"I'll never get up there."
"No? It's not as difficult as it looks."
Nell laughed. "Young man, climbing a rope ladder to a maintenance hatch in the dome may seem easy to you, but at my age, it simply isn't an option."
"Wait here."
In the weeks that she had been tutoring the Prydonian student, Nell had seen parts of the Citadel she had never imagined. Theta insisted on holding their sessions in the oddest places -- the service corridors below the Panopticon, an observation booth on the edge of the galactic tele-imaging chamber, an artificially lit garden in the university district. He always chose places where there was something to see, almost as if simply concentrating on the single task of the lesson was too simple for him.
He was a quick study, soaking up everything Nell could teach him in less time than it took her to present her ideas.
Theta set down the basket he was carrying and took hold of the ladder, pulled himself up with the confidence of an aerialist. It was eight or ten meters to the hatch in the curved ceiling. In hardly more than a moment, he had reached his goal and worked the release mechanism.
A shaft of yellow-tinged sunshine spilled down and Nell gasped. She hardly remembered the last time she'd seen real, outdoor sunshine. Years -- no decades. Suddenly, climbing the ladder didn't seem nearly as daunting has it had. She was about to take hold of the rope and give it a try, when to her surprise, Theta pulled it up after himself.
His head popped back into the square hole in the ceiling, silhouetted by the warm flood of light.
"Just a moment," he called down.
Nell waited. After a few minutes, the ladder fell again, now with the end tied to form a crude sling seat.
"I'll pull you up."
Nell wondered whether he was strong enough -- but this was no time for qualms. She started to get into the sling.
"Don't forget the basket."
She put it in her lap, and he hauled her up, the sling jerking and swinging as he pulled hand over hand. Nell's head emerged from the hatch, and she gripped the iron catwalk that Theta was standing on. She pushed the basket through then hauled herself out into the sunshine, scrambling to her feet and squinting in the bright light.
They were high above the Citadel with a panoramic view out over the roof of the city and the plains beyond. The catwalk they stood on circled the great dome just a bit below its apex -- a platform for maintenance workers who periodically repaired the smooth copper-clad roof to keep it watertight. Below them, the dome sloped away, broken by clusters of antennae and the occasional ventilation stack. The dome was several miles across at its base, covering the Time Lords' Citadel complex and the undercity of small businesses, workers residences and entertainment halls that surrounded it. Beyond the foot of the dome, the terrain spread out in gently undulating, dusty green prairie, broken here and there by the silver ribbons of river. The sun hung above the horizon, wreathed in wisps of light cloud in a sky of deep turquoise fading to hazy white as it neared the ground. A gray-purple wedge of mountain range was visible in the distance.
"Oh my..." Nell whispered, at a loss for anything more to say.
"I told you this was a good spot to study," Theta said, kneeling down to open the basket.
"Maintenance crews must come up here."
"Every two or three hundred years," Theta said, pointing to a small plaque next to the hatch opening. "See, last maintenance was about 25 years ago. Unless there's a bad storm, I'd say we won't be interrupted for at least 175 years."
"I hope you've mastered English grammar before then," Nell said with a smile.
The basket contained several books. Theta took out a book and seated himself, back against the dome. He motioned for Nell to sit beside him. She got down slowly, her joints complaining as she knelt. Theta noticed her discomfort and gave her a questioning look.
"Arthritis," she said. "I'll be all right, as long as you help me up when we're ready to go."
"There are treatments ..."
"Healers cost money. It's not that bad. I'm not in such terrible shape for my age."
Theta looked puzzled again. "How old are you?"
"That's not a proper question to ask a woman," Nell said with a laugh.
Theta frowned. "I find the human life span difficult to comprehend. Your lives seem so fleeting."
"Thanks. You sure know how to make me feel good."
"Sorry. I'm just trying to understand."
Nell thought for a moment. "My life extends from my first memories to somewhere in the future that I can't see. I don't think that's really any different from your life. The endpoint is unknowable. So even though I know I won't live as long as you will, it's still open-ended from my point of view."
Theta nodded and opened his book -- "Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen."
"It is a truth universally acknowledged," he read aloud, "that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.
"However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of someone or other of their daughters."
"Very good," Nell said. "You're getting quite fluent."
"Is it?"
"What?"
"A truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife?"
Nell chuckled. "Jane Austen seemed to think so. Her novels are all about young women snagging rich husbands."
"Was that what it was like, when you were on Earth?"
"Not really. I was born more than a hundred years after Austen. Society was changing."
"Changing? In just a hundred years?"
"How odd 'Pride and Prejudice' must seem to you," Nell said thoughtfully. "Your people don't practice marriage. Females here enter the same professions as males. And your society hasn't changed in thousands of years, let alone hundreds."
Theta smiled. "I read this, and the others you recommended last night. I admit the customs seem strange, but I'm no stranger to the themes: pride, prejudice, status, social acceptance, greed, power. I think we Gallifreyans speak the same language -- with a slightly different syntax."
Nell raised an eyebrow. "You read all the way through 'Pride and Prejudice' -- last night?"
"And the others, 'Life on the Mississippi,' 'Oliver Twist' and 'Ivanhoe.' I enjoyed the Mark Twain book the most. I think I'd like to pilot a riverboat."
"What about love?"
"Excuse me?"
"You were listing the themes you found -- you didn't mention love. That features prominently in three of the four books you read."
Theta thought for a moment. Nell could almost see him paging back through the books mentally.
"In 'Ivanhoe,' the treatment of romantic themes was rather stylized. The characters seemed to be playing out pre-agreed patterns of behavior and fulfilling a set destiny.
Nell nodded. "Courtly love."
"In 'Oliver Twist,' the romantic relationships weren't all good for the people engaging in them. Some seemed quite abusive. Quite a different view of pair bonding than 'Ivanhoe' suggests."
"Pair bonding... interesting term," Nell said. "But I suppose that's a reasonable way to look at it."
"In 'Pride and Prejudice,' I'm not sure whether 'love' is really the right term. Elizabeth Bennet only becomes intrigued by Mr. Darcy after she realizes how extremely wealthy and powerful he is."
Nell chuckled. "Yes, that's true. But Mr. Darcy pursues her even though she isn't very wealthy. Doesn't that make his motive love?"
"I don't know."
"Nadotal always said that romantic love was the most difficult of human concepts for Time Lords to grasp."
"Nadotal, that name is vaguely familiar ..."
"Miranda's father," Nell said flatly.
Theta blinked. "A Time Lord?"
"I know you probably find that hard to believe. But it's true. One of those dirty little secrets that nobody talks about."
Theta was silent.
"I'm sorry. I'm embarrassing you."
"Um, no. Not exactly. I'm just surprised."
"I shouldn't have brought it up. Let's get back to the text."
"I believe you. You wouldn't realize it, but you couldn't have said that to anyone more likely to believe you."
"It doesn't matter. I don't know why I said it."
"If you have a -- connection -- with one of the Time Lords, why do you ..."
"Why do I clean offices in the Citadel?" Nell shrugged. "You're the first person willing to pay me for lessons in all the years I've been here. It's a living."
"But, surely Nadotal would ..."
"Support us? I haven't heard from him in years. He used to visit. He even used to provide for us. I fancied he was fond of Miranda, for a while. But, his visits got farther and farther apart. Your people live such long lives. I'd like to think he didn't reject us. It's just that 15 years doesn't seem a long time to him. He doesn't realize he missed all the years when Miranda was growing up."
"Did Nadotal bring you to Gallifrey?"
Nell nodded.
"He was an observer. I think he was writing a book about early 20th century Earth. I'm not sure though. He never shared his work with me. I wandered into his TARDIS by accident. He had it disguised as a willow tree in the little wood on my family's farm in Kent.
"He was like a wizard... an old man living in a tree in a magic wood."
"You once said you didn't have much choice about coming here, but that you came of your own will."
Nell smiled sadly.
"After that first day, when I found him by accident, he let me come back, many times. I think he was lonely. I was 22 that summer. I suppose I would have been married and starting my own family, but there weren't any young men about. The Great War -- all the boys were off in the trenches in France.
"I loved books and he had the most wonderful library. My family wondered what had gotten into me. Every morning I would go to the woods and stay all day. They would have thought it even odder if they had known I was slipping inside an old willow tree and exploring the mysteries of the universe."
The sun was sliding down toward the horizon. The sky was tinged with orange and the clouds outlined in scarlet. The copper dome felt warm against Nell's back.
"A sunset," she said quietly. "I haven't seen a sunset for so long."
"But why did Nadotal bring you to Gallifrey? Was it because you were pregnant?"
Nell looked at her student with surprise. She hadn't expected him to say that. Gallifreyans seemed terribly sensitive about that particular word. Probably some inferiority complex about all their women being sterile.
"No, I'd lived here many years before that happened. It was because I'd learned too much. He'd given me the run of his library and I'd read about everything from cold fusion to semiconductors. He said it would be too dangerous to Earth history to leave me behind. He'd been recalled, you see. As long as he was on Earth, where he could keep an eye on me, he hadn't seen any harm in letting me amuse myself among his books and data cubes. But since he was leaving, he worried that I might make use of something I'd learned -- even without realizing that was what I was doing."
"So he forced you to leave with him?"
"Not at all. He gave me a choice. He said he could make me forget everything I had seen. I could forget, or I could leave with him. I chose to remember. I was actually delighted. After all, what could be more wonderful than going to live among the people who had built his amazing time ship that was larger on the inside than the outside. I believed I was going to a place filled with wonders."
"Gallifrey isn't what you thought it would be."
"Not exactly."
"An understatement," Theta said bitterly. "The only wonder in this great city is that the inhabitants don't crumble into dust from inactivity."
"The world isn't a fairy story, Theta. What the Time Lords have achieved really is amazing. It's more than most people from my time and place could even imagine. But for every wonder, there's someone doing the sweeping up. Crystal towers are built on foundations of plain old cement. The machinery of wonder is still just machinery."
"Do you want to go home?"
Nell thought about that for a long moment as orange sunshine warmed her face and a cool breeze ruffled her short, gray hair.
"No. Not now. Too long has passed. My parents are probably dead and buried. My friends scattered. The world I knew is a lifetime in the past."
"What if you could go back to just after the moment you left?"
"No... not that either. How would I explain it? I left the house a 22-year-old girl. What would my friends and family think if I returned an old woman? Would they even know me? For them, I'm simply gone. And that wouldn't change if I went back."
"It must have been difficult for you, coming from a place where things change so quickly, living in a society where nothing changes, and where nobody feels anything if they can help it."
"I have to admit, that sometimes I think living on Gallifrey is something like being wrapped in cotton wool."
Theta nodded. "It's like keeping your body in a locked box, and only taking it out to clean and oil it every now and then. Sometimes I think I'll go mad if I don't feel something. Even if it's pain."
Nell looked at her student, his already ruddy face blushed orange in the light of the sunset. His face was lined like that of a middle-aged man, but there was something very young there too. A little boy trapped in a society of old men, wearing the face of an adult, but thinking with the mind of a teen-aged boy.
He turned to her and smiled. There was a mischievous twinkle in his eye.
"Would you like to try something that's fun?"
"That depends ..."
"I think you'll like it... come on..."
His smile was infectious. Nell couldn't help but smile back.
"Nothing immoral or illegal. The Time Lords aren't imaginative enough to make this illegal. They probably would, if they actually thought anybody was going to try it."
After lowering Nell back down from the service hatch, Theta led her back into the Citadel by a different route than they had come by. The upper levels of the complex were mostly abandoned -- dusty, quiet and dimly lit.
They entered a long-unused office and Theta went to work removing a panel from the wall.
"I thought you said this wasn't illegal. Looks like you're damaging Time Lord property, if you ask me," Nell said suspiciously.
"Well, not entirely illegal." He lifted the square of laminated plastic off the wall and set it down, revealing a round opening a little less than a meter in diameter.
"What is this?"
"When these offices were in use, they were the supply department. There's an old tube system that was used to distribute supplies -- clean linens, office furniture, small appliances -- throughout the Citadel. There's a switching system that directs any item placed into the tube to it's proper destination."
"You're planning to get into that thing, aren't you!"
Theta nodded and grinned. "I've done it before. You can't imagine what fun it is."
"What if you get stuck?"
"The walls are made of zero-friction polymer. You can't get stuck. Besides, the tubes are more than wide enough to fit a person through, throughout the whole system."
Nell felt her heart pounding. What he was suggesting sounded terribly dangerous -- but she wanted to try it. At the same time, she knew she shouldn't.
"I'm afraid I may be a little old for this ..."
"Oh, come on. You'll hate yourself if you pass up this opportunity."
"Where will we come out?"
"That's the beauty of it. I have absolutely no idea. It will be on a lower level than we're on right now, because the whole system works on gravity. But the routing controller ceased to be reliable centuries ago. We'll find out where we're going when we get there!"
"I don't know why I've let you talk me into this ..."
"People are always saying that to me. I don't know why," he said with a wink.
He grinned and climbed into the tube. "I'll go first, so if we're going to crash, you'll just crash into me."
With that he was gone, letting go of the edge of the tube and disappearing into the black.
Nell was left with her final decision. She could back out now -- walk back to the nearest lift and go down the regular way. Or she could follow Theta into the unknown.
"It's not like this is the first time you've taken a flier," she said to herself. Her mind was made up.
It was perfectly dark. The walls offered no friction, so unless she put out a hand to feel them, it was as if they weren't there. She was falling through an endless void. There was nothing to gauge her speed by except the feeling of vertigo. Every now and then she would feel a jerk as she was turned in a different direction. The only sound was the whoosh of air rushing by her ears and the pounding of her heart.
The fall lasted for what seemed like minutes. Then she felt herself slowing -- the angle of the shaft must have flattened out. She looked in the direction she believed to be her feet, and saw a gray circle of light rushing toward her.
She shot out of the tube and stumbled as her feet touched the floor. Her forward momentum overbalanced her and she tumbled down at Theta's feet, rolling a bit and slamming into something hard.
"There! Wasn't I right? Wasn't that a rush?" he said as he bent to help her up.
"A rush... yes, I think that's what it was," Nell said, gritting her teeth in pain. "But I think I may have broken my ankle."