Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [101]
So, the Doctor had no idea what was supposed to happen to her now. Perhaps she’d be a loose end, with no fixed destiny, existing outside the confines of history. Or perhaps she’d simply cease to exist altogether.
‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ he told the equations. ‘I didn’t want to have to interfere. Really I didn’t. But I can’t take the risk, can I? I have to give you a future. A life. Outside of mine.’
He looked over his shoulder. ‘We’ll have to be careful, though. We don’t want to become a horror ourselves, do we? A second Ace is the last thing the universe needs.’ He ran his hand over the equation, blurring the first few symbols in the sequence. ‘Besides, I’m not the man I used to be. I doubt I could get away with it. So. One simple change. Not really a manipulation at all. The choice has to be Sam’s, not mine. She gets to choose the life she wants.’
Then he turned, to face the rest of the cell, the parts of the floor he hadn’t even touched yet.
The parts where Badar had lived. Never moving away from the wall, never going anywhere near the window.
‘Beside the point,’ the Doctor told himself. ‘The alteration isn’t going to be any use to me here. Concentrate. Think about Sam later.’
With that, he crawled into the middle of the cell, and began the great work. One drop of blood at a time.
* * *
Dusk
The guards hadn’t interrupted him all afternoon. That had been a mercy, anyway.
The equation had turned out to be a lot more artistic than he’d expected. At least, he hoped it had just turned out that way. It was possible his subconscious had been at work, making him turn it into a work of art, embellishing it with meaningless numbers just for the sake of appearances.
Just like Badar, thought the Doctor. Building his own private world to keep himself sane. Or the closest he could get to sane, after the guards had finished with him.
But the great work was almost finished now. He’d been forced to cut his hands open on some of the sharper bricks in the cell, just to provide himself with all the blood he needed. Like a medieval sorcerer, mused the Doctor, surrounding himself with bloody pentagrams and chalk circles. As it was, some parts of the equation were barely visible, and others overlapped the sequences he’d drawn at sunrise, when he’d worked out the numbers for the story of the little girl and the big horror. He hoped the overlap wouldn’t have any unpleasant side effects.
No. That didn’t seem very likely. The scrawls on the floor weren’t important, not in themselves. They were just aids to his concentration. Ways to help him think through the equations in his head. Ways to make his neurosystem lock on to the details of the temporal mechanics, and… trigger them.
The TARDIS was modelled out of solid mathematics. That was no secret, of course. But whenever he told his companions that, they always assumed he meant just the physical material. They didn’t understand the way these things worked, the subtleties of the Ship’s engineering. The TARDIS was a complex space‐time event. Its very existence, its very position in relation to the rest of the continuum, was just an intricate code series.
As was his. That was what Rassilon had done to his people, when the Imprimiture had been worked into the biodata of the Time Lord elite. When you had Rassilon’s gift, you were mapped on to the vortex by the numbers, linked to the heart of space‐time by an umbilical cord of pure mathematics. Just thinking about the formulae, just holding all the right equations in your head at the same time, was enough to trigger the connection and put you in a different time state.
Back at the Academy, trainee Time Lords would play games with that principle. Transmigration of object, they called it. Sometimes you could do it in a second, without thinking about it, but most of the time you had to concentrate for hours, maybe days, visualising the correct codes. Then you’d take an object, focus on it, and displace it. Use your