Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [36]
She remembered the words of a human writer: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’ When an Earthman looked up at the stars, it wasn’t simply to measure the flow of electrically charged particles or variation between the absolute and apparent magnitudes.
The Doctor’s cat, Wycliff, was brushing around her legs.
She knelt down to stroke him. That was another similarity between Gallifrey and Earth: the demanding nature of the local cats. Locating a bowl near the food machine, she dispensed some food and milk for him. He munched away at his meal, tail quivering. Larna dispensed a drink for herself and began to sip at it as she explored the room. A variety of coats and hats hung from a wooden hat stand. His robes of office lay in a heap at its base. Either they had fallen off or he’d simply thrown them there in the first place. A dozen of the galaxy’s finest wines lay in their rack, the dust gathering.
Larna found the Doctor’s chair, facing the fireplace.
Guiltily, she wondered whether she could sit there, rather than the guest chair. He wouldn’t be here for a few minutes yet, so she moved the book she found there – Four Quartets
– and settled down, tucking her legs up rather than use the footrest. Over time, the cushions had become moulded to his body, used to his presence. The chair was upholstered in a velvet material like the coat the Doctor used to wear. It was still warm from where Wycliff had been dozing. She finished her drink, seeing the Doctor’s room from his perspective. She realised that there wasn’t a video screen in here, so she would be unable to watch the Doctor and the alien delegations arriving in the Panopticon.
The chair faced the fireplace, framed by a heavy marble mantel, with a number of ornaments. There was only one timepiece in the whole room, an ormolu clock from Earth that sat on the mantelpiece, its day divided up into twelve hours of equal length. The longer of the two hands was between the two and the three, the shorter sat about a quarter of the way between the five and the six. At the side of the chair was an occasional table, and it was littered with junk. A tea service was surrounded by bric-a‐brac: computer cards, a bunch of keys. There was a slip of brown paper. Instinctively glancing around to confirm that she was alone, Larna opened it.
There was a single word, handwritten, in capitals.
OHM
Larna recognised the word from somewhere. It was an Earth word signifying the SI unit for electrical resistance, named after one of their scientists, but there was some other meaning that eluded her. She put the paper away guiltily, sure someone had just seen her. But she was still alone, apart from Wycliff.
There was an empty wooden box there, too, presumably where all the stuff had come from. Sticking right through the table was a knife. Larna plucked it out, surprised how easily it came free. The knife couldn’t be metal, it must be a field of some kind. She tapped at the tip of the blade to see how sharp it was, and was rewarded by it pricking her thumb. She yelped, dropping the knife.
Larna sucked a drop of blood from her finger.
Two pictures hung over the mantelpiece. The first was a computer painting of a couple. The man wore a body in late middle age, with white hair and a clipped beard. The woman was smiling. Their eyes were extraordinary: his were dark and knowing, those of an ancient warrior. Hers were grey, young. Larna didn’t recognise either of them, but somehow knew that the painting