Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [1]
Roz had raised a quiet eyebrow ‘What are you suggesting?’
The Doctor had waved his hands in an agitated fashion.
‘Nothing. But I hate loose ends. I hate feeling that there are things I don’t know about going on behind my back ‘
‘Liar,’ Roz had mumbled.
So he’d kept on prodding, and had spent the next few days shifting the TARDIS from one end of creation to the other, looking for leads no one else would have recognized. Showing his face at seances, having tea with black magicians, poking his nose into the psychic nooks and crannies of human history.
He’d had an audience with Madame Blavatsky, and shuffled through Nostradamus’s drawers while the great man had been out on the razz.
‘He won’t mind,’ the Doctor had assured Roz. ‘I’ll leave a note for his wife. She’s the practical one in the household, you know.’
Finally, they’d visited Arizona during the last days of the American empire, where the Doctor had expected to find a convention of half-crazed telepathic UFO abductees. But there had been no convention. Just a desert. Not like this one. A normal desert. A proper desert.
With a body in it.
Then she heard it, the sound of raw, wet flesh grinding against rock, and realized that the creature – the alien – the monster – was following her up out of the ravine. She’d hoped that it wasn’t capable of climbing, but by the sound of it (and she wasn’t going to look back to make sure), it had scaled the ravine wall faster than she had.
She kept running
She remembered the first time she’d seen one of the creatures, as a corpse, lying out in the Arizona sun; the Doctor stumbling across it, standing over its body like the judge of the dead, a look of disapproval erupting across his face.
Roz looked up, squinting at the landscape ahead of her, and felt something sharp and ugly scratch her optic nerve. Looking at the sun was like staring into an eclipse. She gritted her teeth.
Nothing up ahead, no buildings, no exits, definitely no TARDIS. Just a few rocks, nightmare-coloured sand and the occasional gully. She heard the thing slipping over the dust at her heels, and tried not to think about what it looked like.
She failed totally.
It had just lain there, pockmarked and sand-blown, its big, bloated body expanding and contracting, like a sea creature washed up on a beach and gasping for water. Quite dead, the Doctor had insisted, though he couldn’t tell the cause. Its movement had been some kind of automatic function, the thing constantly adjusting and re-adjusting its shape even after death, still uncertain of the exact form it should take.
He’d poked it with the end of his walking-cane – he’d been trying to wean himself off the umbrella – and the body had split open like a ripe peach.
There was no sign of the Doctor now. She was on her own again, by accident or design, with just the Doctor’s parting gift for company. She glanced down at the little shining sphere, cradled in her left hand. The amaranth. Goddess, why didn’t they give these things proper names? ‘Blasters’, ‘Tenser guns’,
‘neuro-whips’... you knew where you were with that kind of technology. What the hell was an ‘amaranth’ supposed to do?
‘Useful,’ the Doctor had said, five minutes before the world had opened up and dragged her down into its shadow. Just that, as he’d pressed the sphere into her hands. ‘Useful.’
Cwej had been fascinated by the alien corpse, of course.
Sure, he’d made ‘yeuch’ noises, but underneath it all he had a kind of morbid curiosity that a fourteen-year-old would’ve been proud of. Roz had glanced into the split in the thing’s body, but only briefly. Coils, cords, knotted tissues, liquid pathways. It had been like looking into the workings of a visceral computer, but the patterns wouldn’t stay still, the connections constantly splitting and rearranging, breaking off to form new circuits and new systems.
‘Is it an android?’ Cwej had asked, eager to be part of the Doctor’s investigation. Roz had rolled her eyes. It hadn