Doctor Who_ Beyond the Sun - Matthew Jones [49]
There was much evidence of hurried repairs and welded sheets of dark-grey metal.
The ship hovered next to them for a moment, and then banked towards the huge orange sun, before shooting away in a blaze of white light, which left Emile’s eyes watering.
After a moment, the dirigible pilot’s voice came over the speaker again. He sounded terrified.
‘We’ll be making landfall in Anarray shortly. Weather and Sunless permitting, that is.’
10
CITY OF ANGELS
It took Bernice a little while to realize what made the city so different from any of the hundreds that she had visited before. She began to notice the differences when she tried to cross a road and looked without success for symbols or pedestrian lights. There were no instructions at all. No Give Way. No Stop. No Walk. No Don’t Walk. No lines on the road. No police. No traffic officers or parking meters. But then there were no cars to park on the roads. Only ancient buses trundled through the dusty streets, their steam-powered engines hissing and spewing clouds of vapour as they carried their uniformed passengers through the bustling, twisting roads.
None of the low-rise buildings bore signs, although most were elaborately decorated. There were no shops. If there had been a town planner, which Bernice rather doubted, then they must have been easily distracted and had the attention span of a toddler. Architectural themes lasted for a few streets, sometimes only a few buildings, before bleeding into new styles. Most of the buildings were single-storey, although some bore signs of aborted attempts at more levels. This, presumably, explained why the city sprawled, was so ungainly.
The people on the streets were of the same races as Bernice had seen in the village. Birds, reptiles, mammals. All wore the same style of grey uniform, but with bands of red around the chest, instead of yellow. There were few of the Sunless creatures on the streets, but Bernice had seen several Ursulans wearing the plain charcoal-grey uniforms of the Sunless. These were the collaborators, she’d learnt. They were always in groups, and Bernice imagined that she could see fear in their faces as they walked among the people they had betrayed. The tension when the collaborators were present was palpable. The rest of the people on the streets avoided eye contact with them. Occasionally they were shouted at, but only from a distance. Scott had spat on the ground when he had seen them.
The atmosphere of the city was full of tension as if it might erupt into violence at any moment.
It felt as if they were sitting on a tinderbox.
Bernice tried to imagine what life in the city must have been like before the Sunless came, before there had been collaborators, before there had been uniforms. It wasn’t easy to do, and time travelling was something Bernice had a great deal of experience at. All archaeologists did.
Piecing together the past with the fragments that had survived was the business of her profession.
In her imagination, she saw the people of the city dressed with the same individuality with which they decorated their buildings. Clashes of bright colours instead of the drab grey and disciplined hierarchy of stripes. It would have been chaotic, but she realized that she would have liked to have visited the city then.
Scott had a brother who lived in a large dormitory near the hospital. It was one of few multistorey buildings in the city. Unlike the single-room dormitory in the village, this one was made up of smaller rooms which contained a few double and single mattresses each. Once again there were few possessions to be seen, although all of the rooms had been painted with brightly coloured murals. The murals were amateurishly executed and covered with graffiti. Bernice thought of her carefully chosen prints in her cluttered rooms back at the university. It felt like a lifetime since she had been in her study and she felt an ache of homesickness.
Since she had arrived on the planet she had lost almost all of her possessions, salvaging only