Chapter Two: Reading Gallifreyan
Rose needed sleep. No matter how unsettled she still felt, there was nothing more she could do about her and the Doctor tonight. He had sounded firm, and a little manic when he left her. That was worrisome, that last part. Manic often meant rash behavior was coming. But there was no point in going after him, tonight, to try and talk him down. Was there?
She yawned. The warmth and orange-yellow light of the fire made the library cozy, in spite of its vastness. The plush velvet settee was deep and long, the arms perfectly angled for reclining. Suddenly Rose felt her own room was impossibly far away; she didn't want to go back there. A fluffy lap-rug was draped conveniently over the back of the settee. She pulled it down, tucked it around her feet. She plumped up the throw-cushions at her head's end, and lay down. Yes, this will do nicely, no reason to move. She gazed into the flames crackling away softly in the fireplace, and saw her bedroom in her mind's eye: dark, cheerless, lonely. The truth was, she felt closer to the Doctor here, could sense the impression of his voice still ringing about in the library's vault overhead. She imagined she felt the impression of his body in the upholstery, under her ribs. She never wanted to sleep in her own room, without him, again.
She knew she was pitifully love-sick. After her first disastrous boyfriend, that Jimmy Stone arsehole, she'd sworn she'd never get wrapped around a man that way again. Yet here she was, love-sick and off-center. She was only barely holding herself back from hunting the Doctor down, right now, and to do what? Wheedle him for sex, or a cuddle. Something, anything. Beg for it. Pitiful.
She yawned a second time, longer and wider. Her gaze fell from the fire to the Doctor's Gallifreyan book on the carpet, the one he didn't want her to read. And why not, exactly? She reached down and hauled it up beside her. It was bound in thick, bumpy leather, but still felt buttery-soft to the touch.
She got up on an elbow and opened to a random page. A scent came up from the paper like a green woods in the heat of summer. Not what you would expect an old book to smell like-no mustiness at all. The Gallifreyan writing was all whorls and circles, intersecting curlicues. She traced a few of the shapes with her finger.
It occurred to her that his language was like him: swirling, hard to take in at once. And never, ever straightforward. She wished, deeply, to be able to read it. In spite of their lovemaking and the slight telepathic connections he had allowed (and only on a handful of occasions), she was certain she had merely knocked at his surface. There had to be more he was holding onto, hiding out of reach. She wanted at it. The Doctor's first language, Gallifreyan was what he learned to think in, and maybe he dreamed in it, still. Eskimos have dozens of words for "snow," while the English only a handful. Meaning, your language is your world, in a way. She was certain if she could read his language, she might get a better idea of how his mind worked.
She turned to the next pages of tangled, circular text. The book's paper was thick, fine-grained, obviously hand-laid. Rose had watched men make books by hand when her first Doctor took her for a tour of Renaissance Florence; one of his compulsory educational excursions. He had loved to educate her, that one. Now when she looked at old books she noticed things she wouldn't have before. The edges of the book were hand-cut, and gilded in what was most likely real silver. She looked at the binding, and saw how the pages were nested, and hand-sewn to the leather cover.
She wanted to know, why had he chosen this book to read, tonight? He had certainly been brooding when he fetched it off his shelves. Had she guessed right? Could it actually a book of rules for Time Lords in love? She knew it was silly, on some level, to think such a thing existed, but she was having trouble clearing her head of him tonight and assumed he was experiencing the same obsession with her. With their relationship. So surely he must have been reading something related to the topic of romance, or at least sexuality.
Rose put her head back down on the cushions. Her eyes were now even with the still-opened pages of the book. From this angle the figures appeared more like a work of art, than text. Maybe, she thought dreamily, it was something really nice. Something like...Gallifreyan love poetry...
She was drifiting now, and her eyelids had almost fluttered closed for the night when a slight but certain movement on the left-hand page reignited her attention. Her eyes opened wide. One of the circles, it was rotating, ever so slowly. "Cor, blimey!" She flew up onto her elbow again.
The Gallifreyan script began crawling about itself. Rearranging, unknotting. Circles straightened into lines, dots merged with other dot, indented bow-tie shapes floated around and broke into pieces. In another moment, the text was sorted into neat ranks and files. Had the Doctor changed his mind, about letting her read Gallifreyan?
Rose eagerly set to reading; she was immediately confused. These were mostly Greek letters, she was sure of that. That big symbol, the one straddling three lines, that was an Epsilon. And she she knew these triangles were called Deltas. A Mu here, and that was Theta. Why would the Tardis translate Gallifreyan to Greek? There were a few Roman letters, mostly "P" and "A," though no words. And this, this was an equals sign, but with a slash through it. She knew that, it was "does not equal."
"You've got to be joking," she said.
She turned the next page, and then the next, and the next, and then flipped through to the end in bunches, only to start at the beginning and go through to the back again. The book was unreadable. Except the title page, it was all mathematics.
"Maths," she said. "He reads bloody maths." There weren't even any numbers! A few ones, but on the whole nothing at all like anything she'd ever been taught. No, this was the sort of maths people like Stephen Hawking did, or those blokes everyone was afraid were going to make a black hole, over in Switzerland, with that collider thing.
She snapped the book shut with a huff, and shoved it off the settee, letting it fall to the floor with a thud. She was frustrated and disgusted, with the book and herself and the whole situation. She took it out on the cushions, punching and pinching them into submission. She yanked the throw back over her legs with her toes, from where it had slipped a little. She lay down, and closed her eyes. She was done with this nonsense for tonight.
As sleep came, her conscious mind began to sink down and mix with that sub-clime upon which it floats. This is the place where the Doctor's mind came to mingle with hers, when he allowed it. But then, as she drifted, here came bubbling up a touch of indigo, fresh and recent, and a lingering scent of cinnamon. He'd been here! Inside her mind, just now. It was him, showing her the Gallifreyan text, translating for her, she was certain. And then, he had laughed. He had laughed at her!
She was not amused. She was too tired to do anything about it now, but tomorrow? Just wait. She'd show him what was funny, and what wasn't.
***
"Mechanics of Time Decay in Semi-Elastic Space" had been most helpful, indeed. The Doctor was certain he was on the right track, though he might be a wee bit in over the tops of his wellies. Tinkering with time decay simply wasn't his area of expertise. He was much more of a thermodynamics guy, extremal black holes and microscopic entropy and the like. He had always favored the creative end of physics. There was no art, no whimsy to this stuff. Celestin's calculations were precise and arduous and so almost wholly unsuited to the Doctor's mind. To delve more deeply into these theories required a more bounded, disciplined intellect. Truth was, the Doctor could really use the help of Celestin himself. It would make things so much easier. Why not go fetch him?
Honore Celestin had been a singularity: a non-Gallifreyan, off-world theoretician of time travel. He had, in the early days, put forth theories which helped make Rassilon and Omega's dreams of an empire built upon time travel possible. The story of how a Homo sapiens cogitationes from a French-speaking backwater colony had come to be the darling of the first Academy, that story was always murky. Nothing was ever put down about the man's personal life, or where he disappeared to after publishing his first and only book.
During his stint as President of the High Council, he'd seen for himself what became of Honore Celestin, when he connected to the Matrix and saw all of the Time Lords' dirty secrets in one go. Honore Celestin had been rewarded by Rassilon in typical fashion. That is to say, Rassilon and his cronies denounced, discredited then exiled the mathematician to some random backwater of time, and proceeded to pretend the man had never existed.
The Doctor had seen Rassilon's fears as well as Celestin's fate in the Matrix. Rassilon did not care for Celestin's new line of inquiry: predicting long-term effects of pinpointing time travel coordinates on space-time. So the first President he had arranged for Celestin's career to come to an untimely end.
Centuries later, after enough Presidents had come and gone and meddling in time across the multiverse as a way of life well-established, no one could remember why studying Celestin had been banned. Academy professors and upper level students were granted access to his original works, and notes. He always managed to be a bit controversial of a figure, though, by the mere fact of his being non-Gallifreyan. His status as an off-worlder had, the argument went, allowed him to penetrate assumptions Gallifreyan physicists had never thought to question. He didn't have innate time-senses, his inner world was different, so he saw things they could not. Thus Honore Celestin was ever the poster-child for the various "open Gallifrey" reform movements the liberal colleges were forever trying to push. Not that they ever came to any good.
The Doctor was set on the idea: he'd find Celestin, wherever he had been exiled to, and pay him a visit. He'd tell him how right and important his work turned out to be. Apologize. Then he'd ask for his help. And should Celestin have any concerns about the effects of tinkering with the fabric of space-time, how much more harm could be done? Gallifrey and the Time Lords were so far past the point of harm the Doctor felt free to not only tinker away with time, but wrestle, bash and bend it if he pleased. Honestly, he did not have to have Celestin's help, but it would make things so much nicer. It would mean the achieving of a level of precision, of subtlety, maybe even a bit of panache, within the calculations. It would minimize the collateral damage. Surely, the mathematician would like to assist with that aspect.
The Doctor scrolled through the archived causality lines the Tardis kept in her memory, looking for the time around the start of Rassilon's reign. Celestin would have a distinct signature-someone so central to Gallifreyan history was sure to leave a wake. Bango, there he was. It was easy to track him down, for there: Indian Ocean, Earth, 1812. The Doctor zoomed in for a preview, to see exactly what the man's situation was. A real-time view swam up on his monitor, a view of a lush, green paradise fringed with coral sands and calm, aqua waters.
He smacked his palm down on the console and said, "Oh, Rose, you're going to have to pack that itsy-bitsy bikini of yours, because do I have a beach for you!" He set the coordinates and started on their way.
Rose. She had still been quite upset when he left her, alone in the library. But, dammit, it wasn't safe for them to take this any farther, not yet. Rose had no inkling of the myriad of hideous happenstances, the monsters she couldn't possibly imagine, all waiting to sniff out the Last of the Time Lords and use him and his technology to no good end. And if she wasn't fully with him, he couldn't fully shield her, and he needed a safe harbor to even figure out if that was possible. And, if it was, their full bonding was merely the first level of the protection he intended to weave around the two of them.
He'd already let it get too far. How stupid was he, to think he could give her physical affection and pleasure, and never start bonding with her for real? They'd already got to the point where they ached, mentally, physically. He could manage, but Rose was obviously becoming more and more irrational. He was worried for her and feeling guilty again. He reached out, down his link with the Tardis, to take a quick peek in on her. He could see her, in his mind's eye, curled up in the library, right where he'd left her. She had a book by her, his book.
All she wanted was to connect with him. It's what he wanted too, so how could he fault her for it? He decided he'd offer her an olive book in her hands, there was no harm in her reading it-she'd never understand it, anyway. But if he told the Tardis to go ahead and translate it for her, she'd know he meant what he said: he wasn't shutting her out, permanently. Quite the contrary.
He opened the hatch in the upper grating and jumped down. The level around the the base of the time rotor was home to most of the maintenance panels. Coding interfaces were here, and yes, the optical system, with its inputs via eye-movements was a quick way to make changes to code on the fly. He opened the optical interface panel and device rather like a two-barreled microscope popped out. He put his eyes to it, and began flying through the visual representation of his ship's files. He located the language translator matrices, and the great, glowing walls of additional security he'd set around Gallifreyan rose up near their center, like its own citadel. He entered, and searched out the modules on systems of mathematics.
He wasn't going to release everything to Rose's view, mind you. Some things he never could, not to anyone or anything, ever. The esoteric set theory which passed for a religion with the Sisters of Karn, for example. That would always have to be kept under lock and key. As would the incantations of the Logopolonians, said to stabilize the very fabric of the universe through the act of calculating its primary structures, over and over again. But the stuff Rose had in her hands? Harmless.
He found the code he needed to alter. With deft flicking of his irises, he moved a few symbols, drew a few lines, and it was done. The ship should start translating that book for Rose, now. He closed the panel, climbed back up top.
He moved back to her, through the Tardis' imaging systems and the broad telepathic field he shared with his ship. Someday, probably very soon, Rose was going to find out about this snooping of his. He would have to admit to her he'd been doing it since her first night on board. For her own good, of course. He hoped she wouldn't be too angry with him.
Here she was, still awake, though barely, eyelids fluttering, yellow hair spilled across the velvet cushions. He watched her see it-the matrix was rebooting. She was wide awake now.
The Doctor turned his attention to the book itself, watching it reconfigure into Humanian-standard notation. It suddenly occurred to him how useful it might be to study Celestin's theory in its original. There could be cultural nuances the Gallifreyan translation had obscured. Without Rose's sweet, stubborn insistence on seeing into this book tonight, he'd never have thought of that. She did that for him, didn't she, his Rose, made him see things fresh. He treasured that in her.
He never intended to snoop on Rose's feelings, but humans were so very emotional, and the intimacy he had allowed had already mucked about so badly with their natural barriers that when Rose was in any way agitated, her emotions broadcast to him like air raid sirens. That's what was happening, now. She was emoting, loud and clear, and to his dismay it wasn't the feeling of comfort, reassurance, he'd intended. No, rather she was crestfallen, let down, disappointed, disgusted, even. With the book, and with him.
He was confused. He'd given her what she'd asked for! Why was she upset? The woman made no sense!
He just had to see what the devil she was thinking. It wasn't right, but he was only revisiting places he'd already been, and it was ridiculously easy to slip into her uppermost levels of cognition-it was almost like that layer had given him permanent berth, had already reshaped itself to match him. So he didn't have to look far, to see what she was thinking.
Rose had never suspected his book was scientific. She had been hoping for something romantic. He caught the last words she'd been thinking: Gallifreyan love poetry.
The incongruity made him lose his focus, pulling him back into where he stood at his console. He barked out with laughter. Gallifreyan love poetry! Really? As if there had ever been such a thing! The idea was hilarious! Poor Rose, sincere, dearest Rose, so very human and doomed to be in love with him. Expecting romance, and getting "Mechanics of Time Decay" instead.
He sent his mind back to her. He realized even though he'd pulled away, when he was laughing, the cognitive and emotional link hadn't fully severed. He'd have to be careful, lest she suss him out. He really shouldn't be doing this. But he saw her poor little bottom lip thrust out, pouting, that luscious bottom lip of hers, all plump and pink and wet. He thought of Gallifreyan love poetry again, and burst out laughing once more, unable to help himself. This time the laughter was not into the air of the console room. It was all mental, and loud, and straight down their connection.
Oh-oh. Chances were good she heard that. She showed no immediate reaction, but it had to had to have registered with her, somewhere. He could only hope the impression wasn't strong enough to swim into her consciousness. She'd find out about his "looking in" on her these past years, soon enough, and he was fine with that, ready to take the consequences, he was. But right now? That would be terrible timing. She was paranoid enough already. Though of course, that mental state was his fault, not hers.
The Doctor forced himself to leave her and return fully to his control room. It was time to focus back on the task at hand, time to set the Tardis flying to 19th century Earth, the Seychelles, untouched islands scattered like a handful of jewels off the west coast of Africa.
He'd meet with Celestin, and Rose would have a few days to sun and lounge and swim while he worked, on the loveliest beach she'd likely ever see, and she would forgive him for reading maths instead of love poems. She would forgive him everything, and when their holiday was done it would be time to see about that full bonding. And then, if that were possible, he could indeed show her all of time and space, but protected this time. Defended.
He wouldn't get her hopes up. He'd be fine with the slow path if it was with her, so they'd start there and if there couldn't be more, then so be it. But there was a chance they could keep traveling, a chance he'd work toward, for her sake and his. He'd keep that to himself though, until he was sure of it. But really, he had a feeling that everything was going to work out just fine.