Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [39]
They’d been working on the tower for almost a year now. The building itself had been planted by Faction Paradox, before the colonists had even arrived, and the thing at its peak was part of the city’s inbuilt fixtures and fittings. But the place had turned out to be the dead centre of Anathema’s culture, so the colonists had decided to redecorate from top to bottom. A single enormous shaft had been built from the floor to the roof, while complex new transmitter systems had been sewn into the walls, supposedly to boost the signals from the media, although Fitz was sure nobody really knew exactly what the hardware did.
And nobody knew exactly what they were doing, either. The Faction had given the city a self-replenishing food supply, and made sure everyone had a place to live, so there was no need for anything like an economy. Nobody had a job. The people helped with the work on the tower, simply because… it seemed like the thing to do. Even Fitz had found himself doing it, over the last few weeks. Giving orders to the construction machines, feeding new code sequences into the computer systems. He was good with the computer systems. Around here, computer science was more like music than mathematics. If there was such a thing as a vocation in Anathema, then that was Fitz’s. He just imagined he was playing the guitar, and his subconscious did the maths all on its own.
What worried him was that it all seemed so natural. He’d had two ‘proper’ relationships since he’d arrived here – not many, but then there was something about this place that seemed to make people lose interest in romantic liaisons – and he hadn’t for one moment stopped to think about the kind of creatures he was sleeping with, or about the kind of friends he’d chosen to have around him. It was the media, he decided. And the receivers didn’t help. They’d been Mother Mathara’s last gift to Anathema; everyone used them now, and these days Fitz tended to wear his for weeks at a time. At first, he’d told himself that he was just keeping in touch with the media, in case anything happened that might help him get out of here. He’d convinced himself he was fighting its influence, not giving in to the signals from the top of the main tower. Over time, though… well, he’d realised that the receiver wasn’t trying to brainwash him at all. At least, no more than the TV sets in his own time, or in 1996, or in the twenty-sixth century. The media was a product of all human life. You couldn’t fight it, because you were it.
Besides, he knew now that he was never, ever, ever going to escape. Not in the usual sense of the word, anyway.
Mother Mathara hadn’t left behind all the Faction’s technology for them to play with. That ‘biosphere-manipulation system’, for example, the machine that apparently let you tap into the veins of the world and change everything from the inside. They wouldn’t be needing it, Mathara had insisted. Not here. Everything had been laid out for them already, so there was no reason to change the environment at all. Anyway, the biosphere of Anathema wasn’t a natural one, and she obviously felt that it wasn’t something Guest and his friends should be messing about with.
That hadn’t made Tobin happy. She was still expecting the Time Lords to swoop down from the skies at any moment, whatever Mathara had told her. She wanted as many defences as she could lay her hands on. According to the stories, one of the first things Faction Paradox did when it ‘colonised’ a planet was to tap into that planet’s ley lines, and use them to send its own power supplies across the world. Mathara had said that once, when two Time Lord agents had accidentally stumbled across a Faction colony on the far side of Earthspace, the Mothers and Fathers had fed raw time along the local ley lines. Burning out the time-sensitive nervous systems of the Time Lords, but leaving the natives unharmed. Or at least, that was the story.
Antipersonnel ley lines. God almighty.
The important thing was, Fitz was stuck here now. When he’d found out that the Faction wanted its ‘children’ to reach