Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [113]
‘Read me,’ said the man, with a kind of seriousness in his voice that Magdelana wouldn’t have thought possible until that moment. ‘Look at my DNA. Look at my biodata. Look at anything you like, then match it with your records. See what they tell you.’
And they were doing it, as well. Magdelana could hear the buzzing Under the Remote’s masks, the signals being pumped in and out of their heads from whatever settlement they called home. She could tell something was wrong. The riders were shifting in their saddles, and the horses started stomping their hooves in sympathy.
Then the sun came back out. The black thing was moving away from the light, turning the riders into silhouettes again. The Remote soldiers were staring at each other, as if they were searching each other’s face for new transmissions. Whatever they’d seen in the blind man’s genes, it’d got them worried.
‘Adjustment of strategy,’ the first of the riders declared.
That was all either of them said before they turned their horses in a neat half‐circle, and rode off into the desert.
* * *
For the next few minutes, Magdelana stood and watched as the Remote vanished over the horizon. When she turned again, the blind man was standing in front of one of the gateposts, plastering something over the wood. It was a poster, by the look of it. The man was putting up a poster.
She hobbled over to the man, and stopped at his side. He was whistling as he smoothed the poster over the gatepost, although Magdelana wasn’t sure what was keeping the paper up.
‘Saved my life,’ she said. She couldn’t think of a better way to start the conversation.
‘Probably,’ said the man. ‘Is it important?’
Magdelana had to think about that.
‘One thing,’ she said, in the end.
‘Oh yes?’
‘We’ve got a satellite in this town. Keeps track of things for us. Keeps tack of the weather. Keeps track of the dust storms. Keeps track of everything.’
The blind man finished his work, and took a step back to admire the poster. ‘And?’
‘There was meant to be an eclipse today. About eight o’clock. Satellite said so last night.’
The man turned to look at her, as well as he could.
‘Well, do I look like the kind of person who’d really carry a stellar manipulator around with him?’ he asked.
Then he turned away, and strolled back into the square. Magdelana watched him vanish into the streets before she fixed her eyes on the poster. She was supposed to stop people walking straight into town, of course. She was supposed to stop offworlders getting past the wall, at least unless they could prove that they had stock to trade and weren’t carrying any heavy firearms. That was the whole point of her being alive, as far as she could tell.
Somehow, though, she didn’t think it was worth getting in the way of the blind man.
The poster was printed in thick black ink, on paper that looked as though it had been left out in the sun for a couple of hundred years. It turned out to be an advertisement for a travelling show. Magdelana didn’t recognise the name at the top of the bill, but she guessed it belonged to the blind man.
‘“I.M. Foreman”,’ she said. For some reason, the name felt right at home on the end of her tongue.
* * *
2
Explain Earlier
(how times change)
The door shouldn’t have been there, the Doctor knew that much for certain. It wasn’t really the fact that the door hadn’t been there before that bothered him, seeing as the TARDIS quite often rearranged her interior spaces while she thought he wasn’t paying attention. But even if the old girl’s architecture wasn’t exactly stable, he still had a good enough feel for her internal workings to know when something was wrong. You didn’t have to be a doctor to tell when someone was sick, and you didn’t have to have a triple first in block‐transfer mathematics to know when a door was somewhere it shouldn’t have been.
He’d found the door in one of the more well‐worn TARDIS corridors, just a couple of turnings from the console room. It had been small, and apparently made out of wood, which hadn’t suited the rest of the decor at all.