Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [116]
A pygmy-sized copy of his sixth self was running around his legs, kicking his shins He didn’t remember creating it, but then a subconscious was a dangerous thing once it was riled.
For God’s sake, the teeny sixth Doctor squeaked, how many more of us are you going to have to kill before you’re happy?
Eventually he reached the gates of the un-city. A gigantic shadow guarded the entrance.
‘Good morning,’ the Doctor said, raising his hat politely.
‘I’m collecting on behalf of the Watchmakers’ Retirement Home. Would you care to make a donation?’
Hsssssssssss, said the big sister of all gynoids.
He sighed, and let his consciousness seep out into the ground. BUT I AM. He imposed his will on the desert, resisting the temptation to relax and let his concentration slip away. NOT. Soon, hard lines were scratching themselves into the sands. I AM NOT. Pure angles were intersecting. A WATCHMAKER.
The android tore its way out of the darkness and into existence. A true android, the Doctor reminded himself; not just a simple machine of positronic circuits and mechanical parts, not like those awful robots the Lamerdines and the humans and the Banjaxi made. It had no shape, because it was shape. A creature of absolute order. Geometry incarnate.
Even the Doctor was impressed by the size of the thing.
The android and the gynoid were at each other’s throats in seconds, each tearing chunks out of the other, but neither ever coming any closer to winning the fight. Like the lion and the unicorn, thought the Doctor. Or like yin and yang. The android was familiar with every rule of combat, while the gynoid made up its own rules as it went along.
The Doctor tipped his hat to them and passed through the gate. ‘I’ll let myself in,’ he said. ‘I can see you’re busy.’
The streets of the un-city shifted like the nonsense circuitry of the gynoids themselves, but it didn’t take long to find Christopher Cwej at the heart of it all. The pathways arranged themselves into regular patterns as the Doctor passed by, almost as if they were scared of what he might do to them if they didn’t comply. Chris was sitting cross-legged on a node of shadow-matter that didn’t look altogether unlike a giant bean-bag, staring with wide eyes at the claw-like pylons and minarets that were sprouting up around him. The Doctor cleared his throat. Chris blinked twice and met his gaze.
‘Oh,’ said Chris. ‘Hi.’
‘I’ve come to rescue you,’ said the Doctor, nonchalantly.
– And what makes you think he needs rescuing? said a voice from up above. The Doctor frowned. Chris looked up.
The Carnival Queen was with them. Not the interface of the Carnival Queen, not the possessed body of Marielle Duquesne, but the Queen herself, growing out of the shadowy sky like a polyp, hovering overhead as if poised to swallow the un-city, faceless and unmeasurable and big enough to blot out the sun.
Earth, of course, wasn’t big enough to contain all the possibilities. A few emerged on Venus, where the wind sang a funeral lament for a lost civilization, the song becoming a living, chuckling thing that looked for a new home amongst the stars. On Mars, the red sands parted to make way for canals of purest springwater, platinum fish swimming in the cracked helmets of long-dead warriors. More than four light-years away, on the seventh planet of the Alpha Centauri system, the thirty-six-legged demon Trama-Tayn-Ku-Ku-Ro sprang from its ancient tomb, and it rained liquid copper across an entire continent.
The form – the silhouette – the thing – that hung there in the sky was every shape that could possibly exist, plus twice as many that couldn’t. She’s a window, thought Chris, and however stupid it sounded, it was the only thing he could think of. The Carnival Queen was a window, and everything strange, dark and unimaginable was