Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Times Crucible - Marc Platt [1]
But Vael did not want to mingle with these ruffians. He wanted only to listen and watch from a distance, just as he observed and watched his fellow cadets and was despised for it. He attended academic parades only on pain of expulsion, guessing that the Court of Principals would never carry out such a threat for they knew that he was an Individual.
This was no guess, he had been as good as told it. He had once seen his tutor speaking in the market with the aged and venerable Pythia from the city temples. The tutor's face was turning crimson as he tried not to choke, for the old priestess's blue, fur-trimmed robes reeked of the woodsmoke and incense in which she was bathed when she consulted the past and future. She leaned from her palanquin and singled Vael out across the busy plaza, remarking on his thick mop of red-gold hair: the sure sign of an Individual. He would have made a good pilot, but he was too old for that now.
He was certain she had meant him to hear, for she glanced directly at him as she spoke, but he blocked his own thoughts when he felt the pressure of her enquiring mind. She did not appear surprised; she simply grunted, her suspicions confirmed, and ordered her transport on.
After that, the Court of Principals seemed more tolerant of Vael's misdemeanours. The warning reports to his home ceased and the letters he sent back dwindled to perhaps one a season. During all his time in the City, he had been relieved to be five hundred leagues from family ties and prying thoughts. He ignored his parents' show of concern for him, knowing that his welfare was secondary to family reputation. Their concern was confined to letters. They never visited him. Their merchant estate in the distant Soonwell Valley was expanding and his elder sisters were both partners with children of their own.
Vael loathed the cadets' arduous training, especially the physical endurance courses. Sports, swordplay and military manoeuvres bored him, so he exercised his mind in creating new excuses which would exempt him from attending lectures and practicals. This should have counted against him, but he had learned how far he could play on a tutor's tolerance and still get what he wanted. His capacity to remember things that children forget when they become adults did not desert him. Above all, his ability to shield his mind against the greatest curse of the Gallifreyan civilization marked him out as an individual among Individuals.
In the old days, before the Intuitive Revelation, secrets were a precious gift on Gallifrey. For most of the population, cursed with the relentless mental fog of telepathy, secrets were an unfathomable mystery. No idea or notion was yours alone. The air ceaselessly droned with the commentary of public opinion; the thoughts of the people's minds invaded each other's heads in an unending chorus of unharmony, before passing into the great pool of collective existence that made up the root of Gallifreyan culture. Some cadets could be taught to shut out the endless babble; to others the shutting out came naturally. Yet those who succeeded faced the greatest horror of all for a Gallifreyan: the terrible isolation of silence. Only those who endured this fate would rise from the plebeian masses as Individuals with all the makings of a Young Hero.
It was at the time of the return of the mighty Hero Prydonius from his greatest voyage that Vael failed his final assessments. When he saw the posted results, he just shrugged and headed back through the gathering crowds for the privacy of his solitary barrack room.
Winter was biting at the City early, freezing the mud on the streets that were unheated - and that year many more streets were cold than before. The dreary summers of recent times seemed havens of warmth in comparison. A bitter wind from the Northern Lakes scythed through the dingy corridors. Steam rose in carved clouds from the food stalls in the market.
The sharpened air buzzed with the thoughts of the people as the crowds choked those