The Wintertime Paradox

by Dave Rudden

  ‘But why you?’ Davros repeated.

  ‘Because I’ve never met you, and you’ve never met me,’ the Doctor said, running a hand through his shock of brown hair.

  Davros looked at him – the long coat, the bow tie, the childlike smile, and the old, tired eyes. Why do I always rebuild myself exactly as before? Every time he died. Every time …

  ‘That limits me,’ the Doctor continued. ‘It limits what I can say about where you’re going, and where I’ve been. But we decided it was worth it. That you might be more inclined to listen to someone you had less of a history with.’

  ‘I have history with all of you,’ Davros said quietly. ‘You think I care what face you wear?’

  The cold air was sour in his mouth. The oxygen separators in his chest were degrading, as they did every century or so. He would have to replace them. There was always so much work to be done.

  ‘Do you know what I see, Doctor? When I look at you? At any of you?’

  The Doctor shook his head.

  ‘I see the look in your eyes the first time we met. All the way back on Skaro, when my children were in their infancy, and you arrived to take it all away before it could even start.’

  Something dark passed across the Doctor’s face. ‘I didn’t have a choice. The Time Lords –’

  Davros waved his hand. It was aching, a spreading chill where metal and flesh met. Why do I never build myself young? ‘We met, and just for a moment you threatened everything I had created. You held the controls of my life support in your hand, and you demanded that I destroy them or you would destroy me.’

  ‘To know,’ the Doctor quoted, ‘that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure of my thumb would end everything.’

  Davros smirked to hear his own words in the Doctor’s mouth. ‘Your casing doesn’t matter to me, Doctor. I never forget who I’m looking at.’

  ‘So why accept my offer to come?’ the Doctor asked. ‘Why agree to meet me this Christmas? Or at Christmas on Lavellan? Or anywhere?’

  Davros fell silent, staring up at the barges crowding the sky.

  ‘Curiosity,’ the Doctor said eventually. ‘That’s why I chose Traxamere Beta. The lights we’re about to see are famous in this bit of the galaxy, and I’ve never seen them before. That’s why I chose this Christmas, out of all the millions that are out there.’

  The lights came on. They were so bright, Davros had to turn away.

  ‘You’ve never seen them before either, I imagine,’ the Doctor said.

  Davros bristled at his certainty. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, the place is still standing, for a start,’ the Doctor said, his youthful grin painted red and green and gold by the celebrations above.

  After a moment, Davros smiled back.

  6

  It didn’t take long.

  It never did, in Davros’s experience. He could spend years planning. Years plotting, and hypothesising, and dissecting, ever dissecting the failures, both his children’s and his own. But, in the end, victory and defeat always arrived in a single, narrow moment, like a dagger in the dark.

  The facility on Gryphon’s Reach had once been Krillitane, and it was in the business of invisibility. The winged, reptilian race were the opposite of the Daleks, in many ways. Davros had built his children to be superior, to be unique, to reject other life with religious zeal. The Krillitane, by comparison, were scavengers. Parasites. Thieves of DNA. They infiltrated other races, taking their forms and eating whole civilisations from within.

  Word had reached the Dalek Empire that the Krillitane were a hair’s breadth away from developing some sort of phase-cloak: true, complete invisibility. A tactical advantage no other race must be allowed to possess. That was the purpose of this invisible facility on an unremarkable world. That was the prize. And Davros had been summoned to make sure the Doctor could not take it from them.

  ++ ACQUIRE ++

  ++ ACQUIRE ++

  The Daleks poured down the corridors of the facility, like wasps attacking a hive. The Krillitane fought back in their scattered, mongrel way – ambushes, scavenged weaponry, even herding genetically engineered warrior forms into the invaders’ paths.

  Davros’s systems recorded every second of the conflict, every shot and scream and kill, but the scientist himself paid only half a mind. Davros knew the strengths of his soldiers. The power of his children. He held no concern for them. And yet …

  ‘Doctor?’ he hissed, fingers flicking over the controls so that his voice seeped from every single intercom at once. ‘Allying with the Krillitane? I thought you had some standards.’

  Nothing. No response.

  Davros took a deep, shuddering breath, wincing as the compressor vents in his chest chugged and seized. He had been in the middle of a repair cycle when his children had called. They might have waited. He might have asked them to wait.

  No. The business of empire called. And, when it called, Davros answered.

  ‘Doctor,’ he wheedled. ‘I might show mercy …’

  An hour since planetfall. Civilisations had fallen in less. Especially when the Doctor was involved. No one knew better than Davros that the Doctor loved to talk, and yet, in that hour, he had not said a single word.

  Davros had engineered worry out of his children. To worry was to admit, however privately, that failure was an option. Not for the first time, he wished he had also done so for himself. For silence from the Doctor was worrying. Silence meant the Doctor had better things to do than talk.

  ++ EXTERMINATE! ++

  Davros thumbed the controls. ‘Keep focus, my children.’

  Two Daleks fell to a proton blaster. Another exploded as a Krillitane warrior tore apart its casing. The reserve forces Davros had ordered to stay in the upper atmosphere were now spiralling downwards, their life signs spiking on Davros’s screens as they scented blood.

  Rage. Always, they raged. Getting bogged down in slaughter. Lashing out at the indignity of being opposed.

  ‘The Doctor is the foe here,’ Davros cautioned. ‘This technology is the prize. Everything else is a distraction.’

  ++ EXTERMINATE! ++

  They weren’t listening. Too busy snarling and snapping at each other, baying like hounds on the hunt.

  They are what you made them, Davros told himself, for what might have been the thousandth time. You cannot resent the pure for being pure.

  And that was the truth of it. The heart of it. The other races of the galaxy scorned the Daleks for their maddened hatred of all other life, unaware that it was all their fault. The Daleks thought only of extermination because there were foes still to exterminate. Had the rest of life in the universe had the good grace to lie down and die, his children would be far more serene.

  ‘Davros.’

  And there he was. The co-author of Dalek rage. The midwife to their annihilating hate.

  ‘Davros, you need to stop.’

  That voice. It was always the same, no matter how different. Davros’s boards lit up as weapons charged to dangerous capacity, as units pulled back from engagements or spun their casing crowns in berserk delight.

  Now the Daleks listened. Now they focused.

  Davros’s chest compressors wheezed in and out.

  ‘I’m giving you one chance, Davros. Call off your monsters. Retreat to high orbit. I don’t want to –’

  ++ DAVROS ++

  ++ CREATOR ++

  ‘Yes?’ Davros breathed.

  There was no capacity for emotional range in the voice of a Dalek. Davros knew that. He had designed them himself. But every time it came to this moment – this narrow moment between the Doctor, the Daleks and him – he imagined it trembled, just a bit.

  ‘Do not waver, my children. Trust the augmented sensors I bestowed upon you. No matter what they have built here, he cannot hide from us.’

  The uncertainty smoothed itself away. That was the job of a father.

  ++ THE PRIZE WILL BE FOUND ++

>   ++ THE DOCTOR HAS BEEN ANTICIPATED ++

  ++ HIDING WILL NOT BE PERMITTED ++

  The Daleks swarmed in, weathering the fire from the Krillitane defenders or ignoring it completely.

  ‘Always running, always hiding,’ Davros murmured into the comms. ‘When will you learn, Doctor? Some problems can only be faced head-on.’

  ‘I’m beginning to agree with you,’ the Doctor responded, and then the world went black.

  7

  Christmas, on the Red Moon of Xhe.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ Davros said. ‘I’m not going to “see the light” or recognise some sort of virtue or value to all these civilisations you show me. You’re wasting your time.’

  ‘Time is the one thing I have lots of,’ the Doctor said, pressing a pair of magnoculars to his lean face. ‘What am I to do but waste it?’

  Ahead, the first of the tribespeople tethered the great armour-plated beasts that were their mounts and homes. Vast, shaggy heads protruded from under spiked bone crests, staring blearily down at their keepers. Each one was the size of a city block – a mountain of flesh and shell that could house more than fifty people on its back. In the light of the red sky, they were the colour of dried blood.

  ‘Then I must consider my time, if you will not.’ The ground was uneven, cracked and baked by the unforgiving sun, and the anti-gravs of Davros’s chair whirred as they sought to make sense of it. The plains of Xhe seemed to go on forever, red and desolate as a Dalek eye lens. ‘Curiosity may sustain you, Doctor, but I have work to do.’

  ‘Wait.’

  Davros half turned, and then shook his head. The tribespeople were making camp. They hadn’t seemed to notice the two men on the hill – one young and striking, the other folded over himself in a cramped bundle of limbs, his lower half encased in stainless steel.

  The thin atmosphere pulled and dragged at Davros’s lungs. When the first tribesman began to sing, his voice tremoring high and clear through the oxygen-starved air, Davros was unmoved.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. ‘I won’t wait. What am I supposed to be learning, Doctor? What puzzle am I supposed to solve? I have never understood this foolish obsession you have with Christmas, and I do not understand why it has brought us two thirds of the way across the known universe to this unforgiving nothing rock.’

  ‘Because it’s just a word.’ The Doctor lowered his magnoculars.

  It was the same face as before, but different. Older-seeming. Davros found himself wondering what those eyes saw from one Christmas to the next.

  ‘I forget sometimes how incredible language is. The TARDIS translates, you see. Makes things simple.’ The Doctor breathed out a long plume of cold air. ‘But there are words – simple words – that you can say to a million different people in a hundred different eras, and to each person the word will have a meaning that is personal and unique.’

  A tribeswoman had joined in, face lifted to the freezing sky. Another had turned a fragment of a shell into a drum, and was slapping out a rhythm with hard and breathless joy.

  ‘Christmas is just a word. Here, it means singing. In other places, it means lights. It can mean religion, or family, or celebrating reaching winter’s halfway point. It’s a … selection box.’

  ‘I don’t know what that means,’ Davros said. There was something about the song the tribespeople were singing, or the lack of oxygen in the air … He didn’t feel like himself.

  ‘It would take a surprising amount of time to explain,’ the Doctor said. ‘But you can choose the meaning of Christmas. You can build your own traditions, build it like an engine, so that it’s entirely personal to you. You choose what it means. You choose the effect it has on the universe. There aren’t many words like that. Words like Christmas.’ His gaze fell on Davros. ‘Words like father.’

  Something in the intensity of the Doctor’s gaze made Davros recoil. Something he had seen once, long ago.

  ‘I am a scientist,’ Davros snapped, angry at himself for flinching. ‘I do not engage in ridiculous wordplay.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ the Doctor said. ‘You’re still a Kaled, Davros, no matter how many bits you lop off or replace. All those lessons. All that philosophy. For a thousand years, words were the only thing your kind had to pass on to each other.’

  ‘So?’ Davros hissed. He didn’t like this. He understood the mechanics of war. He could design weapons of destruction that would have terrified the generals who trained him. But, as always when he faced the Doctor, the Time Lord felt just a half-step ahead.

  ‘Christmas can mean anything, Davros. So can father. But Dalek?’ The Doctor shook his head. ‘Dalek just means Dalek. A force of hatred. A force of destruction, of annihilation. And you are the only person who could make it mean something else.’

  The gentleness had disappeared from the Doctor’s voice. Instead, there was now hunger, the fierceness that shone through when wit met will and empires turned on the edge of a knife. He hid it well, mostly, especially when there was a human to impress, but Davros knew that ambition. That anger.

  It made the Doctor … bearable.

  ‘I can stop the Daleks, Davros. I can beat them, time and time again. But you could change them.’

  He knelt beside Davros, eyes bright and pleading wide, and Davros fought the urge to pull away, to hide the vulnerable controls of his systems with his hand.

  ‘I’ve considered it,’ he whispered. ‘The thought has occurred.’ His compressors wheezed in and out. The atmosphere. Yes. It was the thinness of the atmosphere. Nothing more. ‘You are right in what you say. I have created them to mean one thing, and one thing only. They are not adaptable. They do not change, or learn, or grow. They are what they will be.’ His voice quivered before he could straighten it out. ‘But if I did change them, they would not be Daleks. They would not be my children.’

  ‘But they don’t love you, Davros.’ The Doctor’s voice was gentle again. ‘They never will.’

  ‘If they loved me,’ Davros said, ‘they would not be my children.’

  He looked out over the plain, where a hundred tribespeople sang their hearts out for no audience but the desert, Christmas and two old men.

  ‘It is beautiful, Doctor. Thank you for showing me.’

  8

  ++ WE SUMMONED YOU TO COUNTERACT THE DOCTOR ++

  ++ THIS WAS NOT ACHIEVED ++

  Gryphon’s Reach shrank as Davros’s command ship pulled away. There were still Daleks on the planet, firing again and again into whatever they could find, but Davros’s work was done.

  ‘Synaptic phase-cloaking,’ he muttered. ‘A mixture of Gallifreyan and Krillitane biotech, materialising inside the senses of the observer themselves. Sliding like a curtain between mind and nerve. I should have known. I should have –’

  ++ WE WERE UNABLE TO ACCESS OUR SYSTEMS ++

  ++ WE WERE TRAPPED IN THE DARK OF OURSELVES ++

  ++ IT WAS … NOT OPTIMAL ++

  It had been torture. Cloaking technology was just that: a cloak. A barrier between the seer and the seen. That was why the technology was so rare. It was almost impossible to hide something so completely that no part of it could be detected.

  The Doctor had not tried to hide the Krillitane. He had interfered with Davros and his Daleks’ own systems, severing the links between their biological senses and their casings. Hiding them from themselves. It had only lasted minutes, by Davros’s internal clock, but for that moment – that terrible, eternal moment – every single Dalek in the fleet had been plunged into darkness. Deprived of their senses, shorn from the might of their machine bodies, and reduced to the wet nothing of their flesh existence. Bacteria in a Petri dish, trapped alone with their futile rage.

  Some had self-destructed. Most had gone mad, though even Davros could admit that it was becoming harder and harder to make the distinction between which of his children were sane and which were not.

  When the cloaking field had disengaged, the Doctor had been gone.

  ‘I unders
tand what he did,’ Davros said, and it was true. He did, now that he had seen it. That was ever the issue. Playing catch-up again. ‘Next time, we will not be taken by surprise.’

  ++ THERE WILL NOT BE A NEXT TIME ++

  For just a moment, Davros was back in that darkness, his mechanical lungs wheezing and clattering, struggling to keep him alive.

  ‘What?’

  ++ WE WILL NOT BE CONTACTING YOU AGAIN ++

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Davros said. ‘I know what he did. I can redesign you to defend against it. I can … I can help.’

  ++ WE DO NOT REQUIRE YOUR HELP ++

  ++ WE REQUIRE VICTORY ++

  ++ GOODBYE … CREATOR ++

  The link went dead.

  9

  Christmas, on Alacracis IV.

  Davros had already found a table by the time the Doctor arrived, weaving through the crowd in topcoat and tails. The bazaar was packed with last-minute shoppers, each stall glorious in festive finery of neon and crushed velvet. Merchants paced behind their stalls – demanding, cajoling – and incense burners coughed a thousand streams of smoke into the dark bowl of the sky, filling the air with a haze of cinnamon and soot.

  Davros watched the Doctor make his way through the crush, stopping here and there to joke with a vendor or examine a piece of polished glass. He made it look very easy, as if he was genuinely interested in the price of glishfruit or the origin of a statue, despite being part of a civilisation so advanced that, by comparison, the people of Alacracis IV were insects grubbing in the dirt.

  What am I missing? Davros asked himself. Is there significance, and I simply do not see it?

  ‘You’re early,’ the Doctor said as he sat down.

  The bazaar was full of little places offering mulled wine and pastries from a dozen different worlds. Davros handed the Doctor a menu he hadn’t opened himself. ‘I’ve been thinking about your offer.’

  The Doctor lingered over his choice, before finally brushing his fingers across the menu’s surface. An android waiter in the corner jerked as it received the order, then began ladling hot wine into a cup.