Doctor Who_ The Death of Art

In the TARDIS console room, the Doctor thought of slow, robotic, planet-sized mechanisms moving through inhabited solar systems and laying them waste. He bit his lip. A tiny 253 bubble of blood showed red between his teeth.

Emil"s body lay on the floor, tenantless, next to the morose teleporter who was trussed up with a red-handled skipping rope, unable to move or even teleport away.

The Doctor had only the second-hand impression of the Quoth he had gleaned via Jessica"s link with Emil to go on. If they reacted badly to the existence of beings a billion billion times their size, he might need a fall-back plan. A bad joke occurred to him: why is a Time Lord like someone with a Viking ancestor? They"ve both got Berserkers in their blood.

The nan.o.bots in his bloodstream, part of his Time Lord heritage, could cure Emil of the Quoth if need be. Cure everyone. The only cost would be the death of things too small to see. As it always was, if you just stood in the right place. He seized Emil"s hand. His pulse was steady. Good.

What would be better, the end of Earth - and the collapse of the established timeline - or the genocide of a race of aliens who had never meant any harm and who had already been ruthlessly, albeit unknowingly, enslaved for millions of subjective years? He pulled a coin out of his pocket and scowled when he saw it had two heads. He tossed it anyway. In a local universe like a TARDIS, sometimes prevailing patterns of probability could be determined by stochastic a.n.a.lysis. The coin landed on its side on the TARDIS console.

The Doctor beamed. "Just as I thought." He licked his lips and re-metabolized the nan.o.bots.

Chris looked, and felt his jaw drop. Outside, the duelling pistol spun in the air, a slow-turning golden s.p.a.ce-station orbiting around a black spiral galaxy. Streams of red energy twirled off the gun into the dark hole in s.p.a.ce, which was visibly enlarging.

"So, Doctor," Jarre said, "is this part of the plan?"

"Look," Chris sighed, "I think there"s something I"d better tell you."

[So] [Obvious] [Now.]

254.

< yes,="" warleader.=""> There was newborn wonder in Warleader"s voice.

So obvious now, Emil thought. His father had been working with the Grandmaster, keeping Montague distracted. The Family a buffer zone; a distracting move on a chessboard; a bright shiny trinket for a vulture"s eye. How many had suffered because of it? The artists sacrificed to Montague, the Family members picked off in ambushes over the years, the babies twitching in their padded cradles. The pa.s.sers-by, the people on the express in Lille killed as part of a trap for him.

He had never even noticed that when he had been stupid. His mind was clear as ice now. A ghost in the machine. Who had, who would say that? He felt the circuitry would tell him, if he just knew how to approach it.

He tried not to be distracted; to remember feelings. Was that why the Doctor worked so hard to annoy him? Perhaps, but Emil still found him too hard to understand.

What he did understand was that he could always have this mind. He saw now how to recreate this clarity in his own head.

Proteins like strings of precious stones; hyperganglions. The Family could be remade perfect. The wrongdoers punished. His father forced to confess, and then magnanimously forgiven.

G.o.d"s in his Heaven, all"s right with the world. And the future?

The people unborn, unconceived? What were they to him?

What was he to himself? When he had power, he had hated it and wanted only to be himself. Now he knew, he never knew who he was.

The voice was not his own. Nor was it really a voice.

Now the real dialogue could begin.

If only he could remember what he was supposed to say.

255.

Chapter 25.

Sweat boiled from Dominic"s skin. Behind him, against the stones, Clarissa, Duval and Roz were stockpiling the sharpest shards of rock; getting ready to fight when Dominic"s anger failed. Madness. Sticks against the lightning. Clarissa"s eyes were red from tears. She was worried about Emil. She should be worried about herself. Dominic knew she was going to die soon. They all were.

When Dominic"s strength failed the barrier would collapse and wash over them with its fires, or the things that flung themselves at it like moths at a flame would break through it.

Dominic"s arms shook as he tried to fix the patterns of the fire in his mind. He stared through the distortion of the broil-ing air, watching the figures move back and forth on the other side of the barrier. What did they want? Vengeance?

The mere pleasure of rending flesh beneath their talons? He wished he knew. It might help him hate them. He wanted to want to kill them. He wanted to feel the certainty of anger, but the emotion simply was not there. Holding the barrier without it was like holding ice. Its flame melted through his fingers. Its solidity was an illusion. A couple of the creatures seemed to sense that. They drew close to the weak spots; the blue cold spots in his yellow and red vision.

A man with the head of a lion flung himself against the barrier and sizzled into scarlet gouts of flame, squealing like a pig with its throat cut. Feedback burst into Dominic"s mind as the temperature of the air faltered, and other parts of the barrier cooled as the charred corpse of the leonine man was 256 flung back into the midst of Montague"s puppets. It was so hard to keep it all in motion. The dance of molecules sickened him. A deterministic waltz, interrupted by the perpetual motion of his will. Just to stop might be fatal now.

It would be so easy to lie down and sleep. Just to let go and let the mindless things that Montague had bred swarm over them. A momentary pain, no more, and then oblivion. No need to see Clarissa die; no need to live and have the Family condemn him for his betrayal. Well, why not, Dominic thought. To die is as meaningless as to live. He edged towards the wall of flame. It did not feel hot to him, but a strange cold. Can a Flamer burn himself? he wondered.

Roz"s hand came down hard on his shoulder. She had ripped part of the fabric of her dress and made a contrap-tion of long strips of cloth. Dominic recognized it as an improvised sling. "Can you lower the temperature in one part of the barrier?" she asked.

Dominic"s voice was shaky. "Only for a little while. I can barely hold it as it is. Besides, what good is that thing?

They"ll just heal."

"Will they?" Roz gestured at the corpse of the leonine thing; a dark huddled shape barely visible through the barrier.

"He didn"t. I think something"s happened to Montague, and without him their psychic powers are dying. With luck their metabolisms rely on the power; hardly any of them look biologically sound. If we can hold them off long enough they"ll probably just drop dead."

"You don"t really believe that."

Roz looked at him with stone-dead certainty in her eyes.

"Oh, but I do, Monsieur, considering the alternatives. More, I think they know it too, at least at some level of their consciousness. That"s why they are so keen to get in to us. To get this." She took a transparent cube from her pocket. Inside it, through a thick green liquid, Dominic could just see the distorted shape of a tiny chair.

"Where did you get that?"

"The Doctor slipped it to me when he took off with Emil."

Dominic swore weakly. "You see what this means. We"ve 257 been sacrificed to keep these things in one place while the Doctor escapes."

"No."

"You don"t believe h e " d do it, do you? Take it from me, a man will sacrifice anything to save his skin. Anything."

No. I am a man.

< and="" what="" is="" a="" man?=""> A living being built of cells, built of molecules, built of atoms, built of quarks.

< where="" are="" you?=""> All around you. You are strings of quarks smeared down into the micro-dimensions, living within the atoms of my body.

< you="" are="" our="" cl.u.s.ter?=""> Yes, I suppose so.

No.

< just="" a="" creature="" so="" vast="" that="" we="" have="" barely="" explored="" a="" part="" of="" you?=""> Er, yes.

< so="" all="" the="" cl.u.s.ters="" are="" things="" like="" you?=""> Yes.

< why="" do="" you="" torment="" us?=""> We don"t. At least, we don"t intentionally. At least, not all of us did intentionally. We did not know you were alive. We did not know of you; only of a power that could be made to shape the world around us.

< what="" have="" you="" done="" to="" all="" the="" other="" cl.u.s.ters?=""> I " m isolated so that I can talk to you.

< what="" do="" you="" want="" to="" say?=""> I want to help you to be free, and I want to say I " m sorry.

Dominic felt the barrier waver, and through one of the cold spots an eyeless, moist head forced its way. Razor teeth fixed in a shark mouth. Shoulders like tree trunks, arms like boa constrictors. There were two others with it. Dominic got a 258 confused impression of a tree made out of crystal and a man with a long engorged fleshy organ growing from his abdomen, that opened at its end into a tiny insane replica of a human face.

A scream of shattering crystal jarred the teeth in his head.

The first creature was fighting the other two. It was trying to force them into the hotter parts of the barrier. It had broken a shining gla.s.s limb from the tree creature and speared it through the abnormal limb of the man-thing. Yellow diseased fluid evaporated where it hit the barrier. The eyes of the little head burst in red b.a.l.l.s of froth. Then it burnt away like a wax death-mask on a red-hot statue.

Roz shouted a name, but it was lost in the surge of the fire as Dominic strained to cleave a pathway for the creature.

From the other side, distorted by the heat, a wail arose. A sound like cats being tortured. A groaning, wheezing sound.

Surely even the throats of the altered could not make that sound.

Roz shouted, "Yes!"

In the midst of the bonefields, the TARDIS materialized like a foursquare blue mausoleum.

"Whatever that thing was, it"s alien," Jarre shouted, "and you pick now to tell me you"re not this marvellous sage from the future who always puts things right!" He grabbed Chris by the collar of his gendarme"s uniform. "What is that then, Monsieur Whoever-You-Are?"

"It"s some sort of vortex feeding on psychic energies,"

Chris gabbled, fear granting him certainty. "Just be glad we got to the politicians first or it would be pulling that power out of their heads, probably fatally."

Screams sounded down the corridor. A doppler sequence of sound, getting nearer.

Chris grabbed Jarre and threw him to one side.

A dozen or so more black galaxies smashed into the room and out through the wall.

The Doctor and Emil stood in the doorway of the TARDIS.

259.

The creatures shuffled nearer to it, drawn by the light from the interior and the power they sensed in Emil.

Across the hall of bones, the Doctor stared into Roz"s eyes.

His voice seemed to shake the tombs. "Open the box!"

Roz ran her index finger along the upper edge. The lid turned black and winked out of existence. The green liquid started to flow upwards out of the box, leaving the chair exposed. She almost dropped it. A room-temperature superfluid? Some psychic-deadening alien gloop the Doctor carried in his pocket for just those occasions when malicious furniture needed restraining?

She was momentarily relieved when the thick green soup merged into the upper outer surfaces of the cube as a micro-scopically thicker layer of transparency. She had not wanted any of that on her hands.

The relief lasted less than a second. Roz"s next thought was that the universe had fallen on her. From the bodies of the altered, from the fading barrier, from the stones themselves and from the air, power surged into the chair. Forcing her back like a stream from a watercannon. A stream built out of blue-grey Cherenkov radiation as psychic energies were driven into the fabric of the tiny chair.

From Emil outwards, the wave of Quoth warrior-mission-aries swarmed through the Blighted Cl.u.s.ters that were the inhabited brains of Montague"s creatures. In comparison to that war the Rutan-Sontaran conflict was a squabble in a play-pen. It took almost a full minute.

A man with a body eight inches across and limbs like a spider, whose metabolism had worked by teleporting oxygen into his bloodstream and teleporting fatigue poisons out, started to choke as atrophied lungs with too small a surface area failed.

A woman whose body stretched through several chambers of the catacombs went into spasm as nerve signals once carried telepathically at lightspeed were forced back to the slow routes of synapses and neurons.

A thing neither male nor female screamed in a high treble 260 as ugliness and sin fell back on the pristine contours of its unearthly loveliness.

Dominic, the power to maintain the barrier stripped from him, bent down and ran his hand across his wife"s face.

Compared to everyone else it seemed so normal.

The creature that had striven to make its way across the barrier to them crouched on the ground, doubled over in agony. When it moved, its overpowered muscles splintered the bones to which they were attached, bones that were no longer sheathed with psychic force. It was moaning the name "Claudette" as if it helped it to make a sound. Dominic could hear the surfaces of its bones grinding together under its skin.

From the tunnels a woman in a white shroud tottered over to it; her impossibly long calf muscles making her stumble.

Through the injured and the dying the Doctor pa.s.sed, leading Emil by the hand. Heading for Roz.

The blind man drew a knife from his inside pocket with his right hand.

He held it to the side of Roz"s neck. His other hand grabbed the base of the cube.

"I"ll take that. It will be even more useful now so much power has flowed into it."

The Doctor"s face turned hard. For a horrifying instant he thought it was a Chirurgeon, one of the augmented a.s.sa.s.sins of the Shadow Directory. It was a hundred years since the Doctor had last met one of those - if you could count being face-down with a knife in your neck as a meeting. Against one of them Roz wouldn"t stand a chance.

"Stand down, authority Raphael, Chirurgeon, Baby-Pierre-Baby-Tao," the Doctor snapped, hoping the codes from the time of the Woodwicke Calamity had not become defunct.

Pierre grinned. "I have the feeling y o u " v e mistaken me for someone else, Doctor. Not that I shouldn"t be used to that by this time."

The Doctor returned his grin. "You can"t imagine how relieved I am to hear you say that." His eyes flicked over 261 Pierre"s body. Now that a couple of seconds had pa.s.sed the shifts in body language were becoming unmistakable.

"Grandmaster."

" "Grandmaster" will do fine. Come, let us reason together.

Something seems to be preventing my accessing my more valuable conquests, but this bolthole of a mind, this humble last resort, appears to have been missed. I wonder if you can explain that, Doctor?"

The Doctor rubbed at his ear; adjudication sign language - prepare to engage. "As I once remarked to my old teacher Borusa, it is a cardinal error to imagine that I am responsible for everything that goes wrong."

"Spare me your childhood reminiscences, Doctor." The knife drew a line along Roz"s neck. Then two things happened. Clarissa sank her teeth into the Grandmaster"s ankle, and Roz threw her head back. It hit the rock wall hard, almost stunning her, but it moved her main artery away from the line of the knife. The Grandmaster brought his boot heel down on Clarissa"s face, and deflected Roz"s wild blow - a left-handed jab - with his right elbow, spinning the knife in his right hand as he did so. He was good; probably drawing energy from the proximity of the chair and translating it into reaction speed.