62 (BS) - Oh No It Isn't!

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T H E N E W

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A D V E N T U R E S

OH NO IT ISN'T!

Paul Cornell

First published in Great Britain in 1997 by

Virgin Publishing Ltd

332 Ladbroke Grove

London W10 5AH

The right of Paul Cornell to be identified as the Author of

this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Bernice Summerfield originally created by Paul Cornell

Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

ISBN 0 426 20507 3

Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham PLC

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall

not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired

out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior

written consent in any form of binding or cover other

than that in which it is published and without a similar

condition including this condition being imposed on the

subsequent purchaser. So there.

Scanned by The Camel

Contents

CHAPTER 1 PORTERHATCH BLUES ........................................................................................................ 8

CHAPTER 2 NEW ADVENTURES, NEW DANGER ................................................................................... 18

CHAPTER 3 A COMEDY TONIGHT ............................................................................................................ 28

CHAPTER 4 WHAT KIND OF A-Z WOULD GET YOU HERE? ................................................................... 40

CHAPTER 5 BEAUTY AND BERNICE ........................................................................................................ 50

CHAPTER 6 A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME ................................................................................................. 58

CHAPTER 7 FAIRY STORIES .................................................................................................................... 66

CHAPTER 8 ANOTHER BREAK IN THE NARRATIVE ............................................................................... 77

CHAPTER 9 JUST DESERTS AND DEEPER PLOTS, AND DEADLY DANGER LOOMING . . . LOTS! .... 85

CHAPTER 10 RAIDERS OF THE SEVEN DWARVES .................................................................................. 87

CHAPTER 11 'SCUSE ME WHILE I RIP THE SKY ....................................................................................... 97

CHAPTER 12 IMMINENT DESTRUCTION GRIEF ....................................................................................... 104

CHAPTER 13 A CAT IN HELL'S CHANCE .................................................................................................... 110

EPILOGUE MOMENTS OF PLEASURE .................................................................................................... 118

Thanks to Gareth Roberts and Penny List, Jackie Mulligan, Jac Rayner and Steven Moffat, without

whom there would be no book and no me.

Thanks also to: Russell Davies, Jason Haigh-Ellery, Craig Hinton, Matt Jones, Rebecca Levene,

Claire Longhurst, John McLaughlin, Paul Marquess, Carrie O'Grady, Kate Orman, Dave Owen, Gary

Russell, Carla Tsampiras, Sam Walke, Jo Ware, Peter Ware, and Mark Wyman.

For Jac Rayner

Laughter is a celebration of our failings. That's what

clowns are for. And that's what I am.

Emma Thompson

HAPTER

ORTERHATCH

LUES

The great red building in the shape of a barrel had grown dark in the rain, the natural tan of its

bricks staining with the water. The rain had washed its steamed-up windows, fallen through its

drainpipes and flowed along its gutterings all night. Now it was morning, but the sky was still full

with storm clouds.

The building was made of old mud, baked hard in modern kilns, bonded brick to brick at an

atomic level. Each brick had been blessed by the High Priest of Knowledge of the Tashwari

Regime. Satellite feeds and aerials and data terminals had been knocked through the brick by

Tashwari workers, swinging from girders around the block by their hands and tails. The bricks had

been painted with a rain-tight solution. Doors and arches with electronic keys and entry systems

had been driven into the barrel, a vast staircase lowered through the roof as a slab and unfurled

like a card shuffle, and a big, friendly, fusion boiler tunnelled into the ground underneath.

The future Garland College Hall of Residence of St Oscar's University was completed and

blessed in under ten of the days of the planet Dellah. It was not named at that point. The Sultan

of the Tashwari had put on a pair of stout boots and stamped about the site, his advisers at his

side, quoting from an old book he carried. He pointed at and named all the nine colleges, and the

university itself, after things which would bring the children of Earth to his world. Then he closed

the book, took the mud of construction in both hands, and held it to the sky in hope. Then he had

tea.

The children of Earth had been a problem for the Sultan. His world sat too close to their territ-

ory. Every year, a nearby world would align itself to, or be annexed by, the Earth's 'Empire'. The

Sultan knew Earth was ruled by an elected president, but he had heard the term 'Empire' used so

casually by human explorers that he became wary. A people that were fundamentally at odds as

to the nature of that which ruled them . . . you could not turn your side to them and reach for tea.

And with the ships of the human Spacefleet came their corporations, settling on to worlds like

swarms of feeding creatures, sucking away the goodness and seeing the people of those worlds as

something glimpsed from a speeding sailpod.

Even if Dellah had been a united world, it could not have fought the humans off. But it was not.

As well as the Tashwari Regime, there were two other large power blocs: the monarchy of Goll

and the Sylan Federation. These three nations alone included seven separate intelligent species,

of vastly differing biological types. There were, including all the cults and splinter groups, over five

hundred officially registered religions on the planet. To unite all that would be beyond even the

Sultan's charm.

So the Sultan did something very clever. He swiftly established trade links with several of the

major human corporations, sending learned advisers to them – Tashwari who had spent all their

time learning about the humans from their communications. These ambassadors acted as if rela-

tions with Earth were already at an advanced stage, as if genuinely mutual trade agreements and

treaties were already in place. They talked about the latest share prices, and celebrities and the

wonderful human game called cricket, pitches for which already dotted the meadows of the Sul-

tan's lands.

Thanks to the chaos of the frontier, and the humans' capacity for delusion, these words soon

became truths. The Earth's sphere of influence swept by Dellah, counting it as taken, civilized,

urbane, even. The Galactic War, in which the humans and their allies struggled with an alien spe-

cies that fundamentally disagreed with them, missed the planet completely. With the destruction

of many lines of communication and the razing of many civilized worlds, Dellah's status as a place

of relative safety was confirmed. There never was an invasion. The Sultan sacrificed an eye to his

gods in thanks for that, in the process of a vigil in a cave deep under his palace. After he did so,

numb from the shock, his other two eyes saw a vision. A vision of an establishment that would

affirm and cement the peace that he had made.

A university. A place where all species, including many of the humans, would come and learn,

under the palm of his hand.

A place that could never be a target.

Within days, all the major corporations were involved in sponsorship negotiations. Krytell him-

self, greatest of the many great entrepreneurs who had profited from the Galactic War, visited

Dellah and, over tea, was persuaded of the R&D opportunities offered by a place where knowledge

was free. Well, as free as the corporations wanted it to be.

The campus of nine colleges was built across a chain of hilly islands, a site agreed upon by the

various countries and tribes of Dellah as being absolutely neutral, and of no possible strategic

worth . . . at the moment. The others had never fully given credit to the Sultan for his saving of

the planet, and were puzzled, more than anything else, by his latest vision.

St Oscar's University had its own spaceport, at the insistence of the corporations – Dellah's

first, a silver needle at the northern end of the islands that reached all the way up into orbit.

When the final brick was placed in the base of that construction, when the first parties of aca-

demics, and then students began to arrive . . . each time the Sultan prostrated himself before his

gods, more certain that he had saved his world.

And the cost was not too high, for was the university not made in the Tashwari style, blessed

and baked and red?

The gods extracted but one price: the needle of the spaceport made it rain much more often

than it had.

Hence the conditions over, and the presence of, the Barrel, as the humans called it, that

morning of the human year 2593.

Hence the woman who slept in one set of rooms there, dreaming of Earth, oblivious to the rain

and the leaves of alien autumn that were splattering against her window.

She was finally woken only by a bad dream . . .

Professor Bernice Surprise Summerfield woke up, stretched, and groaned. The stretch had

brought on the groan. That was nothing to do with the look of the day: she'd got used to the tor-

rents of the Dellahan autumn. The groan was to do with the crunch of muscles at the back of her

neck, and the weight that had been settled in the middle of her head during sleep, which had now

rolled over to smack against the inside of her forehead.

Surprisingly, she hadn't been drinking last night.

With her eyes tight shut, she reached out to the cabinet beside the bed, and laid her fingers on

her glasses. Sheer affectation, these, a product of the same urge that had lined every one of her

rooms with books, and had made her order a dozen trad jazz discs from Earth, at the vast prices

of ancient vinyl.

Bernice was trying very hard to be old.

Judging by the feeling down her spine this morning, she was succeeding.

She dropped the spectacles on to her nose, and opened her eyes. She was only in her mid-

thirties, but this last few weeks she had found herself desiring to be much, much older. To have a

body that was like one of the leaves that the suspensor fields were fluttering off the window, all

brown and curled, and a mind that was without desire. This age thing, and the spine thing, were

both products of not having a body beside her under this double duvet, after having got used to

that feeling. Her husband then was her husband no longer. At least, they were no longer married.

And, though she had cried and cried, and the parting had been her decision, she still regretted it

every day. That was also the cause of a band of whiter flesh around her ring finger.

Breaking up, Bernice was discovering, was hard to do. Harder than getting one's tights on after

swimming. Harder than table football. Harder than a lump of something that lay over your ribs in

the night. Bernice was an archaeologist of some fame, the author of the bestselling coffee-table

book that everybody had bought but nobody had read: Down Among The Dead Men. After the

heartache and the separation, she'd jumped at the chance of a teaching post at St Oscar's. St

Oscar's, following their policy of recruiting the most glamorous – if not necessarily the most

learned – scholars, had jumped at having her. Her head of department, Dr Follett, an aged rep-

tilian who purposely didn't regulate the cloud of chlorine that surrounded him when Bernice was in

his office, hadn't been so keen. But at St Oscar's the Shilling was mightier than academic respect.

Writing a similarly bestselling sequel to her book, with lots of mentions of the quality of the

archaeology department at St Oscar's, had been written into Bernice's contract of employment for

taking up the Edward Watkinson Chair of Archaeology. She had a title for the new work: So Vast

A Pile, but that was about it. Even at this early stage, the publishing arm of the university had

started to write her nervous letters concerning the delivery of the manuscript, hinting that they

might eventually get someone else to write it, want their investment back, or even one day

maybe sue her. Oh well. She was sure that she'd get around to writing it one day. If the pub-

lishers got too concerned, she'd just tell them she'd had a system crash and lost the manuscript.

Or something.

And all this was good, because it provided something to do, some security, some people to talk

to. Somewhere to stop being so bloody rooted in depression and start living again. Jason had

gone, and he was, in all probability, not going to come back. Unless she asked him. And she didn't

even know what part of the galaxy he was in these days, so . . . no. It didn't matter that every

time she thought of something they'd done together she felt bruised, that she associated whole

countries, genres of music and the actual experience of watching old cinema with him and him

only, and that every time one of those things crossed her mind her face clouded and her students

asked her what was wrong. She'd got so used to having a little bundle of thoughts that boiled

down to 'and Jason too' at the end of her musings. Such as, 'What colour should I paint my study

. . . what would Jason like?' and, 'That was a good play . . . I must tell Jason about it.'

And these thoughts were with her this morning as they always were, like vultures round her

bed.

There was absolutely no point in being depressed, she told herself as she hugged the pillow.

Depression was counter productive, and why should she give him that satisfaction? Not that it was

anything to do with him any more; not that he'd ever know . . .

She took her first deep breath of the morning, and convinced herself that she was old and wise

and felt better. 'Wolsey?' she called, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. That was

the name of her tabby tomcat. 'Where is he?'

'I'm afraid I don't know, Rector.' A white sphere, about the size of a billiard ball, drifted

towards the bed. This was Joseph, her Porter, whose presence had started to irritate Bernice a

month ago. That was on the day after she'd moved in. The whole business of being the Rector of

Garland College, in charge of the moral wellbeing of a thousand young beings, was a bit of a

bugger too.

Bernice threw the duvet over her head. 'Lullaby of Birdland . . .' she mumbled.

'As you wish.' The Porter floated towards an ancient vinyl record player. The arm lifted itself,

and dropped on to a record that sat there. The gentle tune soothed out from the speakers, one

placed on top of the wall bookshelf and one beside the collection of empty and half-empty wine

bottles.

'You have a tutorial at noon, Rector,' said the Porter. 'And, of course, tomorrow is the expedi-

tion to Perfecton, for which you have not yet begun to pack.'

'Um-hm.'

'Your Head of Department also wishes to remind his staff about the later field trip, only, he

emphasizes, accommodating two students, which –'

'Nobody wants to do because it's too boring. I know, Joseph. Right now, I want tea, the

Campus Bulletin and love.'

The sphere paused. 'Please, Rector.'

'Please what?'

'Tea, the Campus Bulletin and love . . . please.'

Bernice peered out from her duvet cave. 'Please, Joseph. Bring me all those things.'

'Very well, Rector.' The Porter floated out through the Porterhatch at the top of the door.

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