‘Keep going, Miranda,’ he says gently. ‘What are you saying?’
If only the noise and the lights and everything would just let her concentrate. It’s not dark in here now, it’s light, blinding light.
‘Miranda!’ comes a voice from miles away. She keeps this thread, this final thought going.
‘Why didn’t he just wait?’ she manages. ‘If the whole thing is going to change anyway, why didn’t he just stay here and wait for it to wash over him? These higher dimensions?’
The gentle grip suddenly tightens. ‘Yes,’ says the Doctor.
‘Why didn’t he wait?’
She hacks out a coughing laugh. ‘I was asking you.’
‘There must be something he needs. Something in there. I don’t see... how could there be anything in there? Unless... a point of stability, something artificial.’
The voice is soothing, containing an energy that keeps her going. His words haul her back to the land of the living. Don’t let me go, Doctor, she prays. Save me.
‘Of course!’ He is laughing, and it sounds like silver bells to her damaged mind. ‘The Old Ones. Oh, that’s cunning, that’s ever so cunning.’
‘What’s cunning?’
‘They wouldn’t leave a palace lying around like that, ready to trigger that which they spent so long trying to prevent. Not without a safeguard. I mean, you wouldn’t would you?’
‘I don’t understand.’ She lifts her head and opens her eyes again for the first time in what seems like ages. The world around her is not the world she remembers. Like a badly tuned picture on a viewing screen, the solid world is being consumed in a blur of static. Only the Doctor remains whole, corporeal, a brightly coloured fly crawling across the screen.
Of course – the vaccine, the vaccine.
‘Is it possible that the higher dimensions is a place in its own right after all? No, not a place – a realm. Impossible, of course, but we haven’t had breakfast...’
‘You’re rambling.’
He lifts her up, his strength seeming incredible after all his exertions and knock-downs. She feels his vibrancy, his energy, flooding through her. He puts her on her feet and she realises she can stand.
‘They left something else, one more barrier. Come on Miranda, we’re going exploring. We’re going to complete your book.’
She feels her hand grasped in this torrent of grey lines and he yanks her along. ‘Hold your nose!’ he yells cheerfully, and then the ground goes and she is falling, falling.
The infection spreads, call it Valdemar, call it what you will.
Reality fades, like paint melting away, the colours draining to leave only the bare canvas behind.
High above Ashkellia, the palace is in its last throes. Since Huvan’s command, just after he exploded Hopkins’s starship, whatever intelligence lives within its brass confines is politely turning out the lights. Metaphorically speaking.
In fact, if an intelligence does lurk there, it is undoubtedly surprised and, presumably, very upset. After all, for over a million years it has kept the place in order, maintaining and repairing itself without complaint, without dissent. Now, as the roofless metal hull is deliberately dissolved away by the acid clouds, the palace makes itself heard with groans and screeches of pain that ring out across the planet. All that time, and this is its reward? At last, it can no longer manage and simply falls apart, tiny hissing pieces of this legacy of the Old Ones raining down to the surface. There is no one left to hear its death cry.
Except... except down in the gateway there is, unbelievably, movement. In the colourless stain of the higher dimensions, something happens.
A hand, misshapen and strangely deformed, emerges from the lip of the giant aperture. It slams down on to what is only just solid ground. From below, there is the bellow of some agonised animal.
Following the hand comes another, and arms, more than two. The animal, whatever it is, hauls itself screaming from the pit. Tattered remains of a thick purple robe, now melted into what appears to be, of all things, armour, shroud its strangely doubled body. Two heads, two bodies, fused into one by some odd process known only to the mocking higher dimensions. It climbs back into our universe and howls with the pain of birth. Once Paul Neville, once Robert Hopkins, it is a new life, cursed with the blinding rage of both minds.
Does the creature think? Can it know what it is? Who can tell, for only one impulse drives it to survive. Hate. Hate for itself, for its two warring halves.
It should have been swallowed up into that which is consuming everything. There is no reason why this new creature should not be subsumed. Perhaps it is ego, will, perhaps supreme arrogance, a refusal to be beaten by its other half, that keeps it from going down with the universe.
Through this changing state, like a thick grey rain, it charges along disappearing tunnels, fighting its own internal, insane war. A war that never ceases, a war from which there is no respite or release.
It feels like one of those sensory deprivation tanks they sometimes use on starships, thinks Miranda Pelham. If she believed she was dreaming before, she was wrong. This is the dream. Her pain has gone, just a numbness remaining; no sensation but her own heart. Perhaps, she thinks, she is dead. Is this all? Is that it?
She hangs on to the Doctor’s scarf as they swim, or walk or something, through this nothingness. If she is dead, then the Doctor is dead too.
Time passes. How much she cannot say. He seems to know where he is going, so she just grips the scarf. Part of her, a giggling daft part that’s already given up and retreated into madness, is wondering whether they are the last two separate entities left in the universe. Just how strong and long-lasting is this damn vaccine?
They are in another palace. How they got there, she doesn’t want to know. All she does know is that this palace is the spitting image of the other. Or is it the same one?
If the Doctor is as dazed as she is, he isn’t showing it. ‘I was right,’ he mutters. ‘I mean, I’m invariably right but this time I was really right.’
For him, this is probably relief.
She is feeling OK again, somehow. Her arm feels normal and the only blood is the blood that’s dried over what remains of her clothing. ‘What’s happened?’ she asks. ‘How come I feel... ?’
‘Some kind of purging process, engineered by this palace, at a guess. Presumably to ensure that those who travelled over would be fit enough to survive whatever was waiting for them.’
‘And whatever’s waiting for us?’
‘We’ll worry about that when it finds us, shall we? We have plenty of other things to worry about.’
He bites his lip and looks around. ‘This is the equivalent to the airlock at the other palace,’ he says. ‘Not hard to guess where Huvan and Romana would have gone.’
Pelham thinks. She hasn’t felt this clear-headed in months.
‘Control room.’
The Doctor nods and bounds away. ‘We haven’t a moment to lose!’
Oh God, it is getting all melodramatic again. Shame that this purging thing couldn’t purge the mind as well. Her old friend, ‘being scared stiff’, is still hanging around.
‘Wait for me,’ she says weakly, and jogs after him.
Same piazza, same anti-grav shaft, same slow ascent.
Everything is the same until they hit the control room. Then there is something different. Something really different.
‘What the hell is that?’ Pelham breathes.
In quieter moments, the Doctor would sometimes cheerfully wonder whether he really had seen it all, whether there was anything left in the universe to surprise him.
There was.
The architecture is the same, down to the benches and consoles that the Old Ones had clearly never needed or used.
The palace had designed it all for the humans who came blundering in much, much later. The Old Ones hadn’t been humanoid, not even close.
The creature is massive. Huge, the size of a building. It sits or lies or whatever i
t’s doing, right in the centre of the control room. Its bulk stretches out everywhere.
It is green, as such a creature should be. All right, there are veiny purple stalks growing out of one end, and a bluish head shaped like a globe, but in the main its fibrous body is green. Vast tentacles lie supine in and around its complicated, pulsating form, some plugged into the softly blinking instrumentation in the control room. The Doctor realises that the creature is alive, patched in to the palace.
Sensory apparatus... biomechanics and all that. It must know exactly what is going on. Or perhaps its perceptions are so totally alien, that it simply has no conception of the life forms that have just invaded its space.
One couldn’t really tell whether it was animal, vegetable or a mixture of both. As for the smell, well, he didn’t really want to go into that. Strangely, it isn’t frightening; in fact there is a soothing, placid quality about this behemoth.
‘What’s it doing?’ asks Pelham, just after her initial studied inquiry.
‘Dreaming,’ the Doctor replies, lost in wonder at this million-year-old creature. How much could it have learned?
How much did it know? Only now does he feel he is beginning to understand the final days of the Old Ones; just exactly what it was they did.
‘You think I’d be terrified,’ Pelham states, similarly stunned by the sight. ‘According to all the rules of Pelham behaviour, I should be, but it’s not like that at all, is it? To think – an Old One.’
She walks forward, mesmerised by its alienness, its serenity.
‘No,’ the Doctor replies. ‘Not just any old Old One. This is someone much more familiar. Someone I was convinced did not exist. It appears that, actually, I’m not always right.’ He makes a show of it, lifts his arms up in front of the creature.
‘This, Miranda, is Valdemar.’
Before she is allowed any kind of reaction to this statement, there comes the sound of hands clapping, somewhere in the recesses of the control room.
‘Very good, Doctor,’ says Huvan. ‘ Very good.’
‘Hello Huvan,’ he replies, trying to spot exactly where the boy might be, whether there is still time to bring things back.
‘We were just passing so I thought, why not drop in?’
Huvan emerges at last, from round the bulk of the creature. He is looking up at it in wonder. ‘Of course, strictly speaking, you’re not absolutely correct.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘You see, this lovely old thing,’ he pats the giant’s side, ‘was Valdemar. Until I arrived, that is.’
‘Ah!’ The Doctor nods. ‘I understand.’ He makes his speech deliberately slow and patronising. ‘So you think you’re Valdemar now. Oh dear, I don’t think that’s very wise. Names get mixed up, people forget which dark god it is that is controlling their destiny. How about altering the spelling?’
‘Silence! How dare you talk to me like that? You know what I have done.’
‘You sound more like Mr Neville every day. He would have been proud of you. By the way, how is Romana? The earlier question remains unresolved, you know.’
‘And what question is that?’
The Doctor scratches his chin, trying to appear indifferent to the proceedings. ‘Oh, what Romana’s decision would be if she were given a free choice. Would she want to stay with you?’
Something is bothering Romana. The blissful togetherness she has helped set in motion does not seem as blissful as she had believed.
Someone is nagging at her, someone she knows. A man, old and distant as the hills. A discord amongst the concord. She tries to ignore that voice but it won’t go away.
It is telling her to fight the submersion into the Kinetic Dance. Telling her it isn’t right, that she isn’t meant for this.
How can that be? Huvan is the true saviour; the light pours from him, putting the universe to rights. Bringing everything back to its primal, unified state. How could that be wrong?
Even now, the warm pull of the dance is washing through her. Cleansing her.
Yet,
the
voice
remains.
It
tells
her
she
is
Romanadvoratelundar and that she was proud when she earned that triple first, excited when chosen by the president of the High Council himself to accompany the Doctor... but isn’t this the Doctor’s voice?
She can see him now, trying to converse with Huvan, at the side of the old Valdemar, the one who renounced greatness.
He is telling her to choose, to remember who she is. There is a decision to be made, a really quite important decision. If only she could remember what it is...
‘Romana,’ comes the voice of Valdemar. Valdemar. Not Huvan. ‘Romana.’
All at once, the spell is broken. She gasps, literally gasps, as self-realisation floods back to her. The gasp is enough to make Huvan and the Doctor turn.
There are no lights any more, no dance, nothing. Just her standing in a metal room with a monster at her side. She feels full of energy, totally rejuvenated. Just what has she been thinking lately?
There is something she has to say, something she cannot hold back any more. Romana puts her hands on her hips and strides up to Huvan.
‘Let me tell you my decision, my friend,’ she spits.
For all his power, all this greatness he possesses, Huvan shrinks away from her, quailing beneath her anger. ‘My... my love,’ he murmurs.
‘If you think for one minute I could have any kind of emotional attachment to any creature that would dare do what you did to me, then believe me you are very much mistaken.’
The Doctor smiles. ‘Romana... .’
‘Doctor. Quiet. I haven’t finished. Let me say, Huvan, that ever since I was forced to endure that abomination you call poetry, I have attempted to get as far away from your presence as I possibly could.’
‘I think that is sufficient...’
‘And furthermore! Whatever sympathy you may have engendered in me concerning your sad upbringing, you have done your best to remove it. Leave me alone in future; in fact don’t even talk to me. Believe me, you’ll be safer that way!’
Finished. She crosses her arms and glares at the cringing boy. ‘That’s my decision. Doctor?’ She looks up at him.
The Doctor just stares, open-mouthed. Somewhere above, the familiar sound of thunder commences.
He is of course overjoyed that Romana is herself once more.
However, it would have been nice if she had been a little more diplomatic when making her decision.
The Doctor finds that he feels sorry for Huvan. He is surprised that the boy had the courage to release Romana from her transformation; he must have known the outcome of his action. Let us just hope his temper holds.
Unfortunately, this isn’t looking a likely possibility. Huvan is red-faced and angry, clenching and unclenching these new elegant fists he has designed for himself.
‘You all hate me! You always hated me!’ he hisses at them.
‘Don’t be pathetic,’ says Romana. ‘No one hates you.’
‘Well,’ Pelham begins, then realises what she is saying and closes her mouth again.
Despite everything, despite his new improved physique and facial features and his smart haircut, Huvan reveals himself with every breath for the adolescent he really is. The fate of everything ever in the hands of a lonely teenage boy. Hmm, not a particularly pleasant prospect.
‘It’s not fair. You should be on your knees in front of me! I should destroy the whole stinking universe!’
‘But you won’t, Huvan,’ the Doctor says. Come on. Come on, this is the last hurdle, nearly there now.
‘Why not?’
‘Because nothing would change for you. You would still be alone. Look at this poor creature here.’ He indicates the somnambulant Old One towering over them. ‘Like you, he was the psychic channel for the higher dimensions. He had the same power. You know, the answer to th
e riddle of how they contained Valdemar is really quite simple. He contained it himself.’
‘What do you mean? If he had the power, why would he... ?’
‘He changed his mind. He decided he didn’t want to destroy everything. I mean, who would?’ Don’t mention Sutekh. Don’t even think about Sutekh. ‘So he reversed the process and locked himself up here for all this time. Dreaming, learning. I should imagine there’s an amazing amount of knowledge stored here in this palace.’
‘What do you mean, Doctor?’ asks Pelham.
‘Well, look around. Fred here is connected to all the sensory equipment the Old Ones could muster. With his abilities, he’s probably been soaking up information for millennia.’
‘Never mind about him! What about me? We’re talking about me! Why should I put myself to sleep for a million years? No.’
The Doctor looks at Romana, who looks back. She is calm now, determined to help.
‘All you ever wanted was to be normal, to fit in,’ she says. ‘If you don’t stop the higher dimensions spreading, that’s an opportunity you will never experience.’
‘I don’t want to give up all this, I can do anything.’
‘Anything except that which you really want,’ Romana replies.
Huvan sits down, blinking away tears. ‘I don’t know what to do. What should I do?’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, put an end to it, Huvan!’ Miranda Pelham suddenly shouts at him.
He looks up. The anger has gone from him; now there is nothing but sorrow. He sinks to the floor.
The Doctor sympathises, sympathises but doesn’t empathise. ‘I understand that this is a phenomenally difficult decision, Huvan. Not one I would like to make. However, it’s time to grow up. You’re not an evil man, you won’t make the wrong choice.’
There, that’s everything, all he’s got to offer. Everything now is in the hands of the boy.
‘All right. All right,’ Huvan mutters. ‘But what happens to me? How can I be normal?’
Again, the Doctor swaps a glance with Romana. They both know what has to be said. ‘That’s the phenomenally difficult part. There is a way. You won’t like it, but it’s definitely a way.’
The Tomb of Valdemar Page 24
