Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [111]
‘Good grief,’ the Doctor muttered. His companion hugged him a little tighter, but he didn’t seem to notice.
The next freak was the old man with the huge head, squatting in the dust with his cranium in his hands. ‘Mr Zarathustra,’ explained I.M. Foreman. ‘I’m still more or less humanoid in this incarnation, but my biodata’s starting to stretch a bit.’ The blind man moved on, and next in line was the half-man, half-lizard creature, his body split down the middle, his skin charred and blackened on both sides. I.M. Foreman coughed, politely. ‘O’Salamander. My fifth self. This is the point when the stored DNA starts to take over. Part man, part… something else. Whichever part’s supposed to be which.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Kreiner.
I.M. Foreman ignored him, and kept moving along the line. ‘I get less and less humanoid over the next few regenerations. Experimenting with animal shapes. It’s true, I’m doing it consciously by now. Seeing how many kinds of biological data I can mix and match. John Salt, the Missing Link. Mould, the Worm-Boy… hello, Mould. Please don’t leave that goo on my boots again. Thank you. Then there’s the Goofus, our living armoury. My eighth body, when I start absorbing machine parts into myself as well as DNA. Next there’s Ezekiel, the only version of myself who came fitted with wings. Not a very successful experiment, I’m afraid. No offence, Ezekiel. And there’s Queen Nitocris, who’s frankly a lot more snakey than I think any of us intended.’
Then the showman stopped, in front of the small grey thing. Kreiner thought he caught a smile cross the man’s lips. ‘Oh yes. The If. We Gallifreyans have always been bio-linked to our time-travel machines, so I suppose the If’s no big surprise. We’ve got Rassilon’s protocols wired into our biodata, remember. The If here didn’t turn out looking like anything else in the universe, but his – its – time-travel biodata is a lot more well developed than anybody else’s. The If sweats raw time. Isn’t that something?’
Finally, I.M. Foreman moved over to the figure at the very end of the line. Father Kreiner hadn’t concentrated on the last of the freaks before, and now he realised why. It was hard to focus on the thing’s shape, because it kept shifting and squirming, somehow wriggling away from your eyes whenever you tried to stare at it. It was changing all the time, Kreiner saw. It wasn’t a true shapechanger, and it probably couldn’t even decide what form it wanted to take on next, but its body looked horribly unstable anyway. It was a great big blur of living matter, which couldn’t quite settle on one species.
‘My twelfth incarnation,’ I.M. Foreman announced, more than a little proudly. ‘We call him AKA. The metamorph. All the DNA I’ve absorbed over my lifetimes, wrapped up in one ever-changing body. One moment he wants to be a fish, then he wants to be a cat, then… just use your imagination. And that’s the travelling show for you. All comers welcome, no refunds given.’
‘You don’t charge admission,’ the companion pointed out.
‘Exactly,’ said I.M. Foreman.
‘How?’ hissed Father Kreiner.
I.M. Foreman turned back to face the Remote troops, and raised his eyebrows at them. ‘I’m sorry, what?’
‘It’s not possible. How? How can all twelve of you be in the same place at once? How did you call them all together?’
Predictably, the showman just shrugged.
‘To be honest with you, I haven’t a clue,’ he said.
Even the Doctor looked surprised by that. I.M. Foreman obviously hadn’t had time to tell him all the details.
‘You don’t know how it happened?’ the Doctor asked.
The showman took this as his cue to go into ‘storyteller’ mode again. ‘It was in the days when I was still on Gallifrey,’ he said. ‘Just after they abolished the priesthood. I’d been turned out of my home, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, and