Who Universe
Each snowflake melted as it batted into the thick walls of the Citadel, but still they came, like an invading army. Eighty-five storeys below, everything was black or white. Only the tallest of the ruins were visible now, the snows covered the rest. Not that there had been much to see before the ice had come, merely the ancient temples and amphitheatres, the last evidence of a race that had ruled by the sword and built an empire planet by planet until it had spread across the universe. When the temples had been built, the future had been an open sea.
Gallifrey had been ruled by seers who remembered the future as they remembered the past. Destiny was manifest, the bountiful cargo that filled the holds of a thousand thousand starships. The prophecies had been bound and bound up to be the charts used to circumnavigate infinity. Explorers travelled ever outward, apprised of the marvels they would find, aware of the dangers. Prospectors rushed to the stars, knowing where to look for gold. Heroes took great risks, certain of the outcome. The future had shone as bright as the moon, and had been just as incorruptible.
Those times had gone, swept away in a few short years. The statues and towers had toppled and the fleets had been scuttled. The heroes had died, blind and alone, as all true heroes must. And as the temples and libraries had burned, the Books of Prophecy had been lost to the fire, along with all the other books. Only one fragment had been salvaged from the rubble. Now there were only memories of those definitive, intricate maps of what was to come. But the memory cheats, it steals, it lies, it tells you what you want to hear.
Today was a day to live in the memory. The ships were a dream come true, and looked the part. Just from the vivid coloration of their hulls it was obvious that they didn’t belong here – they hung like vast tropical fish amongst the half-submerged clock towers and minarets, light like the planet hadn’t seen for a generation pouring from their portholes and hatches and into the evening.
No wonder that the crowds of Newborn thronged around the observation levels of the quays. The older generation were more sceptical, seeing the whole enterprise as wasteful, potentially catastrophic. The ships hadn’t been in the prophecy, they insisted. This was a betrayal, a calculated attempt to sever all links with the future they knew: it hadn’t been foretold that the Gallifreyan race would become sterile, there was nothing in the Fragment about Looms, Houses, Cousins, this, that or the Other.
Only a handful of the Elders had ventured out here from the shelters, obvious from their stature, let alone their robes of office. Many of them still begrudged the decision that the ships would be crewed by the young, that only a handful of crew members would be over ten years old. But the announcement came as no surprise. Those born since the darkness had fallen were a race apart from their ancestors. The young were eager, enthusiastic and their best days were still ahead of them. They didn’t dwell on the glories of the past, they wanted to live in the future, shape it, rather than merely remember. The new order was no longer shocking, indeed it was becoming comfortable, familiar.
The Old harboured a new resentment: the New should have been temporary, they had been meant as a substitute while things settled down, a poor substitute at that. But now they were the only future. And with the wisdom of the ages, some of the Elders knew it would only be a matter of time before the younger generation began to see the past as a dead weight, one holding them back, preventing them from reaching their potential. Teams of the young were loading the last supplies aboard the ships, passing boxes and modules along in carefully orchestrated lines. In their designated dome, the flight crews would be putting on their uniforms, with the help of the necessary attendants and helpers. A phalanx of the Watch stood guard over proceedings. An army of engineers in protective garments swarmed around and inside the ships, checking every last detail. A small band of musicians had started playing a tune, and the Newborn had taken up the chant.
"Sing about the past again, and sing that same old song. Tell me what you know, so I can tell you that you’re wrong.
Just sing about the past, and the past’s where you belong. Let’s travel to tomorrow, and learn a brand new song."
Their voices drifted up on the wind.
***
Two Watch guards begin to talk.
“You know, though, don’t you?”
“I’ve been with the Watch for nearly nine hundred years. I know my duty.” said second one.
“You’ll try to carry it out?” said the first.
The second just looked over at first guard.
“You’d see to it that Omega is killed?” the first guard repeated.
The second nodded. “Rassilon gave us express orders, and Rassilon had his reasons. He knows that for all their power, for all their knowledge, his Time Lords aren’t perfect. He realizes who the enemy really is.”
“The Watch was here before the Time Lords, and the Watch will be here long after the Time Lords have gone,” The first guard said, quoting the first line of their oath of office.
“That’s right.”
“Isn’t the Other one of the Five Names, too?”
“He is. But Rassilon was very clear that the Other should only be killed when he…“ the second guard paused.
***
Two robed figures, a man and a woman, watched proceedings from their own balcony on the highest level of the Citadel. It was open to the elements, but the snows and the winds circled around them, not daring to intrude.
“They are magnificent,” Omega declared without needing to speak.
“A dream come true,” his wife agreed silently. She was slender, with green eyes. Beneath her fur cloak she wore a close-fitting bodice and leggings.
He towered over her, he seemed to be twice her size at least, an effect only magnified by his immense armour. It was bronze, studded with aluminium, with a lead breastplate. “I must go to my ship. We have to embark before nightfall.”
“Good luck,” she said wordlessly.
“We have prophecy, so who needs luck?” he laughed, hugging her. She nodded, and they parted. He strode away, leaving the woman alone on the observation balcony with her thoughts and memories. Or so she had thought.
“Who indeed?” the little man said, breaking the silence.
She turned to face him. It was the Other. “How long have you been here?”
He stood in the middle of the tiled floor as though he always had been there. “Time is relative.” He checked his pocket watch. “Or at least it might be from lunch time tomorrow.”
“We know from the last line of the Fragment that the expedition will succeed. It is written.” She turned back to face the ships. “It is what comes afterwards that is uncertain. But soon we will not just know the future, soon we will walk amongst it.”
“The Fragment,” he said, walking over to her, placing his hand easily on her shoulder. “I thought you must have guessed.”
She knew what he was about to say.
He spoke softly, deep sadness in his voice. “Rassilon needed to rally his people, he needed to justify his insane plan. You remember what it was like a decade ago, after the Curse. The Elders were looking to the past, they were giving up. All we had was our memory. All those golden ages and legendary adventures, all that infighting over which past glory was the best past glory. Gallifrey had died.”
“Even without Rassilon, we would have lived for many millions of years. We are very difficult to kill.”
This was from the long exposure to the time vortex causing regeneration.
“Oh yes. We’re immortal, barring accidents. But accidents happen, my Lady. We would have died in the end without Rassilon and his plan. Didn’t it ever occur to you how contrived the situation was? A workman clearing away the rubble of some fallen temple just happened to find a page from the Book of Prophecy. A single page, a little charred around the edges. Didn’t you think that was odd? Didn’t you wonder what had happened to the rest of the book? And it was such a useful page – the very one that told of the coming decade, showed the whole of Gallifrey that we would become the first of the Lords of Time. Even Rassilon’s enemies conceded that the future seemed to be quoting word-for-word from Rassilon’s manifesto half the time. An interesting coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”
“The discovery of the Fragment was the clearest possible indication of our destiny,” she said firmly. “The universe moves in mysterious ways.”
“The Fragment!” the little man snorted. “Rassilon wrote it himself, placed the paper under a stone during one of his walkabouts. He doesn’t want to see the future, he wants to shape it. The Scrolls are what might happen, what he wants to happen, not what will. Without the Fragment, Rassilon and the Consortium would not have been allowed to continue the time travel experiments, we’d have squandered the planet’s resources just trying to stay alive, rather than investing them.”
And it made sense, but it made the future an abyss. She shrugged his hand from her shoulder, turned to face him. The little man didn’t speak for a moment.
Finally, in that soft voice of his, he said, “There are many races across the universe who have never remembered the future.”
She shuddered. “It has been bad enough not knowing what would happen this last nine years. To be blind for ever… is that how you want to live?”
“You would be surprised how easy they find ways to explain away what happens. They have many beliefs that we would find strange. They talk of “cause and effect”, “quantum mechanics”, “prediction”. Mostly they put their trust in their gods. They believe that the gods can directly influence the mortal sphere, rewarding their followers, punishing the unbelievers. The laws of physics bend to tile will of the gods. They call it “divine intervention”.”
She stared at him. “A curious notion,” she said finally.
“Yes,” he replied. “Without it, we are forced to create our own miracles.”
He pointed back at the ships and she turned. The sun was behind her, and barely above the horizon. The shadows were long, matt black, beginning to flow together, like droplets of mercury. The ships hung above the ruined Capitol, inviolate. The gangways and docking tubes had withdrawn, the ground crews were retreating back to the safety of the Citadel. The singing had stopped some time ago. Without further ceremony, the air filled with an unearthly wheezing, moaning sound and the massive ships faded away like memories. Then there was nothing there except the ruins of the Capitol, the shadows of the past, and a winter’s evening.
“Shouldn’t you have been with your ship?” she asked.
But he had gone.
***
They had turned their backs on one hundred billion stars. The Gallifreyan fleet had left its home galaxy and was deep in intergalactic space. Now the ships slowed down as they approached their destination, dropping out of vworp drive and proceeding at near-light speed towards the target co-ordinates. Omega had no need to look back. The galaxy behind him was a vast spiral, a hundred thousand light years from one side to the other. It was too far away now to make out any but the crudest of features. Within that mass was Gallifrey’s sun, along with every star that could be seen in the night’s sky of his homeworld. There were two generations of stars. The spiral arms were filled with the youngest suns, which scientists designated Population I.
Gallifrey’s sun was a typical example, hot, rich in elements heavier than helium and hydrogen, surrounded by a planetary system. Towards the galactic core were clusters of older, larger, redder stars, those of Population II. They had formed before the heavy elements, indeed they were the nuclear factories in which the heavy elements had been forged. As Population II stars died they exploded, seeding the galaxy with heavier elements, the process that had brought the Population I stars into being many billions of years ago. But even the Population II stars contained traces of metals and other complex molecules that could only have been created in the hearts of stars. Long ago, long before even the first galaxy had formed, there must have been another type of star.
These Population III stars were supermassive, far brighter and hotter than their modem equivalents. Gallifrey’s sun had been shining for around three billion years, and-even without the assistance of a solar engineer – would do so for twice as long again. The processes within a Population III star were so intense that they would have burned out three or four hundred times faster. The typical Population III star lived for ten million years before going supernova. In the early days of the universe these short-lived, vast stars had been the fuel for the newborn galaxies, filling them with riches. All the Population III stars were long dead, either vanished altogether or become vast black holes. All but one.
Qqaba was the last in the universe, of that Omega was certain. It had barely survived this long, sustained by a drip feed of interstellar matter from the intergalactic nebula that partially obscured it. Even so, it had been teetering on the brink of death for aeons when Omega had found it. He had reconfigured the star, kept it alive. If he had discovered the star a week later, it would have been too late. Qqaba would have died, and so would have Gallifrey. Now they had returned to Qqaba to destroy it. A dying star.
No doubt there were writers capable of capturing the waning majesty of such a thing, or its sheer scale. A poet might be able to sum up a man’s feelings as he saw such a spectacle, find words for the new emotions that welled up in its presence. Perhaps he would fall back on physical description of the mundane surroundings of the observation bay, and note that everything was transformed by the evening starlight, becoming either harsh crimson light or sharp black shadows. There might be room for philosophical or moral instruction in that imagery, Omega thought.
He didn’t know. He was an engineer, not a poet, and he was here to do a job. He ran his gloved hand over each casket in turn. Their clasps and buckles rattled with expectation and impatience. He could feel them in there, radiant. They were so beautiful, so intricate. They were children in a womb, twins, with many possible futures.
Omega had brought them into existence with the help of the Other, they built boxes that were larger on the inside than the outside, Omega filled them with basic programming and operational parameters and opportunities, the Other grew them and let them feed on energy and data. Unobserved, the Hands had slipped the bonds of technology. Even Omega didn’t know what they were any longer, he couldn’t know without collapsing their potential. Whatever was in the boxes might be infinite, it could be anything. Their thoughts touched his, the link of one of their parents, children and lovers through the ages. They had always felt cold, they told him in unison, they had always known their destiny.
“Today was a day to live in history,” Omega thought.
“What about tomorrow?” they asked. “This wasn’t an ending, this was a beginning.”
“Who knows where it will all end?” Omega asked out loud, the words echoing around the room.
They knew. Should they tell? “It is time.”
His mind linked with the captains of the other ships in the fleet. They were on the control decks of their own starbreakers, they would follow him in. There was no room for hesitation or hubris. There was no doubt. There was only the Plan, and that began with a single word.
“Open,” he said. The caskets cracked open, the merest chinks of light filling the room.
“Go.” And they were gone, spiralling round each other, singing like dolphins.
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