Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [129]
Dust had been built out of the signals of the past, out of all the corruption the human race had pumped into the planet over the years, out of all the dreams of falling empires and final frontiers that had been written and recorded and videotaped down through the generations. The colony had been a kind of warning to the universe, a demonstration of what happened if you sat back and let your culture rot, if you let your society recycle the same old messages over and over again until they stopped meaning anything. There were new signals in the ground now, though. With every step Magdelana took, she could feel them moving under the earth. Pushing up the grass. Rewriting the world.
She still didn’t understand how it had happened. All she knew was that it was done, and that the reasons for it had been safely buried, never to come to the surface again. In that much, she was sure she’d done her job.
Seven days after the death of Dust, Magdelana slung her coat over her shoulder, dropped her hat on to her head, and walked out of the town for the very last time. She didn’t know exactly where she was going, but she knew when she wasn’t needed. She took the shotgun with her, just in case, although she didn’t bother packing the dust visor.
Ten metres outside the town gate, she took off the old plastic ID badge that marked her out as the ‘first assigned defender’, and fed it to the grass.
* * *
FOREMAN’S WORLD:
EVENING ON THE SECOND DAY
‘Too many loose ends,’ said the Doctor, as they trudged back up the hill.
‘Usually,’ said I.M. Foreman. ‘For a start, I still want to know what you did to Compassion. Don’t tell me you’ve still got her locked up in that TARDIS?’
The Doctor made a little v-shape with his eyebrows. ‘That’s not important now. If I told you what happened next, we’d be here all week.’
‘Well, I’m not going anywhere. I’m sure I can take a few days out of my busy schedule.’
The Doctor looked down at his shoes. Then frowned. Then looked up again, and pretended to watch the sheep trundling across the fields.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I should stay here. Too many things to do. Places to be. Time frames to exist in.’
‘Typical,’ said I.M. Foreman. ‘No sense of commitment at all. All right, let’s forget about Compassion. You still haven’t told me how you got your shadow back, though. Or even why you lost it in the first place.’
‘I don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s just it. I think something happened on Earth – or on Dust – that neither of us noticed. Something that took my shadow away. There were so many things going on, we couldn’t keep track of them all. We’ve got no way of knowing what the Remote were doing behind the scenes. Or the Faction. And then there was the leader of the Remote on Dust. You remember him?’
‘Mm-hmm,’ said I.M. Foreman.
‘He recognised me,’ the Doctor went on. ‘Not in my third incarnation, though. That means he could be somebody I’ve met since Dust. Anybody. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, recently.’
‘And?’
He looked as though he didn’t know how much to say. ‘There’s something familiar about him,’ he declared, after a dramatic pause that the first I.M. Foreman would have been incredibly proud of. ‘Whenever I think about the Father, it always strikes a chord. Just for a moment, I think I know who he was. Or what he was. But I can’t ever put a finger on it. I can’t put a name to him. I get the feeling that some part of my mind doesn’t want me to work out the truth, even though the truth’s incredibly obvious.’
‘Does your mind often do that kind of thing?’ I.M. Foreman asked.
‘Only when it thinks it’s in trouble,’ the Doctor admitted. ‘The point is, part of me thinks I’d go mad if I knew the answer. So my memory’s blotting the answer out.’
I.M. Foreman sighed at him. ‘You really are a complete