Doctor Who_ Ghost Light - Marc Platt [60]
12
Beautiful Soup
A dark tapestry of fields and woodland was lit by the rising moon. The stone edifice of Gabriel Chase dwindled into the darkness as Light flew like a spinning meteor across the sky. Here and there, groups of dwellings clustered in the valleys where the dominant species, omnivorous like swine, set up their colonies. More than that, Light felt the endless motion and change of existence that it knew from many a world; yet in the whole universe, only one planet harboured such an abundance of multifarious life. Earth, as Light loathed to recall, also had a single empty satellite moon.
Light thought its flight faster, east towards the oncoming track of the sun. It raced the silver rope of a river, cutting through a great cityspread that smothered nature’s growth on its banks. Rows of lamps twinkled among the reeking chimneys. Carriages and engines trundled up and down their bustling courses. There was the smell of rusting iron and stagnant water. Yet even here, plants forced their way between the cracks, animals scurried through the waste-pipes and insects bred in the rotting heaps of refuse. And in the darkest gullies and alleys, the weakest humanesque denizens of the city huddled together in the filth for warmth, clutching their starving infants which squealed their right to survive.
Thinking itself even faster, Light’s path seared through swirls of flying insects and disturbed the swifts that slept on the wing. Far below, it saw the river spread wide into the sea. As it guessed, the water teemed with organisms of every genera through surface plankton and myriad shoals of fish to worms that squirmed in the slime deep below.
And these last creatures had not changed, not since the first time they were catalogued how many thousands of years ago?
With growing anger, Light sped beyond the edge of the mountainous seas and over the forests, crags and plains of a vast continent. Faster and faster its mind raced, but it knew by now. As it saw the first glow of the rising sun advancing to meet it over the Pacific, its thoughts turned back to Gabriel Chase.
In a flash of radiance that set the window blinds spinning, Light returned, filling the upper observatory with the angry drone of its aura. Nimrod saw its massive shape reform, as it folded back its liquid gold cloak like vast wings. Within the glow, its image trembled slightly, as if it now held only the most tenuous grip on its shape and its sanity.
With disgust, it whispered, ‘It’s still changing. Seething with life! Every plane and crevice crawls with it! It’s never ceased changing, evolving. But I still know the stench of its overripe, infested carcass. This is Earth. And it has seen its last day!’
Josiah looked at his gold hunter pocket-watch. Mrs Pritchard had correctly laid only three places for dinner, but Gwendoline was late and so was the guest.
The housekeeper and her two remaining servants waited by the red walls of the dining room. When Mrs Pritchard had entered the kitchen and found nothing prepared for the evening meal, she had come close to panic. She returned to the dining room and was astonished to discover that a tureen of dark brown soup had already been set on the table. There was no time to question its origins, but this was not the service to her master that she prided herself on. She consoled herself with a dark suspicion that dinner would not last beyond the first course. She was a loyal servant, but if Josiah was destroyed, surely the house would remain. Would that mean any more for her than a simple change of masters?
Light would come soon. It had accepted Josiah’s invitation. It needed him. And he could brazen it out. He was human now. The innumerable forms, in which he, the Survey Agent, had catalogued innumerable worlds for Light, were things of the past. Earth was where he belonged. He had evolved to his own requirements, not Light’s: