Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [26]
She glanced down at the book again.
Inevitably, there are those who have a morbid fascination with such evils. Just as the human race has spawned “Satan-worshippers”, at least one group exists which has dedicated itself to the study of Paradox, turning its back on traditional Time Lord values and instead embracing a form of dark shamanic spiritualism. Indeed, this group is not unlike one of the voodoo cults of Mutter’s Spiral, with its own pantheon of spirits and demons, and its own occult rituals. The group is known as Faction Paradox, and it’s hard to describe the dread this name conjures up in the minds of the Time Lord archons...
Sam adjusted her scowl by a millimetre or two, then followed the Doctor. She threw the book over her shoulder as she walked, leaving it lying in the middle of the passageway. She had a suspicion that the Doctor’s pockets would be able to grow another copy at a moment’s notice, if they needed to.
Homunculette poured himself another glass of whatever it was in the bottle. He wasn’t sure how much of the stuff he’d drunk, but he was still in control of all his facilities. Predictably.
‘Can’t get drunk,’ he said. ‘I’m damned if I’m not going to try, though.’ He turned to the woman sitting at the bar next to him. ‘Have you been to Simia KK98, ever?’
Sheepishly, the woman shook her head.
‘No. And you know why, don’t you? Because you’re human, that’s why. Too stupid to go anywhere.’ He started slooshing the stuff around in his glass, trying to make the clots of green go away. On KK98, his House had spent whole months like this. Sealed into the silos under the permafrost, waiting for the enemy probes to finish scanning the surface. His entire House. Doing their best to get drunk, or to go mad, or to do anything that’d stop them thinking for a while. Other species had it easy. Other species weren’t alcohol-immune. Humans would have been able to drink themselves blind in the darkness, singing songs of affectionate comradeship and making jokes that wouldn’t have been funny to anyone on this side of the consciousness threshold.
The human woman wrinkled her nose. Homunculette wondered if she was sniffing at the stuff in the glass, or at the stuff on his suit. He didn’t much care. Her problem, not his.
Unless you counted the Shift, which Homuculette didn’t, there was only one other person in the cocktail lounge. The male human, Colonel something. Homunculette thought about the officers in the Time Lord Last Wave, the old men who’d force-regenerated themselves until their skins had been covered in black organic blast-proofing. Then he thought about the fat idiot in the green shirt, sitting at a table at the back of the lounge, staring into space. The contrast was almost laughable.
The cocktail lounge was yet another stone-walled room near the heart of the ziggurat, this one fitted with a bar and more drinks cabinets than Homunculette could be bothered counting. The furnishings didn’t match the style of the architecture, here. Even if you were in the middle of the Unthinkable City, Qixotl had said, a cocktail lounge had to look like a cocktail lounge. There were some laws of the universe that just couldn’t be broken.
The human woman nervously shifted her backside around on her fake wooden bar stool. ‘It’s kind of interesting,’ she said, obviously forcing herself to make polite conversation. ‘The way you drink. You look very... human. Uhh. Or is that an insult where you come from?’
‘What do you think?’ Homunculette slurred.
‘No, but really, what I meant was... oh, God.’
Something had distracted the woman, had made her look towards the doorway. Homunculette thought about turning to see what she was gawping at. He spent a few moments wondering if it was worth the bother. In the end, he decided that even if it wasn’t worth the bother, he’d enjoy complaining about having to make the effort. So he turned.
And spilled his drink.
There were two people standing in the doorway. Something moved around in Homunculette’s bowels, the result of a deep-rooted atavistic