Doctor Who_ The Death of Art Part 22

Jarre dropped the papers.

Roz turned to Dominic. 'What can you do with your power?

Could you put a barrier of flames, of heat, round us? Buy us some breathing s.p.a.ce?'

Dominic shrugged. 'I could, but it would take all my concentration. Who is to look after Clarissa and Emil?'

'If you don't they'll be dead soon anyway,' Roz snapped.

'It's the Brotherhood out there, not the emergency services.'

Claudette picked up the rifle from where it had fallen. It felt heavy. Powerful. Good.

The War felt the condition of local s.p.a.ce, its currents and flows. Somewhere above, in the strange worlds of ' u p ' , the heart of the Blight pulsed like the weight of history. The surveyor set its patterns in the mode of victory. For the Quoth!

This was the war Truthseeker had meant to fight. Fate had brought them to the heart of the Blighted Cl.u.s.ters. Now they would use what they had learnt to destroy them.

Montague peered into the swirling depths. A tremendous spectacle, he was sure, if only he could see more of it. He could always have members of the Brotherhood altered to 244 resemble the protagonists and have them play out the scene again for his amus.e.m.e.nt.

He was plotting the ch.o.r.eography when a black buzz-saw of light sliced its way through the floor and tried to cut his head off.

Only the sacrifice of his guards saved him. Throwing themselves in its path, they were sliced as finely as the air or the floorboards had been. By then Montague was out of the room, and moving fast.

A figure in white barred his path.

She raised a rifle.

With a groaning like the hounds of Hades, the TARDIS materialized at Roz's side. Dominic didn't spare it a glance: his whole will was focused on the wall of fire that held the Brotherhood at bay. Almost everyone else was too busy or too sh.e.l.l-shocked by the continual attacks on their position to give it a second look. Only Pierre seemed fascinated by it, running his hands over its humming surface. Roz realized the hum sounded far too fast and high; and wondered how the TARDIS felt to a blind man.

The Doctor stuck his head out of the door, and winked.

Good, Roz thought; if ever there was a time for a prepared strategic withdrawal to established fall-back positions, this was it. She started to usher her forces towards the TARDIS.

'Just Emil,' the Doctor said. 'We're going to a very dangerous parley.'

'A summit meeting?' Roz guessed.

'Quite the reverse, I fancy'

He pulled Emil into the TARDIS.

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< show="" me,=""> Warleader demanded.

Quickly the Communications Elite unfolded their structures, 245 letting Warleader quickly perceive the organs he would need to generate in himself to share their observations of the distant Cl.u.s.ter where the Quoth's Wars were active. Warleader reverted to a long string-like form.

They were right. The Quoth's energies had been turned inwards to build the Wars; observations of the distant Cl.u.s.ters had been abandoned, left to the inhabitants of the Wars themselves, but this change was too great to miss.

< something="" momentous="" has="" happened.="" the="" greater="" orbits="" of="" the="" cl.u.s.ters="" have="" been="" swept="" away.="" ask="" all="" quoth="" to="" adopt="" this="" configuration,="" if="" they="" would="" be="" so="" kind.="" i="" need="" more="" data="" to="" understand="" this.=""> Chris held the hot cup of tisane tisane to Jules's lips. He glanced at Jarre. 'His pupils are still dilated.' to Jules's lips. He glanced at Jarre. 'His pupils are still dilated.'

'He got the full blast of that thing. I ' m surprised he's still got a face,' Jarre said sourly.

Jules groaned. 'Where am I?' Chris motioned at Jarre, who took the hint and kicked away the broken ropes that they had used to tie him up under the desk. Jules seemed different, weaker, more malleable, as if an underlying strength had been erased from his brain.

Jarre looked at Chris. 'Are you thinking what I'm thinking?'

246.

Chapter 24.

Claudette pulled the trigger and shot Montague.

He flinched, and in the air the bullet faltered in its path.

It turned into a mist of quicksilver, into a flower with wings, into something that hurt Claudette's eyes to look at it.

In Montague's body, in the real heart of the Blight, the billions of Quoth he had personally enslaved tugged weakly at time and s.p.a.ce, and died.

Reality snapped back. The bullet entered his head and blew the back of his old, old skull into a shower of bone and brains.

Leaving the panting horses they had commandeered from Jules's stables, Jarre and Chris ran up the steps of the Palais Bourbon.

The Doctor placed the electrodes on Emil's head, then hesitated.

'You don't have to do this, you know,' he said mildly.

'What?' Emil spluttered. He couldn't understand the Doctor's reluctance. His own fear he understood, but this sudden undercutting of urgency left him trembling for action.

'We could just leave.' The Doctor gestured at the gleaming white controls of the strange mushroom-shaped console.

'The TARDIS, this machine, is a vehicle for travelling in s.p.a.ce and time. It can take us anywhere, anywhen. Societies of telepaths, shape-changers, places where people like the Family are the norm.' There was a tiny pause before the 247 Doctor continued: 'Or places where mind-powers are damped naturally by the grey stones in the beds of the sparkling brooks, and the air is red and sweet as old wine.'

'And if we do leave?' Emil looked into the Doctor's cool eyes. ' W h o dies?'

'Anyone you might not care for. Everyone you do care for, as well, except that they would die anyway in time, perhaps in worse ways than a world dissolving into its subatomic elements. I could show you the historical databanks, the cancers, the blindnesses, the wars to come.'

'd.a.m.n you. You're talking about the F a m i l y '

' I ' m talking about a whole world. In a moment I'll be putting you in touch with the real power behind everything that has happened. There's no point in doing that if it's only going to make you another Grandmaster - or worse, a second Montague.' The Doctor's voice was flat and empty. 'I can't make you want to save your enemies as well; but it's all or none.'

'And you think I ' m going to turn this power against the Brotherhood? What about your friends? Would you just leave them?'

The Doctor sighed. 'In one of the wars that's coming, or may be coming, on your little blue-green world, one side will coin a phrase about the difficulty of distinguishing the good enemy nationals - civilians - from the bad ones, like undercover fighters, or guerrillas.' He smiled sadly. 'Always a monkey puzzle, that one.'

Emil waited impatiently.

'Kill them all, and let G.o.d sort it out,' the Doctor said.

In Major Henri's outer office in the Palais Bourbon, a newspaperman from L'eclair L'eclair was badgering Major Henri's private secretary. 'Where is he? He promised me fresh information about the treasonous activities of le chien Picquart. My readers are waiting to lap it u p . ' was badgering Major Henri's private secretary. 'Where is he? He promised me fresh information about the treasonous activities of le chien Picquart. My readers are waiting to lap it u p . '

'He's not been in his office for some time, I ' m afraid,' the balding functionary twittered, pushing ineffectually at the piles of paper on his desk. 'A message may have come in 248 from him before I arrived this morning. If y o u ' d just hang on a minute.' He held a piece of paper between both hands and peered at it. For a second as he pa.s.sed the yellowing foolscap before his eyes, he seemed shrouded by the pallid light that fell through it.

The newsman grabbed his wrist and lowered the page forcibly. 'Look Monsieur, your precious Major needs me.

I. . . ' The eyes of the bureaucrat met his. They were lit from behind like a cat's in the night. An optical trick, the newsman thought as the green light burnt coldly into his brain. 'What are you?' he stuttered, meaning to ask 'What are you doing?'

but finding his tongue paralysed by the implication of his half question and the probing ache in his head.

'Seeing if you speak the truth,' the creature said. Its eyes, utterly inhuman now, were large as lanterns, all pupil with a dark purple sheen. It pursed its lips.

'Ah.' A thin flexible tongue, grey and mottled as a snake, flicked out of its mouth and wiped the dust from its left eye.

'He doesn't doesn't need you.' need you.'

The pain in the newspaperman's head tightened behind his eyes, and from his ears a trickle of molten wax dribbled down his neck.

Then a black disk of empty s.p.a.ce cut through the wall and sliced the civil servant up with a sound like metal tearing.

Jarre kicked at the heavy oak door, and watched the wood split round the hinges with a satisfying crack. The door stood firm however, and Chris moved in smoothly with his shoulder and full weight while Jarre was still regaining his footing. This time the door toppled inwards and Jarre, j u m p - ing past Chris, darted through it with a speed that gave the lie to his air of seedy dissolution.

Covering the inspector's back, Chris raised the army service revolver Jarre had given him and loosed a couple of shots down the corridor, aiming high to ensure that he did not accidentally hit anyone. The deputies were keeping their aged heads well down. Anarchism of this kind had not invaded the Palais Bourbon since Vaillant's bombing four 249 years before, and security had become lax. If Jarre was right it would be some time before the gendarmes were on the scene, but Chris knew there was always one gung-ho newcomer in the staidest group. He should know. Up to now it had usually been him.

He backed through the doorway after Jarre, keeping his gun raised at chest level, ready to fire. Holding it in to his body guaranteed him the maximum response arc for the least effort and lessened the possibility of being disarmed, in the event of some over-zealous young politico trying to tackle him.

Jarre already had the drop on the President. The gleaming gun in his hands was a golden threat.

'Who are you?' the President's high quavering voice broke as he lurched up from behind his desk, hands trembling in the air.

Jarre smiled wolfishly. 'Friends of Dreyfus.' He pulled the trigger.

Chris watched the President belly-flop across his mahogany desk.

Jarre spun the alien weapon on his finger, wincing slightly as the narrow guard nipped at his flesh, and blew unnecessarily across the barrel. The crystal rang like a tiny bell.

Chris was into the swing of this now. It was like a big training exercise. Pin-point the potentially homicidal senators and deputies and ping, ping, down they go. For once everything was going smoothly. So far, Chris thought, slyly reaching in his memory for an appropriate historical idiom, it was every time a coconut.

A yelp from Jarre jarred him back to the crime scene. His crime scene. Jarre was shaking his hand nervously, waggling the Menopteran duelling pistol in a jerky, panicky way.

'Should this be getting hot?' He let loose a howl. 'Merde!'

The gun fell and bounced sideways across the floor.

Chris saw it glow red-hot, as the overload hieroglyphs on the handle unfolded like flowers blooming. He thrust Jarre to one side and kicked the gun hard. Trust the top dog to get the best kennel, he thought, as the gun shattered through the picture window.

250.

Maths popped up in Cwej's head. Pilots cannot rely on ships' systems for everything. If the psychic forces vented in real energies, they were toast. Stupidly, he flung himself over Jarre anyway; as if the thickness of his body would do anything more than make a more amusing shadow picture when the sun blinked for a second in the gardens in front of the Palais Bourbon's Greek facade.

The surveyor watched the ma.s.s of the Blighted Cl.u.s.ter fall behind the War. It longed to a.s.sume a pattern of pure joy, but the majority of its body was caught up in the mechanisms of the War, making the tiny changes that its geometries multiplied into the energies needed to destroy the Blight. The structure actually 'whirled' in the four macrodimensions, turning too gradually to show on the Quoth's most sensitive perceptive organ, but still rapidly enough to disturb the 'gravity' that theoretical science showed governed the movements of the Blighted Cl.u.s.ters.

Elsewhere in the machine, a team of Quoth Reclaimers prepared to make the great leap into the depths of the Blighted Cl.u.s.ter to recover those Quoth who had survived its collision with the War. Once the Quoth had been reclaimed they would be asked to build more Wars. With the inexorable growth of geometry the Quoth would overcome their enemies. Already a dozen Wars had been made in this way.

When the volunteers had been hurled into the smaller portion of the Blighted Cl.u.s.ter - the one which was now on a trajectory that should take it away from the main ma.s.s, with its total lack of birthing material - a pattern from the Engineers reached the surveyor's outermost feelers. The Perceptives had sighted a new source of Blighted energy: a more ma.s.sive one than any of the others this War had yet encountered.

Mayeur-Tomas-Henri-Jules felt a flash of ghostly contacts with the world; shadow impressions almost instantly cut off.

Why had he not become the President, or another highly placed official? Surely there had not been time for the 251 patterns he had placed in their minds, crouching for hours with his life-size voodoo dolls, working Montague's trick backwards, to have decayed?

There was only one hope. His hidy-hole. The one form Montague would never suspect the arrogant Grandmaster of taking.

'Do it!' Emil said angrily.

'Sure?'

'Yes,' Emil hissed. 'Sure enough,' his mind added, somewhere calm and underneath his feelings.

'That's all I can ask of anyone,' the Doctor said, pressing a large scarlet b.u.t.ton on the TARDIS console. Emil was sure it had not been there a moment ago. Hadn't he walked right round the console, trailing electronic connections behind him like a train? The Doctor's mysterious s.p.a.ce-time link. Not common-or-garden flex. He was still musing when his mind folded up like a message being squashed into a too small envelope, and posted itself into a boiling blue vortex.

As the blue light engulfed him, he realized that the Doctor had answered his thoughts and not his words.

Something heavy rumbled, 'Why aren't we dead?'

'Speak for yourself,' Jarre cursed, elbowing the time-traveller in the gut, or where he hoped a time-traveller might have a gut. It worked. The Doctor gave a coughing gasp and rolled off Jarre, which was the effect Jarre had wanted. 'What was that all about?'

'I thought the gun was going to explode,' the Doctor said brokenly. ' I ' m , um, denser than you, biologically,' he flus-tered. 'I thought I might stop some of the blast.'

Jarre realized something profoundly worrying. The Doctor really was as dim as he looked. 'Denser, eh? Well, you said it.'

Then over the Doctor's shoulder, out of the picture window, he saw something even more worrying. 'What the h.e.l.l is that?'

252.

Emil fell into the abyss, and age fell on him as he fell. His nails grew and his hair lengthened, a beard bursting out of his face. His body ached to fight back, to regularize the impressions that fell upon him. Only the long discipline of his life let him hold the power in check. One by one his teeth blackened and loosened, falling from wizened gums. What's my lifespan, he wondered. Fourscore and ten? Fivescore? It's illusionary anyway, a product of the mind's time-sense being accelerated. Biologically I'd be dead from loss of water in three days, food in forty.

After the aging, when he felt like a skeleton hanging in s.p.a.ce, it was the turn of his life to flash before his eyes. That was okay. H e ' d forgotten most of it. Being a baby was the worst. Everything was either comfort or not-comfort. Luckily that bit seemed speeded up. After he had lived his whole life to the point where he said 'yes' to the Doctor twice, he stopped paying attention and thought about the physics of his position for a while.

I ' m not me. I ' m a copy of me put in the Doctor's machine and run at its highest speed. I just think like me, and I have to think like me because I ' m the only one with a suitable mind to have touched the Doll's House without wishing, to have felt the Quoth not as a tyrant but as an interpreter, an echo chamber. It's the emptiest vessels that make the best echoes, he thought wryly. He remembered it all now. It all seemed clearer. He was thinking like he used to think when he had used the power to boost his intellect. Except it wasn't the power, was it? Something about thinking with the mechanisms of the Doctor's machine rather than with flesh was doing this to him. His thoughts were not only quicker, but also more accurate. Were his thoughts being subject to some checking process beyond his ken, like the logical gearing proposed by Babbage for his a.n.a.lytical engines?

Interesting concept.