Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [104]
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘Who were you expecting?’
‘Stop it. No games, Doctor. Not here.’
Aha. So the Remote knew him. Sarah turned to look at I.M. Foreman, sitting in his armchair at the other end of the wagon, but his face was blank and his dead old eyes were fixed on the floor. Sarah didn’t even know whether he could hear all this.
‘Have we met?’ the Doctor asked.
When the alien voice spoke again, there was an edge in it Sarah hadn’t noticed before. Hate? Maybe. Computerised hate. Hate that had come straight out of a databank. ‘This incarnation,’ the Remote man said. ‘It’s one of the early ones, isn’t it?’
‘Third, actually,’ the Doctor told him.
‘So we haven’t met. Not yet.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘I’m still going to try to kill you, though. It’s not going to stop me or anything.’
The Doctor was probably dying of curiosity by now, although Sarah got the feeling he was scared to ask too many questions. ‘Look, old chap… I don’t really know what’s going on here, but I’m fairly sure it shouldn’t be happening. Isn’t that obvious?’
‘Does it matter?’
The Doctor sighed. ‘This travelling show belongs to someone I’ve never met before. Someone who was – is – a predecessor of mine, in a sense. I’ve been chasing his tail all these years, without even knowing it. And it’s not a good idea for you to meet someone if you’ve been following in their footsteps like that. It’s against all the usual protocols of time travel. I expect you know that, if your people are as advanced as they seem to be.’
‘Am I supposed to care?’ asked the Remote man.
‘I shouldn’t be here at all,’ the Doctor insisted. ‘The truth about the travelling show is one of those secrets I was never meant to find out about. I shouldn’t ever have met I.M. Foreman, or you, or any of your people. Everything here is wrong. Can’t you see that?’
‘“Wrong”,’ repeated the Remote man. His voice was getting harsher now, although it was hard to say how much of it was genuine spite and how much of it was just the sound of his circuits fizzling. ‘Doctor… I could tell you what’s really “wrong”. I could tell you what you did to my life. What happened to me after you left me. I could tell you all the damage that’s been done to me over the last two thousand years. All the waiting I’ve gone through. I’m older than you are, do you know that? And I don’t even think I qualify as human any more. Your fault. Believe me, I could tell you everything.’
There was a pause. The Doctor presumably didn’t know what to say.
‘But I won’t,’ the Remote man concluded. He suddenly sounded incredibly tired, as if he’d worked himself into a frenzy but couldn’t keep it up. ‘I can’t be bothered. Living like this just wears you down. I don’t want to hurt you any more. I want to see you dead, that’s all. I want to get this over with for good. I want to see your head up on my wall, so I can relax for once in my life. You understand?’
The Doctor cleared his throat, in an embarrassed sort of way. ‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we’d better stick to the point. You want the travelling show, is that it?’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ said the Remote man. He sounded quite relieved to get back to the matter in hand.
‘And what’s to stop us just taking the travelling show away from this planet right now?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Two things,’ the Remote man told him. He didn’t even have the energy to gloat properly, Sarah noted. ‘First, we’ve taken over the town. You won’t leave this place without trying to save everyone. It’s not the way you work.’
‘I see. And secondly?’
‘Secondly, you can’t go anywhere anyway. We’ve figured out how the show works. It plants itself inside the planet’s biosphere, doesn’t it? Makes a new stretch of land for itself on the surface of the host world. Neat, that.’
‘I’ll give my compliments to the owner,’ said the Doctor, flatly. ‘And?’
‘We can play around with biospheres as well. Probably better than you can.