Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [120]
‘Wherever you send us, it’ll be the place,’ he’d said.
The show eventually materialised on a planet close to the centre of the galaxy, several thousand years in I.M. Foreman’s own past. Most TARDIS units had been programmed to avoid the past history of Gallifrey, but the show hadn’t been brought up as a TARDIS, so it didn’t have any of these little hang-ups. It arrived in the middle of the Gallifreyan wasteland, hovering several metres above ground level, and hung there in midair for a nanosecond or two before it exploded.
The explosion was only to be expected. Now it had completed its journey, the show was no longer linked to the guidance systems of the TARDIS, so there was nothing to hold it all together. And there was no other form in the area that it could safely inhabit, either: It hadn’t prepared for this trip, and therefore hadn’t built itself a new ‘body’ on Gallifrey. There were no covered wagons to be found here, and definitely no junkyards. The travelling show simply ceased to exist, and, without anything to keep it in place, the matter that had made up the police-box exterior exploded in all directions.
The twelve passengers survived the explosion, but only just. Their bodies were scattered across the sands of the wasteland, with their bones broken and their blood vessels ruptured. Even AKA the Metamorph had difficulty remoulding its body to soften the blast, while the If found itself breathing a particularly sick and twisted kind of time.
* * *
I.M. Foreman himself was the first to come to his senses. He’d landed face down in the sand, and for a moment he’d thought that the plan hadn’t worked, that they’d all ended up back on Dust. Then he rolled over on to his back, nerves tearing with every move he made, and saw the orange sky overhead. That was when he knew he’d come home.
‘Colder than I remembered,’ he said, just before his vocal cords finally snapped.
He tried holding his hand in front of his face, and noticed that he was bleeding. Well, no surprises there. Bleeding was what he did best. He’d always known that the blood was the most important thing about him, the thing that made him what he was: blood, and the genetic destiny it carried with it. Now all his pores seemed to be leaking, and he briefly wished that he could see it in the normal way, through a working pair of eyes. It must have looked spectacularly grotesque. A real show-shopper.
He could feel the presence of Mohandas the Geek nearby, but Mohandas wasn’t making a sound, not even his usual grunting. I.M. Foreman could tell that Mohandas was in exactly the same state he was, standing at death’s door and waiting to be asked in for coffee and crackers. And beyond Mohandas there was Melmoth, and Mr Zarathustra, and O’Salamander, and…
Oh. And here it came, that feeling down in his bones, as his body got ready to turn itself inside out and start again from scratch. He’d never regenerated before, of course, but somehow he’d known it’d feel like this. He was bleeding light now, light everywhere, so bright that he could almost see. Or was that just the sensation of new eyes growing?
It was going to be a traumatic regeneration, though. And traumatic regenerations had a way of blanking the mind, of making people forget who they’d been, of forcing them to leave behind their past histories. Already, he could feel his memories slipping away. The Doctor, gone. Dust, gone. New Mars, gone. The junkyard on Earth, gone. Everything gone, except for the here and now, the light and the blood and the orange sky.
There in the wastelands of Old Gallifrey, I.M. Foreman regenerated into Mohandas the Geek. Meanwhile, Mohandas regenerated into Melmoth the Map of Scars, Melmoth regenerated into Mr Zarathustra, Mr Zarathustra regenerated into O’Salamander the Dragon-King, O’Salamander regenerated into John Salt the Missing Link, John Salt regenerated into Mould the Worm-Boy, Mould the Worm-Boy regenerated into the Goofus, the Goofus regenerated into Ezekiel the Master Aerialist, Ezekiel regenerated into Queen Nitocris the Mistress