PEARL
Chapter Two
Although I will never know for sure, I suspect that at least as much of my incapacitation was due to the deliberate application of a soporific gas as to the impact of my fall. I awoke hungover but otherwise unharmed, loosely bound to the glass figure of an animal I did not recognize, definitely not humanoid. It vaguely resembled a deer, if a deer had quills instead of a smooth skin. The rope around my wrist was long enough to afford me a safe distance from those quills, and it was also tied with a simple box knot; a toddler could have untied it, so I didn't. It wasn't really in my way and I didn't feel like moving at any rate. I was also afraid of what might happen if I sat up again, and suddenly I realized that the rope was there to protect me from another tumble, not to prevent my escape.
The sculpture turned to me and spoke. "You must learn to crawl," it said, in a jingly sort of voice, like a finger on a glass harmonica. Was this an aftereffect of whatever had knocked me out? It felt real enough, but then, it would, wouldn't it?
"Yes, I must," I agreed. "By the way, my name is the Doctor. How do you do?"
The glass figure, suppler than I could have imagined, shook the rope from its hoof so I untied my wrist. "You must crawl to the palace." Upon perceiving that I was taking this to be excellent advice rather than a command, he added, "You must humble yourself."
"Which direction is the palace," I asked, trying to sound humble.
"Figure it out." Glass, supple and snarky to boot! Who'd have thought it. I looked around and all the purple looked the same. At second glance I saw the merest of changes to the skyline, if it could be called that, an impossible distance away. I began to crawl, and then I stopped on a dime; I was now just awake enough to remember I had friends I had left behind, friends who would be worried about me and about whom I was now worried. What could I do? I crawled until I couldn't feel my knees and then I kept crawling anyway, and the whole time, all I could think about was how worried about me Nyssa and Tegan would be, and what kind of trouble they might have encountered without me to protect them.
Eventually I found myself unable to crawl anymore and let myself lie flat on the purple cloud. It did support me, but I felt deflated and defeated. I had been crawling with my eyes closed anyway; I let my head tilt to one side and pressed my cheek into what little fluff there was, and let myself drift.
When I awoke, unrefreshed and troubled, I opened my eyes and saw a cream-colored structure before me that could only have been the palace I sought. It was smaller than I had expected, but lovely, made of some soft material I could not identify – again, my sonic screwdriver would have helped – and architecturally at once alien and inevitable, as all art must be. It was proportioned for someone of my species, not, for example, a species adapted to museum-sized trees. I could not be the first such to visit here. I almost sat up again, caught myself, crawled toward the palace, and, having almost reached it, dragged my elbow into something, maybe a post, and pulled away from it, not quite sitting up but apparently close enough: down I hurtled, this time farther than before, to a cloudy greenish surface that was decidedly less kindly than its purple predecessor.
Why could I not have been knocked out, as I was when I really didn't need to be? I heard bones break before I felt anything, tiny little sounds, really, but one hears one's own bones (and voice, for that matter) through one's bones, not just ears. There was no anesthetic gas to help me out; if I was less than alert, it's because everything that came after was filtered through a thick layer of pain. People came running out of a palace similar to the one to which I'd been crawling, and when I say "people," I mean obviously organic, more or less humanoid, and in this case as concerned for my well-being as if I were kith and kin. Two of them picked me up and arranged me on a stretcher. That hurt. They carried me as gently as possible through a short portico that involved a step up (that hurt too) and then a step down (again that hurt) and into the palace, where I was ported through so many corridors I imagined for a moment I was back in the TARDIS, although these corridors were straight, had no roundels and were as creamy in hue as the palace exterior. I ended up still on the stretcher but atop a long table, in a small, well-lit room. When the soft green overhead lamp flickered on I realized how low that ceiling was; the normal lights were extinguished, the green lamp began to descend almost immediately, and I was overwhelmed with an atypical claustrophobia and may have cried out.
"Doctor!" came Tegan's voice, not far away, and that calmed me down a bit.
"Tegan! Nyssa!" I called out, trying to recognize my own voice, some stranger's voice, I thought, not mine, so weak and frightened. How could I subject my friends to that voice? They needed to know I could protect them. Well, maybe it was I who needed to know that.
"We're here, Doctor! Lie still! You're going to be fine!" I doubted that I was going to be fine, but I obediently lay still.
The light intensified and I blinked. It intensified further and I closed my eyes against it. Then it enveloped my body and squeezed. How can light squeeze? This light did. It squeezed my broken bones back together and it squeezed the pain right out of me. True, I had a little trouble breathing for a moment, but that passed. The green light let go of me and was retracted back to its initial position at the still-low ceiling. It dimmed, and the ordinary light returned. I could see those changes through my closed eyelids, which I then slowly opened to find Nyssa and Tegan right by my side. They were actually holding my hands but I could barely feel that. Instead, I felt all my muscles relax as I was overtaken by a lovely sleep.
"How did you get down here? Did you fall too?"
"No," said Nyssa, "but apparently it's quite common. How you do depends on where you land. You got lucky."
"Well," I admitted, "I am now." But for a mild all-over stiffness I was, as Nyssa had assured me, fine, and so were my friends, who had decided to crawl on, found an upper level of the palace, asked for help and instead been referred down to the servants' quarters, where the buzz was that yet another level down another stranger – me – was being treated. The palace had stairs! We still appeared to be trapped in a strange, cloudy world, but we were enjoying tea, of all things, with friendly locals, some of whom had saved my life. I felt confident that these people could and would help us find the TARDIS but first I wanted to know who had sent the distress call, and why.
"I am afraid we cannot say who or why," confessed one of the two beings who had carried me to safety and since introduced himself as Dinsov. "I feel sure it was one of us, but we have a policy of strict secrecy among us." He blinked all three of his golden eyes sympathetically. "Most of us were indentured up on purple and escaped down here; a few came from other levels and some escaped farther down. We don't know what became of them. It is possible that someone devised a means of communicating beyond our little world…"
"Big world, I'd say," Tegan interjected.
"… our big world," smiled our erstwhile host. "The fewer of us who know the details, the fewer recaptured brethren can betray us."
"So you do need help."
"Well," said Dinsov, after some thought, "although we all hail from elsewhere, and some would gladly return home, we have made a life for ourselves here on green, where we have established aid for the injured and the unwell, as well as a comfortable living environment. Thus most of us need no aid at this time."
"How do we get down?" I thought Tegan was jumping the gun a bit, but she added "And how far down would the other settlement be?"
"I heard," said Dinsov, "that there might be one on fuschia."
"How far down is that?"
"Well, no one from there has ever come up, to my knowledge. I just heard there might be one."
"Do the stairs go all the way down?" asked Nyssa.
"I don't think anyone knows that either, but the distance would be prohibitive and there could be hostiles on some levels. We are all stumbling around in the dark. I suppose that is why so many of us choose to remain here, where it is peaceful and, as I say, comfortable… and where you would, of course, also be welcome." Dinsov looked slightly confused by our somewhat alarmed expressions. "Have I said something wrong?"
"Oh," I said, lightly, "no, it's just that we have people to see, things to do…." Then I added, more seriously, "We really need to track down that distress call. If we can help, we should."
"I understand," said Dinsov.
I took his hand. "I do want to thank you for saving my life, you know." Dinsov blushed blue (his lightly furred skin was naturally deep pink; the blush must have been the result of an alkaline inrush). "There was someone else, too. Can you please convey my thanks?"
"You may thank her yourself." I looked around and eventually caught a glimmer of light reflecting off of a translucent figure with four arms, one of which floated upwards into a gesture resembling a salute. I could not make out her features.
"Thank you," I replied, and the glimmer moved as if her head had nodded in my direction.
"We don't know her name," said Dinsov. "We call her Fandy, just to call her something. She is used to that. You see, she doesn't speak. She is telepathic, but only with others of her kind and, in a limited way, with the Spikers on purple. They coexist up there… sort of."
"How 'sort of' is 'sort of'? Could someone up there have needed help?"
Dinsov shook his head. "The two species have a complicated relationship but I can't imagine either of them calling for outside help."
"Then," I said, "we go down."