Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [122]
‘And here?’
‘Er, oh yes: “The visionaries will give themselves up to release the power beyond the sun”.’
‘You used a ’puter, right?’
Kitzinger nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. How did you know?’
‘Me too. Software must employ similar interpretative strategies. It hasn’t got to grips with the syntax at all. It got the words partially right, but the ordering of words is all wrong. I mean anyone can see it doesn’t make sense.’
‘That’s what I thought when Nikolas first suggested that the figurine was the visionary, because how could a statue have a vision?’
Bernice nodded. ‘One thing is clear: they are not referring to the crystal representations.’
‘Representations’?’ Iranda snorted.
‘That’s right.’ Bernice nodded, completely ignoring the woman’s dismissive tone. ‘They aren’t the visionaries – only the representations of them.’
Iranda smiled coldly, as if she knew what was coming and didn’t like it. ‘Then what is?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? You are.’
Iranda swallowed down a wave of nausea. The Ache was so strong, she found it hard to concentrate on what Summerfield was saying. All she knew was that she had to have an end to the pain inside her. Nothing could distract her from the desperate need that every nerve in her body was expressing. A need for something.
Bernice’s words had stung her. Penetrated her as only truth could. They were the visionaries.
The visionaries will lead us out of the night.
And give themselves up for the power beyond the sun.
Give themselves up? No, she couldn’t accept that. She wouldn’t. Her mouth was dry, there was a roaring in her ears, and she had to shout to be sure that she was speaking at all.
Through the misty glass lenses of her respirator, Bernice watched as Iranda staggered back a few steps as if she had been punched.
‘You know nothing about this!’ the young woman yelled at her.
I know more than you, Bernice thought. Iranda was wrong. In that moment, she understood it all. She appraised the striking young woman carefully, thinking hard about her next words. Eventually she said, ‘I kept wondering why the super-villainess routine was so unconvincing. And now I know. It’s because you were just covering up the fact that you really don’t have any choice in any of this. You were pretending that you had chosen to search out the Blooms, to come here. You made a melodrama out of it in order to disguise the fact that you’ve just been following some kind of biological imperative. Just following orders.’
‘I’m still an Ursulan!’
‘No, but you’re not really, are you? You never were. You’re a child of the Blooms and the Blooms were programmed to make you years before the Ursu Group had even begun to dream of their world without rules.’
Kitzinger nodded. ‘That makes sense. The theft interrupted the process. If the companies hadn’t stolen the Blooms from here, the Ursu Group wouldn’t have been able to use them to set up the colony. The Blooms wouldn’t have been programmed to breed the Eights in the first place.’
‘But the two extra children from Scott’s Eight would still have been born. Only they would have been born here. Where they were intended to have been born. The visionaries ready to activate the device, and most importantly, to use their vision, the knowledge they had been programmed with, to prepare the civilization which existed then for the momentous moment.’
‘Then my family are all visionaries,’ Scott said suddenly. ‘And the dream is the vision.’
Bernice shrugged. ‘The Blooms had been programmed to produce the visionaries, but they were already in use when the programme was activated, so everything got a bit messed up.
Genes were mixed. The vision blurred when it was shared. It spilt over into all of your minds.’
Bernice sucked on her respirator for a moment, before walking towards Iranda. ‘I imagine that it must have been a bit difficult for you growing up in a society where freedom and choice were valued over everything.’ Iranda said nothing. ‘So here we all are. The device is primed. But the irony is you are going