Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [4]
Still, maybe it was the off-season for UFOs.
Kamala had actually succeeded in selling the Colonel a bumper sticker, which he’d insisted was really a lucky talisman in disguise. It was highly unlikely, he’d said, that they’d find the Unthinkable City without it. Kortez had nodded and said that the bumper sticker was not what it seemed. Of course, even with the sticker, Kamala hadn’t been able to promise them they’d find what they were looking for. Once the merchandise had been paid for, he’d pointed out that the City had only been sighted four or five times in the twenty years since the island had been turned into a ReVit Zone, even though the entire forest had been meticulously surveyed and v-mapped. Kamala had proudly pointed out that it was therefore the last true “lost city” on the face of the Earth.
The last thing Bregman had noticed before leaving the shop had been the message on Kamala’s own t-shirt, which he’d worn over a traditional native polyester loincloth.
SO, THIS MUST BE THE HUMAN DELEGATION, it had read. Bregman hadn’t understood that at all. Probably a native in-joke.
She saw Kortez had stopped moving, and was staring up at the office-grey patches of sky just visible between the treetops. No sunshine here, thought Bregman, not these days. Still damn hot, though.
‘Here,’ Kortez proclaimed.
She blinked the sweat out of her eyes. ‘Sir?’
‘Here. Here. This is the place.’ He extended an arm in her general direction, a thick pink branch 50 per cent fat and 50 per cent muscle. ‘The card, Lieutenant?’
Bregman reached into her top pocket, and slipped the card out of its protective envelope. The card was a brilliant metallic silver, its surface reflecting sharp white light into her eyes despite the obvious absence of sun. ‘Sir? I, erm... I thought we were looking for the City, Sir.’
Kortez nodded. ‘Did you ever see Brigadoon, Lieutenant?’
‘Er, no. No, Sir.’
‘Beautiful film. Beautiful. All those wonderful old songs. Do you know why they don’t write songs like that any more, Lieutenant?’
Oh God, his eyes were going all glassy again. ‘No, Sir. No idea.’
Kortez shook his head, sadly. ‘No. Neither have I. Neither have I.’ He fell silent.
‘Erm... Sir...?’
‘Brigadoon. It was a village. In Scotland. You remember Scotland? No. You were born after the Unification. I remember. This village... this Brigadoon... it became misplaced.’
Bregman was having trouble working out whether he was talking about real life or the film, now. ‘In what way, Sir?’
Kortez shot her a suspicious glance, as if the answer were obvious, and by asking she’d revealed herself to be an evil enemy spy-clone. ‘It was going to be attacked by witches,’ he said. ‘So it was removed. Brilliant tactic, I always thought. The local people made a deal. With God. So that Brigadoon would vanish from the Earth, and only reappear again once every hundred years. Can you imagine that, Lieutenant? A place that only exists once in every century. And then only for one day.’
Bregman nodded. She kept nodding until she was sure he wasn’t going to add anything else without a prompt. ‘Is this relevant, Sir?’
‘Of course it’s relevant,’ the Colonel snapped. ‘Why would I mention it if it weren’t relevant? Here. Here is where we enter the Unthinkable City.’
‘Oh. What Unthinkable City would that be, Sir?’
Kortez gave her another one of his looks. ‘Get a grip on yourself, Lieutenant,’ he said, and pointed.
Bregman followed his finger, only to find herself staring at a gigantic stone cube, a solid off-white block set into the ground a couple of paces to her left. So near, in fact, that there was no way she should have been able to get this close to it without noticing, unless it had spontaneously appeared out of thin air or...
No. That way lies madness, Bregman told herself, or Displacer Syndrome at the very least. The block