Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book Two - Lawrence Miles [7]
‘Wait a minute,’ she said. ‘You just got here from Earth? How did you know where to find me?’
‘You’re part of the culture now, Miss Jones.’
‘You mean… when I had that receiver strapped to my face?’
‘Our culture is just a development of yours,’ Guest explained. ‘You had an affinity with us long before we found you.’
He motioned towards the doorway again. Sam didn’t bother arguing with that part of the script.
* * *
They didn’t have to wait long for a lift platform. Sam was the first to step on to the disc, Guest neatly cutting off her escape route behind her. She wondered whether that had been deliberate, or whether he was expecting her to go along with him whatever happened.
Sam watched the floor sink away, saw the domes on the ground level turn into tiny smudges of white. The patterns of machinery on the walls of the tower became more intricate as they rose, the upper parts of the building ringed with arrays of plastic transmitter hardware. Sam wondered what the signals would look like, if you could convert them into pictures and watch them on a TV set. The transmissions didn’t have any kind of narrative, according to Compassion, no stories or characters or episodes. Just loose images. Moving too quickly to be coherent. Flashes of ideas, of sensations.
And people thought MTV was bad.
Sam watched Guest out of the corner of one eye. He was staring straight ahead, the angles of his bald head looking almost sculpted in the neon light from the walls.
‘Who were you?’ Sam asked him.
Guest didn’t look back at her. ‘I don’t understand the question,’ he said.
‘Who were you, back in the beginning? Before anybody had to remember you. Before you started evolving.’
‘I was Guest. I’ve always been Guest.’
Sam sniffed at him. ‘You’re a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of Guest. How long’s it been, anyway? Since the Faction put you all here? Wherever here is.’
‘A while.’
‘You don’t know how long?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘No. Of course it doesn’t.’ Sam sighed. ‘You people are hopeless, you know that? All right. When the first Mr Guest came here, what was his function?’
At last, Guest seemed to respond. He turned to look at her – to look down at her – but he didn’t answer the question.
‘Compassion treats you like a kind of leader figure,’ Sam went on. ‘Only you don’t have leaders here, do you? So what’s so important about you that everyone does what you say?’
‘I was the only one who had the coordinates,’ Guest said. Then his eyes went slightly out of focus, as if he were trying to recall things that had never actually been in his head. ‘I think I was some kind of pilot. Or chief technician, possibly. The Faction left me with the task of finding the Cold.’
Sam gave him what she hoped was an annoying grin. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘That’s very helpful.’
Guest just turned away, and carried on staring at the walls outside the lift tube.
So. The Remote wanted to find the Cold. They could use their magic doorways to reach the skin of the thing, but obviously the way right through to the Cold’s own realm was beyond them. Whatever and wherever the Cold’s own realm was. Guest seemed to be on some holy mission to find it, but if he was just a distortion of a distortion, then the mission could have been twisted out of shape over the generations. And his answers probably weren’t that reliable anyway.
A few moments later, the lift platform reached the top floor, a transparent plastic disc at least a dozen metres from side to side. As with all the other levels, there was no railing, which gave Sam an interesting idea or two. Compassion stood close to the edge of the disc, her arms folded, a grumpy look on her face. Sam couldn’t see anything else around, no equipment, no other personnel.
It was only when she stepped out of the lift tube that she realised. The central shaft stopped some way below the roof of the tower, and set into that roof, so you could see only the lower half from here, was an enormous sphere of pure black. Actually, it probably had only the same kind of diameter as the