Doctor Who_ The Also People - Ben Aaronovitch [8]
'What's he going to do?' asked Roz. 'Spoon us to death?'
'Worse,' said Bernice. 'He's going to play the spoons. Mind you, I use the word "play"
advisedly.'
The Doctor winked at Roz and slipped the spoons between his fingers.
'You know you're not supposed to do this,' said Bernice. 'It was specifically banned under the White City Convention on psychological warfare.'
'Last chance,' said the Doctor.
'You can't bully people into being cheerful,' said Bernice.
The Doctor started banging the spoons between the table and his hand. His face had an expression of dreamy single-minded determination. 'Did I ever tell you,' he shouted over the racket, 'that I once broke the Galactic record for continuous spoon-playing. Sixty-seven hours it was. I would have broken the Universal record but a Garthanian telekinetic kept on bending my instruments.'
'I wonder why.'
'What was that?' asked the Doctor. 'You want to see if I can do it with both hands at once?
Roslyn, be so good as to pass me those spoons there . . .'
'I give up,' said Bernice.
'I can't hear you.'
'I give up, I'll be cheerful, optimistic, gay, whatever you want. Only for God's sake stop.'
The Doctor stopped clicking the spoons and grinned at her.
'Never mind, Benny,' said Roz, pushing a plate towards her. 'Have a brain pasty.'
The afternoon wore on. It grew warmer on the balcony. Roz retreated to the shade of the living room. The Doctor produced a thick paperback novel from somewhere about his person. Bernice popped back up to her bedroom to find something cooler to wear.
The pixies had been at work again. The bed had been remade, the rag-quilt turned back at one corner to reveal clean sheets of pale lilac. Her clothes, the ones she had brought from the TARDIS, had been folded and neatly piled at the end of the bed. Her diary had been left on top of the clothes.
A similar thing had occurred earlier, while Bernice had been struggling with the suspensor pool in the bathroom. She'd stumbled back in to find her clothes stacked neatly on the newly made bed. At the time it had reminded her of the fairy stories of Northern Europe, the ones about small supernatural beings that did household chores in return for a bowl of bovine lactate left out on the doorstep.
She assumed some kind of domestic robot was responsible. If so they were the quietest and most efficient machines she'd ever seen. Or more to the point, not seen.
She decided to call them pixies, as if naming the unknown made it less frightening. She suspected the villa was infested with pixies and by logical extension, probably the whole Dyson sphere. That had worrying implications: robot-dependent cultures were notoriously decadent, fragile and often paranoid to boot. There was a classic treatise in the TARDIS database on the subject: Taren Capel: A case study in robophilia. The man who wanted to be a robot when he grew up.
Bernice was struck by a horrible suspicion. What if there were no people inhabiting the Dyson sphere? What if the machines had taken over, as they had on Movella? After all, there was no actual evidence that people lived in the sphere. Perhaps this manufactured landscape was empty, inhabited only by machines and animals. It would be just like the Doctor to take them on holiday to a ghost world.
She picked up the pile of clothes; they had a freshly laundered smell.
Although, Bernice had to admit, for a ghost world, the valet service was excellent. She pulled on her halter top and as an experiment left the rest of her clothes scattered across the bedroom floor.
She ran into Chris in the living room. He was standing by the sofa dressed in a garish blue bathrobe. He looked up as Bernice approached and quickly put his fingers to his lips. He nodded at the sofa where Roz was curled up asleep. A videobook was still clasped in her hand, a small page?
ikon flashing forlornly in the left hand corner of its screen. Chris bent over her and gently removed the videobook and placed it carefully on the coffee table. Relaxed, the older woman's face seemed younger, almost youthful.