Doctor Who_ So Vile A Sin Part 30

'I was just trying to fix them, and I pulled off half his head. I thought I'd wrecked him. So I brought him down here.'

'That's right. You hid him in the jungle.'

'And you said it wasn't fair. He was still moving around, calling my name.'

'Well, it wasn't fair. He was terrified to be without you.'

'So you told Mama.'

'I told Mama,' said Roz. 'And Twolumps was found and fixed.'

'And I didn't get to go on any trips for a month.'

'Well,' said Roz, 'it wasn't fair on poor old Twolumps.'

'No,' said Leabie. 'You never used to let me get away with anything.'

'True.' Roz smiled. 'How are your kids?'

'The kids are just fine, they're beautiful. You'll meet them later. They're terribly excited you're here. I think they all raced off to track down your Mr Cwej. You know, to ask all about you.'

'Oh, no,' said Roz. She wiped her face, pus.h.i.+ng the moisture back through her hair. 'Thandiwe was a bit of an afterthought, wasn't she? She can't be seven.'

'She's six. Roslyn... there's something you ought to know about her.'

Roz looked at Leabie. Her older sister didn't say anything, playing the old game they were both familiar with. Guess what Guess what I'm thinking. I'm thinking.

'You didn't,' said Roz.

'Thandiwe is more than your niece. She's your clone.'

'Don't you need my permission to do that?' said Roz.

'Well,' said Leabie, 'it's a bit late to worry about that now.

You'll like her, Roz. She's as bright as a b.u.t.ton.'

'And they say the aristos are inbred,' said Roz. 'You must have started right after I... disappeared. Decided to whip up a replacement, did you?'

'We couldn't replace you,' said Leabie.

'Thanks.'

'No memory record.'

'Oh, thanks.'

214.

'All we could do was try to plug the gap left in the family tree.

I worry, Roz. You don't have my responsibilities. I wonder if you can understand. I imagine a time when there are no Forresters, when everything we've built up is washed away in some catastrophe. Or worse, just trickles away to nothing. The line must continue, as it has continued for a millennium.'

'And you've found the ultimate way of keeping it going.'

Leabie looked at Roz. 'We could have lost you. Again. Why didn't you come to me for help?'

There was a discreet cough from a little distance. They looked up. A dark man in a servant's uniform was waiting with a message. 'What is it, Genneadiy?' said Leabie.

He walked up. 'Madam, madam,' he said, nodding to each of them, and handed her the message.

Leabie read it at a glance. 'Oh my goodness! Duke Walid is coming here! Worse than that, he's on his way!'

'He's coming here?' said Roz.

'Genneadiy, we must get to work at once!' Leabie jumped up.

'I want a banquet ready at nineteen hundred hours, and guest quarters ready for the Duke's entourage. And I want our security stepped up.' The servant was entering it all into a palmtop. 'And no tomatoes. The Duke hates tomatoes. And check the guest database to find out what kind of music he likes I can't recall whether it was modern makossa or ancient dreamhouse. One of those is Duke Armand and we do not not want to get it wrong. And another thing...' want to get it wrong. And another thing...'

Roz closed her eyes, feeling the droplets landing on her skin.

She was well out of this. Had been well out of this.

Leabie lined them all up for the Duke's arrival, her sister and her children and an a.s.sortment of aunts and uncles and cousins.

Chris was there, standing off to one side, looking humble and terrified. Roz waved him over. She didn't care if they all a.s.sumed he was her b.l.o.o.d.y consort.

Leabie had wanted him to wear a full Adjudicator dress uniform, until he'd pointed out that he didn't represent the Adjudicators. She'd insisted on having a suit made for him, 215 though, a soft blue thing that fitted perfectly. He stood next to Roz, hands clasped in front of him, staring at the airlock door.

The kids were neatly lined up even Thandiwe, who had far too good an idea of etiquette for a six-year-old. Bringing her up right, thought Roz, prim and proper. Gugwani was smiling, trying to catch Chris's eye. 'Everywhere we go...' Roz muttered.

'What?' he whispered.

'Nothing,' she said. 'Look, the shuttle's finished docking.'

Leabie was hovering, nervous. 'We're all sorted out, then, Genneadiy? Of course we are, and it would be a bit late now if we weren't. Deep breaths, everyone.'

The grand airlock door irised open with a hiss. The Duke's personal attendants were first through. One of them took out a little trumpet and blew on it. Roz heard a stifled giggle from one of the kids. She glanced at Thandiwe, who was glaring straight ahead, the model of seriousness.

'His Excellency, Duke Abu ibn Walid of Callisto.' The Duke stepped through, and his entourage followed, looking around and smiling. 'Her Excellency Lady Kirsten. The Lady Genevieve ap Gwalchmai.' There were a dozen more, walking in through the airlock as Walid shook Leabie's hand.

'I don't believe it,' said Chris.

'I do,' said Roz.

The Duke was making introductions on behalf of his staff.

'This is my chief personal secretary, this is my accountant and this is '

'h.e.l.lo, Doctor,' said Roz.

'Roz, Chris,' said the Doctor. 'I seem to have fallen on my feet again.'

Gugwani had somehow managed to arrange it so that Chris sat opposite her at the banquet. The two of them were chatting away, sitting on cus.h.i.+ons at the low wooden table. Roz could swear the thing was half a kilometre long, seating the family members, the Duke's entire entourage and every minor n.o.ble, corporate and bureau chief who could get there fast enough.

Chris looked relaxed at last. Roz wondered if her niece had been ordered to flirt with him. Chris had enough sense not to tell 216 the girl anything he shouldn't. Let him enjoy himself for the time being.

The Doctor sat next to Roz, drinking tea and eating fairy bread.

'You know,' said Roz, 'we haven't had a chance to talk in weeks.'

'You're right. It was exhausting, keeping one eye on Iaomnet... and the other on me.'

Roz shook her head. 'We were totally taken in by Zatopek. I don't understand how he could have impersonated you so completely.'

'At first,' said the Doctor, 'he was me. He must have gradually regained control, with time, and distance from Iphigenia.'

'OK,' said Roz, 'he was you. What was inside that moon, a Doctor-making machine?'

'Now, there's a frightening thought.' He smiled. 'Once upon a time... that's a good way to start the story. Once upon a time, there were unicorns and bread-and-b.u.t.terflies, planets like giant apples and suns like red balloons. But since no sentient life had yet evolved, there was no one to notice they were impossible, so no one minded. And then along came the Time Lords.'

'The Time Lords were the first sentient beings?'

'The first to evolve in this universe, yes,' said the Doctor. He finished his tea and poured another cup. 'Back then we were the Shadow people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science. Magick predominated for a long, long time.

And then Ra.s.silon made his decision.'

Roz had forgotten her tomato soup, listening. Don't think of it like a sitrep, she thought, think of it as a fairy story.

'The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice.

Squeezing out the magick. But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks and bubbles. Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was the least impossible, the closest to science. The residue of psi became a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.

'It's still there.'

Roz said, 'And Iphigenia is... on one of the ley lines?'

The Doctor nodded. 'The Time Lords were aware of the ley lines before the Wars began. We'd chosen to make the universe 217 rational. Its irrational citizens objected. So we turned the psi lines into weapons. A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised as craters.

Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey.'

'Iphigenia,' said Roz.

'Yes. A quarter of the moon is jammed with Time Lord technology, riddled with access tunnels. They just built a fake crater over the top, so the Vampires wouldn't notice, and left it there.'

'They must have realized someone would notice. There must have been hundreds of Martiniques through the millennia.'

'Remember,' said the Doctor, 'back then there were no other intelligent races. None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned. Just the Time Lords, and our enemies. The residual horrors of the universe before this one, and the Great Vampires, sucking dry every planet they could reach.'

'So the expedition came into contact with the ley line,' said Roz.

'A primary source of unimaginable psi power. A well of magick,' said the Doctor. 'Where everything that's possible is boiling under the surface of the universe. Zatopek is working for the Brotherhood.'

'Ah.'

'When I realized what we were faced with, I insisted we leave right away. Zatopek and Iaomnet were very, very insistent. I warned them about the fate of the previous expedition. Close contact with the Nexus simply drove most of them mad, left one of them sliding through different realities, and left an N-gram burning inside Mei Feng's brain. They already knew what had happened. I should really have just let them wave their guns about and make threats, but I was curious... I should never have got so close to the thing.'

'Chris's dream aboard the Hopper,' said Roz. 'He said it was as though a great wave of psi power washed out from the centre of the planet.'

'When I came into contact with the Nexus, it released every potential possibility of my existence. Well, almost all of them. If 218 I dust off some of the mathematical manuals in the TARDIS library, I can probably do the calculations. In any case, all those probabilities were thrown loose, spraying loose into the galaxy.

Some of them found places to settle. Zatopek was very close. As I recall, he was holding a needier to my ear at the time.'

'So he turned into you,' said Roz.

'Not quite,' said the Doctor. 'Me, with some tiny difference.

Some decision I didn't make, some road I didn't travel... maybe that Doctor just had something else for breakfast for that morning. In any case, Zatopek's own psi talents allowed him to gradually emerge.'

It was all starting to make sense, in a nonsensical way. 'That explains the you that contacted me on Fury,' said Roz.

The Doctor nodded. 'The distribution of probabilities is chaotic, but broadly, the further you get away from the Nexus, the more bizarre they become.'

'One thing I don't get why blow up Ca.s.sandra, but not Iphigenia?'

'All TARDISes have a self-destruct device,' said the Doctor, 'but the cosmic ley lines don't have such a convenient facility.

Blowing up the planet would leave the Nexus quite unharmed.'

'And the N-forms?' prompted Roz.

'Mines,' said the Doctor. 'They didn't just detect psi. They actively attacked it. Anything that wasn't Gallifreyan. But the Time Lords didn't pick up their toys when they were finished with them. There are still a small number of N-forms, usually damaged and insane, left lying about the galaxy. The ones which didn't want to stop killing were the hardest to find.' He stirred his tea aggressively. 'Typical Time Lord blunder. Create something ludicrously powerful and then forget all about it. Decide you're going to be entirely rational, and then have a psychic war which lasts for millennia and decimates half the galaxy.'

Roz shook her head. 'I can see why you don't go home at Christmas.'

'I'd chew their ear off, for one thing. Each time I go back,' he said, lowering his voice, 'I don't expect to be allowed to leave again. So far I've been lucky.'

She nodded. 'Leabie's been asking me why I never visit.'

219.

They gave one another a what-can-you-do look. Roz said, 'Maybe you could have done more good by staying home.

Sorting them out. They sound like they need sorting out.'

'Ten million years of tradition is a heavy weight to s.h.i.+ft,' said the Doctor. 'They're so content with watching, occasionally messing around a little bit in other people's affairs, and ignoring everything they could be doing...'

'Everything you're trying to do.'