Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [80]
‘As he fell, he tore a hole in time, like a fingernail down a blackboard. It was as if a hole had been ripped from the page of a book. I saw the pages behind ours, other times and spaces. Not parallel universes, but palimpsest universes.
Reality is a slate, and history and memory and matter and time are just patterns of chalk on that reality. There is so much left unwritten, or just sketched in. A casual word, a glance down the wrong alleyway and… and everything could change. The Time Lords hold such power, the power to destroy a planet or change a young girl’s past. We devour time as a beetle chews up leaves or bacteria rots a corpse.
That power scares me. Nothing is safe, nothing is sacred.
‘But these observations were useless to me. I was alone. I was away from the black hole, but in a notorious area of space, with no power to enter the Vortex, not enough power even to call Gallifrey for help.
‘I wrote the name of what I had seen on a piece of paper.
OHM. The ancient name of the trapped God.
‘I drifted, ice forming on the skin of my lifeboat. My food and water ran out, my air was growing stale. I have no idea how long I drifted. A hundred years? A thousand?
‘They came while I slept, burning through the indestructible walls of my escape capsule. They were scavengers, they stepped into the darkness. They glinted, like emeralds and rubies, their legs were metal, jointed in all the wrong places, with glass spines embedded in them.
‘An insect species, I thought. Their compound eyes watched me, swivelling in their sockets as they saw the technology that surrounded me.
‘I told them my name, and where I was from. That interested them. They spoke to me. Asked me questions. I wondered if they were real, or were creatures from my dreams. I had long passed the point where I could make the distinction.
‘Then they took my ship apart – their hands were like army knives, unscrewing and peeling back and sawing away the control panels, the power conduits, the computer core, the light fittings, the springs and mounts of my chair. They scraped away samples of the carpet, of the walls, of the fabric of my spacesuit. They passed it back behind them, into their ship, they did it without rest, relentlessly stripping the capsule of everything that could be taken.
‘Then they started with me. They took some of my hair, my skin, my blood, extracted material from my glands, drained my spinal fluid. That wasn’t enough for them. They stopped for a moment, communicated with each other in a chittering voice, like a man walking over broken bottles, and then they took my eyes. One held me down, without effort, and the other was over me, a hand over each eye, a needle-thin blade coming from its end finger. I felt the eyes slipping from their sockets, only the optic nerve holding them in place.
Then I felt the nerves sliding out, like swords from a scabbard. I could still see. I felt the other one, the one who was holding me down, lean forward. I heard a sound like a buzzsaw.
‘I heard them leave, welding the wall back into place behind them. It wasn’t enough for them to let me die, they let me live. Despite that I shouted after them. “Come back,” I called. “Don’t leave me!”
‘But they had gone Without my eyes, without life support, alone in space, I saw it all. I had time to think, and to dream.
‘Nothing is real.’
Chapter Eight
Death of a Time Lord
The Doctor had stood, Larna at his side, as Savar had told his story. He’d listened to every one of the madman’s words, speaking in a soft voice only to answer a direct question. It had been quite a contrast with Savar, who had strutted and paced around the room, the pitch of his voice rising and falling as he spat out the words. What this Savar lacked in physical presence and strength, he attempted to convey with venom.
The anger was as terrifying as it was fascinating. As Larna watched Savar’s face contorting, as she analysed his sentence structure and posture, she realised that he was insane, by any of the accepted definitions.