Doctor Who: Virgin New Adventures [005] - Cat's Cradle - Time's Crucible by Marc Platt

Author:Marc Platt
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
ISBN: 9780426203650
Publisher: London Bridge
Published: 1992-04-11T22:00:00+00:00

17

Mutatis Mutandis

Listen, Ace!

She hardly noticed the smooth metal buttress that rose slowly up to hit her. The solid air grated the breath out of her lungs. Down the face of the Watch Tower she went like an ant on a playground slide, her head usurped by someone else’s memories and dreams that had nowhere better to go.

The Doctor’s memories were feeding into her mind.

A moment. A single flute was playing somewhere. A gentle, slow, dreaming sound, recalling fields of tall, still grass on Lungbarrow mountain before haytime; the baking wash of Elysian sunshine that warmed him through to the bones; a golden-winged beatitude fly that hovered lazily from one nodding pool of nectar to the next. The scent of hot, dried Gallifreyan earth.

His cousins, full-grown babies born from the family Loom. Yet even they laughed occasionally, lured from the dust-webbed halls of the brooding House on lushberrying trips in the summer woodlands.

And no dinner for those that old Housekeeper Satthralope found out. The arch tyrant of his youth with her clay pipe, wispy beard and twenty-way mirrors.

‘Only a doctor! Wretched child. Such a disappointment to the family and to the House!’

A memory frozen in music played on the instrument of imagination. Without changing its tone or metre, it could set myriad moods, a commentary on whatever scene it accompanies. A gesture of the hand makes it a courtly dance. A glance of the eye makes it a union of love. A single tear makes it the messenger of death.

The timeless music of Time. A line of cool melody from the flute, like the wind singing, so calming, so persuasive, so frightening. Both objective and deeply subjective. The fretwork on which perception is hung. Make of it what you will, the flute plays on.

A tall woman slowly made her way across the grey plain. A grey shawl covered her head in the ancient manner. On her arm she carried a jar, a two-handled amphora decorated with figures frozen for eternity in a scampering dance. She reached the long black crack that split the plain across. Gently she inclined the jar. From its lip fell a trickle of dust.

As the endless, timeless flute melody played, she stood pouring the glinting dust into the bottomless crevasse. Just as the Mother Goddess of the Old Time legends had poured Time itself into the void of the empty Universe.

The same tune stirring different memories. The dust of Time glittering like falling mirrors, trickling like sand in an hourglass. To stop it you might more easily stand a Pythia on her head.

Hurry up, Ace. You’re supposed to know when it’s time. The Doctor is waiting, and the door is sliding shut. It is 11:58.

Someone was shaking her.

‘Come on, Ace. Wake up. It’s time!’

She resisted. The air had a chill. Her mind clung sluggishly to the safety of her dream rather than face the virtual nightmare of reality. Alice, in the book she’d been reading, was told she was just part of the sleeping Red King’s dream and when the King woke up, she would go out – bang! – like a candle.

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