Doctor Who_ The Death of Art

Chris"s face lit up. "A Slippery Jim!"

"A what?"

"A man who was the slipperiest thief of his era, caught and set to catch those worse than thieves. It"s an old story that I was told as a child. I never dreamt it had a basis in fact."

"There"s another part we aren"t supposed to tell. In 1827 Vidocq was forced to resign from the Surete. He set up in business but his paper-mills were crippled by intrusive regulations, changes in employment law, visits from agencies within the Government. By 1833 he was reduced to sc.r.a.ping a living running a private enquiry service in Paris. The Government closed it down. No one knows why. It"s not even in the files I"ve seen. He died alone, unloved, poor, without respect. That"s the real tradition of the Surete. It doesn"t give a s.h.i.t." He knocked hard on the dark wood door. "Come on, I"ll buy you a drink."

On the fringes of the great hub, that core of stabilized s.p.a.ce-time from which the great colonizing expeditions of the 136 Quoth had gone forth over two thousand five hundred million pattern-lifetimes before, a group of youngsters gathered.

Their tutor, a demi-oldest, slow and ponderous in its thinking, childed them gently into their positions. The patterns dropped in inexorable geometry across its body.

The young Quoth stirred in the shallow contracted dimensions of guilt. One, bolder or more foolhardy than the others, let its feelings leak out in the patterns that dappled its surface.

The demi-oldest extended its million limbs into all the friable crannies of s.p.a.ce with a good-natured gesture of resignation. It twitched; breaking and remaking wormholes in the localized Riemann tensor fields of the seventh dimension.

Elsewhere, Quoth scholars were at work. The Cl.u.s.ter that had recently approached the Very Edge of Quoth s.p.a.ce at speed was still being studied at a distance. Its velocity and configuration had been mapped by the Surveyor cla.s.s and matched against those detected in the past by Quoth Rememberers.

The Cl.u.s.ter was the same puzzle as all the others that had 137 been surveyed across the long history of the Quoth. It was rigid without being symmetrical, changeable without being amorphous, too great for the senses even of the augmented Surveyors to measure. The Historians were sure though that it was a New Ma.s.s, not one that had ever before come into conjuncture with Quoth s.p.a.ce, not one that might contain lost survivors of the Great Outward Urge. In this they were partly right. The Cl.u.s.ter had never been in contact with Quoth s.p.a.ce before, but unknown to the scholars it contained Quoth who had.

Emil felt pressure within his skull like poisonous ants crawling over his brain, like the black and purple weight at the start of the worst migraine in history. In his mind"s eye he saw pictures that came with an alien commentary played on his other senses. They came with a taste like burning tar, with a pain in his vestigial organs, with the slow background murmur of distant trumpets. He was reasoning furiously. He couldn"t wrinkle his nose and know for sure that he had done it, but he could still think. The message - however it was conveyed to his brain - must, he decided, be causing his senses to respond in odd ways. There was a disease - the name of which he had forgotten - which caused people to see sounds as colours; and some of the opium-eating poets had written about such sensations. Emil wondered if this was something similar.

One pattern was repeated often. Impossible to say how often. A name? An ident.i.ty? They called themselves something unp.r.o.nounceable. Not a sound, nor a letter, but it had a meaning. The Communicating Ones? The Speakers? Those-Who-Talk? It was the most ancient term in their language of shapes, an archaism reserved as a reference to their race. The Quoth, Emil thought. That would do.

Later he was to wonder how so much experience was embedded in his brain within so short a time. Later still he was to understand how. Now, however, the history of the Quoth spread out before him like part of his own memory.

Better than his own memory; oils to watercolours. Although 138 Emil had sometimes caught himself dreaming in colour and had within the dream thought, "Red, I am dreaming in red", his dreams were normally pale in comparison to the vivid pictures that now flooded through him. He was the unsensed observer of the Quoth"s greatest triumphs, and their greatest tragedy.

< we="" watch="" and="" make,="" old="" one.=""> The Quoth had been obsessed with the patterns of things from their earliest memories. In that ancient time, they had existed solely to form pleasing congruencies of form and substance. During this idyllic period they were immortal and required no visible sustenance. Myth, Emil wondered, or had the Quoth in truth their own Garden of Eden?

< unlike="" now,="" oh="" old="" one.=""> < p="">

Others say it was no G.o.d, but something vast, jealous and unknown, a thing that wished all Quoth ill, but yet could not simply whelm us with power external but sought some devious way to harm our race. Be it G.o.d, or unknown, fate or chance, it wove thus: the first blight upon the Quoth was that our children were born perfect. > Emil watched in wonder as the Quoth history unfolded. It seemed that they were truly immortal, ageless and unburdened by the need to gather or h.o.a.rd food. Their tasks, self-imposed, consisted of the creation of vast works of art, constructed from their environment and themselves. Each Quoth amended its own patterns the better to fit in with the theme of the great changes sweeping across their race. They were thinking beings, though, and changed willingly, not by instinct or compulsion. Emil eavesdropped on their greatest arguments over the fitness of the pattern. Some, the most diligent, tortured themselves to adopt a personal pattern that they hoped was most harmonious for the whole, in spite of any personal difficulty. Others made the minimum changes to their own bodies, and preferred to ride out some changes in the race"s harmony entirely, deeming them unaesthetic. Yet despite these disagreements, they had no violence and no wars.

Individual Quoth held a pattern for a particular length of time. This time, which was fixed perhaps as a fundamental of their biology, they made the basis of their histories. Emil found it difficult to identify. Since the Quoth were immortal he could not relate the time to a proportion of their lifespans, but dimly he sensed that subjectively it was as long for a Quoth as a year might be for a human. There was nothing in the visions he was experiencing to provide him with a temporal frame of reference that would relate "pattern-lifetime" to a human scale of measurement. The world of the Quoth"s far past was a seemingly infinite flat 140 layer, bounded above and below with some dense undulating material, sealed forever from sun, moon or stars. There was neither day nor night there. To the Quoth, it was paradise.

Within that thin layer they built their greatest works; patterns stretching left and right, forward and back, eckwards and andwards. Emil could neither clearly sense nor understand how the Quoth"s patterns extended into those final two dimensions, but it was clear that the dimensions referred to were not up and down. Within that thin layer, the Quoth bred more Quoth and wrought larger works.

They were not a s.e.xual form of life. Which was, in a way, a relief, Emil thought; scientific curiosity was one thing, being cast as the Cosmic Voyeur was quite another. However, they did seem capable of a kind of romantic pa.s.sion a.s.sociated with an odd mechanical mode of reproduction. They built their children from raw material - "birthing" or "protoquoth"

matter - taken from the layer itself and a.s.sembled with conscious, almost infinite care. The parents were those whose patterns suggested the references to be used in the a.s.sembly.

It was as if two humans could decide to have a child that would be guaranteed the mother"s hair, the father"s nose.

Quoth parenting groups could be composed of any number of pattern contributors, although the necessity of being able to work closely together placed an upper limit on the number within the more well-patterned areas of their world. The parents were drawn together by mutual admiration of features in each other"s patterns. They would spend whole pattern-lifetimes inducing the rare birthing material to fuse and flow, until a new Quoth, the sum of all their beauty, was born.

Sometimes individual Quoth, enamoured more of themselves than others, would craft offspring like themselves in every detail, though in a race of immortals the impulse for self-replication was rare. Emil wondered what the Quoth saw in each other; for all the clarity of the images the Quoth themselves were infuriatingly blurry, l i t t l e more than pulsing bundles or skeins of light.

The Quoth"s ancient paradise ended in cataclysm.

141.

< the="" children="" they="" built="" were="" perfect="" and="" so="" beautiful="" that="" all="" clamoured="" to="" make="" their="" own="" children="" after="" that="" design.="" the="" perfection,="" however,="" was="" that="" of="" stasis,="" and="" the="" great="" blight="" of="" stillness="" and="" beauty="" spread="" out="" over="" us="" until="" even="" normal="" young="" tortured="" themselves="" into="" the="" frozen="" immobility="" of="" the="" beautiful="" quoth.=""> < and="" so="" we="" came="" to="" quoth="" s.p.a.ce?=""> < yes,="" so="" we="" came="" here.=""> Emil"s knowledge of astronomy was not great. His scientific studies had centred on physics and chemistry, but he had often gazed at the sky. The vision of the shattering of the Quoth"s world revealed a sky more wonderful than any Emil had ever seen before. He saw it, although he knew that the Quoth did not have eyes. He smelt the burnt ash taste of its winds, although he knew the Quoth had neither noses nor tastebuds.

The sky was an incandescent ma.s.s of stars, burning with a ghostly indigo light. What could cause that, Emil wondered.

Why were the stars all identical in colour?

He was glad now that he had studied, but even so much of the history was beyond him. Briefly he pondered what these visions would have seemed like to an uneducated man; a vision of h.e.l.l perhaps, or the Apocalypse of Saint John? The seething layer of alien life splitting open under the violet pulse of the strange stars; the opening of the seventh vial?

Suddenly there was a movement within the surface of the world, pulverizing its crust and hurling matter up into s.p.a.ce.

These sights must have looked like Doomsday. Emil strained to understand what was happening. The Quoth"s memories 142 had things all askew, he thought. They pictured their world as a cylinder and their patterned layer as a thinner cylinder wrapped round below the world"s surface. It was impossible that there could be such a world; any ma.s.s sufficient to support life would be pulled into a sphere by its own gravity.

Newton"s equations showed that.

His mathematics faltered as he watched matter volatilized, and ma.s.sive fragments were hurled far into s.p.a.ce. One such fragment of the pattern, referred to in the Quoth"s memories as the Node, had contained a pitiful fraction of the Quoth race. Torn from their Art by the cataclysm, without the resource of birthing material to fuel expansion or hope for the future, the Quoth within the Node drifted for an unknown age of pattern-lifetimes. During that time there were few memories, until the voyaging node fell towards a blue-green world, with a large dead moon orbiting a centre of gravity within it. It was Earth, of course, Emil had seen that coming.

Then there was chaos, and blackness, and the Node shattered among an area of the Earth that even filtered through the Quoth"s perceptions looked, Emil thought, like . . . well, like nothing on Earth. There were no solid shapes, only the vague three-lobed Cl.u.s.ters. In this new alien world, the Quoth almost perished.

Immortal, they could yet die of violence, and perhaps also of despair. For a time their hopes were revived by the detection of birthing material, but though the Quoth explored the group of Cl.u.s.ters from which the trace came and made it their new home it proved finally to be barren. This new environment, a great seething Void in which chunks of alien material, none of it useful for their propagation, hung suspended by unknown forces, was loathsome to them. Repulsed, they could not bear to interact with it. Dormant, without a purpose, without the spur of increase to activate the changing patterns of their bodies, they waited. Seventy-two million pattern-lifetimes elapsed, without change, without purpose.

Emil started adding up in his head. If the Quoth had landed on Earth before human civilization had arisen, perhaps, four thousand years ago - a valid a.s.sumption, Emil 143 felt, in view of his inability to recognize anything - and had remained dormant until recently then the Quoth must still live substantially faster subjective lives than humankind to fit so many pattern-lifetimes into four thousand years. If one pattern-lifetime equalled a subjective year, and the Quoth fitted seventy-two million of them into four thousand years - Emil winced. He was no genius, although he had once been able to become one for brief periods. He really needed to see his fingers for this one. Yes, a Quoth must live at least eighteen thousand times faster than a human being. That must be why they were never seen, moving so quickly they would be invisible. Emil felt his head swimming. The ants began to tread methodically rather than randomly, spiralling inwards. Then everything exploded.

The messages stopped. There had been no response. The time had not been wasted, however; the Miners" preparations for the extraction of the birthing material had been lengthy in order to ensure that no Quoth would be lost in the ensuing chaos. Experience in other Ma.s.ses had shown that there could be a destructive reaction as the vital birthing matter was incorporated into the Miners" own patterns for transpor-tation into Quoth s.p.a.ce.

When the birthing material was torn from the three-lobed Cl.u.s.ters in which it appeared naturally to settle in these strange domains, the Cl.u.s.ters would explode. The remaining two-thirds of the matter that formed them would tear apart. Strange events as yet unexplained by Quoth science would follow. Indeed, some Quoth scientists had speculated that there was an absolute barrier of scale, the so-called Sensory Limitation Effect, beyond which events transpired over timescales too vast for cause and effect to remain meaningful.

The expanding two nodes of each lobe would develop velocities beyond the biologies of the Quoth, and swell mightily as they moved apart in random directions, disturbing the configurations of the surrounding Cl.u.s.ters. In that vortex more birthing matter centres would be bom, surrounding and in 144 time merging with the newly enlarged lobes. Those new lobes would be carried by their new velocities far beyond this Ma.s.s, and some might in time strike other Ma.s.ses elsewhere in the Cosmos. Some might even be flung in the direction of Quoth s.p.a.ce, but they would be moving at too great a pace to be captured by any Quoth structure. This waste was regrettable, but there was no life here to harm, and the benefit to the Quoth far outweighed the damage to these tenantless Cl.u.s.ters.

Emil"s eyes snapped open and his consciousness was flooded with real sensations. Across the room, the Doctor"s eyes caught his in the same instant. How had the Doctor known through this chaos that he was conscious? Too much was happening to take in. He felt light-headed, almost as if he was having an out-of-body experience. Please no, he thought, I"ve only just got used to this one. The room was hot and smelt of steam baths and chemistry. Urine? Chlorine? Ozone? Emil felt the hairs on his head starting to stand on end.

Across the room the Doctor was cowering in an alcove as great sizzling bolts of blue fire crackled off the surrounding surfaces, leaving fatty smudges of carbonized dust. Between the bolts Emil saw the source of this energy. A fat old man in a long patched nightshirt with a nightcap half off his head, supported on wisps of hair flung out as straight as lines of iron-filings in a magnetic field. He was so dazed it took him a moment to recognize his own father. Why was Dominic trying to kill his friend? Was the Doctor one of the Brotherhood? Surely not, or why would he have helped Dominic avoid the men and the watcher outside? Perhaps to make me show him the Doll"s House? It was too hard to decide. Emil missed the icy genius he had been able to invoke before he had been trapped in this body.

"Stop it," he screamed. "Make it stop."

A penknife zoomed past the Doctor from behind, taking a slice off his hat. Dominic turned, the anger washing off his face at something. Unseen by the engrossed nightshirt-wearer, the Doctor brought the first thing to hand down on the back of Dominic"s head with a resounding clump. The 145 Babushka doll split with the impact, spilling smaller copies of itself out from its innards.

Worlds within worlds, Emil thought. There was something in that, and then he fainted.

The Doctor looked at the body of the fat toyshop owner, and then moved over to take Emil"s pulse. He pushed the shattered doll with his foot. "If only they knew they were building a model of the Universe," he said.

146.

Chapter 12.

A dark silhouette moved behind the light. The pain in his head made Chris squint and the lamplight refracting through his eyelashes made the figure loom large and distorted, but he knew who it was.

"Now we are going to talk candidly," said Inspector Jarre.

A woman barely wearing a scarlet dress - that under other circ.u.mstances would have made Chris blush - placed a tray of objects in the circle of lamplight. Incongruously, he was reminded of the magician at his fifth birthday party; the one who had flung down his cards in disgust when confronted by three generations of trained observers.

The memory helped him force a chuckle, although his mouth felt dry and slack, and he wondered sickly about concussion. He tried a situational a.n.a.lysis. He had been hit, and hit hard. Probably with a cosh or another blunt instrument.

He was undoubtedly a prisoner. In the Cafe Fantomas? He couldn"t be sure. The fight drove his surroundings into limbo.

Standard disorientation technique. His chuckle had sounded thick and nervous. Good, that was how he wanted it.

"Come on Anton, untie me," he whined. " I " v e been hazed when I joined the gendarmerie. And get the girl to put the tray away. I don"t need any memory training." If he had learnt anything from the Doctor, it was the importance of being underestimated. If he could make Jarre laugh, make himself out to be an imbecile, let the Inspector claim he was only testing a new colleague, he might get out of this.

"No, you don"t, do you?"

147.

No smile there.

"However, I would like you to look at these items closely.

Do you recognize them?"

Chris looked hard at the tray. He wondered if he could kick it up into Jarre"s face and overturn the lamp. His hands were tied behind his back to a chair that was probably heavy, but he thought he could lift it and run at the same time. He exerted an exploratory tug. The chair was fastened to the floor. His legs were tied as well. Jarre was not taking any chances. Why was he so scared?

"These papers, for instance." Inspector Jarre scooped the contents of Chris"s wallet from where they lay on the tray, and shuffled them like a hand of cards. "They look accurate enough, at least superficially. Nevertheless, your manner and competence alarmed me."

Chris tried to look useless. Lord knows he felt it. He had been worrying about his identification papers since the Doctor had whipped them up with a collection of plastic wheels, hollow circles and pins, a two-colour biro and something called a John Bull printing set, and signed them with the names of the Minister of the Interior and the Minister of War.

The fact that they had met every inspection to date did not fully remove the lack of confidence that the Doctor"s bargain-bas.e.m.e.nt methods of forgery inspired. Chris"s face dropped as Jarre continued: "So I sent a telegram to the Alpine Ma.s.sif.

The answer came before I left the Prefecture this evening.

Shall I read it out?"

Chris shrugged. "If you wish, Inspector."

"Jean-Paul Armand as well as can be expected after skiing accident, stop. Will be in bed for another month, stop. Regret transfer will have to be delayed, stop. Trust no inconvenience caused, stop. Captain Rene LaVey, Prefecture de Ma.s.sif. So for the second time, and you will I am sure forgive me a certain lack of patience that results from my having to ask a second time, who are you and what do you want?"

He raised the yellow gun from the tray and aimed it between Chris"s eyes.

148.

The clock on the wall stood at five minutes to midnight.

"Before tomorrow, if you please, Monsieur."

When she was young, she had a book that sang to her. It was a simple mechanism, a laminated set of memories and a voice box. It sang the song of the Tortoise in Swahili, and in Xhosa, and in the shaman"s tongue. Ufudo, the Tortoise, was old and wise, cautious and infinitely prudent. It was the only animal ever to have tricked Tsuro, the Hare. It won the race between them because it knew all the short-cuts, and because it had hidden members of its family along the course. They had all looked alike. Or was it that they all could look like whatever they liked? Roz could not remember. The book had taught her one of the first lessons of childhood: cheats prosper. Of course she had also learnt that from her sister.

The voice of Ufudo was the wind in the reeds by the black river. It was the hiss of air from the s.p.a.ce-dock, the metronomic click click click click of the s.p.a.cesuit life-support. They build them that way for children, to rea.s.sure them. After a while the noise is a comfort that can no longer be heard. If it stops, the silence is more piercing than any alarm. The suit was a custom j o b ; not recommended for children under six years. Roz was five and a half when she had trekked out from the family estate. of the s.p.a.cesuit life-support. They build them that way for children, to rea.s.sure them. After a while the noise is a comfort that can no longer be heard. If it stops, the silence is more piercing than any alarm. The suit was a custom j o b ; not recommended for children under six years. Roz was five and a half when she had trekked out from the family estate.

Despite the suit"s multiple fail-safes, she was dangerously dehydrated by the time she saw the vision.

The physician whose house Mirakle had invaded clutched and rubbed his pale hands together as if the room was cold. In the grate logs roared and sent their dying sparks up the chimney. Mirakle felt sweat gathering in the folds of fat around his neck. The fear had not died.

Mirakle watched the doctor draw the thin grey sheet over Tomas"s face. There was no breath to make it rise or fall. The Grandmaster was dead. At least this version of him was, and it was in Mirakle"s power to make that death permanent. The involuntary thought made Mirakle squirm internally.

The physician took Mirakle by the arm and led him away 149 from the bed. Away from the raddled mattress and its inanimate burden.

"Drink this."

Obediently August seized the offered gla.s.s. The gagging aroma of absinthe clutched at his throat. He swept his arm out in a convulsive gesture of disgust. The gla.s.s shattered in the grate.

August groped for some explanation of his action. "He was my life," he said. The words fell like dull ingots of some dense metal. It was only half the truth, he realized. Tomas had been his justification. Every evil whim, every shady business deal, every patient fleeced had been attributed in Mirakle"s heart to Tomas"s influence. His holy aims, the salvation of France and the prevention of the horrors the Brotherhood"s precogs had seen in the dim gla.s.s of the future, had justified anything. Had justified everything. Now the justifier was dead, and Mirakle could only face his own evil. It smelt of aniseed.

" I " m sorry." He pressed a bundle of francs into the physician"s hand. "I don"t drink absinthe. Not any more.

Please leave me alone for a moment. I need to think."

When the Grandmaster had begun his charades they had been intended solely to confuse Montague, but gradually they had become the cornerstone of his strategy. With the power he could force people to think as he did. More than mesmerism, it was as if a little version of Mayeur had lived in his victim"s brains, reaching out at times to take control of their consciences. Slowly, imperceptibly, he had extended his control; through Mirakle"s circle of rich patients, through his own political contacts. By now the members of an inner core of the French Government were him. Almost.

The flaw was that he had only one fragment of the Doll"s House, only one handle on the power, and periodic exposure to it was needed to keep the spell functioning. Without it the victims would gradually revert to their own personalities.

Which meant that if Mirakle simply put the tiny chair in his pocket and left Paris for a month or so, he would never have to worry about the Grandmaster again. Then there would only be Montague to fear.

150.

It was finally time for him to decide what he was more afraid of.

In the Pink Room, the burnt and torn body of Major Henri exploded into cellular life.

It screamed.

"I move house and yet I never move house, my house moves with me. My house is me," the Tortoise sang. The sh.e.l.l of the tortoise was blue and it groaned as it moved as if its house was a great weight. It came padding across the Culaan Patera towards the volcano Prometheus, its clawed feet kicking up faint puffs of sulphur dioxide. Its tongue stuck out of the corner of its mouth flashing in and out like a light blinking.

"If your house is so heavy, why do you carry it?" Roz asked curiously.

"Why do you wear that heavy s.p.a.cesuit?" the Tortoise snapped.

"It"s not the same thing."

"Isn"t it?"