Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [109]
History was a slave ship.
She moved faster, trying to reach the end of the hold before the smell made her sick; but the hold had no end. There were more shelves, hundreds upon hundreds of bodies stacked on top of them. Roz ran past Indians and Orientals, listening to the pleas of people from nations she’d never even heard of.
Eventually she reached the section where they kept the white slaves. Slaves to time. Philosophers and barbarians. Every so often, she’d recognize a face, blank-eyed in the gloom. Samuel Lincoln. Isaac Penley. Fenn Martle (yeah, like you didn’t see that one coming). Victims of the Watchmaker universe, and no, she had no idea where the thought had come from.
MOST MURDERS ARE COMMITTED BY SOMEONE
YOU KNOW.
YES. HIS NAME’S THE DOCTOR.
The silver shape-changing robot was chained to the wall with the rest of them, a million slaves rolled into one. And why did the Doctor need companions, anyway, if they were just going to get bruised or snuffed out? She remembered Justine (she’d be in the hold somewhere), who’d been convinced that the Doctor was an all-powerful sorcerer, while Roz thought he was just (just?) an alien time-traveller. Maybe he wasn’t anything, until someone thought about him in a certain way, and told him how to act. Maybe that was why he needed dumb humans around him. Without them, he might as well not exist. He’d be a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it.
She stopped. There was somebody standing in front of her in the hold. A figure in silver, a neuronic whip in her hand.
The other Roz Forrester. Forrester the Adjudicator. The one who enforced the rules that history’s slave-masters made.
Agent of the Empire.
The other Roz Forrester began to execute the slaves, one by one. Starting with the aliens, naturally.
‘I had to SAVE the worLd,’ insisted Catcher. ‘ProteCCCt it frOm the DARK the DARK FORCES of ChAoS. You caXXn see that, can’t you? You can SEEEEEEE that?’
The Doctor’s expression was halfway between concern and pity, as if he didn’t know whether to sympathize with Catcher or not.
‘Look what you’ve done to the poor man,’ he said to the thing on the screen.
– Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor, Doctor. Do you take me for a schemer and a user? Do you take me for a Watchmaker?
He did this to himself. I don’t control Matheson Catcher, and I never have. I don’t control anyone or anything.
‘OrDO iDo oRRRRRRRRRRRdo,’ protested Catcher.
– Well, I may have whispered the odd sweet nothing into his ear. But he was damned to his fate long before I ever noticed him. It’s this terrible age he’s living in, n’est-ce pas?
Torn apart by history. A man of his era.
‘Where does he get his dreams from?’ The Doctor was pacing now, hands folded neatly behind his back. ‘Clockwork gods and wind-up worlds. Fairy-tales of yours?’
– No. I can’t explain his fantasies, and I don’t try to.
Perhaps all the children of this clockwork universe know about the Watchmakers, deep down in their hearts. Or perhaps there isn’t an explanation at all. Wouldn’t that be fun?
Catcher started scratching at his arms. Scratching at things that weren’t there. ‘YoU are not NOT NOT the Wa the Wa the WatchmakKers. There ARE no Watchmakers there ARE NO
WATCHMAKERS THERE ARE NO WATCHMAKERS
THERE ARE NO WATCHMAKERS.’
– Oh, don’t be silly. Of course there are Watchmakers.
Why, there’s one standing right next to –
‘Enough of this,’ said the Doctor. His voice was irritated.
Not afraid, not worried, just irritated. ‘You’ve done enough damage. What is it that you want?’
– I want my universe back.
Even the Doctor looked surprised at that.
– That’s all, Doctor. I want every thinking creature to know how it feels to exist in a world without definitions. To live in paradise without