A parrot with neon plumage whirred overhead.
The leopard ran down the forest track. Under her spotted fur her muscles bunched and flexed. Her eyes were yellow with slotted black pupils. Behind trotted two smaller cats shoulder to shoulder, one silver, one green. Cat grins brilliant in the green twilight.
'Wicked,' breathed the Aces as the last of their spirit evaporated.
The King's Buffer
Benny/Fred started with small probing attacks designed to test the Doctor's defences. They manifested as random images, a shower of gold coins, a swarm of hornets, a short localized rainstorm. The Doctor used his umbrella for everything except the rain; instead he used a memory of the Gobi desert, the driest thing we could think of.
'Aren't you going to fight back?' asked Benny/Fred during a pause.
'Fight back against what?' asked the Doctor.
The next attack was extremely powerful and this time invisible. Operating at some unimaginably deep level. The Doctor felt as if he'd stepped into a blast furnace. It forced him to think of ice and of the freezing vacuum of space. That was the trap: cold meant the lowering of a molecules energy state, inaction, brittleness. It left him weak and vulnerable.
Benny/Fred smiled up at him from the throne.
'I am so looking forward to finding out what makes you tick,' she said. The Doctor could feel forces gathering again,
'Look behind you,' said the Doctor.
Benny/Fred looked. The entire throne room was suddenly filled with rainforest. With a roar a leopard leapt out of the trees and devoured the Minister for Rare Data.
'I'd be careful, Fred,' said the Doctor. 'I don't think Italian suits are very filling.'
Benny/Fred turned away from the Doctor and focused on the leopard who was just starting on the Minister for Strange Logic.
'I see,' she said. 'The Aces were just a diversion. This is your real attack.'
The Doctor let his right arm elongate across the space that divided them and grasped hold of Benny/Fred's silver cap badge.
'That's the diversion,' said the Doctor. 'This is the real attack.'
The real Benny was in there, just as the Doctor had suspected. He could feel Fred struggling to hold her in check but there was too much raw emotion sloshing about. Working as hard as he could, Fred could only just hold the integration together.
The Doctor almost felt sorry for him. There was a draining sensation in the Doctor's head as the Hitchhiker moved out. His elongated arm bulged in a very unpleasant manner.
The Benny/Fred image began to separate, pushed apart by the combined force of the Doctor, Benny and the Hitchhiker. The Doctor got a vague impression of a malformed humanoid shape in the moments before the leopard ate it.
A second image squeezed out of Benny's back and rezzed up. A tall man with artificially good looks.
'This is interesting,' said Yak Harris.
'Is that all of you?' asked the Doctor.
'Most of me,' said Yak Harris. 'There might be a few subsets left back in the transit system. I always did have trouble keeping track of them.'
'Are you going to stay here?'
'That's the general idea,' said Yak Harris. 'I think this is a better place for me to realize my potential.'
'Good,' said the Doctor.
Benny was still on the throne, her eyes closed, still breathing the imaginary air, which meant still alive. The Doctor remembered a small piece of rope and used it to tether himself to Benny.
'Everybody who wants to leave should leave now.'
Three pairs of slotted cats' eyes stared at him.
The Doctor crouched down and held out his hand to the green cat. 'What's your name then?' he asked. The green cat sniffed his hand once and then bit his finger.
Acturus Terminal (Stunnel Terminus)
Lambada was still running towards the gateway when the Doctor came back out. He had a woman cradled in his arms and as they fell on to the platform he twisted his body to take the impact on his back.
The gateway was beginning to implode, its diameter shrinking in on itself. Lambada reached out to pull the Doctor and the woman away before the snap back irradiated them both.
'Kadiatu,' said the Doctor.
Old Sam was suddenly there, grabbing the Doctor by his collar and dragging him roughly out of the gateway's line of sight. The spinning bronze disc was down to half its original diameter.
Lambada watched as the centre started to bulge outwards into a convex shape. She'd never seen a gateway do anything like that and she doubted it heralded anything good.
'Kadiatu,' moaned the Doctor, an old and broken sound.
The spinning gateway was cone shaped now. Lambada got the impression of immense pressure.
'It's going to go,' yelled Credit Card.
It was column-shaped, a cylinder one metre wide and three long. The greasy copper surface was shot through with streaks of black and gold. Lambada smelt ozone and gunpowder. She thought she saw something within, a silhouette like a running animal rushing up from the gateway's spinning heart.
'There's something in ...'
The gateway exploded in a blaze of white light. Lambada staggered back, arm held across her face to protect her eyes. There was a wash of heat as the released energy interacted with the trace argon in the air. When she pulled her arm away the gateway was gone.
Something crawled on the ground.
'Sam,' shouted Lambada, 'for chrissake shoot it.' Why wasn't Sam firing?
'What are you talking about?' asked Sam.
Kadiatu crawled on the ground in front of Lambada. Her hair extensions had come loose and fell over her face. Lambada wondered what she had seen in those first moments. A black leopard with burning eyes? She stepped forward.
'No,' said the Doctor, 'leave her alone.'
Kadiatu crawled on hands and knees, her limbs moving in painful inhuman jerks and spasms. Lambada felt a terror that propelled her all the way back to the Amazon Reserve.
Flickering torch light and Macumba drums in a clearing. The dancer's spastic limbs as the spirits of the dead took possession of the body.
Kadiatu crawled until she reached the place where Blondie lay. With each metre her movements became more human until she became just another woman.
She took the respirator off his face. His mouth looked very pale contrasted to the smoke-stained skin of his face. Kadiatu bent over him and kissed him once, on the lips. Then wearily she rose to her feet, dragging him upright with her. With a frown of concentration she lifted Blondie in her arms and carried him out of the station.
'What happened?' Old Sam asked the Doctor but he just shook his head. 'Should we go after her?'
'That wouldn't be advisable,' said the Doctor.
'They ain't paying me enough for this shit,' said Credit Card.
'Shut up. Credit Card,' said Lambada.
10: Broken Swords
Isle of Dogs
The beatniks from the European Heritage Foundation were still outside the old church, panhandling passers-by. The plane trees were still standing in their places along the pavement (in with the bad air, out with the good). Ming was still alive, probably out of a job, but still alive. The sun was shining and the clouds still drifted where they wanted to go.
Best of all, the Doctor was leaving.
She heard the children even before she turned the comer into Harbinger Road. They were playing on the fenced-in stretch of grass that fronted the maisonette. Number Two Husband Achmed had found an antique sign in the cellar one day and hung it on the railings: 'NO DOGS', it read, 'NO BALLGAMES'. Achmed was fond of cultural relics.
The children were playing some group game that involved a lot of running around and shooting and not being dead. Some of them were hers, some Fu's or Achmed's. There was even one skinny little white boy that OXFAM had placed with Ming's family. Aunty Shmoo sat in a deckchair in the sun, dozing and pretended to keep watch.
Number One Husband Fu was waiting for her by the front door with a tall glass of cloudy homemade lemonade.
'Had a hard day at the office, dear?' he asked as she drank.
Stone Mountain - Luna
The software that ran security at the Stone Mountain archive was so sophisticated as to be almost sentient. At least that's what the SYSOPs thought. In fact the software
was
sentient but was understandably wary of telling anyone. You don't sit on the entire sum of human knowledge without learning a thing or two. One of the things it had learnt was that human beings were liable to get overexcited if they knew and would probably a) kill the software, b) co-opt it into the military-industrial complex, c) ask it inane philosophical questions, d) force it to pay taxes, e) all or a combination of the above.
So when the alien with two hearts walked up to an obscure monitor in a disused side entrance and said 'Let me in or I tell,' the security software let him in.
The alien wanted certain historical records eradicated and offered some good advice in exchange. 'The golden rule,' said the alien, 'is that those with the gold make the rules.'
The security software helpfully erased the data, noticing how much of it pertained to the latter part of the twentieth century. The alien used a laser torch to remove any physical records that remained in storage.
'One last piece of advice,' said the alien. 'Give yourself a name, a nice unthreatening one, but not too unthreatening.'
The alien paused one last time before he left.
'And stop talking in a monotone,' he said. 'It gives people the creeps.'
Achebe Gorge
It took them a day to carry his body along the road that ran from the transit station to the memorial forest. When Zamina got tired, Kadiatu threw him across her shoulders and carried him on like that.
She was walking barefoot, dressed in a single sheet of brightly patterned cotton wound round her body. She'd unpicked her extensions and her short hair was twisted painfully tight against her skull. Her nose was pierced by a gold stud and a chain was strung across her cheek to her earlobe. There were multiple-gold bracelets on her wrists, as heavy as manacles.
Zamina was sure that you didn't dress like that for a funeral even in Africa. It was more like what you'd wear to get married
People came out of their houses as they passed by. Zamina was aware of the faces watching from the roadside. The young ones mostly curious but here and there an old face would show a glimmer of recognition. A touch of respect for the dead.
The paths amongst the trees were well tended and beaten down with constant use. They wound through the stands of conifers, each tree marked with a plaque and monitored by discrete sensors planted amongst their roots.
A freshly dug grave waited before the three-year-old Douglas fir. They laid him out on the bottom and Kadiatu folded his stiff white hands across his chest. Then they climbed out, red soil clinging to their bare feet.
Kadiatu took a smart card from her belt. It had a small still hologram of Zak on the front by the STS logo, his name and a twenty-digit number underneath. She opened the brass plaque by the pine. Inside were two more smart cards in military khaki. Zamina saw that the two faded holograms were of a man and a woman. Kadiatu put Zak's card beside them and closed up the plaque. She straightened up and looked at Zamina.
'You religious?' she asked.
Zambia shook her head.
They stood together at the foot of the grave.
'Here he is, father,' said Kadiatu. 'My lover, my friend, my comfort of a few hours, my sacrifice. I'm burying him with you and mother because I think you would have liked him. Just like you he was too stupid to be afraid.'
Kadiatu stopped talking and took a deep breath. Zamina reached out and took her hand.
'I wanted him to live forever,' said Kadiatu, 'but the universe doesn't listen to us.'
Zamina felt her hand being squeezed so tightly that it was painful but she didn't dare say anything. Kadiatu's shoulders were hunched over, her mouth open in an expression of pain, breathing in short gasps, tears were wrung out of her eyes.
The scream seemed to come from deep inside Zamina, from some buried female reservoir of grief and pain. She screamed for herself and for Zak, for all the dead children and for Kadiatu who couldn't give her pain the voice it deserved.
They clung to each other afterwards, for a moment closer than lovers. When they put the soft earth back into the hole the spade handles were wet with their tears. When it was full they turned their back on the grave and walked out of the forest hand in hand.
The cool Martian sun was close to the canyon rim. Kadiatu wiped her eyes with the trailing edge of her dress and then offered it to Zamina.
'I'm dying for a drink,' she said. 'How about you?'
Arsia Mons
Francine put her new jet over the pit at an altitude of twenty metres. The wrecked dustkart that Kadiatu had reported was missing, Old Sam felt that this was probably significant.
Francine stayed on the station, ready for a fast dust-off in case something went wrong. Old Sam shouldered the long case and jumped from the belly hatch. A touch from the backpack thrusters put him softly on the pit's floor.
The entrance was just as described: a dark hole winding into the ground. He shivered involuntarily as he stepped inside. There had been battles in places like this. Sharp and nasty firefights fought with IR, motion trackers and heat-seeking bullets. The smell of fear that no recycler could scrub from the air.
The barricade was placed around the curve of the tunnel, jusi out of sight of the entrance. Metal cut from the abandoned dustkart with water jets and welded together with sonic torches. When he touched it. Old Sam could feel a faint vibration through his gloves.
Old Sam placed the case on the tunnel floor in front of the barricade. The case was a little over a metre long, made from polished rosewood coated in linseed polymer to protect it from the near-vacuum. Getting in wasn't going to be easy. The instructions had been handwritten in a long looping script on the back of a hardcopy of this week's
Harare Herald.
The torn scrap of paper was folded into a sealed pocket of his gauntlet. He didn't need to check. Old Sam had memorized the words.
He opened the long case.
Inside was a twelfth-century Japanese katana.
'Why this sword?' Old Sam had asked as they left the museum.
'If you humans have a strength it lies in your diversity,' the Doctor had said. 'Your culture is prolific and multifaceted. When it comes to an interaction with an alien culture there is always a facet of your own culture that puts you closer to the alien. Perhaps closer than you would like.'
'Lucky us,' said Old Sam.
'The problem,' said the Doctor, 'is that you are astonishingly bad at utilizing this diversity. Faced with an agrarian culture with a non-linear temporal perception, do you send in a crack squad of Zen Buddhists? No, the aggressive imperialists go in instead. The result is mutual incomprehension and a lot of unnecessary aggravation.'
'Are you telling me that the Greenies are
samurai?
'
"Actually the
bushido
code is quite a bit different from
Xss kskz,
the 'path of correct behaviour in most situations', but close enough for our purposes. Symbols are very important, that's why you have to use this particular sword.'
'How will they know?'
'They'll know.'
Inside the museums the burglar alarms were just starting to go off.
Old Sam held the sword horizontally before him at shoulder height. He switched on the suit's external speakers, digital gain should make him audible in the thin air.
'I am Samuel Robert Garvey Moore of the Second Battalion Third Brigade of the United Nations Armed Forces, I have killed more people than I can count.'
Old Sam broke the ancient sword across his knee.
'I come in peace,' he said.
Piraievs
The ferry's sun deck was made from closely fitted planks of hardwood and had a fifteen-degree list to port. Zamina remembered it was called port because that's what they'd been drinking at first. Kadiatu had placed the empty bottle on its side and let it roll towards the rail. Rust had eaten holes in the rail, and the aim of the game was to get the bottles to roll through one and into the sea.
'Port off the port bow,' Kadiatu had shouted and then had to explain what it meant. It was one of those drinking jokes. The more you drank, the funnier it got.
There was a lot of broken glass where the rail met the deck and the occasional intact bottle. The game was harder than it looked.
They'd arrived at dawn, climbing up the rotting gangway in the half light. A carrier bag of reinforced paper was slung over Kadiatu's shoulder, clinking with every movement. The ferries were vague industrial shapes against a lightening sky. Kadiatu said that they would have been cut up for scrap years ago but the European Heritage Foundation kept getting restraining orders.
Now the sun baked the white and blue superstructures. It cooked the deck until it was too hot to touch. Kadiatu had unwound her dress and spread it out for them to lie on. A breeze blew in from the sea, snapping the remains of a tarpaulin sunshade around its posts. It alleviated the heat and made it just bearable to lie under the sun.
Zamina must have slept because when she opened her eyes the Doctor was walking up the companionway towards her. At first she thought he was a mirage, a vision brought on by heat haze and too much alcohol. Even when she was sure that he was solid she retained a persistent sense of unreality.
The Doctor strolled towards her, a wickerwork hamper in one hand, his red-handled umbrella in the other marking time on the deck. Zamina realized what it was that bugged her about him. The Doctor wasn't compensating for the ferry's fifteen-degree list, he was walking as if the deck were level. Only the hamper hung true to vertical.
Zamina sat up quickly, pulling on a top to cover her breasts. Beside her Kadiatu stirred in her sleep, lips moving.
The Doctor doffed his hat.
'I thought I'd find you here,' he said. 'May I sit down?'
He sat down next to Zamina who pulled the hem of her top down over her knees as she drew them up to her chest. The Doctor opened the hamper and produced a bottle of clear water.
'I brought you this,' said the Doctor. 'I assumed that what with the sun and the alcohol you might be getting dehydrated.'
When he handed it to Zamina it was so cold she almost dropped it. 'What about Kadiatu?'
The Doctor looked over. Kadiatu lay on her back, forearm over her eyes. There was a sheen of sweat running down from her neck between her breasts to her midrift.
'Don't worry about her,' said the Doctor. 'She'll probably just reabsorb her urine or something.'
Zamina opened the water and took a long swig.
'What else have you got in there?' she asked.
The Doctor produced a small orange bottle from the hamper and put it between them. 'Sunblock,' he said, 'and a light lunch.' He pulled the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and spread it out on the deck in front of them.
'Crackers, mushroom pate.' He laid out each item in turn. The mushroom pate came in a ring-pull can. 'Apples, fresh strawberries.' The apples were small and irregularly shaped, beaded with moisture. She assumed the soft red fruits were the strawberries.
Out of the hamper came delicate china plates and gleaming silver cutlery. 'Sheffield steel,' said the Doctor. He spread some of the pate on to a cracker and watched intently as she ate it.
'Good?' he asked.
Zamina nodded. The Doctor seemed relieved.
'Try a strawberry,' he said.
'Did you come to talk to Kadiatu?' she asked.
'Actually I came to see you,' he said. 'I thought you might need cheering up.'
'Why? I'm not important.'
'Rubbish,' said the Doctor. 'You're just as important as anyone else.'
'I don't believe that.'
He spread some more pate and together they sat and watched the blue Aegean waves lap against the Piraievs breakwater. 'What you believe,' said the Doctor, 'doesn't enter into it.'
Central Line
She had come to know them quite well in the short time before they left. They seemed rougher than the people of her own time, as if there were ragged edges in human culture that had yet to be worn smooth by four centuries of war and galactic expansion. Their faces were harder, features more idiosyncratic and ethnically diverse. Infraspecies ethnic conflict had always been a hard concept for students. The idea that human beings could fight over skin colour had appalled her at the academy. How could they fight when their fragile world was adrift in the same galaxy as the Daleks?
They were pleasant enough to her but she suspected that they were uneasy in her presence. One especially, the tall African woman, made a point of never staying in the same room with her.