Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [134]
For a moment, the Doctor looked embarrassed. I.M. Foreman wondered why. Perhaps he thought he should formally introduce her to the ship.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘This is goodbye, then.’
‘It’s starting to look that way,’ I.M. Foreman told him.
Unlike Sam, she did kiss him.
* * *
She turned away before the TARDIS dematerialised, and began the long walk back up the hill. She was getting bored with this part of the world now. In the morning, she could move on, maybe heading out into the wilderness where the Remote had once built their ship-town. There was a great big crater there now, full of flowers and thistles from every corner of Mutters’ Spiral, where cross-pollination was so common that entire empires of plants could rise and fall in a single day. She’d seen it only from inside the biosphere, and it’d be nice to look at it all through human eyes for a change.
She’d reached the tree before she noticed that anything was wrong. It was the dent in the ground that gave the game away, the spot in front of the tree where the grass had been pressed flat by something smooth and heavy.
The bottle was gone. Her pet micro-universe had disappeared.
I.M. Foreman turned, just as the TARDIS finally vanished from the edge of the woodland. Why it had taken the Doctor so long to leave, she didn’t know. Perhaps he’d been watching her, who could say?
As the last traces of the ship left the surface of Foreman’s World, she tried to work out exactly where the bottle had gone. The Doctor had to be the prime suspect, seeing that he could have had any number of reasons for wanting to get his hands on the thing. He needed to get in touch with that Father from the Remote for a start. But it had been a big bottle, a good two feet from end to end, so he hadn’t just slipped it into one of his pockets. Not unless his pockets had been specially tailored by the Time Lords.
Then again, she didn’t know what the Doctor had been doing while Magdelana had been in charge of her body. I.M. Foreman could have searched Magdelana’s memories for the truth, of course, but that would have been unseemly. Ugly. For all she knew, the Doctor could have smuggled the bottle on to the TARDIS while I.M. Foreman had been snuffling through the fields with all the other sheep.
For all she knew, the High Council could have taken the bottle while they’d both been distracted.
Still. The bottle was gone, that was the important thing. And, in all honesty, that didn’t bother her half as much as she might have expected. She’d only built the bottle to test her limits, to see whether she could control the ecosystems of an entire universe rather than just this one world. And she could. And she had. The micro-universe had been a bit of a disappointment after that, as if it had outlived its purpose once she’d finished playing God with it. Besides, it had started leaking anyway.
Now it belonged to someone else. Someone who not only possessed the most valuable object in the galaxy (allegedly), but in doing so held the entire future of the Time Lords in his or her hands.
However, I.M. Foreman didn’t have a great deal of interest in the future of the Time Lords. Which was probably why she didn’t feel as though she’d lost much.
* * *
‘Ask any of the politicians, whatever party they come from, and they’ll tell you the same thing. Mankind needs laws, needs discipline, needs politics. Without them, civilisation will collapse, because if they’re left to their own devices then people will do whatever they like, and order will fall apart in a second. Which ignores one obvious point: if that were true, then civilisation would never have been created in the first place […] because the truth is, we don’t need laws, and we don’t need discipline, and we certainly don’t need politics. We don’t need government to keep civilisation alive: we