Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [99]
Intertwined with all this technology, smothering it, communing with it, becoming it, was what the Doctor had come to think of as the Xaranti queen.
It was not a quantifiable life-form as such, but a vast formless entity, an accumulation of the thoughts and emotions and memories of myriad races made flesh. The stuff it was made from was not solid, but free-flowing like liquid glass, iridescent patterns constantly swirling within it. It oozed and curled above and in front of the Doctor, aspects of the many different races whose minds it had absorbed over the years forming briefly within the malleable stuff of its being, as if attempting to break free, before sinking back into the flux. The Doctor saw eyes and claws and mouths; the suggestion of a fur-covered limb; a patch of warty flesh. The impressions were too swift and too vague for him to recognise any of the species depicted, but each and every one of them looked briefly familiar.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said as the ‘queen’ coiled and rippled.
‘Any chance of a chat?’
The stuff quivered and then bulged in front of him, a vast bubble forming on its surface. The Doctor imagined it bursting and spattering him with goo, but he stood his ground.
The bubble elongated, formed into a gluey tentacle which probed almost hesitantly towards his face. It halted a few feet away from him and almost immediately the tip began to thicken and swell, as if the tentacle were a hollow tube and more of the stuff was being pumped through it.
Slowly, at the end of the tentacle, a shape began to form.
The effect was like an impressive display of glass-blowing.
The shape started as a blob, which eventually extended limbs of its own before beginning to acquire definition. Within minutes a perfect but featureless humanoid form stood in front of the Doctor, though, like a new-born, remained attached to the main body of the ‘queen’ via a clear gel-like umbilicus.
The figure could have been constructed from clear glass and filled with colourless, constantly moving oil if it wasn’t for the facial features which drifted haphazardly within it, incessantly forming and fading and re-forming, as if attempting to settle on the correct location. Eyes of many different shapes and hues, as many as a dozen at a time, blinked lazily from the flux of the creature’s being. Several mouths suddenly opened in the figure’s limbs and torso, and one even opened in its head, albeit from the area where its left eye would normally be.
The mouths spoke in unison, though each used a different voice. There was a gruff male voice; a lilting female one; another that was sexless and sibilant. ‘I trust that this form meets with your approval, Doctor?’ the figure said.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘I never judge by appearances.’
The mouths smiled. ‘Then that is something we have in common. To we Xaranti, all forms, all species, have something to offer us. We celebrate the great variety of life forms in the Universe.’
The Doctor’s face hardened. ‘That’s not the same thing at all. You don’t appreciate variety for its own sake. You celebrate it only because of what it adds to yourselves. By recreating other species in your own image, you’re making mockery of life, denigrating the essence that makes each race unique.’
‘We liberate other species, Doctor,’ the figure said. ‘We do not destroy them. They grow stronger through us.’
‘No,’ the Doctor snapped, his face flushing with anger. ‘You don’t liberate, you enslave. You absorb their individuality into this great repository of yours and turn them into mindless drones, creatures driven by nothing more than negative rudimentary emotions and a basic hive mentality. Conquest through absorption. It’s what