Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [108]
‘No?’
‘He brought me here because of you. You have the only thing that he wants. Freedom.’
‘I don’t understand why he’s trapped at all. If he’s got the power to create all this, he must be able to whip up an escape route.’
‘No.’
The Doctor stopped. ‘Oh come on, if the Rutans can convert matter into anti-matter then I’m sure that Omega can.’
‘It isn’t as simple as that. This universe only exists because he wills it. Without his consciousness it would cease to exist.’
‘So he can’t leave because he just can’t take that last step, a part of him has to stay behind.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand why he would want to leave. It’s a beautiful place. He’s a god here!
The Doctor looked up. ‘He wants to go because the sky is wrong.’
She looked up, and as soon as she did, she frowned. ‘I never noticed that before.’
Omega sighed. The sky here was impossibly blue and the clouds looked as though they had been daubed on with poster paint and a thick brush. It wasn’t the colours, it was the shape. It looked as if the sky and the clouds had been painted onto the inside surface of a vast dome, one that seemed to curve and fall beyond the horizon. It didn’t feel like the outside at all.
‘There’s sunlight, but no sun,’ the Doctor said.
Omega knew that. The light streamed down, but it wasn’t come from anywhere, and the shadows were confused, lying at different angles at different places.
‘This place is created from his thoughts, and after all this time, he’s forgotten what the sky looks like,’ the Doctor said.
‘And that’s why he needs to escape. For all his power, he’s impotent.’
No, Omega thought. No. That wasn’t it. In any act of creation, there is always frustrated ambition. The most perfect sculptures and portraits and poems are not quite what the artist imagined. Sometimes the faults are minor, occasionally they are even beneficial, forming unintended meanings, new purpose or clarity. More often, though, the perfect form remains trapped in the mind. Even here, where his thoughts and dreams were all that there was.
Omega remembered the sky. He remembered the sun on his face, the clouds drifting past. But he couldn’t recreate it.
He closed his eyes, head slumping forwards. When he returned his gaze to the mirror, the image was that of the matter universe. It was an office, a bright, airy place. It overlooked a vast statue of a young man, his space helmet tucked under his arm. It was a man with a stony face full of hope, just about to forge a glorious future that he would not be part of.
Castellan Voran was uncomfortable in his chair as the Great Panopticon Bell struck Four Bells.
He was merely the Acting-President, and had felt it in poor taste to take up residence in the Presidential Chambers, especially as his tenure should only have lasted a couple of hours. But that had been this morning, and now Surgeon Grutnoll was advising that the President should get at least another day’s rest. It had been a minor wound, but the President had worn his current body for over a millennium.
The stabbing wasn’t enough to justify complete bodily regeneration. The Castellan just wished that the President had picked a better time to be stabbed, that was all.
From this office he could look out over the Panopticon, and see the people gathering at the foot of the Statue of Omega. Ask them why they were doing it and they probably couldn’t answer. Omega was returning, and the people needed a way to express and explore their feelings about that. The Castellan wondered if he’d be out of a job. When Omega returned, there was no doubt that he’d be given a place on the Supreme Council. He’d almost certainly be elected President – which College would stand against him?
Would Omega sweep away the old structures or would he try to work within them?
So this was ‘change’, this was what the Doctor had been going on about all these years. The possibility of gain, the probability of loss.
As Acting-President, Voran could