Doctor Who: The Also People (19 page)

'And anyway,' said Bernice, 'God would have spotted it.'

'Not the energy burst,' said the Doctor. 'That would have been masked by the storm. Isn't that right, God?'

Everyone looked at the furry terminal in the centre of the table which remained resolutely silent.

'Stop sulking,' said saRa!qava, 'and answer the question.'

'You said you didn't want me around,' said God.

'Never mind what I said. Could the storm have masked an electrical discharge?'

'I suppose consistency is too much to expect from somebody who uses electrochemical reactions to think with,' muttered God. 'Yes, probably. I'm going over the data-records now.'

'Assuming that's how it was done,' said Roz, 'who had the physical capability to carry it out?'

'Another drone?' suggested feLixi.

'We've checked every drone in the sphere,' said Bernice, 'and they're all accounted for. You wouldn't believe how many said they were doing flower arranging.'

'How about remote-drones?' asked Roz.

'I'd still have spotted it,' said God. 'Their power plants have the same signature as a sentient drone.'

'No one's developed a drone that can mask their energy signature then?' asked the Doctor.

'A
stealth drone
?' said God. 'What an interesting idea. If there's a drone that stealthy I haven't seen it.'

'So it's a possibility,' said the Doctor.

'A
stealth drone – I haven't seen it
? Didn't anyone get it?' asked God.

'Everyone got it,' said saRa!qava, 'they just didn't think it was funny.'

God explained that a stealth drone was not a viable option and was willing to explain why at great length to anyone who had six or seven years to spare. Bernice was half afraid that the Doctor might take up the offer.

'Which leaves the ships,' said Bernice.

'Could a ship have done it?' asked the Doctor. 'More to the point, could it have fine-tuned its weapons to the point where God wouldn't spot it?'

'It would have to be close range,' said God.

'How close is close range?' asked Bernice.

'Less than a trillion kilometres.'

Roz spilt her drink. Bernice asked how many ships that was and which of them were capable.

'The four VASs and one of the GPSs,' said God. Their names appeared up on one of the floating screens. Bernice recognized one of them. 'Didn't vi!Cari serve on the S-Lioness?'

'Yes,' said feLixi, 'at the same time as I did.'

'You knew it then?' asked Bernice.

'With a crew of six hundred,' said feLixi, 'you get to know everybody.'

'What was it like?' asked Bernice.

'Young,' said feLixi. 'Like the rest of us, idealistic. I remember it had a real talent for intelligence work. Got itself damaged during that nasty business on Tipor'oosis.'

'Perhaps that's why it was easy to destroy,' said Roz, 'because it was already damaged.'

'Damaged in the mind, Roz,' said feLixi.

'Oh.'

'Transferred to another VAS right after that,' said feLixi. 'The R-Vene.'

'Bad ship,' said God. 'Killed a lot of people for no good reason.'

'As opposed to killing them for the right reasons,' said the Doctor. 'I've always wondered if the victims appreciate the difference.'

'Wasn't that the ship that was disassembled?' asked saRa!qava.

'That's what I heard,' said feLixi.

'Do we know what vi!Cari was up to on board?' asked Roz.

'I can't help you there,' said God. 'You'll have to ask the Xeno Relations (Normalization) Interest Group about that. They handled the war and they don't like to tell me anything.'

'Why not?' asked Bernice.

'Because I was against the war and they've never forgiven me for that.'

'Don't tell me you're a pacifist?'

'No,' said God. 'I'm an extremely large target.'

'
Means
,' said Roz, trying to get everybody's minds back on the job.

'Someone with access to really big technology,' said Bernice.

'A ship or a drone,' said saRa!qava.

'Go ahead,' said God. 'Blame a machine.'

'Opportunity?'

'Same as "means" surely?' said Bernice.

'Not necessarily,' said Roz. 'Someone knew that vi!Cari was going to be out in the storm.'

'Assuming that vi!Cari was the target,' said feLixi. 'Maybe the poor bastard was just a target of opportunity. Perhaps someone wanted to test a new weapons system or just plain didn't like drones.'

'You're not thinking of the Anti-Machine Interest Group, are you?' asked saRa!qava.

'Why not?'

'Because,' said God, 'eighty-two per cent of AMIG's membership is made up of machines. I'm a member myself.'

'Let's skip opportunity for the moment,' said Roz wearily. 'Anyone got any ideas about motive?

If vi!Cari
was
the target someone went to a lot of time and effort to disassemble it. That suggests something a bit more than simple irritation.'

Bernice looked at saRa!qava who shrugged. FeLixi frowned and absently rotated his glass between his palms.

Roz sighed. 'There has to be some motive.'

'What I want to know –' said the Doctor suddenly. Everybody turned to look at him. 'What I want to know is
why
it has to look like an apple tree.'

'Hello,' called Chris, 'is anyone at home?'

'Hello, Chris,' said a small boy he didn't recognize. 'Dep's upstairs.'

'Thanks,' said Chris.

'Don't mention it,' said the boy.

Chris smiled and stepped over the threshold into saRa!qava's house. It was just like the corridor he'd grown up in. On your first visit you were formally invited in and given tea, on the second visit they remembered how much sweetener you liked and after the third, you were expected to help yourself.

The small boy was sitting on the middle third level of the open plan 'living area'. He was building a complex lattice out of pastel-coloured nodes and rods. Chris paused and asked him what it was.

'It's a hyperspace intrusion,' said the small boy. 'See – that's the boundary layer and the real world interface and that's the extension into the subdomain bubble.'

'That's very clever,' said Chris. 'Who taught you that?'

'Me,' said the boy, 'but my mama helped me with the maths.' The boy gave Chris a sly look.

'Shouldn't you be going to see my sister? She'll be waiting and she's got
a bad
temper.'

Chris wondered why he suddenly felt so nervous. What if Dep didn't want to see him? What if he'd just been a bit of fun? Just because a girl went to bed with you, it didn't mean she really liked you – did it? He remembered some of the domestic cases he'd reviewed at the academy –

people did some horrible things to their partners. He remembered his father had come into his room when he was fourteen and given him some advice on the subject. It was good advice, Chris was sure of it, he just wished he could remember what it had been.

He found what he thought might be the stairs up to Dep's room – a series of flat boards that hung in an unsupported spiral. To be on the safe side he called her name from the bottom. Just to make sure she really wanted him there. After a moment he saw her face appear in the doorway at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in an oil-stained sleeveless boiler suit. There were dirty smudges on her cheeks and her hair had coiled itself tightly into a stack at the top of her head.

She grinned when she saw him. 'Don't just stand there,' she yelled down. 'Get your barbarian backside up here. I've got something to show you.' Chris ran up the stairs towards her, wondering what on earth he'd been worrying about.

As Chris came level with her, Dep took his face in her hands and brushed her nose against his.

Then, more cautiously because it was a new thing to her, she kissed him. She smelt faintly of oil and the static charge of hair. Taking him by the hand she drew him into her room.

Dep's room occupied almost the entirety of the house's top floor and was completely filled with flying machines. At first Chris thought they were models, upscaled versions of the spaceships he'd built in his adolescence, but they were much too large. A full-size glider hung in front of the door, its wingspan stretching from wall to wall, bundles of optical cable spilling out of its open nose. An angular wing, matt black and sharply canted, was propped up against the wall. As Dep led him deeper Chris almost tripped over a transparent bubble canopy that had been left casually on the floor and avoiding that banged his head on the tail fin of the glider. He noticed the symbiote dress Dep had worn to the party draped over the naked spars of a cannibalized microlight. Other items of clothing were scattered over fuselages, comm aerials, control surfaces and reinforcement struts. Power cables snaked around old-fashioned-looking impeller units and disassembled combustion engines. Information screens hung like pennants at random intervals, most of them displaying technical specifications, although Chris did see one showing a drama – one about aeroplanes of course.

She led him past a bedfield surrounded by a confusion of shaped wooden struts to a relatively clear space at the end of the room. Tools were hung in ordered ranks from the walls, a portable blast furnace was set into the floor next to a lathe that seemed to be constructed entirely from forcefields.

Dep turned to him with dancing eyes and pointed to the shape in the centre of the cleared space. 'What do you think?' she asked.

It was as big as the biplane but with less ground clearance. The tail assembly was a horizontal plane of individual paddle-shaped slats. The power plant was mounted in the centre of an open cage fuselage but there was no drive shaft to a propeller; instead fantastically angled struts unfolded from a complicated mass of gears to attach themselves to the wings near the roots. The wings themselves were canted upwards, curving back gently like the wings of a gull.

Chris realized what it was he was looking at. 'Oh wow,' he said.

It was an ornithopter, a flying machine that flew by flapping its wings.

'It's almost ready to fly,' said Dep. 'A couple more days and we can take it out for its maiden flight. That is, if you want to fly with me?'

'Is the Empress a woman?' said Chris.

'You're disappointed,' said saRa!qava to Bernice.

They were walking along the stretch of beach north of iSanti Jeni that lay between the headland and the beach-bar. The immovable sun had taken on an orange tinge and the sky was turning a deep shade of purple, signifying, Bernice assumed, the onset of evening. Roz and feLixi were strolling side by side a few metres behind.

'I suppose I am,' said Bernice. 'You don't know him like I do. I kept on expecting him to leap out of his chair, solve the murder, declare universal peace and harmony amongst all beings and start playing Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" arranged for two dessert spoons and a chorus of groans.'

'Is that how he normally behaves?'

'Well,' said Bernice, 'sometimes, if we're lucky, we can get him sedated before he plays the spoons.'

'I knew a ship who acted a bit like that,' said saRa!qava. 'Decided to redecorate the crew decks right in the middle of a supernova. We spent a whole morning running around trying to find out where it had relocated our bedrooms and the afternoon figuring out why the star had got so big all of a sudden. Ship would never ever tell us about a crisis until it was long past.'

'Magic thinking,' said Bernice. 'It's a belief, a superstition if you like, that thinking or talking about something has a direct effect on the result.'

'Like wishing hard enough makes something happen.'

'Sometimes,' said Bernice. 'Often it's the other way round. The belief that wanting something really badly is the best way of ensuring that you won't get it.'

'Sounds like a syndrome of deprivation,' said saRa!qava.

'Haven't you ever wished for something and been disappointed?'

'Once or twice.' SaRa!qava said it easily, blandly even, but Bernice saw a momentary pain in her friend's eyes, like a small flicker of darkness. 'I took steps to rectify the problem.'

Behind them Roz laughed at something feLixi said. It was a short surprised bark, as if the laugh had been tricked out of her.

'Do you think he believes in magic thinking?' asked saRa!qava. There was no need to ask who
he
was.

'Oh yes,' said Bernice, 'I think he's its greatest exponent.'

'Isn't that a bit irrational?'

'I suppose so,' said Bernice. 'But you see with him – it works.'

AM!xitsa met him at the edge of the cove just as the sun was going out.

'She's sleeping,' said the drone.

'Any changes?'

'Lots,' said aM!xitsa. 'She went walkabouts today.'

The Doctor nodded. 'It was bound to happen sooner or later. No "incidents" I hope?'

'She ran into one of your friends, the older female.'

'Interesting. Any reactions?'

'Marked increase in endocrinal activity, lots of adrenalin and a big spike in the memory centres.

I'm beginning to see a pattern in these fluctuations,' said aM!xitsa, 'a cyclical progression. While she's asleep there are surges of brain activity that fall away when she wakes up. But they fall back to a slightly higher level than they were originally.'

'Like the tide coming in,' said the Doctor.

'Yes,' said the drone. 'And like the waves of an advancing tide, as they progress up the beach some of the water fills the depressions in the terrain of her mind. And when the wave recedes –'

'It leaves rock pools,' said the Doctor softly. 'Rock pools of thought.'

'Or memory,' said the drone. 'I still believe she's doing most of her actual thinking when she's asleep but certainly some of the higher structures are now beginning to operate on a semi-conscious level when she's awake.'

'Can you get me close enough to see her?'

'Are you sure that's wise?'

'AM!xitsa,' said the Doctor, 'if she's beginning to regain her faculties I may not get another chance. Besides, if you're with me, how could I possibly be in danger?' The drone said nothing.

They both knew that the woman was machine fast and human unpredictable.