Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [72]
And there’d been a city, on the TV screen. Not a real city. Not a human city. Not even Singapore looked like that.
The phone rang again. Llewis ignored it. It’d just be Peter bloody Morgan, insisting on coming down here to Esher, to take credit for everything Llewis had done. If he’d done anything. Well, Peter bloody Morgan could have it all. The brochures, the hotel room, the Cold, everything. Alan Llewis had better things to do with his life than this. He was in pretty good shape, for an overweight forty‐three‐year‐old. He’d find something else. Bus driving, there was a good, solid job.
For the first time in almost twenty‐four hours, Llewis walked over to the door and opened it. It was time to check out. For good.
Guest was standing on the other side of the threshold, his hand raised, as if preparing to knock. He looked surprised when Llewis opened the door, as did his two companions.
‘Mr Llewis,’ said Guest. ‘We were worried about you.’
* * *
‘When Faction Paradox found the colony, they were… how can I put it? “Overwhelmed”? I mean, they’d seen TV before, but they’d never seen a culture that media‐friendly. Just think. The loa are supposed to be all‐powerful symbols, remember? They’re supposed to be real and not‐quite‐real at the same time. You can’t touch them, but you can pick up signals from them. And can’t you say exactly the same thing about TV celebrities? About movie stars? About pop stars? About DJs, even?
‘The Faction thought so, anyway. As far as they were concerned, they’d finally found a world on their own wavelength. A world run by the loa.
‘A world of symbols. Perfect for them.
‘So Faction Paradox started worming its way into the planet’s media. Interfering with the local transmissions, planting its followers inside the medianet. Soon, the TV loa were supporting a whole new agenda. Inside a couple of years, the Faction’s message had got into the minds of the whole population. The Faction hoped the Time Lords wouldn’t notice, that was the point. The cultists thought that if the natives built their own time machines, without any over‐the‐counter help, the High Council wouldn’t think anything was wrong. Besides, by then the Time Lords had got themselves involved in a war of their own, so they already had a lot on their minds.
‘The Faction was wrong. Again. Even though most of the High Council’s people were busy fighting the war, they still had agents keeping an eye on things around space‐time, looking out for trouble. I mean, if anything, the war had made the Time Lords even dirtier than before. Even more paranoid. When they took action against the colony, it wasn’t nice, believe me.
‘So, the Faction moved on again. The cultists managed to get a few of their followers off the planet, and whisk them off to safety. Some of the colonists were sent out into space, to find new planets for themselves. But most of them were given a new home by the Faction, somewhere they knew the Time Lords wouldn’t think of looking for them.
‘The new home was called Anathema. It wasn’t the voodoo paradise you’d have expected, though.
‘There were hardly any of the original cultists left by now. Hardly any who really knew what Paradox was, or what the cult had been about. After a couple of years, all the real hard‐core Faction people moved on again, and left behind a whole culture of zombies – that’s another Haitian word, remember – who still carried all the cultural baggage of Faction Paradox around with them, but who had no idea what any of it meant. Anyway, it hardly mattered, not to them. They had their transmissions. That was all they needed.
‘That’s right. Once upon a time, the Faction thought these people were going to be their frontline troops. Loa‐driven soldiers who’d bring down the whole High Council of Time Lords one day. But the truth is, even if the Remote still believe in what the Faction taught them, they can’t remember why. I mean, they can’t even remember how the time‐travel rituals are supposed to work.
‘That should answer all your questions, for now.
‘What?