Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [105]
Once the guards had left the cell, the Doctor rolled over on to his front, and tried to examine the equations again. But even the parts he could see didn’t make much sense to him. Not enough energy left, he told himself. Not enough strength for his nerves to start soaking up the numbers, let alone to propel himself back into the rest room of the TARDIS. Besides, the great work didn’t work. So what was the point?
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said, addressing his imaginary audience again. ‘I’m just here to die for all the wrong reasons.’
* * *
Midnight
After a while, he realised he was out of options, and settled down to sleep.
* * *
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
AFTERNOON ON THE FIRST DAY
The sun was going down now. All morning, I.M. Foreman had seen the deer gathering in little groups at the edge of the woodland clearing, peering at the Doctor while he told his story. They probably thought he was there for their own amusement.
And perhaps they were right. After all, most Time Lords liked to think of themselves as gods when they were dealing with the lesser races. To a Time Lord, there wasn’t much difference between a deer and a human(ish) being like herself. Why should she believe that she was the one the Doctor had come here to see, just because she could hear his words in her own language?
Then again, she was a lot more complex than the average human being. More complex than the Doctor, even. It was easy to forget a thing like that, when you were wearing a body as weak as hers.
But the Doctor had stopped talking now, and his eyes had settled on the ashes in the middle of the clearing. I.M. Foreman had lit a small fire there, purely for the atmosphere it brought to the place. You needed a fire to tell a good story. She wasn’t sure where she’d got that idea from, exactly. Just one of the many cultural prejudices she’d soaked up over the years.
‘I’m guessing this isn’t how the story ends,’ she told the Doctor. ‘With you in a cell and Fitz in a completely different time zone. I mean, unless there’s a really strange narrative device at work here.’
‘We’re about halfway through,’ said the Doctor, in the softest of all his voices. The deer started blinking at him on the edges of the clearing.
‘You want to carry on?’
The Doctor paused for a moment. ‘It’s hard,’ he said, once he’d thought things through. ‘I’ve never had to tell anybody one of my adv– one of my life stories before. Not in full. It’s amazing how much detail there is.’
He didn’t seem to want to add anything to that. Either he was tired out, or he’d just run out of words. So I.M. Foreman stood, and stretched, trying to ignore the creaking noises from the bones in her legs.
‘I’ll tell you the bit of the story I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘It’s that thing about you not having a shadow. When did that start?’
The Doctor lowered his eyes, quite possibly out of embarrassment. ‘A few months before Sam went back to Earth. It was while we were in the twenty‐first century. Another meeting with Faction Paradox, actually.’
‘The Faction’s people don’t have shadows either, do they?’
‘Some of them don’t. I think it depends how close to Paradox they’ve been.’
‘So if you don’t have a shadow, then that means…?’
The Doctor shifted his weight from one skinny buttock to the other. A very human kind of discomfort, in I.M. Foreman’s view. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Perhaps the Faction’s people took my shadow away deliberately, just to worry me. It’s the kind of tactic you’d expect from them. Nothing’s more important to them than aesthetics.