in the
V.
As everyone in the group rested, the Doctor’s mind raced. He took a tally of all the potential dangers he faced: angry Sleestaks, the Library of the Skulls, the Master (he always brought an element of uncertainty whenever he appeared) and his new robotic canine, carnivorous dinosaurs of multiple varieties, historic and mythological personas from a wild variety of eras and locales, and - the most dangerous thing of all - a singular stasis point between what seemed to be uncountable rifts in time and space that seemed to have no clear point of origin. HOW could he get himself, Will, and Holly out when he had so many other things to contend with?
His mind snapped back to what he’d last discussed with Holly: her secret name for herself, and the fact that she was convinced that she’d met a future version of herself, despite the fact that it was nearly impossible for such a thing to occur without incident: from what he’d been taught from childhood, if one interacts with ones’ future self and impacts the future, there was a very real possibility that the universe would instantaneously explode…
“Rani,” he whispered to himself, his mind reflecting back to his years at the Academy, and his experiences with a female classmate of his acquaintance that referred to herself as The Rani; it had always troubled him that she referred to herself in the plural sense. He thought back to the many ways in which she’d gotten herself into trouble as a youth, back in her first Gallifreyan incarnation when, interestingly enough, she sometimes sported a blonde hairdo. Had she not been reprimanded by the Gallifreyan High Council for manipulating susceptible youth with lies and innuendo that had the dangerous potential of affecting the outcomes of time-space variables? He was unclear, but this seemed familiar to him. His mind was a little jumbled about The Rani since his last regeneration, when she’d brought him so much misfortune. Suddenly, in the dim light of the room, Enik strode over to the Doctor and spoke quietly to him.
“Doctor,” Enik murmured. “I have yet to relate to you the concerns of the Sleestaks. They have been in quite an uproar since you first arrived. It seems they had been anticipating the appearance of what the Library of the Skulls refers to as the Blue Pylon since antiquity.”
“That’s odd,” the Doctor replied quietly. “Have they been expecting anything else?”
“A stone Pylon,” Enik responded. “As you have seen, the Pylons are all primarily metal; they believe yours to be the wooden Pylon of ancient prophecy, but they also expect to see a stone Pylon, and yet another Pylon made of a substance that is unclear to them.”
“Have there been attempts at describing this substance?” the Doctor asked.
“They say it is a Pylon of Smoke and Darkness,” and that is all.
“Hmmm,” the Doctor puzzled, thinking back to his and Holly’s conversation; she’d described her future self, Rani, as appearing and disappearing from a smoky opening in the Lost City. Of course, to her, such sights went unquestioned, since mysterious smoke often manifested in certain places in the Land of the Lost. Could it be, he wondered to himself, that The Rani had a history with this place that dated as far back as her first incarnation? If so, had she singled Holly out as a future Time Lady and a ranking member of a dark entourage of her creation? Could the “The” in The Rani mean that there actually was more than one Rani, and this had slipped right past everyone’s noses without question? He pushed the thought aside for now, and asked Enik if he was aware that the Master, whom he’d helped when in distress, earlier, was in a TARDIS that appeared to be made of stone.
“It has not yet been sighted by the Sleestak scouts,” Enik informed him.
“Probably because he’s fond of utilizing a cloaking device unless he wants to be seen,” the Doctor mused. “And he clearly wanted me to be aware of his arrival. I don’t believe he was certain who I was but, at the same time, I’ve dealt enough with him to know that I can’t put anything past him. In all likelihood, his misfortune was a ruse to discern my identity, and I wouldn’t doubt that he had cohorts here that he was manipulating to achieve a nefarious end of some kind. But what? What could the Master possibly want from such a place as this.” He snapped his fingers. “I’ve got it!”
Enik waited for the Doctor to expound on his theory, and when no explanation was offered as the Doctor looked off into the darkness at nothing in particular, he couldn’t resist the urge to ask him what his revelation might be.
“I suspect,” the Doctor pondered. “That the Master believes that this location is a starting point for the known universe and, if he can find a way to control the events of the future, he can set himself up as the dark ruler uncountable worlds.”
Enik was intrigued. “Is such a thing possible, Doctor?”
“No,” the Doctor almost laughed. “There are doorways to and from here, but I believe this is a pocket universe, a loop in the time stream that exists parallel with it without affecting the time stream directly. If I’m right, this place co-exists with the time-stream, which would explain why Will and Holly have aged appropriately. By the way, Enik, I wanted to ask you a question about them.”
“You may ask me anything, Doctor. I discern that you are pure in heart.”
“Well, hearts actually,” the Doctor chuckled. Enik didn’t inquire as to what he meant. “How is it that Will and Holly have clothes and such that still fit them? I would have thought they’d outgrown everything by now but, from what they tell me, they’re dressed now as they were when they first arrived.”
Enik spoke quietly so as not to disturb the sleeping Will, Holly, and Chaka: “I provided them with Altrusian fabric many decades ago, and it is a specialized type of cloth that does not wear out and cannot be damaged; it is of specialized material that modifies itself based on the psychic memories of the wearer.”
It was the Doctor’s turn to be fascinated. “So, because of unstable molecules or the like, the fabric reads the minds of the wearer, and it becomes what they’re most comfortable with? Ingenius! And yet you thought your brilliant people had devolved into the Sleestaks? Impossible! Your people’s psychic cloth is very much akin to my people’s psychic paper!”
The Doctor and Enik compared notes about their cultures and people, and continued their discussion for quite some time as the others slept. Meanwhile, in another part of the jungle, three conspirators were also speaking at length.
---
“Master,” the Rani began. “I have been grooming Holly Marshall since childhood; she has been a pawn in this game for far longer than either you or the Doctor know. “I have manipulated her mind, and the mind of her family, since my first incarnation. There’s no way our scheme can’t work.”
The Zarn interrupted before the Master could comment. “Do not put anything past the Marshalls. They may seem simple, but they have a knack for escaping danger. All of them, that is, except for their father and his foolish brother.”
The Rani didn’t even look over at the Zarn, but addressed him nonetheless. “What did you do with Jack Marshall, by the way?”
The Zarn spoke without emotion. “He has been in cryo-sleep aboard my ship since I captured him, lo these many years. I have been probing his mind in search of knowledge, but have yet to discover any information worth sharing…”
The Master listened to The Rani and the Zarn compare notes, all the while calculating his chances of tricking the two into scenarios that would cut them entirely out of any and every equation.
“Master, do you know whatever became of Rick Marshall?” asked The Rani.
The Master turned around to face her. “No,” he said. “I don’t believe you ever told me, actually.”
“Well,” The Rani purred. “The Marshalls have long thought their father returned to their time-point of origin. Nothing was ever further from the truth. You see, I visited him on occasion in the past, just as I visited Holly on that day she regarded as being so momentous. Our visits were of a different nature and, shall we say, were much more personal. Eventually, I persuaded him to commit to being my consort, baited by the promise of bringing his children into our arrangement, provided they never learned of our relationship.” She looked off into the distance, smiling. “He was afraid they’d be ashamed of him if they ever found out about us.” She looked at the Master and grinned with a sinister expression on her face. “I told him to meet me at a certain Pylon, and ply his children with mangos and fruit I’d provided that were of normal size; they never even questioned why the mangos weren’t overly large like all the other plant life. Regardless, the distraction worked, and as they ate outside the Pylon, I lured Rick Marshall into manipulating certain crystals on the Pylon matrix table, and - spit-spat - I pulled him into my trap, where he’s been ever since. Rick Marshall, Master, is my mindless prisoner. He thinks he’s been living a peaceful existence back on earth, but he’s really in a holding chamber aboard my TARDIS, kept alive by machinery of my own creation, and every muscle and tendon in his body is regularly exercised so as to avoid atrophy. When the time is right, he will be the pawn we need to accomplish our task here.”
The Master smiled. The Rani smiled. The Zarn had no expression at all.
VI.
Something was bothering Enik. “Doctor,” he asked softly, “May I speak with you about a matter of a somewhat delicate nature?”
“Certainly, Enik.” The Doctor responded, checking to see if Will and Holly were nearby. Since they weren’t, he felt it would be okay to continue the discussion.
“We Altrusians are gifted with limited telepathic senses. I can easily read the mind of humans such as the Marshalls, but I am unable to discern your thoughts and, especially, your emotional responses to certain stimuli. However, I am occasionally aware of glimmers of certain past memories you have reflected upon since we first met, and my instincts tell me that this is because, somehow, in some unknown way, you were once…human…”
The Doctor was astonished to hear this. He had encountered many telepathic entities over the years, but none had ever discerned this truth. Perhaps Enik was more sensitive to human memories than they had been because he had only ever been exposed to humans.
“Enik,” the Doctor replied, “We Time Lords are sometimes forced to mask our alien physiognomy and even our psyches when we become endangered by a serious threat. We rarely do it, but we have Gallifreyan technology that allows us to temporarily hide our true natures and physicality, and hide our - well, souls, for lack of a better term, but also our consciousness - in an object, say a time piece, like this pocket watch you see me sporting.” He looked into the distance, lost in thought and memories of what occurred after he first used the Chameleon Arch. “In my first life, I was forced to make this transformation, and I became so entrenched in my new human identity that, when I discovered my TARDIS, I thought I was a human scientist who had discovered the secrets of unlocking time and space. I married, fathered a child, even had a granddaughter, and accidentally opened up a rift in time that resulted in the creation of a pocket, parallel universe and a time-line in which the Daleks, our most dreaded enemies, were ultimately able to overtake a version of earth in the year 2150 A.D.”
The Doctor found himself pacing the room as he talked about what Enik had so clearly discerned, because it was a source of embarrassment to him, and a period of his life he wish he could simply erase from his memory forever. But he could not. The results of his decision to temporarily become human in that ill-fated period of his first existence had long-lasting repercussions that affected him from the time he became a full-fledged Time Lord again to this very day. Even after he first regenerated into his current form, it caused mental confusion within him, and he told his first human companion, a lovely female physician he became enraptured with for a time, that his mother had been human, when this was most certainly not the truth.
The fact of the matter was, when coming to his senses after his body’s transformation from his seventh form, the Doctor found himself watching an American television program in which an alien had a mother from earth, and he so identified with the character at that moment that it became fixed in his mind that this was also his back history, but it absolutely was not. He was quite mortified when he figured out the truth.
Most Time Lords, the Doctor mused in his mind, didn’t undergo the extreme confusion he underwent each time he’d freshly regenerated; it was almost as if he wanted to remain human. He’d never made the transformation again, and hoped he’d never be faced with a situation where he might even consider it, because he knew in his hearts that he simply might not want to become a Time Lord again. His affection for humans was simply that strong. But he wouldn’t undo what he’d done, either, he knew, because the positives so greatly outweighed the negatives. His granddaughter, Susan, after all, was someone he took extreme delight in, despite the fact that he’d long ago made the decision to live out his remaining lives without interacting with her -- if he could help it. Every now and then, though, he checked in with her, and soon he would make it a point to see how her son was getting along.
Enik remained intrigued by all the Doctor told him. “Doctor,” he asked, “have other Time Lords experienced this transformation you have described?”
“Oh, yes,” the Doctor responded. “I know of two others: The Master, who is here, as you well know, in the Stone Pylon of prophecy, perhaps. But he didn’t utilize the Chameleon Arch due to a threat as I did. He used it to deceive, and to literally steal the lives of others to lengthen his own.”
“And who is the other,” Enik asked.
“The other,” the Doctor responded, “was someone who has been heavily on my mind since speaking with Holly recently. She calls herself ‘The Rani,’ and no one has ever understood why. Upon reflection, I’m beginning to wonder if she’s ever been to this plane because, in my seventh regeneration, she had the embryo of a Tyrannosaurus Rex on her TARDIS…” His eyes glazed over.
“Does something disturb you, Doctor?” Enik asked.
“Indeed. When I discovered that dinosaur embryo, she was in league with none other than The Master himself.” He snapped his fingers. “It’s all beginning to come together now. Everything I’m pondering is forming a larger picture and, Enik, The Rani may well have a much richer history with your land and your people than either of us can even begin to imagine!”
Unbeknownst to the Doctor and Enik, Holly had been eavesdropping around the corner for quite some time. Enik had not detected her because he was so preoccupied with all the Time Lord was relating to him.
“How dare the Doctor speak of Rani in such a way?” Holly growled to herself. “Rani saved us. Rani saved me. Rani is me. She and I are one, and WE are The Rani!” She fled the compound, and headed out into the jungle, unconcerned with the darkness that was overtaking her.
TO BE CONTINUED…
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