Doctor Who_ Christmas on a Rational Planet - Lawrence Miles [42]
The machine was a clock, that much was clear. It had no hands, no pendulums, no markings; but a clock was a clock was a clock, and you don’t spend the best part of a millennium as a Time Lord without being able to tell one at a glance. The machine’s gears and wheels were balanced so precisely that one breath out of place might have caused them to collapse.
‘I take it that you’re the grand inquisitor of this witch-trial?’ the Doctor asked.
The machine shook its head, and a great crack ran across its central wheel. ‘It’s not a trial, it’s an Inquiry. And you’re not a witch, you’re an Initiate. Now, as I understand it, the point of this scenario is for the Initiate to explore his own psyche. You are your own inquisitor, isn’t that the idea?’
‘Not if someone else is pulling the strings. Or, rather, winding the watch-handle. If there’s some dark and terrible secret in my past that you’d like to torment me about, please get it over with.’ The Doctor sniffed haughtily. ‘And I’ll thank you to stop messing about with my neural processes. These are the only frontal lobes I have. My temples are sacred.’
‘Actually, I just wanted a quick chat about psionics.’
‘Ah.’
‘Never had much time for psychic phenomena before, did you? There was that business with the IRIS machine, of course, but we won’t dwell on the nasty details. Now, all of a sudden, it’s breakfast with Mrs Nostradamus and lunch with Uri Geller. Odd.’
The Doctor scowled. ‘I’ve been very busy.’
‘Really? If I was going to be vicious –’
‘ Were going to be vicious. Grammar.’
‘If I was going to be vicious, I could suggest that there are some issues you just want to avoid. And then there’s Roslyn Forrester.’
The Doctor felt his eyes narrowing. It was an automatic reaction. ‘What about her?’
The clock smiled innocently – something that was physically unlikely, if not actually impossible – and consulted a note in its personal disorganizer. ‘Oh, I was just thinking about the time it took you to rescue her from New York. She was here for over six weeks, I believe.’
‘Burn him,’ interjected the crusading judge, and the others all went ‘shhh’.
The Doctor sighed. ‘I know. Finding her was difficult. It was a while before there were sufficient anomalies in the continuum –’
The man in the toga sniggered. The Time Lady nudged him in the ribs.
‘ "A while"?’ queried the machine ‘One fully-functional time machine at your disposal, minor hiccups aside, and you still think in terms of linear time? Not very convincing.’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘That you didn’t want to come here at all. You knew that in 1799 you’d find the answers, or at least some of them, and you knew the answers would sting a little. Poor Roz. Left in the lurch again.’ The machine cocked its head, and various gears protested loudly in its neck. ‘And what about your terrible fear of the gynoids? Or, rather, of what they represent.’
‘Fear?’ The Doctor’s voice dropped to a snarling whisper.
‘What do you know of fear?’ The line was pure melodrama, he knew, but it seemed to suit the surroundings.
The machine shrugged, and there was the sound of a spring snapping from deep within her (her?) workings. ‘Look down.’
The Doctor looked to his feet. He’d assumed that the stake had been erected on top of the traditional pile of tinderwood, but now he saw that he was standing on a small hill made of burning worlds, each the size of a football. Lava and mucus bubbled up from cracks that swallowed oceans. The Earth died by fire, again and again. The Doctor grimaced.
‘Something wrong?’ asked the machine.
‘The symbolism is terrible,’ replied the Doctor. ‘I said you should have stuck with Daleks.’
Then the fire reached the top of the pile, the stake burst into flames, and everything went orange. The colour of closed eyelids, seen from the inside.
The Doctor called this part of the ship ‘the cloisters’. It was a series of covered walkways, cracked pillars supporting a roof that protected the stone pathways from a marble-coloured artificial sky. Usually, the place reminded Chris of the Initiation