Doctor Who_ All-Consuming Fire Part 23

After a while, we were confident enough that we could introduce a phasing in the chant, with Holmes coming in a beat after Bernice and myself, and the Doctor's fine baritone soaring high above on the descant. The nature of the chant altered in subtle ways: sometimes Holmes's voice was a powerful engine behind us, pushing us on, and sometimes it seemed to be dragging us backwards. Our voices seemed to be echoing in a deeper and larger s.p.a.ce than the cavern.

And then, after what seemed like an eternity but must have been only half an hour, I thought I could detect other voices singing along with us: soft, sibilant voices p.r.o.nouncing words in a subtly different way. A hallucination?

Perhaps, but we took our cue from them and tried to shape our palates to form the same sounds as they did. It was not easy. I suspect now, so many years later, that if they were real then they were not human in form. We must have produced a close enough approximation, however, for it was shortly after that when Bernice plucked at my sleeve and indicated that our shadows were being cast in front of us from a bright source of light behind.

Still singing, I turned to look.

Through the gates of delirium I saw an alien world blazing in all its glory. A wide plain spread before us, curling up in the distance to form tall mountains of k.n.o.bbly purple rock. The sky was white and glowing, and seemed to cut the mountains off as if it were solid. A citrus-scented breeze ruffled my hair.

Still chanting, we walked into another world.

Interlude GGJ235/57/3/82-PK3.

V-ON, BRD-ABLE, WPU = 1.244.

VERBAL INPUT,.

COMPRESS AND SAVE.

MILITARY LOG FILE EPSILON.

CODE GREEN FIVE.

ENABLE.

They know I'm watching them now. I made too much noise getting down from that window the other day, and attracted a bit of unwelcome attention.

It ended up in a chase through the alleys. Since they can fly and I can't, I reckon it was a bit one-sided, so I brought one of them down with a sort of home-made bolas and another two with smart missiles.

I keep having to move my base camp. They're very good at searches: that's what flying does for you, it gives you a different perspective on where people might hide. For a while I hid out in nooks and crannies that couldn't be seen from the air, but they caught on and started using packs of those three-legged rat things with the red eyes. I had to look for somewhere else.

Base camp's only a rucksack anyway, so moving isn't too much ha.s.sle.

Time to get back to the plain, l guess Hope the Professor makes it through okay. If not, I guess it's chocolate flavour animal for tea forever.

DISABLE.

2757/3/FF43 PIP.

Chapter 13.

In which our intrepid heroes arrive in the New World and Watson takes up scouting. scouting.

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield I suspect that midnight has pa.s.sed by, back in India, so distinguish this entry with a new date. I've been awake for almost forty-eight hours and I feel ready to drop. In fact, I keep falling asleep in the middle of writing this diary entry. Four times I've tried to start it now, but each time I get a few words in and suddenly my pen will start sliding down the page. When I snap back to wakefulness a few moments later, I don't know where I am and I've only got a sketchy idea of who. So: if you've just woken up, Bernice Summerfield, and you're reading this for some clue as to what's happened, the Doctor's made some coffee and I think I can cover the past few hours before the big black bag goes over my head again.

First question: where am I? Well, it's an alien planet. Not just any alien planet, either. This one's stranger than most. Stranger than Moloch, the hollow moon of Lucifer that's linked by a bridge to its sister Belial. Stranger than Eusapia and Zeta Minor, half in this universe and half in another.

Stranger than Tersurus, with its clone banks and its singing stones.

Stranger even than Magla, whose crust is a sh.e.l.l covering a vast, dreaming, creature. No, Ry'leh is the strangest planet I've ever seen. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that it's an old world. At some point in its past the local star must have gone nova, blasting much of its matter away into s.p.a.ce to leave a colder, smaller core. Soon after that Ry'leh's atmosphere must have frozen, leaving it looking like a great cue-ball hanging in s.p.a.ce.

The frozen jacket doesn't fit tightly though: the heat from the planet's core has melted the interior layers of ice back into an atmosphere, leaving valleys, fissures, channels and plains with an oppressively solid sky hanging above them, supported upon the pillars of the mountains. And that's where you are, girl: sandwiched between rock and a hard place.

The wind whistles through the canyons like a demon. It plucks at your clothes and whips your hair into your eyes. It s.n.a.t.c.hes things from your hands and whirls them gleefully away from you. It hates you.

The plants hate you too. Only the strongest and most stubborn life-forms survived the sun going nova. Their razor-sharp bruise-coloured vanes catch at your clothing as you clamber past them, and make rents for the wind to get in and sap the warmth from your bones. Some of them hiss and thrust their roots between your feet as you pa.s.s. High above, up where the sky is hard and cold, small black specks wheel. Raksha.s.si? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

You get the picture? Ry'leh is not a nice place to be.

As we emerged from the gateway the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed the words from our mouths, and it collapsed behind us. When we turned, India had vanished.

We were just a step away from Earth in one direction, a million light-years in another.

We were standing at the foot of a mountain range. The dusky purple ground rose gently for a few miles, then jabbed sharply upwards into a set of harsh peaks, all of them truncated by the ice sky. The sun was a lighter spot through the ice, too weak to cast any shadows. Turning, I could see that we were surrounded by the mountains. Valleys led away in three directions. It was as if we had been dumped in the middle of a giant's maze.

Gravity seemed to be about Earth normal. I find it difficult to tell - I've been on so many worlds that I forget what my body was designed for sometimes - but neither Watson nor Holmes were falling down or falling up. The Doctor walked around as if he owned the place. Which he might well have done, of course.

Holmes gazed around in some shock. I think that the reality of an alien planet was turning out to be completely different to the theory. He bent down and investigated the ground, then plucked a small weed-like flower from a crack. It bit him, and he dropped it with a cry. Watson tended to the wound. It wasn't serious, but I think he might have been worried about poison. There's a theory I once heard suggesting that there is no logical basis for alien poisons to work on humans, and vice versa, because the two ecologies would have evolved different chemical bases for life.

Personally, I don't believe it. Summerfield's First Law of Planetary Evolution states that anything not specifically designed to hurt you will still manage to find a way. Or, to put it another way, the b.u.g.g.e.rance factor of the universe tends towards a maximum.

Watson was turning gradually around, a bit like a weather vane influenced by the wind. Eventually he came to a halt facing down one of the valleys towards a misty horizon half-glimpsed through the distant mountains.

'That way,' he said. 'Maupertuis's troops went that way.'

'How can you tell?' the Doctor asked.

'Not sure. It's a matter of instinct, more than anything. I spent some time talking to an old Afghan tracker during the war, you see. He was a prisoner of ours, but he'd been injured and I had to treat him. Picked up some tips on hunting.' He smiled boyishly. 'I rather fancy his skills at treating wounds improved as well.'

'Fascinating though this is,' I interjected, 'where do we go from here?'

'We try and get in front of Maupertuis's troops,' Watson said, 'and alert the appropriate native authorities to the fact that they are being invaded. We then request their help in taking Maupertuis into custody.'

'Of course,' I said. 'Simple, isn't it?'

Watson shrugged.

'Well, as a broad plan I think it has its strong points. Obviously there are some details which remain to be ironed out...'

'Such as: how do we persuade a peaceful, philosophical race like K'tcar'ch's to join together to fight Maupertuis's marauders?'

'We shall have to play it by ear,' he said stiffly.

'But back in the Nizam's cavern you said that you had a tin ear.'

He gave me an exaggeratedly withering glance that had an underlying vein of humour in it. Ever since I surprised him naked in the bath, he seemed to believe that he and I were sharing something special. I hated to disillusion him.

We set out in the direction that Watson had identified, on the basis that it was no worse than any other choice. Watson marched on ahead, and the Doctor and I followed behind. Holmes brought up the rear. He was uncharacteristically silent. Whenever I turned to make sure he was still there, I found him striding along with his hands in his pockets and a distinct glower on his face.

'What's the matter with him?' I asked the Doctor, indicating Holmes with my thumb.

'He's been thrown completely out of his element,' the Doctor explained as we walked. 'Mr Holmes's deductions rely upon a comprehensive knowledge of the way things work, or so Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. He knows London back to front, for instance. He can identify the typefaces used by all of the daily newspapers, he knows the secret signs employed by vagrants and down-and-outs to identify households p.r.o.ne to charity, he can identify the profession of any man based upon the small changes made to their hands, or their clothes, or the way they stand. In the provinces his knowledge is probably less comprehensive. I doubt, for instance, that he knows much about the regional variations in shoeing horses, but he probably does know where to research the subject, should the need arise. In Switzerland, to pick a country at random, he could well be at a disadvantage, as his base of knowledge would be largely useless and his opportunities to research would be limited, but here on Ry'leh he has nothing at all upon which to work. None of the signs that he looks for are valid. On the other hand, your friend Doctor Watson, being a man who works on the instinctive rather than the intellectual level, comes to terms with new sets of rules remarkably quickly. A very adaptable man, and one much after my own hearts.'

'He's not my friend,' I murmured, not liking the way the Doctor had rolled the word around his mouth, getting every last nuance out of it.

'Don't you like him?' the Doctor said innocently.

'I like him, but...'

'I thought you two were getting on rather well.'

'We were. We are. But I'm not going to have an affair with him.'

'Well, that makes a change,' he murmured. 'I'm worried enough about Ace's amorous predilections without every male you meet falling for you left, right and centre.'

He glanced at me with a twinkle in his eye. I smiled back, but beneath his serious surface and his humorous interior I could see something else, a deeper, more fundamental worry.

'What's the matter?' I asked.

He shook his head.

'A word, that's all.'

'A word?'

'Something I heard back in Tir Ram's cavern. Something in that chant.'

I shook my head.

'I couldn't make any of it out,' I said. 'It didn't sound like a real language at all. I'd have understood it otherwise, surely?'

The Doctor pursed his lips for a moment. I took the opportunity to look around. Nothing had changed. The plain was still plain, the mountains still touched the sky. Watson still walked too fast. Holmes was still sulking.

'It wasn't a language as such,' he mused finally, 'more a polyglot collection of words which I've heard before on half a hundred worlds across the universe, although with translations as varied as "window", "reddish-green"

and "happily unicycling in an easterly direction". The actual chant was meaningless, but one of those words made me think.'

'Don't leave me in suspense. Which one?'

' "Azathoth",' he said gloomily.

Now it was my turn to frown.

'I know that word. I've seen it somewhere. An article, or a journal, something. Maybe on Braxiatel...'

'Azathoth is a G.o.d of anarchy and chaos: one of a pantheon whose worship sprung up on various planets across the universe at more or less the same time. The Silurians, for instance, venerated them before mankind was even a gleam in evolution's eye, as did the gargantuan ent.i.ties that ruled Earth a hundred thousand years before them. Hundreds more races sacrificed in their names. There was even a cult amongst the Shobogans at one time.'

'Shobogans?'

'New Age Time-Lord drop-outs, but that's not important right now. Azathoth is a representation - an avatar, if you like - of one of the Great Old Ones.'

'And they are . . .?'

The Doctor sighed explosively. Watson looked round at the sudden noise, tripped over his feet and almost fell.

'I was hoping not to have to go into this.'

'Start at the very beginning.'

'A very good place to start. Very well: the universe is cyclical, which means that it periodically goes through cycles of expansion and contraction, punctuated by a series of big bangs.'

'I think we can skip the history of the universe, if it's all the same to you.'

'No, no,' he complained, flapping his hand at me, 'the Great Old Ones predate even that. In the dying days of the universe before this current one, which is forever separated from us by a point where time and s.p.a.ce do not exist, a group of beings discovered how to preserve themselves past that point where their universe ceased. They shuttled themselves sideways, into a parallel universe which, for various reasons that I will not even attempt to explain now, ceased a split-second after our one. With me so far?'

'No.'

'Good. Just before that universe ceased, they jumped back to our one, which had just started expanding afresh after a moment of nothingness.

The trouble is, the universe before ours was set up differently.

Fundamental physical laws such as the speed of light and the charge on the electron were different, which means that the Great Old Ones have powers undreamed of by anybody in this universe. Powers that make them look like G.o.ds, to naive races. And they're a pretty nasty bunch, too.'

'Great. I thought I'd heard the name before. I went to a seminar on Felophitacitel Major, a few years back. There was a Draconian who had this theory about various cults springing up across the universe, all worshipping the same G.o.ds. We all laughed at him.'

'He was on the right track. The Great Old Ones are those G.o.ds. There's Cthulhu, who we met in Haiti, if you recall, and the G.o.ds of Ragnarok, who Ace will tell you about if you ask her nicely, and Nyarlathotep, who I sincerely hope never to encounter. And Dagon, who was worshipped by the Sea Devils, and the ent.i.ty known as Hastur the Unspeakable who also goes around calling himself Fenric and who Ace will not tell you about no matter how nicely you ask. And Yog-Sothoth, who I met in Tibet and again in London, and Lloigor, who settled quite happily on Vortis . . . oh, there's a lot of them. All alien to this universe and its laws, both moral and physical.'

'It's amazing, the stuff you can remember sometimes.'

'I wish I could remember more,' he scowled. 'I failed practical theology, back in the Academy.'

'Did you pa.s.s anything?'

'I was highly commended for my landscape gardening.'

'Very useful.'

'You should have been with me when I fought the Vervoids.' He suddenly looked confused. 'You weren't, were you? No, of course you weren't. I have a bit of trouble with that period in my life: bits of it appear to be in the wrong order. Never mind, many a mickle makes a muckle, as somebody once said to someone else.'

'What does that mean?' I asked, confused by the rapid changes in conversational tack, just as I suspect he intended me to be.

'I don't know. I just like the sound of it. I wish I knew who said it - was it Robert Burns? My previous incarnation would have known: he was very good at obscure quotations.'