Doctor Who: The Also People (29 page)

Colonies of amphibian mammals lived in the half floors at the waterline. Marsh trees clung to the sides of the buildings, elephantine roots snaking down into the depths. The hydrofoil pushed a path through clumps of water lilies the size of satellite dishes and threaded its way through ornate bridges slung between the tottering houses.

It reminded Bernice of Venice; it even had the smell.

The hydrofoil pulled up against a wharf constructed from floating blocks of concrete. A cast-iron staircase led up to the first liveable floor of a sixteen-storey block that had a noticeable tilt to the left. The staircase was articulated – Bernice presumed to match the ebb and flow of the tide – its lower third slippery with algae and rust.

'Did I mention that God won't allow forcefield furniture here,' said saRa!qava as they laboured up the stairs. 'Everything has to be mechanical.'

'How does it stop people bringing stuff in?' asked Bernice.

'An inhibition field,' said saRa!qava. 'Anything non-sentient with a field component coming within a thousand kilometres just falls to bits.'

'Awkward,' said Bernice.

'Personally, I think God just does it to annoy.'

'Why come here then?'

'Because,' said saRa!qava, 'this is the
only
place to come if you want to do some serious shopping.'

Bernice wondered how you could go shopping in a culture without money. I mean, she thought, those once in a lifetime special reductions are going to be a bit meaningless when everything's free to start with.

They stepped around a six-centimetre-thick blast door that appeared to have been left open and rusted solid and into the building.

The interior looked like a shopping centre that had fallen into disrepair and had been subsequently converted into a flea market. There were spaces that looked like open shop fronts with merchandise hung from lintels and stacked in piles at the sides. Stalls made of driftwood or cut sections of the aquatic trees lined the spaces in between, a variety of people, organic and machine standing or sitting behind them. Bernice was immediately drawn to a shop selling leather goods, jackets and long duster-style coats hanging in sweet-smelling ranks in its dim interior. She changed her mind: it was a shopping centre that had fallen on hard times, been converted into a flea market which had then become
incredibly
fashionable.

'Everything is personally designed,' said saRa!qava. 'You can't order any of this stuff from central stores.'

'How does this work?' asked Bernice. 'Barter, IOUs, what?'

SaRa!qava laughed. 'Nothing like that. You just ask the stallholder for what you want.'

Bernice glanced at the stallholder, an incredibly tall man with sallow skin who was thin to the point of emaciation. He gestured politely, inviting her into his shop. She reached out to touch, a cream-coloured knee-length duster with a wide collar. 'What's to stop someone just rolling up and taking everything away.'

'Oh, that couldn't happen,' said saRa!qava. 'The stallholder has to agree to give it to you.'

She stroked the smooth material of the duster. If it turned out to be waterproof it would be perfect for those unexpected materializations. 'What's this made of?' she asked the stallholder.

'It's too soft to be suede.'

'Skin,' he said.

Bernice snatched her hand away and stared at the man. He grinned back revealing two rows of yellowed needle-sharp teeth.

'Grown in culture of course,' said the man. 'If you like I can take a sample from you now and force-grow a jacket for you while you wait.'

'Ah, no thanks,' said Bernice backing out of the shop. 'I think I'll give it a miss all the same. I was looking for something in brown anyway. Oh, look, there's a woman selling fertility idols, just what I was looking for.' She dragged an amused saRa!qava round the corner and out of sight of the stallholder. 'Yuk,' she said.

'They're very practical,' said saRa!qava.

'What are?'

'Skin jackets. Sort of comforting. I had one made from my mother.'

'I don't want to hear about it,' said Bernice. 'If they don't make money from these stalls, why do they do it?'

'Prestige mostly,' said saRa!qava. 'It's nice to make or design something that somebody else likes enough to take home with them.'

'Like you and your bread?'

'I suppose so.'

They stopped by a stall selling figurines whittled out of hardwood and then varnished. A hand-painted sign hung above the stall. Bernice asked saRa!qava what it said. 'People who are interesting to look at,' she translated. As far as Bernice could tell the sign was only eight characters long. It must be a very economical language, perhaps even ideographic. That could have been why the TARDIS couldn't translate the written form; she remembered it had had trouble with Osiran hieroglyphs. She made a mental note to ask the Doctor about it.

She picked up one of the figurines, admiring the varnished grain, and realized with a shock that it was carved in a likeness of Roz. It was beautifully done, capturing everything from her perpetually disgruntled expression to the stiffness of her backbone. Bernice quickly scanned the crowded table and sure enough saw a matching figurine of Chris.

The woman who ran the stall was almost bouncing up and down with excitement. 'Oh wow,'

she said, 'you're one of the Time Lord's barbarians, aren't you? Do you think it's a good likeness?'

Bernice told her that the likeness was uncanny and the woman seemed almost to explode with pleasure. 'Could you take her one?' She was gushing like a teenybopper at a pop concert. 'She's really popular round here. CiMot's got her face on his Tshirts and he can't fabricate them fast enough. Please take her one – do you think she'll like it?'

Bernice lied and said that Roz would be delighted to find she's been immortalized in driftwood.

The woman asked if she could take a hologram of Bernice as well which she found flattering despite herself. Celebrity at last, she thought. 'Be sure to say that it's
Professor
Summerfield,' she said.

'Professor,' said the woman. 'What a nice name.' She insisted that Bernice take a Chris Cwej as well and even threw in a fabric carrier bag for her to take the figurines away in.

They spotted their first Roz Forrester T-shirt a few minutes later. It showed her face-on and hitting someone, her fist foreshortened and huge. Bernice didn't need SaRa!qava to translate the legend; it was obviously the local equivalent of EAT MY DAY or MAKE MY SHORTS. Bernice decided there and then to let Chris be the one who told Roz about her new-found status as a cult icon.

It took them two hours to work their way up to the restaurant on the roof of the building. They sat down with stuffed carrier bags clustered around their legs but not as stuffed as they might have been.

She was surprised how much she enjoyed moneyless shopping. Bernice had always assumed that actually having the money, the sense of power that came with being able to afford things, was an integral part of the shopping 'experience'. When she was young and living in the woods behind the academy she had vivid fantasies of wading into the local shopping centre, waving her credit card like a magic wand. Later, when she was bumming around humanspace, dodging the draft and eking out a living from dig to dig as an itinerant archaeologist, it had become a matter of survival. Scraping together enough to pay for a layover bed or the next starship out, lack of money had become a constant anxiety, an erosion of her self-worth. There was nothing like real poverty to teach you the true meaning of the word 'cash'.

If you'd asked the younger Bernice what her likely response to a free bazaar would be the likely answer would have been: move in with a standard freighter cargo module and have the stuff away before the buggers changed their minds.

Years of travelling light with the Doctor, and the Doctor's capacious pockets, must have freed her from that particular anxiety because she found herself curiously indifferent to the concept of possessions.

Instead she took her cue from saRa!qava and picked presents for other people. The exception was a sheath dress, grown from the same symbiote material as the one Dep had worn at the party, that saRa!qava talked her into. The stallholder assured her that the symbiote keyed itself to the personality of the person wearing it and wouldn't be nearly so 'active' as Dep's. All the same, Bernice wasn't at all sure she'd wear a dress that might, on a whim, head south at an embarrassing social moment. It
was
pretty though.

The food at the restaurant was hand-made as well, a thick soup in earthenware bowls served with freshly baked rolls. SaRa!qava broke one open and sniffed it with a professional air. 'Not too awful,' she said.

'Perfectionist,' said Bernice. They had a table by the parapet with a good view over the leaning towers of the city. Hydrofoils and steam skiffs chugged slowly along the drowned streets, disturbing the amphibians and crocodiles of white crane-like waterbirds. Bernice decided that if she had to stay in the sphere, God forbid, this would be where she would live.

'I have a confession to make,' said saRa!qava.

'Gosh,' said Bernice, 'I wish I did.' SaRa!qava looked pensive and Bernice realized she was serious. 'Sorry,' she said.

'I think I may be one of the Doctor's suspects,' said saRa!qava. 'For the murder.'

'What makes you say that?'

'I had a really good motive for wanting vi!Cari dead.'

'Why tell me?' asked Bernice. 'I don't think you did it.'

'The Doctor's bound to find out sooner or later,' said saRa!qava. 'I thought I'd better tell you first. Vi!Cari knew about something I did when I was young. I don't know how, but it did and I was scared that it would tell someone else.'

Bernice was shocked to see that saRa!qava was crying. Automatically, she reached out and squeezed her friend's hand. 'Why would that be a motive?'

'You don't understand, how could you? If people found out what I did, no one would talk to me for ever.'

'I understand,' said Bernice. 'Social isolation is a common enough sanction amongst –' Bernice hesitated; she was about to say primitive cultures. 'Many, many cultures. Look, if this is too painful we can talk about something else.'
Bernice, you coward!

SaRa!qava squeezed her hand back. 'No,' she said, 'it's better that you know. There was this man –'

'Isn't there always,' said Bernice. SaRa!qava smiled wanly.

'Who I was in love with,' said saRa!qava. 'But he wasn't in love with me, at least not enough to start a family. So one night I lured him up to the Windmills and we had sex.'

'You're right, I don't understand,' said Bernice. 'What's so criminal about that?'

'I had sex with him that night, deliberately, just so I could conceive,' said saRa!qava. 'I stole Dep from him and he doesn't know.'

Dep watched Chris as he eased the reciprocating arm out of the central drive assembly. Grease was smeared on his cheeks and forehead where he'd wiped the sweat away. He looked like one of the players in the combat games organized by the Barbarian Emulation Interest Group.

Dep had woken up that morning with a sudden fear in her heart that even the induced conception euphoria couldn't cover. She was scared that Chris was going to leave soon, before the ornithopter was finished. Restless, she left him sleeping and began to work on the flying machine, electrosoldering the pipe assembly that would carry superheated steam from the boiler to the wing pistons.

She had finished the assembly and was painting on the insulation when Chris woke up and asked if he could help. She showed him where the central drive needed to be stripped down and restructured.

Chris flourished the reciprocating arm in triumph and handed it to Dep. She threw it at the lathe and told the machine what changes she wanted. 'We can't do anything until the insulation dries.'

'I heard your mum used to design hyperspace systems,' said Chris while they waited. Dep was trying to wipe the worst of the grease off his face.

'She used to,' said Dep.

'I was thinking of asking for her help. We need to know who was capable of creating the kill harmonics in the lightning burst.'

'Apart from Mother?' asked Dep.

Chris's face fell. 'Gosh,' he said, 'I'm sorry. I wasn't implying that –'

Dep leaned forward and affectionately brushed noses with him. 'I was teasing,' she said.

'Oh,' said Chris. 'You've got grease on your face.'

'Never mind that,' said Dep. 'We've got to get this thing finished before . . . before my mother tries to talk me out of it again.' She finished lamely.

Chris obediently got back under the engine.

Life, thought Dep, was much simpler before I met you.

FeLixi checked the time on his ring terminal and wondered if Roz was coming. He let his eyes wander over the featureless dove-grey walls of the station. There were no decorations or seating as one didn't expect to wait down here: a capsule was always waiting when you stepped out of the lift. It was this very utilitarianism that had led feLixi to choose it as a meeting place, neutral territory. Behind him the waiting travel capsule pinged every minute or so, as if to emphasize its own impatience. Occasionally he felt a slight vibration through the soles of his feet as other capsules picked up passengers and carried them away. He resisted the urge to check the contents of the hamper again.

He was about to call up some entertainment on his ring terminal when the lift doors opened and Roz stepped out. She was wearing a loose white sleeveless top and matching stretch shorts that set off the dark skin of her bare arms and legs, and button-down pumps on her feet. A couple of the bracelets that had so intrigued him at the party jangled on her wrists and ankles. He grinned as he waved her over; she had so obviously made an effort to dress casually but it still managed to look like a uniform – it was the way she walked, he decided.

They sat down opposite each other in the travel capsule. 'I'm sorry I'm late,' she said. 'I was just checking out some data and lost track of the time.'

FeLixi watched as she crossed her legs, noticing the fine line of her calves, the muffled curve of her breasts as they shifted beneath her top.