Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [129]
No… the past existed, it was real, he’d been there, his own past and other people’s.
He looked down at the woman sleeping far below him. She had been part of him for generations before his birth. She’d taught his father and his father and his father. She’d helped to raise him, she’d been his tutor, his friend, his first love, his wife, the mother of his children, she had been everything to him in the past. She had always been there, she wasn’t just a whim, a fictional construct.
But how would he know if she was?
There was a rumble of thunder far away, over the sea.
Either she had always been there, or the past was changing, renewing itself. If he woke up tomorrow and she had never been there, would he still remember her? He looked down at her again, suddenly full of the thought that he should be with her for every moment that he possibly could be just in case she vanished, never to be seen or mentioned again.
He scowled, although there was no one to see it. This was nonsense, sophistry, The Doctor knew exactly who he was, who he’d always been. He was a Time Lord, from the Noble House of Lungbarrow on the planet Gallifrey. He had been born of the Loom, son of the greatest explorer of his age and a human woman, Annalise… no… his mother’s name had been Penelope. He knew his father’s name, at least: his father’s name wasn’t Ulysses, and he was a professor at Berkeley.
His own name escaped him for the moment, but he knew that he had one.
Lightning flashed overhead, unbidden, marking out the silhouette of the fortress like a signal flare.
It was a cathedral, kilometres across.
Light streamed from stained glass windows set in the limestone ceiling, walls and floors. It was a vast circular vault, a web of buttresses and supporting ribs. Close to, the arcs and parabolas appeared to be straight lines, as flat as the surface of a planet. Each roof beam was wide enough for an army to walk along, although no army would ever be allowed this far.
It was impossible architecture, of course. The inside of the chamber was far larger than the outside. The floors and walls eschered into one another and out along the power conduits and great arched portals. The light wasn’t sunlight. Gravity was a local phenomenon, governed by whims rather than law. Look too closely and it was all too possible to see that the room was held together by optical illusions and false perspective,.
But no one who came down here ever spent long looking at the architecture because hanging, aberrant and isolated in the mathematical centre of the vault, was the Eye of Harmony itself.
The black hole was encased in an iron globe ten kilometres in diameter. The dark metal was pitted and cratered with age, there were streaks of rust running along it, like dry river beds. It was suspended in its own gravity apparently motionless. The power radiating from it was palpable, compelling.
At the top of the globe was a tiny aperture, and from that poured all the energy that Gallifrey needed, and so much more besides.
Savar stepped down into the vault, found his footing on the stonework.
He scurried down to a higher level, knowing where the TARDIS would arrive, and that it was imminent. The wheezing, groaning sound filled the air, echoing around the chamber. Savar was in place to see it arrive hidden at a higher vantage point. The air swirled and parted like the curtains of a magician’s cabinet. The TARDIS stood where it hadn’t before. In this sanctuary of sanctuaries there was no need for camouflage, and the time capsule retained its natural form, that of a bone-white obelisk.
A panel in the front slid open, and two figures emerged.
The first wore the Doctor’s clothes, but the waist-length blonde hair and the graceful movements were those of the Lady Larna. The second figure wore the Doctor’s body, but it was not him either. Savar could sense its red eyes and true form. The trapped god, unbound and here, at the fount of all Gallifrey.
Savar reached for the force knife he’d recovered from his room. Clutching it in his hand, he began edging down.