Doctor Who_ Original Sin - Andy Lane [115]
‘No!’ she exclaimed, her voice so high that even the sound-deadening walls of the corridor couldn’t disguise her surprise.
‘I’ve found something interesting,’ Powerless Friendless said. ‘Follow me.’
He slithered off around the bend in the corridor, his course taking him across 195
the ceiling and halfway down the wall before he vanished from sight. Bernice ran a hand across her forehead, and followed, keeping to what she thought of as the floor.
There was an open doorway just around the bend, and through the doorway was a room lined with organic control panels. The whole thing looked suspiciously to Bernice like a garden centre.
‘Communications room,’ Powerless Friendless said succinctly as he reached the floor. ‘I’ve checked over the controls. They’re still operative. INITEC obviously started their deconstruction in the middle of the ship, at the weapons bays, and are working their way in both directions. They haven’t got here yet.’
‘And this helps us how?’ Bernice asked.
‘It doesn’t help you,’ he said, ‘it helps me.’ He extruded a trio of pseudo-limbs and began caressing the controls. They bloomed and sprouted beneath his touch. ‘I’m sending a distress call.’
‘To whom?’
He rotated an eyestalk to face her. His gaze was thunderous.
‘To whatever remains of the Hith,’ he said.
The Doctor was standing outside the Hith encampment, enjoying the cool breeze and the sight of Purgatory’s sun poised above the distant horizon. If this replica was anything to go by, he thought that he would have liked Hithis.
It had a certain calmness about it, a rightness that reminded him of Florana and Metebelis in the good old days. The feeling of a planet at peace with itself.
Now Florana was a dumping ground for the waste products of thirty-six races, Metebelis was a desert wasteland and Hithis had been terraformed into a suburb of Earth. All that remained was a hexagonal section some three hundred kilometres across on somebody else’s planet. Sometimes he despaired.
‘Doctor?’ Provost-Major Beltempest emerged from the tent behind him, past the Hith guards who were watching the Doctor and studiously ignoring each other.
‘Over here.’
Beltempest lumbered over, wheezing asthmatically at the effort of moving his elephantine bulk. For a moment, he too watched the sun slide down beneath the edge of the world.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ the Doctor said rhetorically.
‘No,’ Beltempest said, and shivered. ‘It reminds me too much of spilled blood. And spilled blood reminds me of –’
‘He’s gone,’ the Doctor murmured without turning away from the thin sliver of light that showed above the skyline. ‘He won’t come back.’
196
Beltempest shook his head, his trunk swinging from side to side as he did so. ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘He’ll be back every time I go to sleep.’ He caught his breath. ‘Why does he bother me so much? Why can’t I get him out of my mind?’
The Doctor watched as the sun finally slid from sight, leaving a crimson stain behind it that faded as he watched to a deep, meditative blue.
‘Because you could have done the same,’ he said finally, ‘and that knowledge scares you. In the end, Pryce was right. There is no reason why one person should not kill another. No argument against murder stands up to scrutiny.’
He sighed. ‘For every religious prohibition saying, “Thou shalt not kill”, there’s another one that allows killing under certain special circumstances – sinners are fair game, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”, and so on. Moral codes are no better; they’re just formalized opinions, without any logical backup.’
He was aware that his voice was getting louder and louder, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. ‘The sociological history of almost every race,’ he continued, ‘is riddled with examples of laws against murder standing beside legal-ized examples of murder, be they executions, wars or euthanasia. Ultimately, every single argument that we can come up with, stripped of its pretty words, boils down to a fundamental truth: we disagree with murder because we don’t want to be murdered.