Doctor Who - Bernice Summerfield - 11 - Oblivion by Dave Stone

Author:Dave Stone
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Bernice Surprise (Fictitious Character), Action & Adventure, General, Science Fiction, Summerfield, Fiction, Time Travel
ISBN: 9780426205227
Publisher: Virgin
Published: 1998-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

* * *

„My Goddess,‟ Benny breathed. It occurred to her that she

had been breathing „my Goddess‟ rather a lot of late - but

this was no doubt the perfectly natural result of the number

of surprises she‟d had to assimilate. Every time, just when

she thought she‟d got a handle on things, some new surprise

was sprung. She hadn‟t given a lot of thought to how

the Earth might look, even filtered through the imaging of

the Schirron Dream itself - whatever she might have half

imagined, though, it had been nothing like this.

It was as if the planet Earth were a vast and rotting onion,

shown in inexpertly drafted, exploded-diagram form. Layers

linked away and spun lazily about themselves in complex

semiorbital patterns. The facts of distance and position

meant that none but the grossest geological features should

be visible - but the facts of distance and position seemed for

the moment to have been knocked into a cocked ontological

hat. It was possible to see — or to imagine one saw -

buildings, forest vegetation, even individual people.

The shattered conglomerate of matter seemed held together

only by thin energy tendrils of light, which pulsed in a

manner reminiscent of blood vessels - were they, in some

sense, the very veins and arteries of some living Gaia? hi any

event, the pulsing seemed febrile, the fluttery beat of a

damaged and strain-exhausted heart of the world. One of the

ancient Greeks - Benny thought it might have been Aristotle,

but whether through the effects of the disruption or a natural

lapse in memory, she wasn‟t quite sure - had said that all

things that moved had limbs and that the Earth, having

none, simply couldn‟t move. Aristotle (or whoever it was) had

been quite clearly wrong on both counts - the Earth was now

moving in no uncertain terms, and she had the nasty feeling

that it was currently on its last legs.

The communications console squealed and jabbered with

the voices of Alternatives in their thousands, not a one

distinguishable amid the cacophony. Benny shut it off. „All

right,‟ she said. „Now that we‟re actually here, what are we

going to do? How are we going to find Nathan, Leetha and

Kin in this lot - and for that matter, what in the name of

every hell are we going to do if we find them?‟

Jason shrugged. „We‟ve gone this far by trusting the

Dream and instinct, such as it is. I say we just let her have

her head - and if the worse comes to the worst we‟ll try to

improvise.‟ He grinned, suddenly, a genuine and generally

untrustworthy humanity breaking through his recent mood.

„What the hell! We‟ll make it all up as we go along.‟

24

LIGHT COME DOWN (A MEETING

OF MINDS)

Fragments of the world spun lazily through the variegated

sky, seemingly, at one and the same time, wedge-shaped

lumps of fractured rock and complete, microcosmic worlds

in their own right, like a hologrammatic slide (they had

learnt of such things, the majority of them explained by one

Bernice Summerfield) after it was shattered - each fragment

containing a distorted whole. Was this the actual fact of

things,

now,

or

some

shared

and

hallucinatory

representation of something even more unknowable, cooked

up by the mind? For that matter, Nathan li Shao

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