Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [115]
And the Daleks? He remembered the research papers he’d seen in the vid-archives on Riften-5 when he’d been taller and blonder, genetic tests that had been run on captured Dalek specimens after their ‘War of Sharpened Hearts’. When the Kaled mutants had been scooped out of their metal shells and examined, it had turned out that every single one had been grown from male tissue. What had Davros done with the female survivors of the Kaled race, the Doctor wondered?
Experimented on them’? Crashed their chromosomes together to see what kind of noise they made? He imagined them being probed, dissected, and cast aside. ‘Not suitable,’ Davros would no doubt have said, in that nasty little croak of his. ‘Minimal desire for conquest. Inferior genetic stock. Of no value to the Dalek race.’
Stop me, the thing that called itself the Carnival Queen had said, and the witches burn all over again... The Doctor grimaced and kept walking, muttering mantras of faith and determination, trying to ignore the giggling of the gynoids.
In China, the trickster-god No Cha descended from his house-outside-of-time and challenged Emperor Yung-Yen to a game of dice, with the accumulated souls of his ancestors as the stake. In France, the gargoyles of Notre Dame revealed themselves to be the Lords of Misrule, and began hurling rocks at Parisians on the streets below, pausing only to rip the throats out of passing pigeons. Across Eastern Europe, fresh graves opened, the Nosferatu returning from the silent lands to dance with their families one more time. The dead had carnival celebrations of their own.
The Corpse Children were close enough to touch, close enough to smell. Erskine realized, as the nearest of the bastard monsters lurched towards him, that their skins were made from the wings of dead beetles, stitched together like patchwork quilts.
He considered closing his eyes and waiting for the end, but every time he brought down his drooping lids, he saw the same thing; the eyes of the little scientist – sod it, the little magician – called the Doctor. Asking him that one simple question, over and over again.
Erskine stared into the insectoid face of death.
‘Bugger off,’ he told it.
Even as he said it, he became aware of a sudden calm along the street. The Renewalists were standing like statues, blinking in the torchlight, trying to make out what was happening.
Erskine thought he detected a sound on the very brink of his hearing, high-pitched and strangely comforting. He could almost have believed that the Corpse Children were listening to it as well, heads cocked attentively, their mandible-teeth twitching to an unfamiliar rhythm.
Suddenly there were no monsters. There were just empty sacks of mud and insect skin, splitting open and falling to the ground. The last of the Corpse Children twitched in the dirt, legs up in the air, carapace turning to powder.
Somebody stepped into the torchlight from the direction of Eastern Walk. A boy, seventeen, maybe eighteen. Clothes torn. Slashed by tendrils of mud and madness. There was a metal sphere nestling in his hands, and at first Erskine thought that it was the sphere making the sound, singing as it spun; but it was the boy who made the noise, and the globe was just his tool. His instrument.
Erskine suddenly realized where he’d seen the object before.
‘I don’t like this future much,’ said the boy. ‘Let’s make a new one.’
The un-city loomed over him The Doctor walked on, occasionally fabricating tiny little duplicates of himself from the raw matter