Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 2

The female took upon herself a slightly sullen appearance. 'Well, you could have helped me so we didn't get separated from him like that. We've lost him now. Anything could have happened to him, and...'

I realised that the female was glaring sharply to the pallet bed off which, upon the entrance of this pair, I had quietly rolled and behind which had discreetly secreted myself. Not, I hasten to add, out of any sense of cowardice not from a man, you should know, who was presented the Order of Extraordinary Bravery and Moral Turpitude, First Cla.s.s, on three separate occasions by the Sultan of Walamaloon himself but lest my unquestionably impressive and fearsome appearance might fright these new arrivals into doing something rash.

The female started towards the pallet, a look that was not entirely friendly in her eye.

'And who the h.e.l.l are you?' she said.

It was as if the figure behind the bed had been touched by an electrical wire. He leapt to his feet, flashed a grin that was almost blinding in its intensity, then bowed so low that his nose almost touched his knees. He might have been said to have bowed with a flourish, Anji thought, if the word 'flourish' could encompa.s.s what the Greater London Yellow Pages might be to an old cigarette packet with a phone number written on it.

'Jamon de la Rocas,' this apparition said, straightening up and beaming, 'at your most abject and devout service. My heart, I cry! For my heart, you must know, is in the depths of h.e.l.l that I have not met the personification of your beauteous radiance so as to tender said service before now! And who is it that I might have the exquisite honour of addressing?'

Half of her flattered despite herself, half of her wondering whether he was taking the mick, Anji bought some time for herself to work out what he'd just said by looking this stranger up and down. A shortish, portly man dressed in the kind of ill-fitting garb one would expect to find on the inhabitant of a cell. He wore what was basically a couple of st.i.tched-together sacks, however, as though they were the raiment of an Emperor.

His face was the face of a tiger. For an instant Anji thought that was literally true, that he was some hybrid of animal and human with a feline head on his shoulders a bit like some creatures she had encountered a short while before. Then she realised that it was due to the fine and expert detail of the black tattooing on his paper-white face. The face itself seemed human and, in itself, quite unremarkable. No, Anji thought with sudden insight, that wasn't quite the case, because the flesh and bone of it weren't the true true face, The markings were the true one not just overlaid on the flesh and bone but in some strange way bringing out and displaying what was behind them. face, The markings were the true one not just overlaid on the flesh and bone but in some strange way bringing out and displaying what was behind them.

The man was still looking at her, bright-eyed.

'My name's, um, Anji Kapoor,' she said. In a completely unrelated thought, she realised that people tended to hesitate a little like that when giving out their names. Possibly it was to do with the fact that giving out your name gives others power over you, in a simple, but very old magick form. More probably, it was simply that your name tends to be used to and about you rather than coming from you; people don't actually say say their own names all that much. their own names all that much.

Her mind was wandering. Later, she'd realise that it was because she was still in shock over the events of the past few hours: the invasion of the TARDIS, their flight from it to find themselves in a sudden war zone with monstrous creatures and humanoid bodies exploding indiscriminately around them. Her mind kept slipping off on tangents to avoid thinking about those things.

She pulled herself together and turned towards her companion. 'This is...'

Fitz, she realised, was looking at Jamon de la Rocas as though a horrible suspicion, even recognition, was forming in his mind.

Later, when Anji asked him about it, he would merely say, 'It was just this feeling, you know? I mean, we didn't know where the guy was, and he told me once how he could sort of change change, and there was something about this Jamon that... no.'

At the moment, though, he just shook his head as if to clear it still dazed at recent events no doubt, Anji thought, rather like herself and said, 'I'm Fitz. Just Fitz.'

'And it fits you admirably,' said Jamon de la Rocas, 'I have no doubt.'

For a moment everybody gazed up in the air and whistled, avoiding each other's eyes at what could not even be dignified as a pun. It was like one of those moments in a Shakespearean play where the clown says something like 'I'faith, sirrah, thou must think there be a BE in your behind!', then hits someone with a bladder on a stick and n.o.body quite knows where to look.

'How long have you been in here?' Fitz asked Jamon de la Rocas when the moment had pa.s.sed.

The tiger-faced man considered, sucking at an artificially pigmented lip. 'A several number of hours,' he said at last. 'I must confess that in sleeping I may have lost count.'

Fitz nodded to himself, in a strange way that subtly contrived to suggest that something had been confirmed for him in the negative. 'It's not him, then.'

'What?' said Anji.

'Doesn't matter.'

Fitz glanced around himself moodily, taking in the cage and its fellows, the barracks and the strange pile of alien machinery beyond, the humplike forms around a s.h.i.+ning, chrome-bright spire.

'He's out there somewhere,' he said. 'I know the man, and it'll take more than some alien ma.s.sacre to kill him. He's alive and out there somewhere. I wonder where he is.'

The Doctor was currently being marched through a tunnel that had 'access' written all over it. There were any number of types, in his experience, ranging from the gentle dankness of the sewer to the spare whiteness of a nuclear command bunker, and this was of the musty, exposed-pipe, trailing-electricallead and junction-box variety.

His practised eye, on his arrival, during the ensuing battle and now, told him that wherever he was it was the product of an old but sporadically advanced culture. High technology did exist, but in all probability remained in the domain of the few. One only had to look at the splendidly archaic uniforms of the soldiers who were escorting him, and then at the power weapons they carried disguised as musical instruments for some obscure reason to recognise that.

He recalled how the people in the splendid plaza had looked, on average, like beggars trying to live up to standards by keeping their rags neat and clean. The vast majority of people here, he surmised, did not exactly have it easy even without squads of soldiers laying into them, with no regard for life and limb, in an attempt to eradicate sudden monsters.

Once he had seen his two young companions out of danger (without their quite ever realising how he had manoeuvred them towards the lightest area of fighting), the Doctor had busied himself trying to minimise the damage done to the crowd by the soldiery, bounding through the plasma fire to more than once pull some stupefied figure out of its way. At last, when it seemed that he had done all he could, he had allowed himself to be captured. He knew nothing about this place save what he could glean from direct observation, and for the moment it seemed best to follow the line of least resistance and hope for some eventual explanation.

Such explanation, however, seemed resolutely unforthcoming from the escorting soldiery. The Doctor had tried to strike up conversation, but had been met with nothing more than a few curt threats and, though he said it himself, a number of entirely unwarranted and quite xenophobic slurs.

Ah well, he thought, at least he was being taken to to someone or something and while there are any number of terminal and horrific things one might be taken to, at least it gave one more time, and opportunity to do something in it, than simply being killed on the spot. someone or something and while there are any number of terminal and horrific things one might be taken to, at least it gave one more time, and opportunity to do something in it, than simply being killed on the spot.

They were coming up in the end of the tunnel, which terminated in a narrow spiral staircase. The soldiers held back to allow the Doctor to climb it first. For a moment he considered making a break for it but in the end it is physically impossible for something the size and shape of a human to go up a spiral staircase over a certain speed. Besides, he had no idea what might be at the top and he could instantly think of seven thousand, four hundred and thirty-two things that might be simply and instantly lethal. It wasn't that he thought that there would be, but there was no point in taking the risk for no reason.

He emerged behind a set of finely detailed screens at least, presumably they were finely detailed on the other side. His first sight of them from the back showed the tied-off ends of cloth-ofgold embroidery that appeared to depict a number of sonic variety of peac.o.c.k. The soldiers behind him were prodding at him impatiently, so the Doctor stepped out from the screens.

A s.p.a.cious living chamber with black marbled walls, hung with more cloth-ofgold in the form of tapestries. The furnis.h.i.+ngs and fitments were very fine, built from the local equivalents of mahogany, rosewood, onyx, jade and gold-leaf gilt. Here and there, a domesticated palm-leaf plant in an urn.

The Doctor took in all this finery with his peripheral vision. The first thing he saw as some part of him had suspected was the TARDIS. The blue box had been transported here with some effort, those who had done it careless of the gouges this had dug in the white marble flagstones of the floor. There was a vaguely battered look to the outside of the TARDIS herself, but she seemed basically whole and intact. The main door (which the Doctor could quite distinctly remember not closing, being far more interested in putting some distance between himself and his young companions and the a.s.sortment of monstrous creatures spilling out of it) was now firmly shut, with the sense that it would take rather more than simple cajolery for it ever to open again.

Standing by the TARDIS door and peering at it with a body-language posture of intense thought was a tall, bony man in a black cloak. As the soldiers bracketed the Doctor, this man turned towards him with a prim little smile. His head was bald in the manner of one for whom no hair had ever grown to lose. The dead white skin of his thin face was etched with fine lines so black that they could not be any other than artificial.

'Greetings,' this man said. 'You must know that you and this... device of yours have caused us no end of problems. My name is Morel, Amba.s.sador to the Imperial Court of Shakrath.'

'Oh, really?' said the Doctor. 'Amba.s.sador of of where, precisely? Where were you sent to be an Amba.s.sador where, precisely? Where were you sent to be an Amba.s.sador from from?'

The Amba.s.sador to the Imperial Court dismissed the question with a wave of his pale hand.

'The fact is,' he said, 'that for several years a variety of monstrous creatures have attempted to enter our world by way of the Chamber of Transference...'

'Transference?' The Doctor frowned as though the word meant something, but he was not sure what.

'They are not of life as we know it,' Morel continued, with the air of one with little patience at being interrupted. 'Where men arrive in a state of death and have to be revived, these creatures come through... well, I have to say "living" in that they move and seem alert. They arrive in the Chamber with a single purpose to slaughter every man they find.'

'I can see how that might be inconvenient,' said the Doctor. 'So tell me, this Transference Chamber, would it be something in the nature of a '

'Fortunately,' Morel snapped, 'since they have but one place of arrival, it has been possible to station forces there to deal with them. The sages of the College of Physiological Undertakings are in some argument as to whether these creatures can be actively killed killed as such, but what is in no doubt is that their physical bodies can be destroyed. For many years, now, we have been able to eradicate such fiendish apparitions the instant they occur while leaving the vast commonality of the public none the wiser...' as such, but what is in no doubt is that their physical bodies can be destroyed. For many years, now, we have been able to eradicate such fiendish apparitions the instant they occur while leaving the vast commonality of the public none the wiser...'

Again, the Doctor frowned. 'I think I saw some of this eradication quite recently. It was very impressive, possibly a bit overenthusiastic. Do you discriminate between your so-called fiendish apparitions, or do you just open fire on anything with less or more than one head? I know of quite a few races, I think, who look worse to human eyes than the creatures who were chasing us, and most of them are actually quite '

'And now this... thing thing appears!' the Amba.s.sador thundered, obviously having reached the limits of his patience with Doctorial interruptions. 'It appears from nowhere, in a public place, for all to see! The tales of it are even now spreading like a conflagration through the bazaars and smoking houses of the Capital, and panic cannot but follow. In one fell swoop you have overturned the work of years!' appears!' the Amba.s.sador thundered, obviously having reached the limits of his patience with Doctorial interruptions. 'It appears from nowhere, in a public place, for all to see! The tales of it are even now spreading like a conflagration through the bazaars and smoking houses of the Capital, and panic cannot but follow. In one fell swoop you have overturned the work of years!'

'You seem so sure that I'm responsible,' said the Doctor, casting what he hoped was an uninterested eye over the TARDIS. 'How can you be so sure that I'm even the owner of this thing, whatever it is?'

The Amba.s.sador merely looked at him with flinty, narrowed eyes.

'Well, all right,' the Doctor admitted. 'I do do happen to own it as a matter of fact but there's no call to be making unwarranted a.s.sumptions on the basis of absolutely no hard evidence at all...' happen to own it as a matter of fact but there's no call to be making unwarranted a.s.sumptions on the basis of absolutely no hard evidence at all...'

'This cabinet is quite obviously the work of Man,' said Morel. 'And in it you were in some way able to convey these creatures '

'Now, I hope you don't think I brought those creatures to your world intentionally...' the Doctor cut in quickly.

'Had I thought that,' said Morel, 'you would have died upon the instant of your capture.' He turned to run a speculative hand over a section of the TARDIS outer sh.e.l.l. 'It is obviously a conveyance, working in a manner in some way similar to that of the Chamber...'

'Something you have still,' the Doctor said, 'to define in any cogent detail.'

'....but I see by certain aspects that it does not affect you in the same way that Transference affects men. You are clearly the same man as you were when first born...'

'Oh, now I wouldn't go as far as to say that '

'Instead of dissolution and a.s.semblage, it actually transports transports the living from one place to another by some means, whole and intact in person...' the living from one place to another by some means, whole and intact in person...'

'Aha! So am I to a.s.sume, from that, that this Chamber of yours involves some kind of teleportation? If so, I'd have to tell you that '

'Enough!' Morel bellowed. 'Enough of this!' It seemed a little off that an outburst of such strength and volume could come from such a spindly-looking frame. 'The very fact of your existence is a discontinuity. You have shaken our world the Empire itself to the very foundations. It may even topple and fall. Your one act of reparation might be to share the instruments of your arrival. Take me into this magic cabinet of yours, stranger, and show me the means of its operation.' of this!' It seemed a little off that an outburst of such strength and volume could come from such a spindly-looking frame. 'The very fact of your existence is a discontinuity. You have shaken our world the Empire itself to the very foundations. It may even topple and fall. Your one act of reparation might be to share the instruments of your arrival. Take me into this magic cabinet of yours, stranger, and show me the means of its operation.'

'That is something,' said the Doctor, 'that you shall never see.'

The Amba.s.sador Morel regarded him coldly for a moment.

'Oh yes we will,' he said. 'That is, I I shall. Should you prove intractable in this matter, rest a.s.sured I have the means to...' shall. Should you prove intractable in this matter, rest a.s.sured I have the means to...'

'Torture and cajolery won't work, you know,' the Doctor said, returning the gaze. 'Tell me, Mr Amba.s.sador, do you think yourself a good judge of character?'

'As much as might be possible in an imperfect world,' said Morel. He didn't say it with modesty or pride, just as a simple statement of fact. 'I have judged and been proven correct in my judgement more often than not.'

'Then look at my face, Mr Amba.s.sador. Do you think that whipping out the thumbscrews and the braziers or keeping me from sleep is going to work?'

Morel seemed to consider this at length.

'I see a way about you that might make such endeavour fruitless,' he said at last. 'Rest a.s.sured, though, that with the resources of the Empire at my disposal, I shall gain entry to this device, with or without your a.s.sistance.'

'I'd like,' said the Doctor, 'to see you try.'

'Possibly not,' said Morel, giving him the same somewhat prissy little smile with which he had first greeted him. 'I am minded that there are other forms of torture and persuasion. I believe that, when you arrived, you did so with a pair of companions, did you not? Well, let us see how intractable you in fact prove after your and their audience with the Emperor.'

If one is to travel to any extent, I must tell you, even within the bounds of a single world, one must be of a constant guard about the making of unfounded a.s.sumptions. This is not to say that they shall not be made, of course this being part and packet of the very word 'a.s.sumption' but that one must be aware of the danger of making them.

It is quite one thing to say that one sees what another means, when that other has unfortunately lost their sight. It is quite another to find oneself on a world where the race of men born without eyes, as such, in the first place, so that continual p.r.o.nouncements in the very terms of sight as much discourse, when one thinks about it, tends to be may lead in all innocence to another measure of approbation entirely.

In a likewise manner, when one thinks about those old days of Empire, one tends to a.s.sume that each world was of a singular and simple type: that one was a world of pygmies and ziggurats, another was a world of plains-dwelling nomad engineers, or of cities built of sh.e.l.l and mother-ofpearl on artificial barque islands, or of hollowed gourds hanging from league-high trees... and so on, so forth and suchlike. While such things may have been true in the broadest sense, one has only to think of the differences in one's own world between continents, towns.h.i.+ps, even between one street and another to realise that these simplifications are chimeric at best.

I fancy that so far as I myself was concerned, I lived so far as is possible by the dictum of a.s.suming nothing if at all possible. However as I believe I have mentioned my dealings with the humans, Anji Kapoor and Just Fitz, were hampered by the fact that their origins were so far out of my experience that, for all their basically manlike forms, they were quite simply Other in ways for which the well-intentioned following of dictums left me unprepared.

Since they had none of the obvious signs of Transference about them, for example, I a.s.sumed that they were natives of the world of Shakrath (even the name of which I did not know at the time) and quizzed them avidly about its nature. The fact that they did not even know the name of where they were, I interpreted as being due to their being members of some ignorant slave cast or the like (for whom the name of their world would be unimportant) who had been sent to this gaol for some infraction against their masters. This, I am sorry to say, led to an inexcusable if general air of condescension on my part, until I fully realised the truth of things.

And then there was the matter of s.e.x a subject that I freely confess is closer than most to my heart, or at the least some similarly elementary organ. Those expecting some discursion into the veiled and sultry realms of Eros, however, are to be sorely disappointed...

Now, I have said that to the eyes of the vast and panoplous universe outside, what used to be known as the Empire consisted of variations on what in the end were a somewhat limited number of themes. (The Doctor himself, I recall, at one point called it 'explorations of an ergogenically stunted polyfractal probability s.p.a.ce', whatever that in fact means.) One of those limitations, I have to say, was in the relations between the male and female members of the various races of Man. Oh, there were, had been and still are Empresses, jungle-dwelling Amazon warrior tribes, All-High Priestesses and the like, but such things were singular in nature, aberrations from the common norm. In the vast commonality, the distaff side of Man were seen at best as a happy distraction, at worst a positive nuisance and for the most part the invisible bearers of children and suppliers of hot food and clean undergarments.

It is not my purpose here to go into the reasons for this, or to defend such a state of affairs in the slightest. It is simply how such things were in what was once called the Empire. I bring it up so that you will realise that, though I had met my share of Amazon Empresses and so forth, and felt I had a kindly and respectful way with the ladies more than most, I was simply not equipped in my own self to instil a female with such qualities of reason and turpitude as I might afford the meanest of males. It was an aspect of my nature an a.s.sumption, I say so much of my nature that I was truly unaware of its very existence. This had me being on occasion, in the memorable words of Mistress Anji Kapoor, 'a patronising b.l.o.o.d.y squit who'd be improved by having his head boxed off of his shoulders'.

Of course, all of this is very much with the aid of hindsight. I am now fully aware of quite how much My word! You're a lively little thing, aren't you? Now If you'll just sit on my lap for the moment, you can feed me some of those quite delicious toasted, patefilled affairs. And I don't think it would kill you to reach over for that bottle...

All of which is to say that my exchanges with the pair of humans seemed to be laced with a bewildering kind of incomprehension of the sort where one feels a kind of hot anger under the surface of things, is constantly biting back some sharp retort, but is not quite able to fathom the meaning of the reason why.

'...So they knocked us down and dragged us out and brought us here,' Anji said.

She had by this time finished telling me the story of herself and her friend Fitz. From it at the time, I confess, I had formed the impression that they were both the personal servants of this Doctor fellow no doubt some travelling apothecary of no particular note ousted from their conveyance by bandits that seemed monstrous to her ignorant mind. Or possibly by some local monstrous fauna which the bandsmen of this place had duly dispatched. In any case, I could tell that such pertinent information as I might require about my own circ.u.mstances would not be forthcoming from these poor wretches.

'It must have been quite terrible for you, my dear,' I said, giving her a companionable and comforting pat on the head. (I only now recall such a look of barely restrained murderousness that such an overture elicited.) 'This, ah, Doctor of yours...' I continued, intimating that this was the personage with whom, if possible, I should enter into discourse if it were to be of any material use, 'did you see what became of him?'

'We just don't know,' said the man Fitz, with a touching sense of concern, no doubt, for the fate of his master. As should of course be evidenced by every bondsman worth the name.

'So what's your story,' Anji asked me. 'What are you doing here?'

Her tone was a parcel of what I have been talking about in that it seemed, to me, not merely forward for a female, but with the sense that whatever my answer might be, it would prove me nothing of import or so much as interest in the slightest. Biting back my perfectly justified flush of anger quite manfully, I decided to enlighten her by way of civil example.

'First, you must know,' I said, 'that this, oh, "world" of yours is but one of many. Hard though it may seem to believe, it is in fact a vast ball of matter which falls about your sun not in fact the other way around, as you might believe, that being a land around which the sun orbits. The stars you see in the sky at night, some of them, are entire other suns and worlds, and it is from one of them that I come...'

I realised, of a sudden, from the look upon the face of Anji, that I was for some reason dicing with my very life. This was in all probability on the account that the look of murderousness aforementioned had increased a ten-or maybe even a hundredfold.

'Tell you what,' she said, with an intensity which I'll own sent a s.h.i.+ver of fright through even one so valorous as myself, 'let's just agree that you come from somewhere far off. Where did you come from, why did you end up in a cell here and where exactly is here?'

In my startlement, I fear, I may have babbled a little. I began to explain something of my circ.u.mstances... And then realised that the lady Anji had turned her back on me.

'The fat little blowhard's no use,' she said to the man Fitz. 'He doesn't know any more than we do. Probably less.'

Well, there! I like to say as that I had never been dealt so in my life! I was of a mind to say as much when I noticed some new movement outside the cage.

A squad of bandsmen were escorting a new figure towards us: a tall, athletic-looking man in a black suit of the sort, I remember, that had once been worn by the technomages of Valencir those misguided geniuses who had built a stem-driven Difference Engine so powerful that it had, in some strange manner, turned their very world into a numerical abstract. A story so peculiar and not to mention convoluted that it will have to wait for some later, more propitious time...

For all that he was under guard, the face of this man showed such fort.i.tude and resolve that I at once felt common kindreds.h.i.+p with him. Having heard the subtle sense of consequence with which the female Anji and the man Fitz had alluded to the name of their master, I had my firm suspicions that this was indeed he long before either of them could utter it.

'Doctor!' Anji cried, running to the bars as though the mere sight of him could somehow magic them away; she seemed genuinely surprised in regards to her collision with them.

'Are you all right, Doctor?' the man Fitz asked, with evident relief at the simple fact that the man was still alive.

'As well as can be expected, Fitz,' this worthy if somewhat callow-looking personage said. (I would have occasion to remark, time and time again, how extraordinary it was that such a relatively young man had such experience and wisdom as the Doctor evidenced time and time again.) 'I really hope that we can all come out of this all right...'

I had an inkling that this Doctor was worried and from the look of his incarcerated friends I could see that they had caught this, too. I had expected, for the moment, that he would be thrown in with us or possibly, given his more apparently n.o.ble station, sent into another and more comfortable cell but a few bandsmen stood in guard over him while others opened up the cage and hauled the female Anji, the man Fitz and my own good self out.

'We're to be given an audience of some kind,' the Doctor explained as the bandsmen chivvied us along. 'I'm not quite sure as to the nature of it. Never fret, though; I'm sure it won't be as bad as all that.'