Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [130]
‘Explain the principle to me,’ the Doctor’s voice asked.
‘You don’t know?’ Larna replied. There was no anxiety, no hint of coercion. She was the trapped god’s willing servant.
‘Rassilon’s plan was simply to use the supernova as fuel.
It would have supplied Gallifrey for many centuries. After that… I imagine we would have detonated another star.
There is hardly a shortage.’
After a moment’s silence, she continued. ‘The Eye of Harmony is a rotating black hole. As it spins, it distorts space and time around it. The area affected, the ergosphere, is concentrated around the equator.’
‘This globe contains both the black hole and the ergosphere?’
‘That is correct. Otherwise we would have been destroyed by gravitational forces and radiation. Although in theory it is possible to escape from the ergosphere, anything within it would break up – part of it sucked down into the black hole, part of it flung out in the direction of rotation. But the part that escaped would be accelerated by the distortion of spacetime, like a slingshot. The black hole is so powerful that a tiny amount of energy can be amplified to near infinite levels.’
He pointed to the column of light pouring from the hole in the globe.
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘The inside surface of the globe is mirrored. Rassilon shone a lamp through that hole, just for a second or so. Since then, the light has bounced from the ergosphere to the mirrored surface and back, gaining energy every time it re-emerges from the ergosphere. That ray of light now provides the fuel for all of Gallifrey.’
He laughed. ‘Ingenious. Magic.’
‘Superradiant scattering,’ she corrected him primly,
‘allowed for by all the laws of physics.’
‘And at the heart of the black hole is the singularity, the point where those laws break down.’
‘The point where physics allows a certain latitude,’ she replied, quoting one of her tutors. ‘But the universe is careful to hide such a dangerous place. Between us and the singularity is a cloud of radioactive matter; then a region of massive spacetime distortion; then an event horizon – a gateway that will let us in but not let us return; finally a stellar mass or more of matter that becomes steadily more solid until, at the core, it has reached infinity density.’
‘I am Omega. Nothing is hidden from me.’
From his vantage point, Savar smiled.
As the thunder caught up, the Doctor peered over the garden to the castle.
The trees and the hedges and the sky were whispering to him. ‘What’s the matter, what’s the matter, what’s the matter?’
‘What’s the matter?’ his wife asked, stirring and looking up at him.
The leaves were rustling. All around him, they were crinkling, shrivelling, falling.
‘Omega,’ the Doctor whispered, sitting at her side.
She shivered, drawing her gown over her shoulders. ‘He’s gone,’ she told him. ‘He left us in peace here.’
‘No.’ He stared at her face. ‘No. No. No.’
The Doctor looked over at the castle. There were lights on in there.
The wind was whipping up the newly autumnal leaves.
The rosebuds died on their stems, the grapes wrinkled on their vine.
‘Come on!’ the Doctor shouted, standing, starting to run towards the castle. She was right behind him.
A cold night wind drifted over as they ran through the garden.
The leaves were shrinking, desiccated, coming off the branches in droves. The stream was running dry, the imaginary fish flapping uselessly in the parched mud. The Doctor stopped when he saw them willed them away. He stared up at the sky. The stars were winking out one by one.
The air was thick with autumn leaves and particles of dust.
The lawns beneath their feet were sprinkled with sand now.
Lightning flashed around the fortress, lingering for longer than was natural.
‘Come on,’ she urged.
He picked up his pace.
Omega stepped up to an observation pulpit, located a small control panel and flipped it open. He began keying in a series of code sequences, rewiring the ancient circuits with the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver. He had already surrounded their section of the chamber with a stasis halo. Now he was drawing