Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [2]
‘The discovery of the Fragment was the clearest possible indication of our destiny,’ she said firmly. ‘The universe moves in mysterious ways.’
‘The Fragment!’ the little man snorted. ‘Rassilon wrote it himself, placed the paper under a stone during one of his walkabouts. He doesn’t want to see the future, he wants to shape it. The Scrolls are what might happen, what he wants to happen, not what will. Without the Fragment, Rassilon and the Consortium would not have been allowed to continue the time travel experiments, we’d have squandered the planet’s resources just trying to stay alive, rather than investing them.’
And it made sense, but it made the future an abyss.
She shrugged his hand from her shoulder, turned to face him. The little man didn’t speak for a moment. Finally, in that soft voice of his, he said, ‘There are many races across the universe who have never remembered the future.’
She shuddered. ‘It has been bad enough not knowing what would happen this last nine years. To be blind for ever… is that how you want to live?’
‘You would be surprised how easy they find ways to explain away what happens. They have many beliefs that we would find strange. They talk of “cause and effect”, “quantum mechanics”, “prediction”. Mostly they put their trust in their gods. They believe that the gods can directly influence the mortal sphere, rewarding their followers, punishing the unbelievers. The laws of physics bend to tile will of the gods.
They call it “divine intervention”.’
She stared at him.
‘A curious notion,’ she said finally.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Without it, we are forced to create our own miracles.’
He pointed back at the ships and she turned. The sun was behind her, and barely above the horizon. The shadows were long, matt black, beginning to flow together, like droplets of mercury. The ships hung above the ruined Capitol, inviolate.
The gangways and docking tubes had withdrawn, the ground crews were retreating back to the safety of the Citadel. The singing had stopped some time ago.
Without further ceremony, the air filled with an unearthly wheezing, moaning sound and the massive ships faded away like memories. Then there was nothing there except the ruins of the Capitol, the shadows of the past, and a winter’s evening.
‘Shouldn’t you have been with your ship?’ she asked.
But he had gone.
Part One
Intervention
Chapter One
Night Beneath the Dome
He’d never seen the rain, but he’d heard it.
It clattered against the lead and concrete of the Dome, sloshed into the gutters and heaved its way along until it was sucked down the drainpipes or thrown from the spouts.
Whenever it was raining there was a hiss that filled the air, and a pulsating, chaotic pattering. It sounded like an animal clawing away at the shell of a tortoise; edging around, testing defences, quickly withdrawing when it found any opposition.
You could only hear the rain if you were this close to the Dome, and that meant that you had to be at the highest points of the Citadel, the parts in the East Towers where it reached right to the apex. In fact, here the masonry of the Citadel’s roof formed the skin of the Dome, and some of the lofts and attics actually lay between the inner and outer layers of the Dome walls. Although the Time Lords had an infinite amount of energy at their disposal, these areas were kept dark, and weren’t heated. Few people ventured this far from the splendour of the main chambers, only the occasional Technician and the semi-regular patrols of Watchmen. A few tafelshrews had lived here once, but they’d long since turned into fossils, and their descendants had probably scurried off, evolved into spacefarers and left Gallifrey altogether.
From time to time, Captain Raimor had wondered what rainfall looked like. He’d never been carried away by this curiosity, never been so moved as to venture to one of the derelict observation attics or to look up the subject in one of the Archive Libraries. He had never had the desire to accompany one of the maintenance