"What do we do now?" Martha asked, jogging to keep up with the Doctor. He had suddenly decided that he had somewhere urgent to go, and was striding off down the street as though late for an appointment.
"You," he said, "are talking to a man with a map. A map and an address. A map, an address, and a plan!"
"What address?"
"Oh, right, you'd wandered off by then. The address of the priest of Dru. The bloke whose house we saw get set on fire. I said I'd check on him, and this seems like a good time."
"What about Jack?"
"Mister Priest lives here, he might know stuff we don't. Jack can hold his own for a while. There's some information I want, and I can't ask just anyone or they'll want to know why we don't already know what we want to know. So. We ask someone who isn't biased against non-initiates. And who knows, he might know what we need to know to get Jack out of you-know-where."
Martha unravelled that tangle of an explanation and deemed it worthy. It was certainly better than anything she could think of. She hated the idea of leaving Jack in that forbidding building, but at least he had an ally on the inside, and the Doctor was bound to think of something soon.
"What worries me," said the Doctor suddenly, "is those scientist blokes back there. You should have seen some of their experiments. Green ferrets. Weird creatures with more eyes than limbs and teeth growing out of their feet. Not aliens, because aliens have to make sense in their own environment, but genuine freaks. That's not the bad part though. The thought I can't get out of my head is, if that's the level of technology the outlaws have, what are the authorities up to behind the scenes?"
Martha frowned. "Nothing. I thought this was science versus religion. Why would the religion have scientists? Isn't that what they're trying to stop? They don't even let doctors ply their trade properly."
"Just because someone's religious doesn't necessarily make them an idiot."
"That's generous of you."
He shrugged. "I'm a man of science. Emotions and feelings are important, but they really just boil down to biology. Without reason in your thinking, you're definitely on the wrong track. But still, the law of averages dictates that there must be at least some smart people in the higher echelons, and they'll be aware that everything we do has a Darwinian imperative. Your people only have things like faith and belief because at some point in your evolutionary history, these things were vital for your survival – or at any rate, didn't impede it – and that means there should be genes connected with belief. Your DNA governs how likely you are to blindly accept information as fact, and if they can tinker with your DNA…"
"They could make it so you have no choice but to believe," said Martha, in a horrified whisper. The Doctor gave her a meaningful look.
"Thing is, if they go dabbling in Jack's DNA, they're going to get some very nasty surprises. Humans have evolved quite a bit by his time. He can physically pass quite happily as a native of any era, but his genome will betray him if they try and fiddle about with it."
"Good job they didn't get hold of you, then," said Martha.
"Amen," said the Doctor.
"But wait," said Martha. "You can't just grab hold of a gene and twist it so it does what you want. You have to have the gene for blind faith already before you can give it to anyone else, and even then, you can't permanently alter anyone who's already alive. They could make a generation of children who blindly follow their orders, but only if they get to every pregnant woman really early on, and they couldn't alter the actual brains of real live people."
"Maybe, maybe not. I'll have to get a good look at their labs, see how far advanced they are on the twenty-first century. You should be right, if the Order are holding back scientific progress, but it may be that behind the scenes, these aliens are secretly doing some way advanced things. There are other possibilities too. Mind controlling drugs, very sci-fi but definitely a possibility. Of course, maybe they're doing nothing. Maybe a real, tangible god who actually appears and strikes down unbelievers really is enough to convince even the most cynical of sceptics."
Martha wondered if it would be enough to convince her. It was difficult to be a doctor and have faith, but she knew plenty of people back home who managed it. A couple of her closest friends were Sikhs, and she knew several Christians, all in the medical profession. For her, though, it didn't add up. You couldn't watch a sixteen year old heroin addict give birth to a junkie baby, then kill herself, and think that someone planned it that way. That way, insanity lay. She had always tried to concentrate on the here and now, believing things for which there was proof, and withholding judgement on everything else, but if she actually saw something that fitted all the descriptions of god, would she be content enough to go along with it, or would she be able to see through the act?
Funny. She had asked Agnes all about the hospital she'd worked at, and the patients she treated, but she hadn't enquired into her faith. Something told her that Agnes was a doubter, but getting her to admit it might be harder. Was it possible to deny a god, with no proof? She vowed to find out.
They were now in a residential area, and the day was wearing thin. They had been walking these streets for hours on end, she was tired, dirty, and starving. She said as much to the Doctor.
"Have faith," he said, almost under his breath, "that there'll be room at the inn."
He consulted the map again, and smiled. "Almost there, Martha. Did you know there was a Martha in the Bible?"
She shook her head.
"Well, there was. Sister to Mary and Lazarus. She told Jesus off for not getting to Lazarus sooner, and stopping him from dying in the first place. A woman of great faith, apparently, but then, she did see her dead brother get up and start wandering about again."
"He probably wasn't brain-dead in the first place," said the real Martha, still trying to convince herself that she wouldn't take the obvious answer as the true one, even if it was really, blindingly obvious.
"Ah, you reckon Jesus was an Iron Age David Blaine?"
"What else could he have been?"
"What, indeed." The Doctor's eyes sparkled as he came to a stop outside a terraced house. Martha said nothing. She didn't want to get into a Jesus-was-an-alien debate, not when they had more pressing concerns.
With the Doctor, it was automatic to wonder what ingenious way he was going to find to get into a place, so it was slightly surreal to see him ring the doorbell and stand back, waiting. There was a muffled noise on the other side of the door, and finally it was opened by a bulky woman in a pink dressing gown, with her hair in curlers and a scowl on her face.
"Hullo!" said the Doctor. "I'm looking for a friend. Um…" He grabbed the map, pulled a pen from his jacket sleeve, and drew three connected triangles. The woman's eyes widened, and she grabbed his coat. She pulled him inside, and the door shut behind him.
Martha stared at the door, but it wasn't long before it opened again, and the Doctor let her inside.
"Don't worry," he said. "They're just a bit jumpy. Can't blame them."
Martha looked around at the house she found herself in. It was a shabby place to have to live, with peeling wallpaper and frail, scratched furniture. The Doctor was already greeting the Priest of Dru and his family, shaking hands and being hugged. That was the Doctor all over. He'd met these people once before, for about thirty seconds, and now he was their best friend. Martha glanced at the woman who had let them in. She seemed annoyed at the disturbance, but even she managed a smile when the Doctor introduced himself.
"Martha, this is High Priest Kalling and his family. They're Druians. Very much in the closet, so I shouldn't have to tell you to keep it to yourself."
Martha nodded. The little priest was smiling like a loon, overjoyed to see the Doctor again. His daughter – a pale, thin girl who the Doctor introduced as Tess – appeared with drinks and food, and Martha was led to an armchair and told to make herself comfortable. On the rug, three young children were playing, and a fat cat watched from a high shelf. Martha realised they were being made to feel at home. She nudged the Doctor, and lowered her voice.
"Erm, how long are we planning on staying here?"
"Until we know what we need to. Dru is very keen on hospitality. If someone comes to your house, you act like it's theirs. They wouldn't say anything if I asked them to put us up for a month." He eyed the woman in pink. "Most of them wouldn't, anyway."
"So hurry up and ask them about the temple. We need to get Jack out, in case you've forgotten!"
"Got to observe the niceties. Rejecting hospitality is almost as terrible as not offering it. Smile, eat sandwiches, talk about the weather. You're British, it should come naturally."
Martha rolled her eyes, but she didn't have to think twice when the plate was offered to her. She made a stack of little sandwiches on her knee, and munched her way through them while the Doctor got the family to talk about themselves a bit. Martha listened to stories of traditional Druish upbringings followed by their exile to the lower city, and the decision for part of the family to pretend to integrate so that those in the priesthood would have somewhere to go for refuge if the Unity came after them.
Martha watched the children playing. They didn't look like religious refugees to her. She wondered if they even believed in their god, Dru. Children could, she knew, be made to think any story was real, but the sort of faith that effects the everyday working of your life takes personal conviction. Children didn't tend to care about anything other than toys and biscuits, and it was her personal belief that until the age of at least eight, the acquisition of toys and biscuits should be the only driving forces in a child's life. Virgin births, life after death, and men rising from the grave were not healthy topics for a very young mind to dwell on, but those were the things still being taught at Sunday school, in her time. But, like the rest of the family, the children looked pretty much normal. She would never have guessed they were followers of a weird alien cult, not in a million years.
She sighed as she watched the Doctor get drawn into a game of cards with Priest Kalling. She had to take a note from his book; whatever weird beliefs these future people had, they were still all just people. Misguided, perhaps, but human, like her. They weren't Daleks, forced to obey strict genetic programming, and they hadn't even been brainwashed in any evident way. There had to be a way to get through to the people of this place, to make them see exactly what they were. It wouldn't be easy, but then, life with the Doctor never was.
Jack sat up hopefully when the door opened. His stomach had growled non-stop for the last couple of hours, and it was about time Sam came back with dinner. It turned out that thinking really took it out of you.
Not that he'd gotten very far. So far, all he had done was rule out possibilities, including escaping out of a window, and climbing onto the roof. He had come to the conclusion that Sherlock Holmes didn't know what he was talking about; when you ruled out all impossibilities, nine times out of ten all you were left with was a serious headache and a nagging sense of existential dread.
Twice he'd got up, picked up the phone again, and dialled the first few digits of Martha's number before hanging up. He couldn't risk her mobile being traced, and the safety of her and the Doctor put at risk. If they were captured too, all three of them were screwed. No matter how badly he wanted to hear their voices again, he had to rely on them from afar, and do his best to lie low.
Eventually, he resigned himself to scrawling notes and diagrams on a scrap of paper, biting his lip and cursing when his plans came to an inevitable cul-de-sac. He'd managed to fill a waste paper bin with balls of paper before the door finally creaked open.
"Hey, did you bring me a sandwich?" he called, before he realised anything was amiss.
"Sedate him," said a cold, low voice.
Three enforcers entered the room, followed by a thin, upright woman with a mane of white hair and a clinical expression. Jack started up from the floor, but two of the enforcers pushed him down again. He could have taken them both at once, given the chance, but the third struck exactly like a snake, stabbing him in the shoulder with a hypodermic needle. Almost at once he felt his mind slide away from reality, and everything became a blur. He didn't fall unconscious, but his limbs wouldn't obey his commands, and he was powerless to resist as he was hoisted to his feet, and dragged to the doorway.
The corridors they walked down meshed into one incomprehensible memory, and part of him knew he was never going to find his way back to Sam's room on his own. They went down several flights of stairs, through some very ornate rooms, and finally up some more stairs to the medical facility. As they laid him down on an examination table, the effects of the sedative began to wear off. He attempted to drop off the table , but his movements were still sluggish. He received another large dose of the sedative, and the room swirled in front of his eyes, the colours merging into each other, and he forgot why he was so upset about being here in the first place. Come to think of it, he was quite content to lie here. He settled back with a faint smile on his face.
The woman moved into his line of vision, her face and clothes smeared horribly to Jack's eye. She had her arms folded, and a pair of glasses perched on her nose.
"My name is Dr Scott," she said. "I'm a psychiatrist. It is my belief that there is something inherently wrong with the minds of those who do not admit to the divinity of the Light. It is my job to diagnose and cure such individuals."
"…S'nice," said Jack.
"Yes," she said. "It is. I enjoy my job a lot. I haven't found many answers yet, but I'm beginning to work out what all the right questions are. I think you'll be able to help me considerably."
Jack didn't say anything. His body was already breaking down the sedative chemical again, and he felt nauseous, confused, and irritated. He knew that within the last ten minutes he had been both furious and elated, and now he couldn't remember which was normal, and which was drug induced. Which sensations was he trying to fight?
One of the enforcers was standing at his shoulder with a third loaded syringe. Jack decided that, for now, it was best to lie still and not give him an excuse to use it.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eyes, and a fuzzy image in the corner of the room slowly resolved itself into a small, slim figure. The seer walked to the head of the table, so that Jack had to crane his neck to see her, and placed her hands palms-down on either side of his head.
"We should strap him in, miss," said one of the enforcers nervously.
"No," said the seer. "I'm going to attempt to get deep enough to illicit some control over his muscles. Such a one as this could be very useful to me. I will be fine."
Dr Scott prepared another injection for Jack, this time containing a blue liquid he didn't recognise. "I will be asking you some questions when this session is over," she informed Jack. "So please concentrate hard on anything you may see or feel. I'm about to administer a synaptic lubricant, which will increase your mental awareness, and is mixed with a drug to impair voluntary muscle movement. This will be temporary, and it will have unpleasant side-effects." She grinned suddenly, a flash of lightning in an otherwise tepid grey sky. "This," she said, "is not my problem."
Jack shut his eyes as she injected him, trying to compile a list of all the things he knew were real. He held the Doctor and Martha firmly in his mind, and remembered how he felt towards them. Martha, smart and funny, easily a match for her older male companions. He pictured her face, the way her eyes sparkled when faced with a new world, or an interesting problem. Her hair, her clothes, the curves of her body, all the way down to her shoes. He thought about what she was, the essence of her, and kept her firm in his mind. There was no way these people were taking her from him.
And the Doctor. They had tried that already, turning Jack against him, but he felt a now familiar bolt of fear at the possibility they would try again, and succeed. He was unprepared last time; this time he could fight it. He would not doubt his Doctor again, even for a moment.
He slipped unconscious, and all hell was let loose.
Martha found the Doctor outside, in the back garden. The sun had set more than an hour before, the sky was black to the east, and faded to dingy grey in the west. It was a clear night, free of cloud-cover, and Martha could see a vast plethora of stars spread like a buffet table before her and the Doctor, ready and waiting for them to pick whatever took their fancy. It wasn't an unfamiliar sight, but even to someone who had travelled to distant galaxies, it was humbling and breath-taking in equal measures.
The Doctor had his hands in his pockets, his feet placed a little apart, his face turned towards the heavens. Martha stepped up beside him. She wondered what went through his mind when he looked up at the celestial display. The Doctor walked amongst the stars every day of his life. How could he find anything up there besides the tedium of everyday life?
But of course, tedium and the Doctor didn't mix. Martha could see in his eyes that as he looked up, he also looked inwards, remembering the thousands of stories he had lived and would never tell her about.
The Doctor didn't move, but very quietly he murmured under his breath.
"The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not."
"What's that?" she said, wracking her brains. "…Shakespeare again?"
"John. Chapter one, verse five."
"I didn't know you'd read the Bible."
"I've read lots of things you wouldn't believe. It was me who corrected the spelling in the Karma Sutra."
Martha laughed. "Yeah, right. I bet you'd blush just being in the same room as a copy."
"Nah. Man of the world, me."
"Right. That's why you go bright pink when Jack flirts with you, like a kid with his first crush."
"Oi!"
"It's kind of cute," she said. "But pathetic too. I just wish you wouldn't lie all the time."
"What am I lying about?" he asked, genuinely perplexed.
"This whole mysterious, untouchable alien thing, like you're not capable of falling in love with a human. Face the facts, you don't have some precious chastity vow, and it isn't species bias. You're just pain old scared that it won't be roses and walks in the park for the rest of eternity. Well, I've got news for you; everyone feels like that. Even Jack."
He shifted his feet on the grass, and was silent for a long moment. Martha wondered if she had gone too far. Technically, any relationship between her companions was none of her business, but she was the one who had to live with the tension and the anxiety, and Jack's pathetic chat-up lines, and she wasn't going anywhere until she made the Doctor realise how silly he could be at times.
"I met John," he said eventually. "The 'disciple whom Jesus loved'. Funny sort of chap, not your usual stodgy old writer of religious texts. Had a penchant for mushrooms. Very specific mushrooms, mind, not just any old fungus. Very peculiar. Lived in a cave, hated the Romans, but mind you, so would I if I was an early Christian and the empire was all out of kit-e-kat."
"You're saying the writer of the Gospel according to John was some kind of first century hippie?"
"Ooh, yes. I can see him having a whale of a time at Glastonbury."
"So he wasn't very… Christian, then?"
"Not by modern standards. Daft bloke. Kept trying to seduce me."
"Ah," said Martha.
"He believed though. Really believed, and it wasn't just the mushrooms talking. He actually, genuinely thought Christ was the son of god, and took the whole thing literally. And now people take is writings word-for-word. His other text to make it into the Bible was Revelation, and that's barking mad too., but there are people who believe every word, and have faith that what he wrote will one day come to pass."
Martha frowned as she tried to keep up. "You're making the point that people forget it was just other humans that wrote the Bible?"
"No, that should be obvious. I'm making the point that people base their entire lives on the scribblings of a delusional little addict and his palls, and don't realise that very few of the Bible's authors ever clapped eyes on Jesus. Most were born long after he died. People put so much effort into faith, effort they could otherwise use to change the world. But no. Instead of packing up some food and buying a ticket and flying to Africa to feed the starving, they get down on their knees, mutter under their breath, and think they're making a tangible difference, all based on the words of a bunch of people I wouldn't trust to make me a sandwich – people who went around breaking most of the rules the religion they founded is supposed to uphold."
Martha made an educated guess. "And Jack?"
"Has a faith in me that won't hold up if I let him get any closer than he is now."
"But I've never seen you eat a mushroom. Even a normal one."
He smiled sadly. "Martha, there are a dozen very good reasons why I don't do domestics, and they aren't all for my benefit. I don't enforce my own rules on myself because I feel like it. Just because Jack makes me want to break every single one of them, it doesn't mean that I should."
Martha folded her arms and brought her gaze back down to Earth. There was a patch of nocturnal flowers in the garden, their leaves half-way through unfurling to reveal deep scarlet petals to the murky night. Brilliant colour where few creatures were equipped to see it; an evolutionary throwback, she knew, to a time before the plant developed its backwards cycle. The colour was useless, but that didn't make it any less beautiful to Martha.
"I had a friend in college," she said, "who was really religious. Tasha, her name was. She used to help out at a Sunday School, said her prayers every night. You know. Everything."
"That's nice," said the Doctor, his eyes still fixed on the starscape.
"Yeah," said Martha. "Except she took a theology and RE course at college. They taught her all that stuff about the old biblical figures, and the opposition the church faces from scientists, and all about the different religions. How they're all just as convinced they're right as each other."
She knelt in front of the flower bed, her back to the Doctor, and watched as a small brown moth kissed lightly at the half-opened flower nearest her. It didn't seem to mind the plant's weird habits; in fact, she supposed, to a moth this plant was perfect. Two different organisms hat spent their lives in dark places, evolving to fit perfectly with each other.
"Must have been a kick in the teeth," said the Doctor, distantly.
"Yeah, it really hurt her at first. She was down for ages. Thing is, though, she eventually realised none of that stuff mattered. Despite everything her teachers told her about her religion, no matter how much people in the past screwed up, she still had the exact same faith she started with. She still believed, even stronger than before."
"Stubborn," said the Doctor."
"Yeah."
"Stupid, some might say."
Martha shrugged. "She was happy. Does it matter if she chose to ignore a few details?"
The Doctor's gaze snapped down to her level, and he stared for a long moment.
"Yes," he said eventually. "Ignorant and happy isn't something to aspire to."
Suddenly, Martha was angry. She didn't even try to hold back the annoyance in her tone. "Oh, so miserable know-it-all is better, is it?"
His expression remained mild. "Yes."
"Yeah, well, maybe for you, but human beings work a bit differently. We can't have all the answers, so we make do with the best we can get. And yeah, we get it wrong a lot, but at least we're capable of things like romance and optimism. Sometimes that mask you wear slips too far, and I can see what's underneath, and it terrifies me, Doctor. Maybe you should stop trying to change us, and let us change you for once!"
He held her gaze for a moment, then he turned on his heel, and headed back into the high priest's house. Martha grit her teeth in frustration.
"You – you alien!" she shouted after his retreating back, but he did not look round. The back door closed behind him with a very final thud.
Martha growled in frustration, and kicked out at an undeserving plant pot. The moth, startled, fluttered up into the air in a panicked spiral. She watched it for a while. She had read an article about how moths found it difficult to navigate because of artificial lighting, and it occurred to her how very self-centred intelligent life could be.
With a deep sigh, she made her own way back to the house. Apparently a room was being prepared for them. She didn't much fancy sharing with the Doctor tonight, not if he was going to be in one of his moods, but she desperately needed to sleep.
The last of the sunlight bled out of the world. Alone at last, the little brown moth settled back on the flower, which was now fully-unfurled, and continued to feed.