Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [133]
Naturally, it was his ambition to add the Doctor’s head to the Collection, although he knew for a fact that it was never going to happen. The Doctor was far too big a target to end up in a menagerie like this one.
The oldest briefly wondered whether he’d still want to keep the Collection pinned to the walls, after the Remote had stolen the blind Gallifreyan’s TARDIS and used it to get off this planet. Somehow, he doubted it’d have the same appeal once he’d left Dust behind.
* * *
Meanwhile, at the town gate:
The Doctor had to put his arm in front of his face to keep the dust out of his eyes, but he did his best to keep his head up as he pushed against the wind. Magdelana had offered him a dust visor, but he’d refused. He wasn’t quite sure why he’d refused, actually. Probably something to do with his pride. His skin was still tender from where the coffee had scalded him, and the dust storm wasn’t helping the wound much. Magdelana herself was walking in front of him, with her shotgun still cradled between her fat cowhide gloves, leading the way out through the town gate. She was limping, the Doctor noticed. She looked old when she moved, a lot older than she’d claimed to be. She’d almost seemed ageless when she’d been sitting in her office, as if she’d been carved out of the same kind of rock that littered the deserts.
It was this planet, he realised. All living things ended up as dust, but this was one of the few places he’d seen that wanted to remind you of it every second of the day.
There’d still been one or two people out in the square when they’d left Magdelana’s office, fish‐eyed locals with desiccated skin and too many missing teeth. All of them had been heading the same way as the Doctor and Magdelana, out towards the travelling show, but none of them had been in any hurry to get there. It was hard to imagine anything hurrying on Dust. It was hard to imagine there being a point. Even the clock in the main square looked as if it was keeping time only out of a sense of sarcasm.
That was what disturbed the Doctor most of all. The way the dust took history away from you. Typical Time Lord, he told himself. Just goes to show what an Academy education can do to you.
Some part of him must have wanted to help this town, to save the people from the dust and the torpor and… and, well, just life here. But most of him didn’t care, and he found himself rather disturbed by that. All of a sudden, he felt terribly, terribly old. He could feel the wrinkles cutting into his face, the greyness spreading down from his hair and into his veins.
This regeneration had been good to him. There’d been bad times, as there always would be – yes, he’d been stuck on Earth for far too much of it – but the truth was that in this body, he’d enjoyed himself more than at any time since the pre‐Academy days. Driving Bessie around the UNIT training grounds, fiddling around under the bonnets of the Brigadier’s personnel transporters just to see what happened, practising martial arts with innocent young recruits who he knew full well wouldn’t understand the first thing about Venusian aikido (not that there’d been any such thing as Venusian aikido until he’d invented it, of course)…
Nobility. That was the word he was looking for. There’d been a nobility to the things he’d done in this incarnation, a sense of doing the right thing. The decent thing. The gentlemanly thing. Even when he’d been face to face with some of the most ridiculous megalomaniacs in history, it had felt more like a duel than a war. Maybe it was the clothes, he pondered. Ruffled shirts and smoking jackets, opera capes and velvet trousers. He’d adopted that style by accident, but for all he knew it had influenced this entire lifetime. He’d taken on the clothes of a romantic, and he’d ended up living in a romantic’s universe. A noble universe. An infinity of swashbuckling.
But the TARDIS was bleeding. Terrible, degrading