Interesting Times
Egestatem Potestatem Dissolvit ut glaciem [Fate] dissolves poverty and power like ice.
(Carmina Burana, thirteenth century) Near Akhetaten 1366 BCE After a while she realized that she was lying on something warm. Some half-memory rose in her, and she shuddered upwards, making sure it was not a corpse, or worse, the half-living chutney of human flesh that high-tech weapons spread over the ground.
But it was only sand. She breathed out, hard, hitting the desert warmth with the length of her body. She was trembling all over, the flesh of her arms and legs frozen through and through, drenched in cold. Her fluttering fingers made painful movements in the sand.
She rolled over, gasping night air, clean and dusty, almost as cold as she was. She pressed her back into the sand, willing her frozen skin to suck out the stored heat of the sun.
It was black, jet black, but the sky was an explosion of stars. They spun and jittered as her eyes tried to focus on individual suns, tracing the thick line of the galaxy's hub, a blast of smoky light across the sky.
Relax. Relax and wait for the disorientation to wear off, for her brain to thaw the way her body was thawing.
After some time she realized that the sky was changing colour. She rolled her head loosely, in poorly controlled arcs. There was nothing to either side of her, no shadows, nothing but sand.
When the sun came up, she was going to die.
She tried to push herself up onto her knees, but only succeeded in rolling onto her side. She panted, feeling the chill deep in her belly, the stabbing of cramping muscle. Kitten, she thought, helpless as a small kitten.
She'd been in dozens of deserts, had stayed alive in a desert with blue sand and a green sun, drinking ground water and eating lizards and beetles cooked 27 by the noon. But she'd had a couple of advantages then. Like being able to move. And think.
Maybe she'd be lucky. The sun might bring her body temperature up to normal before it could bake her. She might be able to crawl somewhere, find water, find people. If there was water. If there were people. She might be anywhere, from the deepest chasms of the mind to the furthest alien world.
A dozen suns might come up over the horizon and roast her like the Sunday lamb, the fat sizzling under her skin.
She arched her back against the sand, her limbs spasming, not even knowing she was shouting into the dawn.
'Why doesn't anyone come to rescue me?'
The first time they went to the cafe, the air was humid and cloyingly hot, but a breeze had come in through the windows, cooling the room with the scent of garbage, human sweat, rain on asphalt.
'Take careful notice of the details,' the Doctor had said. The walls were white plaster, decorated with antique dirty postcards in tiny frames. The place was full of students, eating cheap pasta and arguing semiotics.
The Time Lord charted a path through the thin crowd to a table in a corner, stepping around the pot-plants in their brass holders. Ace eyed them as she passed. There was something alien about the leaves, about the way the stems seemed to twist, just perceptibly, to follow her.
Their table was set up with three chairs, linen napkins, drinks already poured (mineral water, tequila, vodka and Coke). Ace sat down and immediately drained her glass; she hadn't seen anything interesting yet. Benny traced the graffiti on the tabletop with the tip of her finger, initials scratched into the unfinished wood. Whose?
'Where are we?' asked Ace.
'Glebe,' said the Doctor, watching the bubbles rise in his mineral water.
'Sydney, Earth, 1995.'
'Nice place.' said Benny. 'It doesn't look like anything special.'
The Doctor shrugged. 'The eggplant parmigiana,' he said, 'is outstanding.'
'Yeah, but . . . '
The Doctor put a finger to his lips.
The second time they visited the cafe, the same table had been set up for them, the same three drinks. Condensation ran down the outsides of the glasses.
Only this time, they were in Bellatrix City, and it was the Twenty-fifth Century.
28.'Home,' said Benny, smiling. She spread salt along the joint of her thumb and licked, sipped, sucked.
'Alas,' said the Doctor, 'There's a stranger in the house.'
Ace scanned the room slowly. The crowd was not much different more diverse, and the fashions were different, of course. There were aliens mixed in with the humans, and the humans themselves came in thirty-one flavours. But they were still eating cheap pasta, and still arguing post-post-modern auteur auteur theory. The same plastered walls, the same framed postcards. theory. The same plastered walls, the same framed postcards.
'Yes?'
'Ships have been disappearing from one of the less-used interstellar traffic lanes. Passenger ships.'
'Any black holes lying around where they shouldn't be?' asked Ace.
The Doctor shook his head. 'In one case out of three, the ships are found some time after their disappearance minus the passengers and crew.'
'Ransom?'
'Slavers?'
'No demands. Slavery isn't economically viable any more, not really. Robots are cheaper than people.'
'Is the cafe a re-creation, then?' Ace wanted to know. 'Or just a very well-preserved slice of Earth?'
The smile that normally flickered below Benny's surface was extinguished.
She was thinking about her father. 'How do we stop it?'
'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'Well.' He slapped down a handful of change on the table, a random mixture of denominations and centuries. 'Come on.'
The sixth time they visited the cafe, it was on Argolis. The wood-framed windows had been replaced by hard plastic sheets, giving a good view of the burning sky. Now the clientele were tourists, every conceivable body shape crammed around tables and into corners. But the tables were the same, down to the initials carved into the wood.
'I've got a simple idea,' said the Doctor. 'We allow ourselves to be taken along for the ride.'
'Get ourselves arrested,' said Ace.
'And let the villains tie us up and tell us their plans,' said Benny, six tequilas deep and still sober as a judge. 'Someone would have to stay behind. Stay free, in case of emergency.' She laughed. 'I'll come and rescue you when you've messed it all up.'
In Ace's memory, the Doctor had developed a livid scar under his left eye, a great purple blotch with a red line running crossways through it where someone had hit him. She felt a hot lump of badness in her stomach as he watched her drink, as though she were responsible for the damage.
29.'But we don't know who's doing the capturing,' she said. He shook his head again. 'Doesn't matter,' said Ace, as the memory echoed away into nothing, ''cos we're experts at escaping.'
They'd paid their money, hadn't they? Now they had to take their chances.
That, as the saying went, was the way the cookie crumbled.
She was sitting up now, leaning forward, trying to support the upper part of her body against her knees. She was wearing some sort of overalls, made of rough synthetic cloth, a lifeless beige that blended into the dawn light. Who had stripped off her combat suit, taken away her tools and weapons? What else had they done to her when she was naked and helpless? Why had they frozen her?
She leaned her head against her knees, taking deep breaths. Her body was full of pins and needles. Did she only feel like she was shaking?
The sun was a searing thumbnail of yellow pushed up above the horizon, lighting the emptiness: honey-yellow cliffs, scattered rocks like a Martian landscape, shadows sharp-edged and glowing black. She didn't even have her shades. Would the force shield generator clamped to her wrist provide any protection against the sun? She'd save the batteries, wait until the heat became intolerable.
She needed to get up and start walking, but she could barely stay upright.
She needed to sleep for a hundred years, but if she lost the day she'd never wake up. And even if she did get up, where would she walk to, her bare feet slipping in the burning sand?
Don't care. Her heart was still frozen, her stomach was a lump of ice. The rough defrosting should really have finished her off anyway. By now the three of them must have used up most of the spare luck in the universe. But after everything they'd been through, dying here would be slightly embarrassing. Her heart was still frozen, her stomach was a lump of ice. The rough defrosting should really have finished her off anyway. By now the three of them must have used up most of the spare luck in the universe. But after everything they'd been through, dying here would be slightly embarrassing.
She hoped the Doctor and Benny had landed somewhere soft.
The Doctor had had a sort of map with him. It was a flat plate of some white substance, ceramic or plastic, perfectly smooth. He'd passed his hands over it, and at the gesture a hologram had leapt out and up into three dimensions. A chart of their portion of the galaxy.
Benny's remembered hair had grown out, become blonde, dark roots peek-ing through the straw-coloured strands. She stared through the hologram cube, sucking on a slice of lime.
'How many dimensions?' Ace asked.
'Just four,' said the Doctor, his eyes sharp and bright over the dark scar on his face. 'It charts the cafe's appearance through the continuum. A single space-time event, repeated over and over at different points and epochs.'
30.'Why?' said Benny.
'There are a handful of occurrences which could cause such an effect. All of them have potential ramifications for the entire cosmos. Look.' He made another magician's pass over the hologram, and a line jumped from point to point inside the cube, electric blue.
Ace squinted at the diagram, following it. Each four-dimensional point represented an occurrence of the cafe. To people living in three dimensions, moving through time in a linear fashion, the cafe's repetition would be invisible.
But not to time-travellers 'The disappearances don't form a pattern unless you're looking at them in four dimensions,' said the Doctor, echoing her thoughts. 'Many in the one location, but spread out at great intervals of time. Or many disappearances at once, but scattered through the galaxy.'
'Something punched through space and time,' she said.
'It burrowed through it.'
'Leaving a trail of cafes behind it,' said Bernice.
'Like breadcrumbs in the forest,' said Ace. She traced the line with her finger.
'Yes,' said the Doctor, and there was a touch of indignation in his voice. It was like coming back to the car-park to discover someone had left a dent in your fender. How dare someone muck about with his universe? 'Now,' he said, 'here's a plot of the spaceship disappearances.'
The electric blue line vanished, and was replaced by a livid green line. Not the same track as the cafe, but dead straight through four dimensions. Deliberate. Artificial.
Ace met the Doctor's eyes over the cube. There was a brilliant spot of blood running down out of his nose, tracing its own straight line across his skin. He didn't seem to notice. 'There's a fracture in the universe,' said Ace.
'Someone's using that, that fracture, like a secret passageway,' said Benny, 'stealing people.'
'Well!' said Ace, pushing her drink away. 'Let's go get stolen.'
She had never smelt water before. Water had no smell or taste. Drinking the pure stuff, the recycled water given to soldiers in space, was like drinking metal polish; on the better ships ions were added to convince your tastebuds there was no flavour.
But she smelt water now, nearby, making her stomach rumble and cramp.
In the end, unable to stand, she rolled. Sand got in her hair and inside the beige coveralls as she rolled slowly over the stony ground, keeping her elbows close to her body. It felt ridiculous, but it was movement.
31.She came to the edge of a drop. The world continued to spin even when she had stopped, her guts spasming. She bit her teeth together and tried to see down the hill.
Down the slope was a patch of even ground. It was rocky, white and red, tiny evil-looking plants elbowing their way through cracks in the dry soil.
There was a pool of water in the middle, creamy mud built up around the edges. She let herself half-slide, half-roll down the hill until she fell with a splat into the mud.
There was more mud than water. She didn't care. She let her coveralls get soaked in the ooze around the pool while she sucked at it, splashed filthy water onto her face and hair, mud smearing her fingers.
When she looked up, there was a lioness watching her from across the pool.
'Oh shit,' said Ace.
Her head whirled with useless advice. Run away. Don't move. Scream for help. They can smell fear. Instead she found herself staring at the animal across the water, taking in the smooth rolling of muscle under her tawny skin, the elegant shape of her head, those huge eyes regarding the muddy human being across the small diameter of the pool.
Ace could smell the lioness's breath, the hot musk of her skin. She tried to get up, fell over, splattering a wave of water and mud on to the animal's face.
Huge eyes were raised to regard her, lazily, as she struggled like an overturned cockroach. The lioness was in no hurry.
Get up and run away, get moving, get up, get up!
Ace's hands closed around a stone, but her fingers were shaking with exhaustion and she couldn't hold onto it. Quick death, then, with the lioness'
great paws slapping her into the sand and those massive jaws breaking her neck.
Then a tremendous cry split the valley, and the next thing she knew the predator was under attack.
The animal's roar went right through Ace's head. The bird was huge, the size of a human child some kind of eagle or hawk, diving repeatedly at the lioness. The beast's paws kicked great puffs of dust into the air as she dodged and wheeled, trying to get at the bird. Ace just watched, panting.
She ought to be afraid. But she couldn't feel anything. It was as though she were still frozen, frozen to the core.
When the chariot appeared, she didn't even feel surprised.
It skidded to a halt in the dust, barely twenty feet from the water hole.
It was just large enough for the man standing in it, who was struggling to restrain the pair of horses which stamped and tossed, panicked by the scent of the lioness. Ace shouted for help, wordlessly, knowing he wouldn't understand anything she tried to say.
32.He was carrying a bow. In a fluid movement, he plucked an arrow out of his quiver and shot the lioness dead.
The big cat screamed and fell over in the dirt, her weight making a tremendous sound. The harrier matched her raw cry and perched on the corpse, bounced up and down by its final convulsions.
Ace stared. The arrow had pushed in behind the lioness' ear, penetrating her brain. It was one of the neatest bits of shooting she'd seen in her life.
Rescued.