[Submitted to the Beeb's Doctor Who Short Story Competition]

For all the grief he felt, the Doctor did not weep. The ringing conceit of his words from another incarnation was proof enough that tears were inadequate. Instead, he stood as a silent witness to the tragedy, the open doors of the TARDIS framing the scene of a devastated and empty world.

A world, a dream, dead at his hands.

The Doctor had never once, deep in his hearts of hearts, considered the TARDIS to be non-sentient. Sentience could be a tricky concept, but the old Type 40 was surely more than a mere time machine. Perhaps the limited awareness the old girl presented--without a doubt, the TARDIS was female--was but a shadow of an omnipotence ensconced in an alternate dimension. If so, what did he, the Doctor, appear to be to someone or thing on the other side of that cosmic looking glass?

The random musings suited his humour at the moment. The Doctor, stretched prone beneath the console, scooted over a couple of inches in his wrestling match with the spatio-temporal calibrator. The movement nudged a panel which upended a teacup serving as the reservoir of nuts and bolts, two stale Jelly Babies, and a pebble.  Its contents washed in a noisy cascade over the control panels stacked on the floor, immediately followed by the Doctor's imprecations as he slammed his head into the underside of the console.

The glittering metal pieces and petrified sweets scattered across the TARDIS' floor as the Doctor shook each panel to dislodge the wayward objects. The pebble, an indeterminate gray stone that blended with the muted tones of the console's components, instead became lodged at a critical juncture in the circuitry of the TARDIS' main temporal drive panel. The perfunctory shake the Doctor gave the panel cover did not unseat the pebble from its hiding place.

A smile crossed the Doctor's face as the final control panel cover snapped back into the grooves and fittings of the console. His ear close to the burnished metal of the console, the Doctor held his breath, wary of any murmur of distress from the TARDIS.

Silence.

"Yes. There now." The Doctor gave the gleaming surface a reassuring pat. "I rather thought it would be that simple."

In truth, the repairs had not been simple. The Doctor had spent many hours in search of an untrafficked corner of space in which to repair the time machine. Isolation, distance from enemies and cataclysms--those requirements were difficult to satisfy. The choices were few, ultimately a single candidate, and so the Doctor had nursed the ailing time machine to a barren world with only numbers to its name. He threw open the TARDIS doors to view the bleak vista of the nameless world. It was a planet without life, without sound save for the skitter of the errant nuts and bolts inside the TARDIS. With a negligent brush of his shoe, the Doctor propelled several of the nearest ones through the TARDIS doors, watching as the threaded metal fasteners had rolled and twirled on the rocky surface outside only to be lost from view as the TARDIS doors closed once more.

The experience of several lifetimes had led the Doctor to expect sudden disaster or the emergence of an enemy bent on revenge, even on a world as remote as this. Yet this time there were no disruptions to hinder the repairs. Even now, with the last of the panels fitted snugly in place and a new course laid in to the TARDIS controls, the unfamiliarity of things going right--for a change--was unsettling.

The Doctor made one last check of the instruments, then smoothly slid the main power lever forward. The rotor remained still, indicative of a transient fault. The TARDIS' traditional contrariness was a well-loved game between the Time Lord and the time machine, and the repairs had neither dissuaded the TARDIS from her usual gambit nor the Doctor from his response. 

With a chuckle, the Doctor clenched his left hand into a fist and pounded smartly on the console's surface.

The impact deformed the metal surface of the console, and directly beneath the point of impact the pebble was pushed downward, fracturing and crushing critical relays. The time rotor jammed and a tortured shriek ripped through the TARDIS. The Doctor threw the fail-safe mechanism, then clutched the edge of the console as the TARDIS bucked wildly, and with a desperate shudder, seemed to fall away into nothingness.

The Doctor was fairly sure that ending up as the odd bit of matter whirling around the space-time vortex should not feel like a lazy holiday on Brighton Beach. Rather gingerly he opened his eyes to a view of the TARDIS ceiling and, to his left, a serene light flooding through the open TARDIS doors. The view was no less startlingly normal from a standing position: the whole control room seemed unchanged. The obvious mystery lay in the facts that the TARDIS doors were open and that he, the Doctor, was still very much alive, at least according to the evidence of his senses.

The evidence of the TARDIS' sensors and instrumentation was another matter. According to the TARDIS, there wasn't anything detectable outside the ship and the ship was nowhere. Without galactic coordinates or navigation or help of some kind, even a functional TARDIS could not return him home.

The land around the TARDIS was flocked with feathery vegetation that sighed softly as a light breeze rippled through the lush stands. The lavender-hued ferns segued into a deep magenta as variegated clouds skewed the color of daylight through an untamed spectrum. The sky was aglow with an even, diffuse light, textured only with the riot of cloud colours.

The Doctor surveyed the expanse, dotted with honeycombed hills among the fern patches. The nearby remnants of one such hillock caught his eye. His fingers left no trace on the gnarled surface which curved and twisted as if the wind had played a game of tag with metallic ores. Further on, crystal water from an up slope river spilled over and through another 'hillycomb' as tall as he, reflecting the restless clouds above until it plunged into a mirrored pool. The spray shattered the diffuse light into diamonds and imbued the breeze with the scent of water and lemon and fire and life.

The Doctor was aware of the approach of the being, not through footfall or the rustle of ferns, but because the surroundings became more vibrant. The wind stilled, catching its breath in anticipation. A tremor of excitement seemed to run through the earth beneath his feet.

'Goddess' was an inadequate term, the Doctor decided, a term found wanting in its limitations. She was vaguely humanoid in form, lidless violet-sapphire eyes set in a pale, luminous face with a corona of fired golden hair as a crown and mantle. Each step seemed trod on air, not earth. Her form seemed to glow. It would be easy to mistake her for a fierce new sun to whom this world did honor.

Twin violet-sapphire reflections of the Doctor, the TARDIS, and the landscape behind him served to pose the question.

"I'm called the Doctor." Politeness required a small bow. "Please forgive my intrusion here, but an emergency landing was necessary. I will make repairs as quickly as possible, but I wonder...could you tell me where this place is?"

Her reply was not spoken but summoned from the ambiance of the world.

"Here."

The Doctor frowned. His gift for understanding all manner of alien utterances could not translate personal world views into tidy conceptual packages.

"Yes, well, what I meant was, what is the name of this planet?"

"Here." Patient emphasis underscored the reply, a kindly answer meant for a child's understanding.

Her face turned upward, the deep violet-blue of her eyes alive with the image of the cloud-swept sky. As the Doctor looked up, a sudden rift of the cloud curtain revealed a panorama of planetary systems, arrayed like beloved toys on rich velvet in proximities that were gravitationally impossible. Their procession in the heavens was stately, dream-like, yet undeniably real.

And unlike any place or time he had ever visited.

"It's staggeringly beautiful," the Doctor murmured in awe, "but it isn't my home."

"Home?" She inquired, a wealth of nuance in the single word.

"Yes, home," the Doctor began, ready with galactic coordinates and planetary names. Instead, drawn from his awareness came images, impressions from past and future--

"Home?" Her eyes were pools of disbelief and sympathy.

Ashamed at the contrast of his 'world' with this one, the Doctor nodded. "I...can't stay here. Can you...will you help me to return home?"

The world stilled its heartbeat to hear her answer.

"Yes."

Full day fled into afternoon and nightfall as they entered the TARDIS. Outside, the sound song of the world held keening notes of grief. She stood for a moment in the open doorway, her glow illuminating the TARDIS and spilling out over the darkening landscape and up into the crowded heavens.

The Doctor wrenched the panel cover away and extracted the pebble from its nest of crushed silicon and wiring. In a fit of pique, he stormed to the doorway and pitched the pebble into the darkness, only to hear the small rock strike the hillycomb and roll back, coming to a stop a few feet away in the wash of light from the TARDIS doorway. The Doctor smiled with smug satisfaction as he closed the TARDIS doors and relegated the pebble to the lonely darkness outside.

His concerns about irreparable damage to the TARDIS proved unfounded. He identified the fault quickly and knew that replacement parts were on hand and easily installed. As she watched, the Doctor teased away the fragments of the junction, and pausing only to retrieve a work lamp to better light the area, fitted the new components into place.

As the final piece snapped into position, it occurred to the Doctor that he felt uneasy, as if he'd overlooked something. But the diagnostics indicated no performance failure. All was ready, save for coordinate value inputs. The Doctor turned to ask, already framing the question in his mind, and froze as he saw her hand on the main power lever.

Her pale hand slid the lever forward.

Sitting up was problematic, given that the Doctor was not precisely sure which way was 'up'. Rubbing the nasty bump on his head served to focus his attention as he staggered to the console and flicked on the external sensors. The barren planet's image filled the TARDIS' monitor. The Doctor conceded that he'd been very lucky--the time rotor mishap had resulted in nothing more than minor cranial damage and a dream-like delirium.

The Doctor worked his way around the console, absorbed in noting each reading.

He almost stepped on her.

Her body lay tangled near the console. The Doctor knelt and brushed the reddish-blonde hair away from her face, revealing bloodless skin and pale pink lips. A second later her eyelids fluttered and opened, uncovering eyes of translucent blue-violet.

She shivered in shock, and the Doctor wrapped his coat over her robe. The robe's fabric had an odd texture to it, a gentle resiliency like ferns--

Suspicion turned to dread. At his command, the TARDIS doors ground open. In the thin atmosphere and failing light he noted the rocky, baked plain stretching to low mountain ranges the colour of spent metal. Before him the surface was littered with the scattered nuts and bolts he had impatiently ejected from the TARDIS.

His mind then registered the final detail: a small gray pebble lying five feet beyond the TARDIS doors.

It was only a matter of time. Her memories were slipping away, fading, just as she was a faded copy of that luminous being. The Doctor knew that soon what she had lost would seem to her to be the wisp of a remembered dream.

The irony was that it was a dream. The TARDIS had gone neither forward nor back, but between, to that wellspring of dreams where reality is born. Some intelligence, an entity beyond their perception, had selected this girl and through her fashioned a dream that would have become reality. She had dreamed a fecund world of heartrending beauty, a world that should exist now, but for his interference. Without her, the dream did not exist, and this barren planet was the result.

This desolation was his fault. Ignorance was no excuse. He had been so concerned with securing her help that he had ignored the discernible sorrow of the world and her waning influence. He had committed an atrocity, but the evidence no longer existed, had never existed. Which was the greater crime, the destruction of firmly rooted reality, or the death of a dream?

He stood as a silent witness to the tragedy, the open doors of the TARDIS framing the scene of an empty world, a dream dead at his hands. She hung back slightly, looking past the Time Lord to the desolate reaches outside. She felt a sense of loss but did not know the reason. And although she heard the Time Lord clearly, she could not understand why his broken words were so full of agony.

-end-