Doctor Who: The Also People (28 page)

'I don't know why you bother with this thing,' said saRa!qava. 'Why don't you just get House to replace it? Get something a bit more fashionable like a wobble bath.'

'I like a challenge,' said Bernice, unwilling to admit that it had never occurred to her that she might be able to change the bloody thing. 'I try never to admit defeat when dealing with strange technology.'

'I thought you might want to come shopping this morning,' said saRa!qava.

'I'm not sure I'd be very good company,' admitted Bernice.

'I like a challenge,' said saRa!qava.

'Feeling better?' asked the Doctor as Roz came down for breakfast.

'Why is everyone always so concerned with my health?' she snapped. 'You'd think I was planning to croak or something.' There was a bunch of flowers jammed into a vase on the balcony table, great garish purple and orange blooms on slender stalks. In her weakened condition it made Roz feel ill just looking at them.

'This came with the flowers.' The Doctor handed her a sheet of paper folded in half. 'I think you have a secret admirer,' he said.

Roz unfolded the note; the paper had a smooth, luxurious texture and was written in a smooth elegant hand. She realized with a shock that she could understand the words of the title – 'Poem for a Barbarian Lady'. It was written in Ancient American and signed feLi-!xi-kat-xi. There was a scrawled note at the bottom inviting her to a picnic that afternoon.

'It's feLixi,' she told the Doctor. 'He has designs on my body.'

'May I?' asked the Doctor. Roz passed him the poem. 'I wouldn't say designs,' said the Doctor after he'd finished reading. 'More like a full set of blueprints, a scale model and an artist's impression of the finished development. Interesting that it's in English.'

'I thought so too,' said Roz. 'Do you think I've got a flat nose?'

'Streamlined,' said the Doctor. 'Where do you think he got the translation matrix?'

'He used to work for XR(N)IG,' said Roz. 'I imagine he has access to a lot of classified data.'

'They don't have classified data here,' said the Doctor, 'just things they don't tell other people.

A contact with XR(N)IG could be very useful just at the moment.'

Without being asked, House put a mug of coffee down in front of Roz. 'That was the general idea,' she said. 'His infatuation with me will make it easy to pump him for information.'

'How are you at infatuation?'

'Rusty,' said Roz. 'But it's amazing how fast it all comes back to you.'

The Doctor dropped a pastry into a bowl of caramel and watched it dissolve for a bit. 'I had an interesting conversation with the ships yesterday,' he said. 'There's a couple of things I'd like you to check out. That is if you're not too busy being feLixi's poetic muse.'

'A lead?'

'More like a hot tip,' said the Doctor. 'Did S-Lioness tell you about the habitat that was destroyed during the war?'

'Omicron 378,' said Roz. 'You think there's a connection?'

'Just a hunch,' he said. 'Not even that really, more like a shrug. A ship destroyed a habitat and killed over two hundred thousand people for no good reason. That's enough to ruin their reputation. Because it happened during a war I think XR(N)IG changed the ship's name and classification and then buried the whole sorry story.'

'Surely God would know which ship it was?'

'Not necessarily,' said the Doctor. 'The war was fought over a huge volume of space and ASBIG

were operating shipyards away from the sphere, primarily because God objected to the war.

XR(N)IG and ASBIG could have conspired to change the ship's identity without God knowing. And if vi!Cari found out?'

'That's a hell of a motive,' said Roz. 'Better than that, a former warship would have the expertise to carry out the attack. It won't be easy to find though; for all we know it's happily settled down as a toaster somewhere.'

'You can use the time telescope.' The Doctor plonked the furry terminal on the table. 'It might help you assimilate some of the data. I finished installing it last night and I made a few modifications that should stop God sticking its oar in.'

'I thought Bernice was –'

'I warned you that Bernice might be a bit distracted,' said the Doctor.

'Bernice is doing a job for you, isn't she?' asked Roz. 'Something to do with aM!xitsa and that purebred woman. One of your devious little schemes.'

'Something like that,' said the Doctor. 'Don't you want me to tell you what it's all about? I can do that now because God's figured it out already.'

'No,' said Roz. 'You'll tell me when you want to.'

The Doctor looked at her for a long time. She met his gaze and held it.

'You're not like any other person I've ever travelled with,' he said.

'You tend to travel with nice people, Doctor,' said Roz. 'I'm not a nice person.'

'You believe in justice and you're loyal to your friends . . .'

'Christ, Doctor, what's this?' asked Roz. 'A pep talk?'

'I just want you to know that I appreciate you,' said the Doctor.

'If you don't shut up, Doctor,' said Roz, 'I'm going to vomit all over these hideous flowers.' She looked away from him and out over the sea. For a moment she thought the sky was pink with dust. 'Justice,' she said, 'lift up your blind eyes/and see how thy children have served others in thy name.'

'Speak not to me of Justice/For thou hath broken humanity on thy wheel,' recited the Doctor.

' "The Lament of the Non-Operational", the Fitzgerald translation I believe. I didn't know you were familiar with Dalek poetry.'

'My father collected it,' said Roz. 'He made me memorize all hundred and twenty-eight stanzas.' She grimaced at the memory.

'Take it from me,' said the Doctor, 'it reads far better in the original machine code.' He poked at his soggy pastry with a spoon. 'I knew a man once who used it as a libretto for an opera. Great big sub-Wagnerian score. I even heard that he took the production all the way to Skaro.'

'What happened?'

'Got exterminated by the audience on the opening night,' said the Doctor. 'Terrible critics, the Daleks. I think spending all that melleannium yearning for perfection drove them all quite mad.'

'Are we ruling the S-Lioness out of the frame then?' asked Roz.

'Not yet,' said the Doctor. 'I thought that was something you could check on with feLixi.'

'The more I think about it, the more improbable the S-Lioness seems as a suspect,' said Roz.

'If it was really that pissed off with vi!Cari over the death of one of its crew why wait until now?

I'd like to know more about who it was that died.'

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. 'You think they're related?' he asked. 'Is there something you're not telling me?'

'Nothing concrete, Doctor,' said Roz. 'I'd like to check some facts first. If I think I'm on to something I'll let you know. You talked to the mural painter, didn't you?'

'BeRut? I spoke to him,' said the Doctor. 'He made it clear in no uncertain terms that my company or my conversation was not required. In short he told me to get lost.'

'Shame.'

'And I was being my most ingratiating too.'

'Do you think he's capable of murder?'

'Yes,' said the Doctor, without hesitation. 'I think he's capable of ripping someone's arm off and beating them to death with the wet end. I'm not sure that he's capable of the kind of long-term planning involved in killing a drone.'

'I heard he's been working on that mural for two years,' said Roz. 'If he can be obsessive about his art, he could be obsessive about revenge on vi!Cari. I arrested a painter once who'd planned his wife's murder for six years. Used a binary carcinogenic on her.'

'That's horrible,' said the Doctor.

'You should have seen the medical bills.'

'I had a conversation with a fish last night,' said the Doctor. 'I think you might find it interesting.'

As the Doctor told Roz about the force-bomb, Roz felt something go 'click' in her head. A tiny section of the case, that amorphous blob with all its flapping loose ends, seemed to become suddenly sharp-edged and clear. It didn't mean much yet but like finding the corner of a jigsaw puzzle it was a start.
Like finding a little piece of the divine will
, Konstantine had said.

Thinking of Konstantine brought a short rush of unwelcome memory. A smug complacent face with flat eyes – Boss Shuster. Damn! She must still be experiencing the after-effects of the
flashback
. You're a disgrace, Forrester. What are you? Where had that bottle of
flashback
come from anyway? She hadn't ordered it and House denied it had anything to do with it. She looked at the Doctor who was stirring his dissolved pastry, seemingly content to play with his food rather than eat it. Was it one of his mind games? Perhaps he hoped that forcing Roz to confront her past would make her a better person. She discounted that theory as soon as she thought of it. The Doctor was far too subtle to resort to such spurious psyche tactics, let alone chemical inducement.

Who needed a memory enhancer when you've got a time machine.

The Doctor said something. 'Sorry, missed that,' said Roz.

'I said, if vi!Cari didn't drown the mural it does lessen beRut's motive.'

'Not really,' said Roz. 'It's who beRut thought did the deed, not who actually did it.'

'What were you thinking about?' asked the Doctor.

'When?'

'Just now.'

'My first case.'

'Is it relevant?'

'No,' said Roz. Strange that she could still feel so bitter after all these years. 'Not relevant at all.' She drained the last of her coffee, suddenly anxious to be out of the villa. 'I think I should tell feLixi that I accept his invitation.'

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'don't do anything I wouldn't do.'

'Doctor,' said Roz, 'I said I was rusty, not dead from the waist down.'

'I just had a horrible thought,' said Bernice, as she and saRa!qava rode in a travel capsule to Whynot. 'What if the Doctor did it?'

'I thought he was with you that evening,' said saRa!qava. 'Watching the storm and eating popcorn.'

'What if he wasn't?' asked Bernice. 'What if he was somewhere else and what I thought was the Doctor was really one of those texturized holograms?'

'Benny,' said saRa!qava gently, 'what possible motive could the Doctor have for killing vi!Cari?

He didn't even know the drone.'

'I know, I know,' said Bernice, 'I was just having an attack of paranoia.' She turned to look out of the travel capsule. Whynot was dead ahead. Through the swirls of cloud she could make out the Grinning Archipelago on the equator and in the northern hemisphere the two round continents of Lefteye and Righteye, both, she estimated, roughly the size of Madagascar.

God, she thought, has all the subtlety of a five-year-old in a sweet shop.

And the Doctor has a very plausible motive for killing vi!Cari, assuming that the machine knew about Kadiatu. The drone at the party, the one dressed as an airliner, had said as much and the Doctor had gone to great lengths to keep the woman secret from God. Bernice was appalled at her thoughts: did she really believe that the Doctor was capable of killing someone to keep that secret?

Yes, she thought, if the secret was important enough, if he added up the totals and the positive outweighed the negative. He wouldn't want to, he'd try to avoid it but in the end if he had to, he would do it.

Feeling suddenly cold Bernice hugged herself as the travel capsule fell silently towards the smiling face of Whynot.

The travel capsule touched down on the continental island of Lefteye. They caught a lift to the surface from the travel station and caught an open-topped maglev train across the coastal plains to what saRa!qava said was the second largest city in the sphere: me!Xu!xi-si!cisisa – The Mote in God's Left Eye.

The maglev wound its way through a landscape of meadows and broadleaf forests. To the north the land rose to become a rolling plain. In the distance she could just see the snow-covered tops of a mountain range. Apparently God had built them the year before and was still trying to get people to ski on them. Whynot was God's personal domain; here it was allowed to rearrange the scenery to suit itself and people lived on the planet at their own risk.

It was good to have a horizon again. SaRa!qava said that millions of people lived on Whynot despite the fact that they were subject to the inconvenience of having God periodically shifting the continents around, not to mention that the planet's weird orbit meant that the hours of daylight were so variable as to be essentially random. Bernice understood. The limitless vistas of the sphere were just too big to comprehend and faced with a real horizon for the first time in days Bernice realized that those vast distances engendered a feeling of oppression. Especially in someone who was born and raised on a planet. Getting away from that would be worth the aggravation of waking up to find your home had shifted sixty thousand kilometres overnight.

Or knee-deep in water. One bright morning the citizens of me!Xu!xi-si!cisisa had got out of bed to find that their entire city was suddenly in the middle of a lake the size of Arizona. Which was why Bernice and saRa!qava had to catch a hydrofoil from a terminus on the lake shore. It took another hour to reach the city.

'God disconnected all the travel tubes to the city and absolutely forbids the use of any aircraft more advanced than a microlight,' said saRa!qava. 'Said it would interfere with the ambience.'

Rumour had it that God had heard about a drowned city on a barbarian planet and decided that it sounded like
a neat
idea. God was also slowly sinking the city at the rate of six centimetres a month. The inhabitants had responded by adding an extra storey on to the buildings every year.

As the hydrofoil swept through the drowned streets, its wake washing against ruined stone and mildewed plasticrete, Bernice thought that she, probably better than any of the people, understood what God was about. The buildings had none of the precision that she'd seen in iSanti Jeni or the villa, the extra storeys looked like they had been hastily fabricated without concern for the style of the original. She was irresistibly reminded of an ancient city she'd once helped to excavate; it had the same accretion of layers over time, like a counterfeit artist 'ageing' a painting. God was trying to give Whynot the sense of history that was so conspicuously absent from the rest of the sphere.