Doctor Who: The Also People (11 page)

'Why,' she asked, 'are you doing that?'

'Doing what?' asked Chris nervously.

'The thing with the lips?'

'It's what we call kissing,' said Chris. 'Don't you kiss?'

'Of course we do, just not on the mouth.'

'Oh.'

'Does it feel nice?'

'Um,' said Chris, 'I think so.'

'All right,' said Dep, 'let's do some of that then. I'll try anything once.'

It felt very strange but they reached a compromise so that they kissed and rubbed noses at the same time. When he slipped his tongue between her lips she tried to take her cues from Chris and respond. Unfortunately a stray memory from a biology lesson surfaced suddenly in her mind and she had to break away again.

Her laughter seemed to worry Chris, which only made it worse. 'I'm sorry,' she said, 'it's just that I was reminded of the way birds feed their young.'

'Thanks a lot,' said Chris, but he was smiling.

'I want you,' said Dep.

Chris looked around the balcony. 'What, here?'

'Why not?'

'People can see us.'

'Where then?'

Chris peered into the darkness beyond the railing, searching for something in the distance. 'I think I've got an idea.'

Once she was sure that there was no danger of feLixi's head suddenly exploding Roz began to relax. He was easy to talk to, displaying none of the smugness that characterized the rest of the sphere's inhabitants. He felt more solid too; even his costume, a simple one-piece shipsuit, had a sense of reality to it.

'That's because it is real,' said feLixi. 'I picked it up during a mission.'

'When you were working for
xrinig
?'

'XR(N)IG,' feLixi corrected her. 'Xeno Relations (Normalization) Interest Group and we don't work
for
interest groups here, we work
with
them.'

'Does that make a difference?'

'Well, it means everyone's much politer at the mission briefings.'

'Don't take this the wrong way,' said Roz, 'but I can't imagine you people fighting a war.'

'Neither could we, to be honest,' said feLixi. 'It's amazing how fast it all came back to us. Burn, rape, pillage. Burn anyway, after that rape and pillage was too much like hard work.'

'How bad did it get?'

'Depended on where you were,' said feLixi. 'If I'd stayed on the sphere I'd have hardly noticed there was a war on at all. I volunteered for XR(N)IG, worked as a secret agent in some of the proxy wars. Saw some stuff that I'd rather not have seen, did some things –'

'Yeah,' said Roz. 'Goddess, yeah.'

'Stupid, isn't it,' said feLixi. 'This is my people, remember, so I could have stopped any time I liked. Just said "It's been fun, guys, but I think I'll go home now" but you don't, do you? You keep on taking the missions, doing the jobs and the pain inside gets worse and worse until you can't separate yourself from the pain any more – the pain and you are one and the same thing.'

'Stop,' said Roz recoiling from that image. 'Please.'

FeLixi nodded. 'Yeah, right, I understand – some things you don't talk about.'

'Not here,' said Roz, 'not now. Maybe later.'

'Do you know what I like about sitting on the stairs at parties?'

'You don't have to dance?'

'You meet a better class of people,' said feLixi.

They flagged down a patrolling tray and feLixi ordered something hot and sweet that tasted vaguely of ginger and pineapple. He told Roz a joke about two drones and a ship in geostationary orbit but she didn't get the punchline. 'You had to be there,' said feLixi.

Roz laughed at that; the hot drink was clearing her head. She told him a bit of family history, making it sound a lot funnier than she remembered. FeLixi roared when she described the extreme lengths her mother went to to maintain her social position. How she'd woken the whole Krall in the middle of the night to tidy the grounds – 'because she'd heard a rumour that the Empress's ship might overfly the area'. When she talked about it this way Roz could almost believe that she had enjoyed her childhood.

They lapsed into silence, sipping their drinks and staring over the landscape. Roz liked that.

They were sitting like that when saRa!qava and Bernice emerged from the door below them. The two women were talking softly and Roz found herself unconsciously leaning forward to try to overhear. FeLixi plucked the brooch off his shipsuit and, grinning, held it up between them.

'Eavesdrop,' he said softly.

Suddenly they could hear Bernice and saRa!qava's voices, low and clear, as if they were standing half a metre away. Roz realized that the brooch was a multi-function terminal. She felt a touch of guilt about listening in but she couldn't resist it. After all,
private secrets breed public
crime
was an adjudicator tenet, justification for a million com-taps.

SaRa!qava murmured something, too quietly even for feLixi's terminal to catch, her hand resting lightly on Bernice's arm. The other woman murmured back and gently disengaged the other's hand. It was gracefully done.

'Only hetero then?' said saRa!qava.

'So far,' said Bernice.

'Would it help if I told you I was a man six months ago?' asked saRa!qava.

Roz put her hand over the terminal cutting off Bernice's reply. 'She changed sex?' she asked.

'You mean you can't?' asked feLixi.

Roz shook her head and took her hand off the terminal.

'– only with surgery and genetic manipulation,' said Bernice.

'How inconvenient,' said saRa!qava.

'You mean you do it' – Bernice made a vague circling motion with her hands – 'sort of naturally?'

'Hey, saRa!qava,' said a voice. From saRa!qava's own terminal Roz thought. 'Dep and the barbarian are about to do something really silly.'

SaRa!qava and Bernice went back inside the building. 'Take my advice, Benny,' said saRa!qava.

'Don't ever have children.'

Roz sighed – she had a good idea of who the 'barbarian' was. 'I'd better see what's going on,'

she told feLixi. 'It's been nice talking to you.'

'I live in town,' said feLixi. 'Why don't you come up and see me some time?'

Roz arrived on the balcony just in time to see Chris manoeuvre a projectile rifle onto the railing. Dep was helping him, her eyes bright with excitement. 'He's going to shoot a line back to the villa,' Bernice told her.

Roz stared over the landscape; there was a tiny smudge of light that might, or might not, be the villa. The range was over six thousand metres. 'Can't you stop him?' Bernice asked her.

Roz looked at Chris and at Dep looking at Chris. 'Probably not,' she said.

Chris lined up the gun and squinted into the bulky sight mounted above the barrel. Roz reckoned it was an impossible shot, even for him. Chris fired, there was the distinctive thrum-crack of a linear accelerator. It was a fast projectile, too fast for the eye to follow even with the attached line marking its path. Chris asked the gun whether the far end was on target and secure.

'Yep,' said the gun.

Chris climbed over the railing and clipped a handgrip to the line.

'Are you sure this is wise?' asked Bernice.

'Bundled monofilament,' said Chris. He took a firm hold of the grip and motioned to Dep who climbed over the railing and onto his back. Roz noticed uneasily how reluctant Dep's hair was to let go of the railing.

'See you at the villa,' said Chris and pushed off.

Dep gave a little shriek and then they were nothing but shadows over the landscape.

'Pathetic,' said Roz.

'Isn't it amazing what boys will do to impress girls,' said Bernice. 'Shit, I hope they don't go bang at the bottom.'

'I think the bang is inevitable,' said Roz. 'It's the splat that's worrying me.'

Bernice sighed. 'I suppose it had to happen sooner or later. You don't think he's going to get all mature on us now?'

The two women looked at each other.

'Nah.'

His hands were humming with the friction from the grip on the line. He felt the brush of Dep's breath in his ear, the warmth of her breasts against his back and the heat of her thighs locked around his waist. For a moment only the wind of their passage betrayed their movement. All around them was the vast artificial sky, broken into segments of night and day. To his right Chris could see a vast city, its lights, like a nebula, glittering through the thick layers of atmosphere.

Beyond and above, still lit by the sun, was a vast hexagonal hole through which he could see real stars. The Spaceport, he realized, the sphere's gateway to the rest of the universe. To his left the Endless Sea was a sweep of darkness rising beyond the impossible line where the ocean became the sky. There were lights upon the water, islands as big as continents, continents as big as planets and the running lights of a ship that had to be hundreds of kilometres long.

They swept over a ridge, the tops of the evergreens a bare two metres beneath their feet. The evening air was sweet with the scent of pine needles. Dep gasped as a cloud of moths exploded from the tree tops, thousands of white wings beating the air with a sound like tearing silk.

Chris could see the villa ahead lit up by the external lamps on the roof and balcony. They were linked to that balcony by the line, the bundled monofilament visible only by the dull sheen of reflected Whynot light, the same light that reflected from the villa's windows and the rippling surface of the pool on the roof.

Caught up in the rushing wind, in the warmth of Dep's body, the immensity of the sphere itself, Chris almost forgot to break in time. Some part of him wanted to keep going as if the solid wall of the villa was merely an illusion, that if he were to merely crash through it he and Dep would travel on for eternity, suspended between heaven and earth.

Fortunately the practical side of Chris, the side that had seen a few flitter crashes in its time, took over and squeezed hard on the grip, slowing them down.

They landed stumbling on the balcony, Dep's weight on Chris's back driving him through the windowfield into the lounge. He sensed rather than saw a brief flurry of movement ahead as the coffee table slid sideways out of their path. A soft impact caught him in the shins and he pitched face forward on to the sofa. He twisted, reaching for Dep as she rolled off his back. She slithered back on top of him, her hair lashing out to catch hold of his arm, and he felt her teeth biting gently at the side of his neck. The dress retreated down her back. Chris touched her bare shoulders. Overbalanced, the sofa toppled backwards, something heavy hit the floor and Chris was surprised to realize it was them.

Chris had not led a sheltered life. He'd read his fair share of texts, seen the holovids, done his homework in biology. There had been after-curfew bull sessions in the novice barracks when he was training and he'd raided the odd brothel while on duty. But the theory had never talked about
this
, about the way the brain shuts down and the body takes over. The talk was all of big bazongas and the calibre of a man's torpedo, of positions and teases, not of the way your lover's skin seems to merge into your own until you cannot differentiate where you finish and they begin.

'Excuse me,' said a voice. 'When you've quite finished.'

Dep and Chris froze trembling.

'Don't mind us,' drawled a second, female, voice. 'We can wait.'

4

Policeman on the Corner

There's a policeman on the corner

Taking pictures of the scene

I thought I better warn you

That he doesn't share our dream

Preaching to the Converted

by Johnny Chess

From the LP
Things to do on a Wet

Tuesday Night
(1987)

'Hurry up, Roz, I'm dying in here.'

'Relax, Benny, I've almost got it.'

There was an unbearable feeling of constriction around her chest and then Roz finally managed to get the stays undone and the corset released its death grip.

'Better?' asked Roz.

Bernice took a deep, luxurious breath. 'How did I let him talk me into that?'

'Deep-seated subconscious masochism?'

'You can talk,' said Bernice, 'you're the one wearing the ventilated blankets.'

'Ah, but that's a cultural thing.'

'Help me with the gloves, I can't get them off.'

Roz gripped the forefinger and thumb, making it easy for Bernice to extricate her right arm.

Roz dropped the glove which sinewaved halfway to the floor before House scooped it up and hung it next to the (bouffant) wig. 'I wish it wouldn't do that,' said Roz. 'It gives me the creeps.'

'Convenient though,' said Bernice, extending her left arm.

'I like my stuff where I can find it,' said Roz and pulled the glove off.

'On the floor,' said Bernice.

'Speak for yourself.'

It was true; Roz's room in the TARDIS displayed a compulsive neatness that reminded Bernice uneasily of Ace's barrack-room mentality. The same air of regimentation, of temporary occupation. It was Bernice that lived ankle-deep in the detritus of past adventures. She suspected that she needed the mess as a kind of marker, as if she were saying:
this is my space; see, I'm
spread all over it
. If she ever decided to leave the TARDIS she'd need a skip not a suitcase.

Bernice started struggling with her petticoats.

'Jeez,' said Roz, 'stay still.' She crouched down behind Bernice and pulled at the hooks that held the silk together. 'I've seen combat suits that were easier to get out of.'

'I've
been
in combat suits that were easier to wear,' said Bernice. 'You know, that's what saRa!qava thought this dress was.'

'Why didn't you get House to put in some zippers?' asked Roz.

'Authenticity,' said Bernice, sucking in her stomach. 'Remember, we were going to go as the real thing.' There were six layers of petticoats. 'I feel like a birthday present.'

'I'm almost down to your legs now,' said Roz. 'Hey, so much for authenticity.' She'd seen the Reeboks Bernice was wearing on her feet.

'Well, no one was going to see them.'