Doctor Who_ Last Man Running - Chris Boucher [56]
Needing something fairly long and mildly coherent he recalled part of a speech he had once given at a symposium on ‘The Question of Fear’. Let’s see what it makes of this, he thought as he began, vaingloriously, ‘Death is the question that cannot be answered. It does not follow that because a question cannot be answered it has no answer. But an unanswerable question is frightening because it hints at the failure of reason: the denial of cause and effect. If your world lacks cause and effect then you are doomed to be a victim and fear is all you can expect. You must tremble and bow down. Do not look, do not ask, howl down anyone who does.
That is why the supernatural is terrifying: it has no causes, it has only effects. Madness is terrifying for exactly the same reason.’
He had been rather proud of that argument, which was probably the reason he still remembered some of it, and he was briefly tempted to listen to himself uninterrupted as the voice repeated, ‘Death is the question that cannot be answered. It does not follow that because a question cannot be answered it has no answer –’
‘But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?’ the Doctor declaimed over the sound of his own speechmaking.
‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!’
The copy voice stopped speaking abruptly and after the briefest of pauses a new and different voice said, ‘You have a robust attitude to blasphemy, Thedoctor.’
‘I hope so,’ the Doctor said. ‘How much of William Shakespeare’s work have you people forbidden to be spoken aloud? You do realise it was written for precisely that purpose. To be spoken aloud, I mean.’
‘What are you talking about and what sort of a name is William Shakespeare?’
‘Yes, I should have known. How can you have a flesh-and-blood author for a holy text? It would tend to undermine the supernatural aspects, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, I should have known. How can you have a flesh and blood author for a holy text?’ the copy of the Doctor’s voice repeated. ‘It would tend to undermine the supernatural aspects, wouldn’t it?’
It was impossible in the functionally perfect darkness for the Doctor to judge the distance or the direction of his tormentor. In fact, he was not even sure whether he himself was being held down on a horizontal or a vertical plane and whether the orientation was upside down or downside up.
Although he strained and flexed in every way he could think of he was also quite unable to break free of the total-body restraints. He decided therefore to make a virtue out of necessity and wait in contemplative silence for the runner’s next move. It had to be the runner of course. He had made the same culturally predetermined assumptions about names and called him Thedoctor, and he had the same religious taboo as the other toodies. But what was it he wanted? The Doctor had assumed that Leela was the key: that was what he meant when he told Kley they had something the runner wanted. Odd, he thought, that what in other times and places would be called a fugitive from justice was called a runner by these people – even he himself now thought of him as the runner. You ended up missing things when you started accepting other people’s assumptions. It stopped you asking your own questions. So what was it he was missing? Surely the point about this runner was that he was not running. All along it was they who had been running.
‘Thedoctor?’ the runner said. ‘You can speak now. That part is finished. I am satisfied that the narcotic has been fully metabolised. You are rational. The algorithms are acceptable.’
The Doctor remained determinedly silent. A narcotic gas, presumably, he thought, seeping out at ground level. Lying down had been a mistake.
‘Come now, Thedoctor. The relationship between memory and intelligence interests me too.’
It gave the Doctor a moment’s small satisfaction to have it confirmed that he and the others had been closely monitored.
It would be interesting to learn more details about that, he thought. Was it vision as