Chapter 7
2MASS J23062928-0502285
Heads of departments were sitting around the table in the New York conference room, with department heads in London on video screens in a replay of their previous meeting. That is except for John and Rose, who were now in New York, and Karellen of course, who was sitting on a comfy sofa which had been dragged from the wall to the table. It was the only chair that he could fit in comfortably, even if his legs were crossed with his knees by his shoulders.
'So, just to recap,' John started. 'The Overseers are here to do the bidding of something they call the Overmind.'
'The Overmind?' Charles asked.
'I'll come to that in a minute. The Overmind wants the human race to achieve its full potential and become beings of pure thought.'
'Don't we get a say in that?' Eugene Hunter asked.
'Apparently not. Karellen informs me that our children will be parents to the last generation of humans as we know them. The "new" humans won't be concerned with material things, or even with matter itself.'
['So how does all this play out then?'] Jack asked on the video link.
John looked at Karellen. 'I've been told you've done this before.'
Karellen nodded solemnly. 'This will be the fifth race whose apotheosis we have watched. We do not know how the transformation is produced, what trigger impulse the Overmind employs when it judges that the time is ripe. All we have discovered is that it starts with a single individual always a child and then spreads explosively, like the formation of crystals around the first nucleus in a saturated solution. Adults are not affected, for their minds are already set in an unalterable mould. After a few years, it will all be over, and the human race will have divided in twain. There is no way back, and no future for the world you know. All the hopes and dreams of the human race will be ended.'
['I don't know where you're getting your information, but I can tell you that I know for certain that the human race survives into the fiftieth century,'] Jack told him.
'No, it does not. But do not despair, it is a marvellous transformation,' Karellen assured them.
'Er, no it ain't,' Rose corrected. 'Jack there was born in the fiftieth century . . . sort of.'
Karellen gave her a patronising smile. 'Now you are being foolish young lady.'
'Don't you "young lady" me mate,' Rose said angrily. 'Because of you, my friend Mai Ling on Shan Shen in the five thousand two hundreds has disappeared, and New New York in the five billions was never built.'
John interrupted before Rose could let loose with a full Tyler tirade. 'Karellen. Do you remember me telling you I'm a Human-TIME Lord hybrid. My ship, the TARDIS. The letters stand for TIME, and relative dimensions in space.' He emphasised the word "time". 'The clue is in the name. I'm a time traveller, and my ship travels through time as well as space.'
'But time travel is only a theoretical possibility,' Karellen stated.
'So's a ship the size of Manhattan fitting inside a small blue box.'
'Good point,' Charles agreed.
The so far, inscrutable and composed Overseer was becoming flustered. 'But that . . . that is not possible.'
Rose handed him her tablet PC. 'That is the last post on FaceBlog by Mai Ling. The TARDIS routes messages from different time zones. Look at the date.'
Karellen took the offered tablet and looked at the date, and then looked at John. 'This is either an elaborate hoax, or you are telling the truth.'
['Please, tell us what you know,'] Alice DiMaggio said kindly to the stunned Overseer.
'Each time we have done this, my task and my duty was to protect those I was sent to guard. Despite their wakening powers, the children could have be destroyed by the multitudes around them yes, even by their parents, when they realized the truth. I took them away and isolated them, for their protection, and for that of their parents. I did not blame the parents for trying to interfere, but it was useless. Greater powers than mine had awoken; I was only one of their instruments.'
Rose cleared her throat before she spoke. What she had heard was deeply upsetting. 'And when the children had transformed and left, you destroyed the planets?'
'That would have been simplest, perhaps, and most merciful, to destroy those that were left behind, as you yourselves would destroy a mortally wounded pet you loved. But this I could not do. Their future was their own to choose in the years that were left to them. I hope that they went to their rest in peace, knowing that that they had not lived in vain. And at the end of days, when the parents had all gone to their rest, and their children had made the transformation, they turned the worlds to dust. For what the parents had brought into those worlds may have been utterly alien, it may have shared none of their desires or hopes, it may have looked upon their greatest achievements as childish toys yet it was something wonderful, and they had created it.'
'But why does the Overmind need you?' queried Eugene. 'With all its tremendous powers, surely it could do anything it pleased.'
'No,' said Karellen, 'it has limits. In the past, we know, it has attempted to act directly upon the minds of other races, and to influence their cultural development. It's always failed, perhaps because the pull is too great. We are the interpreters the guardians. Or, to use one of your own metaphors, we till the field until the crop is ripe. The Overmind collects the harvest and we move on to another task. As I have said, this is the fifth race we have watched over. Each time we learn a little more.'
'Let me give you another, more appropriate metaphor,' John said. 'You fatten the calf for the feast.'
There were gasps of disbelief from the Torchwood members and accusing glances at Karellen. 'Surely you are not suggesting that the Overmind is feeding on the transformed populations,' Karellen said.
John looked at the faces around the room. 'I believe I've met this Overmind before, in the old universe. Only then It called itself the Great Intelligence.'
'Hang on Love. Are you sayin' this is the same Great Intelligence as the one in the old universe?' Rose asked.
'I think it could be. It exists on the astral plane, and has no physical form, relying on possession of living creatures to manipulate its environment. I reckon it could have crossed the void like you cross the street.'
['What, like that Sutekh character a few years ago who was messing with the pyramids?'] Jack asked.
'Exactly,' John agreed. 'Just like Sutekh, it can enter the people it encounters. It allowed the High Lama Padmasambhava to live for over three hundred years while he created Robot Yeti, and it also reanimated dead bodies. It's got considerable mental powers, like mind control and can even mentally attack me, which is saying something. It hurt . . . a lot. Oh, and it can travel through time and space.'
['Damn, here we go again,'] Andy McNabb said quietly.
John continued. 'Unlike Sutekh, the Great Intelligence can also manifest itself in simple forms such as a slime that glows brightly, a dense fog that consumes anything that enters it, and a poisonous web fungus that can't be destroyed by chemicals, explosives, or flamethrowers.' He looked at Karellen. 'Any of that sound familiar?'
Karellen was silent for a long time as he thought about what he thought he knew, and what he now knew. 'There was an elder, when we were first engaged by the Overmind . . . the Great Intelligence as you have named it. He lived three times the span of any that had gone before.'
'Yeah, that'd be it,' John said. 'And now I'm guessing you get messages that mysteriously appear on monitors or view screens . . . voices emanating from audio circuits?'
Karellen nodded silently, the full realisation of what the Great Intelligence had done weighing heavy on his shoulders. 'So I am responsible for allowing billions of beings to be taken to their deaths?'
'No!' John said firmly. 'There is only one being responsible for that, and that's how it works, by stealth and deception. It insinuates its way into your lives, into your culture.'
'And we did not question the motives of the Overmind,' Karellen said sadly. 'How can I continue, knowing what I now know? And yet, how can I resist such a powerful, non-corporeal being?'
'You don't,' John told him, standing up. 'I do.' He walked around the table and held his hand out to Karellen. 'It's been nice knowing you Karellen, but when I get back, you won't be here. In fact you won't ever have been here. All I need from you is the date when the Overmind first contacted you.'
When Rose stepped out of the TARDIS and checked her uniform, tugging down her jacket and smoothing her skirt. After all, she was an ambassador for the Torchwood Institute. When she looked up, she gasped in surprise. She was standing, it seemed, unsupported among the uppermost peaks of an alien city, with nothing to protect her from the abyss. But she felt no more vertigo than one does in an aeroplane, for there was no sense of contact with the distant ground. John stepped out behind her, his long brown coat billowing slightly in the gentle breeze.
'Not too shabby is it?' he said as he looked around.
'Not too shabby?' They were above the clouds, sharing the sky with a few pinnacles of metal or stone. A rose red sea, the cloud layer rolled sluggishly beneath them. There were two pale and tiny moons in the sky, not far from the sombre sun. Near the centre of that bloated red disc was a small, dark shadow, perfectly circular. It might have been a sunspot, or another moon in transit.
Rose slowly moved her gaze along the horizon. The cloud cover extended clear to the edge of this enormous world, but in one direction, at an unguessable distance, there was a mottled patch that might have marked the towers of another city. She stared at it for a long while, before continuing her viewing of the alien landscape.
John jumped up and down, looked up at the sky, at the horizon, and then down at the cloud layer. 'Hmm. That's interesting.'
'What is?' Rose said distractedly as she turned a half circle and saw a mountain. It was not on the horizon, but beyond it a single serrated peak, climbing up over the edge of the world, its lower slopes hidden as the bulk of an iceberg is concealed below the water line.
'The gravity's wrong. This planet is larger than Earth, and yet the gravity is about the same as Mars.'
Rose was trying to guess the size of the mountain, and failed completely. Even on a world with gravity as low as Mars, it seemed hard to believe that such mountains could exist. And then, slowly, the mountain began to change. When she saw it first, it was a dull and almost sinister red, with a few faint markings near its crown that she could not clearly distinguish. She was trying to focus on them when he realized that they were moving.
At first she could not believe her eyes. 'John, those mountains . . . they're moving!'
John screwed up his eyes and looked at the mountain. He then raised his eyebrows and grinned. 'Oh yeah. It's like Felspoon,' he said with obvious delight.
Rose forced herself to remember that all her preconceived ideas were worthless here. This was what she loved about travelling the universe with her husband. The mountain, she still thought of it as such, for there was no other word that could serve, seemed to be alive. It was not organic life that she was watching; it was not even, she suspected, matter as she knew it.
'That is amazing,' she breathed. 'Oh I've missed this.'
The sombre red was brightening to an angrier hue. Streaks of vivid yellow appeared, so that for a moment they felt they were looking at a volcano pouring streams of lava down on to the land beneath. But these streams, as they could tell by occasional flecks and mottlings, were moving upwards.
Now something else was rising out of the ruby clouds around the mountain's base. It was a huge ring, perfectly horizontal and perfectly circular and it was the colour of the skies of Earth.
The ring was expanding as it climbed. It was higher than the mountain now, and it's nearer arc was sweeping swiftly towards him. Surely, thought John, it must be a vortex of some kind a smoke ring already many kilometres across. But it showed none of the rotation he expected, and it seemed to grow no less solid as its size increased.
Its shadow rushed past long before the ring itself had swept majestically overhead, still rising into space. They watched until it had dwindled to a thin thread of blue, hard for the eye to focus upon in the surrounding redness of the sky. When it vanished at last, it must already have been many thousands of kilometres across. And it was still growing.
'What is that?' Rose asked.
'Welll. Looks to me as though someone is messing about with gravity manipulators,' he replied. 'Isn't that brilliant? And that mountain. What's all that about?'
Rose looked back at the mountain. It was golden now, and devoid of all markings. Perhaps it was imagination, she could believe anything by this time but it seemed taller and narrower, and appeared to be spinning like the funnel of a cyclone.
A voice behind them made them jump. 'Who are you, and what are you doing here?' They turned to see an Overseer folding his wings behind him. He must have glided onto the roof they concluded.
'Ah, yes. Right. I'm the Doctor . . . John Smith,' he said with a charming smile. 'And this is Rose.'
'Hello,' she said with a little wave of her fingers.
'I am Hexanerax. We have not had visitors from another world before. What is your purpose here?'
'We're here to see one of your elders, Ralpachan.'
Hexanerax frowned. 'Ralpachan? How is it that you know Ralpachan?'
'That, my friend, is the million dollar question. Can you take us to him?' John asked.
Hexanerax seemed to contemplate the question for a long time before coming to a decision. 'I will take you to the Senate. They will hear what you have to say and make a decision.'
'Sounds good to me. Take us to your leaders.'
The Overseer indicated a strip of flooring that at first sight seemed an ornamental pattern. They stepped forward and something invisible grasped them gently and hurried them forward. They were moving past buildings at a speed of twenty or thirty kilometres an hour.
They noticed that streets were practically non existent in the city, and there seemed to be no surface transport. This was the home of creatures who could fly, and who had no fear of gravity. It was nothing to come without warning upon a vertiginous drop of several hundred metres, or to find that the only entrance into a room was an opening high up in the wall. In a hundred ways, Rose began to realize that the psychology of a race with wings must be fundamentally different from that of earthbound creatures.
It was strange to see the Overseers flying like great birds among the towers of their city, their pinions moving with slow, powerful beats. As they travelled, John considered the scientific problem that was nagging at him.
This was a large planet larger than Earth. Yet its gravity was low, and John wondered why it had so dense an atmosphere. 'Do you mind me asking? The gravity is too low for a planet this size, and yet it's able to retain a dense atmosphere.'
'This is not our original planet. We evolved on a much smaller world and then conquered this one, changing not only its atmosphere but even its gravity,' their escort informed him.
John grinned at Rose. 'Gravity manipulators. I knew it.'
The architecture of the Overseers was bleakly functional; Rose saw no ornamentation, nothing that did not serve a purpose. If a man from medieval times could have seen this red lit city, and the beings moving through it, he would certainly have believed himself in Hell. She looked up, and thought she caught a glimpse of something, flashing lights and changing shapes, things that flickered through the air so swiftly that she couldn't be certain of their existence?
She pointed them out to John who shrugged as he answered. 'No idea. They could be something tremendous and awe inspiring . . . there again, they could just be neon signs like on Oxford Circus or Broadway.'
John was sensing that the world of the Overseers was full of sounds that he could not hear. Occasionally he caught complex rhythmical patterns racing up and down through the audible spectrum, to vanish at the upper or lower edge of hearing.
The city was not very large; it was certainly far smaller than London or New York. With a constant stream of conversation, John cleverly learned that there were several thousand such cities scattered over the planet, each one designed for some specific purpose. On Earth, the closest parallel to this place would have been a university town except that the degree of specialization had gone much further. It turned out that this entire city was devoted to the study of alien cultures.
Hexanerax guided them off the invisible travelator onto a great round platform. When they stepped onto the platform, it started falling steadily, like a piston in a vertical cylinder of unknown length. There were no visible controls, and John wondered how Hexanerax controlled it. After all, Karellen had told them that they had no telekinetic powers.
Standing behind the Overseer, he took out his sonic screwdriver and scanned him. The results were displayed on a holographic display above the tip of the screwdriver, which could only be viewed by the operator. 'Ah,' he said as he put it back in his pocket.
['Ah what?'] Rose asked in his head.
['Cybernetic implants. Poor man's telepathy. He's controlling all the transport with brain impulses. When he was thinking about whether to take us to the council, he was probably asking for advice via a radio implant.']
The sense of acceleration at the beginning and ending of the descent was quite noticeable. Presumably the Overseers did not waste their compensating field devices for domestic uses. John wondered if the whole interior of this world was riddled with excavations; and why had they limited the size of the city, going underground instead of outwards? He loved it when he didn't know stuff.
Wellll. Actually, he preferred it when he'd found out about the stuff he didn't know about . . . Oh who was he kidding. He hated not knowing stuff, but loved finding the answers to the stuff he didn't know.
The falling platform came to a sudden stop, and Hexanerax led them towards a pair of large doors which seemed to open on their own.
['Implants?'] Rose asked.
John grinned. ['Implants.']
They were led into a large room where a dozen Overseers were sitting on tiered, circular benches around the chamber. 'Ah, Hexanerax. I understand you have found some off world visitors wandering in the High City,' the leader of the Senate said.
'Yes Vindarten. I have brought them to the Senate as you advised.'
'Very good Hexanerax, that will be all.' Hexanerax bowed and left the chamber.
'Hexanerax informs us that you are Doctor John Smith, and this is Rose. He also informs us that you know of the elder Ralpachan and request an audience with him.'
'Er, yes, yes, yes, and yes,' John said with a cheeky smile. 'Nail on the head there that man.'
'Ralpachan is advanced in years and rather frail. We at the Senate wish to shelter him from any . . . shall we say excitement.'
'Ooh, I think you'll find he'll have a good few years ahead of him if the Overmind has its way,' John said with raised eyebrows.
'You have knowledge of the Overmind?' Vindarten asked.
'Ah. Already made contact has it?'
'At first we believed Ralpachan had become feeble minded. He created designs for a fleet of interstellar ships, and as time passed, it became apparent that an entity was speaking through him. It called itself the Overmind, and it had a message for us. It said that henceforth we would be known as the Overseers.'
'Did it now?' John said with a hint of sarcasm. 'Well I also have a message for you.'
