Doctor Who: Molten Heart

by Una McCormack

  “All right, Doctor,” said Yaz. “You did your excited-to-be-here face. That turned into your quiet-I’m-using-the-sonic-face. Which turned into the if-this-is-what-I-think-it-is-I’m-even-more-excited face.”

  The Doctor was now wearing what Yaz thought of as her I’m-not-entirely-sure-I-believe-a-word-you’re-saying-to-me face. She said, “Do I really do that many faces?”

  “Yes,” the others said, in unison.

  “What usually happens next,” said Ryan, “is that you start bouncing around like Tigger.”

  “Tigger? Oh well, it could be worse. I could be Piglet. Well, I’m glad someone knows what’s going on with this face because I’m nowhere near used to it,” the Doctor said. “And, yeah, it is exciting, to be honest! We’re not outside a planet. We’re inside one.”

  “How does that work, then?” said Graham.

  “Dead easy,” said the Doctor. “Your world – most worlds – have a crust and loads of layers around a molten core. Not here. Here there’s… a sort of balloon inside, right in the middle. A bubble. An egg shell. Outside, on the planet’s crust, it looks like there’s nothing. Think what we saw on the surface.”

  “We didn’t see anything on the surface,” said Yaz. “Nothing major, anyway.”

  “That beach looked like it might be nice,” said Graham.

  “It was nice enough, yeah, but nothing to write home about.” The Doctor spread out her hands in delight. “Do you see? This is where the world is!”

  “So all this – we’re inside the bubble,” said Graham, slowly.

  “Keep up, granddad,” said Ryan.

  “Oi,” said Graham, “button it!”

  “That’s right,” said the Doctor. “Inside.”

  “So that’s why everything feels funny,” Graham said. “Because it’s curving round the wrong way.”

  “Not wrong,” said the Doctor. “Just different. If someone from here visited your world, they’d not understand why you were all scurrying along on the surface. They’d worry about flying off and they’d want to get inside.” She paused, thinking. “I wonder if they even know there’s a surface…”

  “Hold on,” said Yaz. “Are we even sure there are people?”

  The Doctor looked at her steadily. “Those jewels didn’t fashion themselves, Yaz.” She pointed ahead. “Come on. Let’s look round the other side of the ridge.”

  They turned the corner—

  —And, far in the distance, they saw the City.

  “Oh,” said Graham, in a very soft voice. “Blimey.”

  Sheer white towers shot skywards. Anywhere else, Yaz might have thought they were glass skyscrapers, but not here. These were like huge stalagmites, hollowed out, a whole city of crystals. They seemed to shine from within, and here and there white jewels and pale gemstones – sapphire and ruby and topaz and emerald – had been set into the crystal structures to make patterns and decorations, beautiful and intricate mosaics. Light bounced off these from every angle. The whole City shimmered, as if the stone was gently swaying to an alien rhythm. Faintly, distantly, Yaz heard chimes – the music of the City. She breathed out. What they must be like, the people who had created this splendour? How did they see the world? What did they care about, and who were they? Yaz was seized with a great desire to know more about them. There must be good about them, she thought, to make something so beautiful. She tried to say something, something wise and clever enough to capture how moved she felt at this glorious sight.

  “I take back anything bad I might have said about rocks.”

  The Doctor laughed.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Ryan, gazing at the City with his mouth half-open in delight. “It’s really beautiful!”

  “Yeah,” said Graham, “it really is. Doc, is that city made of diamonds?”

  “You know what, Graham, I think it is.”

  They walked on, steadily. The City beckoned them, but, as they walked, Yaz could not shake a growing sense of unease. The air around them seemed to have become very still.

  “Hmm,” Yaz said.

  She had the Doctor’s immediate attention. “What is it?” she said. “What’s worrying you?”

  “Everything feels weird,” Yaz said. “Too still. Stifled. Can you feel it?”

  Ryan was nodding. “Yeah, I know what you mean. It feels like there’s a storm coming.”

  “But we’re inside,” Graham said. “Can there even be storms, inside?”

  “Who knows what the weather does round here?” the Doctor said. “This place is certainly big enough to have climates.”

  They walked on further. Yaz found herself thinking, of all things, about a geography lesson at school, about those big waves that could suddenly hit islands, wiping out everything in their path. The first clue people got – and it wasn’t much warning – was this strange, breathless calm, before the chaos and destruction… What were they called? Ah, that was it…

  “Tsunamis,” she said.

  “Eh?” said Graham.

  “A big wave,” said Ryan. He gave Graham a big wave. “Not one of them.”

  “I know what a tsunami is, Ryan, I just don’t know why Yaz is talking about them all of a sudden—”

  “The calm before the storm,” the Doctor said.

  The Doctor stood still. Yaz knew that look – she thought something terrible was about to happen.

  “Doctor,” said Yaz, urgently, “if something’s about to happen, we should get away right now—”

  “You’re right,” the Doctor said. “Come on, back to the TARDIS—”

  She swung round, all determination and focus. Yaz, looking ahead, cried out, “Doctor! Don’t move!”

  The Doctor froze. A few feet in front of her, the ground had started to bubble. It reminded Yaz, weirdly, of the surface of an apple crumble, right out of the oven, the hot thick liquid pushing up and through.

  “Move back, all of you,” the Doctor said.

  Carefully, they inched backwards, away from the rippling ground. As they moved, Yaz saw that there was steam rising from the rocks.

  What happened next happened very quickly. One second there was steam, and the next, with a vast roar, white fume shot up in a huge jet. Yaz yelled and jumped backwards.

  “Move!” cried the Doctor. “Get back! Get away!”

  Yaz sprinted off. Glancing back over her shoulder she saw Ryan stumble. Behind him, the ground was crumbling. Yaz watched in horror to see Graham dash back to get him away from the edge.

  “Graham!” she cried. “Be careful!”

  Too late. Graham’s sudden movement had done exactly what Yaz had feared. Beneath his feet, the ground began to slip away at an alarming rate. With one last shove, Graham sent Ryan flying to safety. But the damage was done. The ground crumbled – and Graham began to slide down, towards the boiling liquid.

  Two

  Ash had always been something of a loner. Partly that was her nature, which was quiet and inward-looking. Ash liked time alone to think. But a large part of her solitariness was because over the years she got tired of being known first and foremost as her father’s daughter. Ash’s father had a reputation for saying strange things. People had humoured him to begin with, until they came to realise that he believed in what he was saying. At first they laughed, and then, when he kept insisting that what he said was true, then began to get impatient, and then angry – and then, the worst punishment of all in this small and close-knit world, they gave him the silent treatment.

  It had been a hard time. People on the whole were fair, and didn’t judge Ash for her father’s strange ideas, but she was completely loyal to him. Ash believed in her father – really believed in him. She had watched him work since she was a speck; had sat beside him in his workshop, and seen his ideas emerge and develop and become fully-faceted, like a great and brilliant stone, carefully cut by a master jeweller. Ash knew how sharp her father’s mind was. She would never buy friends or a quiet life by laughing at her father behind his back. So on the whole it was mu
ch easier to spend time by herself, go out beyond the Diamond City up onto the quiet ridges, and lie on her back looking up at the twinkling lights above, and wonder whether there really was anything more, like her father believed.

  Ash’s people, as a rule, didn’t like being alone. Their world was enclosed, literally, and even in the more distant settlements curving around the great bowl of the world, you weren’t out of sight, and you could easily see the bright light of the Diamond City, the heart of the world. The Great Family kept together, and everyone knew who everyone else was, and what their business was, and what their friends and relations’ business was, and if it wasn’t their business already they made it their business. So this habit of creeping off to be quiet, to be alone, was yet another reason to look at Ash and think that perhaps something wasn’t quite right.

  And then her father had gone away…

  Ash liked it out here. She felt closer to her father. When she was very small, she and her father would come here, and when he had finished collecting samples, and she had helped him organise them and label them, they would walk along the ridge, and sit together and look out at the whole sphere of the world curving around them. The light of the gems around them would gradually fade, as the night cycle began, and her father would point upwards and say, “What can you see, Ash?”

  She loved this game, picking out the patterns from the shimmering haze above. One by one she would name the landmarks. First of all, there was the rippling sea that connected the whole of the Great Family to each other. Next she would point out the little rocky islands dotted around that sea, and, as she got bigger, she would tell him their names – Isbiter, with its streams of silver, and Tetziger, the best source of pumice. She would point out the biggest ore-rivers on the islands, and the canals that had been dug, nudging the rivers to make them more useful. She would point out the bigger settlements – the twinkling lanterns of the Topaz encampment, and the three villages around the delta of the Fire River. She would describe to him the great bowl of their world, reaching all around them, and year by year she knew more and more about it, until one day she realised that she knew everything. She knew all the paths and the ways that her people had made and always took. And suddenly she realised just how much of the great sphere of the world was unmapped, was full of places where the Great Family never ventured.

  “Dad,” she asked “is there anything else?”

  “Hmm?” he said. “What do you mean?”

  She looked up at the little lights overhead, the signs of her own people on the far side of the sphere of the world. “I mean… is there anywhere else to go?”

  He looked at her curiously. “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s just… sometimes I look up and I think I can see lights, and I can’t name them. I don’t know which island they’re on, and I don’t know who’s making them. Like there are cracks in the sky—” She saw his expression, and stopped, suddenly. “Dad?”

  “So you’ve noticed that, have you?”

  She didn’t know what to say. He’d always told her to look carefully, look honestly, not to take things for granted.

  “Dad? What is it?”

  He didn’t answer at first. He went quiet, and seemed to forget that she was there. But she trusted him. He always tried to find a way to answer her questions.

  “The thing is, Ash,” he said, and a curious glimmer had come into his eyes, like a smouldering fire, “this can’t be all there is. There must be something more. Something beyond… Something lights the rocks around us. Something causes the night cycle, the day cycle. Something must be happening to make those cracks appear, and behind them there must be some source of light…”

  She had shivered to hear this. What else was there but the world? Could there really be something beyond this small, safe, well-known sphere of theirs? She pressed him again and again over the years, but what that something was, exactly, her father would never quite say. Protecting her, she guessed. Not until she was older, and read his essays and notes, did she realise the full extent of her father’s beliefs. That there were holes in the roof of the world through which light came through, and that beyond the roof was the surface of the world, and beyond that was…

  Infinity.

  Did she believe this too? Did she believe him? Ash had tried to imagine infinity, many times, and she couldn’t. But she was wise enough to know that this didn’t mean her father must be wrong. Whatever the limitations of her own mind and her own immediate experience, Ash saw no reason to believe that those were the boundaries of reality. This world, her own world, was very beautiful, and contained wonders. Why could there not be even more?

  Ash sighed. She wished those days could come back, of coming here with her father, and watching the world as it always had been and always would. But things had been changing for a long time, all around her, however much everyone wanted them to stay the same. It was what had finally made him leave. His careful observations, gathered over the years, his notes and records, dating back well before the start of Ash’s life. They all pointed him to a clear conclusion: that the sphere of the world was changing. He had tried to tell this to people, but they were scared of what it might mean, and didn’t know what to do. They pretended it wasn’t happening, and when he insisted, they got angry and told him to be quiet. There was talk of banishment, the worst punishment that could be handed out, to send someone away from the Great Family. In the end, her father had taken matters into his own hands.

  “They won’t believe me when I tell them what’s happening, Ash,” he had said. “But it is happening. The steaming pools, the hot jets, the ground crumbling beneath us—”

  “The cracks in the sphere,” she said.

  “Those most of all,” he said. “Someone has to find out what’s happening.”

  And so he had gone – he and a few friends – and a hundred, two hundred nights and days had past, and Ash had heard nothing…

  The lights of the gems were darkening steadily, signifying that the night cycle was coming. It was time to return to the City. Ash knew that people were keeping an eye on her – for her own good, of course – and she didn’t want questions or trouble. She jumped lightly to her feet. She had two ways to go home: the high way, along the ridge and down the Stairs, or else she could climb down now into the Narrow Cleft, and walk home along the plain. She was looking over the edge of the ridge, considering the climb, when she saw something she had never seen before.

  First there was the colour – blue, blue as any lapis lazuli – and then there was the shape. Big. Solid, like a box. And then came the sound…

  Ash gasped. A big blue box had appeared from nowhere… The box opened, and creatures came out. Strange creatures.

  At first, Ash did not know what to think. Then her heart leapt for joy.

  “People,” she whispered. “They’re people!”

  Her next thought was how strange they looked. Were they wearing costumes? Were they wearing armour? She could see nothing remotely usual about them, could not guess the stone or ore from which they had been hewn.

  They walked along the Narrow Cleft, talking to each other. Ash could not quite hear what they were saying, but something about them made her heart open to them. They were curious, stopping to touch the rocks as they passed, and when she caught a glimpse of their strange, mobile faces, they seemed to be enchanted by everything they saw. She scrambled along the ridge, tracking them, hoping they would take the path that would give them view of the City. She wanted to see what they would think of that!

  When they got there, Ash’s heart filled with pride to see their looks of delight and amazement at her beautiful home. She followed them as they walked on, looking round, taking stock of her world, and she began to form the words that she would say to welcome them. And most of all, she wished her father had been there, sitting with her as he had done so many times, for so many years, before suspicion and mistrust had made him leave. She wanted to cry out to him: It’s true! It’s all true! Every
thing you ever told me was true!

  These new and precious strangers – all the proof he had ever needed.

  Then she saw a glint of emerald in the distance. She opened her mouth to cry out to the strangers to warn them—

  And then the ground crumbled beneath their feet.

  Graham was scrabbling at the ground, trying to get some sort of hold. Ryan and Yaz, dashing forwards, each took one of his arms, pulling him as hard as they could. Yaz felt the stones crumbling beneath her too.

  “Come on…” she hissed to herself. “Come on!”

  With one last, almighty heave, they pulled Graham onto safe ground. He jumped to his feet, and the four friends dashed away from the seething pool of hot liquid, to safety. Graham fell on the ground, wheezing. He gasped out, “Shoe!”

  “You’re welcome,” said Ryan.

  “Not bless you! Shoe!” Graham pointed at his sock. “I’ve lost my shoe!”

  “Here you are,” said Yaz, handing him his shoe.

  “Thanks, Yaz love.” Graham slipped the shoe on, and stood up. Carefully, he peered back towards the new river that had opened up.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ryan. “You’re not cooked yet.”

  Graham turned to the Doctor. “Are we staying here long? I don’t fancy becoming roast dinner.”

  The Doctor sighed. “Well, the TARDIS is on the other side of that…” She pointed at the steaming river that lay in front of him.

  “Oh,” said Graham. “That’s a problem, isn’t it?”

  “If we want to leave here at some point, yes, yes it is,” the Doctor confirmed. She looked at her companions in turn. “Who packed the rope?”

  They looked back at her.

  “Ryan? Rope?”

  “Rope?” Ryan said. “Nope.”

  “Ah. Well. Perhaps we can find one. Or make one…” The Doctor looked around, thoughtfully, as if considering what rocks she might use to fashion into a rope, and how this might in fact be done. “Hmm,” she said, then, brightly: “Oh! Better idea!”