Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [22]
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3
A Day in the Life
(18 August, somewhere a long way from London)
Where were we?
Oh yes.
We were here. Well, never mind. Let’s try not to dwell on that. Where were we before we were here? Say… oh… a couple of weeks before, that should be long enough.
In a darkened room. With the scent of cheap furniture. Air that’s been conditioned so many times, you can hardly taste the oxygen. In a darkened room, with the man called Coldicott.
The promo video ended. The screen in the corner of the dark room filled up with static.
The Doctor blinked a few times.
‘That was horrible,’ Sam said.
The Doctor folded his hands in front of his face. ‘Really? Why?’
‘It was an advert. It was just a great big advert. Only with aliens in it.’
Fitz yawned which was presumably his way of agreeing. Coldicott coughed just to remind them he was still in the room. ‘We think the big black guy’s their leader. Guest. He’s the one who talked to our people in Geneva. The one who wants a face‐to‐face.’
The Doctor thought about this for a while.
‘Two points,’ he said in the end. He stuck out a single finger, then pointed to it with his other hand. ‘One. They’re lying. They’re not interested in trade.’
‘What?’ In the darkness on the other side of the room, Coldicott shuffled his feet. ‘How can you… d’you recognise them or something?’
‘Shh. Listen. Trade‐dependent races are quite common in this galaxy. The Selachians are always trying to unload arms on planets like this one. The Mentors are even worse. And the Arcturans would sell their own souls, if they had any. But you heard the way the man in that video was talking. What did he say? “Transcultural interpersonal relations are always of benefit in an efficient free‐trade environment”?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’ asked Coldicott.
‘It’s gibberish,’ said the Doctor.
‘Uh.’
‘That isn’t the voice of someone who knows anything about interplanetary trade relations. It’s the voice of someone who’s swallowed too many books on interplanetary trade relations, and hiccuped them out with all the indexes missing.’
‘Good metaphor,’ drawled Fitz.
‘Thank you.’
Sarcasm? Hard to tell, with him. No, no, that isn’t important. Keep thinking. Keep thinking things through.
‘OK,’ said Coldicott. ‘So what’s the second point?’
The Doctor stared at his outstretched finger for a moment, trying to remember what it meant. ‘Oh yes. Point two.’ He stuck out the second finger. ‘They’re not aliens.’
‘What?’ said Sam.
‘What?’ said Coldicott.
‘What?’ Fitz tried to say, although he gave up halfway through the word and just made a little whirring noise to himself instead. Sam muttered something to him that sounded like ‘Are we keeping you up?’.
‘They’re humanoid, certainly,’ the Doctor went on. ‘But I’d go further than that. I’d say they’re actually human.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Coldicott protested. ‘They gave their, uhm, credentials to the UN in Geneva…’
‘Credentials?’ said Sam. ‘What, you mean they buzzed the place in a big UFO?’
‘Kind of. Look… how d’you know they’re not aliens? If they look humanoid –’
‘Syntax. They speak like humans.’ The Doctor held up his hand, to stop anybody picking holes in his nice clean argument. ‘That’s not unusual in itself. Any decent high‐grade culture can invent an automatic translator. But translators leave glitches in syntax. Little cultural gaps in their messages. You have to know what to listen out for but they’re there.’ He nodded towards the static on the screen. ‘Now, I think they were using translator technology to turn their words into twentieth‐century English. But even if the words needed translating, the syntax didn’t. The sentence construction suggests human thought processes. I’m talking about their casual conversation, not the bits about economics.’
Was that it? Was that the whole of the speech? There was more to it than that, surely? An almost surgical analysis