Doctor Who: The Also People (10 page)

'Vi!Cari managed to get itself disassembled last night.'

The drone was so stunned that it forgot all about its airliner costume and stopped dead in mid air. SaRa!qava stared; she'd never seen a sentient machine, even one as young as the airliner, lost for words before. She used the moment of distraction to try to suppress the feeling of guilty relief that surged through her.

With a sudden click the drone jettisoned its costume and shot away towards iSanti Jeni, wailing its distress. They heard the muffled boom of it breaking the sound barrier before its discarded plastic wings had hit the floor.

'You could have put that a bit better,' said saRa!qava.

The space pirate shrugged. 'I didn't think anybody liked the nasty little jobber.'

'Are you saying,' asked Bernice, 'that these machines have
feelings
?'

The space pirate looked at her, appalled. 'You
really
are a barbarian, aren't you?'

Roz was doing OK right up to the point where the cockroach ate the canapé. Not brilliant though, just OK. Roz didn't really like parties; she felt foolish standing around trying to make conversation with people she didn't particularly want to know. The costume didn't help. She'd found she couldn't remember how to knot the skirt properly and had to keep hitching it up over her hips.

There was a queasy lump in her stomach that told her that she'd drunk something she didn't agree with. It wasn't her fault. These damned
people
blurred the distinction between narcotics and honest alcohol; she could have been ingesting
anything
. If she ever got back to her own time and space she'd probably have to arrest herself for substance abuse.

There was dancing and that made it worse.

Twisting figures were reflected in the polished marble floor of the capacitor hall. Some danced smiling, some frowning in concentration, some with their eyes closed, out of step with the music and off in some interior world of their own.

She remembered her
umakhulu –
grandmother – painting flowers along the sides of her small breasts while her mama pulled at her hair and cursed its failure to braid well. They were beautifying Roz and her sister in readiness for the party. Roz and Leabie were going to dance that afternoon in honour of her father's guests. Roz felt sick, terrified that she'd forget the steps and embarrass herself. She knew she couldn't dance, the rhythm just kept slipping away from her.

Her mother was intolerant of failure.

Not that
uMama
cared for the guests;
iZulu emhlotshana
she called them – blond Zulus. Not a proper purebred family at all, but one of the new generation of nobles created by the Empress, acquiring the titles of ancient Africa to dress up the wealth they'd plundered on the high frontier.

Father wanted their support, though, for one of his complicated political intrigues, wanted it badly enough to have his daughters painted and set to dancing. He was hoping to link their families in a very old-fashioned way.

She was doing OK. This was not Baronial Krall at Kibero Patera on Io. She was not twelve. She didn't have to dance if she didn't want to. She could stand around and make conversation like a civilized human being.

Then the cockroach said, 'Excuse me.' And ate the canapé.

His mouth, his human-shaped and textured mouth, split open at the sides to allow him to extend large hairy mandibles that picked the canapé from the tip of his top leftside arm. Up until then Roz had assumed that the cockroach body was the costume and the human head the real part. Bizarre, but no worse than an exotic body bepple's she'd seen at home.

Standing in front of him Roz had an unparalleled view of the cockroach's anterior cilia, writhing like two bunches of albino worms, as they masticated the canapé and shovelled the fragments into the sucking hole of his mouth. The discarded cheeks of his mask flapped loosely on either side as the cilia processed a second canapé.

'These are very good,' said the cockroach. 'You should try one.'

A wave of chemically tainted memory crashed over Roz, filling her nostrils with the stink of dirty water and the roast pork smell of burning flesh. She felt the shocking coolness of the water against her thighs, of a palm against her breast, of fingers pulling at her hair. She saw her mother's face, Martle's face, the Doctor's face, Bernice's face, Chris's face – and finally her own face, her eyes wide open and sightless, a fist-sized hole punched through her chest where her heart ought to be.

She heard the sound of children laughing.

The cockroach was surprisingly agile for such a big creature; it managed to skip backwards fast enough to avoid most of the vomit.

'Was it something I said?' it asked politely.

But Roz was already running for the door.

They played a shooting game on one of the entertainment modules in the control gallery. The module, no bigger than a child's head, projected a 180-degree panorama of misty fenland over which flew flocks of birds. Dep and Chris took turns to use a simulated .75 hunting gun to shoot down the birds. As each bird fell a six-legged
retriever
would bound forward into the marshy landscape, seize the corpse in its jaws and carry it to the hunting racks on either side. Left side for Dep, right side for Chris. It was how they kept score.

Dep had racked up two lines of birds with eighteen shots, including a couple of the smaller, faster ones which put her ahead by two points. Standing on the firing line Dep cracked open the heavy rifle and slotted in another cartridge. Beside her the panting breath of the
retriever
steamed in the cold air. It was a salt marsh; from the firing line you could smell the salt and hear the distant murmur of the sea. She raised the rifle into firing position the way aM!xitsa had taught her and waited.

The first wave of birds came honking over the horizon flying in their distinctive double V

formation. The
retriever
whined softly in anticipation. Dep held her fire; you only got one shot per round and you had to decide whether to bag one of the slower birds or wait for the faster ones that were worth more points. You could have the module download the bird's culinary template to your kitchen synthesizer and eat them after the game, complete with simulated ceramic buckshot.

The small ones were supposed to taste better.

This late in the game the birds were getting sneaky. Dep spotted one of the small birds trying to blend into the formation of its larger brethren. Sighting up the barrel of the gun she tracked along the bird's flightpath and squeezed the trigger.

Just as she fired the landscape seemed to jerk sideways. The movement was almost imperceptible but enough to put her off her aim. The birds flew on unconcerned. Beside her the
retriever
whined softly and covered its wedged-shaped head with two pairs of paws. Dep cracked the gun and ejected the spent cartridge.

'Bad luck,' said Chris as Dep stepped back off the firing line.

Dep kicked the entertainment module. 'Hey, box,' she asked it. 'What happened?'

'Sorry,' said the module. 'There was some electromagnetic interference from the capacitors downstairs. I think it was due to a static charge residue. I had to make a correction.'

'Ruined my shot.'

'It won't happen again,' said the module with machine contriteness.

Chris frowned prettily. 'Do you want to take the shot again?'

'I'll think of it as a handicap,' she said. 'I'm still going to beat you.'

'Don't count on it,' said Chris and picked up his gun.

Out of the module's quietfield the party was roaring along. The younger people, Dep's generation, had gravitated upstairs. About thirty of them were crammed into the control gallery.

She knew most of them, friends from town or the Weird Aviation Interest Group. The second entertainment module was playing something complex by aKatsia while simultaneously generating the twisted geometric light shapes that the composer insisted were an essential part of the music.

It was supposed to be
the
fashionable sound for parties but Dep didn't care for it. Perhaps you had to take the right drugs to appreciate it.

Dep snagged a drink off a passing tray and turned to watch Chris make his last shot. The gun looked surprisingly fragile in his big hands, like a toy, as he raised it to his shoulder. There was a curl of blue paint over that shoulder, part of one of the spiral patterns that covered his naked torso. Dep let her eyes follow the spiral as it curved downwards over the taut muscles of his back and further down to his narrow waist. She wondered if there were spirals hidden under his furry loin cloth and, if so, who painted them? Not Roz, that was for sure. Chris called Roz 'his partner'

and that had confused Dep at first but she quickly realized that the word meant something different from its normal usage. She'd recognized the look in Roz's eyes outside the lift; it was the same look of concern her Mama got when Dep was about to test one of her machines. What could Roz possibly be concerned about? It wasn't as if Dep was going to eat him.

Dep grinned.

At least not literally.

Roz and Martle had made love just the one time after the business with the shapeshifter. There was no rule that said adjudicators were supposed to be celibate but a certain disdain for the pleasures of the flesh was encouraged. It was part of the ethos, an adjudicator's loyalties should remain with the order, with justice, not be misdirected into the transient and illusionary lusts of the body. Marriage was allowed, providing that the potential spouse was vetted by the order first, but the rate of suicide and divorce was high. Some people seemed to manage it though: seven generations of Cwejs, every single one producing its crop of adjudicators, proved that not everyone was an emotional cripple. Not that Roz hadn't fooled around in her youth; she'd done her fair share of waking up in strange beds with a hangover and a man whose name she couldn't remember. It was just that after a while sex had lost most of its charm, had begun to seem too messy, too sticky and biological, too uncertain a process to be bothered with. It didn't give her anything she couldn't get from a three-pack of Martian ale and a long shower.

When
going over the side
, adjudicator slang for sleeping with a colleague, there were rules but they got broken all the time. Who else but another adjudicator could possibly understand what the life was like, the bodies, the aliens, the stupid vacant venality in the eyes of the suspects, the numbing day by day routine horrors.

She remembered struggling in Martle's arms as he led her back to the flitter after she'd shot the shapeshifter – a gap – then she was in the shower with him, the water soaking their undertunics. She was shaking, the worst shakes of her career; he'd put his arms around her and she'd hit him, hard enough to leave a bruise on his shoulder. Martle kept hold of her, stroking her back, her hair and face. Pain and fear became something else. Something long and slow and comforting. It had none of the alcoholic desperation of her earlier encounters, not lust but need drew them into the tangled covers of the bed. Afterwards she held Martle tight, feeling the beating of his heart between her breasts. In the morning Martle brought her breakfast in bed and the early morning edition of the newsfax. They joked about the fact that the incident with the shapeshifter hadn't even made the back page. It put it in some kind of context. Just another day in the life.

One month later Roz discovered Martle taking bribes and opened up his throat with a vibroknife. She didn't have any choice; it was him or her.

A door at the base of the external staircase banged open and a knot of partygoers lurched out of the building. From her perch halfway up the metal stairs Roz got a glimpse of glitter off their costumes as they crossed the lighted stretch of flagstones below. Their voices sounded shrill and hollow in her ears, as incomprehensible and as mindless as birdsong.

'They can't help it,' said a voice behind her, 'they've never suffered.'

It was a man, or at least a close approximation of one. He must have walked down the stairs while she was distracted. Roz snorted in disgust; it seemed just about anyone could sneak up behind her these days.

'You must be Roz,' said the man. 'My name is feLixi. May I join you?'

'I wouldn't advise it,' said Roz. 'I'm not very good company.'

'I'lll take my chances,' said feLixi, and sat down on the step beside her. 'Don't worry about throwing up on diClark; worse things happen at these parties.'

'Not to me,' said Roz. 'It must have been something I drank.'

'Someone once ate someone at one of saRa!qava's parties,' said feLixi. He was smaller than the other people Roz had met so far; his face had a reassuringly human aspect and his eyes were an ordinary muddy brown. 'I told them that it was a mistake dressing up as a roasted animal carcass but would they listen to me?'

'That's sick.'

'It is, isn't it?' said feLixi.

Roz nodded. It was really sick but she had to ask – 'How did it taste?'

'Not bad actually.'

'I take it they didn't die.'

'Who?'

'The somebody who got eaten.'

'Oh no, nothing that a couple of hours of regen couldn't fix,' said feLixi. 'Around here, you have to work much harder than that if you want to kill someone.'

The game ended in a draw but only because they both cheated. Dep started it, letting her hair creep up Chris's thigh, distracting him as he prepared to take his next shot. He retaliated during her next round, placing the tip of one finger on the sensitive spot between her shoulder blades, just below the point of her hairline. Dep tried to concentrate on the shot but her dress, symbiotically linked to her treacherous subconscious, started opening down the back. As Chris's finger traced a line down her spine Dep gave up trying to aim at the birds and waited to see how far he was willing to go. When he reached the base of her spine she fired off the gun at nothing, just for the look of the thing.

They went out onto the balcony, looking for some privacy. They leaned against the railing, facing each other. Chris's hands were restless. Dep could tell he was nervous, frightened even. It was intriguing. Gently she took his hand and placed it on her hip, the dress melting away beneath his palm. Then just to make sure he was getting the idea she leaned forward and brushed her nose against his. It was a good nose, large and firm, the touch sending a trail of shivers down her neck. Boldly, she put her arms around his neck and moved in for a really good rub. It went a bit wrong; Chris kept on trying to touch her lips with his own. Dep pulled her head back in confusion and saw it mirrored in Chris's face.