Doctor Who_ The Death of Art Part 9

She fished part of her ruined dress from the water and tore enough material to wind into a garrotte.

The sound moved closer.

She waited until it drew level with the entrance of the sub-artery.

Then she snarled and leapt.

It was small, less ma.s.sive than a child.

Its fur was wet, and smelt familiar.

A wet tongue licked at her face.

She realized she had almost throttled a dog.

In the Deep Ward, Francesque Duquesne opened his grey eyes and found himself staring into those of the stranger from the day before yesterday. He hoped it had been no longer.

There was nothing in the pink room he could use to tell one day of the week from another. Nor could he remember how long ago he was brought here. There were no church bells in earshot to distinguish the sabbath from a workday. a.s.suming he had ever been conscious on a Sunday.

The doctors' notes at the end of his bed were out of reach, and he suspected were carefully devoid of information. It is possible with training to determine what is being written merely by watching from a distance the movements of the top of a pen. None of the doctors had written anything like a date or the name of a day.

He heaved himself up in bed. 'So you're back. I don't suppose you bought me any more grapes?'

The visitor pulled a whitish bag from his pocket. ' I ' m sorry if they're a bit m u s h y '

'I did not expect to see you again. What's the matter? Was my debriefing insufficiently detailed for the gallant gentlemen 108 who have taken over the remains of the Directoire Tenebreux?'

The visitor shuffled his feet. ' I ' m not with them. But I do want to know more about them.'

'Lucifer? Lucifer?' The voice was old and deep and rich. The dog tried to bark, and Roz clapped its mouth shut with her hand. It was hard to imagine any of the things she had seen before having any interest in pets, beyond how far they could crawl with their intestines ripped out, but just because someone had a dog did not mean he was a potential ally.

On the other hand she was wet through, in the dark, alone and p.i.s.sed off, and somewhere nearby things with more arms than table manners probably had her on their dish-of-the-day list. How much trouble could one man and his dog be by comparison? She stood up. 'Over here?'

A man tottered into one of the patches of diffuse light. He was dressed in rough work clothes. Old work clothes. His face was elderly and kindly, but with a look that might have been weakness or wasted strength about the eyes. He was carrying Roz's rifle. He seemed to find nothing surprising in there being a woman with a torn dress hiding in the sewer.

'h.e.l.lo? My name is Pierre Duval. Have you seen my dog?'

With a start, Roz realized he was blind.

'Why should I trust you?' The man in the bed was trying hard to sound wary. Too hard, perhaps?

'Why did you trust me before? You've already told me too much for your safety.'

'I was alone and disorientated. I needed to talk.'

'You really expect me to believe that? That it's good to talk?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Sorry, private joke. Ask me again in a hundred years.'

Francesque wagged a finger at his visitor. 'Now I ' m sure.

That's why I trusted you. You're Le Docteur. Le Docteur. We've been waiting for you since Mademoiselle Dorothee's disappearance.' We've been waiting for you since Mademoiselle Dorothee's disappearance.'

109.

'Delicious,' Pierre heard the woman say, but the sound of the teacup coming down on the bone-china saucer was heavy and Pierre knew it had not been tasted. No matter.

His back to his guest, a china plate in each hand and one balanced on the crook of his left arm, Pierre turned. He imagined he must look like a living cake stand. No doubt on seeing the sticky pastries piled high on the plates his visitor's face would take on a greenish hue. It was a small vanity that he permitted himself, this feeling of superiority. His only vanity. He had adapted too well to his 'retirement' to feel any other. It was hard to be proud when time had left you crippled. Abilities lost, opportunities blocked. The priest had tried to help him, but not even religion had brought any consolation; not the priest's variety anyway.

Below and to the side of the picnic table, he could hear the thick black effluent of the open sewer flowing away into the dark.

He seated himself on one of the cane chairs and bit into an eclair. 'So how did you come to be hiding down a sewer? Not that it's any of my business, I know.'

'Do not blame her, Doctor. She made a good - is "stab at it"

an appropriate colloquialism? - a good attempt at being.'

Francesque hesitated. 'Well, not inconspicuous. That is not, perhaps, her way, but at least she was not overtly out of place, nor anachronistic. The Shadow Directory has a lot of experience of people trying to act "not overtly out of place".

By 1892 she was on our Red List. When she disappeared, we took the unpardonable liberty of searching her house. I led the team. It was, you may imagine, something of a revelation.

Among her effects was a certain diary.'

The Doctor frowned. 'Reading someone's diary, good grief. You'll be steaming open love-letters next.'

Francesque shrugged. 'As it happened, we could barely read any of it. The agent who picked it up said that he saw pages in English when he first flipped through the diary, but neither he nor anyone else has ever found those pages again.

The visible text has baffled the best cryptographers available 110 to the Directory, as well as thwarting the archeological skill of Lionel Barton, although he did note a resemblance to the carvings found on certain ruins in Ecuador. I myself, suspecting that the majority of the diary was not in code but in a language whose alphabet is based on the principles of geometry, consulted widely with mathematicians. Alas, the celebrated author of The Dynamics of An Asteroid, The Dynamics of An Asteroid, whose treatise on the binomial theorem had once so impressed the Academie Francaise, proved to have disappeared, and other experts professed themselves outcla.s.sed.' whose treatise on the binomial theorem had once so impressed the Academie Francaise, proved to have disappeared, and other experts professed themselves outcla.s.sed.'

The Doctor glanced up from his perusal of the notes at the end of the bed.

'Don't mind me. Do go on, this is fascinating stuff. So what did you do next?'

'I put the diary aside, marked the case as being not yet closed, and accepted my next a.s.signment. A body had washed up on the banks of the Seine. It was hideously deformed, a freak. Even the police who drag the river for the corpses of men killed in brawls wouldn't go near it. It smelt of fruit, and clutched giant hands across its pigeon-breasted chest. It wasn't dead.'

'So what did you do with it? Lock it away in a warehouse, next to the Holy Grail?'

'What do you take us for, Doctor? We tried to nurse it back to health, of course. Here in the Deep Ward. Sadly it did not long survive. It lacked something, a mineral perhaps, or an element not found on Earth. Nor was it especially communicative, although it could speak French after a fashion, but it did have one very special trait.'

'It would tell you all about anything that you put into its hands.'

Francesque halted, the flow of his anecdote broken. 'Why, yes.'

'So you gave it the diary to hold?'

'It seemed the obvious solution.'

'The effort was probably what killed it.' There was anger in the Doctor's voice. Francesque had to look away, the stranger's eyes were too piercing to meet. The voice continued: 'Your 111 so-called alien was a psychometrist. A pretty basic psi-power, the ability to follow the world-line of an object back into the past. The smell of limes is a common side-effect. That or violets. It burnt itself out trying to read my past, just so your Directory could get its hands o n . . . ' A note of puzzlement entered the Doctor's voice. 'On what? Technology? Secrets?

Mr Kipling's recipe for fondant fancies?'

'You do us an injustice, Doctor.'

'I can live with that.'

Francesque shrugged. 'Then why should I help you? You must need help, or why come back here?'

'I was looking for an honest man, held against his will.'

'And I was looking for a time-traveller. So tell me honestly: how is the future?'

The Doctor met his gaze unflinchingly. 'It's brutal and violent. France is invaded twice by Germany, and a little farther on Paris is flattened by an Ice Warrior reprisal weapon. Shortly after that Europe is decimated by plagues unleashed by a race from the farthest reaches of this galaxy prior to global invasion.

French culture is lost forever, and the ideals of the Revolution are buried under an aristocratic empire that lasts until the thirtieth century. When that falls the whole of Europe undergoes another dark age.'

Francesque blanched. 'Mon Dieu. This future, then, you have come to prevent it?'

The Doctor smiled. 'No, to make certain of it.'

112.

Chapter 10.

Tomas walked through his garden to the tiny chapel in the grove of orange trees. Blossom and fruit hung incestuously on the same boughs, fragrant as High Church incense. The late afternoon light made everything as pale and brown as an acid-etching.

He knelt in the chapel and tried to pray. It was quiet there, and the robust carvings of the stalls offered him an obscurely tactile comfort. He wondered if he was trying to fill his broken memory with mere density. Oh G.o.d, give me substance, he thought, and the prayer seemed more real than he was.

What had he done during the time of his broken memory?

It was impossible to be sure. All he had were fragments.

Striking a fat man in the face with his hand wrapped in silk.

Meddling in politics. Other things too fantastic or distorted to be real. A waking nightmare of biology.

Francesque Duquesne had his hands over his ears. ' I ' m not listening to you. There's nothing you can do that will make me help you.'

'Really? I thought you wanted my knowledge.'

'Not any more.'

'It's only a penny for my thoughts.'

'What profiteth a man if he gains the entire world but loses his soul?'

'So you do think there are things worth more than life.'

'For a person, yes.'

113.

'Not for a country?'

'What do you mean?'

The Doctor's voice was grim, and dry as dust. 'I mean that France as you think of it, the France you value, will die the quicker if you d o n ' t help m e . ' He seized the end of the militarily folded bedsheet and tugged. The tight sheet of linen stretched between his hands. His left hand twitched. A wave rippled through the sheet. '1884. A psychic force tugs at s.p.a.ce and time.' He jerked with his other hand. 'Still to come, unless I or my friends can prevent it, at least one more tug. Possibly more. Already s.p.a.ce-time is stretched to fracture point. More than one disruption might end everything.'

Francesque scowled. 'End everything h o w ? '

'Already the tension is an unnatural condition. A weakness. A time-fissure. A breeding ground of dreams. Rogues and vagabonds seize the powers of G.o.ds. Soon time itself disrupts.' The Doctor balled the sheet up in his hands and let it fall in a creased ma.s.s. 'Oh, and it would also heat up s.p.a.ce to approximately ten to the power thirty-two Kelvins, reunify the strong and electroweak forces, and utterly vaporize Paris.

Need I go o n ? '

Francesque's voice was tortured. 'How can I believe you?'

'You believed me when I said the future would be bad.

Why doubt me when I say it might yet be worse? You've seen it, haven't you?'

'Yes, d.a.m.n you. I've seen it. The French army falling. The Pa.s.schendaele Ridge. The land ironclads. The rotting bodies on the barbed wire. They promised me it would never be.'

' W h o ? '

'La Fraternite.' Fraternite.'

'Tell me.'

Francesque was sobbing now, his hands clutching at the remaining bedclothes. 'After the death of the alien, the psychometrist, I was taken off active duty. Anton thought I had been under too much pressure. I was given a desk j o b . Sorting out the Directory archives u n d e r Mont-St-Michel, one of the locations the Directory acquired during 114 Napoleon's tussles with the Vatican. I found something missing. A haunted doll's house, captured during the forced relocation of the Directory to London at the time of the Bourbon restoration. Then it had been used to generate ectoplasmic manikins that killed. Nasty business.' He wiped his brow. His hand came away wet and trembling.

' A n d ? ' the Doctor prompted.

'It had been stolen from us, G.o.d alone knows how long ago, and something else was in its place. A trap, I suppose; or perhaps a residue, or an echo, if you like. I caught the full impact of it. Went, well, mad. It's all a bit vague, now. I wasn't surprised to wake up here, but after I'd been here a while I worked out that things must have changed politically.

No one I knew was in charge. No one would talk to me.

Then, after your first visit, he he came to see me. He knew about my dreams of the future, called me a precognitive, said I must have been infected by the power in the psychometrist.' came to see me. He knew about my dreams of the future, called me a precognitive, said I must have been infected by the power in the psychometrist.'

' W h o ? '