Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [131]
The future. Was that supposed to be the future?
The grey lump – the If – had breathed on her, and she’d felt the hormones from its body sweep over her skin. Pushing her along her own timeline, then bringing her back again. That was it, wasn’t it? The creature had raw time in its body. I.M. Foreman had said that each of the performers specialised in something different, and the If had obviously specialised in time, so…
…so that was silly. You couldn’t change your body to make yourself breathe time. Even the Doctor couldn’t do a thing like that. Besides, the thing in front of her wasn’t, couldn’t have been, human.
She found herself staring at it again. It might have stared back, if it had owned a face. Sarah opened her mouth to speak, then wondered if she’d be able to deal with an entire conversation, if a simple ‘hello’ from the creature had been enough to throw her that far into her own future.
So she started to back away, keeping her eyes on the little grey blob as she went. Absurdly, she felt like saying goodbye to it, as though it’d be rude to leave the thing’s presence now it had started talking to her.
Oh, bother it. Why not?
‘G–’ she began.
There was a church hall, or something like a church hall. You could tell what it was just by the air, the smell of parquet flooring and old scoutmasters. Sarah didn’t feel she was actually there, even though she could see the place. It was more like television than real life. Not that there were any cameras in the hall of course, not with so many ‘sensitive’ people around. Sarah couldn’t focus on them properly, but she could sense their presences all around her. She got the feeling that a lot of them were UNIT staff while some of them belonged to… well, another organisation entirely.
Sarah tried to work out what that organisation could be. Not military, by the look of them. By the feel of them, rather. Part of some political movement, maybe? You could tell them apart by the little black seedlings they wore on their lapels, dark petalled flowers that had somehow been frozen in time just before they’d blossomed. What the seedlings were supposed to represent Sarah couldn’t say.
There was a stage at one end of the hall. Someone was standing there, reading a speech to the crowd, although most of the people in the hall were staring at their shoes instead of looking dead ahead. Sarah realised that she knew the speaker, even though she couldn’t put a name to the face. It was her best friend, the one she’d been talking to in the pub in 1999. The speaker was wearing one of those black seedlings, just like the people Sarah couldn’t quite identify.
‘I had more in common with Sarah than anyone thought,’ the speaker told the crowd. ‘And that includes the Doctor. The Doctor never really understood me properly. He thought I was just another messed‐up teenager. He thought I wanted to tag along with him so I could spread my teenage angst all over the universe. He was wrong, though. It was only when I said goodbye to him that I think he figured that out. The bottom line is, whatever I said about saving the world, the real reason I wanted to see the universe was because I thought it was bright and funny and exciting. I was like a six‐year‐old who’d been let loose on the galaxy. And so was Sarah. That was Sarah exactly.’
Goodbye.
This was how the If said goodbye. It was showing her the big goodbye, using part of her own future instead of words. Difficult to miss the message, really.
Except that if she really had seen the future…
Sarah suddenly realised that her jaw was hanging open, and that her vocal cords had frozen up in mid‐word.
‘–oodbye,’ she said, hurriedly. Then she turned her back on the grey thing, and rushed out of the tent.
This time, she headed straight for the exit of the travelling show. She didn’t need to see anything else here.
*