Doctor Who_ Match of the Day - Chris Boucher [14]
‘My guess is if you damage that thing something quite unpleasant will happen. I think it might tighten up. Probably the other three will too.’
Stubbornly Leela carried on probing with the knife. ‘I am not afraid of them.’
‘You don’t have to be afraid of them,’ the Doctor said, struggling not to lose all patience with the irritatingly primitive girl. ‘You just have to be rational. This appears to be an extremely violent society, so I doubt whether these things will just twinkle and buzz and play jolly jingles if you set them off. So until we know what it is they do instead...’
Leela stopped what she was doing and sheathed the knife.
‘If the threat from them is supposed to keep us here why do they not tell us what it is? A threat is not a threat unless you know what it is.’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘They assume we know already or else it doesn’t matter to them.’
Leela held up her wrists. ‘Are these what they would use on you for stealing the TARDIS? If they caught you?’
The Doctor did his best to sound mildly affronted. ‘What gives you the idea I stole the TARDIS?’
‘It is what you said.’
He didn’t remember saying that. The trouble with Leela was that she listened to everything and remembered most of it.
He must try to remember that. He smiled at her and said,
‘You misunderstood me.’ What happens now, he wondered?
Presumably this Court of Attack thing was some sort of legal process, but what sort, and when and where did it happen?
He got up and wandered across to one of the bookcases. It was probably too much to hope that they might have a beginner’s guide to breaches of the rulebook. A Child’s Garden of Murder and Mayhem, perhaps. The Care and Maintenance of Sacred Death Marks?
‘You did not steal the TARDIS?’ Leela persisted.
That was another problem, the Doctor thought. She was persistent. ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘It was more of a technical infringement.’ Disappointingly, the books all appeared to be heavyweight legal tomes, the sort that required years of study before you could understand the chapter headings never mind the main body of the text. He pulled one of the books from a shelf at random and opened it. It seemed to be a book of case law but all the cases were fights. The declarations, the moves and the kills were described in detail and then a summary outlined the effect each element had on the duelling laws. The fights were in chronological order, he realised, and were all of a particular type: in this case, or rather in these cases, the fights involved the use of one particular sort of handgun. He took down another volume. It was laid out in the same way but now the fights involved the combatants each using a different one of two particular sorts of handgun.
‘What is a technical infringement?’ Leela asked.
The Doctor said, ‘It’s a rule nobody knows about until they break it.’ There were probably books for every sort of combat and kill, he realised, and there were hundreds of them.
Perverse, is that what he’d said? Perverse didn’t begin to cover it.
‘Isn’t that the truth,’ a plump man at one of the corner workstations said. The Doctor hadn’t noticed him slouched down behind his computer screen. ‘Technical infringements,’
the man went on. ‘I tell you the rules are getting impossible to interpret.’ He shook his head and tutted. ‘Sooner or later there’s going to have to be a full Kill-council to rework the rulebook. Sooner rather than later actually or we’re all doomed.’
‘You’re not a lawyer by any chance?’ the Doctor asked him hopefully.
‘Agent,’ the man said. ‘Jerro Fanson’s my name. And you are?’
‘I’m the Doctor,’ the Doctor said, smiling in what he hoped was an encouragingly intimate way, ‘and this is Leela.’
‘She’s your fighter I take it,’ Fanson offered.
‘In a manner of speaking, I suppose you could say that, yes,’ the Doctor said. His response sounded lame even to him, but knowledge was power and if he was going to learn more without appearing too ignorantly helpless he needed to keep it vague.
‘Oh gods,’ Fanson groaned, ‘you’re not another scuffling freelance operator are you?’