DOORS
Chapter One
I swear I should have known better. Love at first sight is real… but rare. When it happens to you, it's real. When you find out it's not real after all, then you know exactly how rare it must be.
Something had gotten into Nyssa and Tegan. I needed to find them and make them see things as they were; somehow, they were both experiencing the same delusions, and maybe they weren't alone. There is no ergot on Panderas but it's as if my friends had ergot poisoning and were suffering shared hallucinations. How was I not affected? Never mind; the important thing was to find them and somehow cure them.
Panderas' capitol city, Darnell, rises between two mountains – rises above them, in fact - and is bordered by an ocean to the south and a river to the north. The river boasts two bridges, Pont de la Tour and Spencer Bridge, two and a half miles apart; on the other side of the river are sparsely inhabited hills, and beyond them, Panderas' second city, Cosham, built vertically just like Darnell and rising above its own surrounding mountains.
I wasn't worried that my companions had somehow crossed the ocean; communication among the continents was slow, and uncommon. There is so much ocean on Panderas that the continents might as well be different planets. Besides, I didn't think they would ever leave me so far behind, no matter how delusional they were.
Darnell, which is not square, covers about 550 square miles, but its base measures only 10 square miles, and the topmost few floors are considerably smaller, perhaps to allow smokestacks and such to operate. It might be the biggest high-rise garden-style complex in the universe, with everything from residences to industry, government to parks (central courtyards with their own small artificial suns and precipitation dispensers), hospitals to schools, laboratories to recreational venues. Most residents work and play on their own levels or, less often, nearby levels. Escalators abound, as do the kinds of passenger-bearing conveyor belts one sees at Earth's airports. For long-distance travel there are cheap, bumpy, crowded transmats ranging in size from a London double-decker bus to an Airbus 380-800. Better off individuals have private transmats, sometimes just as bumpy but without the presumed riff-raff. How in all this was I supposed to find my errant friends, even had they not been hiding from me – which they most certainly were?
At a loss, I asked Circe for advice. I'd been doing this more and more lately. We'd landed on Panderas six days earlier, in the middle of Darnell's largest park, more or less by design. Nyssa had read about the verinka, a gigantic white flower that grew on only three planets in the known universes, and described it to Tegan, who'd become intrigued, and the two of them asked if we could go to one of the three planets. Smenk was having a world war (its 15th) and a plague was spreading over most of Jotz, so off to Panderas we flew. We came within inches of destroying the planet's biggest, most perfect verinka, and did manage to crush a bed of common but previously healthy and beautiful pansies. The parkmaster asked us to move. I explained how difficult a short hop could be but he insisted. We crossed our fingers (well, Tegan crossed hers, anyway) and gave it a shot, and there we suddenly were in the bedroom of a private home, startling its lone resident, a stunningly beautiful woman of about the age I appear to be (but looks are deceptive), or perhaps a few years older, at any rate sleep-tousled and not wearing anything but a duvet and that look of startlement. The room smelled of oranges.
"Oh," I said, turning my back immediately; "pardon me!"
"Pardon us," corrected Nyssa, as she and Tegan also turned their backs.
"You are pardoned," said the woman, after a moment. We turned back to see her standing by her bed, closing an opaque white robe over a fairly transparent pink nightgown. She seemed completely unaware that her black hair was a mess; it tumbled down past her shoulders in glorious disarray, framing her high cheek bones, dark green eyes, olive skin…. I wished, irrationally, that she would from that moment on never comb that amazing tangle. She looked at us impassively and then smiled. "You have parked your strange vehicle in a no-parking zone," she gently admonished us. "However, having pardoned you, I must welcome you. My name is Circe Ceres. I am the Provisor of our local high school."
"I am the Doctor," I finally remembered to say. "These are my friends, Tegan and Nyssa. We came to see the verinka but apparently have found quite another flower entirely." At this my friends stared open-mouthed at me, as if I had grown another nose or sprouted rosebuds. I returned the stare. Circe laughed.
"If you will excuse me, I am sure I can manage to look less like a plant and more like an educator. Would you mind waiting in the parlor while I get dressed?" We repaired to the parlor, closing the bedroom door behind us, leaving the TARDIS in its prohibited space, and sat down on the sleek burgundy furniture; Nyssa almost disappeared against the sofa on which she settled in her burgundy velvets. Tegan perched on a matching ottoman. I stood perfectly still, my hands resting lightly on the back of an empty armchair. To be honest, I felt as if I were floating, slightly. I had to remind myself to breathe.
By and by, after a minute or an hour or a day, I wasn't sure which, Circe emerged from her bedroom dressed in something perfectly proper, in beige, with a burgundy scarf, sat down next to Nyssa on the sofa and indicated that I should sit in the armchair whose back I was now gripping rather harder than I had realized. I smiled in what I hoped was an agreeable manner and fell in an undignified heap onto the gleaming white tile floor.
I awoke to the smell of oranges. The duvet previously adorning Circe was now wrapped around me. She could have just dumped me on the sofa, I thought, but she put me in her bed. I sat up and looked around. The TARDIS blocked a good deal of my view but I could see that the door was ajar and I could hear Circe's voice and those of my friends, all somewhat muffled, probably to avoid disturbing me. Feeling awfully foolish for having fallen down for no reason at all in front of a woman in whose presence I wanted to feel anything but foolish, I sat up, then stood up in my stocking feet and looked around for my plimsolls. My coat was draped over a chair. When I felt presentable, I wandered into the parlor and found my friends sipping tea and chatting with Circe. They clammed up when I appeared and didn't speak again until I sat in the armchair I'd failed to claim… how long ago?
"Doctor, how do you feel?" Nyssa looked worried.
"I'm fine. How long was I out?"
"Maybe ten minutes," said Tegan. Circe just smiled. I smiled back. I was melting but this time I didn't fall down.