Who Universe
The House is full of sunlight. Shadows are banished to skulk in corners. The panelled walls, polished with wax from the sugar-ant hives on the estate, gleam darkly between the white trunk columns and arches. Now and then, there is a lazy creak from the floorboards or the tiles on the gabled carapace of the rooves. Sometimes a chair shuffles slightly to avoid the passage of a Cousin on the galleries. Momentarily, a deep sigh trembles through the arbore scent architecture from one end of the House to the other. It sounds like a breath of wind rustling through leaves. The House is dozing. But it is listening too.
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
“... and Rassilon, in great anger, banished the Other from Gallifrey that he might never return to the world. Then there was great rejoicing through the Citadel. But the Other, as he fled, stole away the Hand of Omega and departed the world forever.”
Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.
The Doctor was needling his name into the varnish of the big desktop in his room. Cousin Innocet's hairgrip was considerably more adept at this task than the clumsy Chapterhouse mess-blade that old Quences had given him on his last name day. The trick was to see how deep you could carve before the desk protested.
“Are you paying attention?” boomed his tutor Badger.
“Yes, thank you,” he intoned, completing another tricky top stroke. “And the Other departed the world forever.”
“Correct.”
There was a pause. He was aware of the huge bulk of his tutor approaching the desk, but he had to get the final letter finished. “You see, I was listening,” he added, vainly hoping to ward off the inspection.
The sunlight from the tall window glistened on his looming mentor's fur. Serrated black stripes on its creamy pelt. The Doctor felt the intense scrutiny of the glass eyes as they peered down over fearsome tusks. Flustered, he jabbed a quick accent stroke over the final letter. Too fast. The varnish flaked. The big desk shuddered. It gave what sounded like a woody cough of protest and snapped its lid indignantly, just missing his fingers.
“Why are you not paying attention?” The tutor's voice drummed out of its chest rather than its throat. The horns that curled from either flank of its head were big enough to hang a coat from.
The pupil swung his legs. “Why can't we do something else?” He had formed the habit of answering the tutor's endless badgering with queries of his own. His feet didn't even touch the floor.
“What does the curriculum state?”
The pupil shrugged and looked out of the window. “What about a field trip? We could go down to the orchards. It's so hot, the magentas must be ripe by now.”
He opened the desk and fumbled through the chaos inside in search of his catapult. “I can shoot them off the branches,” he called from under the heavy lid.
“Repeat the Family legacy...”
He groaned. “Then can we go out?”
“What was your birth?”
“It's boring.”
“Where were you born?”
He closed the desk lid with a sigh. “I was born in this House.” His sing-song approach, armoured with a growing contempt for the whole mechanical business of learning by rote, was wasted on the tutor. “The House of Lungbarrow one of the many Houses founded in order to stabilize the population after the Great Schism when the Pythia's Curse rendered Gallifrey barren I was born from the Family Loom of the House each Loom weaves a set quota of Cousins defined by the Honourable Central Population Directory at the Capitol.”
He paused to take an exaggerated breath. Beyond the whitewood-framed window, the noonday sun dazzled off the silver foliage of the trees.
The tutor tapped the desk with a yellow claw. “The quota…?”
“The quota of Cousins allotted to the House of Lungbarrow is forty-five when a Cousin dies after her or his thirteen spans a new Cousin will be woven and born as a Replacement.” He stopped again and regarded his tutor.
“Continue,” it said.
“I can remember waiting to be born.” He said it deliberately to see how much reaction he could get.
“Impossible. That is impossible.”
“You're just a machine. What would you know about it?”
The robotic tutor dithered. But the pre-programmed awkwardness wasn't convincing. It was too precise to be really lifelike. And yet the huge furry avatroid, with its prim and proper manners, was more absurd and endearing than any of the Family in the House.
“Perhaps now you are teaching me,” said the tutor. His bulky shoulders sagged a little.
“I couldn't think. Not put thoughts together.”
“Grammar,” complained the tutor.
“But I knew where I was and what was happening. I couldn't wait to get out. And then I was born. My lungs nearly burst. The first rush of air was so cold. And they were all there, of course. All forty-four of them. All laughing because of. . . because...”
There was a hurt that he could never ease. They say your first sight after birth, the first thing that looms into view, is the one that governs your life - but when it's forty-four Cousins staring down at you from all sides, laughing and sniggering and prodding, then what do you expect? He avoided the subject, as had become the custom. “And Satthralope smacked me so hard I could barely walk.”
“When were you told this? How can you really remember?”
“I do remember too. And don't badger me. You always badger me. I'm not newly woven, you know. I'm nearly nine
and three-quarters.”
“And you are very precocious.' The tutor indicated a coloured glass core that was sitting on the desktop. 'Turn your book to the Triumphs of Rassilon.”
“What happened before the Great Schism? How were people woven then?” He smirked, half hoping the answer would be rude. “What were... mothers?”
“Mothers were women who gave birth to children.”
“What, like the Loom does?’ He gave free rein to his smirk. “I bet Satthralope couldn't do that. Did the children grow inside their mothers? That's what the tafelshrews do. There was a nest of them at the back of the pantry, but the Drudges found it before I could get them outside. Or did mothers spawn in the river like the songfish?”
“It is my job to ask the questions.”
“What's the point when you know all the answers? How did the children start growing? And why don't all the animals have Looms? Why is it only the people?”
“We are studying…“
“Did they have sword fights then with monsters and reptile pirates?”
The tutor lifted the data core in its heavy paws and began to screw it into the desk's console unit. “We are studying the provenance of Gallifreyan culture.”
“It's that nursery verse, isn't it?... And now all the children are born from the Loom. You whistle it and I'll sing it. Isn't it dark, Isn't it cold, Seek out the future...”
“Housekeeper Satthralope does not allow singing during lesson times.”
The young boy grimaced. “She smells like old cupboards. Quences wouldn't mind. And he gave you to me.”
“Ordinal-General Quences programmed me to encourage your brainbuffing. You will repeat the Triumphs of Rassilon.”
“Not again. You promised.”
“The Triumphs.”
“They're really boring.”
“Commence.”
The Doctor glanced down at a wooden screen that had slid eagerly up from the desk.
“Without looking,” instructed the Badger. “By rote…” The desk retracted its screen with a little whine of disappointment.
The Doctor sighed too and began, “Hear now of Rassilon and his mighty works. He, who single-handedly vanquished the darkness and...” He peered across the room beyond his tutor. “Cousin Innocet, what are you doing?"
The tutor lumbered round with difficulty in the tight space. The big desk flinched. The room was empty. A magenta kernel, fired from the catapult, pinged on one of the Badger's curling horns. By the time the furry machine had turned back, its charge had hoisted himself up to the sill, slipped through the open window and was clinging to a vine that grew up the outside of the House.
“Tell Innocet that I'll be late for supper,” he grinned, sticking his head back round the frame. “She always makes the best excuses when Satthralope's on the war-wagon.”
Leaving his shaggy tutor in a state of bumbling perplexity, he scrambled down the vine and ran out into the sunlight through the long, lush grass. ‘Can't catch me!”
***
They say that no two snowflakes are the same. But nobody ever stops to check. Above the Academy blew great billows of them, whipping around the corners of the dark building as if to emphasize the structure's harsh lines. Mount Cadon, Gallifrey's highest peak, extended to the fringes of the planet's atmosphere, and the Prydonian Time Academy stood far up its slopes. From within the fortress, chanting could be heard, as young Gallifreyans were instructed in the rigours to which biology had made them heir. Trains of scarlet-robed acolytes made their way about the towers in endless recollection of protocols and procedures. From the courtyard came the sounds of mathematical drill, as instructors demanded instant answers to complex temporal induction problems. In high towers, certain special pupils were being taught darker things.
But behind the Academy, somebody was tending a flower. The bloom was a tiny, yellow blossom, sheltering in a crack in the grey-green mountainside. Near it stood a blasted tree, and under the tree sat a robed figure, regarding the flower. It was just a simple bloom, but hardy.
The Gallifreyans called it a Sarlain, but the Hermit Monk knew of people who would have called it a Daisy, or a Rose, or a Daffodil. It was complex and strange, the edges of its petals notched and striated. It was very beautiful, but to understand it, they would have to label it as something, the Hermit knew. This, to him, was the most urgent issue in the universe.
The Doctor dashed up the hill, panting, his breath boiling away in the cold. Tears were freezing on his cheeks. He approached the hooded man almost angrily, as if to demand something of him.
“They're fools! Blind, uncaring fools! They can't see the way it's going, they won't…”
"Sit down."
Calming himself, and wiping his face on the cuff of his robe, the Doctor sat, and bowed to the dark figure.
"I am pleased that you wish to continue your . . . other studies. Have you prepared the verse?" The voice from beneath the cowl was a whisper.
"I have. I have fasted for three days and three nights, I have made supplication to . . . to the powers you named. I was discovered."
"They will not punish you."
"I don't understand much of what I've written."
"Of course!" The old man laughed. "That's the point. Much of it you are too young to remember. Read."
So, shivering in the breeze and the billow of time, the Doctor began to do so. The head beneath the hood nodded, one eye glinting from the darkness. It would be several centuries before the Doctor grasped the meaning of his work. And as for understanding it, perhaps he never would.
Hermit Monk taught the Doctor many things perhaps one of the most important was certain mind protection techniques.
***
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