They reached their destination on the fourth day. The neutronium revenant of a first-generation star, one of the first to form from the slowing wavefront of the Big Bang, it had been boosted through its life-cycle by the dense photon pressure of the galactic core. Before the Earth had cooled, it had shed its gas cloud and ceased to emit radio pulses. Now it barely rotated, its ma.s.s locked by the competing pulls of other dark stars.
The TARDIS came out of the s.p.a.ce-time vortex a millimetre above its surface and fell like a brontosaurus with one of those flimsy paper hang-gliders. Even so its impact made no sound. There was no atmosphere to carry sound and no loose surface material to carry vibratory packets of heat.
Nothing moved here, ever.
In the console room, Chris crossed his arms and rubbed absent-mindedly at his shoulders. Compared to the surface of a neutron star, s.p.a.ce is a forgiving place; blossoming with virtual particles, sprinkled with cosmic rays, interpenetrated by clouds of organic matter. This was a grave in s.p.a.ce.
Internally it retained some power, smeared veins of quarks like those in which the Quoth had evolved, but on the surface it was simply a vast cinder of compacted matter.
Roz nipped the TARDIS scanner on, almost defiantly.
No secrets humanity was not meant to know for her, Chris thought. Death of a star or death in the vicarage, it was all one to her. A cop to her fingertips.
The scanner image formed lazily. Chris half-expected it to show nothing but, after a second"s white fuzziness, it fizzed into partial life. Gallifreyan technology. How could he have doubted it? They had a treaty with the Dyson Sphere builders after all, people who could house the entire population of Earth"s Empire in their wardrobe s.p.a.ce without noticing. The trouble was the People"s technology looked spectacular, but Gallifrey"s science looked like valves and sealing wax, and it was all that was keeping them alive.
The scanner showed the collapsed remains of the star in shades and tones of grey, the whole tinged with the indigo light that falls at the bottom of a deep gravity well. Even the 271 blue-shifted light looked tired and broken. Autumnal, Chris thought, and then chided himself for thinking of something so meaningless as the autumn of a star. He found himself holding the edge of the console tightly.
Outside, gravity, the softest force in the universe, a force so weak that a hand-held magnet could overpower the amount of it generated by the whole Earth, had smoothly and silently ground protons and electrons into neutrons. If he were to step outside, out of the leading edge of the force-shield that sheathed the external event sh.e.l.l of the TARDIS, he would be plated over the surface a fraction of a nanometre deep.
The Doctor depressed the red-handled lever on the TARDIS console. Halfway down, three-quarters down. Chris eyed the doors nervously. Roz nodded, impatient. Get it over with, her body language said.
The TARDIS groaned. The inner doors opened and the Quoth leapt into the void between the inner and outer doors into the existential depths of the real-world gearing. The Doctor thrust the door control back, closing the inner door.
He smiled at Chris and Roz. "Cheer up. There"s no danger at all here. A TARDIS is absolutely stable even in gravity fields stronger than this one. The mathematical structure can stand this for oh, oodles of time yet."
"Then why are your fingers crossed?" Roz said.
"Are they?" The Doctor held his right hand up before his eyes. "I must have been trying to remember something. I wonder what it was?"
"To open the other door?" Chris said tersely.
"That"s right." He tapped at a couple of controls. On the scanner, the outer door swung open and air, dust and Quoth fell in a silver torrent onto the geometric plains of the star.
"Now what?" Chris said.
The Doctor gave a shy smile. "Now we wait. Anyone fancy a cup of hot chocolate?"
"I fancy an explanation," Roz said.
" H m m . " The Doctor was looking for hot chocolate.
"You started to tell Montague about the Quoth. Well, tell me. I want to know what I"ve had in my head."
272.
"Okay." The Doctor steepled his fingers. "Take three neutron stars, and collide them in exactly the right way. Too much energy and you could get a black hole, too little and you might get a pulsar with second-chance planets. Just right gets you a time engine: a cylinder of neutronium a light-day long, spinning rapidly enough to distort time with its gravity. That was the Quoth home world. Only in that flux of bent time could the barriers between our macrodimensions and their collapsed dimensions naturally drop. There they evolved by developing patterns that could deflect and control the time-flux. Any that didn"t probably youthened to death."
Chris looked thoughtful. "What could destroy a Time Engine?"
The Doctor shuffled his feet. "Some random cosmic accident, I expect. Anyway, it happened and some Quoth were hurled into s.p.a.ce. Eventually they arrived on Earth and started to look for a source of the materials they needed to . . .
em . . . breed. The stresses that permit quarks to exist in the disa.s.sociated form necessary to Quoth biology are immense; on a low-gravity planet like Earth the only possible source was organic: the quantum side-effects of psionics."
"So they started eating people"s brains," Chris said.
Roz glared at him.
"Not quite. The material they were extracting was one which had a fairly narrow half-life anyway, nothing you would miss, but in the process of extracting it they stimulated the psychic nodes in their hosts" brains, driving them to new levels of power. In Montague - and in his followers and even his enemies, since they learnt from his example - a process of feedback enslaved the Quoth: blighted them. The host wished for greater power, so the Quoth mined more to release more power, to make more Quoth to mine more power, and on and on."
"And now they are free," Roz said. "What do you think a race of sub-nanite reality-engineers with the ability to turn humanoids into G.o.ds are going to do to the politics of this galaxy? How long before we are their slaves?"
273.
The Doctor shook his head. "Let"s deal with that if we have to. I think we can extend a little trust."
Roz snorted.
Paris, 1903 Emil looked up as the shop bell tinkled, thinking that Madelaine was back from picking up the children from their grandfather"s. The family always spoilt the children; M a d e l i n e " s parents complained they barely saw them.
It was not his wife but a man in his middle forties, dressed in stiff tweeds and stout walking shoes, a battered travelling-bag slung over his shoulder. Emil watched indulgently while he pottered around the piles of books in the foreground of the shop, chortling to himself in English and rubbing his hands with glee over a longed-for volume here, a rarity there.
Really, Emil should have told him that the shop was closing up now and that he only had the door unlatched for his wife, but the man"s enjoyment was so infectious that he set down his account books on the counter and came out to join him. Soon they were chatting away like old friends. The amply upholstered man proved to be quite a connoisseur of old books, topping Emil"s tentative quotations with Latin and Greek tags, and ama.s.sing - the shopkeeper in Emil noted - a respectable stack of purchases.
Emil was wrapping the books in brown paper, the heaviest - a Latin translation by Olaus Wormius the Lesser - at the bottom, when the man gave a gasp and flung his right arm up over Emil"s shoulder, grabbing Emil"s other arm to steady himself.
"I say! H o w much is that?"
Emil swivelled in the man"s grasp and saw that his eyes, piercing within the magnifying circles of his gold-rimmed spectacles, had lit on the strawberry-gothic doll"s house that stood alone on a shelf at the back of the shop. On the Doll"s House. Emil still emphasized it in his thoughts. Gently he disengaged the man"s grip.
" I " m afraid that is not for sale. It"s by way of being an 274 heirloom, you see. It was my father"s when he owned the shop. He was in the toy line then."
"Did he make it himself? It looks very old."
"He, ah, acquired it from an old English family"
"Really, do you know which? I " m something of an anti-quarian, you see, and I can"t help but think there"s something familiar about that house."
Emil shrugged. "Possibly, Monsieur. I really do not know."
He disliked lying to this charming man but the House had done quite enough harm, and even though the Doctor had a.s.sured them that it was harmless, he still preferred to keep it in sight, and to keep its history to himself.
The man sighed and paid for the books. Turning to go, he pulled a card from his pocket and pa.s.sed it to Emil. "If you do learn more of its history, this is where I can be reached.
It looks like it might have possibilities. Um, yes, definite possibilities." Still waving his brown paper parcel, the man grabbed his bag to his side and, pushing the door with his back, went out into the night.
Emil shrugged and threw the card into the waste-paper basket behind the counter, the receptacle into which he pitched all the detritus that people left between the pages of books they no longer wanted. It rested there, its black lettering dark against the cream card: Montague Rhodes James, Provost"s Lodge, King"s College, Cambridge.
T h e N e u t r o n Star Roz saw it first. "Is that it?"
The Doctor blinked at the scanner"s blurred image, and focused it downwards.
"You have to make allowances for relative cultures. It"s quite an achievement, under the circ.u.mstances."
Chris stared at the screen. He snorted with laughter, and realized that he felt free.
Roz glared at him and then, to his immense surprise, cracked up. Her laughter was rich and wild. He almost stopped laughing from shock, but instead the sight set him off 275 even more. Perhaps there was hope for him and Roz yet.
The Doctor cleared his throat.
"I may not know much about art," he said - with the smug intonation of someone who knew an awful lot and was not averse to letting people know it - "but I know what I like."
"That?"
"Yes, that."
Chris glanced at Roz, who was staring up at the ceiling.
"Very, er, nice," he said.
The Doctor scowled. "Nice!" He started the dematerializa-tion. "Humans. No sense of artistry."
Warleader no longer, but gifted with a third name, Blight-ender watched the made and their makings playing on the broad steps of the great monument. From this point they would colonize the star, digging the rich veins of birthing matter from beneath its surface. The lost paradise is regained, it thought.
His old friend the surveyor burst out of the time-like underpinnings of the colossal structure in a thrashing ball of spines and clutching limbs. The children patterned their mock-fear and darted for the arbitrary points of safety, each in a different spatial dimension. Learning all the time, Blight-ender thought fondly. Building on their initial synthesis.
They, not it, would be the true inheritors of this paradise. It felt itself solidifying, freezing its own memories. Soon now it would be an Oldest.
The map-maker puffed itself up beside him. It gestured, what was the term, ah yes, up. up. Blight-ender considered. It was resolved never to lie to his friend again, never to lie to anyone. it patterned. Blight-ender considered. It was resolved never to lie to his friend again, never to lie to anyone. it patterned. Map-maker scrolled happily over its communicating surface.
Above them, stretching an almost infinite height height into the vastness of the four macrodimensions, the memorial stood in all its evil realism. Quoth s.p.a.ce, their prison for so long, now the permanent relic of their slavery. into the vastness of the four macrodimensions, the memorial stood in all its evil realism. Quoth s.p.a.ce, their prison for so long, now the permanent relic of their slavery.
Crooked and broken, the millimetre-high Doll"s House leered out across the neutron star.
276.