Doctor Who_ The Paradise of Death - Barry Letts [67]
‘Wowie-zowie!’ interrupted Jeremy, who’d been looking out of the window, not listening to the conversation. ‘Look at that! It must be the size of a rugger pitch!’
Onya followed his gaze: a space freighter landing. ‘Yes, the Interplanetary Freighter Docks are scattered all round the perimeter of the city – of every city.’
‘That thing’s a freighter?’ said Sarah. ‘You mean it’s full of goods of some sort?’
Onya nodded. ‘Raw material coming in for processing.’
‘Rapine?’ asked the Doctor.
‘Exactly. And going back, everything Parakon can manufacture from it. They say that there’s a Corporation freighter either landing or taking off from somewhere on the planet for every twenty breaths you take. And I say those freighters are killing us, as surely as the Corporation killed the land below us.’
They all looked down.
‘It looks like sea,’ said the Brigadier. ‘Are we flying over the ocean? No, hang on,’ he said. ‘It looks just like... I remember once, when I was flying from Kathmandu to Patna, from the air the edge of the Terai – the jungle –
looked just like a coastline. That’s not the sea.’
‘Kathmandu, Lethbridge-Stewart?’ said the Doctor.
‘Backpacking, were you? Dropping out and tuning in? You must have looked rather fetching in a kaftan.’
‘Undercover,’ said the Brigadier shortly. He turned back to Onya. ‘It’s desert.’
She looked at the Doctor. She suspected that he’d come to this conclusion long before. He saw her looking at him.
‘A gigantic dustbowl, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Does anything grow on Parakon any more?’
‘Practically nothing,’ she answered. ‘All the accessible fertile land was turned over entirely to rapine. You can see the result.’
‘But that’s terrible,’ said Sarah.
‘There are a few patches of wilderness left, where the terrain made it difficult to farm. That’s where we’re going now, to the largest. It’s known as the Lackan, the place of no hope.’
‘Oh cheers,’ Jeremy muttered in Sarah’s ear. ‘That’s all we need!’
Onya ignored him. ‘I heard the President say that Parakon is a paradise; it’s more like a hell,’ she said. ‘Oh, it used to be a paradise in earlier times; a lush green paradise where the people hunted and grew their crops, giving their thanks to the earth and the sky – living real lives, not lives of illusion and fantasy.’
‘Oh, the Golden Age,’ said the Doctor drily. ‘In every culture I’ve ever met, they’ve had a legend of an ancient Golden Age. And there’s usually no lack of guides claiming to know the way back.’
‘This is not legend, Doctor. It’s fact. I’m not talking about a dream world with no pain. To seek that is to be trapped in the more insidious fantasy of all. I’m talking of a world full of pain – but it was real pain, to be suffered and borne, knowing it would be balanced by joy in the spirit.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the Doctor.
‘Please,’ she said. It didn’t matter; why should she take offence? It was far more important that they should understand.
‘The President told you that rapine is a generous plant.
Rapine is greed. It takes the best from the earth and puts nothing back.
‘It’s taught us all how to he greedy too, until our cravings have become the whole of our lives, and our spirit is dying from lack of joy...’
She stopped short. When she spoke again, it was almost to herself.
‘...and I can’t tell if my heart is breaking for the sorrow of it – or being torn apart by rage.’
For a while, the only sound was the faint hum of the flycar as it made its way over the endless waste below. The silence was broken by the Doctor quietly echoing the earlier question of the Brigadier.
‘Who are you, Onya Farjen?’ he asked.
‘Who is she? Where does she come from?’
In the very nature of things, Freeth’s expression could never be described as thin-lipped, but his mouth had tightened to a downcurved grimace which made his feelings quite evident.
‘That is precisely what I am checking at the moment,’
replied his Vice-Chairman, surveying with dead eyes the data coming up on the screen before him.
Freeth sucked at a gap between his teeth. ‘To be outwitted by a housekeeper! And these