Doctor Who_ Interference_ Book One - Lawrence Miles [114]
He was starting to have doubts now, though. Now he was a good ten lards down the passageway. At least, he thought it was a passageway, although the place was still in pitch darkness. He couldn’t see any walls on either side of him, but he was sure he felt some instinct telling him to keep walking forward, and not to veer left or right at all.
Perhaps it’s an initiation, he thought. This was the kind of thing Freemasons and black‐magic cults did, to scare the living daylights out of new recruits. Put them in a pitch‐dark tunnel, make them feel psychologically vulnerable, get them ready for a good brainwashing. Perhaps the Time Lords had put the passageway here, as a way of indoctrinating him into one of their little political cliques. There was probably an agent of the Celestial Intervention Agency at the end of this tunnel, with a membership form and a ballpoint pen. Hoping he’d be scared witless enough to sign up.
As if.
It was quite clear where he was supposed to be going, anyway. He could see light up ahead, although it wasn’t strong enough to illuminate the passage. It wasn’t actually the light at the end of the tunnel, as such: It was some kind of object, glowing in the darkness, all red and throbbing. No, not exactly an object. More a sort of pattern, like –
The Doctor stopped walking, suddenly realising what he was looking at. He stopped humming, too.
The passageway ended in a wall, and the glow was just bright enough for him to be able to see that the wall was grey, more like concrete than the usual off‐white of the TARDIS. The pattern had been smeared across the wall in a muddy phosphorescent red, as if it had been drawn with firefly blood instead of ink. The pattern was circular; more or less. There were lines connecting various points around the circle, forming equations in the centre of the shape, sums formed out of sheer geometry. It took the Doctor a while to recognise the pattern, because the memory of it was so old that it seemed to have been filed away in a part of his brain he’d forgotten how to use.
‘Obviously, there’s no such thing as magic,’ said Cardinal Brabbajaggl, stirring in his chair the way all fat old academics did when they knew they were getting on to controversial ground. ‘However, this doesn’t mean that magic isn’t a useful metaphor to employ when dealing with less advanced beings than ourselves. Supernatural concepts are used by many cultures as a form of code, with which they can describe the more… how shall I put it? The more complicated aspects of reality. In much the same way in fact, that we might use higher mathematics. If our mathematical constructs in any way resemble the rituals we find in magic‐based or spirit‐based cultures, then this is hardly coincidental…’
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said Theta Sigma, raising his hand only once he’d already started talking. When are we going to get on to the good bits?’
‘“Good bits”?’ rumbled the Cardinal. The interruption had obviously caught him off‐guard, because his jaw had dropped and his chin count had very nearly doubled.
‘Yes, Sir. You know. The bits about vampires.’
It was a time equation. The Doctor had sat through enough elementary geochronometry lessons to know that. A good old‐fashioned time equation, painted on to the wall up ahead. He found himself trying to decode the pattern, to find out what it had been used for. He spotted some angles in the shape that suggested a transmigration program – ah, those were the days – and every now and then,