Doctor Who_ So Vile a Sin - Ben Aaronovitch [94]
‘The Time Lords were the first sentient beings?’
‘The first to evolve in this universe, yes,’ said the Doctor. He finished his tea and poured another cup. ‘Back then we were the Shadow people, caught between the warm dark of magick and the cold light of science. Magick predominated for a long, long time.
And then Rassilon made his decision.’
Roz had forgotten her tomato soup, listening. Don’t think of it like a sitrep, she thought, think of it as a fairy story.
‘The world solidified around us, like water turning to ice.
Squeezing out the magick. But, like an ice cube, there were little cracks and bubbles. Psi was the last magick to survive, perhaps because it was the least impossible, the closest to science. The residue of psi became a network of ley lines, stretching through the universe in improbable directions.
‘It’s still there.’
Roz said, ‘And Iphigenia is… on one of the ley lines?’
The Doctor nodded. ‘The Time Lords were aware of the ley lines before the Wars began. We’d chosen to make the universe 217
rational. Its irrational citizens objected. So we turned the psi lines into weapons. A Distant Early Warning line that stretched through the galaxy, studded with receivers the size of mountains or even small moons, parabolic dishes disguised as craters.
Listening for eruptions of psi power beyond Gallifrey.’
‘Iphigenia,’ said Roz.
‘Yes. A quarter of the moon is jammed with Time Lord technology, riddled with access tunnels. They just built a fake crater over the top, so the Vampires wouldn’t notice, and left it there.’
‘They must have realized someone would notice. There must have been hundreds of Martiniques through the millennia.’
‘Remember,’ said the Doctor, ‘back then there were no other intelligent races. None that mattered, anyway, as far as we were concerned. Just the Time Lords, and our enemies. The residual horrors of the universe before this one, and the Great Vampires, sucking dry every planet they could reach.’
‘So the expedition came into contact with the ley line,’ said Roz.
‘A primary source of unimaginable psi power. A well of magick,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where everything that’s possible is boiling under the surface of the universe. Zatopek is working for the Brotherhood.’
‘Ah.’
‘When I realized what we were faced with, I insisted we leave right away. Zatopek and Iaomnet were very, very insistent. I warned them about the fate of the previous expedition. Close contact with the Nexus simply drove most of them mad, left one of them sliding through different realities, and left an N-gram burning inside Mei Feng’s brain. They already knew what had happened. I should really have just let them wave their guns about and make threats, but I was curious… I should never have got so close to the thing.’
‘Chris’s dream aboard the Hopper,’ said Roz. ‘He said it was as though a great wave of psi power washed out from the centre of the planet.’
‘When I came into contact with the Nexus, it released every potential possibility of my existence. Well, almost all of them. If 218
I dust off some of the mathematical manuals in the TARDIS
library, I can probably do the calculations. In any case, all those probabilities were thrown loose, spraying loose into the galaxy.
Some of them found places to settle. Zatopek was very close. As I recall, he was holding a needier to my ear at the time.’
‘So he turned into you,’ said Roz.
‘Not quite,’ said the Doctor. ‘Me, with some tiny difference.
Some decision I didn’t make, some road I didn’t travel… maybe that Doctor just had something else for breakfast for that morning. In any case, Zatopek’s own psi talents allowed him to gradually emerge.’
It was all starting to make sense, in a nonsensical way. ‘That explains the you that contacted me on Fury,’ said Roz.
The Doctor nodded. ‘The distribution of probabilities is chaotic, but broadly, the further you get away from the Nexus, the more bizarre they become.’
‘One thing I don’t get – why blow up Cassandra, but not Iphigenia?’
‘All TARDISes have a self-destruct device,’ said the Doctor,
‘but the