Doctor Who_ Unnatural History Part 23

He frowned. They were so unaware of the dangers, it was the Summer of Love all over again. In the distance, the Wild Hunt was rus.h.i.+ng through the streets, the Kraken was dreaming deep in the ooze.

'Which "early stuff" of mine are you such a fan of?' he asked the boy.

The kid gave a crafty smile. 'Oooh, how about the way you're going to '

The Doctor screeched the car to a halt against the kerb. 'No spoilers,' he said.

'I'm not playing any of your paradox games. Tell me anything anything I haven't done yet, and the deal is off here and now.' I haven't done yet, and the deal is off here and now.'

'Jeez. OK, grandad.'

145.

The kid went back to destroying the dashboard as the Doctor slipped back into the traffic. 'I just meant the games you've already started playing with time. Leaving notes for yourself.'

'That was a bad habit, long abandoned.'

'The whole post-destination thing with the Vervoids. The way you tricked the Dalek Empire into tangling their timeline so bad that their history collapsed under the weight of the paradoxes. Elegant.'

'Yes,' said the Doctor smoothly. 'That was clever of me, wasn't it?'

'And most of all,' said the boy, 'what you've already done right here.'

The Doctor glanced at the boy. Old eyes watching him, far too old, far too focused for the face they looked out from.

'When you scarred this place, you changed everything,' said the boy. 'That was your birth cry, wasn't it? Barely a day old, and the first real thing you do is reach for the timelines and grab, twist and pull. Tying knots on a cosmic scale.

Temporal grace, temporal orbits you blew causality right out of the window.

All your way of saying you'd arrived arrived.'

'And I'm still learning the consequences,' said the Doctor.

'Oh, that was just the beginning,' the boy went on. 'In the last few years, you've met more people from your own past and future than you ever have before. You've ridden the Ouroboros in the Emindian war. After all those years you spent being so careful about the timelines. . . you're getting more and more out of line. I don't think Grandmother Time is too happy with you these days, is she?'

The boy was just trying to provoke him, unbalance him, gain the upper hand.

The Doctor said nothing, concentrating on the late-afternoon traffic.

'And this is just the beginning of the fun. Whether you like it or not, wherever you go, the universe gets knocked into a new shape around you. Like with Sam.'

'Like with Sam,' repeated the Doctor.

The boy made him park outside a small church in the Mission District. It seemed deserted no other vehicles in the car park, no one in the garden grounds. The boy led him inexorably towards the old wooden doors.

The boy wasn't casting a shadow, the Doctor saw. All of the Faction's agents had lost theirs, or so the legend went; it was a reflection of their liberation from cause and effect, which they regarded as an outdated set of aesthetic principles far more limited than their own. Or something like that. It was probably just a careful bit of showmans.h.i.+p on their part, part of the effect they tried to engineer.

146.

'You wanted her to go with me, didn't you?' said the Doctor. 'You staged the attack in London. So that I could rescue her and bring her here.'

The boy grinned at him, putting a hand to the doors. They seemed to wrench open at his touch. The s.p.a.ce inside was cool, pitch-dark.

'And then, here in San Francisco,' said the Doctor. His spine itched, the kind of itch inside that you can't hope to reach. 'You wanted our attention. You spent all that time with Fitz, just so we'd track you down.'

He followed the boy into the church. Somehow, in here, the Faction had switched on the night the sunlight stopped dead at the windows, leaving the rows of pews enfolded in darkness. The detail of the apse seemed blurred, distant.

The doors closed behind them.

'But do you know why?' asked the boy.

'You wanted me to come to you for help,' said the Doctor. He was looking around the church, frowning.

'Relax,' said the boy. 'We haven't done anything to the staff or the congregation. We just moved their church a couple of femtoseconds into the future.' He glanced around. 'They might be crowded in here saying ma.s.s right now, we'd never know about it.'

'You wanted me to come to you for help,' said the Doctor again.

'I'm your greatest fan,' smirked the boy.

'But what it has to do with Sam. . . ?' He trailed off, muttering ideas to himself again.

'You want to know?' asked the boy slyly.

'I'm not paying you for it,' said the Doctor. 'It's not worth my blood.'

There was movement in one of the pews. The Doctor turned sharply to see the little boy sitting up he must have been lying down on the wooden bench, out of sight.

'Hiya,' said the second boy. He leapt over the pew, strode up to his twin, and, before the Doctor could move or speak, slapped palms with him.

They grinned smarmily up at him, seeing his astonishment. 'How?' he asked the boy who had brought him.

'How can we touch without shorting out the energy from the time differen-tial?' answered the second boy. 'You think there's something that says we can't.

Called the Blin-o-vitch Lim-i-ta-tion Ef-fect.'

'Blinovitch Blinovitch Blinovitch,' said the first boy, repeating the word play-fully to himself. 'Blinovitch Blinovitch Blinovitch Blinovitch Blinovitch. . . ' He 147.

kept reciting the syllables till they lost any sense of meaning, reducing them from an idea to a collection of silly sounds.

'It's all a handwave,' said the other boy. 'Truth is, Blinovitch was one of us.

Didn't you know?'

'Ah, no, actually,' said the Doctor. 'I think you're just playing tricks.'

'Bet you'd still love to know how we do it,' said the other one. 'Go on for free.'

They took him to a room at the back of the church. When they pushed the door open, the air was suddenly full of streaking electricity, white arcs so bright they seared his eyes, making it impossible to pick out the details of the huge machine they came from.

Somehow the s.p.a.cious room itself remained dark, confining the flashes to the air right around the machine. In normal time, this place was probably a library, perhaps a lounge. The boys had removed everything, all the books and furniture, even the carpet had been torn up. The machine sat in the centre, reaching to the ceiling, grinding in the blackness.

Remember, the Doctor told himself, all of this is for effect. All to make the moment as impressive as possible.

It was still a moment he'd rather not be in.

His eyes were adjusting. It was a great iron wheel, with what looked like a standing stone in the centre of the metal. He wondered what ancient site they'd plundered to get it.

The stone and the wheel were covered in components and ornaments, intersecting smaller wheels at crazy angles, metal shaped and twisted into loops and spirals and trompe l'oeil trompe l'oeil motifs. The Mobius strip was everywhere, the lazy eight of infinity, of contradiction. motifs. The Mobius strip was everywhere, the lazy eight of infinity, of contradiction.

Figures were plodding with the wheel as it rotated, each holding on to a protrusion from the rim which looked uncomfortably like a human femur.

Cords of lightning shot from their hands right to the centre of the machine, illuminating metal and bone and rock, catching each of the plodding figures in the syncopated flashes of light. And each of the figures was the little boy.

The Doctor watched as one of the boys broke formation, walking through a stone archway that stood in the centre of the room. He vanished. A moment later, another little boy emerged from the other side of the portal and took his place at the wheel.

'Oh, very clever,' said the Doctor. 'A Blinovitch generator. You use a time portal to send yourself back in time, wait five minutes, then go back to your 148 original point in time and keep on doing it until there are a dozen of you, all existing in the same moment. Then you use this thing ' he waved at the contraption 'to drain off the potential energy built up by crossing your own timestream. Using the excess energy both to sustain the portal, and to allow you to do various nasty things to causality to boot.'

'Simpler'n using biodata samples,' said the boy on his right.

'They won't let you play with needles, will they?' said the Doctor. 'Very sensible.'

The boy on his left glared up at him, the whites of his eyes standing out in the dark. ' They They let me do whatever I want.' let me do whatever I want.'

'I don't believe that for a moment,' said the Doctor. 'You're just a baby Brother, aren't you? A novice.' Now both of the boy were glowering with prep.u.b.escent umbrage. 'This is probably the first time they've let you out on your own.'

'Is not,' the right-hand boy said tightly. 'Don't push it. The Spirits'll get mad.'

'You don't believe in the Spirits,' said the Doctor. 'You're only in it for the lies.'

All of the little boys turned to look at him at once.

'You just like knocking things over. Don't you? And history's as good a thing as any. And you like getting to play with people's minds. And that's that's what this whole show is for.' what this whole show is for.'

He raised his hands and applauded slowly. 'Typical Faction work. A retro-bootstrapping time machine, powered by its own impossibilities. Cla.s.sic irony-punk. But take away the technovoodoo, and what's left?'

More and more of the boys were turning up, crowding around him, from the portal, from elsewhere in the church. Excellent. Show you're not intimidated, and we'll sort this out with a minimum of fuss.

'Just a celebration of your own cleverness,' he finished. 'Nothing more than that.'

One of the boys said, 'Looks like we gotta teach you to respect the Spirits.'

All around him, the boy drew his knife.

'Oo-er, how evil,' said the Doctor. 'Yaah boo scary. Satan, Sataaaan Sataaaan!'

One of the boy was closing in on him. He could see the glint of what looked like a set of bra.s.s knuckles, a sharp spine sticking out along each finger. A biodata sampler.

The boy raised the spines, to just under the Doctor's eyes.

'Playing with needles is the fun part,' he said. Two of the boy held him down as another tightened the leather straps around his left wrist. More of the 149.

boy scuttled around, on all sides staring, poking, sn.i.g.g.e.ring, tightening the clamps that held his head rigidly in position.

'You don't need to bother with all of this,' he said. 'I came here by choice. I'm hardly going to run away.'

The boy wearing the sampler shook his head. 'It's for your own good. We don't want you moving suddenly when I'm inside.'

All the other iterations of the boy stepped back, well clear of the chair. It was installed in the centre of a s.p.a.cious kitchen. Others of the boy sat on the counters, leaned against the cupboards.

He'd got only a glimpse before they'd shoved him into it, but it had looked like an old electric chair. Knowing the Faction, it was probably the chair used to execute John Wilkes Booth in some distant alternity. Just for effect. Just for the moment.

'You must think it's really important to stop this guy, if you're willing to deal with us.' The boy stepped behind the Doctor, just out of sight.

'I think I know what he wants with me,' said the Doctor. 'And I think I know what he wants with Sam. I don't think I can let that happen.'

'Whatever you say, grandad.'

'Why do you keep calling me that?' he said tightly.

He could hear the smile in the words. ''Cause it p.i.s.ses you off something chronic.'

He felt the point of one of the spines pressing into his temple. His fingertips flexed, his whole body itching to tear loose from the chair. No matter how he strained his eyes, they couldn't reach far enough to see the boy, see the needle.

'Just one moment's worth,' he said. 'One moment of my life. That's the bargain. A fact for a fact.'

The needle broke the surface.

He felt it sliding impossibly through skin and bone, burrowing through the soft matter underneath. Not pain. More like a vague memory of pain, a mental ache.

'I could take it all,' whispered the boy.

'Tear out my biodata now, and I won't be there to do all those future things which you're so looking forward to.' The Doctor sighed again. 'Can we get on with it? This is starting to tickle.'

'Make it something old,' said the boy. 'Something obscure.'

The fruity scent of karmine pudding, the clink of cutlery, the rattle of adults in conversation.

150.

Young eyes rounding a corner, looking up at a dining-room table taller than he was.

I'm in the Great Hall of the family House. My father is there, at the table, with his friends. They're talking about grown-up things they're always talking about wars, and great projects, and big things that have to be taken care of.

He'll be leaving again soon.

How old am I? Barely a Loomling.

I've just been up on the mountain, and I've caught a cobblemouse, its wings have just begun to sprout. I've got to show it off to them, right this instant. You know what it's like to be young there's no concept of time, just of right now.