by Dave Rudden
‘Hello!’ shouted the Doctor.
For all their many faults, the cult had picked an excellent spot to hold their sinister get-togethers. This was the largest chamber beneath the sphere’s surface – a great circular cavern large enough to hold several football fields (should the Cult of the Breaking Sunset ever decide to get a match going) and so acoustically perfect even the slightest whisper carried.
‘I’m the Doctor, and I’ve come to stop your terrible plan!’ He paused. ‘You are doing a terrible plan, aren’t you?’
Silence. The Doctor rubbed the back of his neck. ‘And the entrance? The entrance was OK, wasn’t it? Sorry, it’s been a bit of a morning.’
‘I thought it was very good,’ the Grand Hierophant said from the floor. Her features, like those of her congregation, were hidden beneath the hood of a voluminous black robe. The Doctor liked black robes. No self-respecting cult skimped on the robes.
The Grand Hierophant sat up, straightening her crown. ‘Although …’
The Doctor hopped from one foot to the other self-consciously. ‘Although?’
‘I’m not quite sure we are doing a terrible plan, unfortunately.’ The Grand Hierophant had the careful, surprisingly smooth voice of a community-club organiser, the kind of voice that took notes on meetings, got the proper insurance and remembered to put out biscuits. Good voices were also necessary when it came to running cults.
‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you!’ the Doctor crowed triumphantly. ‘You’re the Cult of the Breaking Sunset. Worshippers of the universe’s ending. You’ve chosen the last days of the thirty-third century to steal the Globe of Unmaking from the vaults of the Shemi-Goroth, and now you’re going to use it to punch a hole through reality itself!’ He took a breath. ‘Aren’t you?’
The Grand Hierophant had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘No. Sorry.’
The Doctor sat down hard on the lip of the black stone altar. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I had a suspicion. Didn’t see a Globe of Unmaking anywhere.’ He picked at a bit of congealed candle wax with his finger. ‘Can I ask why not?’
‘Well, for a start,’ the Grand Hierophant said, ‘we’re not the Cult of the Breaking Sunset. We’re the Order of the Knotted Fate.’
‘Blessed be,’ said the congregation.
‘The Cult of the Breaking Sunset were the last tenants. Left the place in an awful state too, I don’t mind telling you. We recycled the robes because, well, they’re nice robes, but we threw out all the skulls and candles because they weren’t really in keeping with the whole Knotted Fate thing.’
‘Blessed be,’ said the congregation again.
The Doctor gave them a look. ‘And so you stopped them?’
‘Oh my, no,’ the Grand Hierophant said. ‘We just moved in when it looked like they weren’t coming back. I wasn’t actually here but –’ she looked around, then pointed at a hulking figure in a hooded robe identical to all the other hooded robes in the chamber – ‘you were, Clodus, weren’t you?’ She leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Clodus was in the Cult of the Breaking Sunset. Now, he’s on the side of the Knotted Fate. Aren’t you?’
The huge figure shrugged. ‘Just like keeping busy, your grace.’
‘What happened?’ asked the Doctor. He was getting frustrated again. This was what happened when you tried to go somewhere specific, instead of taking the universe how it came. Getting your dates wrong, well, that wasn’t the worst thing. There were a lot of dates. It was hard to pick the right one. But he’d always wanted to see a Globe of Unmaking, a piece of technology that made a TARDIS look young. But now the globe was gone, like so much else, and the Doctor had missed it.
‘A man came,’ Clodus said, scratching his head through his hood. ‘He interrupted the Elder Magnificant just as she was about to activate the globe, then gave the whole cult this big dramatic speech –’ Clodus pointed – ‘right where you’re standing. And then it turned out that he’d done something to the globe’s circuitry and, rather than poking a hole in the universe like it was supposed to, it just unmade itself. He said it was –’ the Doctor could practically hear Clodus’s brow furrowing in the depths of his hood – ‘cascade polarity reversal.’
‘Cascade polarity reversal,’ the congregation repeated as one.
‘After that, we all started thinking that maybe it was fate that the universe hadn’t ended, and then me and the boys thought maybe we should find a new cult –’
‘Order,’ the Grand Hierophant interrupted. ‘Order sounds better, Clodus.’
‘As you say, Elder Magnifican–’ Clodus cleared his throat.
The Doctor was sure that, within the confines of her hood, the Grand Hierophant was scowling.
‘Um. Grand Hierophant,’ Clodus went on. ‘And, by the time we thought to look for him, the man was gone.’
‘And tell me,’ the Doctor said, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Did this man also have a blue box?’
A ripple of nods went through the chamber.
‘We thought about adopting it as a symbol,’ said the Grand Hierophant. ‘But then we thought about the other thing he said, and we decided that this might be more appropriate.’ The Grand Hierophant pulled down her hood, revealing a face as wrinkled and shiny as an old apple, her hair a dandelion mass of white wispy curls.
The other cultists pulled their hoods down too.
They were all wearing bow ties.
‘Bow ties are cool,’ the Grand Hierophant said a little sheepishly, but the Doctor was already flinging open the doors of the TARDIS. Then he turned as if a thought had just occurred to him. ‘Did he say anything? This stranger?’
The Grand Hierophant held out a red envelope. ‘He gave me this. In case – and I quote – “the grumpy one with the big ears” showed up.’
The Doctor stared at the envelope suspiciously. ‘What is it?’
‘I think,’ the Grand Hierophant said, ‘he called it a Christmas card.’
The TARDIS spun. Outside, whole aeons flew by. Flocks of minutes whirled like spooked sparrows. Centuries pattered like raindrops against the doors.
The inside of the TARDIS was just as complicated as the vortex swirling around it. The Time Lords had built the TARDISes, but it was more accurate to say they had grown them. Planting a seed didn’t mean you knew where every bud would bloom or where each vine would curl. There were places in the TARDIS that even the Doctor didn’t know. There were rooms he had never been in.
There was one room he thought he might never go in again.
The door to this room wasn’t dramatic or forbidding. It wouldn’t have passed muster with any cults for dark and mysterious deeds. It was just a door, no more intimidating than the envelope in his hand, and that just went to show how misleading such things could be.
I should know better, he thought.
It was incredibly dangerous to contact your past self. Even the Doctor, who was curious in the way stars are hot and ice cream is cold, did his best not to meddle in his own timeline. Even the slightest knowledge of the next changed the now. A single bow tie could destroy the universe.
‘Twice now,’ he said. He’d gone back and retrieved the envelope from the receptionist on Eirene, mostly so he could glare at it. ‘Twice. And they’re writing to me.’
What were they thinking? Never mind reading the card – just having it was a Class Four Felony. He dreaded to think what the Time Lords’ Chancellery Guard or the Celestial Intervention Agency would have said about that. Gallifreyan law enforcement got really ratty about anyone messing with timelines. That was one of the reasons why the Doctor had enjoyed it so much.
Time Lords were so solid. So sedate. The TARDISes had given them a doorway to every picosecond and planet that ever was or would be, but the Time Lords looked at those door frames and saw picture frames instead. Like the universe was just a painting on a wall – faintly interesting, but mostly decorative. So intent on taking their time, when all the Doctor wanted was to take time and do something with it. That was the
seed the Time Lords had planted in him.
‘And look how that ended up,’ he said, and gave the closed door in front of him a sad little smile.
That was all over now. The Doctor would have quite relished being dragged up on charges in front of his peers – again – but there were no more Class Four Felonies to be charged with because there were no Time Lords to do the charging. There was just him. Only him. And it frightened him to death getting a card like that, because it meant that maybe this loneliness would last forever. Maybe, somewhere out there among all the minutes and seconds was a version of himself so alone they were desperate enough to send him cards.
The Doctor knelt, and carefully pushed the envelope under the door. It could sit there forever, for all he cared.
‘You’re the last person I want to talk to,’ the Doctor said, and went back to the TARDIS’s control room.
One lever hadn’t been enough last time. Now he pulled two, just to be sure.
Unfortunately, not listening to yourself cuts both ways.
The Doctor flew to the Ark of the Gammazed – that famed, failed expedition beyond the borders of the dying twenty-ninth galaxy – only to be gently told off by the ark’s captain, who was ‘doing fine, thank you,’ since a nice traveller had pointed out the flaws in the Gammazed grav-acceleration design before they caused catastrophic engine failure.
A third card took up residence in the TARDIS. The Doctor pushed that one under the door as well.
Next, the X-Particle Mines. The Doctor had always wanted to visit the X-Particle Mines. It was said that, in the deepest tunnels, there were shapes. Shapes that whispered under the clatter of tools and the gasp of the particle collectors. Shapes that promised you things. Shapes that stole you away.
When the Doctor arrived, however, he learned that a nice woman in a blue box had not just rescued the missing particle miners, but had also convinced the miners and the shapes – revealed to be particle miners from another dimension tunnelling into this one – to strike for better holidays. Now the disappearances had stopped, and everyone got Sundays and Christmas off. Which was nice.
The Doctor left with a plate of turkey, the beginnings of a monstrous headache, and a fourth Christmas card. It was very like collecting Chibolg Mega-Stamps, he realised, in that you swiftly wanted to kill everyone else who was doing it.
That was when he had a fantastic idea.
The Forty-Fifth Chibolg Mega-Stamps Convention was held at the Zhudash Plaza Hotel, on the sprawling city-world of Ghent. It was the most famous event concerning Chibolg Mega-Stamps – which meant that if you were in the hobby it was the event of the year, and if you were outside the hobby you had no idea it existed. This led to annual confusion among the Zhudash Plaza’s other guests, who for one weekend a year found themselves sharing the hotel with very intense beings from all over the universe who wore garments with slogans like IF YOU WANT ME TO LISTEN, TALK ABOUT MEGA-STAMPS or I WAS COLLECTING MEGA-STAMPS BEFORE IT WAS COOL! (The Doctor, on witnessing the latter T-shirt, briefly considered visiting this mythical time, but decided there were some areas of history too distant for even him to visit.)
There had been a time in Ghent’s history when it had not been a city-world, but that was long forgotten. Now, every square metre of the planet was covered in shining neon towers and oiled-brass citadels. They marched not just over the land but across the oceans, the great floating raft-districts spreading like oil slicks. Forests had been bulldozed. Mountains had been planed flat. All for the ever-growing Megapolis of Ghent.
A hundred billion people lived in this city, and what little sky existed above the vast super-skyline was filled with circling, swooping atmosphere scrubbers, spindly as dragonflies. Their wide, thin wings were complicated arrays of smog-sieves and ash-collectors and they hummed softly as they drank in pollution and exhaled crisp, clean air.
‘You know they have to keep moving?’ the Doctor said, to nobody in particular, slinging first one leg over the hotel balcony rail, then the other. ‘It’s the way they’re designed. They never land. Never stop.’
Behind him, the opening ceremony of the convention continued. The organiser – a twitching, hissing Voord whose rubbery black skin contrasted sharply with the distinctive white gloves of a Mega-Stamp collector – was giving a speech. People sipped drinks and chatted. This was a big occasion in the world of Mega-Stamps. Everyone who was anyone was there.
I should go make friends, the Doctor thought. He was good at making friends, most of the time. Though that might have been because he usually tried to make friends when things were exploding and, if you spoke like you were an expert on why those things were exploding, people tended to listen. And, often, he did know why they were exploding, which worked out well for everybody.
Now, however, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.
It was funny, he thought. He’d spent so much of his life running from his home world, but, now that it was gone, it was like the ground had been stolen from under his feet.
The roof of the Zhudash Plaza Hotel was 284 floors above the busy street below. Wind plucked aggressively at the Doctor’s STAMPS? STAMPS!! T-shirt. He thought about saying something clever, but then decided that there wasn’t much point if there wasn’t anybody around to hear it. Then he pushed himself off the balcony.
It was a long fall, but Zhudash Plaza had not skimped on its safety protocols. The Doctor had barely plummeted ten floors before the hotel’s lawsuit-avoidance hardware spun into life and caught him in a focused anti-grav field.
I could say something clever now, too, he thought.
Instead, he took out his sonic screwdriver and convinced the window opposite his floating form that it should be a door instead. The translucent gel that served Zhudash Plaza as glass opened in a neat circle, and the Doctor drifted through, feet touching down lightly on the carpeted floor.
‘Hmph,’ he said.
Suite 2V34 was an immense warren of complicated art and plush furniture, all carved from materials so rare they could have bought whole tower blocks anywhere else on Ghent. Wall-mounted screens played local Christmas-music videos on mute. The suite had its own kitchen, tucked away behind a holo-screen in the corner. The Doctor could hear the armed guards outside in the corridor, and gave serious thought to knocking something over so they’d rush in to capture him and he’d have someone to talk to.
He decided against it. They would have enough to deal with in a moment.
The Forty-Fifth Chibolg Mega-Stamps Convention would eventually become known as the Mega-Stamps Massacre, because the Fraternity of Keepers (who did not go for robes, but did have very sharply tailored tunics) was about to steal the Mega-Stamp commemorating the crowning of Chibolg Emperor Glin. A fierce war would break out in the wake of the theft. The hotel would be locked down for months.
That was why the Doctor was going to steal the Mega-Stamp first.
He made his way to the huge desk in the centre of the apartment, scanning it with his sonic screwdriver until he found three slight discolorations on the wood.
‘Voord finger oils,’ he murmured disinterestedly.
He held out three of his own fingers in roughly the same arrangement, pressing down on the stains until a secret hinge clicked and a panel slid back, revealing a tiny square in a glass display case.
‘The Chibolg,’ the Doctor said, ‘built the most efficient postal service in the universe. It became a species obsession – hunting for innovation, improving response times, training legions of staff – and then they all just disappeared. Vanished one day. Total mystery.’
Nobody exclaimed shock, or seemed impressed, or used this as an opportunity to tell the Doctor something about their experiences with the postal service. Nobody said anything, so the Doctor continued talking, because it was better than being silent.
He swept his sonic down the little square, then nodded. ‘I thought so. Sentient ink. That’s where the Chibolg went. Everything they were, everything they are, rendered into data and writt
en on paper. They began posting themselves.’
He smiled. It was the first genuine smile he’d had in a while.
‘And why not? You build this amazing thing – of course you’re going to use it. Why have something so marvellous and not use it to go everywhere and see everything? Why spend any time at home at all?’
He looked closely at the little square. The tiny threads of ink were writing and rewriting themselves constantly.
‘I suppose home is what you make it,’ the Doctor said, and lifted the glass display case. ‘I suppose it only feels like home when you can’t go back.’
There was a series of clicks.
‘You’re early,’ the Doctor said, turning round to find seven guns pointing at him. ‘I wasn’t going to trip the secret alarm for another three minutes.’
‘Hello, sir,’ the leader of the security team said. The visor of her helmet danced with a glowing crosshair. ‘My name is Squad Leader Quell. We’d like you to stand down, if you don’t mind.’
‘Hi, Squad Leader Quell,’ the Doctor said. ‘Nice to meet you. I probably won’t stand down, actually, if it’s all the same to you. I think I’ll escape with this Mega-Stamp so it can’t be stolen, thus preventing all-out war.’
‘That does sound nice,’ the soldier said. ‘And what do you plan to do after that?’
The Doctor shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me this early. I never know this early.’
‘He said you’d say that.’
The translucent gel of the windows shimmered and became diamond-hard. Armoured panels crashed down over all the doors. The other members of the security team moved like the jaws of a trap, surrounding the Doctor and covering the doors.
There was a long moment of silence.
‘Was it the bow-tie one again?’ the Doctor said. ‘Because I –’
‘I don’t know anything about a bow tie, sir,’ Quell said. ‘This gentleman had a bit of an accent, sir. Sort of an angry accent. He –’
The Doctor waved his hands. ‘Don’t be specific! I can’t know specifics. I’m trying to forget the specifics I’ve already heard!’