Now between the Rust-red city of Ragnathlon
and the Iron-black blocky towers of Banza-Xboth, there remained a pitiful
creeping trade despite the sharpness of the obsidian plain, and the upwelling
of lava from the lower circles. Ragnathlon exported the idolatrous to Banza-Xboth,
where was practised a greater range of ironic ecclesiastical punishments, and
in return swindlers, setters of unfair taxes and the drafters of small print
user-contracts were transhipped to the fire-filled Moloch-pits of Ragnathlon. Despite this doubtless rewarding trade,
these were third-rate citadels at best, far removed from the nighted towers of
Dis, and less impressive in their way than the semi-professional, partly
privatised, torturous Dukeholds of the middle-lowerarchy. This was the industrial hinterland: where
dark satanic mills went to die. At the
time of my last visit: Ragnathlon was ruled by an under-fiend of the
Abominations and Banza-Xboth was the tyrannised domain of a Lamia of the
species Sculptorex Malgrifilant – neither of whom, it may be said, afforded me
more than a martyrs’ welcome.
Virgil’s
Visitors Guide To Dante’s World p34,711 Asbestos
Press: Dis,
Year of Eternal Damnation: 75,304.
‘You cannae be
telling me people come here for pleasure Doctor. I mean if yon’s no
Hell, it’s surely
Satan’s...’ Jamie hesitated, he’d not so
long ago (subjectively speaking) suffered through an adventure with the Doctor
in which he’d been subjected to everything the airport of Gatwick had had to
offer in the way of comfort, and it had afforded him a view of modern torments
... ‘baggage checking area.’
He folded his arms in Scottish dissenting
disapproval of the whole Hieronymous Bosch landscape (Zoe’s description of it) that
unfolded from before their eyes, from where the TARDIS stood butted against a supposedly
red hot iron wall that seemed to be doing no harm to the apparent wood and blue
paint of its deceptive exterior, even though the air around it rippled and
distorted with every appearance of heat.
Zoe though from a period far after
Jamie’s origins in the Jacobite Rebellion of Ancient Scotland (as she thought
of it) was no more inclined that he was to regard the scene before them, with
pleasure. It was all so unnecessary
surely; hadn’t the scientific education of her own time done away with all this
medieval nonsense? To find it replicated
in a giant space going cone in the 73rd Century, for the purposes of
tourism, was as mindboggling as, as, well she was sure she’d think of something
it was as mindboggling as in a moment.
‘You have to remember Zoe,’ the
Doctor had said gravely, ‘that people are complicated. They like to be scared, and they like to
affirm their beliefs on a large scale. And
when there’s a lot of people, it only needs a small number to really believe
something, to make it worth someone else’s while to build it. This whole, ah, Dante’s World, is no more
than a Haunted House ride in a rather rundown amusement park, compared to the
great megalostructures and special constructs of this century. No one here is
actually suffering. That is,’ His natural honest compelled him to qualify his
statement, ‘none of the visitors, are – unless they choose to.’
‘So why have the Time Lords sent us
here, then – if it’s no more than a tatty auld fairground?’ Jamie asked. The Doctor sighed, and sat down on a hummock.
It moaned slightly and distended, and he jumped back up quickly uttering a
quick apology and flicking a hanky over the now pinkly flushed mound.
Privately Jamie
thought he was looking older, even though their picking up of Zoe – during
Victoria’s absence – had done a lot to re-invigorate him. He wasn’t at his best these days. He hated being at his mysterious peoples’
beck and call. His parole, into this
strange errand boy’s life, in which former companions were allowed only on
sufferance and by the whim of the Tribunal, might be marginally better than the
exile that still hung over his head, threatening it with an enforced change of
features, (the Doctor called this threat the facelift of Damacles which Zoe had
explained was a classical joke although she hadn’t had time to explain the
reference before that business with the Autons) but it was still profoundly
disheartening for someone as anarchic as Jamie’s old friend and mentor.
‘Oh just the usual, Jamie – giving
someone a good talking to and explaining why they’re wrong, and should be
pleased to be told so. All without my
Masters getting their lily-white tongues dirty.’
‘Tongues,’ aren’t white,’ Zoe said,
rolling her eyes. She could be painfully
literal at times (the Doctor had a wall on the TARDIS with a Venn diagram
painted on it that showed that ‘jokes’ did not have to reside full within the
circle marked ‘truthful statements about nominal reality’ but it hadn’t settled
the issue. She’d merely remarked that
she did expect them to fall fully within the circle marked ‘being funny’ and
had written ‘facelift of Damocles’ outside it with an exclamation mark, by way
of counter-demonstration.
‘We’re going to meet a fellow
exile’.
‘Who?’ Jamie and Zoe both asked.
‘Lucifuge Rofocale
– Ex Prime Minister of Hell, now Dante’s World’s technical advisor.’ The Doctor beamed at Jamie and Zoe. ‘He’s not an exile from my lot, he’s a
disgraced Daemon. I’ve always wanted to
meet him. (The Doctor explained quickly
that the Daemons were an ancient space travelling species, and not at all
actual Demons, at which Zoe felt somewhat reassured, but Jamie looked
unconvinced. He also explained that they should on no account take any gift
from the Daemon, especially of knowledge without agreed payment. They understood this for it was only a week
or so ago, they had encountered the sinister ox-bow train, in its own temporal
backwater, and the rules of Fae and Hell are cut from similar cloth.)
‘Why was he exiled? Did he wander off like someone we know,’ Zoe
teased.
The Doctor
considered. ‘It was a little more
serious than that, Zoe. He was banished from the Daemons’ dark homeworld, a
construct many times larger than this structure, because he discovered,
rediscovered perhaps, a concept so strange, so outre that it was impossible for
most of his species to contemplate it without a fatal brain seizure. Before the pamphlet he wrote explaining it
was suppressed he caused the deaths of roughly twenty thousand Daemons.’
Zoe and Jamie were flabbergasted by
this (possibly for different reasons) and the Doctor hastened to explain. ‘He was very sorry afterwards – sorry as any
of his people can be anyway - he really didn’t mean to do it. He only proposed it as a theoretical
construct too unlikely to be real, but even the hypothesis was functionally lethal
to many of his less flexibly minded kin.’
‘What concept?’ Zoe asked nervously. Her time was one in which rogue meme’s
interrupted the telepress with fake-news on a daily basis and she knew how
dangerous ill-expressed or chaotic thought could be.
‘Altruism,’ the Doctor said. ‘Don’t
drop it into the conversation he’s still deeply ashamed of it. Come on, I can see his tabernacle on the
plain.’
‘Oh, aye, yes one of those,’ Jamie
said, in the hope of cheering the Doctor up. He could see full well that the
tabernacle was a floating gold structure, like a light framework with banners
depending from it, that was spinning lazily above the blood-red meadow. Inside it a shadowy figure was spread-eagled,
a limb pinned in each of the yellow cube’s corners. Jamie blinked, as if through an invisible
telescope, he could see the figure had four arms and four legs, as if two
copies of a man had been run together in the middle. It also had horns, its legs were those of goats
and a pointed tail draped around the yellow latticework like a vine across a
trellis. He’d heard the Doctor say their
contact was a ‘Damon’ not a ‘Demon’, but surely now the look of the thing was
against him. And twenty thousand of his
kin dead.
While they were taking in the sight of
the construct the Doctor called a tabernacle, they were suddenly next to it as
if it had suddenly zoomed into focus or the world had fast-forwarded through their
walk across the blood-meadows. Looking
back at the vampire-poppies feeding on the pink hummocks between them and the
TARDIS, Zoe shuddered.
Jamie
set his face in mulish disapproval. ‘I’ll just be sitting out here, Doctor – you go and convey your
people’s message
to the auld a’ill thing. I’ll nae stop yer, but I’ll no help yer. An’ Zoe if your nay af yer heid,
you’ll hold
yer wheesht and wait with me. Yon Clooties, nay a fair friend for any man,
Time Lord nor mortal.’
He always got more Scottish when he felt his
goodwill was being put-upon or if the Doctor was walking into
trouble unnecessarily.
‘Well,
I’m not a man,’ Zoe said teasingly, ‘and I’m not going to miss up the chance to meet a devil.’
She linked arms with the Doctor, ‘come on
then’. And they entered into the tabernacle. From a distance
Jamie had seen into it
clearly, but from up close, the air between the golden bars
seemed to whirl as if the
Daemon within was constantly revolving, but so quickly as to
seem still until the supersonic whistle-lash
of the air around it was close enough to
feel, like a prickling in his thumbs.
Suddenly, a horrified cry - Zoe’s
voice raised in terror, sounded from inside the yellow lattice. Drawing his sgian-dubh, and muttering a quick
prayer against all the imaginary devils and the single real demon of this
place, Jamie plunged after her.
It was dark inside
the yellow cage (and inside it was clear that a cage was what it amounted to),
and it smelt of goat. There was a glint
of white in the dark and a clatter of bone on bone. Jamie saw, in the shadows, the Doctor and Zoe
tea cups and saucers in their hands.
‘Och, yer wee
baggage, I should have known. Ye’ll cry wolf once too often one of these days
my lass.’
‘He can’t do any
harm, he’s all tied up look’.
The former Prime
Minister, was indeed fastened to the interior vertices of the cube, and
although it wasn’t clear how he was spinning while the Doctor, Zoe, and now
Jamie weren’t – his bisectional symmetry seemed to be a product of persistence
of vision. He was there at 180 degrees, and at 90 degrees, but between He
wasn’t. It made Jamies’ head hurt.
The Doctor
finished the bite of blood-red muffin, that was in his mouth.
‘We were just,
explaining to Lucifuge, that the Time Lords would be willing to negotiate for
his release with the Powers of Damos, from what must be an inconvenient, if not
a somewhat belittling imprisonment in return for His willingness to contribute
a portion of His knowledge to their records.
He would surely find the position of Ambassador to the Homeworld, less
trying than this feeble pastiche of his origins, which some might find
extremely vulgar. However’…the Doctor
paused…’He seems to doubt my bona fides as far as being able to make promises
for my people. Zoe of course vouched for me, but He seems to put great store by
rules of three, and trinities.’
‘What we have observed three times, we take
as true, Doctor – have you never heard that saying of us? You have said you are to be trusted, and she
has said it. But what does this young
man fingering his knife say?’
Jamie looked up
into the incarnadine eyes of the creature that could never understand what it
was to do something selflessly, without fear of consequences, because it was
simply right.
‘She doesn’t know,’ he said, ‘she
joined us again only recently. She’s never had any reason to doubt him’.
‘Jamie!’ Zoe was shocked, was this his response to the
ruse that had persuaded him to enter the tabernacle? Surely he wouldn’t
jeopardise the diplomatic negotiations of the higher powers in a fit of
Scottish pique!
‘Yon’s not the Doctor, not really.’
‘What are you saying, you hairy
highlander,’ the Doctor’s voice was aggrieved, but his eyes gleamed in the
darkness.
‘The Tribunal changed his face and
sent him into exile on Earth, and they sent Zoe and me back to our own time and
made us forget everything but our first adventure with him. So for me I was back in the Highlands, I
suppose, and Zoe there was back on her Space Wheel, and so it was for the Real
Doctor, and the Real Jamie, and the Real Zoe
too for all I know.’
‘And
yet are you not real? I observe the three of you: most clearly?’
‘Well how they
explained it to me: it’s like they took a cutting in time as a man might take a
cutting from a tree. And that cutting
was this Doctor, aging in their service, and they took cuttings of me and
Victoria (reaching into our own times to do it) and of Zoe. Maybe Ben and Polly
too, with a Doctor all their own. But my father had orchards, and apple
trees. You can take a cutting and graft
it into another stock and it’ll bear fair apples: and too all intents and taste
they will be true apples of the first tree. But if you plant them in the earth,
their seeds will not grow true. The man
with us looks like the Doctor, and mostly sounds like him, and so do we
resemble ourselves. But deep inside how
can we know we’ve been made true to ourselves, and will not turn deceitful. They might have made us to lie: how would we know? Given us other memories or thoughts, how would we know?
He’s done good
since, and we have. We’ve saved people,
still. But is it their good we do, rather than our own?
‘What torment it is to live a pastiche of one’s own
history.’
‘I kenned you’d
see that. If this world is really a
fairground copy of your own, your people must have been cruel to pen you here.’
‘They are cruel, and theirs is a pitiless empire. And thus it must be – for what is Goodness
but an incomprehensible puzzle. Why, for
instance, did you tell me the truth? The
Lords who made you, will they not punish this transgression?
Where is the gain for which you risk this? It cannot be your friends’ comfort, for
behold they are shocked and troubled, nor your own for I see the guilt you feel
at their self-doubt. Incomprehensible.’
(A great and gusty
sigh)
It is as well, that my mind is the strongest of my
kinds’ : and yet despite the thoughts I
nearly grasp – what a vast wall stands between us. You little things, in your false prison, and
I in mine.
‘False or not,
fake or not’, the Doctor said, ‘the offer still stands. Say the word and you can leave this place.’
‘Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it. Thinks thou, that I who saw the Face of Satan,
and tasted the Eternal Joys of Freedom, and not tormented with Ten Thousand
Hells by being separate from all Things Real.
No realer yet than This your Master’s World. I intuit it now: but one of Nine, soon to be
lost to War. Better a known illusion
than a deeper falseness.’
The Doctor looked
very old, and more pitiful than Jamie had ever seen him. It took him and Zoe together to bundle him
out of the yellow cage. He patted Jamie
on the shoulder. ‘You did right. Tell the truth…and shame the Devil’.
‘WAIT - ’ the voice of
Lucifuge. ‘Jamie you have risked the wrath of powers that might yet wipe you from
existence – to tell me the truth. We
value truth, my kind – pursuing it with every kind of experiment and
question. I must repay my debt to you err
you depart. Know this. Very shortly as you judge time, you will be
sent to another Prison where people who also serve truth after their kind will
be awaiting death. Your task will be to
free them, but if you are wise, they may yet free you, all of you. Go, my little creatures, and when you are
real again think of me with your perverse minds, in that strange mode you have
- what is the word you use? Think of me "kindly", when you are real.
