Mother
4
"What do you think?" asked Jenny, "Just pick the tallest one and hope for the best?"
The Doctor was staring at the console room's only screen once more. In the time they had been on Iavai, it had been able to build a detailed impression of what the Frame really looked like, a giant sphere covered in spiky towers all hundreds of thousands of miles apart from one another.
"I don't see which one is the tallest," said the Doctor, "They all look uniform from here."
"I imagine they need to be, from a structural perspective," said Romana, "Too much mass in the wrong places could be too destabilising." The Doctor stared at the screen, deep in thought, the Frame burning itself into her eyes.
"…Okay," she said eventually, pulling out the keyboard from the bottom of the monitor, "This could be a longshot, but… maybe if we look for artron energy."
"With that temporal rift and the solar winds, the system will be full of it," said Romana.
"I know, but I want to see what they're doing with these scoops," she typed.
"Can't he do something?" said Jenny, indicating K-9, sitting there on the floor.
"Like what? He helped us chart the Bleed earlier," said Romana.
"Did he?" Nobody answered. "Seems like a dead weight to me."
"Jenny!" said the Doctor, pausing, "Don't be so rude to him! She didn't mean that, K-9, don't listen to her." K-9 said nothing. The Doctor shook her head and returned to the computer.
"Maybe he's broken," said Jenny.
"All my systems are in full working order, Mistress Jenny," said the dog. Jenny glared at it.
"What would you do with a scoop like that if you had one, Blue?" asked the Doctor, surprising her. "What do you think the use case is?"
"Kidnapping people?" Jenny suggested. "That's what it was used for earlier."
"But why? And if you need a person's DNA, why pull their own DNA around space and time?" she wondered. Jenny didn't have an answer, and going by the quiet, neither did Romana. "Here we are. I can isolate all these trace readings and then, we see…" The screen lit up. Little pockets of blue, glowing clouds had appeared within each and every tower, with only a faint blue burn around everything else. "They're all up to it." Looking at the screen, she clicked her fingers and pointed at Jenny, "Pick a number between one and fifty."
"One," she said. The Doctor turned around. "What?"
"You're ridiculous. But fine." She selected the tower nearest the top of the screen as their destination and the central column began to thrum.
It was a bumpier ride than usual. Jenny thought the TARDIS might be resisting the journey, not wanting to go nearer to the rift, but the Doctor fought through it. The ship landed with a thud, jerking to one side before stopping and going completely dark.
"You okay there?" said the Doctor softly, to the TARDIS. "She's just being careful. Doesn't want to aggravate our delicate, spatial-temporal situation."
"As long as she didn't just break down," Romana warned.
"No, no. Don't worry." The lights came back on, dimmed way down, but the constant humming was gone. Jenny had rarely heard silence like that on the TARDIS.
"I knew this is a bad idea," she said, "Even the TARDIS doesn't want to be here."
"The TARDIS never wants to go anywhere!" said the Doctor, heading for the doors, "She used to fly me around in circles to stop me from seeing Clara, and then kept moving Clara's bedroom around and hiding it."
"Keeping you from sneaking in, I bet," said Jenny. The Doctor shot her a look.
Outside, everything was white. The walls, floor, ceiling – all of it looked as if it had been carved from a perfect piece of marble. It was as sterile and lifeless as a hospital morgue, and the TARDIS had never looked so blue in comparison. The door clicked shut behind them. Jenny could hear her own breathing and her heartbeats as if she had earplugs in, and when she cleared her throat, she felt it to her bones.
"This is all wrong," she said.
"Air's dense," said the Doctor, "Too much nitrogen for us."
Jenny crossed her arms tightly, "I feel like I've been vacuum-packed."
"It is rather novel," said Romana.
"I hate it," said Jenny.
"Hey," the Doctor turned away from the walls to look at her again, "If you want to wait on the ship, you can…" Her face shone faintly orange. She had seen something on the other side of the TARDIS, behind them, that stopped her mid-sentence.
"I can't stay on the TARDIS, I need to keep an eye on you," said Jenny, determined. But the Doctor had stopped listening. Romana, too, was enraptured. Jenny turned around last of all to see it.
A viewing window, of course, though she couldn't imagine why anybody would want to look at what was outside. An endless sheet of metal, burning black with the star glowing through the Frame's skeleton. The starlight was rusty and wounded.
"If I believed in hell, I imagine it would look something like this," said the Doctor. "They're damned, alright, refusing to leave this thing."
There was a metallic crash on the other side of the room. Jenny turned around and saw a massive door – circular, like a bank vault, and flanked by two glass automatons full of clockwork. They weren't moving, though; on the floor was its hand, shattered.
"Its hand fell off," said Romana.
"I don't like that at all," said Jenny, shaking her head.
"What? Robots? A little prejudiced, don't you think?" said the Doctor.
"That's not want I meant – clockwork droids? I've heard your stories of clockwork droids."
"It is interesting to see them here, and that clockwork scoop," said the Doctor, "After everything with the SS Madame de Pompadour. Lots of strange coincidences."
"Clockwork is rather a universal thing though, is it not?" said Romana, "Hardly noteworthy that multiple species would concoct clockwork robots. Perhaps they tell fortunes, like those Mechanical Turks."
"Mechanical Turks play chess, they don't tell fortunes. And they're fake, anyway, there's just a guy hiding in there," said the Doctor.
"What am I thinking of, then?"
"You're – Jenny?" Jenny had stolen away back into the TARDIS.
"Back in a minute!" she called, just before the door closed.
"She better not be hiding in there," said the Doctor. "Not that I'd mind if she was. I'd just prefer her to be upfront about it. And you're thinking of mechanical genies, they're at least slightly less… well, actually they're probably more racist, come to think of it."
"I distinctly remember you arguing with a mechanical fortune teller when we were on Earth once."
"Who? Zoltan? I had a bone to pick with him and what he said about there being a bright future on my horizon," she scoffed, "Where does he get off telling me a thing like that? It's half a tautology!"
"Was that not a robot, as well?"
"That's no excuse for rudeness," she scoffed. "Sitting there in his box… bright future…"
"Why did you keep putting the pennies into it, then?"
"That's hardly the point, I – what is that!?"
Jenny had returned with a sword slung across her back.
"My heat cutlass," she said.
"Put it away! No weapons, I'm in charge."
"Sorry, but what's your plan for if either of those things comes to life and attacks us? You'll talk them to death?"
"Yes, actually! I've done it before."
"They're just clockwork robots, and this sword will cut through them like butter if it needs to," Jenny defended herself.
"You should borrow the sword and take it to see Zoltan," said Romana.
"Don't you talk to me about Zoltan anymore, the lying little… fine. Keep your sword. But you use it as a last resort, alright?"
"It's always a last resort."
"…Correct me if I'm wrong, Doctor," Romana began, "But did Marie Antoinette not commission an automaton to be built for her?"
"No, it was a gift," said the Doctor, "From David Roentgen, the royal mechanic, of the Queen, playing the dulcimer. She had him build all sorts of things."
"Including, perhaps, these life-sized, clockwork men?" said Romana.
The Doctor rubbed her face, thinking again, and eventually sighed, "All questions I don't have answers for. Strange … things in common."
"What's a dulcimer?" asked Jenny.
"Like a harpsichord, but you hit it with hammers."
"Don't all harpsicords use hammers?"
"Well, yes, but you hold the hammers, there are no keys," she said, doing a little mime to illustrate. "…I'll show you later, I'm sure I have one on the TARDIS somewhere."
"Shouldn't those things be attacking us?" asked Jenny. The automatons didn't move.
"I don't believe they're in a fit state to do that, hands falling off and whatnot," said Romana, "Perhaps they're just for show."
"I suppose if you live in a place like this, the likelihood of anybody breaking in is slim to none," said the Doctor, "Maybe they're so arrogant they didn't program their guard dogs to actually do any guarding. And don't you think it's chilly? So close to that thing, and it's cold – like a tomb."
"I think that explains what they need all the energy for," said Romana, "Air conditioning."
"They kill a star over central air, meanwhile there's a frozen planet a stone's throw away!" The Doctor threw up her arms. "Come on," she stormed towards the vault door, "Let's go find them before they make even angrier." She didn't even bother to check the door for any kind of handle. Instead, it rumbled and moved out of the way automatically, rolling to the side just behind the automatons. The fallen, glass hand crunched underneath it.
"Three-hundred years ago," said the Doctor, quick-marching ahead of them through an alabaster hallway, "I landed on a spaceship, the SS Pentallian, ripping a sun apart with a fusion scoop. It was grotesque, and Martha nearly died. She could have burned up – I could have burned up. At least this star isn't alive. Kasterborous, where do they come up with that?" She sighed, "I should talk to Martha, I haven't seen her around much lately. What's she been up to?" She looked over her shoulder at Jenny, who didn't know what to say. She stopped walking. "What?"
"She died last year, dad," said Jenny.
"What? No, she…" The Doctor stopped, getting a glazy look in her eyes, which momentarily returned to focus. She shook her head. "Right. Yes." There was an uneasy silence, but the Doctor didn't dwell on it. She turned back around and went off walking, frustrated, rubbing her hands together in the same way Eleven used to.
"Do you taste that?" asked Romana after a minute, "On the air."
"Artron energy," said the Doctor.
"I don't taste anything," said Jenny.
"You have to breath it in, like you're tasting wine." Though she felt somewhat silly and had never been much for wine, she did do this, then frowned.
"It's like… cream soda?"
"Right!" the Doctor smiled, immediately chipper after her lapse. "You see why the TARDIS likes it so much. You get those tastebuds from my side of the family."
"You're the only side of my family."
"Exactly. But going by the potency of the smell," she began, speeding up, "I'd guess that the energy source we're looking for is right around… here!" They turned a gentle corner and there, ahead of them, was another door, also with a clockwork robot on either side.
"Congratulations," said Jenny, "You found the only other door in this place."
"It mustn't be a very wide tower, after all that," said Romana, "I wonder what they build it out of to withstand the rotational speed…"
Again, the door opened on its own when the Doctor approached, and the droids didn't move.
The room beyond was dark. It had no windows, and the only light was emanating from the floor. Slowly, they entered, and saw that it wasn't the floor that was glowing, but rather a large pit full of a viscous, yellow substance, shimmering like it was radioactive.
"And this thing is producing artron energy?" asked Jenny, keeping a few feet away from it. The Doctor and Romana both approached, however, the Doctor crouching down. She breathed in deeply, sniffing.
"It's a cloning vat," she said.
"Don't touch it," Romana warned, "The last thing it needs is getting contaminated with Time Lord DNA."
"Isn't that right…" She stood. "A cloning vat, plus high concentrations of artron energy." She was still stumped, so Jenny took some initiative and walked around to the far side of the vat, where she spotted a black podium nearly invisible in the gloom. If she had to guess, it looked like it might house a control panel – and she was nearly right.
It was not a control panel, but rather another clockwork temporal scoop, set into the podium right at the top.
"There's a scoop over here," she said, "Whatever they're pulling in, they pull it into here."
"And it needs DNA," said the Doctor.
"But the only DNA they have-"
"Is their own," Jenny finished.
"As far as we know," said Romana.
"Nikomar said they have some weird way of reproducing," said the Doctor.
"Cloning, then," said Romana, "A little like us."
"Only a little," she grumbled. "But there's still too much energy, it's not residual, there must be something else in here." On a whim, Jenny kicked the black podium. Her boots were steel-toed, and it made a tell-tale clanging sound.
"This thing's hollow," she said, "At least partially."
"Alright, then," the Doctor decided, taking out her sonic screwdriver, "Let's see if we can't bust it open."
Just as she began trying to release the temporal scoop from its casing, the door rumbled, churning away to let in the light of the brilliant white corridor again.
A male voice spoke, "And this, Altia, is the Womb of Lim." All Jenny could see were silhouettes, an adult and a child, embossed against the hallway. "This is the room where you were born, where we were all born, as far back as the Lims go."
"Do I get to meet mother?" asked the child, a little girl. The man chuckled.
"Not mother, Altia. The Mother, the Mother of Lim. But, no. Nobody sees the Mother. Even I haven't seen the Mother, as the Chief Guardian of the Nursery." Jargon, all of it, thought Jenny.
It wasn't until the door rolled closed again and their eyes began to adjust back to the darkness that the two aliens realised there were intruders in their 'womb', standing around their time machine.
"Hallo, there!" said the Doctor loudly, waving, "We were just looking for somebody to talk to."
"You-!? Who-!? Orphans!"
"Not at all," said the Doctor, stepping away from the podium, putting out her arm to push Jenny and Romana back a few steps, too. "We're only visitors. Envoys, if you will, interested in this here, uh…" She took a look around the room, "…Structure."
"A likely story. You have to be orphans."
"No, I don't think so. We're from Gallifrey, you might have heard of it?" He silenced. "It's in the constellation of Kasterborous. Well, it is from a certain angle if you've been spending a lot of time in the back alleys of Mutter's Spiral. I'm the Doctor."
"You can't be the Doctor. Only the leader of the Orasi uses that title."
"The leader of the what-now?"
"The Orasi."
"Oh. Sure. It's not a title, though, it's just my name. The Doctor. Just like your name is…?" She prompted.
"Daljiaranutalim," he said.
"Well, Dalji…whatever-you-said, this is my good friend Romanadvoratrelundar. The two of you seem to have something in common."
"It's just Romana," said Romana.
"But you can't possibly be from… from our Gallifrey."
"Your Gallifrey? Jeez, I don't like the sounds of that," said the Doctor.
"We're from our own Gallifrey, thank you very much," said Romana curtly.
"You must speak to the Orasi and explain yourselves," he said.
"Is that it? No big spiel, introductions? Not even going to tell us the name of your little girl, there?" the Doctor indicated the child, who was now hiding behind Dalji.
"This is Altialasterlim. She will be the next Child of Lim to join the Orasi, following her initiation today," he said.
"And these Orasi, you keep mentioning them – who are they, exactly? Your government?"
"They are the leaders of the Temporites, divinely chosen to see into the Truth, the Truth of our future."
"I got some bad news for you about your future, but maybe I should save it for later. In the meantime," she clapped her hands, "Whatcha got here in this podium? It's screaming out to me with artron energy and radiation like there's no tomorrow. Which, incidentally, there might not be."
"Excuse me?"
"Seriously, Dalji. Open up this thing or I'll do it myself," she said, switching from jocular to deathly serious.
"It can't be opened. The Lim Mother is sealed within, kept safe."
"Is that right?" She turned to Jenny, "How hot does your sword there get?"
"Very."
"Do you think you could cut it open?" Without a word, Jenny withdrew the sword from the scabbard and switched it on, the blade heating up.
"This is an abomination!" said Dalji, "In our Nursery, you would dare to disturb the sanctity of – guards!" He turned to shout for the automatons when Jenny raised the sword to cut through the podium.
The robots came clanking around the corner, shuffling like their joints had seized up. Maybe they had. All in all, they weren't very intimidating, and Jenny didn't doubt that her sword could cut through them, too. That was, if they got close.
However, they couldn't have been very efficiently programmed, because both of them walked directly forwards and – despite Dalji's protests – fell into the glowing, yellow pit. They didn't even thrash, just sank to the bottom like dead weights.
"You need to give those guys a proper performance review," said the Doctor, "Maybe some additional training? 'How to Avoid an Obstacle 101'?"
Jenny resumed what she'd been doing, holding the sword sideways so she could slice through the podium cleanly, like cutting a cake in half.
"Stop! The Mother – you can't-"
The metal melted easily, not designed to withstand direct heat of tens of thousands of degrees Celsius. And Dalji, for all his posturing, was clearly too frightened to come anywhere near them himself. The little girl cowered behind his legs.
Jenny sliced the top off and it took all three of them to awkwardly lift the extremely heavy metal with the temporal scoop still set into it, dropping it down onto the floor where it made a dent. A smell wafted out that made them step back, Romana covering her nose and mouth. Something rotten, and producing a similar, yellowy glow to the cloning vat.
"You can't remove her!" said Dalji, "The Mother, she's everything. I wouldn't expect orphans like you to understand-"
"You're going to stop talking to me right now," said the Doctor with more venom than Jenny had ever heard her use before.
"Please, I'm begging you-"
"If you've got in here what I suspect you do, it'll be you getting cut apart by that sword next."
"What is it?" asked Jenny, "What's the smell?"
"Help me pull it out." She sheathed her sword and went to help the Doctor, Romana standing back, appalled.
Together, they dragged out a cylinder, severed wires on top and a thicket of intact ones bleeding out from below. It contained a feeding tank, an organic mass inside, pressed up against the external glass.
"It's a foetus," said Jenny.
"Maybe," said the Doctor quietly, "If you have a very loose definition of the word." It was malformed, with countless, protruding limbs and at least three half-finished heads which Jenny could see. And faintly, underneath its rotten odour, the smell of cream soda. "This is our artron energy source."
"This?"
The Doctor set it down on the severed ridge of the podium, still having to hold it to keep it from falling.
"It's their DNA source, for propagating," she said, "My guess is it needs fresh blood every so often. Hence the time scoop. Just use it to pull stuff in, bits and pieces. Graft it all together. Look, no bubbles. No breathing. It's not alive, not really. Just cells."
"Do you think it ever was?"
"I hope not."
"But what do you mean, fresh blood?" asked Romana, "Not people? They can't be kidnapping people?"
"I don't know. Where do you get your new samples from?" the Doctor asked Dalji.
"When the Guardians are near to death, they offer themselves back to the Nursery."
"Near to death?"
"It's a graceful end. Our biological material returns to the womb and the Mother."
"This thing? Your 'Mother'? That's appalling, you understand?"
"I don't get it," said Jenny, "Isn't this the same as any cloning race? I'm a clone, technically."
"It's different. It's the difference between two people of the same species who aren't remotely related copulating and creating offspring, and two siblings doing that. Just because those processes are mechanically identical, doesn't mean that they're both right," she said. "What do you think happens if you grow someone out of this?
"These people want to be royalty so badly – Charles II of Spain, they called him the Hex. So inbred his dynasty collapsed along with most of Europe when he had no heirs."
"It's not particularly dissimilar to the Looms," said Romana, "On a superficial level."
"Yes. I daresay that's where they got the idea. But the Looms were more complicated than this. Your progenation machine was more complicated than this," she added to Jenny, "All built by people intelligent enough to recognise the dangers of consanguinity.
"It's barbaric, one step above cannibalism. No wonder none of them sees the dangers of the radiation or this doomed star they live on – you know, the arrogance is astonishing," she turned on Dalji again, "And I say that in one of a long line of extremely arrogant people – so arrogant they go around calling themselves 'Lords of Time'."
She let go of the Mother and it wobbled, leaving Jenny to steady it. The Doctor didn't notice, she went marching off around the pit. Romana came over and helped Jenny to slowly lower the tank back into the podium.
"I don't like a single thing I've seen here today," the Doctor went on, "The way you've destroyed your home planet, left them there to die-"
"The Orphans have no higher thought," said Dalji.
"Is that what they tell you? What you tell yourselves? You're a damn sight further away from 'higher thought' than they are, let me tell you. They got out of here. Escaped from you and your suicide mission of a society. And I helped them. You need to abandon this, all of you, or it's going to kill you and nothing will be left. Then again!" She threw up her arms, "Maybe that's for the best. Maybe nothing should be left of you, or this place."
"But who, precisely, are these Orasi?" asked Romana, leaving the podium to follow the Doctor (and get away from the smell). "You say they see the 'truth of the future'?"
"Pythia," said the Doctor, not letting him speak. "Something we outgrew."
"Outgrew? Rather a callous way to describe Great Schism, isn't it?" Romana challenged her, which made her pause. "If I'd said that, to you, you would have jolly well told me off."
The Doctor stepped away from Dalji.
"You're right," she said. "This world is a caricature, and it still has too much of Gallifrey in it. Brings out the worst in me."
"I think you ought to take us to see your leaders," said Romana.
"Yes," the Doctor nodded, "Else Jenny will… what'll you do with that sword?"
"Oh, um," Jenny faltered, "Cut off your fingers, I suppose. Very slowly."
"Exactly, she'll do that."
Dalji regained some confidence, despite the threat. He stood up tall, much taller than the three of them, haughty with his sickly, grey skin and luminous, yellow eyes.
"As the Guardian of the Nursery of Lim, it would be my honour to finally present the Temporite Successors to the Orasi. Even if they are so… strange, and small. And rude."
"I don't like the sounds of any of that," said the Doctor. "But fine. You'd better lead the way."