Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [81]
SAM: You’re not really Mark Lessing at all, are you?
MARK: How d’you know?
SAM: You’re mainly using complete sentences. And you’re not slobbering.
MARK: Oh yeah.
* * *
When Sam came back out of the static, she found herself back in the dome. It took her a while to work out that it was actually a different dome, identical in every detail. Not that there were many details for it to be identical in, mind you.
Compassion stood just outside the doorway, looking up into the sky. Sam followed her out of the building, the static window folding itself up into nothing behind her with a little ‘pfop’ sound.
As soon as she stepped outside, she knew they’d reached the surface of Anathema. They stood at the edge of an enormous circular plaza, paved with flawless slabs of pale subluminous blue, the perimeter ringed by identical white domes. There were people crossing the plaza, moving between the domes, stepping on to walkways that curled around the edge of the area and linked up with the wider roadways overhead. The natives’ clothes were just like the buildings. All different colours, all different styles, but somehow co‐ordinated, products of the same basic culture.
Products of the same mass mind, maybe. Different, but inspired by the same transmissions.
So was this the way Earth looked, to an outsider?
Sam realised that, like Compassion, a lot of the passers‐by were gawping up at the sky. She raised her head, and was just in time to see the explosion, as the first of the fighters collided with the platform a hundred metres overhead and about the same distance across the city. The fighter wasn’t even scratched. The ships hung around for a while, circling the area until the wreckage had fallen to the ground, then shot away. Sam wondered if the wreckage would hit anybody, and if anyone would care if it did.
A few of the onlookers politely applauded.
‘It’s not possible,’ said Sam.
Compassion’s head snapped around to cover her. Her eyes were still blank, and she wasn’t blinking half as much as she was supposed to be.
‘Everything’s random,’ Sam told her. ‘You can’t have built a city this complex. Not if the signals are as meaningless as you say they are.’
‘We’re only human,’ said Compassion. ‘We’ve got the same drives as anyone else. We need to live. To form communities. It’s all part of our neural hardware. You can’t be that different from us.’
‘But the transmissions –’
‘Tell us how to develop our culture. You only need a few basic guidelines to build a civilisation.’
‘Ants build anthills,’ Sam muttered.
Which was when Compassion hit her.
It wasn’t a proper punch, not one designed to do damage. More like a big slap. Sam wasn’t quite quick enough to stop it connecting. Her face stung, and she staggered backward, back into the dome.
When she looked up, Compassion was just standing there staring at her. The woman didn’t look as though she knew why she’d done it. She didn’t look as though she cared, either.
‘We’d better go,’ Compassion said. It sounded like the closest thing to an apology she could manage. Then she turned her back on Sam, and started to walk away across the plaza.
She made no attempt to drag Sam along. There were no guards here, no security measures. Sam wondered what would happen if she ignored Compassion’s request, and just went off on her own. Nothing at all, probably. She’d get lost, and that would be about the size of it. She’d wander around Anathema until something decided to kill her, purely on a whim.
So Sam followed. Maybe, she thought, this was how the Remote felt all the time. No coercion, no pressure. Simply following whatever leads they were given, because there was nothing better to do.
She might have expected more from a culture that thought war was a colossal waste of time. But maybe that would have been overly optimistic.
* * *
Travels with Fitz (V)
The Faction Paradox Warship, 2594
All initiations were basically the same. Fitz had read enough of the literature to know the essentials, whether you were dealing with Freemasons, black‐magic cults or the Chinese Red