Doctor Who_ History 101 - Mags L. Halliday [10]
Much to her own surprise, the ground levelled out: she had reached the top. Looking up, she saw the huge white church in front of them, like a cross between the Taj Mahal, the Brighton Pavilion and a frosted wedding cake. The Doctor was stood on the cobbled forecourt, his dark red jacket slung over one arm, both hands in his trouser pockets. He was looking up at it, half-smiling and chewing one side of his lip. Anji watched as a tourist couple addressed him in broken French and he obligingly took their photograph in front of the huge building. He turned and saw her standing against the city’s skyline.
‘Ah, Anji.’ He came over and leaned against the promontory wall that ran around the forecourt whilst they waited for Fitz to catch up again. He handed her a slim drinking flask and she frowned.
‘It’s OK, it’s just mineral water,’ he assured her. ‘Less obtrusive than a plastic bottle of Vittel, I think.’
She took a sip, accepting his unspoken apology for his brusqueness in the pavilion. It was just water, surprisingly cool given it was from a flask that the Doctor must have had in a pocket of his velvet coat. Unless he had a miniature cooler in there somewhere as well.
‘It’s about perception,’ he told her whilst she took a bigger gulp of water.
She frowned. ‘The water?’
‘The painting.’
‘Ah.’
She leant on the parapet next to him, looking up at the huge, improbable church. ‘In what way, or shouldn’t I ask yet?’
‘I’m not sure. When we looked at the painting we saw one version of it, when we looked at the book cover we saw the same but different. I checked every part of it and they are visually identical.’
‘So something is causing us to perceive them differently?’
‘Exactly.’
Anji spotted Fitz making his way across the forecourt towards them, still breathing heavily. She smiled and gave him a little wave, waiting till she was sure he was in earshot to ask the Doctor her next question. ‘Do you think seeing Picasso will help? Only I hate to think Fitz climbed the hill for nothing.’
She hid her grin at his groan behind the lip of the flask.
* * *
There. Not there.
He was aware that he was starting to loop, that he was getting stuck on this one glitch, but it was the key, he was sure.
The search results on the face came back. No matches found. So the man had not existed. Then how could he have ever seen him?
The search results on the face came back. The man was sighted in Florida in 1935, next to a Mexican man with a rifle. Rome, 1980. The man looked the same in both locations. A fractured, partial link pointed towards England in 1907, where a boy whose face would eventually match sat rapt at his father’s tall tales of espionage. The father was real, set. From the father thousands of gossamers ran, connecting him to events and people. Except in two directions where the links flickered, broke. One of which tried to lead to the boy, the man, the impossibility.
The search results on the face came back: no matches.
There / not. He could still see the dusky reflection in the man’s glasses, the darkening russet sunset. Yet the square was empty; no man stood by the fountain, no glasses for the light to reflect in.
He felt a burst of energy coming down the line from the Hub. New information, the results of his first search query about the situation. It took a long time to arrive, the connection was increasingly frayed.
The information unfurled into his awareness. There was a solution, a way