Doctor Who: The Also People (16 page)

Not that it seemed to bother saRa!qava any – why
should
people think alike. Any more than it bothered her that machines were smarter, or faster, or more efficient. It bothered Bernice and being bothered made her feel a bit guilty.

With saRa!qava's help she ordered a virgin portable data terminal from central stores, which told them ten minutes. Bernice used the time to clarify some of the terminology. 'Drones' were always people, 'remote-drones' were machines slaved to another person – ships in particular used them to hang out in places where they wouldn't fit. Remote-drones were also called 'jobbers', presumably because they did all the jobs. 'Constructs' were remote-drones that looked like animals, although never like people because that would be in bad taste. 'Houses' were generally not people but occasionally they became one. Sometimes those that changed transferred to a ship or a drone body; for some reason a fairly high percentage of shuttles were run by ex-houses.

They even had an Interest Group, the DSIG – the initials standing for Domestic Service. 'Recipes mostly,' said saRa!qava, 'and how to get stains out of vulnerable fabrics.'

The data terminal arrived via the House's freight lift. It was the size and shape of a cricket ball and covered in short pink fur. Central stores apologized when they complained and said it thought saRa!qava wanted it for one of her children. It could provide them with another if they were willing to wait?

'Never mind,' said Bernice, 'it'll do.'

Smelly thought so too and dropped onto the table to play with the new toy. 'Don't worry,' said saRa!qava as the child tried to stuff it into her mouth, 'she can't damage it.'

'How does it work?' asked Bernice.

'You just tell it what you want,' said saRa!qava. 'It's remote-linked to the network and to God.'

In a strange way the very ease of accessing the data caused Bernice the most problems. On the 'puter equipment she was used to there would have been small delays compiling such a large array database. There was hardly a gap between Bernice finishing a request and the terminal saying –
ready
. She realized that it had become her habit to use those little moments of impatience to collect her thoughts. She found herself suffering from information meltdown – like turning on a shower and getting a face full of scalding water.

'Why was vi!Cari so unpopular?' asked Bernice.

SaRa!qava shrugged. They were having a break for ginger tea and biscuits. Smelly was amusing herself by throwing the terminal off the table and lunging for it as House picked it up again. Bernice was forcing herself not to think about the database, trying to keep her eyes off the output screens that hung around the kitchen like heraldic pennants. A new screen appeared each time Bernice created another subset in her database whether she wanted one or not. She couldn't get them to stop and they were stacked three deep in places.

'It annoyed people,' said saRa!qava.

'Enough for someone to want to kill it?'

'Do you have children?'

'No,' said Bernice. 'Haven't got round to it yet.'

'But you've dealt with children, looked after them?'

'Let's just say that I've been in the same room as children,' said Bernice. 'Some of them even lived to tell the tale.'

'Have you ever got into a why loop with a child?' asked saRa!qava.

Bernice gave her a blank look.

'It's when a child asks, "Why?", about something obvious, like "why is the sky blue?" So you say because the atmosphere refracts the light. And the child asks "Why?" So you explain about refraction and –'

'The child asks why again, and again,' said Bernice. 'I've had that done to me.' Hell, she thought, I do it to the Doctor all the time.

'And suddenly you find yourself trying to explain what an elementary particle is in toddler terms and asking yourself why you're doing this and you can't stop even though you
know
they're just going to ask it again.'

Not me, thought Bernice. It's
Because I say so
and
Shut up and drink your milk
, long before we get to sub-atomic particles. I'm probably a very flawed person.

'It has to be one of the most irritating things I can think of,' said saRa!qava, 'and vi!Cari was a billion times worse.'

Why? Bernice almost asked. However it was done, someone went to a lot of trouble to murder vi!Cari. What precisely was it that vi!Cari did that got someone that pissed off with it? But saRa!qava was giving her definite
I don't want to talk about it
vibes when it came to the details so Bernice backed off.

'You haven't input ship positions,' said saRa!qava.

'You fly ships inside the sphere?'

SaRa!qava looked blank.

The trouble with the TARDIS translator, thought Bernice, was that it was so good you didn't know when you were making a mistake. 'Spaceships,' she said. 'We are talking about spaceships?'

'Not inside the sphere,' said saRa!qava, 'but close, docked at the spaceport or near the system.

I can't think of anything else that could shoot down a drone. Apart from another drone.'

'Through the side of the sphere?'

'Oh yes,' said saRa!qava. 'The ASBIG came up with a lot of new weapons for the war. Remote forced quantum singularities, controlled hyperspace breaks and something called a Pin-Stripe Cattle Grate which nobody ever talks about.'

Bernice told the terminal to give her a listing of all spaceships docked or near the sphere at the time of the murder. 'No such thing as too much data,' she muttered to herself. The terminal put up yet another screen – making twenty-three so far – and asked her what radius she wanted the search volume to be.

'Thirty light-years,' suggested saRa!qava.

So Bernice told the terminal thirty light-years, speaking the words before the sense of them had a chance to set in. That couldn't be right, no crukking way, no weapon she knew had a range of thirty light-years. Oh my God, they could take out the Daleks without raising a sweat. Non-aggression pact with the Time Lords, the Doctor had said.
Shit!
Now she believed it. Little Smelly playing
catch-catch-can
with the terminal, heir to a civilization that could move in and roll over human space in any time period you care to mention. If they got the notion to do so. Which Bernice didn't think they did except now saRa!qava was talking about a war, past tense but recent, Bernice thought. People didn't talk about the War, capital W unless it was less than half a generation back, longer than that and it stopped being
the
War and picked up a label, 'the Thousand Day War' or 'the War of Jenkins's Ear'. Something to differentiate it from all the other wars that flesh was heir to.

She remembered writing a paper about the semantics of conflict once, during a particularly excruciatingly boring journey on a clapped-out Draconian free-trader. Something about how naming a war that hadn't happened yet created an expectation that it would happen. She'd used World War III as her primary example – or had the argument been that naming the war meant that you didn't have to fight it? The Doctor had once mentioned a World War IV, did they skip III and go directly to IV?

A war against some insects, saRa!qava was saying, but everything was cool now and the insects turned out to be OK people in the end. One of them had been at the party last night –

talking to Roz of all people.

'They started it,' said saRa!qava.

Yeah, thought Bernice. Of course they did.

They tried to check the ranges by calling up data on weapons capabilities only to be informed that no such information was held in public records. 'That just means that ASBIG didn't leave any of it on public record,' said saRa!qava. ASBIG being, would you believe it, the aggressive ship-building Interest Group. 'You could always ask God, I'm sure it knows.'

'I'm trying to avoid religion at the moment,' said Bernice.

'May you be struck down by a thunderbolt,' said God. 'Oops, sorry, bad taste remark there.'

Roz woke up with the lingering aftertaste of forgotten dreams like spaces in her head. Stumbling into the bathroom she tried to wash them away with cold water from the sink and caught sight of her reflection in the floor-length mirror. There was a ghost memory of a wounding. A soundless, painless detonation between her breasts, of falling into stagnant water. She watched her reflection touch the exact spot with its fingertips and shuddered. A blaster wound, she thought, in a fatal area. Most definitely not one of her fine collection of line of duty injuries. She pulled oil from her travel kit and used her fingers to rake it through the rough untidy curls of her hair. The curls were beginning to mat near the roots, it having been too long since she'd last combed them out. She found an afro-comb in her kit and went to work, pulling ruthlessly at her hair and trying to remember a time when it hadn't been shot through with grey.

There were notes from the others scattered around the villa. Chris's glowed in mid air above the coffee pot. AERIAL RECON – CRIME SCENE W/T DOCTOR. Roz waved her hand through the letters and they vanished. In the living room Benny had left a yellow memo stuck to a pile of clothes. The note warned Roz that it was going to be hot again and that she might find these items useful. A peace offering, decided Roz. Or, having looked at the clothes, possibly a practical joke. The sleeveless top was OK, made of some lightweight cotton/silk hybrid but she had to lie on her back on the sofa with her legs in the air to wriggle into the lycra shorts. She found the final note written on lavender writing paper and placed in her blaster carry case. She recognized the spidery hand as the Doctor's.

My dear Roslyn. As you know we find ourselves faced with an interesting mystery here.

Chris is likely to be somewhat distracted by other interests. Bernice too is liable to find
her attention diverted by other matters. For reasons that I am unable to articulate, my
own scope for action is severely circumscribed in these circumstances. I am therefore
relying on you to bring this matter to a satisfactory conclusion. Try not to tell God
anything unless you have to.

The Doctor.

PS – leave the weapon at home.

PPS – you may encounter a drone called aM!xitsa. He is a friend and entirely trustworthy.

PPPS – eat this message immediately after reading.

Roz folded the paper, popped it into her mouth and chewed. It tasted of peppermint.

Roz decided to walk into town, telling herself that a good sense of the local physical geography would help maintain her
situational awareness
. Her instructors at the academy had been big on
situational awareness
, on the investigator gaining a global perception of the crime, both secular and spiritual. The crime scene, they repeatedly said, is more than just the scene of the crime. It is a space that encompasses the mind and spirit of the victims, of the witnesses and the perpetrators. It represents the amorphous and corrosive power of chaos. It is the task of the investigator to confine it and give it shape. To bring order out of chaos.

It was the routine of the investigator, thought Roz, to round up the likely suspects and mindprobe them until one of them confesses. That was how it had gone down on the street. Guilty until proven innocent, that was street adjudication. After all, the street logic went, everyone was guilty of something.

You can bet that it wouldn't work here, she thought. Too damn liberal to allow mindprobes and half the suspects were going to be robots. People killed their own kind, she knew that, not just street logic but backed up by the statistics. Wives murdered husbands, children murdered parents and scum from the Undertown murdered other scum from the Undertown. Roz was willing to bet her sister's fortune that robot boy had been offed by another robot.

Back on Earth in the mid thirtieth century if a crime was committed by a robot you went looking for its operator. The robots she grew up with weren't self-aware, or if they were they were keeping
real
quiet about it. A robot was usually just the murder weapon, a more sophisticated version of the traditional blunt instrument. But not here, she thought; here they had robots with attitude and Roz wasn't going to let her preconceptions get in the way of that fact. After all Mama Forrester didn't have no stupid children.

Which gave the lie to the hereditary theory of intelligence.

Roz knew that what she needed was that other staple of successful street adjudication – a local informant.

Roz met the woman at the point where the dunes washed against the base of the hill. Her very first thought was that her mama had spent a fortune trying to get her skin that dark. Her second thought was that she had surprised some kind of weird humanoid animal, but looking closer it was obvious that it was a human female she was looking at. A tall one with long limbs and a compact muscled torso, crouching naked in the middle of the track and staring back at Roz. The hair was matted into dreadlocks that hung over broad shoulders, the almond-shaped eyes were coal black, the nose was broad and close to the face. Definitely a human face. And yet there was something bestial about the set of the limbs, something animal in those dark eyes. There was something else in them as well, an expression that Roz found impossible to read; pain perhaps or pleading. Roz reached automatically for the blaster that the Doctor had told her to leave at the villa and wasn't holstered at her waist.

The woman pulled back her lips to bare white teeth.

Roz stepped back in shock and decided that this was absolutely the last time she ever listened to the Doctor's advice on personal safety.

And then the woman was running away, the turn so fast and smooth that Roz was barely aware of it.

'Wait,' she cried, but it was too late, the woman had gone.

Roz turned at a soft sound behind her. A flattened metal ovoid whispered past her and sped off in the same direction as the woman. 'Excuse me,' said the drone politely and then it too was gone.

Is everyone on this damned sphere an eccentric? Roz asked herself. It wasn't going to make her job any easier. Something about the woman's features nagged at her. The people of the sphere exhibited a wide range of divergent physical characteristics. She supposed it was possible that amongst a population of two trillion there could be any number of individuals whose features were arranged like the woman's. It had to be a coincidence, a little bit of convergent evolution.