Doctor Who - New Adventures - 52 - Christmas on a Rational Planet by Lawrence Miles

Author:Lawrence Miles
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective, Fiction
ISBN: 9780426204763
Publisher: London Bridge
Published: 1996-08-14T07:00:00+00:00

AEONS BEFORE MAN EVEN CHARTERED HIS OWN

DOMAIN? TO US, ALL OF SPACE – ALL OF TIME – IS

NOTHING MORE THAN A CLOCKWORK, AND WE ARE

THE ONES THAT HOLD THE WATCH-HANDLE.

REMEMBER WHAT WE TAUGHT YOU, BOY.

Yes. Catcher remembered tearing through the halls of the family home, being pinned to the floor by his parents, being carried away on the back of a cart. His family had paid the surgeons to lock him in a little grey room, where they’d watched him and fed him and scrubbed him and stuck instruments into him. It had been meant as a punishment, he’d been sure, but it had felt more like a BE VERY CAREFUL

AS ‘REVELATION’ IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC TERM more like something he couldn’t really name.

Because the little grey room had been perfect in every way.

Eight corners, four walls, straight lines, hardly any furnishings. The room only changed its nature when the sun rose or fell, but even the shadows had a mechanical precision to them. Catcher remembered staring at a blank grey ceiling, hour after hour and day after day. Watching the shadows stretch and shrink in the corner above the bed, until the corner had finally unfolded and the Watchmakers had revealed themselves to him in full for the first time.

Their messenger was there, in the corner of the room and in the angles of his head. The Majestic Clockwork Machine-age Hermes. The clockwork began to turn, and he knew his Reason, and his Reason was to remake the world IN OUR

IMAGE.

Months later, the surgeons had tried to take him out of the room and carry him back to the family home. He remembered trying to dig his nails into the floor of the grey room. Trying to dig his way into the structure. AND? And to stay there.

Matheson Catcher reached the far end of Hazelrow Avenue and found himself staring up at his house. A less rational mind, he told himself, would have seen no pattern or logic in the shape of the building. But he could see it. He could see the workings of the machine. OH YES.

‘You’re not going anywhere, vermin!’

Adjudicator Volsted Kornbluth Cwej – or, as young Christopher called him, Dad – was a giant of a man, and when Christopher looked up at him, he seemed to stretch all the way to the Luna Sierra. His jaw was firm, his teeth clenched, a look of absolute determination etched across his proud and chiselled face.

‘He’s gotta be a cop! Waste ‘im!’

On the far side of the Overcity Four Shoptronic Mezzanine, two figures scurried away from the bank, weapons glinting in the afternoon sunlight. The bank was easily recognizable from the large sign marked ‘BANK’ that hung above it. The bank robbers were easily recognizable from their pug-ugly faces, their (illegal) snub-nosed plasmode blasters, and their working-class accents.

Young Christopher gasped as the plasmode shots rang out across the mezzanine, but they spittanged harmlessly off the plastic body-armour that Dad wore even when taking his family out shopping.

‘But,

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