Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [3]
'Leopard,' called Tsuro. 'I've been told that you fell into this trap. Is that so?'
'Yes, it is true,' agreed the Leopard, flexing her paws so that each of her claws extruded one after another. The woman, seeing this, edged behind Tsuro.
'O clever Hare,' she whispered, 'I hope you know what you are doing.'
Tsuro ignored her and asked the Leopard whether it was true that she had promised not to harm the woman.
'Yes,' said the Leopard, 'but there is no reason why I should keep my promise. After all, her brothers dug the trap into which I fell. And they are the ones who always shout at me and then try to kill me when I am anywhere near their village.'
'I see,' replied Tsuro, scratching his head thoughtfully. 'So it was the woman's brothers who dug the trap into which you fell. And you were lying there, right at the bottom of the trap when the woman came and let you out. Now, I would like you to show me how it happened.'
'That's easy,' said the Leopard, happy to find someone who understood her situation. She jumped down into the trap. 'I was lying like this . . .' Scarcely had she begun when, quickly, Tsuro pulled the branches across the top of the trap.
'Let me out, let me out,' cried the Leopard. 'If you let me out of the trap I promise not to harm anybody ever again.'
Tsuro turned to the woman.
'Well,' he asked, 'are you going to let her out?'
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I get so weary following this old road
It don't go nowhere but damnation
When I turn around what do I find?
Got evil in my bones and bad luck following behind.
'Travelling Man Blues', singer unknown
Recorded: Mama Stanley's Chicken Shack, Clanton.
Alabama (1937)
The man is standing on the roof of the villa which itself is built on the crest of a hill overlooking the sea. A storm is racing in from the ocean, black streamers of cloud are unfurling towards the coast. The wind has become brisk, filling the man's nostrils with the stink of ozone and salt. He opens his arms wide as if to embrace the oncoming wind, as if the storm has been laid on for his entertainment alone. The air is heavy with the promise of lightning. Growing stronger now, the wind plucks at the man's robe and lifts strands of his blond hair. He is smiling, a wide infectious grin that exposes white teeth that are just slightly too sharp for comfort.
Around him he senses but cannot see the great sphere of the world rising all around him.
Above him an immovable sun dims in accordance with a strict timetable, its gorgeous twilight hue a precise and machine-modulated bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum. He knows that people have built this world, have chained the sun to do their bidding. Knows that people built the planet that hangs blue, green and impossible over a horizon that doesn't exist. That the horizon is in reality only a sensory illusion, a DNA-encoded perception, a legacy from the first things to crawl up that Devonian Beach and look at the sky.
The storm is real, he can sense that. Even the people who built this place, people whom he has not yet but is dying to meet, know that life can be made too comfortable. That without the sublime, without danger we will grow sickly and die by degrees. So they have let this storm boil itself up out of the endless ocean and have watched it roll in from the sea like some fantastic Krakan, its belly rumbling with enough static potential to illuminate a small planetoid.
It comes, a solid wall of air twenty kilometres high and hundreds deep, ready to break against this artfully rocky coastline where a man stands atop a villa that stands upon a hill that overlooks the sea. Ready to roll inland and die stranded amongst the sculptured hills of this manufactured continent.
The man tries to open his arms wider, spreading his fingers to grasp at the wind. He is imagining the air as it streams around his limbs, the complicated mandelbrot shapes of the pockets of turbulence that trail behind