amusement. ‘You look surprised, Doctor.’

The Time Lord shrugged in irritation. ‘I didn’t think you’d be so unsubtle.’

Walid shrugged. ‘I’m the Emperor now,’ he said. ‘I can do whatever I like.’ He consulted his DataStream. ‘The conjunction occurs in ten minutes,’ he told Martinique. ‘You’d better hurry.’

Chris knew the routine: he expected a dungeon and fists and needles. Instead, they led him through the maze, two guards behind him and two in front, the hedges high on either side.

Funny, this wasn’t half as nerve-racking as meeting the Duke would have been.

Genevieve had been bundled back to the palace by a couple of security guards. He figured she’d been told to take him somewhere secluded, but she had been as surprised as he had when Iaomnet turned up with her weird, weird voice.

258

Eventually they came to an open area, a lawn. There were rose bushes and a white gazebo. It was so quiet.

‘Have a seat, Chris,’ said Iaomnet in her choir voice. A very scared-looking Jeopard was waiting with cucumber sandwiches.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked, taking one of the chairs in the gazebo. The security guards stood just behind him, where he couldn’t see them.

‘I speak for the Brotherhood,’ she said. ‘We picked up Ms Wszola shortly after her return to Imperial Intelligence.’ The Jeopard looked so awkward, Chris took a sandwich just to make him feel better. ‘We were dissatisfied with her debriefing. There was too much she wasn’t able to tell us. We needed a closer look.’

Chris stopped with the sandwich halfway to his mouth. ‘You killed her,’ he said, aghast.

‘She is not dead,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘She is, however, not here. Chris, we are aware of your presence on Yemaya Four in the year 2257.’

Chris wondered what they’d do if he tried to fight. They wanted something from him – badly enough to keep him alive?

‘What about it?’

‘We know that you are a latent psi.’

‘I’m not a latent psi,’ said Chris. ‘I’ve got some recessive genes, that’s all. And the cure we came up with for the Yemaya virus has probably mucked those up anyway.’

The Brotherhood said, ‘Incorrect. You have immense potential with the necessary treatment.’

‘You want to make me telepathic again,’ said Chris. The Brotherhood just looked at him. Iaomnet’s eyes and face were blank. It was like talking to a robot – her eyes reminded him of something, he couldn’t think what. ‘You bastards. You think it’s OK to do whatever you like to people’s minds.’

‘We know you were traumatized by your experiences with telepathy on Yemaya Four,’ they said. ‘You will be similarly traumatized. Your mind will open like the flower you examined.

We will learn everything about the Doctor from you, and everything you know about the Nexus.’

259

‘And then I’ll end up like Iaomnet? Just a machine to do your talking for you?’

‘No, Chris,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘Iaomnet possessed no psychic potential. You are precious. You will be the first to be liberated from silence.’

Chris stared at them for a moment. The plan was suddenly obvious. ‘You’re going to make everyone telepathic.’

‘Telepathic. Psychokinetic. Pyrokinetic. Clairvoyant.

Psychometric. Precognitive. Capable of teleportation and psychic healing. All those with the potential will be brought to fruition.’

‘You’re going to turn the whole world on?’ said Chris. ‘You’ve got another virus, haven’t you?’

‘We do not have another virus,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘That technology could not do the work on the necessary scale.’

‘What, then?’ said Chris.

‘It is time,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘The conjunction is occurring.’

‘The conjunction? What do you –’

‘Shall we continue?’ said Professor Martinique. The pepper-haired professor waited for an answer from his guest.

The Doctor sat in a comfy chair in one of the private apartments. His arms rested on the chair’s arms, his head rested against the back of the chair. It took him a moment to get his breath back. ‘Yes,’ he said.

He shifted.

His body changed, stretching and altering, but it wasn’t some kind of grotesque biological movement, just a smooth, almost mathematical change.

‘Anything interesting?’ said Martinique.

It wasn’t Martinique. Martinique was very obviously brain-dead, his empty skull echoing with the voices of the Brotherhood’s leadership. The gestalt that consulted on every decision.

It wasn’t the Doctor, either. Not exactly. He was tall and imposing and blond, but he wore black, and a brightly coloured waistcoat with a golden badge in the shape of a cat.

260

‘This is who I would have been if I hadn’t regenerated,’ he said. ‘Or one of them. He seems a very serious fellow. His experience with Fenric changed him a great deal.’

He changed again, flowing back into his own shape. Sweat was running down into his eyes. He moved trembling fingers over his brow. They felt insubstantial, fading.

Walid felt safe. Too safe. Safe enough to let his allies crawl out of the shadows in his own palace. He wasn’t even here, he’d left them to it.

‘This is what Zatopek told you,’ he breathed. ‘He must have seen the pattern of the ley lines. Learnt that one passes right through Earth’s solar system. That’s what attracted the N-form we encountered in 1987.’

The Doctor had counted twelve alternatives so far. Presumably they couldn’t use any of the timelines where he was dead. There must be thousands of those. That left all the different paths his life hadn’t taken.

‘One of these selves,’ said the Brotherhood, ‘will tell us what we need to know.’

‘There must be another Nexus here,’ said the Doctor. ‘Hidden somewhere in Earth’s solar system. There are only a few places it might be concealed.’ He heard his voice changing as the probability intercession gripped him again, flowing over him.

‘You only think you can control your pet Nexus. Otherwise you wouldn’t need my help.’

‘Who is this?’

The Doctor wore full ceremonial Time Lord robes. He lifted a hand to his curly hair. ‘This is an earlier version of myself who became President of the Time Lords.’

‘We must remember that one,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘Shall we continue?’

The Doctor looked at him as his face flowed back. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Chris shook his head. He felt as though he was being rebooted, like a primitive computer. ‘Cold start,’ he said.

Shhh,
said the Brotherhood.
Don’t use your mouth.

‘My mouth?’ said Chris.

261

Don’t use your mouth,
repeated the Brotherhood.

Chris realized he was slumped forward in his chair, as though he’d nodded off. He sat up straight.

Nothing had changed. He was still sitting in the gazebo, on a long Callisto morning, facing what the Brotherhood had done to Iaomnet.

Everything has changed,
said the Brotherhood.

Chris looked at himself. He was wearing black. Tight black trousers, black shirt with a high collar, tall black boots with four wraparound buckles. His big jacket was hanging over the back of the chair.

His normal uniform, then. He looked at the rank flash over his left breast. A balance, bright red. He was still the Pontifex Saecularis, then.

Everything has changed,
the Brotherhood insisted.

Chris listened.

There were two guards behind him. One was bored by all the weirdness, and was admiring the garden, because he’d been stuck on a courier run for over a week and it was nice to be breathing fresh air again. The other was focused, watching Chris’s back for the slightest sign of trouble, determined to do his job right for the Emperor. Both of them were Brotherhood operatives, not psis, just hired muscle.

‘What have you done to me?’ he said cautiously.

The Brotherhood said, in one hundred and seven perfectly clear voices,
You are one of us now. Not one of the gestalt. One of the
Brotherhood. Tell us everything you know about the Nexus. Help
us. Join us. You are us.

‘We were right,’ said Chris. ‘There is another Nexus. Another fake crater. On Tethys. That’s why the Brotherhood was there, in the Temple of the Goddess.’

The Brotherhood just watched him. He needed to stall for time, find out what was going on. ‘What are you waiting for?’ he said.

He stood up, pulling on his jacket, smoothing the shoulders so the red epaulettes sat straight. ‘What do you expect me to do?’

What you did on Yemaya,
said the Brotherhood patiently.

‘You’re going to do this to everybody,’ he said. ‘You know what it is and you know how to use it.’ Goddess, it was obvious 262

now, the investigation coming together. ‘No. You don’t know how to use it. Just a little bit. Just enough to twist those poor people into monsters. Just enough to make little changes. You switched allegiance from Armand to Walid when you saw which one had the best chance of becoming Emperor. Do you know what I did on Yemaya?’

He looked at the Brotherhood. Iaomnet’s face stared blankly back.

‘Bang,’ said Chris.

He reached out and cut off her connection to the gestalt.

She tumbled out of her chair, becoming a tangle of arms and legs on the gazebo floor.

‘He shouldn’t be able to do that,’ said one of the guards.

Chris turned around. He shoved with all the might of his enhanced mind. They both flew backward, one flipping over the railing, the other smashing right through the plastiwood and landing in a pile of splinters.

‘He shouldn’t be able to do that, either!’ shouted the second guard.

‘And who is this?’ The Brotherhood said through Martinique’s mouth.

‘My name is Huitzilin,’ said the man with the blue eyes. ‘And I think you’ve just made a very serious mistake.’ He reached out for the Brotherhood’s speaker with a hungry hand.

But the hand was shifting, suddenly, and the Doctor was back.

He lost his balance, tumbling from the chair.

‘We have only another ten minutes of conjunction,’ said Martinique, in his dozens of voices. ‘I think we should move on to the alternatives in which you died.’

The Doctor tensed on the floor, trying to get up.

The Brotherhood watched as the change washed over him. ‘I see,’ they said. ‘In this alternative, your throat was torn open by a werewolf. Intriguing.’ They watched as the change ebbed away.

‘Again?’ said the Brotherhood.

‘Yes,’ moaned the Doctor. His fingers dug into the carpet, as though trying to find something to hold on to.

263

The change flowed over him. ‘In this alternative,’ said the Brotherhood, ‘you died of shock while being interrogated by a military telepath.’

The Brotherhood watched as the Doctor’s existence stretched and changed, stretched and changed. ‘A long life, and a busy one,’ they said. ‘And thousands of moments where you
might
have died.’

‘I’ll die before I help you,’ he whispered.

‘Yes,’ said the Brotherhood. ‘Thousands of times.’

‘You won’t find a reality where I helped you.’

‘Again?’ said the Brotherhood.

Stop this.

Martinique joined him on the floor, open-eyed marionette, dropped and empty.

‘What happened?’ breathed the Doctor. He seemed to be himself again. It was just that he didn’t seem to be able to get up off the floor.

Genevieve wanted to go to the Emperor and ask him what the hell was going on. She wanted to know why the palace was suddenly full of strangers, why half the security guards had been replaced, and what they wanted with Chris Cwej.

Part of her mind was telling her to accept the changes as a natural part of Walid’s coronation. Of course he was upgrading the staff, of course there’d be all sorts of strange visitors. She knew she could trust the Duke, the Emperor.

Even if for some strange reason he didn’t want to talk to her at the moment. For the last week.

Part of her mind was telling her to get out, fast.

Her mother’s wedding presents had included five acres of reclaimed land in Kenya, a gorgeous candelabra, a city block in New Zealand, and a secret château on Triton hidden under one of the cryovulcanism research bases, deep in a crater that spat out liquid nitrogen at odd intervals. It had a numbered account and a robot staff and no one in their right mind would go anywhere near it. ‘The Duke’s a powerful man,’ said her mother. ‘If he ever does anything that makes you afraid, go right there. And call me.’

264

Genevieve pulled on a red suit and some sensible shoes and pocketed the keycard to the safe house. She stuffed her handbag with credit cards and added a personal blaster. She left a message in her open diary saying she was going to do some shopping on Europa.

She was halfway to her shuttle when she heard the screams.

She looked back at the maze, horrified. What were they doing to that poor man?