Doctor Who: The Also People (5 page)

'This is the best bit,' said God.

The clouds parted to reveal the fabulous nightscape of the sphere. Artistically framed in the upper left-hand corner of the picture window was a blue and white planet, complete with continents and swirling clouds. It was the same apparent size as Earth seen from the moon.

Whynot. Home of most of God.

It took a special kind of confidence to build a Dyson sphere and then orbit a planet
inside
. The Doctor said they were lucky it was so close; the orbit was designed in such a way that Whynot passed over every part of the sphere in turn. 'Like a three-dimensional spirograph pattern,' he said.

Whatever
a spirograph
was.

With no appreciable effort Chris picked Roz up and carried her upstairs. Bernice found herself yawning and decided to follow. She left the Doctor deep in his conversation with God.

2

Life's A Beach

Wake up in the morning.

Baked beans for breakfast.

So that everyone can beef-head

Ooh, ooh, my ears are alight.

Chris Cwej

Morning.

Although it's hard to tell when the sun is nailed to the ceiling.

Bernice Summerfield hangs upside down in a perfectly spherical globe of warm water.

Fortunately she has managed to push her head into the air and so is in no danger of drowning.

She is thinking that there must be a trick to using a bath like this but it's something she's never learnt. She's been weightless many times but she's used to ablution facilities that minimize the problem, not simulate it.

She refuses to thrash about. To thrash like a hooked fish would be to lose the essential core of dignity that is central to her personality. She will remain calm and think of something.

The door to her bedroom is open, the pile of belongings she left on her bed clearly visible. As she watches an invisible force is folding her clothes one item at a time until they are piled neatly at the foot of the bed. There are no pixies, she realizes; instead, the machine that runs the villa merely uses a variety of forcefield projectors to do its daily chores.

It certainly gives her something to think about.

Just as soon as she can get herself the right way up.

There was a note from the Doctor. It should have read GONE FISHING but the word 'fishing' had been crossed out with heavy-handed pen strokes and the word SAFARI scribbled in above it. Chris wanted to know what a safari was.

'It means to travel,' said Roz, 'in Swahili.'

'No, it doesn't,' said Bernice. 'It's when you watch wild animals.'

'What wild animals?' asked Chris.

'Benny, I speak some Swahili and it definitely means "to travel".'

'I know what it means literally, Roz, but its accepted usage means to watch wild animals.'

'Perhaps you watch the wild animals while you're travelling,' suggested Chris.

'What?'

'Just a thought.'

'Anyway,' said Bernice, 'the Doctor says there's a town about an hour's walk down the coast. I thought I'd go and have a look. Do you want to come?'

'Seems like a reasonable idea,' said Roz. 'I'll go and put my armour on.'

'I don't think you'll need the armour,' said Bernice.

'What if we run into those wild animals?' asked Roz. She turned to Chris. 'Cwej, you too.'

Chris gave Bernice an if-it-makesher-happy look and followed Roz to put on his armour.

'Really,' said Bernice. 'The Doctor said it was safe here.' She thought about that for a moment and went to find a knife that would fit into her boot.

***

The base of the villa was completely surrounded by forest. There were three tracks leading away from the front door and Roz and Bernice let Chris choose which one to take, partly because he claimed to have charted its route from the roof of the villa the day before, but mostly because they could then blame him if they got lost. Bernice was pleased to see that both he and Roz had at least decided to leave their helmets and blasters at home.

The track was little more than a sandy path that twisted and turned its way down through the conifers. Once they got amongst the trees the air was still and warm. Bernice could smell wet loam, leaf-mould and under it all the sharp tang of the sea.

Chris went bounding down the track ahead of them and vanished around the first corner. Roz and Bernice followed on at a more dignified pace. Bernice asked the older woman what 'Inyathi'

meant.

'It's my clan name,' Roz told her.

'Is it significant?'

'It's isiXhosa for buffalo,' said Roz. 'According to my grandmother it meant we weren't supposed to eat buffaloes.'

'What, never? No buffalo burgers?' asked Bernice. 'No buffalo fricassee or buffalo
a l'orange
?

I'm shocked. What is a buffalo?'

'Big ugly hoofed quadruped,' said Roz, 'with horns. Last one died in captivity in 2193.'

'I suppose they were notoriously stubborn and bad-tempered?'

'How did you know?'

'Just a wild guess,' said Bernice.

The track angled steeply down the side of the hill. As it switched back and forth they caught occasional flashes of blue sea through gaps in the trees. Bernice found herself whistling as they strolled along, an old jaunty ballad that took all of thirty seconds to get on Roz's nerves.

The track led into an area of dunes at the base of the hills. The conifers gave way to gnarled little trees with spreads of broad oval leaves. The small trees gave way to tufts of dune grass, wiry long-bladed plants that sought to fix the windblown sand in place. The tufts grew fewer and the sand finer until finally the dunes became mere mounds of sand. It was a difficult surface to walk on, especially for Roz in her heavy boots. It didn't seem to bother Chris who ran up the last dune, reached the top and yelled, 'I can see the sea.'

'I'm terribly happy for you,' muttered Roz as she laboured after him.

'And I think there's a beach-bar too,' called Chris.

Roz and Bernice glanced at each other and picked up the pace.

If it was a beach-bar it wasn't much of one: just half a dozen circular tables with matching chairs plonked down on the edge of the dunes. The beach itself was much more impressive, a kilometre-long crescent of pristine yellow sand between two rocky headlands. It was the kind of beach that got texture-mapped into fraudulent holiday brochures. Bernice assumed that iSanti Jeni lay just beyond the eastern headland, providing that the Doctor had been telling the truth.

'You know,' said Chris, 'I've been examining that beach.'

'I know where this is going,' said Bernice. 'And what are your conclusions?'

'I think it's safe,' said Chris.

'Really?' said Roz.

'I think it's really safe,' said Chris. 'Possibly the safest beach I have ever seen. In fact I would go as far as to say that it is the very epitome of a safe beach.'

'Chris,' said Bernice.

'Really, really safe.'

'We're not your parents.'

Chris glanced at Roz who sighed and gestured vaguely with her hand. Chris whooped and ran for the waterline, hands busy with the straps of his armour as he went.

'He'd only sulk,' said Roz.

There was another shout and Chris dived into the surf. His footprints were clearly visible in the pristine sand. Bits of discarded armour were strewn to either side. They saw his blond head surfacing beyond the line of breakers. He waved and then vanished from sight.

Bernice looked over at the tables. 'Do you think that's really a bar? I don't see a service area.'

'Only one way to find out,' said Roz.

They sat down at the nearest table. The chairs appeared to be moulded out of rigid white plastic but Bernice felt the material shift subtly under her weight, making the chair more comfortable. When she leaned back to look for Chris the chair leaned back with her. 'He certainly got out of that armour fast enough.'

'You learn the technique when you're at the Academy,' said Roz. 'In case the armour gets contaminated or compromised in some way. There are ancillary benefits too.'

'I'll bet,' said Bernice. 'Can you do it that fast? I mean he didn't even break his stride.'

'Faster,' said Roz, 'when I was younger.'

'But not any more?'

'I haven't had much reason to try,' said Roz. 'Not recently.'

Bernice pretended to examine the table top, hoping that Roz would say more, give a little, maybe strip off some of the armour she was wearing on the inside. The table was made from the same white plastic as the chairs, its top covered in what Bernice recognized as writing. It looked a bit like Arabic, if you thought Arabic was written top to bottom in a dayglo orange scrawl.

Roz looked around. 'What do you have to do to get a drink around here?'

'Ask,' said the table.

Both women, very slowly, bent down and looked under the table. There was nothing except a small oval of shaded sand, a heavy base and the thin column that supported the table. Their eyes met briefly. Roz raised an eyebrow.

'Look,' said the table, 'do you want a drink or not?'

Bernice banged her head on the underside of the table. She heard Roz cursing. Both women slowly and with infinite nonchalance resumed an upright posture in their chairs.

Bernice cleared her throat. 'Who wants to know?' she asked.

'I do,' said the table. The voice was light, conversational and sounded entirely human. 'If you don't want a drink, I can offer you a wide range of snacks, delicacies –'

'Are you sentient?' asked Bernice. Roz was surreptitiously looking around for a speaker grill.

'Of course I'm not sentient,' said the table. 'I'm a table. I have two functions, one is to hold material objects at a convenient height by virtue of my rigid structure and the other is to take your order. What would be the point in a sentient table?'

Bernice considered this. She had to admit it was a good point.

'I lived in an apartment with a door that acted like this,' said Roz. 'It had a nasty accident involving a wide beam disintegrator and three metres of quick-drying epoxy resin.'

'We'll have a drink,' said Bernice quickly.

'Good,' said the table. 'What do you want to drink?'

'What have you got?' asked Roz.

'There's a menu in front of you,' said the table.

Bernice looked down. The dayglo Arabic was scrolling towards the edges of the table, new strings of writing spooling out of a null point at its centre. Bernice sighed. 'We can't understand the menu,' she said. 'Can you give us a verbal summary?'

'Hey,' said the table smugly. 'You name it we've got it.'

'In that case,' said Bernice, 'I'll have an exaggerated sexual innuendo with a dash of patriot's spirit and extra mushrooms. Roz?'

'I'll have the same,' said Roz, 'but with an umbrella in it.'

'Coming right up,' said the table.

'And get us some shade here while you're at it,' said Roz.

A parasol-shaped forcefield opened above their heads and turned opaque. 'Now, that's slick,'

said Bernice.

Roz shrugged, as if forcefield parasols were an everyday occurrence where she came from.

Perhaps they were. On her last trip to the thirtieth century Bernice had been far too busy running for cover to notice details like that.

'An exaggerated sexual innuendo,' said Roz. 'What kind of a cocktail is that?'

'I just made it up,' said Bernice. 'God knows what we'll get.'

What they got was two tall glasses swooping over the dunes on the back of a self-propelled tray to make a perfect landing on the table. The drinks were a cloudy orange shot through with streaks of vermilion. Moisture started condensing on the glasses as soon as they stopped moving.

One of them had a small paper parasol stuck in the top.

'That one's yours, I think,' said Bernice, taking the other drink. It was wonderfully cool against her palm. Something grey floated near the top of the glass; it was the extra mushroom.

There was a waterfall somewhere inland; the Doctor could smell it. If he concentrated he could just hear a low rumbling to the south. A big one then, larger than The Smoke That Thunders on the Zambezi and big enough to cast its spray as far as the coast and create a sub-tropical microclimate around the cove. The short stretch of beach was a dazzling white, enclosed by rocky promontories on both sides and by low forested hills on the other. The trees were tropical varieties, narrow-trunked with spreading crowns of broad emerald leaves. Brightly coloured blooms nestled at their roots and ran in streamers along the symbiotic vines that linked tree with tree. It was an isolated place and judging from the scantness of the path he'd traversed to get here, rarely visited. Just what the Doctor ordered in fact.

The Doctor waited just inside the tree-line, confident that the sharp contrast between shady forest and the dazzling sand would conceal him. Well, moderately confident anyway.

She was standing so still he didn't see her at first. Hip-deep in the water, the swell of the waves lapping around her waist and thighs, she had a spear in her right hand, poised motionless above her head. Some kind of pale wood, bamboo, guessed the Doctor, with a fire-hardened tip.

Her left arm was held slightly behind her body, elbow bent for balance, fingers spread as delicately as any pianist. The woman was thirty metres away; could she throw such a crude weapon that far? Probably not, but would you want to bet your life on it? Luckily for him she was facing out to sea, although this was probably not so lucky for the fish. Sunlight glittered off the water that beaded her head and back. The spear didn't so much as tremble, held in perfect balance, perfect stillness.

He remembered her dancing with the soldiers in the street outside M. Thierry's house in Paris.

The flowing interplay of muscle over bone and under skin. A macabre Blue Danube waltz choreographed for a single diva and four expendable extras.

Corpse de ballet
, thought the Doctor.

There was a whisper of displaced air and aM!xitsa the drone was beside him. The machine's external fields were flush with its ellipsoid body, showing a dappled pattern of green and brown.