Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [101]
‘You mean you had all this planned?’ Chris remembered the robo-suspect again, the way the facial display would light up TILT if you hit it too hard, hard enough that it would have caused serious damage to a real suspect.
– Planned? I never make plans, Christopher. These things just happen. Some plots create themselves. That’s the true wonder of Cacophony. Speaking of which...
Another gynoid struggled through the spontaneous birthing process. Its shape was fuzzy and it wobbled alarmingly. It reminded Chris of something from a pornographic magazine he’d once found stuffed behind a cupboard in one of the TARDIS’s many guest rooms.
– I can’t help feeling, Christopher, that you’ve had a depraved upbringing. Or do I mean deprived? Either way. Left to play with so many Watchmaker toys. Big guns and fast vehicles. You like to try new games, don’t you?
Chris nodded slowly. ‘Well, yeah...’
– Good. Then here’s one for you. A game for the new universe. No blasters or aeroplanes this time, though.
She indicated a space on the dune next to her. Nervously, Chris sat, glancing at the gynoids as they slithered in slow circles around them. ‘What am I supposed to do?’
– Give birth.
‘Sorry?’
– To a gynoid. It’s easier than you might think. Birth is, however, a painful experience, and you might find your sense of logic slightly bruised.
She was grinning on the inside, Chris was sure of it. ‘How?
I don’t know anything about making, er, things. Un-robots.’
– Un-robots. She laughed. You don’t ‘make’ them, Chris, you just let them happen. Let go of your rational impulses, forget the conditioning of the Majestic Clockwork. It’s easier to do here, outside of Normal-Space. Go on. Try it.
Another smile. For a second – no, not even a second –
Chris had that old memory again, himself as a child at the Overcity Four Shoptronic Mezzanine. Then his attention was somewhere else, somewhere under the sand. The Carnival Queen had guided his thoughts there, leaving his concentration buried and lost in the blackness.
Down in the dark, something began to blossom and uncurl.
Something that might one day call him ‘da-da’.
History went overhead. Roz Forrester ducked.
There was the obligatory sound of mass carnage. Abraham Lincoln’s head fell to the ground in front of her, a hurt expression on its face. Shot from the rear, she noted.
It all went horribly quiet.
She looked up, shielding her eyes from the dirt that was blowing across the plain. The bodies – men, horses, machines
– were being pulled down into the ground. Vestigial houses sprang up in their place, foundations chewing on the corpses, and New York forced its way back into the world, rolling confidently across the empty battlefield. Roz felt like she’d taken some kind of psycho-active race-memory drug, but it’d been fifteen years since she’d dropped any Instant Trauma.
Daniel’s voice was in her ear, shouting incoherently over the sound of expanding societies. Roz saw something that looked like a scar across his chest, a thick red line where his shirt had been ripped open. One of the horsemen must have got to him, then, slashed him with its sword-stroke-gun-stroke-generic-weapon. Roz had ducked; Daniel had just stood there and faced it. Was that supposed to be important or symbolic or something?
He was still shouting, shrieking about history and damnation and Revolutions, when the streets of America stretched under Roz Forrester’s feet and tugged her off into the future.
Tourette bolted upstairs, ignoring the hideous screeching landlady who’d tried to keep him out of the boarding house.
He pushed the door of his room open with his shoulder and leapt through it, unable to resist a touch of high drama even in this moment of crisis. He shut the door behind him, and started piling up the sparse furniture of the room against it.
He’d run past the docks, where that Duquesne bitch’s ship had been rocking in the water. Someone