Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [73]
145
‘Fascinating as this is,’ said her prisoner muffledly, ‘I don’t think I see your point.’
‘The rabble-rousers. The whackos. . . You know the sort of thing. I was there when we invaded Kapteyn 5, you know. The place was a madhouse.
Sixty sentient species, crammed together in four continents and two oceans.
Bugs, birds, humanoids, it was like a damned zoo! But we sorted it out. We exterminated four races, made deals with eight, and enslaved the rest. Tribute system: they hand over a percentage of their population each year. Some of them are damned useless – we just eat them.’
‘I know all this,’ said her prisoner. ‘I’ve read Historian’s Account of the Kapteynian Peoples.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said Te Yene Rana. ‘Anyway, my point is, these daimyo have the right idea. Keep that pod out of the hands of the peasants. Let
’em have the guns, if it keeps them happy; with any luck they’ll be too busy shooting each other to bother with him. Petty wars on Kapteyn 5 made our invasion a pushover. And anyway, you’ve got more guns, and bigger guns.
But imagine if the peasants got hold of something you didn’t have, something more powerful. . . ’
‘The villagers weren’t planning to overthrow the government,’ said the prisoner. ‘They just wanted the soldiers to leave them alone.’
‘Ah,’ said Te Yene Rana, ‘but what if one of them had realized its potential as a weapon – and had actually done something with it?’
She glanced back at him. The Doctor shifted slightly, looking appallingly uncomfortable, bound and draped over the back of her horse.
‘What kinds of torture do they have here?’ she wondered.
‘Oh, do shut up,’ replied the Doctor.
Penelope appeared in normal space ten feet above the ground. She fell into the vegetable garden and lay there, winded. A cog rolled out of the time conveyance and down the slope. I’ll fetch you back, she thought at it, when my brain is once more functioning normally.
The Doctor had called it a ‘hyperwalk’. They had discussed the possibility briefly while he was adding notes to the machine’s plans. He had calibrated the device to travel instantly from one point in three-dimensional space to another, the way they had travelled from Hekison village to the forest.
But that required destination coordinates.
Penelope rolled over in the dirt, feeling the world not spin around her, the opposite of spinning, as though it was terrifyingly stable and hard. She reached out to the time conveyance, and removed the punchcard from it.
There was only a single hole in the card, just a single instruction to enter the fourth dimension.
146
She had walked up the mountain, the heavy machine wrapped in her arms, sometimes through the air and sometimes through the rock, seeing the back of each tree as well as the front, moving in a direction she had no name for, until she had walked through the wall of the monastery and entered normal space at an angle that had knocked the air out of her lungs.
Everything looked so simple, so solid, so normal. Her mind was settling back down. The human brain had never been meant to perceive the world in four dimensions.
Her hand shot to her heart. She pressed her fingers urgently against her chest, feeling the pulse echoing deep inside, and relaxed. Her heart was still on the left side.
It would have been so easy to give in to the strange tuggings she had felt, allow her body to turn itself inside out or back to front.
‘I never want to do that again,’ she said out loud.
She looked up – up, thank God, up – at the figure standing over her. She could see only the front of the woman’s head, thank God.
‘What are you doing in the vegetable garden?’ asked the monk.
The two armies faced each other across the plain. The purple and orange banners were silent in the still air. Joel was uncomfortably reminded of the pieces on a chess board the moment before the game started.
They had given him a sword and even a gun, but those were mostly for show – he could fence, but he had no idea of how to fight with the heavy longsword, and less idea of how to