Who Universe
The night crackled with frost. Above the twinkling inert lights of the City's Olmesian Quarter, Pazithi Gallifreya was a burnished sickle in the sky. To the west, snow clouds loomed on the horizon.
"Those who plot the destruction of others, often fall victim themselves."
Pelatov's Collected Sageries — an illuminated folio of the classical repository, surface bound in leviahide with a scroll-screen of tempered quartz. Limited edition.
Rassilon slid the volume to the back of his desk with mild irritation. The foreword he had been inveigled to input for the screen-tome eluded him. He found the philosopher brethren of the Third Century pompous in the extreme. It annoyed him to have to write some portentous frippery praising a long-dead scholar, who undoubtedly bored his students five thousand years ago as much as he bored his readers today.
"The Ancients have much to teach, but one should not dwell amongst them forever."
Could anything from so long ago be held relevant to today's world? Pelatov had unwittingly damned himself. There was only Now. Rassilon must never slide into that trap. It was abhorrent that any civilization could be founded on superstition and barbarism. These only weighed down any advance. But the Mythic schools, resembling and run like factories, dealt in holy lies and taught the children religious ignorance. They reinforced what was already in the dark Gallifreyan soul. The people must believe in something and so belief was supplied and readily packaged, and blood flowed readily in the holy Games.
Yet it was an honour to be asked for such an inscription. But he might change his mind again tomorrow.
Pazithi the mystic, the virgin moon Goddess, still watched over them, and was still worshipped. Yet even with the antique telescope at his window, he could make out the industrial complexes that fouled her sacred surface with angled shadow — the dust-grubbers and smelting furnaces that raped her divine celestial beauty.
He tabbed through the pages of his journal. It had been a year to the day since his visit to the inner Temple. No one had seen the Pythia in that time. No public appearances or private audiences. Occasional bulletins stated that she was in good vitality, but as her 170th suncycle approached, she deemed it prudent to work on public affairs in privacy. Other duties were delegated to the closed ranks of her staff and the Court of Principals.
Rassilon's own information network was confounded by the barriers of officialdom that surrounded the Pythia. Her staff were unbribable and beyond infiltration.
After a lost harvest and a second winter that dragged on into spring, popular feeling was rising. The thought-pool of the City resounded with rumour and guttersniping. When the people were hungry and cold, their humour deepened to mask the unrest. The latest laboured riddle ran "When is the Pythia like a lost pipe-cleaner?" As yet Rassilon had failed to catch the punchline.
Most rumours said that the Pythia was dead and no successor had been named. But Rassilon still felt her thoughts, like waves of hatred directed at him. And the campaign of contrived slurs against his name was endless.
Amid his own public appearances and speeches, his journal reminded him that tomorrow he was due to see Prydonius again. This would be the third visit that the Hero had made to Rassilon's office above the west wing of the Academia Library. Prydonius was the last ally that Rassilon had expected, but the Admiralty was angry at the lack of funding for the Empire Fleets. They were further incensed that the Time Projects should be continuing after the loss of the Scaphe the year before.
"A leader's greatness is best judged by the quality of her advisers."
"Shut up, Pelatov, you obsequious groveller!" said Rassilon out loud. But the old philosopher had certainly known how to write a catchy sagery.
An alerter purred and a bubble retina glittered into the air above the desk. The face that appeared was all forehead with a squat little visage crouching by the chin. Thrift, Rassilon's freeman servant, his invaluable Tersurran factotum, won eleven years ago for a few treazants in a marketplace brawl game.
"Apologies meyopapa but listen we've a visitor in the Library. Curator system thought you'd better take a look in." Thrift sneezed. The miserable frozen spring disagreed with his native equatorial constitution.
The bubble flicked to a view of the main hall of the Library seen from a panoptic high in the galleries. The building was closed for the night and the lights were dimmed. It took a moment for enhancers to lucidate the image. But Rassilon could see a hooded shape making its way across the central area.
"Came in straight through," said Thrift's voice over the scene. "All the doors just opened up by themself no argument."
"Ask the curators to keep the main hall clear," Rassilon said. "I'm coming down now. And Thrift?"
"Yes meyopapa."
"Run to the Temple and fetch two sisters here. Don't use the vidilink. Go yourself."
"Meyopapa it's snowing."
"Take my coat. The southern trader's fur cloak. They will understand. But hurry, Thrift."
In the main entrance to the Library, Rassilon found the confused group of night curators. The massive doors had been thrown wide open before the intruder's advance and would not close. All secure systems had been overridden. The ghostly intruder, robed in blue, had passed into the main hall, ignoring their challenge. It had been wandering up and down the rows of ancient books so aimlessly that the panoptic security circuits were having problems following it. From the main hall, the presence had moved into an adjacent section of the Library. It seemed to be seeking something.
Rassilon thanked the curators for their information and deliberately removed his shoes. He slipped quietly down into the hall through a back route. By night the Library was like a cavern system, echoing and lost in shadow. High in the galleries above, snow was drifting silently against the tall windows. He moved quickly. The marble floor was bitterly cold on his bare feet.
There were exhibits among the rows of shelves, ancient artefacts in dusty glass cases relating to the sections where they had been placed. Old bones and alien armour. In the half-light they seemed to be watching, returned to secret life at night once all the paraphernalia of the day was gone.
Rassilon heard her before he saw her. A voice raised in angry accusation, coming from several directions, bounced within the confines of the walls. He could not hear another voice.
He rounded a corner in the section devoted to the barbaric Empire of Thule, and saw her. The Pythia's back was turned against him. She was facing one of the exhibit cases and leaning on her sceptre-headed wand. She had levelled a finger at the object in the glass case as she railed at it.
"The door of the Future is shut. I cannot see beyond. I drag myself from day to day and can see no further than the instant. I might as well walk backwards. Speak to me, wise one."
The severed head of the Sphinx stared at her from its case. Savage, feline eyes, frozen for more than a Gallifreyan year since a sudden death had overthrown its regime of riddles.
The Pythia laid down her wand and sat cross-legged on the floor before the head. Her tone was familiar, as if she recognized in the dead monster an old friend, an equal and ally. "They say that of all the augurers within the nine corners of the Universe, you see the furthest. It is true? Hmm? Yet you submitted to the sword of a Gallifreyan Hero. Did you not see?"
She paused and nodded to the head as if she heard some answer. Rassilon, shifting back and forth on his frozen feet, heard nothing. The grotesque shape in the glass case was just an object. "Yes, that's true,"
The Pythia went on. "Perhaps you are farsighted. And the future that's close is transparent to you, so that you can see beyond." She laughed. An old crone's cackle — not the voice of a demigoddess at all. "Perhaps we both need spectacles."
A pearl of guilt that had rolled in Rassilon's mind for a year was growing. How much of the Pythia's state of mind was due to his own intervention? An act of egotistic mischief that another had warned him against. The dark tradition of millennia was instilled in his soul also. Was he the man to sever the ancient course of Gallifreyan history as surely as the hero sliced the monster's head from its spine?
"Time is changing," said the Pythia to the Sphinx. She rocked on her haunches like a wailing woman at a funeral. "They would sweep away all the ageless lore with a cold and dismal practice that they call reason." The Library echoed her shriek of disgust. "Fools! They have machine-minds and do not fear the Gods. They say the Gods are dead and want to steal their thrones. I fear they will succeed. I, who am Gallifrey, must know. Tell me what you see."
Rassilon stepped closer to the hunched figure.
"Tell me, wise one!" the Pythia cried. She pressed her hands against the glass of the exhibit. "If they doom me, they doom the world. What is the future? Tell me!"
Rassilon fell forward with a cry of pain. His toe had stubbed on a shelf. He stumbled over in agony. The Pythia turned and a wave of hatred hit him like the hindward kick of a sagittary to his head.
"You!" she cried.
As he reeled under the blow, he saw the venerable Pythia, a decrepit old woman, struggling up with her wand like a spider on spindly arms and legs. Her eyes fixed him, eclipsing any other pain. They burned into his mind like knives. His lungs seethed with scorching air.
The jewels on her robe clinked and glittered like starlight. She was muttering a spell over and over as she scrambled closer. It sounded like "Vael, Vael, Vael . . ."
Rows of books spilled to the floor as he clutched at anything in an attempt to steady himself. He fell to his knees. He could taste smoke and his body was scorching.
Then the attack ceased.
He tried to catch the air to cool his throat. He looked up, bewildered that he was not dead.
The Pythia stood over him. Tall, taller than him, even in her dotage — but then everyone was taller than him. Tears of anger ran down her wrinkled, golden face, "Vael is lost, little man," she said. "I cannot find him."
Out of her coiled hair she pulled a steel comb and lifted it to strike at him.
He caught her bony arm and tried to push her away. Her strength was frightening. The comb wavered close above his head.
There was a clatter of shoes on the marble floor. Another arm, squat with white hair, dragged the Pythia clear. She cried out and pulled free of Thrift's grip. Then she threw down the comb and crouched to the floor in a foetal knot.
Thrift pulled Rassilon to his feet. "Meyopapa you all right." It was a statement not a question. Tersurrans know about things like that.
Two sisters stood nervously behind, young adepts with snow still clinging to their rust-red cloaks. Rassilon hauled himself up and tried to stand on his good foot. He coughed and cleared his throat several times before he could manage to speak at all. The Pythia ignored them all. She squatted, staring at the lifeless head of the Sphinx.
"Despite the rumours, your mistress is in shockingly good physical health," he croaked at the adepts. "I think you'd better take her home before she does someone an injury with her mind."
The Pythia, her face shaking and eyes staring emptily, pushed away the helping hands and got to her feet. She walked slowly out, followed by one of the sisters. The other adept, her hair like a torrent of red fire, lingered for a moment staring at the Sphinx head in the glass case.
"It's just a facsimile," said Rassilon. "Only exhibited in the Library while the real head is being studied and cleaned."
He watched the tall adept walk away between the rows of shelving. So cool-faced and so young and pledged to a lifetime of unworldly devotions. His toe began to throb, the overture to a whole concert of aches and pains throughout his body.
"Vael," he muttered. The name was vaguely familiar, but he could not quite place it.
From the thought-pool of the people he suddenly caught the punchline of the joke.
When is the Pythia like an old pipe-cleaner? When she's gone clean round the bend.
***
She watched them as they came and went. Some of them she knew, others were strange. They barely interested her. Today it was Lord Dowtroyal from the Court of Principals. He brought petitions from across the Empire. There were calls for military aid which needed her seal. Demands for independence from the Aubert Cluster.
The Council would find ways around this. They would sustain her. She was sacred and her cook and her latest taster were trustworthy. As long as she endured, she was still the figurehead. They said that civil unrest was mounting against her. The people would not do that. She was their Pythia, their guardian.
The Admiralty was in a dudgeon over restrictions placed on the space fleets. The Hero Prydonius had publicly denounced the Pythia in Council, pledging his allegiance to the Rassilon clique. Prydonius had always sulked like a spoiled brat, but he was popular and therefore dangerous politically. In an unprecedented gesture of esteem, the Council of Principals created him a hereditary noble and packed him off to Funderell on the asteroid archipelago. Conveniently far out. She approved of that. He was to act as an independent observer in some minor territorial dispute between Ruta III and the Sontara Warburg.
If she had still had her powers of course, she would have foreseen the situation and headed it off long before. In the circumstances, the Council were handling events better than she had imagined.
Rassilon had been held under house arrest, accused of misappropriation of Academia revenues. The charges were trumped up of course, but the investigation forestalled his plans for a while. They would never hold. The little man's political record was impeccable. But she knew he was not to be trusted. He had stolen her steel comb.
"Excellency, we must have your decision."
The tedious Lord Dowtroyal was droning at her from just below her basket. His cowl was pushed disrespectfully back so that she could see his pudgy, grey face. Beside him, muttering in his ear, was her personal physician. They stared at her as if she were a curio in the Academia Library.
"Highness, you must name a successor. The constitution is adamant on this point."
So that was their scheme. Once they had a successor they could be rid of her. She had chosen long ago, but there was an impediment. That was why they waited.
Dowtroyal and the physician looked as if they would never leave. They irritated her.
"Her name, Highness. One name. One word, then. For the security of the future."
He was clutching the reliquary of accession, defiling with his man's hands the epiphany scrolls of Soneuramos. Ancient sacraments entrusted to the two hundred and seventeenth Pythia in the sacred firelake of Rag-Finish. What did she care? Next they would bring out the invisible armour of Troppolsabler, or the holy icons of the Bright Past. Finally the Great Book of Future Legends itself. She spat, picked up her bowl of fish tongues and flung it at him.
After that, they left her alone for the day. No more despatches to ignore, or strangers who stared. They were all ushered out of the Cavern and Handstrong barred the door.
She picked at the weavework of her basket and counted the talismans on her robe, waiting for the evening devotions to begin in the Temple above. Living from moment to moment, each one an achievement, where once she had seen all that would be and marked Time as it passed.
At the stroke of the crepuscular gong, she heard a side gate to the Cavern sing on its hinges. A figure emerged from the shadows. One of her older vot'resses, wearing muddy sandals and wrapped in the fur robe of a market trader. From her sleeve she drew out a small casket.
"As you commanded, venerable one."
"Let me see it."
Handstrong came from his cell, carrying a pole fixed with brass fingers. The digits grasped the casket as the Grelladian raised the contraption up towards the Pythia.
A rough box with a worn leviahide binding, profane that so precious an item should be smuggled out in such a package. Yet she could feel its power before she even raised the lid.
The eye stared up at her from a cushion of red silk. A globe of mottled amber streaked with a single black slit. The eye of the Sphinx. She was sure that the pupil contracted as it was exposed to the light. She lifted it up gently and it weighed heavily in her hand.
"How much?" she thought.
"Twenty thousand treazants, Highness."
"What does one expect from common thieves and cutpurses?"
"It will be missed from the Library."
"The Council Police contingent has always been a prime beneficiary of the Temple Welfare Trust. I have been their Matron for many years."
She cupped the glistening eye in her hands, feeling its peculiar energy diffusing through her brittle bones and dry sinews. "Begone," she said aloud.
The vot'ress bowed and left the Cavern. Handstrong remained, awaiting orders.
"I said, begone!" she cried.
She must be alone at this moment. The torchlight painted the Cavern of Prophecy with gold and black shadow. Water oozed on the sooty rock walls. The age-old legacy of Time gathered in this place like dripped tallow from a candle. It had been the hub of the Empire since the beginning and she was the core. The guardian and embodiment of that heritage. The unsullied symbol of the world's fertility.
She was Gallifrey.
Without her, the world and its Empire would slowly die an ageless living death.
That was her curse, and she laid it on Rassilon and all his followers.
Even as her guard slipped away, she opened her hands and looked into the depths of the Sphinx's eye.
At the Gate of the Future, the light was hazy. The wheeling birds cried hungrily overhead. She stepped forward and pressed against the bronze doors.
They would not yield. Mocking faces looked out from the grilles.
As she reached for the doors again, one moved of its own accord. A blade of the darkness beyond slowly widened as the door ground its way open. A cowled figure with a flaming torch stood in the archway.
"Who do you seek?" he said.
There had never been a gatekeeper before.
"I seek my successor," she declared. "He must be found."
"Come through," he said. "If you dare . . ."
He stood back to let her pass, but she faltered. A cold wind was blowing into her face from the Future.
***
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