Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [96]
It wasn’t the first time in his travels with the Doctor that Chris had wanted to ask that question. Again and again, Earth had turned out to be where the action was. Some places, the Doctor once said, were special. Some places just attracted things. Like Loch Ness, which had been home to a thousand different monsters since the world was formed – or so the Doctor claimed – from the first primeval weed-monster in the days of the dinosaurs to a near-mythical spiny-headed sea-serpent in Chris’ own time. It was as if monsters and anomalies found their way there, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn. Maybe Earth was like that. Special.
But the Carnival Queen had just shrugged. In technicolour.
– I’m not bound by your rules of linear time, Christopher. If I make myself known on Earth during its Age of Reason, I make myself known on every other planet during every other Age of Reason. In different times, simultaneously. A universe of unreason. Forever and ever. Isn’t that nice?
Well, so much for the ‘special’ theory.
– Any rational planet would do, she’d continued, but Earth is... vulnerable, shall we say? So many visitations. So many alterations. No wonder the Shadow Directory is kept so busy.
He hadn’t asked about that, for some reason.
So now he watched her, up on the high peak, making gestures with arms that moved through more dimensions than the human eye could see. It looked like some kind of summoning ritual, like she was beckoning to the shadows around them. Chris sighed. Whatever she was doing, he had a duty to try and stop her, that much was clear. She was threatening the universe. Wasn’t she?
– You don’t look happy.
Chris jumped. She was right beside him, and the promontory had vanished. There was a look of genuine concern on her face.
On Marielle’s face.
‘Marielle,’ he blurted.
‘No,’ she said, with one voice. Then made a sound like the clearing of a throat.
– No.
The Carnival Queen gestured at the desert around her.
From behind every dune, from within every fissure, the shapes were emerging. Gynoids. Hundreds of them. Thousands.
– My children. I’ve been letting them out into the clockwork universe, letting them get a taste for their new home. Some of them have suffered, the poor things. Poisoned by the noxious influence of Reason. The body you found...
please, Chris, try to relax. They don’t bite.
One of the creatures sidled up to Chris, wrapped something vaguely limb-like around him, and let its flesh splash over his shoulder. Chris tried, very very hard, not to wince.
New York unfolded before their eyes. The towns prospered and grew, linking together to form one enormous city, the streets knotting themselves into something grey and ghastly.
Roz caught sight of Daniel, trying to swim against the tides of garbage that were spewing out of the alleyways, and she saw more in his face than she would have thought possible. I know this place, he was thinking. This is where the Revolutions are made.
A flenser wave rippled towards Roz, but by the time it reached the spot where she’d been standing, she was a decade into the future. Forrester-2 in front of her, being dragged away on a current of passing years. Roz suddenly realized where the amaranth had to be getting its information from.
It was still linked to the TARDIS. The amaranth was sucking the raw data out of the ship’s systems, working its way through the Doctor’s historical records, rebuilding Woodwicke according to the lore of the data banks. The sphere was forcing history to happen, faster than history wanted to go. Around them, roaches bred in their millions between the paving-stones as their own little corner of New York went through half a century of expansion in under a minute. Roz blinked, and by the time the blink was over, the world had turned and they were standing on a battlefield.
The council of Woodwicke was no longer in session. The walls of the meeting hall had split open in a most unscientific