Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles Part 2

'Cigarettes will be the death of you,' the Doctor said.

Fitz took the cigarette from his mouth. 'You know that for a fact?'

The Doctor looked askance at him.

'Hey, look, sometimes you know the future, yeah?

You being a time-traveller. I've seen you do that "I know you" stuff, and then you tell someone their destiny.'

'I've not done that for ages,' the Doctor laughed.

'So you don't know how I die?'

'No. There are some things it's better not knowing.'

'Yeah.'

'Are you all right? You look like there's something on your mind.'

Fitz looked distinctly uncomfortable. 'Er. . . look. Didn't mean to interrupt.

I'll get back to. . . I'll go back to my room.'

It had been an hour. Marnal had been sitting in the same spot, the same look of expectation on his face the whole time. He'd been writing up today's events in his diary, scribbling away happily. He'd not once asked Rachel for her side of the story.

'I don't think they're coming,' Rachel said gently.

'I don't understand why they haven't shown up. There must be a good reason.'

'So how did you end up here on Earth?' Rachel asked.

He was clearly a little irritated by the question. 'I'll explain later.'

16.'Don't you have a rocket or a flying saucer or something? You could go to them.'

Marnal shook his head sadly. 'My TARDIS was taken from me.'

'TARDIS?'

Marnal took a deep breath before starting. 'It stands for Time And Relative Dimensions In s.p.a.ce. TARDISes are semi-sentient dimensionally transcenden-tal time-s.p.a.ce machines created using block transfer computations and powered via the Eye of Harmony. They dematerialise from one point expressed as a set of relative s.p.a.ce-time coordinates and travel via the time vortex until they rematerialise at another point. My TARDIS was a Type. . . '

Rachel listened carefully, wondering if she should take notes.

'So you're stuck on Earth?' she asked, when she was sure he'd finished.

'Yes.'

'No alien technology at all? Not, of course, that you'd think of it as alien.'

'Nothing.'

'Is there no other way to get in touch?'

Marnal thought for a moment. 'There may be,' he concluded. 'We need to check the library.'

The Doctor was back in the control room, sitting in his chair with his book.

There was a chime from the console. The Doctor finished the scene he was reading and headed over. The computer display was scrolling data too fast for human eyes to take it in. The Doctor read it carefully, then read it again to make sure.

He reached out, a little tentatively, and flicked a couple of switches. He waited for this to take effect, then adjusted a dial. There was an anomalous reading coming from Earth. He tried to pinpoint the time zone.

Trix was sneaking past him.

'I can see you,' he told her, without looking up. 'Getting itchy feet?'

'Eh?'

'Can't wait to land?'

Trix relaxed. 'No, sorry. Looking for something in the fridge.' She was in silk pyjamas. ' The Doctor's Dilemma The Doctor's Dilemma?' she asked.

'Yes. I met Shaw at one of Wilde's parties.'

'I didn't think Shaw drank.'

'He didn't drink spirits or beer. He drank champagne. "Doctor," he told me, "I'm not a champagne teetotaller."'

'That gives me an idea,' she said, resuming her journey to the TARDIS fridge.

'Wait a second. Oscar Wilde?'

The Doctor smiled and nodded. 'March 1895. Around the time of the Mc-Carthy murder. Sherlock Holmes solved the case before I could, as I recall.'

17.'Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character,' Trix pointed out.

The Doctor grinned. 'My dear, one of the things you'll learn is that it's all real. Every word of every novel is real, every frame of every movie, every panel of every comic strip.'

'But that's just not possible. I mean some books contradict other ones and '

The Doctor was ignoring her. 'We're heading to Earth, 40 BC. We've had to change course to avoid resolving a quantum storm front. We should have landed any minute, but it'll be more like three hours now.'

'Oh. OK. Three hours?' she asked.

'You don't mind?'

Trix had a bottle of champagne tucked under her arm. 'Not at all. I'm sure Fitz and I will be able to fill the time somehow.'

'Jolly good,' the Doctor replied, returning to his study of the readouts as she hurried away.

Marnal was pacing around the library now. He kept playing with the lapels of his blazer, and clearly loved it. Rachel wondered if it was a little too tight for him.

Most libraries consisted of books written by other people, but this one was different. There were a dozen bookcases, packed with volumes of all sizes from big leather-bound books to yellowing paperbacks. There were also papers, pamphlets and notebooks stuffed into every available s.p.a.ce, and countless magazines, comics and journals. Every single thing here had been written by Marnal. How many words, Rachel wondered. Tens of millions, easily, she thought, although she had no real idea how many words there were in a novel.

She had looked him up a few months ago, when the agency told her that her new patient was an author. She had a vague feeling that she recognised the name, but she couldn't place it. She hadn't found 'Marnal' in The Oxford The Oxford Companion to English Literature Companion to English Literature, between Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field and Marney, Lord. Or in and Marney, Lord. Or in Cultural Icons Cultural Icons, between Marley, Bob, and Marsalis, Wynton. She'd gone online. There weren't any books in print on Amazon, although The Emergents The Emergents and and The Kraglon Inheritance The Kraglon Inheritance were listed. Bookfinder was little better she put in an order for were listed. Bookfinder was little better she put in an order for The Witch Lords The Witch Lords, the one book her search revealed, but was emailed back by the seller and told the copy had just been sold. On Google she got a list of autoparts and vitamin retailers. When she added 'science+fiction' she got one hit: a page in Spanish that she decided was best left untranslated. It had taken her a couple of days at a library, and a brief correspondence with a science-fiction society, to find out anything more tangible. This had sparked off some memories. She'd read a couple of his novels, but couldn't remember very much about them.

18.There was something sad and strange about finding all these forgotten books here, together in one place, gathering dust. It was the literary equivalent of the lost gardens of Heligan. That's what everyone thought of Marnal, if they thought of him at all: a rich, colourful mind that had become overgrown, tangled as it grew old. An author of popular adventure fiction who had succ.u.mbed to senility without realising it, whose books had become an impenetrable jungle, alienating even his most loyal fans.

'Where do we start?' she asked.

She reached up, moved aside a Hugo Award and pulled down a copy of The The Strand Magazine Strand Magazine that had almost fallen apart. that had almost fallen apart.

Carefully, she opened it, and flicked past pictures of Moriarty and Holmes and the falls at Reichenbach until she found the story she was looking for.

' The Giants The Giants, by Marnal,' she read. 'Once, long ago, on an island in a sea of clouds, there was a land where giants walked. The giants lived amongst the other peoples of that land, and they used their great strength to help them.

But the power of the giants was too great, their hands were too strong, their tread too heavy and the more they tried to help the people, the greater was the destruction that they caused. Until the people that they had tried to help were no more.'

Marnal took the magazine from her. 'The first myth of the Time Lords, and my first foray into the Terran literary world.'

Rachel sifted through a pile of Pearson's Magazine Pearson's Magazine, The Idler The Idler, The Graphic The Graphic and more copies of and more copies of The Strand The Strand.

'These are all over a hundred years old,' she told him.

'George Bernard Shaw was first published in 1884,' Marnal replied. 'He was still writing when he died in 1950, and the obituaries said his was the longest literary career this world had ever seen. Since 1960, I believe that honour has belonged to me. I don't think anyone ever noticed. These books represent the longest-running science-fiction series anywhere in the world, an exercise in worldbuilding that '

'Well, no one's written your obituary,' Rachel interrupted. 'And they probably think "Marnal" is a pseudonym like, I dunno, Herge or Saki or Iain M.

Banks or something.'

Marnal waved his hand. 'What I need is in one of these books, but I can't remember which one.'

'What? I thought you had your memories back?'

'I have a good memory, but not total recall. That's one of the reasons I wrote all these. There had to be a record. Help me to look. I think it's in one of the Arrows. A paragraph describing the main temporal monitoring chamber.'

He reached up and pulled down an armful of colourful paperbacks. Rachel took them. They all had lurid covers variously depicting bronzed men in 19 flowing robes standing over scantily clad (but not too scantily clad) women, s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps shaped like egg timers, monsters that looked like trolls, vampires and icky worms.

'Whatever the books' literary merits, their covers were always a problem,'

Marnal conceded. 'Come on we have work to do.'

20.There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider's silk but of s.p.a.ce and time.

But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don't you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. But these were projections of reality, not the reality itself as long as the Lords of Time remained in their Citadel, merely watching. Yet, if a single one among them were to cease observation and to step out into the universe, they would freeze time wheresoever their feet touched the ground, wheresoever they drew breath from the atmosphere. At that moment, their mere presence would change time, from a fluid to a solid thing. If one of the Lords of Time but glanced into the night's sky, the stars would become true in the instant they were seen, and thence back for every picosecond of the ten thousand years of the stars' photons' journey. When a time-traveller swam in this ocean, it solidified around them, crystallised, became trans-muted into that which could never change. And so was written the most sacred law of all for even the softest touch of a Lord of Time could condemn a man to existence or nonexistence, bring empires into being and destine them to ruin, and blot out the sky or fill it with heavenly radiance. Observe. Never interfere.

Extract from The Hand of Time The Hand of Time (1976) by Marnal Chapter Two (1976) by Marnal

Chapter Two

Gone

Rachel put the book down. She wasn't sure that 'destine' was really a word, or that 'flux' was a verb, but they might have been. Marnal had been a writer for a hundred years longer than she'd been alive, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

She was skimming through the gaudy paperbacks, looking for the words 'temporal' (which appeared a lot, almost as often as 'anomaly' and 'eldritch'), 'monitoring' and 'chamber'. It was like a one-armed bandit, she thought every so often one of the words would spin into view, but not all three of them at once in a row. So she hadn't hit the jackpot. Marnal was making slow work of it. Reverentially lifting the books, opening them ever so carefully, treating them like medieval parchment.

'This is the entire history of Gallifrey,' he explained. 'Or at least everything I remember. A record of the greatest civilisation the universe has ever seen.'

'If they're stories,' Rachel began, 'then, er, how true are they?'

Marnal glared at her.

'Because every time you write something down you, er, well it's like you say here. You crystallise it. If you do that, you change it. Yeah?'

Marnal was still giving her that stare of his.

Rachel dug herself in a little deeper. 'You have to change it a little, to make it a story in the first place. Tidy it up, make sure it's entertaining. Your own opinions inevitably seep into the story, don't they?'

'Everything happened like I said it did,' he told her firmly. 'Everything.

That's the whole point of writing it down. Humans might not be able to write what happened down without skewing it and ruining the truth of it. I can, and I did.'

He continued his search, in silence. Rachel made a half-hearted effort to do the same. Almost straight away, though, she found what they were looking for.

' The Time of Neman The Time of Neman, page 127,' she said.

Marnal s.n.a.t.c.hed the book from her, and scanned it quickly. 'Yes,' he said.

'Well done.'

'Er. . . Now what?'

23.'We build one of these,' he said, stabbing his finger at the page and pa.s.sing the book back to her.

'A temporal monitoring chamber?'

'Yes.'

'Er. . . '

'If you know the true way to read it, this book contains codes and hints for building a pocket universe that maps every aspect of the real one. Using such a device, we'll be able to see Gallifrey.'