Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors Part 9

The Doctor was coming out of the headman's house, Penelope at his side, stressing out. The Doctor waved to Chris.

'When you are as old as I am,' said Kame, 'and you begin to know that you have done enough killing, perhaps it will make more sense to you.'

Penelope ran up the steps of the shrine, stopping just short of the door. She s.n.a.t.c.hed up one of the pots the pots that last night had contained soil. Now they were crammed with madly blooming flowers.

The Doctor was looking at a flower. It hung on the end of a branch, alone, trembling in the breeze.

Did humans experience flowers in the same way as he did? Their senses were duller, simpler. The scent and colour would not, could not, be as sharp with, well, inferior processing equipment.

His eyes traced the faint UV pattern which guided bees to the petals. It must have been such a shock when the human race had first looked at a flower under ultraviolet light. So much for Sherlock Holmes's idea that the rose proved G.o.d; the blossoms' beauty wasn't meant for humans at all.

On the other hand, how many Time Lords would bother to stop and look at a flower? After a few thousand years in the sterile air of the Capitol, your emotions simply withered away. In a lifetime a human would know fear and anger, love and pleasure, hate and joy. A Time Lord might feel apprehension, irritation, amus.e.m.e.nt, a certain uninterested curiosity. If anything stronger flared in their hearts, they were expected to silently quash it.

And they almost never laughed.

54.No wonder they hated him so much. Well, found him so distasteful.

He was sitting on a stone at the edge of the forest, looking down at the village. The patterns of ordinary life were in motion. Children were playing, women were weaving, and in the fields he could see the wide hats of the farmers bobbing up and down as they worked. Robust patterns, centuries old.

Fragile patterns, easily disrupted by an afternoon's random violence.

Chris was coming up the hill towards him, adjusting his jacket. The Doctor waited.

'So,' said Chris, 'what is that thing, and what are we going to do about it?'

'I don't know,' said the Doctor, answering both questions. 'What do you think we should do?'

Chris gave him a surprised look. He leant against a tree in a very unsamurai-like slouch. 'I don't know.'

The Doctor went back to considering the flower. Chris fidgeted. 'How can we find out what it is?' he said.

'Simple. Open it up.'

'It looks like a satellite,' said Chris. 'With antennae at the top. Maybe it fell out of orbit. But if it's some kind of container, G.o.ddess knows what could be in it. Radioactive waste, anything.'

'Schrodinger's Cat,' said the Doctor. 'It could be anything until we open the box.'

'Do you reckon it is is Kannon?' asked Chris. The Doctor tilted his head. 'I don't,' the Adjudicator went on. 'Kannon's derived from the Hindu Avalokites-vara. The pod would've had to have landed centuries ago. a.s.suming this is its first visit.' Kannon?' asked Chris. The Doctor tilted his head. 'I don't,' the Adjudicator went on. 'Kannon's derived from the Hindu Avalokites-vara. The pod would've had to have landed centuries ago. a.s.suming this is its first visit.'

'Mmm. . . '

'You said you'd had a lot of experience with deities.'

'None of it good,' said the Doctor. 'It's amazing how a spot of omniscience can make someone miserable company.'

Chris laughed, and the Doctor smiled despite himself.

'What do you think of Penelope?' said the Doctor, changing the subject.

'She's for real, I think. But she's scared of you. That's why she keeps arguing with you.'

'Mmm. She's got the wrong impression from whatever Joel has told her.

She thinks I'm some sort of temporal traffic warden.'

Chris laughed. It was still a boy's laugh, clear and happy, after everything he'd been through. 'Nothing wrong with being a traffic cop.'

'True.'

'No, I mean it. When I joined the Academy, I wanted to be out there solving great crimes, but the first thing they put you on is traffic. I hated it at first. I felt like such a doofus telling people off for flying their flitters over the speed 55 limit. You know, like I was their mom. And then I saw my first really bad accident. . . ' He shuddered, rubbing at the cut on his face. 'It wasn't a great job, but at least I was saving some lives.'

'Let me see that.' The Doctor got up and examined the sword cut on Chris's cheek. He took a small bottle of salve out of his pocket and applied a dab to the cut with his little finger. Chris winced, trying to stand still.

'Sometimes,' said the young man quietly, 'I kind of wish I could go back to being a traffic cop.'

The Doctor sat back and looked at him, feeling a sadness deep in his chest.

And something else: a claustrophobic, uneasy feeling. He shrugged, and the feeling was gone.

Chris said, 'I really let you down in that fight. We would have both died.'

'I didn't manage any better,' said the Doctor. 'I should have seen it coming.

And I should have been able to talk my way out of that situation.'

'They were going to kill us no matter what,' said Chris. He breathed a long sigh, and murmured something.

'Sorry?' said the Doctor.

'It's just. . . ' The Doctor waited patiently. 'I don't want anybody else to die because of me,' whispered Chris. 'That's all., And how do you answer that?

The Doctor let a few minutes pa.s.s. When it became clear that Chris had nothing to add, he said, 'There's only one way of guaranteeing it.'

'I know,' said the boy. 'Lock myself in the TARDIS and never come out.'

The Doctor sat back on his stone and drew his thoughts together. 'Do you think she'll be more useful to us if she's frightened, or if she's not frightened?'

'Penelope? I hadn't thought of it that way,' Chris said.

No, thought the Doctor, of course you hadn't.

'It'd be better if she wasn't scared,' the young man decided. 'If she trusts us, she'll be more likely to tell us things. And besides, it isn't fair to hold a non-existent threat over her head.'

'I'm not the only thing she's afraid of, though. . . What should we do about it?'

'I'm going to talk to her,' said Chris. He was frowning as he walked away.

The Doctor sighed.

When he looked back to the flower, it had fallen from the branch.

Out out Penelope sat cross-legged by the smoking firepit. In her lap she held the Doctor's rainbow egg.

56.Tanganyika had never been like this. She would have preferred the African heat to the cold j.a.panese spring, the rough floor of a tent to the smooth floor of the house. Travelling where she pleased, in that one wild year before her marriage, instead of being trapped in a foreign, ancient place.

Where her fingers contacted the egg's surface, the colours rearranged themselves. The object in the shrine had left a trace on her, marked her in some way. The Doctor a.s.sured her it was nothing to be concerned about. Nonethe-less, she felt contaminated.

She sighed, watching the play of colours over the strange machine's surface. She had spent the better part of an hour attempting repairs on her time conveyance, but she still could see nothing wrong with the mechanism. It simply would not function. The electrical battery's indicator showed that it was still half full; it was as though some other, hidden source of power had been extinguished.

Despite the emptiness of the room, she felt that the walls were too close. It was a familiar feeling. She had experienced the same sense of enclosedness, of trappedness, in her home in London. In the cluttered bedroom and the overfilled study. In the dining room every evening when her husband had begun one of his interminable lectures.

Penelope shook herself. She was free of that suffocating residence at last.

But what did her freedom mean, if the mechanism by which she had achieved it no longer functioned?

The sense of confinement rose up in her suddenly, like a wave of panic. She had to find some way out of here.

Joel knocked on the doorframe, awkwardly, and ducked under it. Penelope tucked the glowing egg away in her jacket. 'Mr Mintz,' she said.

'How's the horseless TARDIS?'

'My time conveyance?' Penelope frowned. 'I owe you an honest answer. My repairs have made no difference. We appear to have two options, neither of which I find appealing.'

Joel sat down near hen 'Either we're stuck here, or we ask the Doctor for help.'

Penelope's scowl deepened. 'I am disturbed at being forced into relying on him.'

'You've got nothing to worry about, Miss Gate. He's one of the good guys, he really is. Besides, I already asked Chris if they could give you us a lift home.'

'I don't wish to return home. You know that, Mr Mintz.'

'Oh, come on!' said Joel cheerfully. 'Think of the acclaim, even if there are still a few bugs in the ol' time machine! Even the Wright brothers did the odd nosedive.'

57.'No doubt,' said the inventor. 'Though if my time machine had truly made any scientific impact, you would have heard of it in the late twentieth century.'

Joel looked glum. 'Well, anyway. . . ' he said.

Chris glanced up at the sky. It was a clear, cold day. He could smell blossoms and turned earth and smoke. There wasn't a cloud to be seen.

Why could he hear thunder?

By the time he had realized, Kame was already running towards the village gates.

Chris shouted and leapt down from the veranda of the house, tugging at his katana katana.

There were maybe a dozen of them, riding like madmen towards the town.

Purple banners flapped behind them. Children were crying and running, getting out of the way of the hooves. Farmers were running in from the fields, yelling.

'Close the gates!' Kame was shouting. 'Don't let them in!' The villagers were pus.h.i.+ng the wooden gates closed as the last farmers slid inside. But they'd waited too long. Two women were sent flying as a samurai charged the gate, kicking it open.

Kame drew his katana katana and shouted a challenge as the purple samurai burst into the village, sending one of the peasants tumbling in the dust. and shouted a challenge as the purple samurai burst into the village, sending one of the peasants tumbling in the dust.

One of the mounted samurai leapt down from his horse. Chris was running up.

He saw the sword flash down into Kame's shoulder, a blue line of movement, reflecting the clear sky. He found himself slowing to a trot, then to a stumble, and suddenly he was on his knees in the dust, gazing at the fallen body of the ronin as dark blood spread across the ground.

'Shut the gates!' the man roared, his bloodied sword flas.h.i.+ng in the sunlight.

'Shut them! There are demons coming! Demons!'

58.

6.Flying Heads

Chris was watching Kame's blood spreading out across the half-frozen soil. He was fascinated by the edge of the puddle, where the surface tension created a rounded shape.

Distantly he could hear people yelling and screaming and kids crying and a little voice inside him telling him he had seen far worse than this, far worse than this, he should get up and keep functioning.

The blood didn't seem to be soaking into the ground much, although it wasn't spreading out as quickly as before.

The human sounds were quietening down. Chris looked around, slowly.

Everything was moving like a sim played at half-speed and slightly out of focus. The villagers had formed a frightened knot behind him, across the square from the dozen samurai.

The Doctor walked through them, and they parted around him. He headed straight towards Chris.

The Doctor knelt beside Kame's fallen body for a moment, ignoring the samurai standing over him with the killing blade still in his hand. He stood up and turned back to Chris.

'Get up!' he stage whispered. He put his hands on Chris's face, trying to get his companion's attention. Chris blinked, wondering why he couldn't seem to respond. 'Get up, get up!'

Chris saw the samurai looming behind the Doctor. His sword was still drawn. The Adjudicator felt his mouth opening as his brain tried to shout out a warning, but suddenly everything was moving at normal speed and there wasn't any time left.

The samurai's sword rose and came flas.h.i.+ng down and broke into three pieces that spun away from the Doctor's back without ever having touched it.

The Time Lord turned around. 'Do stop that,' he said. 'Someone will get hurt.'

59.The Doctor and Chris sat on opposite sides of the fireplace. Outside, on the veranda, their guards were as silent as the village.

The rest of Captain Hadankyou's samurai were keeping watch through gaps in the village's fence. Waiting for the demons to attack. The villagers had been ordered to keep watch as well, or to stay in their houses.