Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [124]
‘Sit down,’ said the witch-woman.
Erskine sat. He’d never seen the woman before, but Christ knew it wasn’t hard to guess who she was. He’d been scouring the town for her, not twelve hours ago, back when he’d worn the sackcloth mask of Reason and... ho hum.
‘Didn’t think you’d still be in town,’ Erskine mumbled.
‘After what we... you know. After what happened.’ It was the closest thing to an apology that he could manage. The witch-woman just shrugged.
‘This is going to be my last day here,’ she said. ‘Have you seen Isaac Penley anywhere this morning? I heard he’d...
recovered from his injuries. Do you know him?’ Erskine swallowed, and shook his head. ‘I thought I owed him one last reading. There was something I thought he should know.
About the future.’
Penley. Erskine wanted to tell the woman about the Doctor and his abomination, but... hellfire, where would he find the right words? He imagined Penley, with his pinned-together face and his bits-and-pieces body, sitting here in the tent asking his usual moronic questions. Just like always. Asking witches, priests, stargazers, charlatans... anyone who’d talk to him.
Erskine suddenly felt like crying.
‘The future,’ he said. ‘By Christ, yes. This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Yesterday, I called myself a rationalist.
Wouldn’t be seen dead in a place like this. Look at me now.
Look at all of us. Us poor buggering human beings, doing things we never thought we were capable of, in the name of gods we don’t really believe in. Us and our revolutions and our witch-hunts and our bloody scientific reform societies.
That’s what old Isaac was worried about all the time, isn’t it?’
The witch-woman sighed. ‘It might be like that,’ she said.
‘The future might be any number of things. But history’s made by people, not by gods and monsters. If there was ever a time to change it...’
She sighed again.
‘The future’s not what it used to be,’ she said. ‘That’s all I can say. The rest, you’ll have to work out for yourself. If you see Isaac, can you tell him that?’
The Doctor had slipped into a new suit, but it was identical to the old one. Chris didn’t know where the replacement had appeared from. He hadn’t watched the Doctor get changed, either; he reasoned that there were some things no human being should ever witness.
Now they were taking the longest possible route back to the console room, clearing up the mess on the way. The Doctor found Interface’s control unit in the ‘human’s corridor’, removed a few vital components and ‘accidentally’ lost them down the back of a sofa in one of the guest rooms. He also poked his head into the library to make sure that the hallway was in one piece again, picking up a copy of A Passage to India that had been left on the floor.
The Doctor flipped through the book, and Chris looked over his shoulder. Every page was a space, the mouth of an impossible meta-dimensional tunnel. Every page led to a different location in the TARDIS. The ultimate secret passage.
‘Nothing like getting lost in a good book,’ said the Doctor, and smiled. ‘Hackney Empire, 1957.’
‘That’s what I said,’ replied Chris. ‘Hang on, you’ve talked about the Hackney Empire before, haven’t you? What was it?
I mean, was it anything like my Empire?’
‘Ah, the Hackney Empire. A ruthless intergalactic superpower, conquering whole civilizations with appalling puns and jokes about dogs with no noses.’
‘No noses? How did they smell?’
The Doctor paused, as if trying to resist a terrible temptation.
‘Do you know, I don’t believe the question was ever satisfactorily answered?’ he said eventually.
At last, they reached the console room. Within seconds the Doctor was back at the controls, furiously jabbing at the switches. ‘So much to do,’ he muttered. ‘Yemaya... we still haven’t found out... the SLEEPY project...’
‘Doctor?’
‘What did she say? Killing lessons... the Shadow Directory... too many coincidences... probably means something...’
‘Doctor,’ I wanted to ask you a question. About the Carnival Queen.’
The Doctor looked up, but his fingers