Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [91]
There’s one in particular...
The book opened up in front of Chris, and he wondered whether it was really there or just an illusion written across Marielle’s face. The pages shone like glass, and one paragraph, penned in ink the colour of rust, had been underlined.
‘ For there was Time before this; and there was Being before this; and there was Space before this. And there were Things Damned in that place, and there were Things Remarkable. ’
– The Watchmakers, being rational monsters, never understood that passage properly. They take it all very literally, these days. They think it means that there was another universe before this one, and that it was destroyed in the Big Bang. Ask the Doctor, and that’s what he’ll tell you.
Naturellement, it isn’t true. The ‘Space before this’ was just this universe, before the Watchmakers sucked all of the glamour and the strangeness from its bones. Ohh, yes, there were those of the old time who escaped. A handful of baby godlings and ‘great intelligences’... but they were such weak, unimaginative creatures. Too ready to obey the Watchmakers’
order. Too ready to give themselves up to Reason.
– Not like me. Not like me at all.
Chris gawped. Tried to say something. Gawped some more.
Then he looked around, at the desert, at the sky full of unlight.
‘And this is your prison? This is where you’ve been trapped all this time?’
– My prison. My home. But not for much longer, Christopher.
And across her face, aeons of history played themselves out. On Minyos, the heliomancers were cast out of society, the machines of the Watchmakers replacing them and turning the planet to cinders. On the fringes of the Scrampus Federation, the Witches of Enderheid were tried, sentenced, and burned at the stake. On planets whose names had long been forgotten, whole races tried to master the sciences of the older races, turning themselves into sick things with sick ambitions... and the curse of the Watchmakers touched every corner of creation.
The scalpel was hungry. Twice already, it had fallen from Raphael’s grip. It had lain in the dirt of the backstreets, twitching like a fish out of water, hungry for caillou blood.
Raphael had fallen to the ground, forgetting all the rules of stealth and posture, scrabbling to pick it up.
Then, movement at the far end of the street. Raphael stood, the scalpel quivering excitedly between his fingers. People approaching. Five, maybe six. A mob? Possibly. Usually, people didn’t notice the chirurgeon when he was at work, but Raphael had been careless. Terrible things were happening; perhaps the people thought he was to blame? An understandable error, surely?
The scalpel jerked in his hand, almost wrenching itself out of his grasp. Raphael swallowed, panicking for the first time since his training in the lead-lined room. The scalpel had detected a caillou. A powerful one. A true mutation. Perhaps one of this mob had been so changed by the rain that –
The scalpel flew from his hand and embedded itself in his arm. Raphael howled, then looked down, and saw how the blood was gurgling out of the wound, how the flesh shifted around the blade. His body. His body was changing. He was becoming...
... no. Oh, no. That was too horrible to even consider.
The mob closed in. The scalpel still sucking the blood from his arm, Raphael turned and ran, every terrified step erasing a month of Directory training.
The rain was beating at his face, turning his hair into seaweed.
Erskine Morris didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. They were tying him to a trellis, piling firewood around his feet, and the only thing he could think about was the weather.
‘In the name of Reason,’ chanted Walter Monroe.
‘In the name of Reason,’ replied the other Renewalists.
Erskine couldn’t see how many of the men there were left; there seemed to be more than he remembered, but