Doctor Who: The Also People (4 page)

'That's a G-class main sequence star up there,' said the Doctor, 'just like Earth's sun. The radius of this sphere is nearly one hundred and fifty million kilometres and it has an interior surface area of two point seven seven times ten to the power of seventeen square kilometres.

That's roughly six hundred million times the surface area of Earth.'

'That's a lot of
lebensraum
.'

'And you don't have to invade Poland to get it.'

'Just how technologically advanced are they?'

The Doctor scratched the back of his neck. 'Benny, as an archaeologist you more than anyone else should know that technology is not simply a matter of linear progression. There are twists and turns, branches and cul de sacs, pools and rivers –'

'Your metaphor is wandering.'

'That's what happens when you try to describe the indescribable.'

'Or try to avoid a question.'

'Let me put it this way,' said the Doctor. 'They have a non-aggression pact with the Time Lords.'

Bernice picked up her glass and swallowed the last of the wine. Quickly she poured herself another glass and swallowed that with a single gulp. Poured another glass but left it on the table.

There wasn't any point; there wasn't enough alcohol in existence to cope with that.

'Do they have time travel?'

'Strangely enough they don't,' said the Doctor. 'They just can't seem to get the hang of the technology. They get close but for some reason it never seems to work properly.'

'Really?' said Bernice. 'That is peculiar, isn't it?'

'It is, isn't it?' said the Doctor. 'I can't imagine why they have so much difficulty with it, since they have the theoretical capability.' He grinned. 'I suppose either you have what it takes, or you don't.'

'And if you have it, you make damn sure no one else gets it.'

The Doctor frowned, as if remembering a bereavement, then he brightened again. Bernice felt he was making an effort.

'These two trillion people,' she asked, 'are they human?'

'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'that rather depends on your definition of human.' He gestured vaguely off to the left. 'There's a small town called iSanti Jeni an hour's walk up the coast. You could stroll up and ask the people there what they think.'

'Would they recognize
me
as human?'

'That depends,' said the Doctor, 'on whether they talk to you before or after you've had your morning cup of coffee.'

The Doctor knew the storm was coming long before the first clouds became visible through the atmospheric haze. He said it was going to be a gigantic one and insisted that they all gather to watch it in the living room. He said nothing beat a good storm for entertainment.

There was no horizon inside the sphere, nor was the curve perceptible; with a radius of one hundred and fifty million kilometres it was far too gradual for that. Sea and sky appeared to go on for ever until they both merged into the atmospheric haze. Despite this, Bernice found that her mind insisted on creating a sort of virtual horizon where none existed, an invisible line of demarcation mid point between the water and the heavens. Bernice supposed it gave the view the formal unity of a Renaissance painting, and allowed her to cope with the scale of it all.

Leonardo would have been proud of her.

It started as a dark smudge on her virtual horizon, then a line of black and then the leading edge of the storm was crashing down on them. Through the balcony window Bernice saw the first sharp actinic flashes of lightning in the distance. She shivered in the sudden chill, amazed at how fast the clouds were moving. It was darkening quickly; through the murky light Bernice could see brush strokes of white spray whipped off the ocean. She was glad she was safe inside.

Lightning flashed, much closer this time. Bernice counted seconds, waiting for the thunder.

There was a muffled thud behind her and the sound of a curse. Bernice turned to find Roz blearily getting up off the floor.

'Hey,' she said, 'has it got cold or is it me?'

'There's a storm coming.'

'That's what it was,' said Roz, stretching her arms and back. 'I thought I was dreaming.'

Thunder.

The first splatters of rain fell on the balcony, those drops that hit the invisible barrier in the picture window frame performing abrupt right-angle turns and splashing away to the side. The barrier seemed designed to allow the breeze in, however, and Bernice began to feel cold.

It was warmer upstairs. In her bedroom the rain clattered on the skylights. Her belongings were scattered all over the floor, just as she'd left them. The pixies had obviously not bothered to tidy up this time; perhaps they were still waiting for their bowl of milk. Bernice kicked the clothes around until she found the sweatshirt she was looking for, the one with I'M ACE AND THIS IS THE

DOCTOR block-printed on the front above a big cartoon hand pointing to the left. Ace had bought it from a silkscreening stall at the Glastonbury Festival several lifetimes ago. Bernice had one with her own name on it but the ink had run. They'd got one for the Doctor which read: I'M THE DOCTOR

AND THIS IS [DELETE WHERE APPLICABLE]. Ace had joked that she was DELETE and Bernice was APPLICABLE. Bernice had never seen the Doctor wear it.

'Benny.' Chris's voice.

'I'm in here,' she called, muffled by the sweatshirt as she pulled it on.

Chris stood in the doorway, his fair hair slicked back by the rain, his soaking wet robe clinging to his arms and chest.

'Have you seen the storm?' he asked.

'Some of us were sensible enough to be under cover when it arrived,' said Bernice.

Chris gave her a sunny smile, its effect mitigated somewhat by a lightning flash that briefly flattened out his features and turned his eyes into dark hollows. He said something but the words were drowned out by the thunder.

'Here, you wally,' said Bernice, grabbing the rag-quilt off her bed and handing it to Chris. 'Put this round you before you get a chill.'

Chris laughed. 'You sound just like Roz.'

He pulled off his robe, briefly showing the width of his chest, the hard ridges of abdominals before they were hidden under the folds of the quilt. One day, thought Bernice, he's going to make some girl somewhere very cheerful. Not her, of course; it would have to be someone with
stamina
.

It should have been Kat'laana but she was what? Dead? Not born yet?

Gone certainly, taking a piece of Chris with her. A piece of his innocence that was forever buried below the Detrian permafrost. It had a horrible inevitability, this loss of innocence. It had happened to Ace on Heaven and to herself on King's Cross Station. I went into the time machine on my own two feet and I've been losing bits of me ever since. Like the broken Dyson sphere in the Varteq Veil, all hopes and dreams shattered.

'No, no. I'm not a part of anyone's machine.'
Ace had said that, in Paris, meaning not a cog any more, not a pawn, not a
soldier
.

She couldn't bear the thought of losing Christopher Cwej. Not he of the wet nose and golden fur, the big stupid grin and mindless optimism in the face of danger. She had a premonition then, so intense it was painful. An image of an older Cwej, grim and silent on some nameless desolate plain, his face etched all over with lines of pain, his eyes having lost their lustre, full of anger and hatred.

'Hey,' said Chris, 'are you all right?'

He was watching her, concern on his big open face. Bernice touched her cheeks and was shocked to find them wet with tears.

She wondered which of them she was crying for.

It was a big storm.

They sat on the sofa facing the picture window with the rag-quilt over their knees. The Doctor produced four enormous bowls of what looked like popcorn but tasted of deep-fried plantain. Chris worked his way through two of them during the evening; Bernice and Roz had one each. The, Doctor nibbled.

The lightning became so frequent you could almost have read a book by the light. Flashes would stab down towards the ocean illuminating first one section and then another. Without a horizon to curtail the view the storm seemed to stretch on for ever. Little of the violence of the storm seemed to leak into the villa; rain was deflected by the window field and Bernice suspected that the noise of the thunder was being muted. They were kept snug within a cocoon of safety with just enough storm to make it entertainment.

Bernice was thinking about that as she sat, cosy under the rag-quilt, secure between the Doctor and Roz, eating popcorn that tasted almost but not quite like fried banana. She was thinking that the Doctor was a master psychologist to design this scenario, to create this sense of warm conviviality. All of them together inside, terrible, violent forces outside.

She glanced to her left where Chris loomed at the end of the sofa. He was leaning forward slightly, his large face changing expression with every lightning flash. Roz looked relaxed and comfortable, smiling indulgently each time Chris yelled his appreciation of a particularly spectacular flash.

Bernice looked over at the Doctor, scrutinizing him in profile.

'You're not the Doctor I knew.'
Mel this time, hesitating in the TARDIS doorway.
'You're a liar
and a user and quite possibly a murderer too. I don't wish to know you.'

Bernice had learnt to accept the Doctor on his own terms: the lying, the using and, yes, the occasional bit of justifiable genocide. He was, after all, The Doctor; you accepted him on his own terms or not at all. Meeting Mel had been a shock, a window on the Doctor's past. Through this window Bernice had glimpsed a different person, as different to 'her' Doctor as her Doctor was from the ersatz Doctor Who created by Jason's adolescent imagination. A simpler character, thought Bernice, less terrifying and more 'human'. One that could enjoy a fishing trip, a bacon salad sandwich or the sound of rain against a window pane.

The Doctor seemed to sense her scrutiny and turned to look at her. For a moment Bernice was staring straight into his strange eyes.

She looked away quickly, uncertain of what she'd seen in them.

'How much of this storm is real?' asked Roz.

'That's a good question,' said the Doctor, 'given that this is a wholly artificial environment.'

'Who cares,' said Chris through a mouthful of popcorn.

'What do you think, Benny?' asked the Doctor. 'How much of this is real and how much of it manipulation?'

'God knows,' said Bernice quietly, thinking of a different question.

'Perhaps we'd better ask him then,' said the Doctor. 'House. Get God on the phone, will you.'

'God here,' said a voice.

'Goddess,' hissed Roz.

'If you prefer,' said the voice. 'Although around here God is generally considered to be a non-gender specific noun.'

Considering it was the voice of God it wasn't very impressive. Just a normal, fairly pleasant male voice that just happened to issue from every corner of the room simultaneously. It was an expressive voice though, managing to cram nuances of surprise, annoyance and world-weary cynicism into a single word – 'Doctor.'

'Hello, God,' said the Doctor.

'You're supposed to inform me when you arrive.'

'Am I?' said the Doctor in tones of clearly feigned innocence. 'There's nothing in the treaty about that.'

'As a courtesy?'

'Well, I didn't want to bother you,' said the Doctor. 'I know how busy you are. Running the world and everything. Let me just say how dazzling tonight's storm is. We're all enjoying it immensely.'

'I'm so glad you think so,' said God. 'By the way, who are your friends?'

'Silly me, forgetting my manners,' said the Doctor. 'God, this is Professor Bernice Summerfield, Adjudicator Secular Roslyn
Inyathi
Forrester and her Squire Christopher Cwej.'

Roz twitched so hard at the word 'Inyathi' that Bernice felt it. The small woman glanced quickly at the Doctor, who raised his eyebrow in reply.

'Pleased to meet you,' said God pleasantly. 'Any friend of the Doctor is hopefully a friend of mine.'

We're on good terms with a deity, thought Bernice; that makes a nice change.

'Do you control the sphere?' asked Chris.

'Yep,' said God. 'Although "manage" is probably a better word.'

'Where do you live?'

'Quite a lot of me is on Whynot but I'm pretty well diffused. I've got nodes all over the place.'

'So you're a computer?'

'Are you a mollusc?' asked God.

'Er, no,' said Chris.

'Then I'm not a computer,' said God, with a discernible amount of smugness.

Chris looked confused, his thoughts comically obvious on his face. 'What have molluscs got to do with anything?'

Bernice leant to murmur in Roz's ear. 'Oh, great, machines with attitude.' The other woman smiled.

'Ah,' said God. 'Prejudice.'

They never did quite get to pin down how much of the storm was real. The Doctor and God got into a light-hearted philosophical argument about what reality was at a fundamental level. It escalated to the point where both resorted to logic symbols, glowing holographic tiles that got shunted around the living room at knee level.

Roslyn fell asleep again, her head resting on Chris's shoulder. It was funny watching how he was so careful not to disturb her. Three-quarters of his body remained its normal expressive self while his shoulder never moved, not even when a tremendous flash of lightning lit the world from sea to sky, illuminating a limitless expanse of boiling waves. A clap of thunder big and loud enough made even the Doctor and God pause in mid argument.

'Just a moment,' said God, and then resumed the conversation.

Later Bernice asked herself whether she might not have seen something in the sudden darkness after the flash. Just a speck of something reflective far out to sea, falling.

The storm abated, the popcorn was finished.

Bernice was tired again. Why? She hadn't done anything strenuous that day, if you didn't count trying to have a bath in a suspensor pool. Perhaps you could get tired even without constant stress; it was certainly a thought. She hadn't had much opportunity to experiment in that direction recently.