Part 23 (1/2)

After a while, we were confident enough that we could introduce a phasing in the chant, with Holmes coming in a beat after Bernice and myself, and the Doctor's fine baritone soaring high above on the descant. The nature of the chant altered in subtle ways: sometimes Holmes's voice was a powerful engine behind us, pus.h.i.+ng us on, and sometimes it seemed to be dragging us backwards. Our voices seemed to be echoing in a deeper and larger s.p.a.ce than the cavern.

And then, after what seemed like an eternity but must have been only half an hour, I thought I could detect other voices singing along with us: soft, sibilant voices p.r.o.nouncing words in a subtly different way. A hallucination?

Perhaps, but we took our cue from them and tried to shape our palates to form the same sounds as they did. It was not easy. I suspect now, so many years later, that if they were real then they were not human in form. We must have produced a close enough approximation, however, for it was shortly after that when Bernice plucked at my sleeve and indicated that our shadows were being cast in front of us from a bright source of light behind.

Still singing, I turned to look.

Through the gates of delirium I saw an alien world blazing in all its glory. A wide plain spread before us, curling up in the distance to form tall mountains of k.n.o.bbly purple rock. The sky was white and glowing, and seemed to cut the mountains off as if it were solid. A citrus-scented breeze ruffled my hair.

Still chanting, we walked into another world.

Interlude GGJ235/57/3/82-PK3.

V-ON, BRD-ABLE, WPU = 1.244.

VERBAL INPUT,.

COMPRESS AND SAVE.

MILITARY LOG FILE EPSILON.

CODE GREEN FIVE.

ENABLE.

They know I'm watching them now. I made too much noise getting down from that window the other day, and attracted a bit of unwelcome attention.

It ended up in a chase through the alleys. Since they can fly and I can't, I reckon it was a bit one-sided, so I brought one of them down with a sort of home-made bolas and another two with smart missiles.

I keep having to move my base camp. They're very good at searches: that's what flying does for you, it gives you a different perspective on where people might hide. For a while I hid out in nooks and crannies that couldn't be seen from the air, but they caught on and started using packs of those three-legged rat things with the red eyes. I had to look for somewhere else.

Base camp's only a rucksack anyway, so moving isn't too much ha.s.sle.

Time to get back to the plain, l guess Hope the Professor makes it through okay. If not, I guess it's chocolate flavour animal for tea forever.

DISABLE.

2757/3/FF43 PIP.

Chapter 13.

In which our intrepid heroes arrive in the New World and Watson takes up scouting. scouting.

Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield I suspect that midnight has pa.s.sed by, back in India, so distinguish this entry with a new date. I've been awake for almost forty-eight hours and I feel ready to drop. In fact, I keep falling asleep in the middle of writing this diary entry. Four times I've tried to start it now, but each time I get a few words in and suddenly my pen will start sliding down the page. When I snap back to wakefulness a few moments later, I don't know where I am and I've only got a sketchy idea of who. So: if you've just woken up, Bernice Summerfield, and you're reading this for some clue as to what's happened, the Doctor's made some coffee and I think I can cover the past few hours before the big black bag goes over my head again.

First question: where am I? Well, it's an alien planet. Not just any alien planet, either. This one's stranger than most. Stranger than Moloch, the hollow moon of Lucifer that's linked by a bridge to its sister Belial. Stranger than Eusapia and Zeta Minor, half in this universe and half in another.

Stranger than Tersurus, with its clone banks and its singing stones.

Stranger even than Magla, whose crust is a sh.e.l.l covering a vast, dreaming, creature. No, Ry'leh is the strangest planet I've ever seen. I'm not a geologist, but I suspect that it's an old world. At some point in its past the local star must have gone nova, blasting much of its matter away into s.p.a.ce to leave a colder, smaller core. Soon after that Ry'leh's atmosphere must have frozen, leaving it looking like a great cue-ball hanging in s.p.a.ce.

The frozen jacket doesn't fit tightly though: the heat from the planet's core has melted the interior layers of ice back into an atmosphere, leaving valleys, fissures, channels and plains with an oppressively solid sky hanging above them, supported upon the pillars of the mountains. And that's where you are, girl: sandwiched between rock and a hard place.

The wind whistles through the canyons like a demon. It plucks at your clothes and whips your hair into your eyes. It s.n.a.t.c.hes things from your hands and whirls them gleefully away from you. It hates you.

The plants hate you too. Only the strongest and most stubborn life-forms survived the sun going nova. Their razor-sharp bruise-coloured vanes catch at your clothing as you clamber past them, and make rents for the wind to get in and sap the warmth from your bones. Some of them hiss and thrust their roots between your feet as you pa.s.s. High above, up where the sky is hard and cold, small black specks wheel. Raksha.s.si? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

You get the picture? Ry'leh is not a nice place to be.

As we emerged from the gateway the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed the words from our mouths, and it collapsed behind us. When we turned, India had vanished.

We were just a step away from Earth in one direction, a million light-years in another.

We were standing at the foot of a mountain range. The dusky purple ground rose gently for a few miles, then jabbed sharply upwards into a set of harsh peaks, all of them truncated by the ice sky. The sun was a lighter spot through the ice, too weak to cast any shadows. Turning, I could see that we were surrounded by the mountains. Valleys led away in three directions. It was as if we had been dumped in the middle of a giant's maze.

Gravity seemed to be about Earth normal. I find it difficult to tell - I've been on so many worlds that I forget what my body was designed for sometimes - but neither Watson nor Holmes were falling down or falling up. The Doctor walked around as if he owned the place. Which he might well have done, of course.

Holmes gazed around in some shock. I think that the reality of an alien planet was turning out to be completely different to the theory. He bent down and investigated the ground, then plucked a small weed-like flower from a crack. It bit him, and he dropped it with a cry. Watson tended to the wound. It wasn't serious, but I think he might have been worried about poison. There's a theory I once heard suggesting that there is no logical basis for alien poisons to work on humans, and vice versa, because the two ecologies would have evolved different chemical bases for life.

Personally, I don't believe it. Summerfield's First Law of Planetary Evolution states that anything not specifically designed to hurt you will still manage to find a way. Or, to put it another way, the b.u.g.g.e.rance factor of the universe tends towards a maximum.

Watson was turning gradually around, a bit like a weather vane influenced by the wind. Eventually he came to a halt facing down one of the valleys towards a misty horizon half-glimpsed through the distant mountains.

'That way,' he said. 'Maupertuis's troops went that way.'

'How can you tell?' the Doctor asked.

'Not sure. It's a matter of instinct, more than anything. I spent some time talking to an old Afghan tracker during the war, you see. He was a prisoner of ours, but he'd been injured and I had to treat him. Picked up some tips on hunting.' He smiled boyishly. 'I rather fancy his skills at treating wounds improved as well.'

'Fascinating though this is,' I interjected, 'where do we go from here?'

'We try and get in front of Maupertuis's troops,' Watson said, 'and alert the appropriate native authorities to the fact that they are being invaded. We then request their help in taking Maupertuis into custody.'

'Of course,' I said. 'Simple, isn't it?'

Watson shrugged.

'Well, as a broad plan I think it has its strong points. Obviously there are some details which remain to be ironed out...'

'Such as: how do we persuade a peaceful, philosophical race like K'tcar'ch's to join together to fight Maupertuis's marauders?'

'We shall have to play it by ear,' he said stiffly.

'But back in the Nizam's cavern you said that you had a tin ear.'

He gave me an exaggeratedly withering glance that had an underlying vein of humour in it. Ever since I surprised him naked in the bath, he seemed to believe that he and I were sharing something special. I hated to disillusion him.