Doctor Who: The Also People (15 page)

The drone asked the Doctor if he'd heard about the murder.

'Heard about it,' said the Doctor, 'I'm investigating it.'

'Well, it wasn't me,' said aM!xitsa. 'I was playing a game of long distance
brownian motion
with a GPS. It can vouch for me.'

'Did you win?' asked the Doctor.

'Against a ship, are you kidding?'

'Then why play?'

'I keep hoping I'll get lucky,' said aM!xitsa. 'It wouldn't be a bad idea if you visited me sometime soon. Our mutual friend is getting a bit frisky.'

'Oh,' said the Doctor. 'Nothing too severe I hope.'

'Nothing I can't handle,' said aM!xitsa.

'I'll drop by later,' said the Doctor.

'Fine,' said aM!xitsa, 'I'll see you then. Nice to meet you, Adjudicator Cwej.' The drone peeled off and dropped back down towards the coast.

'Who's this mutual friend?' asked Chris.

The Doctor didn't answer. Instead he instructed Chris to turn ten degrees to port. 'That should put us over the murder scene in about twenty minutes,' he said.

'What then?'

'I don't know,' said the Doctor. 'Depends on what we find. I'd like to start by retracing vi!Cari's course into the storm and then we'll take it from there.'

'Your friend aM!xitsa was the same design as kiKhali,' said Chris, 'which means it's a defensive drone. I know kiKhali said that God would have detected a drone making an attack but what if it didn't? What if a drone figured out a way of using the storm as camouflage? That's something that God or IDIG hasn't thought of.'

'Good point,' said the Doctor. 'You'd better check that out when we get back.'

Chris kept an eye on the coast. Within minutes he saw the unmistakably jumbled shape of the villa and pointed it out to the Doctor.

'We'll use the villa to mark one side of our search perimeter and use it as a reference point,'

said the Doctor. 'I memorized the relevant co-ordinates last night.'

Starting from a position midway between the villa and iSanti Jeni, the Doctor directed Chris to turn out to sea and climb to an altitude of eight hundred metres. They flew straight and level until after half an hour the Doctor told Chris to turn around and fly back the way they'd come but at half the altitude. As they approached the coast for the second time Chris thought he saw some sort of animal sprinting along the beach ahead but it was gone before he got close enough to be certain. He did see somebody on the beach. He recognized the small upright figure despite the distance and imagined the automatic scowl on her face as he waggled his wings in greeting. In response she lifted her arm in a desultory half wave before turning and walking off towards the town.

'Was that Roz?' asked the Doctor.

'Yes,' said Chris.

'Did they teach you how to do a dog-leg search pattern at that academy of yours?'

'Just the theory,' said Chris, 'in case we were ever assigned to a frontier world.' There not being a hell of a lot of open space left on Earth in the thirtieth century, even the oceans had churned, sluggish with pollution, under the grey shadow of the overcities.

'I want you to double back over our last course,' said the Doctor, 'but this time I want you to perform a dog-leg pattern, about six hundred metres on each leg.'

'How high do you want us to be?'

'The operative word is "low",' said the Doctor. 'I want us down at six metres.'

The biplane didn't like flying that low and kept raising its nose as the wings interacted with the surface effect of the water. It got harder when the Doctor, grumbling that Chris could have chosen a more appropriate aircraft, climbed out of his cockpit for a better view. He took up position on the left wing near the root, leaning with the wind, one hand hooked casually into his waistband, the other grasping his umbrella which was hooked around one of the wing's bracing wires. Even his slight weight unbalanced the biplane, forcing Chris to keep the joystick partially heeled over in the opposite direction. He had to be careful not to overcompensate; the biplane was far too eager to follow each movement of the stick. Up in the air it didn't matter, altitude gave you space to correct your mistakes. Down here, this close to the water, a careless move could flip you over too fast to correct and send you cartwheeling across the sea. Not like a flitter at all, where even on manual the autopilot kept one beady shortwave eye on the ground for you. Chris realized he was beginning to sweat with the strain.

And the Doctor just hung there, peering into the sea with an expression of absorbed irritation, as if he could whistle up a clue like a magician. 'Watch the spray,' the Doctor called as the undercarriage clipped the top of a wave. 'I don't really want to start swimming just yet.'

What was he looking for? Chris asked himself. What could he possibly hope to find that God had not? A small blue light on the instrument panel caught his attention; it was inset into the face of a small gauge below the altimeter. The needle pointer was stuck resolutely at the bottom of a graduated scale, the last third of which was shaded blue.

'Doctor,' he called, 'I think we're running out of fuel.'

The engine faltered, coughed twice and ran smooth again. Well done, Chris, not the future predictive but the present tense – we
have
run out of fuel, we
are
about to crash into the sea. The Doctor scampered nimbly into his cockpit. 'Gain some height while we still can,' he said, but Chris was already pulling back on the stick. 'I wish you'd told me sooner.'

'The French plane had better endurance,' said Chris.

'Can you see anything that looks like a back-up drive?'

Chris hurriedly scanned the instrument panel. 'No.'

'Sometimes,' muttered the Doctor, 'these people take authenticity just a little bit too far.'

They were still climbing but Chris was detecting a definite slackness when he adjusted the throttle. The engine coughed ominously again. They were probably flying on vapour now.

'Do you think we can make it to the beach?' asked the Doctor.

Chris looked over to where the coast was a dark smudge in the far distance. 'I don't think so.

Couldn't we ask God for some inflight refuelling?'

'I'd rather not,' said the Doctor. 'Asking for divine intervention is not my style. Besides, God would never let me live it down.'

The engine coughed one last time and died. Chris put the nose down to maintain airspeed. It was suddenly very quiet.

'Have I ever told you,' asked the Doctor, 'how much I hate swimming?'

'We might not get the chance,' said Chris. 'This thing is nose-heavy. We might just cartwheel when we hit and break up.'

'You,' said the Doctor, 'have been spending far too much time with Bernice. We're not done yet; all we need is a handy last-minute coincidence.'

'Such as?'

'That ocean liner will do nicely.'

Chris banked gently to avoid bleeding off too much airspeed and levelled off with the ocean liner framed with the V-shape of the stalled propeller blades. 'Watch your glide path,' the Doctor told him. 'She's further away than she looks.'

The ocean liner was big, really big. Sixteen kilometres from bow to stern, he was to learn later, a kilometre across and seven hundred metres tall. Without the Doctor's warning the scale of the ship might have fooled Chris, made him think he was closer than he really was, fooled him into a wet landing kilometres short. Even so it was not until he was close enough to make out the tiny passengers on the decks that he really got his mind around its size. The Doctor radioed the liner and asked for permission to land.

'Sure,' said the liner and lit up an empty promenade deck with a double line of pink holograms.

Chris circled twice above the liner's funnels using the hot air to gain a small margin of error and then glided into a final approach.

It was eerie landing with just the sound of wind humming in the wing braces. Promenade decks and games courts flicked by underneath, cabins and swimming pools, comms antennae and gantries, lifeboats as big as houses and landing pads with helicopters and VTOL jets parked in untidy rows. Gusts of wind rebounded off the cliffs of portholes and pulled the biplane from side to side. The joystick trembled under Chris's palm. The empty promenade deck rushed up silently to meet them. He flared at the last possible moment, putting the rear wheel down first. The forward undercarriage hit next, skidded, and then bounced twice as if reluctant to settle. Chris pushed hard on the rudder as the rear of the biplane slewed sharply to the right and skidded to a halt three metres from the end of the deck. The joystick was still trembling. Chris wondered what could be causing the strange vibration until he let go and found that his hands were still shaking.

'Did you enjoy that?' asked the Doctor.

Chris nodded, unable to speak.

'I could tell,' said the Doctor.

Bernice was trying to explain the methodology of Martian archaeology to saRa!qava and why she needed her help.

'What do you want to know?' asked saRa!qava.

It didn't seem to surprise saRa!qava that Bernice and the Doctor had taken over the investigation of vi!Cari's murder. These things were generally left to the IDIG but only because people associated with IDIG were the ones that wanted to be involved. 'Some people just love being nosy,' she had said. To make it worse even the Interest Groups were just collections of individuals with shared interests; you didn't have to
join
anything, you didn't even have to register your
interest
. It didn't matter how often the Doctor tried to explain, Bernice still found it difficult to believe that a society could function without some kind of structure. It was all so maddeningly vague.

'I need some help,' said Bernice. 'I'm looking for some information but I don't know how to get it.'

'Let me just finish with Smelly then,' said saRa!qava.

'Smelly' was an unnamed female baby of nine months, one of saRa!qava's six daughters, although Bernice had forgotten to ask whether saRa!qava was the father or the mother. The little girl was howling as saRa!qava rubbed moisturizing lotion into her plump belly. She had luminous orange eyes, red hair and, judging from the volume, high capacity lungs. Like every baby Bernice had ever met Smelly gave off the faint but unmistakable aroma of sour milk, which was why she was called Smelly. In another year or so she would be talking and would probably be calling herself something like 'Poo' or 'Yaga'. SaRa!qava said that most people adopted at least two or more names as they got older and she knew a few who had given themselves numbers instead.

The idea offended Bernice for some reason, perhaps because her identity was so bound up with her name. Her academic credentials were all phoney, she had the ultimate in no fixed abodes, but her name was her own. Before she was even old enough to separate the universe into
me
and
not-me
, her mother and father had looked down like gods and gifted Bernice with her name. A small collection of letters, a pair of syllables. A flimsy thing to build your personality around. It was all that she had left of her parents.

SaRa!qava's people sloughed off their names like snakes shedding their skins. Their identities were as protean as their society, with its non-laws and non-organizations. They discarded the past without thought and stepped into the dawn of a bright new future. And if the dawn wasn't bright?

They damn well manufactured themselves one that was.

SaRa!qava finished with Smelly who immediately stopped howling. The child started bouncing up and down in her mother's lap, waving her plump arms in the air.

'No,' saRa!qava told her. 'You're supposed to crawl today. You have to do it or otherwise your legs will atrophy and drop off.'

Smelly's bouncing became more insistent.

'Oh, all right then,' said saRa!qava. She lifted the child above her head. 'House!' she called and Smelly drifted into the air where, gurgling with delight, she began to do slow orbits around the kitchen ceiling.

Go for it, kid, thought Bernice. Why crawl when you can fly?

'Another one destined for the Weird Aviation Interest Group,' she said.

'I hope not,' said saRa!qava. 'You should see the contraption Dep is building in her room. She says it's going to fly under its own power but I'd be happier if she stuck on an impeller for back-up.'

'Databases?' prompted Bernice.

'Why don't you tell me what you're looking for,' said saRa!qava.

Bernice was planning to follow a Martian data collation system she'd used on some of her better funded archaeological digs. It involved pulling in information from every possible source, from local legends to the arcane measurements of the bio-statisticians, and compiling it into a single independent database. With that as your baseline data, you input your actual findings at the dig as they occurred and that was supposed to give you an enhanced insight into whatever the hell it was you were looking at, it being an article of faith amongst Martians that one can never have too much data. Aiyix-sith, they called it – the time telescope.

It was also supposed to take six weeks to set up – patience being another Martian trait. But Bernice was betting on saRa!qava's help and saRa!qava's people's obvious expertise with machines.

Which turned out to be a problem because machines, here on the sphere, had rights. Which meant you didn't so much as access data as ask for it – politely. 'What's in someone's mind,'

saRa!qava explained, 'is their business.' There were non-sentient data storage units but they used the same displaced hyperspace storage medium as drones, ships and God – meaning that occasionally they achieved self-awareness. Meaning that according to saRa!qava you sometimes didn't know you were talking to a
person
until that person started talking back. Sometimes the machine would wait hundreds of years before registering as a sentience. Nobody knew why.

Except God, of course. God knew everything, or at least claimed it did.

Machines didn't think like flesh and blood people, didn't obey the same imperatives that were hardwired into the messy lump of cold porridge that passed for data processing in an upright biped. Human-built machines either behaved like idiot savants or were carefully designed to mimic human mannerisms. Gone native already, Bernice, she thought, saying and thinking
machines
not
robots
. Machines here had their own thoughts, their own imperatives, motives and agendas that were sometimes impossible to fathom, even for a native like saRa!qava.