Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [84]
– Perhaps I am. Perhaps I’m not. Marielle is acting as my...
my interface, if you like. Just like your TARDIS, I’m really too difficult for one individual to understand. No offence, Christopher Cwej.
Chris stared at her. Then he stared at the desert. Then he ran out of places to stare.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
– Ahh. I thought you’d never ask.
The woman (that was the only way to think of her, as the woman) spread her arms wide, and they made tiny and beautiful echoes of light in the air around her.
– I’m the one who starts the carnivals, Christopher Cwej.
The one who makes the music that plays when civilizations fall. Sister to superstitions, grandmother of gynoids. The spirit imprisoned in every piece of clockwork. Matheson Catcher would call me the enemy of all humanity, which seems funny, when you consider how long he’s been under my spell.
There was a moment’s pause, and in that moment a billion possible new universes were born.
– Call me Cacophony. Call me the Carnival Queen. And I’m very, very happy that Marielle has let me back into the rational universe.
PART THREE
DAMAGED GODS
‘ Have you seen what’s happening in India? Magic’s very big there, as you know Gurus and spirit-healers, some of them get treated like pop stars. There are these groups of men calling themselves "rationalists" who travel from town to town in these great big buses, debunking the medicine-men wherever they go. Trying to teach the people that witchcraft is baloney.
They’re amazing to watch... when they’re on the road, [they]
chant these battle-cries about how wonderful rationalism is.
They practically sing rationalist hymns. They don’t see anything odd in that at all... sometimes I think this "rational"
planet has forgotten what superstition means.’
– Miles de Selby, Letters from Earth (1993)
‘ As I once told the reigning monarch of er, of a small nation in the former Soviet Union... there’s nothing "only" about being a girl. ’
– Sarah-Jane Morley, from her
speech to the Nobel Academy (1998)
9
Bogeywomen
‘Ah, well, there are lots of Hells. As many Hells as there are stories about Hell, I should think.
‘Across the universe, you see, people were dying.
Protracted illnesses, motor accidents, alien invasions, failing bodies and weakened spirits. You know. The usual things.
Every second, millions of souls were experiencing that moment of confusion as they were shoved off this mortal coil and taken...
‘...somewhere. Anywhere. No, I don’t know for certain.
Yes, I knew you’d ask me that. Well, they say that when a child of the Age of Reason dies, her guilty spirit can find itself lost in Null-Space, where its phobias and anxieties feed on smaller and – oh, what’s the word I’m looking for? – less vindictive souls. Yes, that’s it. Perhaps some of them grow up to be Eternals. Perhaps some of them are snatched from Null-Space and turned into terrible psychic weapons by... by certain unscrupulous persons who shall remain nameless.
‘No, don’t laugh. This is a fairy-tale, you know.
‘Anyway, you’re distracting me from the story. What I’m saying is that the traffic of souls must have stopped that night.
Just for a while, I mean, just for a few curious moments. Even Death must have stopped whatever she was doing and looked to the heavens... yes, I wish I could have seen the look on her face when she realized what was happening. His face. All right, its face. Every tortured soul in every nook and cranny of purgatory must have fallen silent, looked up, and peered into the far corners of creation.
‘They must have seen it coming. They must have wondered if it would make any difference to them.
‘What do you mean, when was this? Time is relative, I told you that when you joined me. That’s the most important thing a traveller... yes, yes, I know. Oh, very well. Let’s just say that it wasn’t all that long ago, on the cosmic scale of things. I looked quite different then, of course.
‘But you’re distracting me again. I was trying to tell you about what happened to Woodwicke. About what happened to everything,