Part 30 (1/2)

'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 stars.h.i.+p, whatever intelligence lives within its bra.s.s 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 stars.h.i.+ps, 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 pa.s.ses. 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 ent.i.ties left in the universe. Just how strong and long-lasting is this d.a.m.n 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.sive. Huge, the size of a building. It sits or lies or whatever it'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 s.p.a.ce.

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.