Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [5]
The Doctor gave up on the deer, and nodded. ‘Sam was a schoolgirl from London. That was what she was supposed to be, anyway. You remember London, don’t you?’
‘Mmm,’ said I.M. Foreman, hoping he’d interpret it as a ‘yes’.
‘Her timeline was altered,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Adjusted. By some very bad people with some very bad ideas. They shaped her into the perfect travelling companion, and planted her on board my TARDIS. Playing games with her timeline. Or maybe I was playing games with her timeline, and they were just the ones who made me realise it. It’s hard to say for sure.’ He paused for a moment or two, while the deer trotted off to find something more interesting to stare at. ‘Of course, that version of Sam wasn’t a bad person,’ the Doctor concluded. ‘Quite the reverse, in fact.’
‘Oh dear,’ said I.M. Foreman. ‘This isn’t going to be one of those stories where everybody meets versions of themselves from parallel universes, is it? Only I’ve had enough of that kind of thing recently. What with the bottle and everything.’
‘No no no. Nothing like that. By the time Sam decided to leave me, she was… the only version of Sam in existence, I suppose. The definite article. Dedicated. Vegetarian. Blonde. Naive, sometimes. But you’ve got to keep that one thing in mind. Whoever she was, however much I might have respected her, she only really existed because somebody wanted her to exist.’
‘The story so far,’ I.M. Foreman muttered.
The Doctor didn’t say anything for a while after that. He tucked his knees up in front of his body, and rocked backward and forward in the middle of the clearing, with his eyes fixed on the dead old leaves in front of him.
‘I want to tell you what happened on Earth,’ he said, a full five minutes into the silence. ‘Earth in 1996. Then we can go over what happened on Dust. I’m sure there’s something linking the two stories together. Even apart from the fact that some of the characters are the same.’
‘If you think it’ll help,’ said I.M. Foreman. ‘It’s not as long as The Lord of the Rings, is it?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s not quite that long.’
* * *
WHAT HAPPENED ON EARTH
(PART ONE)
We can see everything from here. We passed London a few moments ago, so now we’re looking down over the grass‐and‐motorway spaces between cities, heading out across suburban Britain at a height of well, the height doesn’t matter. Just remember that, when we say we can see everything, we mean everything. Somewhere in the future, the Doctor’s telling this story to I.M. Foreman on a grassy hilltop, but he’s giving her only the edited version. Just his own memories, and the things he was told after it was all over. Us? We’re seeing the bigger picture. All the scenes the Doctor never got the chance to appear in, and all the secrets he never managed to uncover. All the details he missed.
Now. Pay attention to that building down below, the big grey one by the side of the racetrack. We’re a few miles out from London now, and this is the place where the story’s due to start. It’s a bazaar, really. They call it a fair; an exhibition; sometimes even a convention, when they want to sound particularly hard‐edged and businesslike. They’ve put security people on the doors, security people on the roof, security people around every possible corner. They’ve cordoned off the building with bureaucracy, body searches, and – where necessary – threats, so the select few who are allowed through the metal‐detectors and into the main hall are sure to come with smart suits and serious intentions. But it’s still a bazaar, at heart, like one of those old marketplaces you read about in the Arabian Nights. The stalls are loaded with hardware, the hi‐tech fruits of faraway lands, and the atmosphere’s damp with a thousand varieties of male sweat.
There are guns that can fire off a dozen rounds in the blink of an eye, and suits of body armour specially designed to make those guns useless. There are riot shields that can send 40,000 volts through any dangerous animal or dangerous civilian who happens to get in the way,