Doctor Who: The Also People (27 page)

'Did you tell God?'

'You're joking. Getting away from God was one of the reasons I became a fish in the first place.

Look, it's nice chatting with you but I need to be off now.'

'Is there any way I can contact you again?'

'Nah,' said the fish. 'I'm planning to migrate right around the Endless Sea, then I'll get some feet and explore the interface a bit. See you.'

The fish ducked back under the water and swam away.

The Doctor stood up and brushed the stray crumbs off his sleeves.

He doubted vi!Cari would have used a force-bomb to wipe out beRut's mural; its internal weapons would have been easily sufficient for the task. If he remembered his briefing documents correctly, a force-bomb would consist of a one-shot forcefield generator wrapped around a tiny memory core. Small enough to escape detection by God, providing God wasn't watching carefully.

Its range was probably unlimited but he couldn't help thinking that whoever had launched it had been close to iSanti Jeni.

He should probably speak to Roz about it, along with some of the other things the ships had let slip. Only he'd better wait until the following morning when she'd be feeling a little less poorly.

The Doctor rubbed his hands together as he walked towards the esplanade. He could hear music, someone playing a guitar with nine strings. That should be worth investigating. Squares of brightly coloured silk began to appear between his hands, knotted at the ends to form a long string. The Doctor made a swift pass with the scarves and then disappeared them.

He'd done enough for truth, justice and universal peace for one day; it was time to relax. He held out his arm and wasn't at all surprised when a small white bird fluttered down to land on his hand.

'How would you like to be in show business?' he asked it.

Hyper-lude

From the diary of Prof. Bernice Summerfield

I have to admit I walked right into it, a classic Doctor trap. All those times I've accused him of holding life cheap, of manipulating people like chess pieces, of being an inhuman monster that puts desperate expediency ahead of human morality. How was I to know that he was actually
listening
! I have no one to blame but myself.

AM!xitsa (or however you spell it) took me to see her this morning. I watched her running along the beach like some graceful bipedal animal, like the leopards I have seen in the simulations. You could feel it, even from a distance, the sensuality of it, her pleasure in her own physicality, her sheer joy as she revelled in the perfection of her own body. Perhaps the Doctor is right, perhaps she has gone beyond human now, elevated herself to some higher plane of terrible beauty and sudden violence.

In the old days in Africa and by that I mean the middle of the twentieth century, there was a rather cack-handed approach to the preservation of wildlife. It was a philosophy of containment, providing areas in which the wild animals could roam free of interference from human beings. Its great mistake was forgetting that human beings were as much a part of the natural ecology as the wild animals. It was as typical a bit of human arrogance as you're likely to find. The people that ran these areas were called game wardens and their primary task was to patrol these 'reserves' and prevent unauthorized human intrusion.

They had another task: sometimes an animal, through starvation or opportunity or perhaps just plain old genetic imperatives, would start to attack and kill humans on a regular basis.

It became the task of the game warden, these people who professed to love animals more than anything, to track this animal down and kill it. The euphemism they used to describe these killings was 'problem control'.

I read the folder while drinking a bottle of something industrial. Most of it was technical specifications, page after page of what I barely recognized as a human genome chart. The Doctor had written helpful little notes in the margin, explaining which cluster of base pairs represented which particular antisocial tendency or superhuman capability. The last third of the folder contained details of how she was supposed to have been trained; an entire base was being built on Titan under conditions of strict secrecy. The security measures were impressive, most of them aimed at preventing anything escaping. I got the distinct impression that her makers didn't really know what it was they were creating. Just mixed up a cocktail of the worst aspects of humanity and hoped for the best.

I guess the joke's on me, isn't it, Doctor? I keep looking for some sign of the young woman I thought was Kadiatu and finding the animal staring back. I won't let you do this to me – she has to live. Otherwise everything I've said to you and to others was so much self-righteous poppycock.

I tried to imagine that I was telling Alistair about Kadiatu; she is his great, great, great, granddaughter (sort of) after all. She comes from a family of soldiers starting with him. All I got was a vague sense that I should buck up my ideas and pull myself together.

I can't sleep, even after another bottle of industrial. What are my options? I could leave her on the sphere, make an arrangement to have her watched. I'm sure that aM!xitsa would agree to that; there's definitely something more than scientific curiosity that draws the drone to her. No good: she'd escape, I know she would.

She knocked holes in the fabric of space-time, almost destroyed the entire universe. If I let her go, what will she do as an encore? According to the notes she automatically goes into kill mode at the first sign of danger. The first time someone takes a swing at her, bang, they're dead. And that first death will be my fault because I was the one that let her go. All the deaths will be my fault.

It's all those people I don't know that worry me. The ones that she's certain to kill once she starts travelling again. She's like a blaster with no stun setting. The inevitable consequence of my decision will be that some people will die, an awful lot of people in fact. That's a very high price for salving my own conscience.

No, I can't think like this. Kadiatu is a human being, she must make her own moral choices,
must
be allowed to make her own moral choices. I am not my sister's keeper.

Yeah, I'm sure the dead will be forgiving. 'That's all right,' they'd say, 'we were glad to give up our lives so that you could prove a point to the Doctor. Our only regret is that we have but one life to lay down for your conscience. Being brutally killed by a programmed psychopathic killing machine actually gave meaning to our existence.' I don't think so.

I'm going to turn out the light in a minute and drink something that House assures me will slap my alpha waves flatter than the Norfolk fens.

I have come to the horrid realization that maybe I'll have to problem control Kadiatu after all.

No wonder the Doctor sleeps as little as possible.

Extract Ends.

9

Cult Status

Give me a woman,

with a flat nose and a bad temper

with black eyes and sulky lips

that taste of hidden memories.

Give me a dark woman

with straight shoulders and swinging hips

who vanishes unsmiling in the darkness

when the lights are out.

Poem for a Barbarian Lady
, feLi-!xi-kat-xi

Dep is staring into a reflective hologram. It is positioned over and behind the forcefield funnel that passes for a sink in her bathroom. She is using it to help her concentrate inwards, to exercise mental control over her body. She should be able to do without the mirror; body-management was one of the first things she learnt at school along with finger painting and interpersonal ethics, but she is nervous. Outside Chris is waiting in her sleep field, a pale shape floating amongst the intricate clockwork angles of her flying machines.

She manages the thought sequence easily enough. The thought sequence becomes a message encoded as a series of pulses down the major nerve cluster that links her brain with the oversized gland that sits under her brain stem. There the message is translated into a series of complex organic molecules that are released into her bloodstream.

Dep has three ovaries, two more than her mother and one less than her father. The central ovary responds first to the chemical messengers immediately releasing a specific fertility suppressant to prevent the other two from following suit. The ovary then contracts slightly and expels an egg into the pre-fallopian duct where Dep's own autonomic immune system checks it for defects. There is no degradation of the egg, no genetic damage or rogue enzymes. The immune system signals its approval with an enzyme of its own causing the very small muscles surrounding the pre-fallopian duct to ripple in sequence and propel the egg into the fallopian tube proper. With the egg goes a wash of chemical messengers and enzymes generated by the ovary. Some of these messengers rush on ahead of the egg to trigger changes in the womb, while others cling to the egg like scaffolding around a ship, transmitting the precise codes that Dep formulated in her mind only minutes earlier.

The egg hurtles down the fallopian tube, ripening at a rate that would have a human gynaecologist reaching for her medical database. The scaffolding enzymes, their job done, detach and whirl away. By the time it reaches the womb the egg is primed, programmed and fertile.

Dep feels a moment of slight discomfort in her lower abdomen as, for the first time in her life, the neck of her womb unseals itself and flowers open.

It is much later and they hang together in the bedfield. Chris has fallen asleep, an occurrence that Dep has now accepted as an apparent design fault in barbarian males. Her hair is waving gently in the still air of her bedroom.

Deep inside her a cloud of Chris's microgametes are swimming through the opening of her cervix, tails thrashing like there's no tomorrow, which of course for most of them there isn't. A larger cloud of specialized B-cells converges with the spermatozoids, picking off ones that fail to meet the criteria specified by Dep's mental impulse two hours ago. As the first microgametes are absorbed the species-specific structure of their DNA triggers off another enzyme release which in turn trips the appropriate cluster of plasma cells embedded in the endometrium lining of the uterus. These plasma cells begin to produce a fast-acting metamorphic catalysing enzyme that over the next two hours will change the very nature of the endometrium cells and provide a protective barrier against Dep's ferocious auto-immune system.

Later.

Artificial selection has pared down the number of the microgametes to a mere couple of hundred. The surviving spermatozoids have almost expended their glycogen reserves and are making the final dash for the egg that lies nestling in the newly mutated endometrium lining. The egg absorbs every single one of them and starts the process of sifting through their precious bundles of DNA. Chris's grandfather's colour blindness is discarded, a faulty sequence that predisposes the male line of Cwejs towards late onset diabetes goes the same way, as does an unfortunate predisposition towards paranoid schizophrenia. The discarded DNA chains are broken down into protein and stored for later use as building material. The egg then proceeds to construct a complete set of chromosomes by translating Chris's DNA into the slightly different (and more efficient) format used by the people. The specific genofixed characteristics of the people, self-induced gender selection, wide band eyesight, etc., will all be passed on to a child that will grow into an otherwise exact copy of Christopher Cwej.

The egg divides, divides again and keeps on dividing until a colony of one hundred and fifteen cells have formed into a blastocyst. Satisfied that the colony will not be injurious to the body, the ever-watchful auto-immune system gives the blastocyst the thumbs-up for further development.

A chemical messenger is released into the bloodstream that will give Dep a slight feeling of euphoria for the next two hours or so. The rest, as they say, is biology.

Dep hangs in the bedfield with her face against Chris's chest, listening to the slow comforting rhythm of his heart. Now that it is too late she is suddenly struck by the enormity of what she has done, of the crime she is intending to commit. She has stolen the blueprint of his life and taken it into herself. Taken what uniquely belongs to Chris, his individuality, and on a whim made him less than what he was.

But what made it a true crime in the eyes of the people, one that could earn Dep social isolation for the rest of a miserable life, is that she has no intention of ever telling him.

SaRa!qava called while Bernice was having her morning fight with the suspensor pool. The call was announced with a discreet little chime that was on to its ninth repetition before Bernice realized it was the phone. She tried to twist around but only succeeded in getting her feet higher than her head. 'Hello,' she called.

A full-size hologram of saRa!qava rezzed up in the corner of the bathroom. 'Good morning, Benny. Do you always bathe in that position?'

'Absolutely,' said Bernice. 'I find that having the blood rushing to my head first thing in the morning helps me wake up.'

The daylight quality hologram wandered around the bathroom, peering curiously through the bedroom door and laughing at the fittings. 'This place is so old,' she said. Bernice watched in amazement as the holographic projection of saRa!qava started rummaging through the bottles on the bathroom shelf. 'I think you should try some of this,' said saRa!qava, holding up a plastic squeezy bottle. 'It's microgravity soap.'

Bernice let her fingers brush against saRa!qava's as she took the soap – she felt skin. 'How are you doing this?' she asked.

'Your House is using its manipulation fields to create a textured shape that matches my projection,' said saRa!qava. 'I can derez and go image only if it annoys you.'

'Doesn't annoy me,' said Bernice. 'And since you're feeling so solid you can come over here and turn me the right way up.'

SaRa!qava stepped over and, catching hold of Bernice's leg, flipped her into an upright position. 'Much better,' said Bernice.