Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [1]
I think the word I’m looking for is ‘fable’.
– L.M.
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Editor’s Note
It’s a big, nasty Universe out there. A storm’s been building in the life of the Eighth Doctor, and in the story you’re about to read, it begins to break.
The next few books in the range of Eighth Doctor adventures are linked a little more closely than usual, as the nature of things – of far‐reaching things – gradually becomes clear.
In the meantime, we forego normal service in favour of Interference.
– Steve Cole, Consultant Editor
May 1999
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Utopia n. any state, real or imaginary, considered to be perfect, ideal, or beyond corruption. [C16: Coined by English statesman Sir Thomas More, as the title of his book describing an imaginary ideal island‐state. Literally: no place, from Greek ou ‘not’ and topos ‘a place’.]
Dawson’s English Dictionary, 1993.
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Marshal McLuhan once said that some day there’ll be so much information in the world that our culture will collapse in on itself and become a single ultradense unit of human experience. J.G. Ballard once said that our lives are so ruled by fiction, by advertising culture and television politics, that original thought is no longer possible and anything we might say or do will already have been pre‐empted by the media. And James Stewart once said that his best friend was an invisible six‐foot rabbit in a suit. But he was an actor, so he was allowed to say things like that.
This book is dedicated to anyone who wants it to be dedicated to them. Especially Andrew Vogel, who changed the whole direction of the plot with one carelessly chosen sentence.
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FOREMAN’S WORLD:
MORNING ON THE FIRST DAY
It might have been an imaginary story, because stories like this quite often are. But if any of it could be called real, in a continuum where parallel universes and alternate states of being were ten a penny, then it would have started something like this:
I.M. Foreman was sitting on the grass at the top of the hill, where the breeze was strong enough to blow through her hair, but somehow not strong enough to carry the smell of the animals up from the fields. She was resting her back against the tree she’d planted there, with her legs crossed underneath her, while the most valuable object in the galaxy (arguably, anyway) nestled in the grass nearby. Right now, however, the most valuable object in the galaxy didn’t interest her much. There were more important things happening in the world, and they were happening down in the valley.
There was a woodland down there, past the fields at the bottom of the hill, past the rows of corn that I.M. Foreman knew full well wouldn’t ever be harvested. There were trees from fifty different ecosystems growing in the woodland, but the planet had made sure that they matched each other perfectly, at least from an aesthetic point of view.
So the thing that had materialised at the edge of the woodland stuck out like a sore thumb. I.M. Foreman knew it had to be a TARDIS, even before it had finished wheezing its way into the world. And the man who finally stepped out of the vessel, sniffing the air with his chest puffed out and his hands behind his back, just had to be the Doctor. A quick look at his biofields told I.M. Foreman that, even though he didn’t look anything like the man she remembered.
Either he’s regenerated, she told herself, or my memory’s worse than I thought.
She sat back, letting her head go limp against the bark of the tree, and watched the Doctor get his bearings. He spent the first few moments peering around the valley, shading