5x02: Swansong
Notes: I am deeply indebted to fahye for allowing me to borrow various concepts and people from fortuna fugit for use in this episode. I dearly hope this satisfies, darlin'. <3
5x02: Swansong
(New Victoria, Asellus Australis, 6347)
He stands for a long while in the quiet vastness of the wardrobe room, the arching curves of his ship less than soothing today. She hums around him, trying to reassure, but he's shivering in his damp clothes and he has the look on Wilf's face imprinted vivid in his head, and he does not want reassurance.
The opposite of reassurance is punishment, the Doctor supposes, smoothing out a new dry shirt and doing up the buttons with unshaking fingers. He feels torn, literally stretched and tugged to pieces: what his other self did, what Davros said and Sarah Jane said and Rose said and Donna had no chance to say. He shrugs on his coat, the long familiar sweep of it settling him into himself a very little, and returns to the console room. "What d'you think, then?" he asks the TARDIS, and mercifully his voice doesn't echo in the emptiness. She hums under his fingers with regret for losing those other five pilots, and an impersonal machine understanding for the necessity of what he does. He nods a little and sets the coordinates for anywhere fast, somewhere in that human future that still exists now. Understanding his quiet urgency, the TARDIS sets down nearly at once on a colony world in Asellus Australis, sixty-fourth century. It'll do.
The Doctor steps out into a foggy evening; the TARDIS melts nearly at once into the shadows of an alley, picked out in brass lettering as the corner of Low Strand and Beggar's Alley. The Doctor folds his coat in around himself and sets off down the cobbled street, shreds of mist clinging to him like little hands.
He's evidently landed in a bad part of town: he hardly walks thirty feet before a rather unwashed man attempts to pick his pocket. The Doctor ignores this entirely and leaves the man standing in the street, holding a banana and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, pocket edition, staring after the Doctor in some bewilderment. The Doctor walks on, past boarded-up subterranean houses and the occasional flickering light from hopeful pawnshops. He pauses for a moment by an advertisement reading AUTOMATA INDUSTRIA MK 6: all new models! Installed with only the finest silicon; clockwork runs two weeks at a go! An anti-gravity locomotive screams by overhead, and the Doctor moves on.
A few streets on -- he still doesn't know what he's looking for, and another banana, a magic 8 ball, and a stubby candle have been sacrificed to further pickpockets -- a figure disentangles itself from a lighted doorway and calls to him. The sign above the door reads The Gallows, which is hardly encouraging. Still, the Doctor stops, because this is the first person to speak to him directly. Or -- not person, he corrects himself, when he can see her more clearly. Leaning in the doorway in a low-cut dress and her hair done up, she's quite beautiful in a false and perfect way, marred only by a hole just under her left collarbone and left exposed by the dress: lock and serial number. "Won't you come in?" she asks again, in the perfect imitation of a rather sultry human voice, and the Doctor's about to politely refuse and move on when the music starts.
He's never heard the like. The notes soar, really soar, creating complex mathematical patterns that the Doctor can nearly see in his mind, almost complete concentric fractaled circles that form snatches of words, vanishing before he can quite grasp at them; music that harmonizes with itself and creates sympathetic vibrations in the Doctor's chest.
On a technical basis alone, it's brilliant, but the Doctor isn't considering the how of the music. It draws him in, births of star clusters and vast red-and-silver gardens inside the confines of song, and the Doctor cannot turn away. He goes forward, fumbling for the psychic paper as he does so; whether or not it actually fools the mechanical girl in the doorway, she must see the naked longing on his face, and lets him through.
Inside the Gallows is another world, opulent. It contains a bar, a raised small stage, and a number of low-lit tables, all populated by finely dressed gentlemen and the occasional lady; the mechanical girls drift among them, serving drinks and making small conversation. How they can, the Doctor doesn't know; he barely notices them. Sinks down on a seat at the bar with his eyes fixed on the back of the stage dais, where something akin to a pipe organ sits, though where pipes would be there is instead a great mass of strings. A young man sits at the keyboard, fingers flying and feet working the pedals and his head flung back as he sings, wordless notes that vibrate through the strings and out. The Doctor knows such instruments exist, but he's never seen one before -- heard it. A psallopiano, made unique by the strings. Each psallopiano is different, and each arrangement of music: the random arrangement of the psallostrings, subtly shifting with each use, change the notes. It's nearly a living thing, a psallopiano, tuning and retuning itself according to no strictures. They only exist for a century after discovery, as it takes remarkable and innate aptitude to play one, and the skill dies out, or is smothered. At this particular moment in time, though, the Doctor is blessed with a single perfect moment that will never come again to the boy at the psallopiano, and he sits perfectly still in reverence of it.
At length the music ends, to a smattering of light applause. The Doctor tries not to be disgusted by this show of indifference -- as though the music is just some delicacy for the rich, like Mbodian snakes' eggs! -- and turns to the bar. A mechanical girl sees him and comes over at once. "What'll it be, love?"
"I don't --" the Doctor starts, and sighs. "Don't suppose you have any linji-bloom nectar?" At her smiling nod, he adds hopefully, "Carbonated? And with one of those little umbrellas?"
He gets it bubbly, but sans umbrella, which he supposes is at least something. No one else is in need of attention at the bar, so the girl stays hovering near him, and since the music's over the Doctor watches her. She moves quite without clockwork jerkiness; apart from the impossible green of her eyes, and the little exposed keyhole at her shoulder, she might be human. "Sorry," the Doctor says, leaning forward, "sorry, but -- automata industria?"
She looks at him, too sharply for a moment; pretending, the moment a smooth smile for the client comes over her face. That's interesting too. "Of course, sir. Eyai. All of us here at the Gallows are mark five and specially ordered by the lady of the house."
"Of course," the Doctor murmurs, echoing back the words, frowning a little.
Someone else comes to the bar, and the mechanical girl -- this eyai -- turns, still with that artful grace. The smile that lights her face is no more or less genuine than the one granted the Doctor, nor is her voice changed, but the Doctor detects absolute sincerity in her "Will! Glad to see you improvised tonight. No old embellished classics. What'll it be?"
The Doctor turns his head to look. It's the young man from the psallopiano, looking wrung out. "I'll have the best scotch you think I can afford," he says. "Thanks, Louisa."
So the eyai girl also has a name. Interesting.
"'Scuse me," the Doctor says, edging a little closer. "Will, is it? Will. I just wanted to say, you were brilliant."
The young man looks a little taken aback. He recovers nearly at once, though, and says, "Thank you." He obviously isn't used to the clientele addressing him, but the Doctor doesn't look terribly like these neo-Victorian dandies. "We have, ah, a different performance every night."
"Every one different," the Doctor agrees. "Depends on the psallostrings."
"That's right," Will says. "Do you know much about psallopianos?"
"No," the Doctor admits. "Never even heard one before tonight. I'm a bit of a traveler, wandered through entirely by chance. But you're good, Will, you're -- well, you're brilliant." He props his chin in a hand and allows himself a grin. "And I don't often say that."
"Thank you," Will says with unwavering courtesy. He looks intrigued, but it's buried beneath the politeness, and a sort of wariness, and his exhaustion.
"Tell you what," the Doctor says, finishing off his nectar and standing, "I'll just come back tomorrow night and hear a whole new one, how does that sound?"
"I should like that," Will says, a little startled. He's probably staring at the Doctor, but the Doctor's already racing outside and doesn't bother to check.
He's in enough of a hurry to avoid running into any would-be thieves on his way back to the TARDIS. In he goes, and she hums in sympathetic resonance as he sets the dial for twenty-two hours later -- makes sure it's hours, not days or months or years. When the TARDIS settles, he pops back out into the dark, a bit clearer than last night's. The fog is mostly gone, and he can see the spindly shapes of the anti-gravity train tunnel, and the towers of the colony's rich. There are no stars.
A different eyai girl is at the Gallows' door, but she doesn't stop him from going in. This time the Doctor's well settled at the bar and stocked with a pile of charming little sandwiches when Will comes onto the dais, not even sparing a glance at the audience, his eyes only for the psallopiano. Then he sits, playing a rising set of notes, a pause, and in a crash of sound he's off and dragging the Doctor. Each particular chord pulls another single impression from the Doctor's mind, and this time he's closer to seeing the music properly. They mean something, each of these mathematically precise and completely spontaneous notes. That pattern there, one arc; that string of notes, its mirroring opposite. Like Will's creating some complex word in High Gallifreyan with which to name the world, and he can't possibly know he's doing it.
By the end the sandwiches have gone dry and the Doctor hasn't moved an inch. He almost wants to get up then, return to the TARDIS, and watch the following night's performance, and the one after, and the one after that, but there probably lies madness, so he stays in his seat. Will doesn't come to the bar, however, so the Doctor rises and goes the curtained partition that seems to delineate backstage. It opens into a long hall full of lighting apparatus and the smell of greasepaint. Will's sitting on the steps leading down from the stage, carefully pulling the kinks out of his hands. He hears the Doctor and his head snaps up.
"Just me," the Doctor says, coming over. "Hello."
"You're not allowed backstage," Will says, more observation than warning. "So you came back after all."
"Yes," the Doctor says.
Will gives him a long thoughtful look. "You really are here for the music."
"Possibly," the Doctor concedes. "I might also be here for other things." Runs a hand through his hair. "Like I said, I'm a traveler. And I've heard of psallopianos before, but these eyai -- are they an invention of this world particularly?"
"That's right," Will says readily enough. Then, in a recitation of simple fact strangely devoid of patriotic pride: "The first scientists on New Victoria discovered a small siliconite moon in orbit. The silicon from the moon is of superior quality. That's why our eyai are much more sophisticated than the artificial intelligences on most other systems."
"And those keyholes?"
"Clockwork," Will says, standing carefully and wincing a little. "Energy-efficient, and in theory it makes the eyai easier to control." Something strange enters his voice then, thinly veiled but extremely calm distaste. The Doctor looks at him sharply, but when Will's eyes meet his they're mild. The Doctor wonders if, were he to look, he might find a small lock under the collar of Will's shirt.
"Why are there no exports, then?" the Doctor asks after a moment.
Will shrugs. "Too expensive?"
"Well," the Doctor says. "Nice to meet you, Will. Really, the playing's brilliant. Might come again tomorrow. I'll just nip out the back and take a look around."
Will starts to nod and pauses, frowning. "A traveler. Are you staying pipeside?"
The Doctor blinks. "Excuse me?"
"Pipeside," Will repeats, a sharp jerk of his chin towards the ceiling. "For rich fellows like you who can afford establishments like this."
"Oh no," the Doctor says, laughing a little in surprise at the absurdity, "I'm not -- I'm not rich, really. I'm just staying on my ship."
"Tubeside?" Will says in astonishment, and when the Doctor opens his mouth to ask, adds, "That's the two ... districts, I suppose. Rich people in the uppers, and the rest of us down here. Named after the Pipe trains and Tube trains."
The Doctor nods slowly. "Well. Yes, then, my ship's tubeside."
"Someone's bound to try to nick it," Will says. "You'd better hurry and get back to it."
"No one's going to take her," the Doctor says, with a proud little grin. "She can't be stolen." He hesitates fractionally, the words sticking in his throat. "Want to see her?"
Will hesitates too, but the Doctor knows he's going to say yes. This boy with his matchless hands and voice hears the truth in his own music, and can't possibly be content down in the fog and the cobbles with only bored rich men and beautiful mechanical girls for an audience. He nods slowly, and holds out a hand in a strangely formal gesture. "William Pennsworth," he says.
"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor returns, grinning and shaking his hand with enthusiasm. "Nice to meet you, Will Pennsworth. Shall we?"
"Out the back, then," Will says, taking his hand back and going on down the dim corridor. They slip through a storeroom to reach a set of stairs leading out onto the street, and though Will seems not at all bothered by them, the Doctor is instantly terribly aware of the motionless eyai girls -- off-duty? wound down? -- lining the walls. Storeroom. The Doctor follows Will up the stairs, frowning.
Will doesn't move like those girls do, the Doctor thinks as they go along one slanted cobbled street and then another toward the TARDIS. But he might not need to. Still -- he lets his hand brush Will's for a moment, and that's blood in his veins, not a trace of silicon in there. No clockwork. That leaves more things unexplained than not, the Doctor thinks, and a grin slides across his face.
When they reach the TARDIS, Will makes no comment on its outside appearance, although he does look at it closely, and touch the wooden side while the Doctor unlocks the door. He peers inside, backs up a step, observes the TARDIS from the outside again, and comes inside all the way. He doesn't say It's bigger on the inside. He says, "How much bigger?"
"Very," the Doctor says.
Will simply stands there for a long moment, gazing around him. He says, "I see. It's like the music."
The Doctor grins near to splitting his face. "Yeah."
"I think," Will says, looking up at him, "there is something I would like to show you in the morning."
"Right, course, you need to get a bit of sleep after all that playing," the Doctor says, nodding.
"I'll be back here tomorrow at half eleven," Will says, walking backwards toward the doors.
"Right," the Doctor says again; counts back from six-hundred fifty-nine in primes, which gives Will exactly two minutes to walk away from the TARDIS before he pulls himself forward into the following day, at just before half eleven. He pats the console fondly and throws his overcoat aside, goes down to the doors and opens them to see Will coming up the cobbled street, all the more grimy and derelict in the daylight. The Doctor hops out, locking the TARDIS behind him. "Hello, Will! Rested up?"
"Yes," Will says. "It's only a few Tube stops down."
The Tube's far worse than the streets, but the Doctor doesn't mind; just stands amid the rattling and the flickering light, hands shoved into his pockets to avoid the grime just as Will's are. He wonders how many of their fellow passengers are eyai.
At their stop, Will bounds up the steps ahead of the Doctor towards the filtered daylight, and up top catches his hand on the metal post of the Tube sign and swings around. The Doctor comes up with little more dignity but does omit the signpost. In all this time they haven't spoken, but it's companionable, and not at all startling when Will says, "There," and points across the street at a little shop, dust in the windows.
He follows Will inside; there is no tinkling bell to announce their arrival, and the inside is not so much a display of goods as a riotous mess of useful and useless antiques, rugs and books and spare spaceship parts, all gathered together in chaos. Will watches the Doctor look around and nods a little, mostly to himself. "Anna?" he calls.
A girl appears, in apron and lace-edged dress, a little dusty herself around the edges, blond and beautiful in such a precise and perfect way that the Doctor knows at once she must be eyai. "Hello!" he says. "I'm the Doctor."
"Anna Marsh," she returns, looking him carefully up and down. "I run the shop."
"Eyai with a full name, running a shop?" the Doctor asks, and her chin tilts up a little, but she only says, "Yes."
"Hm." The Doctor glances around; there are broken things, but there are made things, too -- a pair of earrings from dangling scraps, picture frames, a compass: a slow reversal of the mad entropy of the shop, the Doctor thinks. "Anna," he says, "have you made all this?"
"Yes," Anna says again. "I make things." She glances over at Will, a smooth beautiful movement. "Would you care to explain --?"
"He's from off-planet," Will says, and it clicks in the Doctor's head, that strange defensive way Will spoke of the eyai earlier. He's in love with her, and the Doctor's hearts go out to him, for being so foolish and brave. "I thought he might like to have a look around."
"Actually," the Doctor says, setting the compass gently aside. "Anna. Will. Are there many free eyai around here?"
The hesitance from both of them is answer enough.
"But," the Doctor says, coming a bit closer to Anna. She doesn't draw away and he nods in approval. "You see? There's no reason for creation to be in any artificial intelligence programming. That's dangerous. But here you are, so you're either the product of a mad scientist or you're capable of learning."
Anna nods. "I taught myself how to make things."
"Silicon, silicon -- the moon!" The Doctor beams at them. "That's it. Big old motherboard orbiting around you, and that's your basecode, not whatever's put in by the people who construct your living shape. Bet you wind yourself, too, yeah? Your own key?"
"Actually," Will says, "I've got it." He tugs at a little chain around his neck, neatly hidden by his shirt collar.
"Clever," the Doctor says, although the original gesture might well have been a romantic rather than practical one. "Legally --"
"He doesn't have papers," Anna murmurs, "but it gets us by, yes."
"So," the Doctor says, pacing inasmuch as the clutter will allow, "what we have here is a whole lot of free minds enslaved by their creators -- children trapped in servitude." He looks between them. "How many people are really happy like this? And I don't mean just ignorant, I mean how many of them really enjoy living day after day in places like the Gallows?"
"I don't know," Will admits, but Anna says, quiet and firm, "It's terrible."
"Right!" the Doctor says. "Anna, I have this --" he pulls his sonic screwdriver from his pocket "-- and it might tickle a little, but I promise it won't hurt you. May I?" At Anna's graceful nod, he scans her with it, running it past the little port at the base of her neck, over the lock under her collar, along her arm, while her skin shivers a little, although she stays otherwise absolutely still. After a moment the sonic screwdriver picks up a complex frequency -- the base code. "Got it!" the Doctor says, switching it off and pocketing it again. "Will. Is the psallopiano at the Gallows the only one you have access to?" Will nods. "Well, can't be helped. Could I maybe possibly get in during the day and play it?"
"Theoretically," Will says, blinking, "but I thought you said this was the first time you'd seen one."
"I'm a very quick learner," the Doctor says with a grin. "Now come on!"
They come out of the shop with him and head for the Tube station, but Anna's watching him closely. "That frequency you found on me," she says. "What does it do?"
"It's who you are," the Doctor says, starting down the steps. "It's what makes you think."
His words manage it just as well; both Will and Anna are silent on the train, which rattles too much for proper conversation anyway. When they arrive at the Gallow's back entrance in Low Strand, Anna pulls a bit of wire from her dress. The Doctor's already got his sonic screwdriver out but he stops and lets her pick the lock: he's just helping them along, and it's her lock to pick.
In the daylight the back rooms of the Gallows are dusty, all the eyai girls wound down. The Doctor follows Will out onto the stage, watches as the boy makes to sit down at the psallopiano out of habit and stops himself. He turns to the Doctor. "Most people who try just make a great big noise," he warns.
"I'm not most people," the Doctor returns, sitting. Rests his hands gently on the keyboard, one trainer to each pedal, and looks up at the psallostrings. They're vibrating a little all on their own in the still air, potential energy on the verge of release. The instinctive trick, what makes a good human psallopianist, is the ability to make the vibrations harmonious. The mathematical trick is to make them vibrate at a very particular frequency, and the Doctor is very good at maths.
"They say," Will adds, with a peculiar gentle hesitation, "only the mad and the desperate can become psallopianists."
The Doctor looks up at him.
"Good," he says, and begins.
The first notes catch under his skin, snag at it like the first terrifying prickles of regeneration. Playing the psallopiano is entirely different from listening to it: he sees the notes imprinted inside his eyes, his, some terrible creation unspooling his life into song, and the Doctor lets it. He breathes in too sharply and carries on, pressing down the pedals, carrying the notes upwards until the strings vibrate and hum and resonate back; a few notes up and the frequency is right, the perfect pitch to call the eyai out into the greater world.
This isn't one of the regenerations where he's particularly inclined towards singing, but he had a classical education and knows what to do, arches himself into the music and throws out his voice, keeping the frequency steady and playing a rise and fall of notes that arc into the words of a dead language: High Gallifreyan in complete patterns, the mathematical symbol-sounds for freedom, for awake. He's distantly aware of Will's awe, of Anna trembling in sympathy to the sound, but he's made of the music, carried in the music, all of it pulling him further and further in. A last song, he thinks distantly; the Ood said it was coming to an end. And here he is, far from home, recreating his language and losing himself. Each note tears him further asunder, and then, instinctually -- because he has become a psallopianist now -- he knows the song is over, closes it with a dying shout for consciousness, and soars the notes to a close.
Silence.
The Doctor discovers with faint surprise that he's still sitting there, slumped at the psallopiano with Anna leaning a little against its side and Will on the bench next to him, eyes wide.
"That was the best song I've ever heard played," Will says with fervency.
The Doctor swallows; it makes a dry clicking noise. "Why," he says hoarsely. "Why am I still here?"
A small crooked grin passes over Will's face. "The music gives you back in the end."
"Ah," the Doctor says, and stands shakily.
"I'll get you some tea," Will says.
Five minutes and they're sitting at one of the small tables below the stage, the Doctor gratefully gulping down the tea while Will drinks his own cup more slowly and Anna watches, breathing in the steam.
The Doctor thinks of the things he should say; about responsibility, about the upcoming revolution, about how brilliant they both are. He thinks: You could come with me. He even sets down his teacup and opens his mouth to say it.
Then the bottom drops out from the world under him and the heavens split wide and in that second, somewhere in the universe, there is another Time Lord.
The Doctor leaps to his feet, narrowly avoiding spilling his tea. "I," he says. "I have to --" and can barely even hear himself over the hammering of his hearts. "It's been brilliant," he says, "really, it has -- good luck --" and before eyai or psallopianist can protest, he's dashed off out the door and towards his TARDIS, carried on by hope and fear.
Previous: 5x01: The Twenty-Four-Hour Minister | Next: 5x03: Scavenged Pieces
5x02: Swansong
(New Victoria, Asellus Australis, 6347)
He stands for a long while in the quiet vastness of the wardrobe room, the arching curves of his ship less than soothing today. She hums around him, trying to reassure, but he's shivering in his damp clothes and he has the look on Wilf's face imprinted vivid in his head, and he does not want reassurance.
The opposite of reassurance is punishment, the Doctor supposes, smoothing out a new dry shirt and doing up the buttons with unshaking fingers. He feels torn, literally stretched and tugged to pieces: what his other self did, what Davros said and Sarah Jane said and Rose said and Donna had no chance to say. He shrugs on his coat, the long familiar sweep of it settling him into himself a very little, and returns to the console room. "What d'you think, then?" he asks the TARDIS, and mercifully his voice doesn't echo in the emptiness. She hums under his fingers with regret for losing those other five pilots, and an impersonal machine understanding for the necessity of what he does. He nods a little and sets the coordinates for anywhere fast, somewhere in that human future that still exists now. Understanding his quiet urgency, the TARDIS sets down nearly at once on a colony world in Asellus Australis, sixty-fourth century. It'll do.
The Doctor steps out into a foggy evening; the TARDIS melts nearly at once into the shadows of an alley, picked out in brass lettering as the corner of Low Strand and Beggar's Alley. The Doctor folds his coat in around himself and sets off down the cobbled street, shreds of mist clinging to him like little hands.
He's evidently landed in a bad part of town: he hardly walks thirty feet before a rather unwashed man attempts to pick his pocket. The Doctor ignores this entirely and leaves the man standing in the street, holding a banana and the Complete Works of Shakespeare, pocket edition, staring after the Doctor in some bewilderment. The Doctor walks on, past boarded-up subterranean houses and the occasional flickering light from hopeful pawnshops. He pauses for a moment by an advertisement reading AUTOMATA INDUSTRIA MK 6: all new models! Installed with only the finest silicon; clockwork runs two weeks at a go! An anti-gravity locomotive screams by overhead, and the Doctor moves on.
A few streets on -- he still doesn't know what he's looking for, and another banana, a magic 8 ball, and a stubby candle have been sacrificed to further pickpockets -- a figure disentangles itself from a lighted doorway and calls to him. The sign above the door reads The Gallows, which is hardly encouraging. Still, the Doctor stops, because this is the first person to speak to him directly. Or -- not person, he corrects himself, when he can see her more clearly. Leaning in the doorway in a low-cut dress and her hair done up, she's quite beautiful in a false and perfect way, marred only by a hole just under her left collarbone and left exposed by the dress: lock and serial number. "Won't you come in?" she asks again, in the perfect imitation of a rather sultry human voice, and the Doctor's about to politely refuse and move on when the music starts.
He's never heard the like. The notes soar, really soar, creating complex mathematical patterns that the Doctor can nearly see in his mind, almost complete concentric fractaled circles that form snatches of words, vanishing before he can quite grasp at them; music that harmonizes with itself and creates sympathetic vibrations in the Doctor's chest.
On a technical basis alone, it's brilliant, but the Doctor isn't considering the how of the music. It draws him in, births of star clusters and vast red-and-silver gardens inside the confines of song, and the Doctor cannot turn away. He goes forward, fumbling for the psychic paper as he does so; whether or not it actually fools the mechanical girl in the doorway, she must see the naked longing on his face, and lets him through.
Inside the Gallows is another world, opulent. It contains a bar, a raised small stage, and a number of low-lit tables, all populated by finely dressed gentlemen and the occasional lady; the mechanical girls drift among them, serving drinks and making small conversation. How they can, the Doctor doesn't know; he barely notices them. Sinks down on a seat at the bar with his eyes fixed on the back of the stage dais, where something akin to a pipe organ sits, though where pipes would be there is instead a great mass of strings. A young man sits at the keyboard, fingers flying and feet working the pedals and his head flung back as he sings, wordless notes that vibrate through the strings and out. The Doctor knows such instruments exist, but he's never seen one before -- heard it. A psallopiano, made unique by the strings. Each psallopiano is different, and each arrangement of music: the random arrangement of the psallostrings, subtly shifting with each use, change the notes. It's nearly a living thing, a psallopiano, tuning and retuning itself according to no strictures. They only exist for a century after discovery, as it takes remarkable and innate aptitude to play one, and the skill dies out, or is smothered. At this particular moment in time, though, the Doctor is blessed with a single perfect moment that will never come again to the boy at the psallopiano, and he sits perfectly still in reverence of it.
At length the music ends, to a smattering of light applause. The Doctor tries not to be disgusted by this show of indifference -- as though the music is just some delicacy for the rich, like Mbodian snakes' eggs! -- and turns to the bar. A mechanical girl sees him and comes over at once. "What'll it be, love?"
"I don't --" the Doctor starts, and sighs. "Don't suppose you have any linji-bloom nectar?" At her smiling nod, he adds hopefully, "Carbonated? And with one of those little umbrellas?"
He gets it bubbly, but sans umbrella, which he supposes is at least something. No one else is in need of attention at the bar, so the girl stays hovering near him, and since the music's over the Doctor watches her. She moves quite without clockwork jerkiness; apart from the impossible green of her eyes, and the little exposed keyhole at her shoulder, she might be human. "Sorry," the Doctor says, leaning forward, "sorry, but -- automata industria?"
She looks at him, too sharply for a moment; pretending, the moment a smooth smile for the client comes over her face. That's interesting too. "Of course, sir. Eyai. All of us here at the Gallows are mark five and specially ordered by the lady of the house."
"Of course," the Doctor murmurs, echoing back the words, frowning a little.
Someone else comes to the bar, and the mechanical girl -- this eyai -- turns, still with that artful grace. The smile that lights her face is no more or less genuine than the one granted the Doctor, nor is her voice changed, but the Doctor detects absolute sincerity in her "Will! Glad to see you improvised tonight. No old embellished classics. What'll it be?"
The Doctor turns his head to look. It's the young man from the psallopiano, looking wrung out. "I'll have the best scotch you think I can afford," he says. "Thanks, Louisa."
So the eyai girl also has a name. Interesting.
"'Scuse me," the Doctor says, edging a little closer. "Will, is it? Will. I just wanted to say, you were brilliant."
The young man looks a little taken aback. He recovers nearly at once, though, and says, "Thank you." He obviously isn't used to the clientele addressing him, but the Doctor doesn't look terribly like these neo-Victorian dandies. "We have, ah, a different performance every night."
"Every one different," the Doctor agrees. "Depends on the psallostrings."
"That's right," Will says. "Do you know much about psallopianos?"
"No," the Doctor admits. "Never even heard one before tonight. I'm a bit of a traveler, wandered through entirely by chance. But you're good, Will, you're -- well, you're brilliant." He props his chin in a hand and allows himself a grin. "And I don't often say that."
"Thank you," Will says with unwavering courtesy. He looks intrigued, but it's buried beneath the politeness, and a sort of wariness, and his exhaustion.
"Tell you what," the Doctor says, finishing off his nectar and standing, "I'll just come back tomorrow night and hear a whole new one, how does that sound?"
"I should like that," Will says, a little startled. He's probably staring at the Doctor, but the Doctor's already racing outside and doesn't bother to check.
He's in enough of a hurry to avoid running into any would-be thieves on his way back to the TARDIS. In he goes, and she hums in sympathetic resonance as he sets the dial for twenty-two hours later -- makes sure it's hours, not days or months or years. When the TARDIS settles, he pops back out into the dark, a bit clearer than last night's. The fog is mostly gone, and he can see the spindly shapes of the anti-gravity train tunnel, and the towers of the colony's rich. There are no stars.
A different eyai girl is at the Gallows' door, but she doesn't stop him from going in. This time the Doctor's well settled at the bar and stocked with a pile of charming little sandwiches when Will comes onto the dais, not even sparing a glance at the audience, his eyes only for the psallopiano. Then he sits, playing a rising set of notes, a pause, and in a crash of sound he's off and dragging the Doctor. Each particular chord pulls another single impression from the Doctor's mind, and this time he's closer to seeing the music properly. They mean something, each of these mathematically precise and completely spontaneous notes. That pattern there, one arc; that string of notes, its mirroring opposite. Like Will's creating some complex word in High Gallifreyan with which to name the world, and he can't possibly know he's doing it.
By the end the sandwiches have gone dry and the Doctor hasn't moved an inch. He almost wants to get up then, return to the TARDIS, and watch the following night's performance, and the one after, and the one after that, but there probably lies madness, so he stays in his seat. Will doesn't come to the bar, however, so the Doctor rises and goes the curtained partition that seems to delineate backstage. It opens into a long hall full of lighting apparatus and the smell of greasepaint. Will's sitting on the steps leading down from the stage, carefully pulling the kinks out of his hands. He hears the Doctor and his head snaps up.
"Just me," the Doctor says, coming over. "Hello."
"You're not allowed backstage," Will says, more observation than warning. "So you came back after all."
"Yes," the Doctor says.
Will gives him a long thoughtful look. "You really are here for the music."
"Possibly," the Doctor concedes. "I might also be here for other things." Runs a hand through his hair. "Like I said, I'm a traveler. And I've heard of psallopianos before, but these eyai -- are they an invention of this world particularly?"
"That's right," Will says readily enough. Then, in a recitation of simple fact strangely devoid of patriotic pride: "The first scientists on New Victoria discovered a small siliconite moon in orbit. The silicon from the moon is of superior quality. That's why our eyai are much more sophisticated than the artificial intelligences on most other systems."
"And those keyholes?"
"Clockwork," Will says, standing carefully and wincing a little. "Energy-efficient, and in theory it makes the eyai easier to control." Something strange enters his voice then, thinly veiled but extremely calm distaste. The Doctor looks at him sharply, but when Will's eyes meet his they're mild. The Doctor wonders if, were he to look, he might find a small lock under the collar of Will's shirt.
"Why are there no exports, then?" the Doctor asks after a moment.
Will shrugs. "Too expensive?"
"Well," the Doctor says. "Nice to meet you, Will. Really, the playing's brilliant. Might come again tomorrow. I'll just nip out the back and take a look around."
Will starts to nod and pauses, frowning. "A traveler. Are you staying pipeside?"
The Doctor blinks. "Excuse me?"
"Pipeside," Will repeats, a sharp jerk of his chin towards the ceiling. "For rich fellows like you who can afford establishments like this."
"Oh no," the Doctor says, laughing a little in surprise at the absurdity, "I'm not -- I'm not rich, really. I'm just staying on my ship."
"Tubeside?" Will says in astonishment, and when the Doctor opens his mouth to ask, adds, "That's the two ... districts, I suppose. Rich people in the uppers, and the rest of us down here. Named after the Pipe trains and Tube trains."
The Doctor nods slowly. "Well. Yes, then, my ship's tubeside."
"Someone's bound to try to nick it," Will says. "You'd better hurry and get back to it."
"No one's going to take her," the Doctor says, with a proud little grin. "She can't be stolen." He hesitates fractionally, the words sticking in his throat. "Want to see her?"
Will hesitates too, but the Doctor knows he's going to say yes. This boy with his matchless hands and voice hears the truth in his own music, and can't possibly be content down in the fog and the cobbles with only bored rich men and beautiful mechanical girls for an audience. He nods slowly, and holds out a hand in a strangely formal gesture. "William Pennsworth," he says.
"I'm the Doctor," the Doctor returns, grinning and shaking his hand with enthusiasm. "Nice to meet you, Will Pennsworth. Shall we?"
"Out the back, then," Will says, taking his hand back and going on down the dim corridor. They slip through a storeroom to reach a set of stairs leading out onto the street, and though Will seems not at all bothered by them, the Doctor is instantly terribly aware of the motionless eyai girls -- off-duty? wound down? -- lining the walls. Storeroom. The Doctor follows Will up the stairs, frowning.
Will doesn't move like those girls do, the Doctor thinks as they go along one slanted cobbled street and then another toward the TARDIS. But he might not need to. Still -- he lets his hand brush Will's for a moment, and that's blood in his veins, not a trace of silicon in there. No clockwork. That leaves more things unexplained than not, the Doctor thinks, and a grin slides across his face.
When they reach the TARDIS, Will makes no comment on its outside appearance, although he does look at it closely, and touch the wooden side while the Doctor unlocks the door. He peers inside, backs up a step, observes the TARDIS from the outside again, and comes inside all the way. He doesn't say It's bigger on the inside. He says, "How much bigger?"
"Very," the Doctor says.
Will simply stands there for a long moment, gazing around him. He says, "I see. It's like the music."
The Doctor grins near to splitting his face. "Yeah."
"I think," Will says, looking up at him, "there is something I would like to show you in the morning."
"Right, course, you need to get a bit of sleep after all that playing," the Doctor says, nodding.
"I'll be back here tomorrow at half eleven," Will says, walking backwards toward the doors.
"Right," the Doctor says again; counts back from six-hundred fifty-nine in primes, which gives Will exactly two minutes to walk away from the TARDIS before he pulls himself forward into the following day, at just before half eleven. He pats the console fondly and throws his overcoat aside, goes down to the doors and opens them to see Will coming up the cobbled street, all the more grimy and derelict in the daylight. The Doctor hops out, locking the TARDIS behind him. "Hello, Will! Rested up?"
"Yes," Will says. "It's only a few Tube stops down."
The Tube's far worse than the streets, but the Doctor doesn't mind; just stands amid the rattling and the flickering light, hands shoved into his pockets to avoid the grime just as Will's are. He wonders how many of their fellow passengers are eyai.
At their stop, Will bounds up the steps ahead of the Doctor towards the filtered daylight, and up top catches his hand on the metal post of the Tube sign and swings around. The Doctor comes up with little more dignity but does omit the signpost. In all this time they haven't spoken, but it's companionable, and not at all startling when Will says, "There," and points across the street at a little shop, dust in the windows.
He follows Will inside; there is no tinkling bell to announce their arrival, and the inside is not so much a display of goods as a riotous mess of useful and useless antiques, rugs and books and spare spaceship parts, all gathered together in chaos. Will watches the Doctor look around and nods a little, mostly to himself. "Anna?" he calls.
A girl appears, in apron and lace-edged dress, a little dusty herself around the edges, blond and beautiful in such a precise and perfect way that the Doctor knows at once she must be eyai. "Hello!" he says. "I'm the Doctor."
"Anna Marsh," she returns, looking him carefully up and down. "I run the shop."
"Eyai with a full name, running a shop?" the Doctor asks, and her chin tilts up a little, but she only says, "Yes."
"Hm." The Doctor glances around; there are broken things, but there are made things, too -- a pair of earrings from dangling scraps, picture frames, a compass: a slow reversal of the mad entropy of the shop, the Doctor thinks. "Anna," he says, "have you made all this?"
"Yes," Anna says again. "I make things." She glances over at Will, a smooth beautiful movement. "Would you care to explain --?"
"He's from off-planet," Will says, and it clicks in the Doctor's head, that strange defensive way Will spoke of the eyai earlier. He's in love with her, and the Doctor's hearts go out to him, for being so foolish and brave. "I thought he might like to have a look around."
"Actually," the Doctor says, setting the compass gently aside. "Anna. Will. Are there many free eyai around here?"
The hesitance from both of them is answer enough.
"But," the Doctor says, coming a bit closer to Anna. She doesn't draw away and he nods in approval. "You see? There's no reason for creation to be in any artificial intelligence programming. That's dangerous. But here you are, so you're either the product of a mad scientist or you're capable of learning."
Anna nods. "I taught myself how to make things."
"Silicon, silicon -- the moon!" The Doctor beams at them. "That's it. Big old motherboard orbiting around you, and that's your basecode, not whatever's put in by the people who construct your living shape. Bet you wind yourself, too, yeah? Your own key?"
"Actually," Will says, "I've got it." He tugs at a little chain around his neck, neatly hidden by his shirt collar.
"Clever," the Doctor says, although the original gesture might well have been a romantic rather than practical one. "Legally --"
"He doesn't have papers," Anna murmurs, "but it gets us by, yes."
"So," the Doctor says, pacing inasmuch as the clutter will allow, "what we have here is a whole lot of free minds enslaved by their creators -- children trapped in servitude." He looks between them. "How many people are really happy like this? And I don't mean just ignorant, I mean how many of them really enjoy living day after day in places like the Gallows?"
"I don't know," Will admits, but Anna says, quiet and firm, "It's terrible."
"Right!" the Doctor says. "Anna, I have this --" he pulls his sonic screwdriver from his pocket "-- and it might tickle a little, but I promise it won't hurt you. May I?" At Anna's graceful nod, he scans her with it, running it past the little port at the base of her neck, over the lock under her collar, along her arm, while her skin shivers a little, although she stays otherwise absolutely still. After a moment the sonic screwdriver picks up a complex frequency -- the base code. "Got it!" the Doctor says, switching it off and pocketing it again. "Will. Is the psallopiano at the Gallows the only one you have access to?" Will nods. "Well, can't be helped. Could I maybe possibly get in during the day and play it?"
"Theoretically," Will says, blinking, "but I thought you said this was the first time you'd seen one."
"I'm a very quick learner," the Doctor says with a grin. "Now come on!"
They come out of the shop with him and head for the Tube station, but Anna's watching him closely. "That frequency you found on me," she says. "What does it do?"
"It's who you are," the Doctor says, starting down the steps. "It's what makes you think."
His words manage it just as well; both Will and Anna are silent on the train, which rattles too much for proper conversation anyway. When they arrive at the Gallow's back entrance in Low Strand, Anna pulls a bit of wire from her dress. The Doctor's already got his sonic screwdriver out but he stops and lets her pick the lock: he's just helping them along, and it's her lock to pick.
In the daylight the back rooms of the Gallows are dusty, all the eyai girls wound down. The Doctor follows Will out onto the stage, watches as the boy makes to sit down at the psallopiano out of habit and stops himself. He turns to the Doctor. "Most people who try just make a great big noise," he warns.
"I'm not most people," the Doctor returns, sitting. Rests his hands gently on the keyboard, one trainer to each pedal, and looks up at the psallostrings. They're vibrating a little all on their own in the still air, potential energy on the verge of release. The instinctive trick, what makes a good human psallopianist, is the ability to make the vibrations harmonious. The mathematical trick is to make them vibrate at a very particular frequency, and the Doctor is very good at maths.
"They say," Will adds, with a peculiar gentle hesitation, "only the mad and the desperate can become psallopianists."
The Doctor looks up at him.
"Good," he says, and begins.
The first notes catch under his skin, snag at it like the first terrifying prickles of regeneration. Playing the psallopiano is entirely different from listening to it: he sees the notes imprinted inside his eyes, his, some terrible creation unspooling his life into song, and the Doctor lets it. He breathes in too sharply and carries on, pressing down the pedals, carrying the notes upwards until the strings vibrate and hum and resonate back; a few notes up and the frequency is right, the perfect pitch to call the eyai out into the greater world.
This isn't one of the regenerations where he's particularly inclined towards singing, but he had a classical education and knows what to do, arches himself into the music and throws out his voice, keeping the frequency steady and playing a rise and fall of notes that arc into the words of a dead language: High Gallifreyan in complete patterns, the mathematical symbol-sounds for freedom, for awake. He's distantly aware of Will's awe, of Anna trembling in sympathy to the sound, but he's made of the music, carried in the music, all of it pulling him further and further in. A last song, he thinks distantly; the Ood said it was coming to an end. And here he is, far from home, recreating his language and losing himself. Each note tears him further asunder, and then, instinctually -- because he has become a psallopianist now -- he knows the song is over, closes it with a dying shout for consciousness, and soars the notes to a close.
Silence.
The Doctor discovers with faint surprise that he's still sitting there, slumped at the psallopiano with Anna leaning a little against its side and Will on the bench next to him, eyes wide.
"That was the best song I've ever heard played," Will says with fervency.
The Doctor swallows; it makes a dry clicking noise. "Why," he says hoarsely. "Why am I still here?"
A small crooked grin passes over Will's face. "The music gives you back in the end."
"Ah," the Doctor says, and stands shakily.
"I'll get you some tea," Will says.
Five minutes and they're sitting at one of the small tables below the stage, the Doctor gratefully gulping down the tea while Will drinks his own cup more slowly and Anna watches, breathing in the steam.
The Doctor thinks of the things he should say; about responsibility, about the upcoming revolution, about how brilliant they both are. He thinks: You could come with me. He even sets down his teacup and opens his mouth to say it.
Then the bottom drops out from the world under him and the heavens split wide and in that second, somewhere in the universe, there is another Time Lord.
The Doctor leaps to his feet, narrowly avoiding spilling his tea. "I," he says. "I have to --" and can barely even hear himself over the hammering of his hearts. "It's been brilliant," he says, "really, it has -- good luck --" and before eyai or psallopianist can protest, he's dashed off out the door and towards his TARDIS, carried on by hope and fear.
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