by Dave Rudden
‘I know,’ the Doctor said. ‘And I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ he said, ‘the show must go on.’
‘I don’t like this at all,’ Rose whispered.
It turned out that High Gallifreyan robes were extremely heavy. She had to keep them hitched up so she didn’t trip, and the headdress kept making her think someone was behind her.
‘I’d do it if I could,’ the Doctor said, adjusting her collar one last time.
They’d retreated to the corner of the control room, the floor now shaking and buckling as, like floodwater, the Autons tried to push through. Even as Rose and the Doctor watched, a tile popped free and grit-flecked plastic began to ooze from the gap.
‘But they sensed the vortex energy on you. To them, you’re the Time Lord. That’s the role they’ve given you, and you have to play it. Do you remember your lines?’
‘I do.’
She’d watched him write them on a scrap of paper, and he’d reminded her of nothing so much as one of the Autons, his face scarily blank but for the flickers of something alien moving underneath. The fact that writing those lines – accessing those memories – had so obviously hurt him was what had made her agree to this in the first place.
Shara Betomax was a lot smaller and frailer without the bulky robe, but the look she gave Rose was worthy of several empresses.
‘You’re going to be fantastic, my darling. Break a leg.’
That was Rose’s cue.
The Doctor pointed his sonic screwdriver at the teleporter controls, and – with one last look at the bubbling, growling flood making its way towards her friends – Rose turned sideways and disappeared.
When she snapped back into shape, she was standing centre stage.
Similarities, she told herself through the sudden and absolute terror. It’s just like the stage at Jericho Street.
Except it wasn’t. It really, really wasn’t. Rose and the Doctor had been teleported away before they had got a proper look at the inside of the Masque Magestrix. She had thought the golden palace that topped the scarlet sphere was the theatre, but she’d been wrong. The sphere was the theatre – a hollow globe lined with a hundred thousand rows of seats, curving up and away on all sides. Miles of seats. Millions of seats. Millions of eyes, staring down at Rose, as numerous as the stars in the sky. It was so overwhelming that she could barely take in the majesty of the stage itself – a great circle covering the bottom of the sphere, vanishing off into the gloom.
Rose must have arrived during an exciting bit of The Saga. Maybe it was all exciting. She hadn’t really had time to speculate. She was not the only person onstage by a long shot. There were holographic TARDISes flickering in and out of sight. There were projected constellations that would have made any Earth astronomer need a lie-down in a dark room. There were rust-red outcrops and golden cities, and a choir a hundred strong in robes of white and gold.
‘IT IS I!’ a voice roared.
Rose turned to see a large man in black robes, his voice as deep and smooth as a wardrobe made of chocolate.
‘RASSILON, THE PRESIDENT OF TIME.’ He stood on a floating platform, a great spiked claw on one hand. ‘AND I SHALL BUILD AN EMPIRE THAT LASTS FOR TEN MILLION –’ His eyes fell on Rose. ‘TEN MILLION …’
The choir had seen her too. Some were murmuring. Others, she noticed, were beginning to twitch and shake as the sight of Rose triggered their Auton programming. A wing of holographic TARDISes above paused mid-dive. The orchestra cut off suddenly with a skidding, shrilling shriek.
‘Um,’ Rose said. ‘Uh …’
Oh, God. It was Jericho Street all over again. The terror. The uncertainty. The ice in her veins, spreading and spilling out to everyone else like frost covering the surface of a lake. It was, she decided, a lot like the feeling you got when you missed a step on the stairs … but in front of a live audience.
Rassilon – no, the actor playing Rassilon, Remiere something – began to froth and dissolve. He took a staggering step towards her, claw outstretched. And, just when it felt like the silence couldn’t stretch any longer, Rose began to speak.
She spoke of aeons. Of knowledge cut from the meat of the cosmos and pulled from the heart of black holes. She spoke of shining jewels, and binary stars, and golden cities under orange skies. She spoke of how majestic a civilisation could be when you gave them all the time in the world.
Every face was turned towards her, swirling as if stirred by her words.
Some of what Rose said was what the Doctor had told her to say, the lines he had prepared, but as she gained confidence, stepping out into the light of the holographic suns, she found words welling up inside her that demanded to be said.
Some were her Doctor’s words – her first Doctor’s – fresh in their pain. Others were scraps she had overheard, rumours of the later years, the harder years, the years when Gallifrey’s arrogance and bravado had come home to roost. The Time Lords had all the time in the world, but the younger races, bright in their jealousy, lived more in their short time than any child of Gallifrey.
Bar one.
Rose didn’t have Shara’s voice, or Remiere’s – a voice with gravity, a voice that drew you in. She hesitated. She halted. She became aware, crushingly so, of her dry throat, of every swallow and gap. But, somehow, it didn’t matter.
People went to the theatre for lies, but Rose told them the truth.
Finally, she spoke of the ending. Of a moment – a single, simple moment – that was the culmination of all that had gone before it, the way a story was not finished until the last line fell into place.
The moment the Time Lords’ saga ended and left a single soul alone.
The great, hungry vacuum of the Masque swallowed Rose’s words, then swallowed her silence, until there was nothing at all but the eyes of the audience and her soft and ragged breath.
And then the whole theatre burst into thunderous applause.
The clamour was louder than the orchestra, but Rose didn’t mind it as much. It beat down on her like summer rain and Rose closed her eyes and let it, feeling helpless and invincible and about eight years old.
When she opened her eyes, Remiere was beside her. His face had resolved, all hard and handsome angles, and he took her hand in one of his own. They bowed. It was what you did, when a show was complete.
Eventually, Rose raised her head. Remiere did not. The singers in the choir of Autons were slumping, sliding out of their robes in rivers of flesh. The audience’s applause was still shaking the theatre. They evidently hadn’t noticed. Perhaps they thought it was part of the show.
I suppose it is.
Rose saw the Doctor and Shara sitting in the front row. Shara was clapping, a small, dignified smile on her features, and the Doctor was smiling too, though tears ran from his face.
Her Doctor. Her sad, happy Doctor.
He hadn’t changed a bit.
‘Are you sure you don’t want a lift somewhere?’
They had retreated into the green room, the floor littered with frozen puddles of deactivated Auton. Apparently, there was quite a queue for autographs outside.
Shara shook her head. She’d redonned her robe; it suited her. ‘I think I’m going to stay here. We still have to find where the Autons stowed the people they mimicked, and I want to make sure they’re all right. And get back to rehearsing, obviously.’
‘I thought you didn’t like panto,’ Rose said.
A faint blush suffused Shara’s features. ‘Well. I must admit there is something about the spectacle. A sort of gaudy, horrific charm. And, after a few rewrites, I think The Saga of the Time Lords might be something really rather special.’ She cast a shrewd eye at Rose. ‘Especially if I could tempt you to a repeat performance?’
‘Not even a little bit,’ Rose said. ‘But thank you. It was lovely to meet you.’
‘And you,’ Shara said, clasping Rose’s hands in her own. ‘Both of you. Very well done.’
She swe
pt out of the green room.
‘Doctor,’ Rose began. ‘I have two questions.’
‘Hmm?’
‘Firstly, is Dancing with the Stars actually still on?’
‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor said. ‘Though now it’s Dancing with Actual Stars. Massive fatality rate. What was your second question?’
Rose nodded at the doors through which Shara had just departed.
‘Do you think …?’
‘Well,’ the Doctor said, ‘the Autons were mimicking those actors so closely that their need to finish the show actually overrode their innate programming. You pretend to be someone for long enough, it can be hard to stop.’ He leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Plus, the real Shara Betomax once walked out halfway through a performance because the green room didn’t have the right flavour of tea. I have to say, this Shara seems a lot more invested in her fellow actors.’
‘So what happens when the real Shara wakes up?’
‘I don’t know,’ the Doctor said. ‘But I hope they sell tickets.’
After they had both finished cackling, Rose reached out and took his hand.
‘It’s not over, you know,’ she said.
‘What’s not?’
‘The saga of the Time Lords. You’re still writing it.’
He took her hand. ‘We both are, Rose Tyler.’
They twirled each other, and grinned.
‘The show goes on.’
AFTER
‘What did you think of the ending?’ the girl asked, adjusting the fit of her delicate golden mask.
The theatre was empty now, the seats deserted but for a host of antlike cleaning droids. The unkind glare of the house lights picked out every stain and tear – another sight no ticket buyer was ever meant to see.
‘I think employing Autons to lure out survivors of the war was risky,’ the young man said. He had removed his silver mask and put it down on the seat beside him. Sometime earlier, a cleaning droid had whirred too close and made the fatal mistake of looking into his face. Now, it spun mindlessly in circles, making little whimpering noises, its optical sensors clawed out. ‘We have bigger concerns.’
The girl sniffed. ‘Only a Time Lord could wipe out a trillion timelines, and then try to use that to make you feel sorry for them later.’
As she spoke, she flickered; like a bad edit, a bleached negative that sizzled and cracked before becoming whole again.
‘Time Lords have always been self-obsessed,’ the young man said, impatient to be gone. ‘It’ll be the end of them.’
It was impossible to see beneath the girl’s mask, but he knew that she was smiling.
‘Not if I get there first,’ she said.
2
Father of the Daleks
1
It did not begin with the Doctor, of course, but he was there at the beginning, and for that Davros would never forgive him.
2
++ EXTERMINATE! ++
The cry blared from a thousand vocoders, a toneless thunder rolling from horizon to horizon. The Daleks spun down upon the world of Gryphon’s Reach, fat cylinder after fat cylinder glowing with friction as they took their place in formation – bullets deciding where to strike.
As one, they dived, billowing dust from the Reach’s endless grimy plains. From the command ship in orbit, Davros’s scanners outlined a thousand red dots, which scattered and vanished as what little wildlife there was went to ground or simply died of shock at the majesty of his children making planetfall.
‘Ex-loading coordinates of the facility,’ Davros croaked, feeling that familiar thrill as the Daleks responded, like the memory of his long-lost limbs. Just for a moment, the cold confines of his command ship fell away – the empty halls, the snarled throne of wires and input feeds. Just for a moment, it felt as though he was striding the desiccated surface of Gryphon’s Reach.
A father and his children.
An empire.
A family.
‘Daleks,’ he growled, ‘exterminate.’
3
Christmas, on Lavellan.
‘It amazes me sometimes,’ Davros said.
It was evening. They had found a little café off one of the main squares. Most of the tables were deserted. The sky had turned a fantastic shade of violet, and the canopy of hard light above their heads was igniting each falling snowflake in a minute, dazzling flare.
Like a fleet making planetfall, Davros thought. Like the end of the world.
‘What amazes you?’
A Lavellanese waiter, all feathers and tentacles, tried to hand Davros a menu, but he waved the waiter off. He never ate at these things. He rarely ate at all any more. Not since his … second reconstruction? His third? He wasn’t sure. Somewhere along the line, digestion had seemed more trouble than it was worth.
‘Christmas,’ Davros said. ‘Christmas on Lavellan. Why do they celebrate it? It’s an Earth holiday, is it not?’
‘Well,’ the other man said, ‘I imagine there’s a story behind that.’ He tapped his chin. ‘Or maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s just what happens when you’re willing to share a universe. Cross-pollination. There might be a human colony somewhere out there celebrating the First Ascendancy of Lavel. Though you’d need a lot of feather boas, I suppose.’
‘Like a virus,’ Davros said. ‘An idea pathogen. Carried not in the cells or the blood, but in the hearts and minds of those infected.’
He took a stylus from a pocket and absently began to scratch formulae on the tablecloth.
The Doctor frowned. ‘They’re going to make me pay for that, you know.’
4
The Kaled of Skaro – the ancient, bitter race to which Davros had once belonged, before he forged his own, superior people – were unsurprisingly fond of romanticising conflict. Davros’s childhood had featured a succession of wrinkled, half-mad tutors preaching the glory of Skaro-That-Was, as if that planet still existed and hadn’t long ago been reduced to an irradiated no man’s land by a thousand-year war.
Now they were all gone, bar him. He was the last Kaled, and the Daleks – who were no more the descendants of the Kaleds than a pearl was descended from the grit that formed it – had no time for the past. Not when the future was there to be won.
++ EXTERMINATE! ++
A battle cry. A promise. A threat. An entire race and culture distilled into a single mechanical shriek spat in the face of the universe.
‘Exterminate,’ Davros whispered to himself in the clammy egg of his command throne. Drool had frozen on his upper lip. ‘Exterminate.’
Gryphon’s Reach was not the most illustrious beginning to a crusade, truth be told. Various races had conquered the dingy little planet over the aeons, in the way that one might examine a grubby penny before deciding it wasn’t worth the trouble. It was a forgotten place. A nothing place. Remarkable only in how unremarkable it was – particularly to the Daleks, whose eyes, like the eyes of all predators, were drawn to movement and colour. There was little colour to Gryphon’s Reach.
Not unless you knew where to look.
++ FACILITY LOCATED ++
++ COMMENCING ATTACK ++
The facility didn’t possess a title, not that his children had asked. It was just a low dome built into the underside of a grey and crumbling cliff, its surface ridged with sensor baffles and perception filters that did nothing at all to hide it from the Daleks’ newly upgraded sensors.
They should have come to me sooner. The Daleks had been combing this region of space for weeks, turning to him only when all of their options were exhausted. He could tell it cost them to do so. Admitting defeat was not in their design. But was that not always the way? They were his children. He was their fail-safe.
But no matter. They called. That was enough. That was always enough.
Davros pulsed a command, and a comms channel opened between him and the facility. Gloating was a bad habit, according to Kaled philosophy, but that didn’t matter. Davros had rewritten all those lessons a long time ago.
<
br /> Besides, he was lonely.
‘Doctor,’ he purred into the comms. ‘We have come for you.’
5
Christmas, on Traxamere Beta.
The Lumineers Guild had outdone themselves this year. Each of the great crimson barges hanging over the capital had been strung with a hundred thousand lanterns, now hanging dark and deactivated against the swollen red globes like the pips of strawberries. Below the rooftop bar in which Davros sat, the streets were packed to groaning with excited onlookers, all here for the flicking of a switch.
‘I don’t understand,’ he muttered. ‘Why are you doing this?’
The Doctor stared into his drink. Tiny photoplasmic algae gleamed in its depths. Traxamere was a dark world with a weak sun. Light was many things here. Currency. Communication. And during this, the darkest day of the year, it became a celebration.
The Doctor took an experimental sip, the light spiralling and sparking down his throat. It made his new face gleam from the inside out. ‘Not a daiquiri,’ he said, ‘but it’ll do.’
‘And why you?’ Davros said. ‘This young form. Come to mock me?’
‘All your many reconstructions,’ the Doctor said, looking out over the crowds with a rueful smile, ‘and your skin is still always so thin. Always looking for insults, for challenges. Why can’t I just be here to talk?’ He set his drink back down. ‘And I have been talking. Not to you, but to … me, I suppose. A few mes, actually. You know that we like talking.’
Davros grunted.
The Doctor looked around. There was something different about him. Davros could see it. Not his face – that changed all the time. But these meetings had rules, and one of those rules was that they always come alone. No allies, no minions, no traps, no threats. And, without an assistant to show off for, this Doctor was different. Quieter. Less prone to dramatics.
It didn’t snow on Traxamere Beta, but there was a thrilling snap of cold to the air.
‘That’s what Christmas can be, sometimes,’ the Doctor said. ‘A time for talking.’