Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [76]
When she stopped moving, she found herself staring down at a city. A city whose highest buildings were a good fifty metres below her.
Sam froze. She stood there, still as a statue, and let her senses catch up with her body. She couldn’t see the ground. Somewhere, a long way down, there was an expanse of pure black – sure sign of a bottomless abyss, that – but most of the blackness was covered over with buildings. Thousands upon thousands of buildings. Not little buildings, not houses that had been piled together over generations, but great big statements, vast works of modern architecture, crisscrossing one another in a way that suggested they’d all been designed at the same time.
Sam raised her eyes a little, to take in the cityscape ahead of her. The city stretched out as far as the eye could see, before vanishing over a horizon that seemed much too close for comfort. And everything was grey. Not dull, office‐block grey, but a kind of bright, clean, futuristic grey. Space‐Lego grey, so the angles and curves of the buildings almost sparkled in the deep‐red light. Sam found herself focusing on the tallest of the structures, the great towers that were scattered across the city, sheer spikes of metal pushing themselves up out of the invisible ground. She remembered old movies she’d seen on BBC 2 before she’d left Earth, adventure stories made by the RKO film company, just like the voice in the Cold had said. She remembered the RKO logo, a stylised image of a transmitter tower, its peak burning with lightning. And she remembered the good old BBC news logo, too, another spire‐transmitter, concentric circles around its tip to symbolise the TV transmissions it sent out into the air.
That was it. That was what the towers were like. Like abstract shapes, like icons, not like real pieces of architecture at all. They were too smooth for that, too free of dirt and detail. And the other structures around them, the low pyramids and the squat tower blocks, were the same. There were buildings that looked like domes, but were actually stacks of pale circular plates hundreds of metres across, each level slightly smaller than the one below it. There were cylinder‐shaped blocks of housing, ringed by wide, flat, featureless balconies, cartoon radar dishes rotating on every rooftop. There were walkways strung between some of the towers, vast roadways that arced through the air, not supported by any visible pylons. Some of the structures evedapped the structures below them, making parts of the city look like enormous rock gardens, full of steps and valleys.
The city looked alien, but not for the usual reasons. Not because the architecture was vastly different from that of Earth, or because the buildings had been designed for anything other than humanoids. It was alien because it seemed to have been poured straight out of someone’s head, without needing to be crafted by their hands at any point point. The cityscape made Sam uncomfortable, itchy, the same way she would have felt itchy if a complete stranger had sat next to her on a bus and started telling her all his dirty secrets. After the first few seconds, she realised it wasn’t grey at all: there were a million colours on display, but the buildings were so precisely placed that the tones blended into each other, a kind of perfect uniformity created out of what should have been mindless, reckless individuality.
Then there was the sky. The sky was red – blood‐splatter red, not sunset red – but smudged with patches of black, dirty great fingerprints of smoke and thunder. And some of the clouds were moving, or at least, that was how it looked. But Sam was sure she was actually seeing things moving around inside the clouds, artificial shapes circling in the air overhead, making the whole sky come alive. Enormous shadows fell across the shine of the city, so you got the impression that the buildings were undulating, the surface rippling with black.
A seasick city. A city that shouldn’t have existed, that looked like a deliberate insult to conventional architecture, to every accepted law of