‘You try,’ said Bill.

‘Oh, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Rory.

‘If you’re a Nurse Elect, Guide will recognise you and let you in,’ said Winnowner.

‘Really, I—’ Rory said.

‘Try,’ ordered Bill Groan.

Rory placed his hand flat on the panel.

Chapter

11

The Maker of Our Earth

With the Doctor enthusiastically leading the way, they explored the deep chambers and tunnels of the massive terraformer plant.

The simple scale of it silenced Bel and Samewell, and took Amy back a bit too. The machined and engineered cavities inside the artificial mountain were bigger than any machine, factory or structure she’d ever seen on Earth. They also matched or exceeded the scale of structures she’d seen since leaving Earth and travelling aboard the TARDIS.

They followed winding tunnels lined in galvanised metal plates or slightly tarnished sheets of shipskin.

They entered chambers that had been hollowed out of the hill so that the face of the rock was cut perfectly smooth and straight-edged, like set and polished concrete. Colossal machines that Amy thought of as turbines dominated these chambers, feeding whatever energies or processes they output into vast networks of gleaming metal pipes and condensers. Some of these pipes, large enough in cross-section to take two trains on parallel lines, exited into vent stacks, or swept down into stone floors, connected to other, deeper chambers and larger, stranger machines.

Sometimes, the Doctor and his companions came out of tunnels onto mesh walkways of welded shipskin that crossed, precipitously, the middle of vast subterranean spaces, delicate bridges suspended hundreds of metres above the chamber floors from which they could look up at dim ceilings thousands of metres above, or peer down into heat-exchange trenches or energy sinks or other abyssal clefts that pulsed with distant glimmers of energy, and dropped away into the planet’s crust for miles. Warm updrafts touched their faces and billowed their hair.

‘I’ve run out of words for big,’ said Amy.

‘None of them seem adequate, do they?’ the Doctor agreed.

Everywhere they went, they could hear the whirr and hum of the giant mechanisms. Occasionally, they could also hear the scratch and scurry of transrats emanating from blind tunnels or side vents.

They entered one chamber on the level of the rock floor and found it to be the largest they had seen yet.

Its dizzying space was dominated by a massive column of silvery metal that was fed by a cobweb of tubes and ducts. It looked like a huge chrome oak tree. High up, the roof of the titanic chamber was hazed by clouds of vapour, so that the branches of the giant metal tree appeared to be swathed in ghostly foliage.

‘Are those clouds?’ Amy asked, looking up.

The Doctor nodded.

It was drizzling slightly, like a wet autumnal day.

The chamber was so big, it had its own weather system.

‘That’s a secondary sequence prebiotic crucible,’

said the Doctor, with the appreciative tone of a twitcher who has just spotted a very rare species. ‘What a beauty.’

‘What does it do?’ asked Bel.

‘It makes the world a better place,’ said the Doctor.

‘In human terms, anyway. It makes life. It’s gently sculpting and shaping the ecosystem of Hereafter.’

‘You said secondary,’ said Amy.

‘What?’

‘You said it was a secondary sequence something or other.’

‘Yes,’ said the Doctor, matter-of-factly. ‘There’ll be about a hundred of these, all supporting the main sequence crucibles. I hope we get a look at one of those, because they’re really big.’

Amy grinned at him. ‘I don’t often get to see you actually impressed,’ she said.

‘How could you fail to be?’ he replied. ‘This is human engineering at pretty much its peak. This is the point at which those little apes from Earth actually advanced so far they could rebuild and redesign whole planets. That’s the mark of a great species. To be fair, it’s a slow old process. It takes hundreds of years, and the people who start the process don’t live anything like long enough to see the end, but still. But still, they do it. That’s what I love about people. They have dreams and grand ambitions, and they start building towards them, even though they know they won’t live to see them finished. That’s how the pyramids were built. And the great cathedrals of the middle ages.

People were prepared to invest in the future. They were prepared to donate the labour of their entire lives to a greater whole that other lives, future lives, would benefit from.’

Amy glanced across at Samewell and Arabel, who were standing in reserved awe, gazing up at the vast machine, rain speckling their faces.

‘What happens if it takes so long they start to forget what it’s all for?’ she asked.

‘The Morphans haven’t forgotten, Pond,’ said the Doctor. ‘They know what they’re doing with their Terra Formers. They’re committed to the process. They’re sticking to the great plan.’

‘Yeah, but even so,’ said Amy. ‘It’s taken so long, they’ve started to misremember. It’s taken so long…

What did Bel say? Twenty-seven generations? They don’t even understand the technology any more. It’s all automatic. They’re like the transrats living in the shadow of a machine that works all by itself. Sure, they know their routines and their jobs, and I’m sure they understand what they’re part of, it’s just…’

‘What?’

‘What happens when it ends?’ she asked. ‘I mean, when the job’s done? Will they be ready for that?’

‘It won’t happen for several more generations,’ said the Doctor.

‘That’s my point. Will the great-great-greatgrandchildren of these Morphans know any better? Will they be ready? Isn’t there a danger they won’t know what to do with the world they’ve built, because all they’ve ever learned to do is survive during the process of building?’

‘I’m sure they’ll take to it,’ said the Doctor.

‘What did the stonemasons of Europe do when there were no cathedrals left to build?’ she asked. ‘What did the slaves do when the pyramids were finished? How did they feel?’

The Doctor thought about it and frowned.

‘These Morphans are really good people, what I’ve seen of them,’ said Amy. ‘They’re hardworking and selfless and totally serious about their lives. But it really feels to me like they only understand this, the work in progress. I don’t know what they’ll do when the job’s finished.’

‘Well,’ replied the Doctor, ‘that’s what life and evolution is all about. The Morphans are adapting a world to fit their biology. When it’s ready, when it’s properly Earth-like, they’ll have to adapt their minds and attitudes to make the most of living in it.’

He fell silent for a moment.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Amy.

‘There’s always the question of if they’re actually going to get a chance to make a go of it anyway, of course,’ said the Doctor. ‘A problem that starts with Ice…’

‘And ends with Warriors,’ Amy said, and nodded.

‘This sightseeing is all very interesting and rather uplifting,’ the Doctor told her, ‘but I need to work out exactly what the Ice Warriors are doing to the Firmer systems.’

‘And stop them?’

‘Yes,’ he nodded. ‘I actually have a lot of time and respect for the Martian culture, but in this instance, I’m on the Morphans’ side. They have the claim here, and the Ice Warriors are essentially trying to wipe them out. We have to put things right for the Morphans.’

They started walking again, and crossed through another tunnel link into a chamber cavity that opened a giddying drop beneath their narrow shipskin walkway.

Far below, magmatic forces rumbled and glowed.

‘Not being funny, but how are we going to win this?’

asked Amy quietly. ‘The Ice Warriors are very big, very strong, and very hench. And they’ve got sound guns and spaceships and all kinds of freaky nastiness. On our side, we’ve got a bunch of farmers whose idea of a weapon is a garden rake. If it comes to a fight, it’s going to be really one-sided.’