Doctor Who: The Also People (13 page)

'Including me,' said kiKhali.

'And where were you on the night in question?' asked Roz.

KiKhali's face ikon vanished completely. AgRaven smiled.

'God knows where I was,' said kiKhali. 'Why don't you ask it?'

The Doctor smiled. 'The ultimate alibi.'

'What if God lies?' asked Roz.

'You have to assume God always tells the truth,' said agRaven. 'Let's face it, if God lies to you, you'll never know about it.'

The Doctor poked his finger inside the solidigram and wiggled it about. 'The brain cavity is very small,' he said.

'Most of a drone's brain exists outside of reality,' said kiKhali. 'The physical volume is really just an anchoring point for an intrusion into a subdomain of hyperspace.'

'Very clever,' said the Doctor.

'Stop me if I'm getting too technical,' said kiKhali.

Bernice refused to believe that the Doctor didn't know all about the way these machines worked. He'd asked the question, with just enough spin to make it insulting, making sure that kiKhali would answer in baby talk easy enough for even an archaeologist with an imaginary professorship to understand. It could be the Doctor's way of telling Bernice and Roz to pay attention, like a flagged item in a stream of data – listen up, children, this is important. Could this murder be the reason they had come here? Time was, she thought, the Doctor took an interest in such things because he happened to be on the spot. Nowadays she assumed it was the other way round.

KiKhali was getting technical, talking about double recurved spirals in imaginary time. The Doctor listened with an expression of polite interest. Roz was watching agRaven with narrowed eyes. AgRaven in turn looked bored and deeply uninterested as kiKhali droned on about the esoteric nature of hyperspace.

KiKhali had to know that the Doctor knew all about this stuff but did the machine know that the Doctor knew it knew? Trying to second-guess the Doctor was a fast track to a migraine and that was when you were
on
the Doctor's side.

Bernice wondered why having your brains in hyperspace might be important. Perhaps the monsters would be coming from that direction. She found it frighteningly easy to populate hyperspace with monsters; she'd run into a few of them herself. Let's face it, running into monsters was definitely not a problem when you travelled with the Doctor. It had been her fantasy when they'd been staying in the house on Allen Road that the Doctor had a secretarial service, one of those video-phone graphic constructs that took the place of ansaphones in the early twenty-first century. She imagined it would be programmed to deal with monsters –
I'm
sorry, the Doctor is not available right now. Please leave your name and the planet you wish to
invade at the tone and the Doctor will get back to you.
If you were a
real
unlucky monster.

Roz asked kiKhali how smart vi!Cari had been.

'Vi!Cari was rated an eight point three,' said the drone. 'That's twenty times smarter than you are.'

That was an insult. Bernice thought. No mistaking kiKhali's delivery. Not like the way these people called you a barbarian; that was just a statement of fact not an insult. I'm a machine, kiKhali was saying to Roz, and I can beat you at chess with one arm tied behind my back. Saying this to a woman who claimed she had once disassembled a securitybot for answering back. Said she'd done the deed with a plasma torch. Better be careful, kiKhali, me old cock, or you might just get to find out how much of a barbarian Roz really is.

'It's not what you've got,' said Roz pleasantly, 'it's what you do with it.'

AgRaven laughed at that and Bernice breathed out.

The Doctor stepped in at that point, asking questions about how much of a data record God really had of the murder and whether it was too much trouble to have it transferred to the villa's own memory. It was all pertinent stuff but Bernice got the strange impression that the Doctor was just asking these questions on automatic pilot. As if, having now talked his way into a leading role in the investigation, he was just going through the motions. Bernice did not find that comforting at all.

KiKhali was swearing out loud, presumably for agRaven's benefit. 'Meatbrained, dysfunctional, gland-debilitated organo-fascist,' hissed the machine.

AgRaven sat down in the closest comfy-field and watched kiKhali as it twitched from one side of the travel capsule to the other. The indicator panel showed that they'd reached the main transverse transport tunnel in the base material and were accelerating to a cruising speed of nine kilometres a second. There was no sensation of movement.

KiKhali lapsed into silence.

'Have you finished?' asked agRaven. 'You shouldn't have let them upset you so much. They're only barbarians.'

'Barbarian!' said kiKhali. 'That woman was so primitive she should have been wearing a skull necklace. God shouldn't let
animals
like that wander around the sphere.'

AgRaven was genuinely shocked. 'KiKhali,' she said, 'that was beneath you. You're just upset because she insulted your intelligence.'

'You liked that line,' said kiKhali. 'I saw you smiling. I bet you wish you'd thought that one up yourself.'

'Won't stop me using it in future,' said agRaven.

'I can't believe we just handed the whole investigation over to a bunch of retrogrades.'

'You include the Doctor in that category?' asked agRaven.

The drone shifted slightly. Many drones cultivated little non-verbal mannerisms like that when talking to non-machines – adding, or so they claimed, an extra layer of subtlety to their conversation. AgRaven had worked with kiKhali long enough to know that such a twitch in its movement was an indication of uneasiness. She suspected that they were as much a polite fiction as the face ikons which were supposed to mirror a machine's mood.

'Especially the Doctor,' said kiKhali.

'Perhaps God's involved him on purpose,' said agRaven. 'Entangling him in this murder may force him into a pro-active posture. That should help God gather more data for a profile and that's bound to facilitate further extrapolation of Time Lord culture and intentions.'

'I love it when you talk like a machine,' said kiKhali.

'Especially since he's brought people with him this time. They might not be as careful as he is.'

'I just wonder if it's worth the aggravation.'

'Don't you want the secret of time travel?'

'I have a serious moral objection to time travel,' said kiKhali. 'I don't like the idea of what it might do to the exercise of free will. If you know what's going to happen in the future then your actions become pre-ordained.'

'Didn't stop the Temporal Interest Group's experiments, did it?'

'That was just power politics,' said the drone. 'They got it, so we gotta have it. Besides the TIG

were looking for valuable spin-off technologies, trans-dimensional engineering, that sort of thing.'

'God said it was a treaty violation.'

'Opinions differ. I for one don't think the Time Lords have been entirely honest in their dealings with us. We still don't have a delegation on Gallifrey, we don't even know whether we're dealing with people from our relative past or future, we don't even know whether this "Doctor" is the same as the last one. In fact, we know much less about the Time Lords than they know about us.

Strategically, that's a serious disadvantage.'

'You're just a militaristic hawk at heart, aren't you?'

'Built that way,' said kiKhali.

Bernice waited for Chris and Dep to disappear upstairs before leaning over and asking Roz exactly why she felt the need to constantly antagonize complete strangers. Roz gave her little twisted half smile.

'Because it was easy,' she said.

'You mean, because they were aliens.'

'I don't like being interrogated,' said Roz, 'especially, by amateurs.'

'That's a classic, Roz,' said Bernice, sharper than she meant to. 'Paranoia is often a side-effect of xenophobia.'

Roz stood up forcing Bernice to step back out of her way. 'Bernice,' she said, 'I'm tired and I don't want to have this conversation. We were being questioned whether you like it or not. That robot probably had a dozen varieties of scanner trained on us.'

'You said they were cops,' said Bernice. 'Didn't you used to question people? Or is there one rule for you –'

'At least when I suspected someone of a crime they knew about it,' said Roz. 'I didn't stroll in all friendly like and pretend I was on a social call.'

'What makes you think we were suspects?'

'Of course we were suspects,' said Roz wearily. 'A robot gets destroyed the day we arrive and within six kilometres of where we're staying. I said they were amateurs, I didn't say they were stupid. Now if you don't mind?' Roz brushed past Bernice and headed for the stairs.

'And the winner, this year, of the much coveted Ace memorial award for tact and diplomacy in an interpersonal relationship is Bernice Summerfield.' Bernice turned to face the Doctor. 'I'd like to take this opportunity to thank my right foot and of course my mouth, without which none of this would have been possible.'

The Doctor smiled.

'Do you think I should go after her?' she asked.

'I doubt that would be a good idea,' said the Doctor. 'Roz has a lot on her mind at the moment.'

'Such as?'

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'judging from the faint but indicative discoloration of her iris, I'd say –

most of her life.'

'In her iris? Well, I never, who'd have guessed it,' said Bernice. 'You're not going to explain that, are you?'

'She'll feel better tomorrow,' said the Doctor.

'I don't think Roz ever feels better,' said Bernice. 'Just less worse.'

Something dark and spherical shot past the window. 'Is that Chris's airborne boudoir?' asked Bernice.

The Doctor nodded. Together they stepped out onto the balcony and watched the sphere as it shot out over the ocean and accelerated into the distance, the light from Whynot gleaming dully off its sides.

'Well,' – said Bernice, 'at least someone's happy.'

They stood together until the bedroom had vanished into the darkness. She considered asking the Doctor whether there was something going on that she should know about but decided that it would be a waste of breath. She went upstairs, leaving the Doctor alone on the balcony.

After a brief tussle with the suspensor pool Bernice sat up in bed and tried to write up the day's events in her diary but she seemed to have little enthusiasm left over from the party. She told House to turn the lights out and wake her in nine hours with a cup of coffee. The spat with Roz bothered her; she had too many memories of what she thought of as the
difficult
period with Ace.

She didn't want a repeat of that.

Bernice could remember the exact moment when the woman who ate pizza and compared nipple sizes had vanished. She'd seen Roz's eyes change so suddenly it was as if something physical, a metal shutter, had slammed down behind them shutting everything in. They had become watchful eyes, suspicious and careful eyes that betrayed nothing. They were eyes that could calmly look over a mutilated corpse, looking for this detail or that or examine a grieving widow's face for some small sign of deception.

Lying in her bed with the patchwork quilt wrapped tightly around her, Bernice suddenly realized what Adjudicator Forrester meant when she spoke of 'cop eyes'.

God is watching over you, thought the Doctor. Walk slow, talk slow, act dumb. God's very bright, mustn't forget that, very bright indeed. Perhaps even brighter? Well, let's not get carried away.

Bright and learning fast but not as experienced, didn't have the same brutal teachers I did. Still, High Council is scared of these people, only real threat to Gallifreyan supremacy and pro-active with it. Scared enough to renege on the treaty. Has God figured that out yet? Lucky that their material bent mitigates against time-travel but important not to underestimate them. High Council would have time-looped them but the probability was that they would have escaped
and
used the experience to make the theoretical jump to a temporal technology. Dangerous. An integrated machine/human society – laugh in the face of the Daleks, drop ice cubes down the vest of fear.

Keep them out of Mutter's spiral, away from the time/space nexus and, by everything that is sacred, away from Earth. So far they've adhered to the treaty's secret protocols even if the Time Lords have not. Have I made a mistake coming here? Was a mistake for sure to involve aM!xitsa.

Still the murder is good, keep God off-balance, keep Bernice off-balance and give Roz something to do. Keep everyone's attention away from that
thing
at the cove. Hard sometimes to do the right thing; the lesser of two evils is still an evil. Should have destroyed it when I first realized, should have let Ace deal with it in Paris. But then
Ship
might have killed me for certain and a king/queen swap is a losing gambit in any variation you care to mention. Old hologram chess set in the TARDIS attic, one whose pieces fought short doomed battles when they were taken. Played a game against Melanie, tinny little voices screaming in triumph and pain. Got so distracted that I lost the match. Scared to make the winning moves in case I lost a pawn. Lost them all in the end, mate in thirty-seven. Lesson in that but not a pleasant one.

God is watching, the air has ears, the water has a nose. Doctor sings the blues,
I was born
under a bad sign, if it wasn't for bad luck I would have no luck at all.
That dark 3 a.m. place with Nietzsche talking about the abyss, superman and monsters. I've looked into all of them and found I was already there. Davros's eyes staring back at me from the mirror. I condemned the Brigadier for sealing up the Silurians. Me, steeped in the blood of Skaro up to my elbows, who would have guessed that Daleks had so much blood in them?
Out, damned spot.
Promised Bernice a nice simple adventure this time; turn up somewhere and do what's right. Knew I was lying even as I set the co-ordinates. Never were any simple adventures. I was just too naive to realize it.