Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [122]
Number Thirteen thought about this for a moment. Yes, it decided, the Time Lord was right. It did use to be a little blind man called I.M. Foreman. Not that it mattered now.
‘I.M. Foreman dedicated himself to becoming something more than he was,’ the Time Lord went on. ‘And he did it, too. He became you. A million different species in one. The collected biodata of a thousand planets. You’re quite unique, you know.’
One of the minds Number Thirteen had swallowed wanted to point out that something couldn’t be ‘quite’ unique: it was either unique or it wasn’t. But Number Thirteen told that particular part of itself to shut up.
The Time Lord cleared his throat, although he kept his eyes fixed on the towering mass of Number Thirteen. ‘The point is, I know what you are, and I know what you want. You want to be all things to all people. That’s why you haven’t picked a solid body for yourself yet. You’ve got so much genetic experience inside you, you don’t know whether to be fish or fowl. One body isn’t enough for you. You want to be more than you are, which was what I.M. Foreman thought everyone should aspire to.’
Again, Number Thirteen had to agree, although it was starting to get bored with this whole conversation.
‘When you ate the Remote ship, you ate all the ship’s systems, too,’ the Time Lord continued. He seemed to be coming to the punchline at last. ‘One of the things you swallowed was the machine the Remote used for tapping into a planet’s biosphere. Isn’t that right?’
Number Thirteen considered this. It had already broken the ship down into raw matter, but the blueprints were still stored in its memory. As the Doctor spoke, it started rebuilding some of the ship’s machines inside its body, carefully putting the biosphere-manipulation system back together in the depths of its fluid stomach.
‘Have you thought about what that machine can do?’ asked the Time Lord.
Number Thirteen hadn’t thought about that at all. It hadn’t had any reason to.
‘Turn it on,’ said the Doctor. ‘You’ll see.’
That made Number Thirteen suspicious. The Time Lord wanted it to activate a piece of alien machinery inside its own body. For all it knew, the device would explode, or even…
No. The machine wasn’t a bomb. It didn’t look harmful at all, in fact. The thing was part of its body now, so it could always take the device apart again if there seemed to be any negative effects. True?
‘I suggest you try it,’ said the Time Lord. ‘I promise you, you won’t regret it.’ And there wasn’t a single drop of sweat on his body when he said it, not one ounce of deceit.
All right, thought Number Thirteen. All right, let’s see.
It let its mind flow into the workings of the Remote’s biosphere machine, and switched it on.
* * *
There was a door.
The door opened, and Number Thirteen saw the world behind it. The planet Dust, seen from the inside. An entire biosphere, a complete ecosystem made up of ecosystems, a whole environment made up of environments. It saw the DNA of every species that had ever existed on the planet, from the snakes that crawled in the deserts to the insects that fed off the skins of the humans. It saw the seeds of plants that had lain dormant under the sand for millions of years, waiting for the next great rain. It saw nutrients, layers of dead things buried under the soil, waiting to be reprocessed and turned into raw life again. It saw never-ending networks of ley lines, patterns of energy no single life form had ever seen before. Not like this.
The surface of Dust was peeled back for Number Thirteen’s benefit, revealing the cities under the sand, the leftovers of the old Earth empire. It was in touch with the planet’s evolution, with the fossil records and the strata of the rocks. It watched generations of carrion birds flutter past in a second, as the lizards of prehistoric Dust grew