Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses (7 page)

‘But you are the mine!’

Heidt shook his head. ‘Not any more,’ he said.

*

Once upon a time, there was a terrifying weapon of high technology and fury. It was one of thousands. It was alive, after a fashion, given intelligence to make it more dangerous. It was adaptive, cunning, and hungry. It thought of itself as Son 11-21.

Son 11-21 was seeded in a remote part of time and space, the littoral plain of a rift, and there it waited and waited for its moment. Opportunities came and went, but they were wasteful, incomplete. It was programmed to optimize its impact, and these small chances were not enough. It was there to strike a decisive blow, to turn the tide of a battle, to immobilise a vital convoy, to capture a crucial messenger.

That was fine. Waiting was something it did well, part of its core identity. It settled into a tiny trapdoor universe spun off from the real one, and it waited.

And then suddenly it had waited too long.

The Time War ended, and was won, was lost. The little trapdoor universe was sucked along with everything else into the lock.

But the enemy was not contained. There were loopholes: fabulously arcane and difficult to create, dangerous to the greater fabric of existence in ways which were painful to think about, but they were possible – just. They could be forced, if one were mad enough, dedicated enough. In consequence, these eruptions when they did happen were always the action of the worst or the best, always the consequence of schemes whose scope and ambition were dauntingly vast. Arks; helix tunnels; alternate realities and paradox engines: the lock was incomplete.

That was intolerable. Son 11-21 watched single entities whisper away into the originating universe. And realised it could follow.

Its position was unique. Creating its trapdoor universe where it had done, it had woven rift energies into the web, and those energies had made the trapdoor less absolute than it might be, less stable. In the originating universe, that had been a flaw which might leave Son 11-21 vulnerable to assault from within its own trap, so it had fortified itself. But now, here, that same flaw could become a doorway. The trapdoor universe might open not out into the timelocked region, but back into normal space.

Son 11-21 reached, tore, and fell.

The passage was appalling. It was not how reentry should be. It was violent and corrosive. Son 11-21 was compromised, scrambled, damaged. Its ability to create such passages was burned away. It huddled in space, trying to repair itself, and mostly failing. Processors were vaporised, great parts of its mind simply turned to gas and ash. Its consciousness fragmented, had to be loaded into discrete systems to maintain some form of rational thought. It tried to repair itself, but much information was gone and simply could not be retrieved. Amongst which: Son 11-21 no longer knew which side of the war it had been on.

And then the TARDIS came.

The damaged mind within Son 11-21 found that it was in a dispute with other aspects of itself. It argued for patience, for repair, but the self in the weapons system was now hardwired for destruction and was prepared to accept allied casualties in the hope of punishing an escaped enemy. The war had been like that, towards the end.

It couldn’t destroy the TARDIS outright, couldn’t take it out of the universe and hold it. But it could do other things which would work as well, in the end. It struck, pushing at the TARDIS’s own temporal dislocations, unbalancing them, sucking and undermining and buffeting, forcing time to flow differently in and around the vessel, stressing the fabric of it, draining its energy. It was a new method of attack, untested and uncertain, but it was what was available and it was working, if slowly.

In desperation, the mind of Son 11-21 opened a doorway onto the TARDIS and stepped through, only to drag the feral entity from the weapons system along with it. Son 11-21 struggled with his twin as they rampaged through Jonestown, shattering and smashing, but it was only when the electrophysical presence they inhabited was briefly disrupted with jets of water that he was able to seize control of their shared body and force the feral self temporarily away.

*

Heidt spread his hands. ‘And here we are.’

‘Son 11-21?’

Heidt nodded. ‘Yes. Or maybe that honour belongs to the monster, and I’m the aberration.’ He paused. ‘Do you happen to know, Doctor, which side I was on?’

‘No. And there’s a fifty per cent chance I wouldn’t tell you if I did. All right, what do you want? Can you stop this?’

‘Yes. If you repair the mine, I can take control and stop the attack.’

‘Give you the keys to the kingdom. The launch codes.’

‘Yes.’

Christina raised one hand as if she was at school. ‘Or, alternatively, that might all be so much rubbish and you just need a hand to reset your zap gun and when we do it we die and you win.’

‘That is possible.’

‘You couldn’t just tell us how to beat your monster? Or escape?’

‘I am precluded from sabotaging my own mission. But I can engage in temporary alliances to restore my own full function. And once I’m back in control, I have discretion over whether to execute my purpose at any given time. You see?’

‘We can’t trust you.’

Heidt nodded. ‘You might look at it that way. Certainly I would, in your position.’

‘Right,’ she said.

‘But he wouldn’t,’ Heidt added, pointing to the Doctor.

Since the Doctor didn’t argue, she supposed he wouldn’t, although in her honest assessment his optimism was symmetrical with a somewhat justifiable level of lethal paranoia. Although if he were a little less determined to be gentle with the universe’s horrors, she thought, he probably wouldn’t have to do appalling things quite so often.

‘Well, fine,’ she said. ‘We’ll go back to Jonestown and think about it.’ The old puzzle?
If one man always lies and another always tells the truth…
But it was much harder if either one of them might do both.

Heidt twitched slightly. He was looking regretful, even dyspeptic. Had he eaten something that disagreed with him? Well, yes: a TARDIS. ‘That may be a problem.’

She glowered. ‘I expect we can get a taxi if your nice car is not available.’

‘No doubt you could, but my control of this situation is only temporary.’ He glanced over at the Doctor. ‘I have tried to arrange matters so that you have everything you need. But I’m afraid quite shortly my time will run out. Do not leave the house. There is nothing else on the pinnacle, and my other half has the ability to destroy the bridge at any time.’ He twitched again. ‘I must leave you. Do please feel free to look around. The library is particularly interesting. And when I return, do bear in mind what I have said.’

When it came again, the twitch was not a twitch at all, but a spasm of the body. Heidt lurched away from her, and she saw his face ripple as if he was made of water. She moved to support him, and found the Doctor’s hand on her arm.

‘Don’t.’

Heidt rolled his shoulders and twisted, and she heard things pop in his spine.

‘Thank you, Doctor. If you touch me, Christina, it may accelerate the process. The weapons system might interpret that as a physical attack.’ He coughed, hacked and groaned.

The Doctor barely glanced at her, went on. ‘You should go. Now. Walk across the bridge and don’t look back.’

‘No!’ Heidt spun in his crouch, flung out his hand. The joints were cracking and the fingers hooked and clawed at the air. ‘No, no, no! She has to stay! She has to!’ He lurched closer, his rictus face stretching towards them. ‘Damn you! I can’t say it out loud! You can’t send her away or it all comes down like wasps tearing through the web. It’s perfect now! Perfect! But if she goes then where’s the surprise? You can’t make a breakfast without mushrooms.’ He shuddered, lowered his hand. ‘Don’t make her go, Doctor. She has to be here. I have prepared… I can’t say more. I can’t. It’s happening now. I’m leaving. When I come back we’ll either all be dead or we won’t. Breakfast in the library. Perfectly all right, it’s full of spiders. Weavers, webs or woven? Perhaps it’s all the same. Go. Look. Five minutes, maybe less. Go now!’

And he stopped. Not just stopped speaking but stopped, stock still and silent, and no longer breathing. His body froze in place. She had expected some vile werewolf transformation, but this was not that. It was eerier, bleaker. He was simply absent, and his absence implied the presence, somewhere nearby, of the other.

Pah pah pom.

Well, that was not unexpected.

Pah pah pom.

Even if it was rather close at hand.

Pah pah pom.

Casual, even. Close and casual and confident. Not in a hurry. She looked out of the window, and saw the bridge in ruins, the house isolated in the middle of the pinnacle. ‘Run,’ she told the Doctor, and took his hand.

*

Christina grabbed him and said ‘run’ and then he heard it: the triple beat of the weapons system, Heidt’s other half. She was very fast, he thought. Even if she had anticipated, she was fast. He looked at her hand and saw it flicker slightly, purplish light dancing around the edges. Refraction from the glass chandelier, probably. Probably.

She was right, it was definitely time to go. This house was a puzzle, the library apparently contained the solution. But Heidt couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him what solving the puzzle would mean, so he had to work that out before he worked out what the puzzle was and how to solve it because otherwise he might be levered into defeating himself.

He looked around. There were three doors: the way they had come in, which led to the shattered bridge; a small door to the kitchens which he suspected would be downstairs, and hence, if Heidt was to be believed, closer to the enemy; and the big, bold double doors to the rest of this floor, including no doubt the library. Heidt wanted him to go there, that was clear enough. He instinctively wanted to go somewhere else, to step outside the game, but if he beat it and it was aimed at the enemy that would be something of a fatal embarrassment. It had occurred to him that he had only Heidt’s word for it that Heidt was the nice half of the mine’s consciousness, or indeed that there were two halves at all.

In the end, it came down to a choice: trust, or don’t.
Heidt knows you believe in trust. He could be manipulating you. But he let you know that he knows. Show of honesty. Show of honesty could be a ruse, can’t trust it. If you don’t trust it, and he’s telling the truth, and you lose.
Round and around and around. Finally, the question is: if you’re going to die, do you die believing in enemies or friends? All right, one vote in favour of trust.

And Christina: why was she here? She was a piece of what Heidt intended, obviously. Key. Detonator. Bomb. Hostage. Save her. Save Jonestown. Save the TARDIS. Save himself.

She was tugging on his arm. ‘Run!’

He ran for the big doors. For the library.
I am the Doctor. In the end, I choose this: I choose trust, I choose to solve the puzzle, I choose to see what’s behind the curtain.

They went through.

*

The Library was huge, with more books than she’d ever imagined. They were stacked in shelves, lying around in piles. Some were floating. It was impossible.

She stared. The Doctor was nodding slowly, as if he’d known all along, though she was reasonably sure he hadn’t.

He looked over at her with a ghost of a smile. ‘Go ahead.’

‘It’s bigger on the inside!’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is my library.’

The TARDIS library, he meant; so they were back in the TARDIS proper. Inside Heidt’s house, the room he sent them to, the room he was presumably protecting, was in the Doctor’s part of the TARDIS, the bit of the machine which was still functioning the way it was supposed to.

But if the monster got in here, that would mean very bad things, she was sure. Death and endings. She realised she despised death.

She felt the monster arrive outside, the appalling power of it. The doors behind them shuddered, but held. The noise was not that neat three-part beat any more, it was a scream, a howl of metal and stress, far too long. The Doctor winced. ‘Propulsion,’ he muttered. ‘And structural integrity fields.’

‘That sounds bad.’

‘It is.’

‘Then do something. Solve the puzzle.’

He seemed to ignite. ‘Yes! Exactly. Solve the puzzle.
Allons y!
That’s French, you know.’

Marvellous. Now he was quoting Arwen Jones at her.

But he was moving, too, talking to himself, thinking aloud the way he had before but much, much more faster.

‘Library, library, library. He can’t say, he’s trying to tell us but he can’t go right ahead and say it. All right. Full of books. But really full of books. Too full. Can’t possibly be a book he wants me to find unless there’s a clue because we don’t have time to read them all and he has to point the way. What’s not where it should be? Ludowig’s
Histories of the Dalek Imperium
ought to be there but it’s here… no, that was me. This one is…
The Quarry
. (Only signed copy in the universe. He’ll be missed.) But not what we need right now… No! Not books… furniture. Chairs, tables, tapestries… can’t be! No! Maps!’

He turned left, hurtled down between the stacks, and they emerged into a sort of side chapel, a room formed by the shelves, with a huge table covered in ancient and modern maps. At the far end was a writing table and a very comfortable-looking chair.

‘Maps! Maps maps maps, oooh, YES! Jonestown. Never had a map of Jonestown, never knew it was here, so this belongs to Heidt. (Nice penmanship. Mermaid. Other mermaid. Lots and lots of and lots of mermaids, not really the point…) Map. Map is not the territory. Not what I’m supposed to see, just a clue to tell me I’m in the right place. OW!’ Another shrieking impact, and this time she saw his foot twist as if he’d put it down, heard the ankle tear. ‘She’s been shielding me but now she can’t any more, she’s losing her grip. Aaaah! Chair! Chair!’ She guided him to the chair. ‘Yes! Chair. Chair is the answer. Oh, you sneaky sneaker! Sit down in the chair. What do we see?’