04 - Genocide
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GENOCIDE
PAUL LEONARD
BBC BOOKS
Other BBC DOCTOR WHO books include:
THE EIGHT DOCTORS by Terrance Dicks 0 563 40563 5
VAMPIRE SCIENCE by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman 0 563 40566 X
THE BODY SNATCHERS by Mark Morris 0 563 40568 6
THE DEVIL GOBLINS FROM NEPTUNE
by Keith Topping and Martin Day 0 503 10564 3
THE MURDER GAME by Steve Lyons 0 563 40565 1
THE ULTIMATE TREASURE by Christopher Bulis 0 563 40571 6
BUSINESS UNUSUAL by Gary Russell 0 503 40575 9
DOCTOR WHO titles on BBC Video include:
THE WAR MACHINES starring William Hartnell BBCV 6183
THE AWAKENING/FRONTIOS starring Peter Davison BBCV 6120
THE HAPPINESS PATROL starring Sylvester McCoy BBCV 5803
Other DOCTOR WHO titles available from
BBC Worldwide Publishing:
POSTCARD BOOK 0 563 40561 9
THE NOVEL OF THE FILM on audio tape 0 563 38148 5/Z1998
Published by BBC Books.
an imprint of BBC Worldwide Publishing
BBC Worldwide Ltd, Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane,
London W12 0TT
First published 1997
Reprinted 1997, 1999
Copyright © Paul Leonard 1997
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Original series broadcast on the BBC
Format © BBC 1963
Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
ISBN 0 563 40572 4
Imaging by Black sheep, copyright © BBC 1997
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham
Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton
Scanned by the Camel
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................. 5
... .................................................................. 6
PROLOGUE ................................................................. 7
BOOK ONE
CHAPTER 1 ................................................................... 13
CHAPTER 2 ................................................................... 17
CHAPTER 3 ................................................................... 22
CHAPTER 4 ................................................................... 26
CHAPTER 5 ................................................................... 29
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER 6 ................................................................... 36
CHAPTER 7 ................................................................... 41
CHAPTER 8 ................................................................... 46
CHAPTER 9 ................................................................... 49
CHAPTER 10 ................................................................... 52
CHAPTER 11 ................................................................... 54
BOOK THREE
CHAPTER 12 ................................................................... 61
CHAPTER 13 ................................................................... 65
CHAPTER 14 ................................................................... 69
CHAPTER 15 ................................................................... 74
CHAPTER 16 ................................................................... 77
CHAPTER 17 ................................................................... 83
CHAPTER 18 ................................................................... 91
BOOK FOUR
CHAPTER 19 ................................................................... 98
CHAPTER 20 .................................................................. 104
CHAPTER 21 .................................................................. 108
CHAPTER 22 .................................................................. 112
CHAPTER 23 .................................................................. 117
CHAPTER 24 .................................................................. 119
EPILOGUE .................................................................. 121
... ................................................................... 123
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First and foremost I would like to thank the usual crowd who read and made suggestions
about this book: Barb Drummond, Mark Leyland, Jim Mortimore, Nick Walters, Simon Lake
and George Wills.
Then there are all the people who had to put up with my irritability, writer's panic, and
general lack of availability for the last six months or so: my mother, Hazel Bunting, and my
stepfather, John; Nadia Lamarra; Barb Drummond (again); Jim Mortimore (again); Damon
Burt. Patrick and Martine Walling, Helen Butterworth and Jim Dowsett (good luck at
Oxford!). Many thanks to all these, and any I've forgotten to mention. And thanks to
Frances Cherry and all the others at Victoria Wine for general niceness, swapped shifts,
and a different sort of working environment!
Finally, I must thank Nuala Buffini and Steve Cole at the BBC for their extreme patience
and understanding, as well as their many helpful suggestions concerning the plot, the text
and continuity matters. Any remaining errors are mine... all mine... ha!
-
The alien figure on the low bed was little more than a skeleton. The skin was shadowed, pinched –
the eyes seemed welded shut. The tan-coloured fur on the alien's head was dull, listless. Its
clothes hung loosely: velvet, satin, and a coarser artificial fibre.
Mauvril watched the dying figure for a long time, shivering in the cold air of the cell. Finally
she spoke.
'I know that you can't forgive me. I don't expect it. I know that you had a special relationship
with humans, and to see them wiped out after all your efforts, and all your love – that must be
a tragedy for you.
'And I know, too, that you're right not to forgive me. I haven't cleaned my soul, only
made it dirtier. I don't even know whether I've succeeded in saving my people from slavery and
extinction. If what you have told me is true, then I have failed.
'But I want you to understand me.
'We're both going to die here, so it really doesn't make any difference now, what we've done,
whether we can forgive each other. I just want to know the truth: if you had been me – if you
had been in my situation, on my world, and the humans had done to your people what they did
to mine – would you have destroyed them? Would you have been without mercy, would you have
destroyed all humans, for all time?
'Please tell me. I need to know. I need to know if it was possible to have acted in a different
way.
'Doctor? Can you understand me?
'Are you still alive?'
PROLOGUE
The smell of the wind had changed.
Walking Man knew it as soon as he woke; perhaps even before that. Strangeness had haunted
his dreams, lingered into his waking.
He stood, the movement as silent as he could make it. It was still night; no dawn stirred in the
east. But something had disturbed him. He sniffed the dark, cold air blowing over the ridge.
An animal... No. It was more like the smell of the air before a thunderstorm. But there was no
storm nearby: the steady wind and star-filled sky told him that.
A shuffling sound in the darkness. A faint, uneasy bleating. The sheep could sense it, too.
Walking Man took a cautious step on the soft grass. Whatever it was, this was a big thing. Big
enough to fill the air with its scent, and far enough away to be silent. As big as a cloud, perhaps.
Walking Man felt a cold, glassy touch of fear at his throat. But there was nothing he could do,
nothing he could fight or run away from. In the darkness, he could only wait.
So he wrapped his buckskin cloak around himself tightly, and waited.
When it came, the first light of dawn showed him nothing. The pasture slopes, grey in the dim-
ness, traced with pale silver dew. The sheep, light shadows, dark faces moving, slowly waking.
The mountain a hunched back against the sky. Everything was as it should be, but...
The sheep were uneasy.
And the scent in the wind was still there.
Alert, Walking Man stood, peering down into the valley. The wind had stilled, and a thin mist
pooled there, its edges dappled with dark beadings of trees. The village...
There was a light in the village. A light that you could see through the mist.
Fire!
The shock jolted through his body, set his heart jumping in his chest. He was running before he
could even begin to think, running across the cold dewy turf, leaving his sheep, leaving rabbit furs
he had prepared while watching his flock in the High Pastures, leaving his pack with his copper
axe and his totem. Nothing mattered but getting to the village. Nothing mattered but reaching his
wife, her sister, his brother-by-marriage, and their children. He imagined he could hear their
screams as he ran, imagined the hut filled with smoke and terror, the wood burning in the wind...
I have to get there.
His feet found the stone of the familiar path down, the stone that was smooth because so many
Walking Men and their sheep had used the path, season after season, as they moved from pas-
ture to village and back again. The shoulders of the mountain rose around him, hiding the village.
About halfway, at Fern River Gorge, where there was a view of the Low Pastures, he stopped.
The sun was clear on the slice of hillside he could see through the end of the gorge. There was no
smoke in the air. The village was not burning.
But the smell was there. The hour-before-a-storm smell. The impossible smell, impossibly
strong now.
He slowed his steps, slowed his breathing, trying to think. The boys should be here in the
gorge by this time, setting their traps for the water rats and their nets for the fish in the slippery
green water. But there was no one. Nothing. Only the river, talking softly to itself in the cold
morning air.
Walking Man opened his mouth to call out, then changed his mind.
He advanced along the edges of the gorge, moving slowly, softly, as if he were hunting or
tracking a stray sheep from the flock, using the narrow paths weaving between the scrub pines
and steep rock walls, the wolf paths that smelled of pine and carnivore dung.
At the end of the gorge, the paths ended in the cleared ground, the goat meadows, the damp
earth where the children gathered mushrooms in the mornings, the fields where the old people
grew their grain and carrots. He could see the village at last, the low, dark roofs over the dew-
silvered swathe of grass.
And he could see the source of the light.
It was fire. And yet it wasn't.
It was like a tree, burning. But there was no smoke: only dim, cold flames creeping along the
branches, lake-blue and summer-leaf green, moving around huge leaves that were bright orange,
as if it were autumn.
But a tree?
There had been no tree on the morning he had taken the sheep to the High Pasture, not many
days ago. No tree could grow so fast. And no tree he had ever seen before looked anything like
this one.
And why were there no children in the fields, gathering the mushrooms?
For a moment, Walking Man wondered if he had entered the spirit world while he had slept. He
looked up, checking the skies for the Eagle, his totem animal.
No. If the Eagle was guiding him, it was from far away. This was still the human world.
Silent as a hunter, he moved across the familiar meadow where he had played as a child, his
eyes on the strange tree. As the curve of the land fell away, he could see the village, the rough
circle of the lodges, the people kneeling in the open space between them.
He became aware of another smell, a smell like the hay he stored to feed the sheep in winter.
And there was something dark beneath the coloured branches of the tree.
Something alive.
Walking Man crouched down, then stretched out and lay flat on the grass.
Was it Ox? It was the size of an ordinary ox, such as the hunters might find in the forest, but it
was black, and its head was wrong – raised up in front of it, with a long, thin snout like a wolf.
And it had arms.
His wife's totem was the Ox. Had she died, then? But he could see her kneeling with the other
villagers, the distinctive black wool trim on her cloak marking her as Walking Man's Woman.
The Ox, or whatever it was, spoke.
At least, it seemed like speech – it had the air of speech, the density of changing sounds – but
it was like the speech of a foreign man, like that of the strangers who came to trade copper and
had to speak to the villagers in signs. Walking Man couldn't understand a word of it.
The speech became urgent, angry, like the grunting of a beast. Walking Man saw the gleam of
metal in the Ox's hand, felt the danger in the air – too late. Flame exploded around his wife's
head. She gave one short gurgling scream, then fell to the ground. Her body thrashed for a
moment, then was still.
Her head was black, like burnt meat. Walking Man could smell her flesh burning.
For a second, he remained frozen, then anger and grief got the better of his fear. He rose to a
low crouch, darted forward, crossing the meadow, making for the nearest of the lodges.
He was only a dozen strides from the heavy wooden walls when the Ox saw him.
He saw the huge eye in the side of its head open, saw the blood-hatred there. What had his
people done to offend the Ox? Had the hunters not killed oxen with proper respect? Had the traps
been set wrongly?
There was no point in wondering about that now. The gleaming metal that had killed his wife
was still in the spirit-animal's hand, and Walking Man could sense it readying the fire to kill him as
it had killed his wife. He ducked, then dodged sideways, knowing he could not avoid a magical fire
but not knowing what else to do.
The fire exploded behind him. He felt its breath, heard the curse of the Ox.
He stopped dead for an instant, waited, saw the fire explode ahead where he would have been
if he'd kept running.
Then he ran, ran as he hadn't run for seasons, ran until he'd put the wood and hides of the
lodge between him and the spirit-animal. He lay on the damp leafy earth behind the lodge for a
moment, gasping with anger and terror.
There was a flicker of the killing fire, and the short, choked scream of another death.
I have to do something to prevent this.
It was madness to fight the Ox, but what else could he do?
He closed his eyes, called out to the spirit of the Eagle, felt the great totem-wings spreading in
his soul.
Yes. He could do it.
He crawled along the dark earth to the hunter's door of the lodge, the one that faced out to the
forest. Cautiously, he pushed aside the flap of skins and peered inside.
Red lights glittered in the dark interior, and the alien smell, the before-a-storm smell, was
strong, too strong, stronger than the human smells of the lodge, the flesh and sweat and leather.
Walking Man withdrew slowly, in absolute silence.
The Ox was outside, waiting for him, the metal thing which had brought the spirit-fire in its
hand.
With its other hand, it beckoned.
Walking Man looked at the three alien fingers, shook his head, then jumped. Straight up.
His hand found the rough end of a roof-beam; his body fell against the wall of the lodge. He
kicked, struggled, heaved himself up. He ran up the sloping roof, the dry turf that insulated the
lodge soft under his heels. He crouched down in the hope that the Ox's fire wouldn't be able to
reach him.
Then he was at the crown of the lodge, above the open chimney, smelling the faint smoked-
flesh aroma of the cooking fire.
He dropped inside.
There was a movement, light at the doorway – Walking Man could see Ox Hunter's spear, fallen
across the floor of the lodge. Ox Hunter must have taken up his spear when the Ox came, and –
Walking Man saw the charcoal form that had once been human, realised it wasn't the cooking
fire he'd smelled at the chimney.
His body burning with a rage he hadn't felt since early manhood, he grabbed the spear,
charged the door of the lodge.
But when he got outside there was nothing, only deep prints of cloven hooves in the mud.
Walking Man ran, circling the village behind Ox Hunter's lodge and that of his neighbour, Deer
Dance Woman, the shaman. Through the gap between the huts, he saw two more of the huge
black Oxen standing on either side of the kneeling villagers. He thought he saw Walks-with-Moon-
light, his eldest girl, kneeling with the others. But he couldn't stop to be sure.
Behind Deer Dance Woman's lodge, he stopped. The meadows were only paces away. He could
run. He might make it. He could hide in the woods. He could go to the people of the Marsh
Meadow and ask for their help, perhaps offer them a sheep in return for shelter in one of their
lodges, if he could find his flock in High Pasture.
There was another flash of fire, and from beyond the lodge came the sound of people
screaming, and high, strange calls, unlike any animal that Walking Man knew. He crept around
Deer Dance Woman's lodge until he could see what was happening. Smoke was drifting across the
Dancing Place, half obscuring the tree. The bulky black form of one of the Oxen moved in front of
him, facing away, towards the alien glow of the tree.
The fire was everywhere. His people were dying.
He couldn't leave them to die. He had to attack now. The Eagle would make him strong.
Walking Man charged, silently, spear in hand, towards the Oxen. The spear glanced uselessly
off the black flank of the beast. Walking Man saw the legs kick out, but the spirit of the Eagle pro-
tected him: somehow he managed to move aside in time.
He rolled on the hard ground, was brought up against something strange.
Something alien, crawling with glowing light.
The tree.
Yes! The Eagle had guided him! The tree was new, so the Oxen and the tree were linked in
spirit. That was obvious. It wasn't possible for one man with a spear to defeat so many of the
huge spirit-beasts – but perhaps if he attacked the tree...
It was worth a try.
He crawled under the glowing branches, realising as he did so that this was where the air-
before-a-storm smell, the scent he had first sensed in the High Pastures, had its origin. It was all
around him here, making his hair move and crackle as if a spirit hand were running fingers
through it.
'Spirit of the Eagle...' he muttered. Saying the name of his totem aloud was a last resort:
totems didn't like being commanded. If he lived – even if he died – he'd be punished for this later.
But he had to do it.
He reached into the tree, found something like a cluster of seeds in his hands. He twisted,
pulled down –
And the world changed.
Brilliant sunlight, hotter than summer, was casting sharp shadows on his skin.
Huge grunts of alarm from the Oxen, screams from the villagers. Through the now-dim
branches, Walking Man saw people running, saw fire exploding all around them. Beyond, the
world had become a vast white waste, burning in the sun.
Where was the mountain? Where were the High Pastures?
In an effort to see more, Walking Man pulled himself up on to the first branch of the tree, then
to the second.
The forest was gone, too. The pale wasteland was everywhere.
Had he already been punished for commanding the Eagle? Was all this a punishment, a spirit-
penance for his life? What had he done that was so bad as to deserve this?
Desperately he climbed higher into the strange branches, as if seeing more of the world would
better his understanding. His hands closed on another of the seedlike clusters. Almost without
intending to, he broke the cluster away from the tree.
The sky became dark, filled with stars and a full moon. Again there was a gust of wind, and the
air became cooler. There was a clatter of wings as birds scattered in dark trees.
There was a clatter of rock, a groaning of breaking wood. Rocks were falling! Falling across the
village!
People were scattering out of the way, but one of the Oxen was knocked over by a boulder. It
screamed, and Walking Man saw the madness of pain in its huge eyes.
It saw him. One arm was still free, and metal gleamed in the hand.
Walking Man dodged aside, but this time the Eagle could not protect him. Fire exploded every-
where. He clung for a moment to a burning branch, watching gold light spill out of the tree like
blood, then the pain hit him and he fell.
When he hit the ground, he felt something break inside him, but he ran anyway, screaming
with pain and pent-up terror, ran through the fire and shouting and smoke to where his wife's
body should be –
But a sheet of flame wrapped itself around him, and the world faded away.
He woke in agony, pain misting his eyes. He could see tall, golden grass, and rearing above it a
strange mountain, not the mountain he knew. It was shaped like a lodge, a lodge of stone, its roof
of snow, as tall as the sky.
The lodge of the spirits. Yes.
A rustle in the grass, the heavy beat of wings.
With an effort, Walking Man moved his head.
Yes. The Eagle was here. He saw the dark plumage, a great hooked beak, an eye as black as
death, watching him. It was like no living eagle he had seen, but he knew it was the Eagle none-
theless – just as the great black beasts had been Oxen, though they looked like no living ox.
He met the death-black eye and tried to speak, but his mouth opened silently. He reached out
for the spirit-bird, though the effort cost him the last strength he had.
Take me, spirit, he thought. Take me within your body, carry me on your great wings, and we
will fly in the spirit world together.
As his vision dimmed, Walking Man saw the wings of the spirit-Eagle spread open, huge and
dark as the night, ready to carry the burden of his soul into the everlasting sky.
摘要：
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GENOCIDEPAULLEONARDBBCBOOKSOtherBBCDOCTORWHObooksinclude:THEEIGHTDOCTORSbyTerranceDicks0563405635VAMPIRESCIENCEbyJonathanBlumandKateOrman056340566XTHEBODYSNATCHERSbyMarkMorris0563405686THEDEVILGOBLINSFROMNEPTUNEbyKeithToppingandMartinDay0503105643THEMURDERGAMEbySteveLyons0563405651THEULTIMATETREASUR...
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