Who Universe
She was born of Blyledge, one of the Senior Houses of Glorious, married to Omega. He took her as his wife the very day after Omega’s death. She didn’t see much of him at first, he, the Other, was busy shaping the new future; caught in the midst of the rebuilding Gallifrey, using the wisdom and experience acquired on his previous travels before he came to Gallifrey. He was also very preoccupied with trying to build an advanced time machine/space ship, since the time machine he arrived in stopped working, living him stranded here. That was why he was helping build one in the first place. Then he fell in love with her and wanted her even though she was married to Omega.
Rassilon was responsible for figuring out the technology and mathematics it would take to build the ship; while, he experimented growing creatures to help navigate the machine/ship. This was much more advanced that what he had doing before, growing the Houses and the Hands of Omega. The creature would need to be in tuned what is outside space and time as well, what is inside space and time and exist in both realms at the same time. All he knew that the ship was to run on artron energy.
***
The Other bought a old house which stood on a hill. It was a small dark building beneath the orange sky. Inside it is large and the walls are white, with a regular circular pattern on the floor. There is a walled garden in the centre of the House, a quadrangle filled with silver trees. Then came the biggest day of his life, he remembered what he was doing. He painted her portrait. She’d been standing in the atrium of the family home, in that dress of hers that she had found somewhere. As she had stood there, she’d told him, ever so calmly, that a miracle had taken place. She was pregnant. He remembered how he had felt that combination of elation and trepidation. The knowledge that there was a future, a sense of destiny, of inevitability. Things would never be the same again. He’d never look to the past, he’d told himself, only to the future.
***
Success the Other was beginning to believe that he was very close to completing his project and now was beginning to find the time to see his family. The birds sang a pretty song and there was music in the air. It was springtime and the youngest children were playing in the courtyard.
A dark-haired woman straddles her husband, his unfamiliar hands beneath her shoulder blades. He rolls her over onto the grass, stroking her side and kissing her belly. As he kisses it again an owl flies through the amber sky. The sun is overhead, so it’s a little after noon.
“I’m getting old.” He pulls himself up to his knees, resting a hand on her thigh.
She sat up, laughing, tickling his beard. It was darker and coarser than the blond curls growing on his head. His new body was so much taller and hairier than the last. ‘You said that when we were expecting our firstborn,’ she replied.
“And by this time tomorrow he will be a father himself. Perhaps then he will start feeling his age.”
“Perhaps he’ll start acting it.” She kissed his cheek.
He cradled her head, running his fingers through her short black hair and down her neck to her collar-bone. Turning her over onto her front, kissing the back of her neck, his hand running down her body. His thoughts dipping into hers, tasting her emotions. She was propping herself up on her elbows. Her body was familiar, he’d known it for centuries, seen it age ever so slowly. The birthmark on her ankle, the pattern of freckles on her shoulder blades. He lay alongside her, examined her spine as though he’d never seen it before, ran a finger right down from her neck to the back of her knee. Pressing her down, nuzzling her cheek and shoulder. Memories and bodies intertwined in a beautiful, intricate design. Her body moving with a rhythm both familiar and utterly new to him.
“I’m so sorry, but I shouldn’t be here, not now. I have to go.”
***
The next day there is a woman screaming. The sun is low on the horizon. It is the early evening and the house is screaming. Guards in full ceremonial dress are advancing down the corridor with stasers drawn and swords at their sides.
“Search the bedchambers.”
“You can’t …“ a staser blast, killing the housekeeper.
The house screams again, its lights flicker. The Screaming children. The eldest son, dragged by the hair into the courtyard. His twelve brothers and sisters there already, all in blue. Where is his wife? Where is her husband? The youngest were crying.
The eldest son stood tall and faced the captain, the guard in the plumed helmet. “I am a Cardinal, and a Time Lord of the first rank. My father sits on the Supreme Council. On whose authority are you acting?”
The guard captain unfurled a scroll. “By Presidential decree, only the Loom-born shall inherit the Legacy of Rassilon. There shall be no more children born of woman. We have authority to search this House for the spawn of the Pythia.”
“Let me see that.” The guard captain handed the scroll over. The eldest son read the hieroglyphs, examined the seal. “It is genuine,” he concluded. “They have issued a warrant for father’s arrest. They accuse him of consorting with aliens.” Something had broken within him as he had read it. When he spoke again, his voice contained none of its former resolution. “My wife is expecting her child. What do you propose that they do?”
The Doctors were moving towards the bedchambers.
“The law is clear, sir. Her pregnancy is to be ended at once. Your wife will be examined here, then taken to a medical centre.”
“I must ask you to lead me to her.” As if to add emphasis, the guard captain placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. Numbly, the eldest son nodded and began to walk towards the living quarters.
His siblings screamed, begged them to stop. “Why are you doing this now?”
***
“I want to know what is happening.”
“If you would be so kind as to come with me?”
“Who are you?” He was so old, but there weren’t any old people any more. He walked through the cloister with the aid of a stick, a knobbled stick with strange writing on it. There was a dark shape drifting behind him in the shadows.
“You wear my husband’s ring.”
He held it up to the candlelight, examined it, then clutched it to his chest. “Yes. So I do.”
“Please stop them – they are trying to find our daughter- in-law, they are going to kill her child.”
He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “Our granddaughter was born ten minutes ago, I was there at the birth. She is safe, quite safe.”
“A girl? Where is she?”
“She will be taken away from here, away from this madness I will take her far from this world of vampires and valeyards. First, however, we must get you to safety.”
“Me?”
He took her hand. ”Come, my dear.”
He sent her away in a prototype ship.
When the Other had found his family. He hid them and insisted his granddaughter be kept separate from the others. They named her Susan. He often would visit his family, but it was dangerous, since Rassilon’s decree no more womb babies. How could Rassilon do this especially to him? He often found himself arguing Rassilon, but seemed to do no good.
He would argue with him saying. “The curse is over, we have a new future. Remember how you felt when you lost your daughter.”
“The Lords of Time belong to the loom born. They have been programmed with my genes and are the future. We don’t know if the womb born are born with a curse. No the spawn of the Pythia shall not live.”
***
The Other watch his TARDIS being built in neural construction dock on Gallifrey. "TARDIS" was an acronym that Susan devised. She made up the name TARDIS from the initials — Time And Relative Dimension In Space. Rassilon loved it. Right now the TARDIS was just bone-white obelisk its natural form. Soon he would prime it and then pour out his memories into and connect with it telepathy. When he created it he made so that it had a similar personality as his. Usually he would leave it blank so who ever first flew it would give its personality, but he wanted his it to help him with his faults a perfect union. Rassilon was a great delegator; most of the innovations attributed to him were commissioned from others. He supposed it would be the same with his work.
***
Time's roses are scented with memory. There was a garden where they once grew. Cuttings from the past grafted on to the present. Perfumes that recalled things long gone or echoed memories yet to come. Thorns that could tear like carrion beaks. Stems that could strangle and bind like the constrictors in the fathomless pits of the Sepulchasm.
The garden grew on the tallest summit of the Citadel, high above the frosty streets, clear of that endless telepathic commentary of gossip and gibble-gabble that marked out the thoughts of the Gallifreyan people. Sometimes amorass of countless random ideas, sometimes a single chorus united by one urgent conviction. A hope or fear or death wish. But the days of the mob were numbered. The great mother was gone. The Pythia was dead, overthrown by her children. And with her died her people's fruitfulness. The Gallifreyans became a barren race. In the long aftershock of matricide, the cursed people learnt to keep thoughts and secrets to themselves. They discovered privacy and furtiveness. They taught themselves loneliness. It made them angrier too. A pall of smoke drifted across Pazithi Gallifreya. The moonlit garden on the tower was furled in darkness. A new, harsher light came from below. There were fires in the city.
From his place high on the crest of the Omega Memorial, a solitary figure, the Other, watched the west district of the city go up in flames. The fire had started in the abandoned temple. He could hear the distant rattle of gunfire. Guards drafted in from the Chapterhouses were quelling the uprising. No good would come of it. The fleeing dissenters (Rassilon already called them rebels) had taken refuge in the Pythia's temple. He had warned Rassilon a hundred times over. That once sacred place must not be violated. If violence was used against the dissenters, then he would up and leave Gallifrey to its own devices. He would never be party to a massacre.
Suddenly the box was back. One of the two, nobody knew what happed to the other. It hovered in the air just below his vantage point. A flying coffin. One side in darkness, the other catching the glare of the distant fire. It clicked, whirred, gave a little whine and tilted slightly to one side in a crude anthropomorphic approximation of affection.
“Shoo! Go away, you stupid...” He nearly called it 'brute', but that only reminded him of his long-running debate with Rassilon on the viability of artefactory life forms, and he was very weary of arguing. The box was pining. It missed its other creator. It was always breaking its bonds and escaping from its hangar, to skulk dejectedly around Omega's Memorial. For years it had done that. When they relocated the hangar, it only sat rumbling discontentedly on its servo-palette and then got out again. Rassilon worried about it, but it didn't really matter. For a quasi-aware remote stellar manipulator that could tear open the furnaces of stars and dissect the angles of reality, it was fairly harmless. It just wasn't house-trained.
Omega, despite his sacrifice, still had a hand in their affairs. It was rather a good joke, he thought, but Rassilon didn't find it funny at all. One night, they had stood among the roses on the tower and watched Omega's death again. The light of the dying star burnt out suddenly in the constellation of Ao. Rassilon had wept again. Everything the man did was done for love. But sometimes love was remarkably shortsighted.
The figure on the Memorial shuddered and drew his cloak about him. Lately the box, the Hand of Omega as it was known, had taken a shine to him. It had started to follow him about, often appearing at the most inopportune moments. It disrupted his affairs and drew attention to private business that was better kept secret. Besides, he was bored, achingly bored, with manipulation and power. He longed to be away, free of schemes and other people's ambitions, and, more than that, free of himself. He could cast off this dark, brooding persona more easily than a serpent sloughs its skin. But if he did go, there would be no way back. And Rassilon would be left with absolute control. No checks, no balances.
In frustration, he took off a shoe and threw it at the box. The Hand of Omega dodged so fast that his shoe seemed to travel straight through it. He stood with one stockinged foot out over the drop. “Well? What will you do, eh, if I step off?” Pointless to ask really. The box would be there under his foot. Ready to catch him. So much for suicide. 'Selfish brute!' he complained.
Below, he could see figures skulking in the shadows around the Memorial. No rebels these, but agents of Rassilon sent to arrest him. He supposed he should feel flattered. Too good to lose, apparently. In the air he caught the scent of burning flesh. A decision had been made for him, but there was much to prepare and a difficult farewell to make. Ignoring the box, he lowered himself down the stone curve of the Omega symbol and dropped to the ground. The shadows came at him fast out of the dark. He was surprised by their knives. They were surprised by the bolts of energy that flung them like dolls out of his path. The box whirred in beside him with that unnerving knack of seeming to move faster than its own shadow. He drew a cut bloom out of his cloak. The rose's milky scent reminded him of children and the lost future. He laid it at the foot of the monument and bowed his head. The box, taking an uncharacteristic moment to decide its course, settled down beside the flower. He knew it was watching as he hunted for his shoe in the gloom. Unable to find it, he threw away the other shoe and walked barefoot down into the burning city.
A fiery glow appeared in the distance. It grew steadily until half a city was lit beneath them in the hellish glare. A group of guards were standing at one corner, drinking. The figure paused for a moment against a doorway. He wrapped his cloak tightly round himself and the gloom swallowed him. The guards burst into drunken laughter. The first shades of grey were leaking into the night sky when he finally reached a shuttered house, wedged between a seedy tavern and the dingy shop of a memory broker. He let himself in and padded up the wooden stairs. The old alien woman, sewing in the little room stacked with books, hardly acknowledged him when he entered. Her Punchinello face huddled near her chin, overshadowed by her wispy domed head.
“Where's my granddaughter?” he said.
She put away her needle. “Sleeping, Meyopapa. Half the night she spent on the roof watching the fire.”
“I told you not to let her up there,” he growled. “Not where she can be seen.”
The old woman scratched her teeth. “No use arguing with that one.”
He fished a jingling purse out of his cloak. “You have to leave, Mamlaurea. It's no longer safe here.”
“Go home?” she said. “Back to Tersurus?”
He nodded grimly. “And take Susan with you. Take the first Astrafoil you can get places on. Carry as little as possible. You mustn't look as if you're fleeing.”
The old woman was staring at him. “Meyopapa, you not coming too?”
“Some time, perhaps.” He bent to look out of the little window.
“Grandfather!” She hurled herself at the man, burying herself in his cloak. “Oh, Grandfather, I thought you'd never come. It's been days. Where have you been? Did you see the fire? What happened to your shoes?”
“Yes, I saw it, child. Deplorable.”
Her hair was cropped short and her eyes were huge and brown, set in an elfin face. She was laughing. “Oh, I've missed you. I was reading Pelatov and then I suddenly knew you were here.”
He looked directly at her. “And you've seen no one else?”
“No. I don't go out. I know it's dangerous out there.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Well, you told me.”
“Hmm?”
She was only half daring to meet his eye. “And there are strangers in the street below. I've seen them from the window.”
He glared at the old woman. She shrugged and bustled out. “I cannot turn my eyes every way all at once.”
“I'm sorry, Grandfather,” said the girl and hugged him again.
“No, no, Susan. It's I who should be sorry. This is no way to bring up a child, not locked away with a fussy old nanya and a crotchety grandfather who's never here.”
“You have your work,” she said. “It's a great secret. That's why you protect me.”
“What's that? What do you mean?”
She lowered her eyes. “I never saw my mother. But I know that she died when I was born.”
“What's that old woman been telling you?”
“Not Mamlaurea. My mother told me. I still hear her thoughts in my mind. And father too. Ever since he died in battle.”
“On one of Rassilon's filthy bow-ships.”
Susan was smiling gently. “Mother told me that I'm the last of the real children of Gallifrey.”
“Dear child,” he said. “That's why you're so precious.”
“But you'll always be with me too, Grandfather. I'll always know you.”
“You must leave with Mamlaurea. Now!”
“No, Grandfather! I won't leave you!” The girl was clinging desperately to him. Her eyes were red with tears.
“You cannot stay here, Susan. It's too dangerous on Gallifrey. Mamlaurea's family will take good care of you.”
“But I won't go. I want to be with you and help you.”
“Susan!” His voice was suddenly dark with authority. She covered her mouth in shock. “You have to go. I may well be going away too. Perhaps on a long journey.”
“Where?” she whispered.
“I don't know. But I will always be with you. You said that yourself. And one day I will return. And you will remember me.”
He held her very tightly as the old woman came into the room with two bags and cloaks. Susan was quiet as she was prepared for departure. He picked several books from the stacks around the room and slid them into her bag. Then he hugged her again.
“Please take care of yourself, Grandfather.”
“And you, dear child.”
“I'll be waiting.” She pulled away quickly and her nurse hurried her from the room. The old man - at least he seemed suddenly very old -stood at the window for a while. Turning back to the room, he walked the shelves, running his hand slowly along the spines of his books.
“Always the same,” he said.
At length, he walked down the stairs and out into the street.
***
Page 10