Doctor Who_ The Tomb Of Valdemar Part 10

'Baylock's palsy. Premature ageing. Those afflicted never live a year beyond p.u.b.erty. He was a serf, one of my family's people. The treatment was expensive and in its infancy. I took it upon myself to do what I could. Believe me, his family were only too relieved.'

Forget that image of those greedy peasant parents grabbing at the pittance he paid them, shoving the screeching child into his carriage, dancing with joy as he drove away. You are telling a lie, it didn't happen. If you're saying it's true, it is a lie.

'Really,' Romana says, but she is uneasy.

'I'm sure you wish to find your friend,' he continues, easily.

'You know, one of these days you really are going to have to tell me who you are.'

Romana smiles back. 'One of these days. Am I a prisoner here?'

'Oh no. I have no claim on this palace. I am merely a tenant. The real owners, well, who knows... ?'

'Indeed, the riddle of Valdemar and the disappearance of the Old Ones is one of the ten great mysteries of the universe,' says Romana. 'Number six as I recall, from those on my planet who were obsessed with lists.'

'You want the Doctor.'

'Please.'

'You realise, of course, that this palace is nothing more than the control centre of a jumped-up particle accelerator,' says Romana after Neville has left her and the Doctor together in the library. It is evening now, not that it makes much difference on Ashkellia, but somehow the dim palace lights have dimmed even further. Shadows loom large in this repository of the Old Ones.

The Doctor grunts. He has been tinkering with one of the data-storage cylinders. Slowly, he lowers it on to the carved table. Oh dear. Romana realises she has made a big mistake.

'Of course I know,' he replies, patiently. 'Now, undoubtedly, so do they.'

'Ah. Sorry.' She tries to spot the recording devices. 'Which is why Neville was so helpful in bringing me here. How do you think he is observing us?'

'It doesn't matter. Nano-bugs, cameras, telepathy for all I know.'

'I'm sorry Doctor.' She is still painfully aware of the gap between intelligence (the understanding of the purpose of the palace) and experience (knowing when to keep one's mouth shut).

'Don't worry. He would have worked it out in the end.'

Romana paces the huge hall. 'But applied on such a scale.

Even Gallifrey... What could they possibly have hoped to achieve? These Old Ones.'

The Doctor's face is in shadow, but she could swear the lines on his face had deepened. He seems older, old as his years. 'To breach the higher dimensions,' he says.

Romana is shocked. Really shocked. 'But... but that's impossible. The whole idea, that's ludicrous.'

The Doctor laughs, but without humour. 'Why are you so upset? Because the Old Ones did it? Or that they achieved an engineering miracle not even the Time Lords could manage?'

'The experiment was closed down. The Dimensional Ethics Committee...'

'Banned any such experimentation. I know. The consequences would have been appalling.' The Doctor sits back in his chair, furiously twiddling his thumbs. To Romana, it was as if he had been there, as if the experiment had been taken from him. A personal insult.

'Why, Doctor?' she asks. 'What would happen if the higher dimensions were breached?' She is on familiar ground the debate, the discussion of evidence.

'Reality would begin to change,' he muses, looking up at the data cylinders lining the walls. 'Or more strictly, appear to change. The higher dimensions are are reality, just a greater reality than we can perceive. Even Time Lords, with their occasional insights into the fourth and fifth dimensions, aren't immune to their effects.You recall that poor man inside the tomb?' reality, just a greater reality than we can perceive. Even Time Lords, with their occasional insights into the fourth and fifth dimensions, aren't immune to their effects.You recall that poor man inside the tomb?'

Romana shudders. She remembers all right. 'And K-9?'

'The mind and body adapt to exposure to the higher dimensions. Organs in the brain, dormant for centuries, begin to grow. The eyes...'

'Yes, I know about the eyes.'

'Ah!' He is suddenly awake. The air pops with the sound of snapping fingers. His own wide eyes gleam in the dying light.

'Of course! How could I have been so stupid?'

'I don't know. What are you talking about?'

'Telepathy. Nano-whatever, cameras, telepathy, that's what I said, isn't it? Don't you see?'

'No. What's all this got to do with Valdemar?'

'Telepathy! That's what this has got to do with Valdemar.'

Romana frowns at him She thinks she understands what he means. She remembers a rather fanciful paper on this very subject at the Academy. 'Doctor, that was only supposition.'

'Supposition? Superst.i.tion? It's fact and the Time Lords knew it! Valdemar. Of course. It has to be.'

'That certain individual forms of life are more adapted to perceive the higher dimensions? It's a childish conceit. Like the idea that certain privileged families could control and master some universal force...'

'It's undemocratic, I'll grant you. But I think it's true. The Old Ones must have had great quant.i.ties of psychic energy.

Enough even to instil their computers with that knowledge.'

'Doctor. This is speculation.'

'Is it really?' He is up and pacing now 'Even on minimal power, the sensors could interpret your psychic energy and recreate an environment you felt a deep empathy towards.'

'My room?'

'What else would you call it? Magic?'

Romana doesn't want to be convinced. She doesn't want to believe she is trapped inside a giant living computer that can read her mind. '"It knows", Huvan said. A frightening thought.'

The Doctor spreads out his arms. 'Frightening, indeed.

Imagine. A million years ago, the Old Ones breached the higher dimensions. The effect would have been catastrophic.

But not for everyone. Certain individuals, perhaps only one, were sufficiently psychically evolved to control its influence.

To shape reality to its own ends. With that kind of power, it could do anything. And in the end, millennia later, when even the universe itself has changed beyond recognition, the memories of this time still live on.'

'Valdemar,' breathes Romana.

'This palace is only a fragment,' says the Doctor. 'An echo.

If it can do what it does now, what would it be capable of when operating on full power?'

The words ring round the hall. Together, they look up at the library. It seems to have provided them with knowledge after all.

'We can't allow that,' Romana says.

'No,' the Doctor replies, somewhat evasively. 'No. Of course not.' He keeps himself impa.s.sive, not allowing his face to betray his real thoughts.

Up in his control room, Paul Neville rubs his hands with glee.

His fingers dance over the video-disc controls. The Doctor's words are repeated once more. 'No. No. Of course not.'

It is time to begin work.

Night falls in the palace. Its battered metal skin is still a.s.sailed by the same liquid storms; the stabilisers still spin and fire; the updraught from the core still holds it aloft.

However, deep inside, self-maintaining sensors understand and respond to the needs of its latest occupants and perform operations, relevant to their biological clocks.

In a way, the palace becomes even more fairy-like at night.

We pa.s.s over the sleeping bodies of the young n.o.bles, exhausted from yet another day of frolics. They dream of money and ease and love. We move to Huvan, muttering and flinching in his sleep from the thousand dark blows and slashes from the creatures living inside his mind.

We see Pelham, who has been released from her bonds by the terrifying Kampp, and escorted to a comfortable cell. She will be summoned in the morning. She dreams of her golden past, the success she never appreciated, the greed that brought her here. Of Robert Hopkins and his threats.

Mercifully, memories of her treatment at the butler's hands, as well as the experience in the tomb, are overridden by these pleasanter scenes.

Neville sleeps at his console, like a grey spider in its lair, the spying machines still bobbing and floating. It's obvious what he dreams of power. Limitless power. And Valdemar.

Finally, we see the Doctor and Romana, doing whatever Time Lords do that pa.s.ses for sleep. They are trapped here, they know it. The weight of the universe presses down on them; the need to get moving, to get on with their mission. As yet, they feel themselves unable to proceed. Worse still, unable to perceive those factors larger than themselves that would allow them to know which decision would ultimately prove correct. What do they do? Escape and continue with the Key to Time? Or stay and prevent the worst, the unimaginable, from happening again, as it did a million years ago?

Sweet dreams, Doctor.

Chapter Six.

You see, you have to see, the thing is the Doctor is so very, very wrong.

All this talk of higher dimensions and particle accelerators, that's the typical kind of pseudo-rationalisation so beloved of our new lords and masters in the Protectorate.

He lacks the true knowledge, the true perception of what is and what isn't.

Valdemar cannot be tidily explained away, much as they would like him to be. Valdemar is aeons old, almost as old as time itself, so how can this Doctor arrogantly spout that he knows better, that he can reduce the Dark G.o.d to such principles? It is the mouse saying to the cat that he cannot exist because he is not just a big mouse, carrying on these protestations as it is consumed.

The truth can only be discovered through dedication, through exploration and, of course, through faith. Not the diluted, whining materialism of the New Protectorate, faith is an absolute belief that there is something more, something greater than this grubby life. One just needs the right eyes.

Perhaps if the Doctor had suffered, the way the small bundle of life energy known to the universe as Paul Neville has suffered... Paul Neville. A name given to this bundle by other bundles. Quite accidental, quite random.

Of course, nothing is random, or accidental. Neville was not born the eldest son of two of the richest and most powerful planet-owners in the empire for nothing. Oh no, there was meaning there, a predestination. This was always known.

Neville has a memory. He recalls events perfectly. His upbringing on the private moon, its atmosphere and gravity terraformed to provide just the right effect. The parents had been ostentatious, something Neville disliked. Their home was a recreation of the famous Alton Towers, that apex of twenty-first century culture. Their Alton Towers, however, was large, much larger than the original. Ninety-five kilometres larger.

Neville remembers long summers and skeletal rides; ornamental fountains that stretched to the horizon; the indolence of the duke and d.u.c.h.ess.

He himself preferred science. Oh yes, science. He gave it a go. Let the Doctor and his sceptics mock, but Neville tried their way. Determined to create something, something that would aid him in his destiny.

For a moment, emotion breaks in. Neville had a pet, a dog, its pampered life extended through genetic manipulation.

Neville remembers he extended that life span himself with surgery, to see what he could achieve. And more, so much more.

Neville remembers the horror on his parents' faces when he introduced the dog (what was its name again Pinch?

Punch?) to the court, clad in its own fine doublet and hose, and it opened its augmented mouth and politely introduced itself with a languid bow.

Alas, speech did not suit the creature. Despite the modifications to its brain, it lacked some spiritual component in its canine nature and failed to adjust to its new life. The new perceptions, the human perception, drove the creature mad.

The dog... Oh, there was some unpleasantness with servants, a death perhaps; he was only eleven at the time...

and it had to be exterminated. Neville remembers this was the first hunt he was allowed to attend; that and the dog's blood on his face when it was eventually cornered.

Soon after, he knew science was a dead end. The life of the spirit was what consumed him now. Could life be altered spiritually? Was life any more than just living?

He gained entrance to the most prestigious arcane university on Earth, despite the parents' disapproval and, in fact, refusal. Oh yes, that particular turning-point.

When the sh.e.l.ls of the duke and d.u.c.h.ess were found poisoned in their private herb garden, no one could understand how this could have happened. The duke was an idiot; three centuries of n.o.ble breeding left no doubt about that, but the d.u.c.h.ess, she knew everything she needed to know. Maybe it was a suicide pact, in the face of the impending revolts on their major planets. Even in his idiocy, the duke was rumoured to have extra-natural clairvoyance; perhaps he had forseen the day Hopkins would come and take his planets, wealth and lands off him.

It had been interesting to Neville. To watch as the spirits left his parents' physical trappings; their bewildered pleadings. At that moment, Neville realised he could breathe in those spirits and make himself stronger; compound his sense of self. They lived in him now, occasionally making their voices heard.

The human Neville left university having learned little officially anyway. He already knew he was greater than anything his professors could teach him. He needed more.

Oh, he had learned the usual arcane arts, even added to his store of scientific and medical knowledge, but he sensed a greater truth, beyond theurgy, beyond even him.

By this time, Neville had a reputation. He was a visionary, a fanatic, one who saw. His first group gathered around him.

He remembers those days with amus.e.m.e.nt, children practising useless ritual the candles, the evocations, the chalk circles. Neville likes to think of these times as groundwork. They were a masterpiece of style over content.

The engine contained the parts but there was no power to drive it.

And then, there came the revolution. He remembers the slogan: 'The oppressed ma.s.ses of this evil empire will no longer tolerate centuries of idle cruelty.' Dull, unimaginative, long-winded, like the revolution itself.

Neville, the young Neville, his hair already greying with the knowledge of a generation, was on Europa at the time, wandering the universe, looking for that which he needed, when the word came. His home, that moon with its palace, had been scorched. An Immolator Six capsule fired into the atmosphere from Robert Hopkins's own personal stars.h.i.+p.

Robert Hopkins, Chief Prosecutor to the New Protectorate, second only to the Virgin Lady High Protector herself.