Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [129]
In fact, whenever she found herself wandering close to one of the spaces in the crowd, she usually ended up looking the other way. Which made her wonder why she’d bothered coming, all in all. She felt no desire to see John Salt the Missing Link in close‐up, and the one brief glance she’d given to the Worm‐Boy was enough to tell her that she didn’t want to get any closer. In retrospect, the Worm‐Boy almost certainly hadn’t been as bad as she was starting to remember him, and she was fairly sure that his limbs couldn’t have been as stunted as they might have seemed, even if he’d obviously been born without any… well, even if he hadn’t needed a blindfold like I.M. Foreman’s.
The one thing the show people had in common was that none of them ever spoke, not to the crowds, and not even to each other. No repartee, no hoopla. She got the impression that I.M. Foreman had already said everything that needed to be said, that all the other performers had long ago decided there was no point adding anything to his patter. Human, Sarah reminded herself. They’d all started out as human beings, or at the very least as things like human beings. She wondered about that. The Doctor had known the name ‘I.M. Foreman’, which suggested… what? That the show people were Time Lords, too?
Well, it made a kind of sense. There had to be hundreds of them floating around the universe, so if anything it was surprising you didn’t run into them more often. For all Sarah knew, there could have been a gaggle of Time Lords interfering with the local culture on every planet in the galaxy. Already this week, the Doctor had claimed to be on speaking terms with Chairman Mao, and to have been the inspiration for the character of the Devil in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. (The Devil had owned a tiny little home with an infinite number of rooms, Sarah had remembered, which everybody else in the world had assumed was some kind of satire on housing in communist Russia. The Doctor had said it was the first time he’d been used as a political metaphor, and he hadn’t been sure whether he’d liked it.)
Eventually, she broke away from the crowds and came to a stop next to one of the saggy grey tents, where she got her breath back and watched the locals stumbling past. Yes, this place was sick. Yes, she didn’t want to have to watch any more of the star attractions, at least not without putting her hands in front of her face and squinting through her fingers. But it was alive, you couldn’t argue with that. However disgusting some of it looked, and however badly the performers may have mutilated themselves, here in the desert the show actually seemed to mean something.
It was, in short, exactly what the townspeople needed in their lives. The horror was making them whole.
So what was in it for I.M. Foreman? Why had the show people come here, if they didn’t even charge admission?
Sarah was so caught up in these thoughts that it took her a while to notice the obvious point. And the obvious point was this: hardly anybody was going near the tent where she was standing. Most of the tents had ugly little crowds forming around them, suggesting that this was one of those planets where people had never invented the noble art of queuing. But nobody seemed to be gathering here at all. Sarah watched the passers‐by a little more closely, and saw that the few who stuck their heads through the canvas flaps slouched