Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [126]
‘This is wrong,’ he said.
Then he died in the dust.
* * *
There were plenty of witnesses. The townspeople, for example, watched from their broken homes as the offworlder took his last breath and a brand new life form began to grow out of his biomass. And then there were the agents of Faction Paradox, the crew of the great skeletal warship, who observed every detail of the square from their position in orbit of the planet.
Mother Mathara stood before the monitor wall in the command section of the ship, dressed in the same Faction-issue spacesuit that had been keeping her in one piece ever since the twenty-sixth century. She tried not to show any feeling as the Third Doctor passed away in front of her eyes, but it was hard not to get emotional at times like this. She wasn’t entirely sure which emotions she should be feeling, but a regeneration was such a primal, archetypal thing that it appealed to senses she hadn’t used properly in years.
The warship had spotted crucifixes in the desert, Mathara reminded herself. People nailed to wooden crosses, hanging there like Odin at the World Tree or Christ at Golgotha. Symbols of rebirth, according to primitive human culture. Almost as though the universe had seen the death of the Doctor coming, and decorated the planet with the appropriate props.
‘We’ve messed it up, haven’t we?’ said Cousin Llewis.
The Cousin was standing beside Mathara on the gallery of the command section, slouching against the railing with his suit hanging from his shoulders and his mask tucked under his arm. The Mother tried not to let his lack of enthusiasm bother her.
‘No,’ she told him. ‘We’ll report this to the Eleven-Day Empire, just as it happened. I don’t think they’ll be disappointed.’
‘We messed it up,’ Cousin Llewis repeated. ‘They gave us a mission, and we blew it. They’ll bloody skin us.’
At least the man was honest. Llewis had been recruited from twentieth-century Earth, but he’d been put in Mathara’s care after only five or six years under the Faction’s wing, so he was probably the youngest of the crew on the ship. He was in his early fifties, and he looked his age, which made him more or less unique among those on board. Mother Mathara was frankly amazed how well he’d adapted to life inside the family.
He’d been a failure back in his own place and time. His native culture had been perfectly in tune with the Faction’s own principles, a culture of rogue symbols and technological fetishism, but Llewis’s society had been so riddled with guilt and anxiety that the man had effectively been crippled. Once he’d been taken away from all of that, and given the Faction’s perspectives on life in a blame-free universe, he’d positively bloomed.
He’d been touched by the family’s work on his own world, and it had almost destroyed him. He’d lost his way, he’d lost his job, and he’d very nearly lost his mind. But he’d cried out for help, and when Faction Paradox had agreed to adopt him as one of their own he’d become the human being he’d always wanted to be. In fact, his ideas about human psychology had been quite inspirational. It had been his idea to take the Faction’s agents back to Earth in the early 1980s, for example, and to vandalise a small patch of land that was known locally as the ‘Blue Peter garden’. According to the research the Faction had done afterwards, this one act of petty destruction had introduced a whole new kind of guilt and terror to a generation of young people on the planet, a psychological trend that would turn thousands of them into potential Faction agents once they grew up and the neurosis blossomed.
Besides, nobody would have even remembered the garden if it had been left intact. It had become valuable to human culture only once it had been ruined. Which was perfectly in line with Faction doctrine, of course.
However, Llewis’s one problem was that he often failed to