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“It’s radioactive?” Narvin said. “The whole Capitol?”
“Which is precisely why it is not the Capitol any longer,” said the first Time Lord they’d found. “How long have you been offworld? Surely you must have noticed.”
“Quite a while,” Romana said, “for varying definitions of ‘a while.’”
It was true, of course. They had been offworld for a while. A long time, in fact; the years were beginning to take their toll, most notably on Leela but in truth on all of them. Narvin’s hair was greying, from copper to steel, and she’d been unsurprised to find, three months ago, that her face was rather more lined than she remembered. Of course they hadn’t been offworld in quite the sense that this Time Lord meant, but … well, close enough.
“Twenty years, would you say?” their host said sweetly.
“Something like that,” Romana said. Why did it always have to be twenty years with these things? Why could it never be forty-two years, or something? “I’m fairly sure the Citadel isn’t usually a pile of smouldering rubble, but maybe I’m missing something.”
“Missing the obvious, I’d say.”
“May we enquire as to your name?” Narvin said.
“Cardinal Trey,” she said. “And the two of you?”
Right. Probably some xenophobic, power-grabbing whackjob. The usual fare, so to speak.
“Ralon,” Narvin said. A nice trick, to use a different part of his name; it earnt no apparent reaction from Trey. She nodded to Romana to continue.
“Romana,” said Romana. In theory she should conceal herself, but in practice, what was the likelihood of stumbling into another version of herself in what appeared to be a desolate wasteland?
Trey raised an eyebrow. “Are you, now?”
“Should I be someone else?” Romana said.
“Oh, no,” Trey said. “I recognised the name … but never mind. That’s besides the point. You have an audience with a cardinal. Are you just here to flatter me, or is there something the two of you actually want done?”
“We’re not here on any sort of business,” Romana said. “But if you were to explain what’s going on here—we’ve been absent rather a long time…”
Trey laughed, then coughed. “Have you, now? Have you perhaps been living under a rock, as well?”
“With regards to…?” Narvin said.
“The civil war, Ralon!”
“We’ve been away for a very long time,” Narvin said. “I was beginning to miss home … but now it’s just a wasteland.”
It wasn’t as if he was lying.
“I hope I don’t have to explain to you where we are,” Trey said.
“Arcadia, I take it,” Romana said. A rather dilapidated and unimpressive version of an already dilapidated and unimpressive city, she thought.
“The last bastion of Time Lord civilisation,” Trey said bitterly. “Look.” She tapped a button on the wall and a great metal shield fell down, revealing the city below. A narrow, winding street broke through row upon row of huddled rectangular buildings, each the same as the other; awnings hung over shop windows and the streets were cobbled, people hurrying to and fro in shorter, simpler robes than Romana would have expected from her own Gallifrey. There was life, there was activity, there were vendors hawking their wares and children trailing after their cousins but there was no colour to the world; all the buildings were rundown, the ground was ashen and all the fabrics a dulled orange-brown, the vibrance worn out of the everything through too many washes. Many, many people were wrapped in ill-fitting shawls or trailing bandages: Trey, she realised with a start, was amongst them. A man huddled against a wall, knees drawn to his chest, rocking back and forth. “This is all that remains: a city of refugees. My people starve in the streets, whilst their superiors stockpile our dwindling resources in their bunkers. The poor get poorer. The rich get richer.” There was a streak of rage to her, Romana saw, one which ran deep and bitter: a crevice of righteous anger. “And nobody dares do anything, in case we destroy ourselves further!”
She coughed again, into her arm, her whole body shaking with the force of her anger. Romana glanced at Narvin: this was not a Gallifrey they would be lingering on.
“Then what are you going to do about it?” Narvin said.
“Bother the Council, of course,” Trey said. “In theory, there’ll be an election next year. In theory, I’m a candidate for election. In theory, I could find my way onto the High Council … all hypothetical, of course. You know how these elections are.”
“Do tell.”
“Oh yes, if you’ve been away you won’t have seen the corruption … but I’m sure you can imagine for yourself. I’ll admit, killing a voter in the streets was a new low. Only Time Lords can vote, of course, and only those with some modicum of wealth and power. It really is—terrible.”
“You don’t say,” Narvin said drily. “And you really think you can help these people?”
Trey set her jaw, steeled herself. “I don’t know if I can help them. I am going to help them. Whether I’ll be any good, Rassilon only knows—but it’s not as if the people around them are any better. The only problem, of course, is the elections themselves.”
Romana frowned. “Which bit of them?”
“How do you win a rotten borough virtuously? If I threaten, or bribe, or coerce my audience, I’m no better than the people I’m up against. If I don’t, I’m at the mercy of my opponents, and funnily enough, they have no such moral qualms. When did little things like ethics ever stop tyrants?” She groaned. “Do you understand what I’m up against? We live in a political system which is corrupt from the ground up, and designed to encourage that corruption. We live in a political system where the threat of extermination hangs above all our heads. Don’t push too much, or you could find yourself wiped off the map, along with everyone else, by some trigger-happy member of the High Council. I’m not keen to watch yet another city come tumbling down.”
“The answer seems fairly clear to me,” said Narvin. “If you wish to save Arcadia and Gallifrey itself, then you must do what is necessary—”
“For the future of Gallifrey, I know. But do the ends justify the means? Could you torture innocents on the off chance it might give you an edge?”
“If it saved the many?” Narvin said. “Willingly.”
“But the few are part of the many!” Trey said. “They’re the faces of the faceless masses! People have been killed for less than what I’m trying to do—I can’t let innocent bodies litter my rise to power!” Romana shifted uncomfortably. “You’ve seen the devastation for yourselves. You see how little we have left. The balance of power is so delicate, any wrong move could send it all crashing down like … like…”
“Like a Jenga tower,” Romana suggested.
“Like a what?”
“Never mind,” Romana said.
“I apologise,” Trey said, “for using the two of you as a sounding board. But the things I’ve seen … I wonder, Romana, have you seen them yet?”
Romana flinched. “What do you mean?”
She snorted. “You come in wearing my old face, using my name, broadcasting your psychic signature like some sort of Lowtown wanton—you come in doing all that and you expect me not to react? Dare I ask what your reaction is to all this?”
Romana swore. Another version of her. “I would do what is necessary—”
“For your planet and your people, etcetera etcetera—oh, we all would. Anyone can be a patriot, it’s practically in the job description. But it was loyalty to the cause that got us here and loyalty to the cause that’ll destroy us again—because the cause isn’t some grand heroism, it’s just greed and self-preservation. The only cause anyone here is interested in protecting is themself and maybe their status, if they have any. As you should know … but perhaps you’re too early in my timeline to understand. How did you get here, anyway?”
“TARDIS malfunction,” Romana said. “We weren’t aiming for here.”
Once again, not exactly a lie.
“I see. Well, that certainly explains your confusion. Welcome to the future: it’s crap.” Trey suddenly staggered to the side, half-crashing into the wall. “Really, really crap … crutch … pass me my crutch.” There was, Romana realised, a desk in the room; against it leant a cane and a crutch, one medical grade, the other little more than burnished wood. “Sorry, it’s … there’s nothing good waiting for you in your future, I’ll say that much.”
“I can see that much,” Romana said. “However did you get here?”
“The same way anyone else does,” Trey said. “Cold war.”
Ah yes, cold war. Mutually assured destruction. All this and more from the two great superpowers of twentieth century Earth.
“But why?” Narvin said. “What drove you to destroy yourselves?”
“What do you think? Interventionism. Brutal and bloody civil war … the problem with confining yourself to one planet is that half a universe wouldn’t have put enough distance between the warring factions, and we barely had three cities. It almost didn’t get as far that; if one person hadn’t agreed to provide their biodata, to authorise the launch, to sanction mass murder … but what’s done is done. The Capitol was bombed; if the first explosion didn’t destroy it, the fifth surely did.”
“And how do you know all this?” Narvin said.
“I was there as the Capitol burnt and fell. Not at the heart of the storm, but I was in the Capitol.” She laughed. “You can’t imagine. People screaming as they burnt alive. The world literally coming to pieces around me. Bomb after bomb after bomb … there wasn’t enough room in the shelters for everyone, we had to close the doors on screaming innocents. Now it’s gone and Arcadia is a ghost town, and—” She coughed again, violently. “It’s killing me. The radiation is killing me.”
“So is your precious idealism,” Narvin said.
“I wouldn’t die of anything else,” she replied.
“Then you’re a fool,” Narvin said coldly. “Idealism has never led the hopeless to anything but their own destruction.”
“N—Ralon,” Romana caught herself. “You’re not helping.”
“Very wise, Romana,” Trey said, though her eyes flickered at Romana’s slip. Now that she looked at her—herself—properly, Romana could see the damage: the gaunt, pale face, the amount of effort it took to remain standing … little smears of blood on the palms, from where the radiation sickness had not been successfully hidden. “Have you seen what I’ve seen yet?”
“Does it look like I have?” Romana said. “Civil war—in this manner—I never dreamt…”
“Not that,” Trey said. “The Daleks. I mean the Daleks.” Romana flinched. “Ah. I see that you have. Tell me, what do you make of all this? Not your friend, you. What would you do if you were me, bearing in mind that someday, you will be? Would you succumb to corruption? Would you let what remains of the Council turn you into something as despicable as them?”
“I—”
“You would, wouldn’t you? Well, I can’t. There’s so little left of my world … I can’t let it take me, too. I can’t betray my people like that.” She smiled coldly. “And I can’t have you meddling in affairs you don’t understand.” The door clicked shut behind them. Narvin glanced around the room anxiously for some escape, but there was none. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. Did you really think I would let two remnants of the past run around with vital information that could change the war in their favour? I’ll wager you’ve been sent on an errand, whether you know it or not. And I can’t let things get worse than they are.”
“You don’t understand,” Romana said. “I swear, you don’t. And even if that were true—would it really be so bad if someone unwrote the war?”
“Romana, my dear, the likelihood of anyone unwriting civil war is far less probable than someone wishing to rewrite the war, in their favour. Don’t worry, I’ll let you go—I just need one little thing out of you.” She grinned. “I may be dying, but I’ve still got it.”
Then, before Romana could stop her, her hand brushed over Romana’s skin. She wasn’t thrown back; the usual psychic interference was dialled down. Which made perfect sense, if she, too, had been subjected to Etra Prime…
The sharp sting of mental invasion. Her paltry psychic wards stripped down to nothing. This day wrenched from her mind—
And then, nothing.
“So what did you see?” Leela said. “What did you see on that Gallifrey?”
“Nothing much of interest,” Romana said, struggling to recall it. What had they seen? Somehow the details were fuzzy. “Yet another version of me. A cardinal, this time…”
And an optimist. That was perhaps the strangest part of it all. A version of herself who had seen all the same horrors as she had, but a version who had never flinched away from her moral code, a version of her who had never bent or buckled or broken. Well, broken, maybe, but never to the extent of sacrificing her principles.
That could have been her. Not even in a metaphorical sense; that could, literally, have been her. Besides the new body, which she couldn’t quite recall; besides the political position, they were practically identical. And that version of her would not have allowed herself to be corrupted. Not by Pandora, not by the High Council … not by anyone.
“Frankly,” Narvin said, “we’ve seen much worse.”
And much better. But Romana kept that to herself.
“Well then,” Romana sighed. “Onwards and upwards. Where shall we go next?”
“Somewhere warmer would be nice,” Leela said. “And not evil.”
“I think we can do warmer,” Narvin said. “Though evil I can’t help you with.”
“I will take it,” Leela said, patting him on the shoulder. “What did you see there? You sound … unhappy.”
“That’s just the problem,” Narvin said grimly. “I’m not entirely sure. I suspect we’ve … but never mind. There’s nothing we can do about that now, not without Brax here. Our best bet is to keep moving, as Romana says.”
Well, at least they were agreeing. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong on that Gallifrey, and her mind was hiding it from her.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it now. And sometimes it seemed like there never was. They could only hope that the future, faced hand in hand, would be less grim.
There was nowhere else left for them to go.