Doctor Who: The Also People (17 page)

After all, Roz was certain that
she
was the only pure-blood African around.

She reached the edge of the sea and stood for a moment to watch the breakers. The incoming tide was slowly obliterating a trail of footprints in the sand. 'Woman Friday,' said Roz, thinking of the classic vid starring Robert Roundtree and Peter O'Toole. She should ask Bernice about that one, late twentieth century trivia being Benny's favourite obsession.

She was beginning to sweat. It was getting hot again and the dunes had been heavy-going, even with the soft-soled pumps Benny had left out for her. The water looked very cool and inviting.
Ngizadada ngomso
, she thought, quoting her grandmother – I will swim tomorrow. Today I work under a clear sky –
Namhlanje ngiyasebenza ngaphansi izulu elizolileyo.

Umakhulu had also tried to teach her the proper walk of a woman. Goddess, she'd spent hours with a videobook balanced on her head while her mama lamented and asked the ancestors how she could have borne such a graceless child. The walk came back to Roz there on the beach, the slow steady distance-eating steps from the days when a woman might travel half the morning to fetch water. Days that her grandmother, born and raised at the Io Kraal, could no more remember than Roz could.

But it was practical when walking under the hot sun.

SaRa!qava's extended family came stampeding down for breakfast with all the decorum of a herd of elephants arriving at the last waterhole before the drought. The adolescents descended first, long-limbed and awkward as they walked through Bernice's floating screens and issued breakfast orders in over-loud voices. A squadron of toddlers flew down the connecting stairs, joining Smelly in her random orbits amongst the baking bread. Young adults, all of whom had been to the party the night before, crept in one by one and started looking for hangover cures. Bernice was secretly pleased to find that saRa!qava was sometimes forced to yell at her children just like any normal mother. In the end sheer weight of numbers forced Bernice and saRa!qava out of the kitchen and into the street. It took some outrageous bribery to get Smelly to relinquish her grip on the terminal. God insisted that it was going to be another glorious day and so they walked down to the esplanade. As they walked the datascreens lined up behind them like obedient children, an oxymoron saRa!qava insisted upon, and followed along, their images unwavering and clear even in the bright sunshine.

They chose a bistro at the western end of the esplanade where they had a clear view of the harbour. The tide had come in, the sea covering the pebble beach and floating the disparate collection of boats. Despite this the painter Bernice had seen the day before was still hard at work, standing calf-deep in the water as he patched up his mural. Bernice asked saRa!qava who he was and whether he ever stopped.

'Oh, that's just beRut,' said saRa!qava, 'and he's been working on that ugly thing of his for years. He almost had it finished last month but a micro
tsunami
washed bits of it off.'

'Hasn't anyone told him he can't paint?'

SaRa!qava frowned. The question had obviously never occurred to her. 'I doubt it,' she said.

'He's not annoying anyone and he's not exactly the most communicative person in the world.'

There were other people on the esplanade, out walking or sitting at the tables set out in front of the restaurants. Although saRa!qava admitted that you could order identical refreshments in any establishment in the sphere she was adamant that each place had its own atmosphere.

Shouts and laughter came from the harbour where a group of teenagers were preparing one of the ocean-going trimarans. A remote-drone was busily cleaning the esplanade's paving stones with short bursts of its dorsal fields. In the distance at the end of the breakwater Bernice saw a couple of indeterminate gender holding each other and necking, or rubbing noses or whatever it was couples did here. There was a holiday air to the proceedings, one that in this place, Bernice realized with a shock, went on every single day.

Many of the passers-by stopped briefly by their table to say hello to saRa!qava and have themselves introduced to Bernice. Someone the size of a man and the shape of a cockroach sauntered over and thanked them for a wonderful party last night. 'I do hope your friend is feeling better this morning,' said the cockroach to Bernice. 'Please give her my regards.'

'I'll be sure to do that,' said Bernice.

A quartet of very human-looking women walked past, wearing sun hats with outrageous brims and pushing a gigantic bath chair. Something touched her memory like the brush of a butterfly's wing. Bernice turned to ask saRa!qava who the women were but when she turned back again they had vanished. The slapping sound of the waves against the harbour wall came back before she noticed it had gone.

'Is this crude little thing really going to help?' asked God.

'If solving this murder was a mere matter of getting the right database,' said Bernice, 'you'd have done it already. Isn't that right, Mr Omniscient?'

'Please don't call me that,' said God. 'Too many people think it's true.'

'Isn't it?' asked saRa!qava. 'That's the first time I've heard that.'

'I'm just very well informed,' said God. 'There's a big difference.'

'Why do they call you God then?' asked Bernice.

'It was a joke, a nickname I got when I was still creating myself.'

'Well, if you could get off your pantheon for a moment,' said Bernice, 'you can tell me whether you monitored any large energy surges the night of the murder.'

'Apart from a gigantic thunderstorm?'

'Apart from that.'

'Not a sausage.'

'So much for that theory.'

'Is that Roz?' asked saRa!qava, pointing up the breakwater.

'I'm not sure,' said Bernice. It could have been Roz except the walk was wrong. The movement was slow, relaxed and upright, with a sway to the hips that wasn't at all like the Roz Forrester that Bernice knew. The woman saw them watching and waved, Bernice waved back. The woman strode towards them, a brisk impatient march that was so instantly recognizable that Bernice had to wonder whether she'd been tricked by the distance. All that sunlight glaring off the water, she told herself. I need sunglasses.

'How's it going?' asked Roz.

Bernice told her about the time telescope and the frustrating little gaps where the data was stored in someone's mind. Roz frowned when she heard about the ships and their long-range weaponry. She said she thought she might be able to fill in some of the gaps. 'I met a guy called feLixi at the party,' she said to saRa!qava. 'Does he live locally?'

'Just the other side of town.'

Roz asked for directions and saRa!qava pointed down the esplanade with instructions to turn right at the end and look out for the weirdest looking building. 'That's feLixi's.'

When Roz was a safe distance away saRa!qava turned to Bernice and raised an eyebrow. 'Well,'

she said, 'you don't think?'

'I'm certainly not
going
to think it,' said Bernice, 'thank you very much.'

***

'What kind of game is long-distance brownian motion?' asked Chris, hoping to put the Doctor off his next shot.

The Doctor squinted down the length of the deck, figuring out the angles. The red target puck was currently at the centre of a grid of white squares painted on the deckplanks. Chris had managed to place three of his yellow pucks in a rough line between the red puck and the starting line. He couldn't see how the Doctor was going to get around him, not without going for a trick shot that ricocheted off the cabin bulkhead and that was all cluttered by the legs of divans and sunchairs lined up against it.

'It's a guessing game that the machines play,' said the Doctor. 'They tag a molecule and try to predict where it will end up after a set period of time. At the easiest level you use a liquid, the next level you use a gas and the hardest is tracking a molecule through a superheated plasma.'

The Doctor hefted his stick, performed a practice stroke and then, with great casualness, smacked his puck down the deck.

'There's plenty of other variables,' said the Doctor. 'The time period, the exact energy state of the medium.'

At first the puck seemed to be travelling in a straight line, then suddenly it curved, described a half circle around Chris's pucks, slowed down and gently nuzzled up to the red target puck. There was a scattering of applause from the watching spectators.

Chris looked at the Doctor.

'It's all in the wrist action,' said the Doctor.

Which left Chris facing a pretty problem in regards the disposition of his pucks. To score he had to get his puck closer to the red than the Doctor's blue – which was right up against the red.

Meaning Chris had to find a way to shift the Doctor's puck and get his own in between. It had to be the puck you shot, said the rules; you couldn't knock one of your earlier pucks closer. He thought he'd been clever, planning ahead, building that barrier of his own pucks but the Doctor had sailed his blue around it. He should have known better than to try and outplan the Doctor, who always had some new trick up his sleeve. Now he had two shots left and the Doctor had one.

Chris saw a way to win but he was going to have to be sneaky.

And the first step was to get the Doctor thinking about something else. 'It must take an enormous fusion reactor to drive a ship this big,' he said.

'Not really,' said the Doctor. 'What it does take is about twenty hydrogen-burning steam turbines geared to drive four very large screws.'

'Gosh,' said Chris, as he kicked his puck into position on the starting line, 'how do you know that?'

'Oh, that's easy,' said the Doctor. 'It's the steam that gives the engines away and I counted the number of funnels when we made our final approach – Oh, bad luck.'

'Damn,' said Chris. He watched his puck settle into position – right where he wanted it. 'If you're going to use hydrogen anyway why not a fusion reactor?'

'Aesthetics, I imagine,' said the Doctor. 'An ocean liner under full steam does have a certain grandeur. Have I ever told you about the
Titanic
?'

'No.'

'Oh, a magnificent ship.' The Doctor knocked his puck up the deck. It described a mirror-image trajectory of his previous shot before nestling up to the opposite side of the target puck. Exactly as Chris had predicted. 'Terribly advanced for its day, the
Titanic
– they said it was unsinkable.'

Chris caught the eye of a female spectator who was leaning against the bulkhead in the wrong place. He made furtive little waving motions with his hand until the woman got the idea and moved out of the way. He checked the Doctor to see if he had noticed. 'What happened to it?'

'It sank on its maiden voyage,' said the Doctor. 'Tragic. Bad luck really because the idea of sealable compartments was basically sound.'

Chris swung and hit his puck with such force that it was lifted clear of the deck for the first ten metres. At first everything went according to plan. The puck ricocheted off the bulkhead, smacked into the puck which Chris had placed earlier which in turn hit one of the Doctor's away from the target puck. Things began to deteriorate from then on. The first puck hurtled off at the wrong angle and smacked into one of the barrier pucks which hit the target puck just as – Chris had by now lost track of where everything was going – another puck slammed into the target from the other direction. The first puck hit yet another puck, jumped off the deck, ricocheted off the deck railing and slammed into the target. There was a crisp sound like glass cracking.

There was a scattering of ironic applause.

'Yes,' said the Doctor, 'I thought you were going to do something like that.'

They strolled down the deck to examine the carnage. The target puck had been cracked right across its top face. The Doctor scooped it up and turned it over in his hands.

'When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?' he asked.

Chris who knew a cue when he heard one said, 'I don't know. When is a lightning bolt not a lightning bolt?'

'When it's a projected energy weapon,' said the Doctor. He tossed the damaged puck back onto the deck. 'I doubt vi!Cari found the punchline very funny either.'

6

Faces in the Water

Another dirty day is brokenly dribbling.

Gotta get my gun and blast your sibling

Down around in the undercity town.

Gotta get away before they bring me down.

Adjudicator Truth
by Hith's With Attitude

From the HvLP:
Terrorformed
(2952)

She was wading waist deep in the bile-coloured water of some nameless Undertown canal. Her left shoulder hurt, there were new dents in her armour and a vicious welt on her right cheek. The water dragged at her legs as she struggled after the metamorph. She was tired and hurt and she wanted to lie down and sleep.

'For Goddess' sake,' she shouted, 'stand still so I can kill you.'

Perhaps the metamorph heard her because it stopped running then. Perhaps it too was tired of the chase.

Forrester knew, even before the metamorph turned to face her, knew with a sick certainty whose face the alien had borrowed this time.

Her blaster was heavy, the grip slippery with moisture. It dragged at her hand as she struggled to haul her arm up into a firing stance. Her own face, bracketed in the sights, looked back at her.

The eyes were wide, pleading.

Forrester thumbed her blaster to its highest setting.

The metamorph reached out her hands to her.

She shot it in the chest.

She noted the surprised look on her face, the fist-sized hole in her chest. Watched herself tumble backwards into the stinking water.

Somebody called her name – Martle?

Forrester let the blaster fall listlessly to her side.

Somebody called her name – feLixi.

She was all right, the metamorph was five years' dead and she was a very long way from the Undertown. She was lying on a canvas blast chair in feLixi's listening room and the soft roaring was the sound of the sea. The lights had been lowered and feLixi's face was a pale blur above her.