Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [3]
He caught Duquesne’s eye. ‘I believe that pagan peoples would call it "The Sight",’ Catilin went on. ‘A sense, a sixth sense one might say, for the uncanny and the improper. To me, the Collection is merely a building full of oddities. To Roche, it was much more. He claimed he felt a burning in his spine whenever he grew close to certain objects, as though his body could sense the very strangeness of them. He once told me that he could often hear whispers from the skeletons and the fossils, and wondered if they wished to relate their peculiar histories to him.’
He’d been watching Duquesne as he spoke, and he’d seen her hand involuntarily shoot back to her spine. That was it.
The woman was sensitive, just as old Roche had been.
Probably the only reason why her employers had sent her here.
The French weren’t in the habit of using women as agents.
‘How fascinating,’ she said, flatly.
‘Indeed,’ said Catilin, deciding not to tell her that Roche had gone quite mad and cut his own throat open with one of the Collection’s sharper ‘exhibits’.
‘What do men do?’ the Doctor had asked, turning his back on them.
The question had been directed at Cwej, which was a pity, as Roz had thought of about half a dozen smart answers in no time at all. ‘Er,’ Cwej had said. ‘Er, give up.’
‘The same things as women,’ Roz had muttered. ‘But without wiping the sick off the furniture afterwards.’
There was a furrow, a tiny indentation in the ground, and Roz had run right into it, catching the toe of her boot against the lip and losing her balance. Instinctively she threw her arms out in front of her, realizing that it probably didn’t make much difference how you fell if there was an alien monster breathing down your neck. She felt the amaranth slip out of her grasp.
‘No. Not the same at all.’ The Doctor had paused, as if he had difficulty getting to grips with this subject himself ‘The male and female of the species, of every humanoid species, have completely different psychologies. Evolution made sure that their brains were suited to very different tasks. Usually the two perspectives lock together, and no one even notices the join. Nobody spots the difference. Usually, that’s how civilizations are made.’
Roz had folded her arms impatiently, wondering what this had to do with dead aliens, and Cwej had looked like he hadn’t been following any of it.
‘Men build,’ the Doctor had continued, his Gaelic inflection becoming more noticeable by the second. ‘Their fundamental purpose is to act as architects. Towers. Pillars.
Bridges. All men’s things. In a man’s world, everything has to be defined, named, planned with precision. Things have to be conquered, not accepted. No patch of earth is complete until it has a building on it. An orderly, precise, geometrically exact building.’
Roz rolled as she hit the ground, and realized that she was on top of another slope. Fine by her. She pushed herself over the edge, picking up momentum as she spun downhill. Once in every 360-degree roll, she could see the gynoid as a grey blur framed against the unnatural black of the sky. There was something else, too, a flash of gold, somewhere nearby.
The amaranth. Obviously.
‘Towers and pillars. Right.’ Roz had remembered an Academy lecture on Freudian symbolism in the psychology of the serial killer, and remembered that she hadn’t listened to most of it. Routine procedure when faced with a serial killer was to blow his kneecaps off, so she’d never understood what his psychology had to do with anything. And women?’
‘Different instincts. The female psyche has no need to construct, no need to control –’
Cwej had giggled, but they’d ignored him.
‘– no need to define. The female psyche