Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [97]
Frankly, he wasn’t sure what his standing was with Mother Mathara’s people right now. He’d been initiated into the Faction, shown glimpses of how their techniques worked, but over the last eighteen months they’d told him next to nothing. He didn’t even remember the initiation properly. He remembered the transmissions coming in through the receiver that Mathara had put in his ear, and he remembered thinking he was talking to somebody’s shadow, but after that it was all a bit of a blur, as if several hundred channels of information had been beamed into his head at once. He’d had to switch channels very, very quickly, and he wasn’t sure he’d taken it all in.
He remembered seeing a man with one arm, although he was pretty sure it had been a hallucination. Grandfather Paradox himself had only one arm, according to Faction lore. The Grandfather had hacked off one of his own limbs, the stories said, to get rid of the monitor tattoo the Time Lords had carved into his shoulder. Then again, Mathara always said that the chosen of the Grandfather tended to cut their own arms off as well, just to make a point, so it still wasn’t entirely clear who or what Fitz had seen.
After he’d got back to the real world, Mother Mathara had explained the rules to him. Fitz had been touched by the loa, by the transmissions of Paradox. He wasn’t a fully fledged member of the ‘family’, not even a Little Brother, but the door would be open to him for the rest of his life. Whenever he wanted, he could open himself up to the Grandfather. It was as easy as giving up his shadow.
Fitz glanced down at the ground, where his shadow was currently melting into the shadows of all the other refugees. He was special, among all the people here. They were just blind followers, the Faction’s shock troops in the event of a full‐scale confrontation with the Time Lords. He was different. He was an associate, or an ex‐associate, of the Doctor. He had the option of going deeper into the techniques, of becoming something else entirely.
Unless Mother Mathara had told everyone that, of course.
The sky flashed. Lightning from the future. A few of the refugees around Fitz yelped, then looked down at their feet, embarrassed. Fitz squinted through the rain, trying to focus on the figures at the far side of the circle. There was Guest, the big bald black man, coordinator of the entire evacuation. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Fitz remembered a briefing in a UN office, six hundred years in the past, the first time he’d seen the man’s face. But it hardly mattered now, not after all this time. After Fitz had spent three years of his life systematically selling out.
Had he ever had a choice, though? Even for one moment?
And there, by Guest’s side, Mother Mathara herself. She was already sealed into her Faction‐issue spacesuit, the huge batlike head locked Into position over her face, connected to the life‐support systems by veins of thick black plastic. The skeleton had presumably been augmented by the Faction’s engineers, the ribs sealed together with translucent artificial skin. Fitz had no idea which bits of the outfit had been parts of the original corpse, and which were pieces of bolted‐on hardware. He didn’t know what kind of animal the bones had come from, either. He doubted it mattered.
Was the suit any more efficient than a normal spacesuit? Probably not, Fitz decided. More Faction fetishism, that was all. Mother Mathara was like all the rest, obsessed with technology, and with the limits of technology. Like any other cult, Fitz told himself. Hung up on its toys.
And suddenly there was light in the sky, a light that stayed constant, no matter how much the air shook, no matter how much the sky rippled. The lander was coming. Coming to take them up to the Faction’s ship, up on the other side of the atmosphere.
The planet was dying. The media were getting out while they could.
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