'No,' he screamed.
The real world snapped back.
Blondie's heart beat weakly against the imprisoning fingers, once, twice. The cake monster's brown eyes blinked at him in sad astonishment. His heart beat twice more and stopped.
Blondie felt the darkness enfold him, as soft and as silent as a fall of rose petals.
Mariko watched the body fall to the ground as Naran withdrew. He stared at his hand for a moment and then looked over at Mariko. Then with an angry snort he picked up the body and threw it away. Mariko could understand his anger: like her Naran was a bit of a perfectionist.
She put a comforting hand on his shoulder and together they walked to the gateway. They took up a defensive position beside the control equipment and waited.
Benny walked in from the galleria through a cone of violence. Around her the canteen
razvedka
fought short bloody combats to buy her passage. The KGB assault team had been concentrating on getting into the station, they hadn't expected an attack from the rear. The smoke boiled to either side, lurid flashes of colour as the fighting continued.
The floor of the station proper was littered with wreckage, bodies and bits of bodies. Both sides were using explosive rounds and their remains were difficult to tell apart.
Mariko and Naran were waiting for her by the gateway. Close up to its spinning surface Benny could almost fee! reality tearing as the power poured in. Mariko had prepared the controls for her, Benny had only to tap in a single command sequence to initiate the tunnel. And then?
The future past that moment stretched away into darkness.
She punched in the sequence and the gateway began to open.
Mariko and Naran moved before she did, reacting to the gust of wind that swept through the station. She thought it was the Stunnel initiation but the wind was at her back, parting the smoke like a curtain.
Naran ran forward, both gun barrels pushing out of his palms. He came flying backwards, the metre-long ramming spike of a
razvedka
tunnel board protruding from his back. The board's momentum slammed him into the gateway. There was a flash of bright pink light as the torque forces ripped him limb from limb.
Through the smoking air flew a figure, arms spread as if crucified. Benny realized that the board's passenger had jumped off when it emerged from the Central Line gateway at two hundred kilometres per hour. The arms were spread to maximize wind resistance in a vain attempt to slow him down as he described a flat parabolic arc along the two hundred metre length of the station. It was an insane suicidal manoeuvre. The man was going to die for sure.
At the last moment the man snapped in his limbs and became a human cannonball tumbling as it hit the ground. For a moment Benny thought that the impact had literally exploded the man. that limbs and torso were being ripped apart. Then she saw that he was still intact, his body describing a convoluted series of twists in the air.
As she watched him twist through the air, Benny wondered whether the Doctor had any limitations at all.
The Doctor knew that the landing was crucial, you could lose a lot of points for a sloppy landing. You had to come down with your feet together and absorb the impact with your knees. It was a question of maintaining the correct line. Of course you weren't supposed to be travelling quite as fast as he was and the provision of a soft landing mat would have been nice.
In the seconds before his feet touched the ground, he heard the conductor tap his baton on the lectern three times. The sound echoed through the orchestra pit of his mind. There was the poised hush from the musicians as they gripped their instruments.
The fugue started the moment he hit the floor,
apassionato -
with passion and this time without the mix-up with the printers. The themes were all there but this time they worked in harmony. The flute solo that had spoken of patterns in energy was now backed by the strings, loud and grand. It had the slightly stilted artificial envelope of a synthesizer. The sampled percussion backbeat that the Doctor realized represented the cake monsters was faltering, their place in the score fading.
As he faced Benny the Doctor could hear the slow oboe wail of betrayal, but whose?
'You're too late. Doctor,' said Benny.
The Doctor ignored her for the moment and turned instead to the cake monster that stood at her side. 'Don't I know you from somewhere?'
The cake monster shrugged.
'You can't stop us,' said Benny.
The Doctor continued to ignore her. The violinists were reaching a climax, bows smoking across the strings of their instruments. He wasn't going to talk to Benny right now. He was waiting for her boss.
The colour of the gateway was changing: swirls of intense copper began to radiate from the hub. The Doctor watched with interest. He'd never seen anything like this before.
The actual egress was barely visible; the copper colour briefly covered the whole disc and then subsided. Only Benny really changed and not physically either. Instead the Doctor got the impression that she was filled up to the brim with another intelligence. He half expected her skin to crack and leak light.
The Doctor gave it a few moments to integrate its personality.
'How do you do?' he said. 'I'm the Doctor, I believe you already know my friend Bernice.'
'Intimately,' said the thing inside Benny.
'And who are you?'
'The concept of personal pronoun is not applicable in these circumstances.'
'Fine,' said the Doctor, 'm that case I'll call you Fred.'
Lowell Depot
The survey crews had been sent off on an early and extended tea break. Achmed didn't want them around when whatever happened, happened. Primarily because whatever was going to happen it probably wasn't covered by the company's workplace insurance.
Deirdre had a minicam trained on the weird assembly by the crash barrier. Others were placed to get a good view of the whole station and she had remotes covering the cavern at the far end of the structural collapse.
'What for?' he'd asked.
Deirdre thought they might tape something worth selling to
The Bad News Show.
'Don't worry. Boss,' she'd said. 'I'll cut you in for a percentage.'
The drone lay on its side by the assembly. As soon as its work had finished it had drifted off slightly and just fallen out of the air. Whoever had been operating it obviously didn't need it anymore. Achmed wondered if it was salvageable; technically it was within his contract area and fair game. He decided to check his legal database afterwards.
Afterwards was the problem. The assembly looked like a huge holographic projector pointing down the station at the Central Line gateway. Except you didn't need gigawatt cabling for a projector, no matter how big it was.
Achmed looked over at Deirdre who had produced an apple from somewhere and was polishing it casually on her dungarees. 'Are you sure we should be standing so . . .'
There was a click and a huge subsonic hum like the biggest amplifier ever made being switched on. Achmed turned back to the assembly just in time to be blinded by the light.
It burst out of the projector in a single pulse of brilliant silver energy shot through with sickly green streaks. It raced down the station and into the gateway. The subsonic hum clicked off and the whole projector assembly collapsed, bursting into flames.
'Did you see that?' shouted Deirdre.
Achmed blinked rapidly but all he could see was one massive purple after-image. He hoped to God that he hadn't blinded himself permanently. Eyeballs were bloody expensive these days.
'I don't know where that was going,' said Deirdre, 'but I wouldn't want to be standing in front of it.
Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)
A single sustained note from a trumpet, high and sweet, suspended above the rough chords of the main orchestra.
Duke Ellington, thought the Doctor. And about time too.
Kadiatu was coming, he could smell the violence.
He looked down to check that he was standing on the cross of gaffa tape. X marks the spot. He shouldn't have long to wait now.
'What do you want?' asked the Doctor. Stalling.
'That depends,' said Benny/Fred. 'What do you want?'
The cake monster with Japanese eyes was tensing up, ready to attack.
'I want my friend back,' said the Doctor.
Jazz, thought the Doctor, is all about improvisation around a central theme. The musician creates spiral riffs within the framework of the rhythm. In the early days when the white musicians caught on to jazz the black musicians responded by escalating the complexity of the riffs. Trying to stay one step ahead of their white contemporaries. Every jam session became a declaration of war.
The virus, and, by extension, Fred, constantly improvised to achieve its objectives. The Doctor understood this, he operating in an identical manner. The question was: of him and Fred, who was better?
The next ten seconds, he thought, should decide that.
The cake monster started its jump.
The Doctor forced himself to stay in place.
A single burst of coherent light drilled through its skull. It was a magnificent shot considering that Kadiatu was sprinting at the time. She was by his side before the body hit the ground.
'Is that the real Benny?' she asked.
'Sort of,' said the Doctor.
Kadiatu raised her pistol. 'Time to die,' she said.
Without taking his eyes off Benny/Fred the Doctor reached out and shoved Kadiatu off her feet. Killing Benny wouldn't even slow Fred down.
The entire artron energy reserve of the TARDIS hit him right between the shoulder blades. The Doctor let the power fill him up. In front of him he saw Benny/Fred struggle to react, but Fred was unused to the physical limitations of a human body. The Doctor had been counting on that.
Just when he thought he was about to burst he let the power go.
Kadiatu picked herself up just in time to see the Doctor, Benny and the gateway vanish in a brilliant wash of white light. When it subsided the Doctor was standing alone.
'Benny?' said the Doctor.
'What the fuck was that?' said a voice. Kadiatu looked over and saw Lambada climbing out from a tangle of debris. She pushed away the body of a cake monster as she got up. Credit Card followed her out. Kadiatu looked around but couldn't see Blondie anywhere. She was going to ask Lambada when the Doctor called her over.
'Kadiatu, listen,' said the Doctor. 'I'm going in after Benny. If I don't come back I want you to destroy all records of me. The history files, the opera, the lot.'
'Why?'
'If I'm killed,' he said, 'it's better that I never existed at all.'
'I don't think going in there's a good idea,' said Kadiatu.
'She's my friend,' said the Doctor. 'Wish me luck.'
The Doctor ran towards the gateway and jumped. He passed through the interface and vanished.
'Damn,' said Kadiatu.
'He shouldn't have done that,' said Lambada.
'Don't tell me that,' said Kadiatu.
'No,' said Lambada, 'I mean the whole tunnel is going to collapse.'
'How long?'
'Thirty-two seconds,' said Credit Card.
Kadiatu stared at the Stunnel gateway.
'Shit,' she said and threw herself in after the Doctor.
9: Chain Gang Song
Node One
There was no sensory input but there was a sensation of movement. The Doctor felt himself marooned in space of infinite complexity. He realised instantly that he was in danger of disassociating, flying apart down all the logical pathways of probability.
I am what I am what I am, he thought fiercely and felt a part of himself detach and go spinning down an alternative pathway. He got a glimpse of himself as he went, he had outsized forearms with anchor tattoos and a pipe.
Stop, thought the Doctor and the sensation of movement ceased.
What he needed was a frame of reference, a hook to hang his hat on. It took a while but soon he had constructed a sphere around himself which he called Node One. The inside of the sphere was dotted with recessed roundels, scaled-up duplicates of the ones in the TARDIS. Each one represented a possible pathway that led from the Node. He colour-coded the roundels: black for those pathways he'd already traversed, blue for Popeye the Sailor's route, red for the rest.
He spun a web across the roundel he'd come through; it would transfer his frame of reference to anybody following after him.
Fred was somewhere in the system ahead. An intelligence operating within its own environment, it wasn't going to be easy to defeat.
First he had to find it.
He could hear the Popeye subset of himself in the distance, his little ditty echoing through the pathways. By concentrating he could trace the subset's path through the system. The Doctor created a map in the air to make it easier to visualize. The trace created a meandering pattern to what the Doctor decided to call the west. He called the direction he had come from the south, he didn't have to, but he liked to keep things simple.
The Popeye subset suddenly ceased to exist.
Was that Fred, wondered the Doctor, or did the system contain predators of its own?
Find Bernice.
The Doctor reached into his mind and pulled out Bernice's memories. He sifted through them, looking for something strong and emotional. There, it was a simple child's doll but it practically stank of guilt. He looked into his own memories for something that could track her but rejected the Cheetah people. The Doctor suspected that his memory was too accurate for the Cheetah people to be reliable. Instead he came up with a lugubrious-looking bloodhound.
Fusing the bloodhound with the doll created an inelegant mess but it would probably get the job done. He created a baker's dozen and sent them bounding out through random pathways.
He watched them fan out on the map, ricocheting from node to node. The ones going roughly east and west spread out into the distance, their traces getting fainter the further out they went. The ones going north seemed to have locked on to something but kept bouncing off an invisible wall. Their repeated attempts to cross this wall built up a picture on the map. A semi-circular line that divided off most of the north.
The Doctor chose a north-facing roundel and floated through. As he crossed the threshold he felt a strange sense of separation as if he had left something intangible behind. A quick mental inventory found nothing missing.
The Doctor pressed on. He didn't have time for introspection.
Node One
There was an unpleasant sensation like a ghostly caress, as if she had walked through a spider web. Then she floated free inside the first node, There was a laminated card in her hand, identical to the instructions that had come with the pressure suit on Mars. The letters at the top of the card blurred briefly and became her name.
Dear
Kadiatu,
she read. You are now entering a world of sensory illusion. In practical terms you have just become a very complex piece of software that happens to think it's a person called, the blurring effect again,
Kadiatu.
Don't ask me what happened to your physical body. I haven't got the faintest idea. I have provided a frame of reference with which I hope you will feel comfortable. Think of it as a front-end interface, it should allow you to move around. Try not to get attenuated and be careful, this is the most dangerous place you have ever been.
The card dissolved between her fingers.
There was a hissing sound above her.
A hatstand floated horizontally above her and to the right. A cat was perched precariously at its middle. It was a large animal, half a metre long with glistening silver fur as if it had been dipped in mercury. Its eyes were slanted shards of refracted light.
The cat hissed at Kadiatu again, showing sharp white canines. Bands of green formed around its shoulders and rippled down its body until they formed a ring at the end of the cat's tail.
Kadiatu bared her teeth and hissed back.
The cat recoiled, it had obviously not been expecting that response. Its ears flattened and the tail twitched from side to side.
'Such a small cat,' said Kadiatu. 'Where I come from the cats are as large as men and as fierce as tigers. They assume the form of women and walk the paths of the forest in search of prey.'
The cat yawned, feigning indifference.
'Well, little sister,' said Kadiatu, 'do you belong to the Doctor?'
The cat stiffened, its eyes blazing with green light. I am my own cat, the eyes seemed to say. I belong to no
man.
'Well then, little sister. Shall we hunt him anyway?' Kadiatu asked the cat.
The cat wiped its face with a paw. Considering.
'Perhaps not,' said Kadiatu. 'Perhaps you should leave this to me.'
The cat stopped its wash and stared at her, green and silver chased themselves over its fur. With a light confident movement it jumped on to Kadiatu's shoulder, twisted around and made itself comfortable. Its purr was loud and comforting in Kadiatu's ear.
There were many red roundels, fewer blue and only one black.
'Well, little sister,' said Kadiatu, 'shall we dance?'
Node Twenty - Twenty-One
The attack came from nowhere. The Doctor got the impression of animal fur, lithe speed and ferocity. Like a greyhound crossed with a yeti, thought the Doctor, and of course that's what it was. Ragged brown fur pulled tight over starvation ribs, lean elongated limbs tipped with three-fingered claws. Red eyes blazed over a sharpened dog's snout, a pink tongue lolled out between yellow teeth.
The Doctor made a mental note to keep his imagination under restraint. The mental note popped into the air between the greyhound yeti and him. An Alexandrian scroll fluttering down in the imaginary gravity, blue tie ribbons streaming behind. The greyhound yeti snapped at it and the Doctor used the distraction to leap through the closest roundel.
Once in the next node he imagined a huge vault door slamming shut on the pathway. He locked it tight with memories of Fort Knox, the Bank of England during the nineteenth century and the Great Seal of Rassilon in the Panopticon.
A random predator, decided the Doctor. That's why it appeared in my frame of reference as an animal.
He was going to need some kind of advanced guard to prevent another ambush, and something to guard his back. The Doctor thought long, hard and
carefully
about it.
The result was a group of yard-high figures in black bomber jackets and pony tails. They carried little silver deodorant cans and careened around the node with irritating exuberance. They also made a lot of noise, yelling nonsense in high pitched voices.
He wondered what he should call them in the multiple. A brace of Aces, a confusion? One hurtled past his head and ricocheted off the side of the node. An explosion, he decided, an
explosion
of Aces.
He decided to move on before things could get out of hand.
Node Twenty
She stretched, enjoying the rich luxury of the movement, the pull of her muscles against anchoring bone, the silk feeling of being wrapped in her own skin.
The silver cat had returned to its place on her shoulder and was now batting idly at a scrap of fur as it drifted past. Other pieces of the monster floated in the node, a severed limb twisted close by Kadiatu's face. She watched it rapidly decompose, the structure breaking down particle by particle, like a slow derez on a hologram.
The monster had been trying to break through a locked roundel when Kadiatu entered the node. She'd jumped on its back and torn it to bits with her bare hands and teeth.
She felt enormously better now.
The trail of the Doctor led through the locked roundel.
'What shall we do now, little sister?' she asked the cat.
If one pathway was blocked then she would just have to try another.
As she considered her options she licked her lips, running her tongue over sharp white canines.
The cat's purr was loud in her ears.
Node Thirty-Six - The Border
The Minister for Primary Colours was waiting for the Doctor at the boundary. The Minister appeared as an iridescent shimmer at the north end of the node. The Doctor's frame of reference should have translated the Minister into something more recognizable: compatibility problems deduced the Doctor. He made a brief attempt to resolve the Minister into a human figure but gave up when he encountered escalating resistance.
The Minister was flanked by a personal guard of fearsome Reds. The Doctor's explosion of Aces bounced about the node but generally behaved themselves by staying behind him. The Reds hung in the air as sheets of solid colour, dangerous in their stillness. When the Minister spoke it was with a sound like wind chimes.
'I am the Minister for Primary Colours,' said the Minister.
'I am the Doctor,' said the Doctor, 'and these are my Aces.'
'What is your function in coming here?' asked the Minister.
'I am searching for a utility called Fred.'
'This utility is registered with me,' said the Minister. 'It is held in the directory of the Monarch. Why do you seek it?'
'The utility called Fred has bootlegged a program that belongs to me. I wish it returned.'
'This is a matter that is out of my purvue. You must take this matter before the Monarch,' said the Minister. 'But be warned that the utility Fred is held in high esteem by his Majesty who ranks him above all other programs in his directory.'
'None the less,' said the Doctor, 'I will take my suit to the Monarch.'
'Attend,' said the Minister of Primary Colours. 'These are the access protocols, you must divest yourself of all offensive programs and the colours Red, Blue and Ultramarine. Are these protocols acceptable?'
'No,' said the Doctor. 'But I shall abide by them. A moment as I prepare.'
The Doctor thought jazz, and back beyond jazz, stripping away the European influence, the instruments of varnished wood and cunning artifice. Back across the cramped and recking ocean to where the forest met the sea. Back to the drums, the human voice and the dance. Dance for joy, for sadness, for funeral, harvest, wedding and childbirth. Lover's dance, young feet stamping down the dust, children's dance, old men's dance, mother's dance.
Women's dance, secret in the forest or the society huts. Leopard agile: the feet barely touch the ground. The body becomes the instrument: infused with the spirits of the gods. The dance of which no woman will ever speak, that no male shall ever know. Save one.
There! thought the Doctor.
Spear-sharp and arrow-fast the thought sped away down the alien pathways.
He checked quickly. The Minister for Primary Colours hadn't noticed, nor had his Reds.
'Stay here,' he told the Aces, who pouted collectively but did what they were told.
'If I may make an observation,' said the Minister as he led the Doctor through the pathway, 'the number one is not an efficient base for a good attack program. I hope you do not rely only on that.'
Spear-sharp, arrow-fast.
'No,' said the Doctor. 'Of course not.'
Node Fifteen
Spear-sharp, arrow-fast.
The knowledge of Blondie's death hit her in the chest, just under the heart. The mind is the seat of consciousness and therefore the site of human emotion, but we feel it in our guts.
The knowledge seemed to wrench open a hole beneath her ribs.
The cat leapt from her shoulder, spitting in fear. It split apart as it flew across the node, becoming two cats, one silver, one green.
Kadiatu floated with her limbs outstretched as the hammer blows piled in. She saw the family dead come dancing up the beach again and the sky was filled with lightning.
'We came out of the sea,' chanted the dead, 'we came down from the trees. We walked upright across the plains and talked to the old gods. We picked up sticks and stones and fashioned them into tools. The spirit ran through us, mother to daughter.'
'What do you want with me?'
'A sacrifice,' said the dead. 'Your soul for the lives of the children.'
Kadiatu folded over the pain, rolling up tight and fetal. She saw an old woman suspended in a basket above an abyss from which clouds of incense rose. As she watched, the old woman spoke a terrible death-curse and cut the single rope that held the basket aloft. Woman and basket tumbled into the abyss.
The curse came out of the abyss, roaring and invisible as it streamed into the sky. Kadiatu heard thousands of mothers screaming as the curse sucked the creation spirit from the world.
Into the void went the curse, leaving the world only half alive behind it. As it streamed across the gaps between stars it left a bow wave in the metareality of time and space. In its wake even the stars began to dream.
Kadiatu saw the beach again but the dead were not yet born. She saw the curse as it fell from the sky and into the primeval ocean. The waters suddenly boiled with life.
The two cats warily circled each other, each an identical copy of the other save for its colour. Each with flattened ears and claws extended, slant eyes probing for any weakness.
A noise stopped them. The cats turned curious eyes on the woman curled in the centre of the node.