Doctor Who: Keeping Up With the Joneses (8 page)

She could see a plain table with a pen, some writing paper, and no ink. There were stacks of paper around the chair, piled up. A manuscript. And, for no obvious reason, a saucepan full of water. ‘What’s that?’

‘Saucepan! Condensation from the cloud layer in the upper stacks. Always rains on the desk. Doesn’t matter where I put the desk, always rains. If I don’t have a container here it gets on the paper and then it moulders. And you’ve got no idea the trouble you get when psychic paper goes mouldy. Mould on psychic paper is psychic mould. Psychic mushrooms all over the TARDIS, and when you think at them too hard they try to turn into what you’re thinking about… Ah HAH! Mushrooms! “You can’t make breakfast without mushrooms.” Right! Right, what else did he say?’

She struggled. Outside, somewhere, the monster was stalking, testing. She could hear it, feel it. Heidt had made no sense. ‘“Weavers, webs or woven”?’

‘Yes! Here are the mushrooms. Trapdoor universe, the mine’s like a spider. Is that the web? We already know that, it doesn’t help! Oh. Um. Christina?’

He was staring at her hand where it was resting on the saucepan. She stared too.

The paper below was stained and brown where the water had slopped over. It must have gathered while he was away from the desk – hours? Centuries? Had time flowed slowly here, or fast, in this strange emergency? – because the paper was indeed mouldy and green, and the green stuff was reaching up towards her fingers like a strange sea creature. It touched her skin. Tickled. She smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, knowing he was, ‘it’s all right.’ She turned her hand, saw the tendrils reaching into her skin. Painless. Natural. And with them: memories. So many. So rich and beautiful and terrible. So sad. ‘Oh. Rose. You miss her, don’t you? You miss them all.’ She drew back, and the column subsided into the paper. ‘Sorry. I know that was private. It just came into my head.’

He nodded slowly. ‘It would. This is my diary.’

‘A psychic diary?’

‘Of course. It holds everything I feel, everything I see…’ He sighed, then stared at her. ‘Ohhh, it can’t be…’

‘What can’t be?’

From his pocket, he withdrew a scrap of cloth – the piece of her coat he had torn off in the car after her accident. If her clothes had healed, she supposed, she had to own that it was somehow part of her, unless everyone in Jonestown wore psychic clothes like the firefighters.

He put the cloth down on the paper and watched as it stretched out, yearning, towards the patch of mould, and the two of them merged. After a moment, the mould rustled and shifted, becoming a wide patch of the same cloth.

He said: ‘Brilliant!’

She said: ‘What?’

And saw him smile in sympathy. ‘This! This is brilliant. You’re brilliant. Ooh, Heidt, you cheeky devil. Yes. Yes. YES! Because I can trust you now, can’t I? Now that I know what the deal is. Oh, Christina – you should keep that name, you know, she can hardly complain that you’re stealing it – Christina, Christina, Christina! You’re amazing. This is why we kept talking about cheese! Cheese means mould. Glorious mould! Unconscious knowledge. And my unconscious knows LOTS. Maybe even more than yours. Ooooh, yes! Here’s the TARDIS, caught in the temporal sheer. Massive fluctuations in the flow of time inside the structure. To keep me safe she shunts them all into one place. I don’t wake up with one foot ten thousand years older than the rest of me, the sheer doesn’t stress her buttressing. Right? Right!’

He was nodding, and that infuriating charisma was pulling her in again and she was nodding along with him.

‘Ohh, but there’s a side effect. Floating around the TARDIS are lots of little spores of psychic slime mould, because the water here’s been dripping onto the paper. And inside the sheer zone, those tiny weenie microscopicy psychic boojums start to evolve! Because they would! I mean, it’s billions of years all concentrated in a single instant. BANG! Zap! And in the TARDIS there are echoes of people. People I know, people I meet. Bits of genetic material from everyone I’ve touched, memories and recollections, psychic impressions, sensor readings. And all those go into the mixture so that all that evolution is directed, pushing towards a perfect functioning dream of humanity. WHAMMO! Jonestown.’

He was holding his arms out to the vaulted ceiling, exultant. This was what he loved, she thought, more than anything. Wonder. Strangeness.

‘And you! Most of all, you! Christina de Souza 2.0! Brilliant! Evolved psychic slime mould in human form. So fast you’re starting to see your own thoughts reflected through time, getting just that little but quicker than it’s physically possible to be! And you’re all part of the same thing! “Weavers, webs or woven”! You’re one vast network of interconnected psychic mould! Different personalities sharing a single subconscious, which is why you never get lost, even when you’re in a city which was built while you were away, why nothing new surprises you, why you know how to drive even though you’ve never learned! Ooooh, brilliant! You gorgeous mushroom!’

She punched him smartly in the nose. ‘Oi!’

‘OW! Yes, all right, fair point, not the best way to put it. No, look! You’re still connected to the town! You’ve got acres and acres of space in there. You’re evolving all the time. They are. In there, right now, time’s passing again, passing so very fast!’

He was staring into her face, holding her eyes by sheer force of self. It was appalling how much self he had. She could feel it now, the edges of him, the record in his diary.

‘No, don’t look away, look at me. Think. Think, and write it down. Right. Yes. Here…’ He drew her hand to the blotter, and the layer of mould reached for her again. ‘Write! Write what you want.’

She wrote. She wanted so much. She wanted calm, and quiet, and Simon back again, and she wanted the Doctor on his way with his ankle better and his aquarium back again. She wanted Heidt’s story to end well, even – well, why not? And the monster. Well, not much of a monster, in the end. A scared thing, a fragment of a mind in control of a huge machine. Thought of like that, it wasn’t so awful, was it? A rescue cat trying to drive a car. She laughed.

She heard the door open, but she didn’t pay attention. There was too much, and she had to get it all down. Music, she wanted music, and art, and drama, and children, and she wanted to go skiing because Simon had always said they would. She wanted life. There was so much inside her she had kept all bottled up, in that vast, quiet place where she put everything she didn’t want, the lake.

‘Christina,’ the Doctor said, ‘are you ready?’

‘Oh,’ she said, a little embarrassed. ‘Yes.’

‘Good,’ he said, a bit muted, and she turned around.

The monster stood directly behind her. It towered over her. Opened its mouth.

She stared at it and realised she had no idea what to do.

And felt the Doctor’s hand latch onto hers, grip the paper on which she had been writing and thrust it upwards into the descending maw, so that both of them were engulfed at the same time, swallowed to the shoulder in the vast, vile jaws.


She expected the thing to bite down, wondered if it would hurt very much to be eaten. She felt the Doctor pushed away from her, hurled back by focused time distortion. She was alone with Heidt’s twin. She waited for the end.

And felt, instead, a connection. Psychic notepaper pressed to the flesh of the monster and bound at the same time into her skin. Contact. She felt howling, rageful things pour into her mind in a great torrent. Years of war, of concealment, of planning and tactics and ambushes and programming, of victories at great cost and sacrifices and last stands, all of it buffeted her. She hated and feared and cheered and celebrated, and was suddenly cut off in a cold, dark place, cast aside, seeing fellow prisoners slip mockingly away into the night, pursuing. Finding one. Attacking. She would win this time. She would crush, rend. She felt herself fading away.

Jonestown rose up inside her, narrow streets and old women buying fish, barrow boys and taxis and markets giving way to skyscrapers and schools. Women and men went to work, went shopping, went out on the town, went home early for a good night’s sleep, went out for a pint of milk and fell in love. Thousands of minds touched her own, calm and reassuring and vastly ordinary. What was all this fuss? That little thing? It was loud and silly and a bit childish. No cause for such a ruckus. There was a place for that kind of behaviour.


She dropped the tiny, squalling awareness of the monster into the black lake in her mind, the place where she put everything which unsettled her, and watched it sink. The oily water swallowed it down. At her back, Jonestown nodded, brushed the dust from its hands, and good riddance.

After a moment, Heidt surfaced and swam awkwardly to the shore.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome.’ She waited. He didn’t do anything evil. And, she realised, she could have stopped him, anyway. She began to take note of herself, and of her home and what it had become in the meantime.

‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘That’s… brilliant!’ And she laughed.

*

The Doctor stood in the main street of Jonestown and watched it fold itself up and away, saw the houses unravel and whirl into motes of light, saw the people wave cheerfully and then vanish as if stepping through a door. Arwen Jones the fire chief smiled a dimpled smile and faded, and he thought she blew him a kiss as she went. The skyscrapers disappeared and the road itself shifted and shrugged and became the deck of the TARDIS, plain and clean, and he was in one of the starboard passenger compartments, the one he’d been using as a dry ski slope.

There were three people standing by the door.

‘Christina,’ he said. ‘Mr Heidt.’

Heidt nodded gravely. ‘I see you worked it out,’ he murmured.

‘What? Oh, that. Yes. Well, not so hard, in the end. You made it easy.’

‘I certainly tried.’

The Doctor paused. ‘I don’t think I know this gentleman, though.’

‘This is Simon,’ Christina said.

‘I thought…’

‘Yes, he was. But he always continued to exist as part of the town. While one of us exists, we all do. It’s a bit complicated.’

He grinned. ‘Always is.’

‘Mr Heidt is coming with us now, so you don’t have to worry about the mine going off or anything like that. You could come too, if you want.’

‘But then I can’t come back.’

‘Well, no. Probably not. But you probably wouldn’t want to, either. It’s going to be remarkable. It has to do with the trapdoor universe and the—’ She stopped. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

‘It’s been seven thousand years since we last spoke, Doctor. We’ve come rather a long way. And we fixed the TARDIS for you. She’s all shiny and healthy, good as new.’

‘Oh. Thank you.’

‘A universe where every atom is a universe unto itself. And that’s just the beginning. You only travel forwards and backwards through time – don’t you ever wonder about left and right? Up and down?’

He smiled. ‘Sounds great.’

‘It will be.’

‘But I’d miss the little things. Earth, and so on. And I don’t imagine I could take the TARDIS with me.’

‘She would have to be substantially changed. Upgraded.’

‘Not sure she’d like that.’

‘Sooner or later, everyone grows up.’

He grinned. ‘Not me.’

She swatted at him in exasperation, but they were already fading away, and a moment later they were gone.

He went up to the console room and peered at the readouts. Fair enough. Everything as it should be. Copacetic. Interesting thing about the word ‘copacetic’: no one knew where it came from. No etymology, no derivation. Just appeared in the 1960s, entered the language complete with a definition. Generally agreed, but utterly without predecessors in any human language.

Which was really, really interesting, now that he thought about it.

He wondered what he was missing out on, not going with Not-Christina. He wondered whether he’d regret it, when the time came and he had to regenerate.

A universe where every atom was a universe unto itself. That was quite a lot to turn down.

Mind you, what if there weren’t any dachshunds? What if wherever they were going wasn’t the sort of place where slime mould grew on soggy psychic notepaper and evolved into Welsh towns?

And then, too: copacetic. You couldn’t just leave something like that lying around and not have a look.

I mean, you couldn’t.

It was just rude.

Wouldn’t do to be rude.

He set the controls for Ojai, California, in 1963, because there was a man there who cooked the best French Toast in the history of the Earth.

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Published in 2014 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.
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Copyright © Nick Harkaway 2014
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