The Wintertime Paradox

by Dave Rudden

  ‘Sorry, sir.’ The Doctor had never seen someone so apologetically point a gun before. The crosshairs on Quell’s visor flashed as she blinked. ‘Our orders are specific. He’s going to deal with the kerfuffle outside, and you’re going to put your feet up for Christmas.’

  ‘I’m what?’

  ‘He says you need a break. That’s what Christmas is for.’ Quell indicated the plush surroundings. ‘This suite is practically impregnable. He paid quite a lot of money for us all to train in a very expensive restaurant on Darillium, sir. He really thinks you should take some time off, sir. He said he was trying to be nice.’

  ‘House arrest,’ the Doctor said disbelievingly. ‘House arrest as a Christmas present.’

  The security guard looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Quell repeated. ‘He said you’d understand why he couldn’t say more. He said there’s a room in the blue box you won’t go into, and he says he knows why.’

  The Doctor let out a long sigh. ‘All right. All right. Just let me …’ His eyes narrowed. ‘So you’re all highly trained, are you? Best equipment in the universe? Probably kitted out with all sorts of enhanced sensors, right?’

  The security guard nodded. ‘Best money can buy, sir. Magnification of all five senses. I can hear the atmosphere scrubbers sighing two hundred feet up. I can hear the bell at reception. They’re really very strong sensors, sir.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ the Doctor said. ‘Fantastic.’

  He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the wall-mounted screens.

  ‘How loud do you think these go?’

  Later, the Doctor sent Quell and the whole security team boxes of chocolates as an apology. In their thank-you notes, they assured him their hearing was definitely going to come back.

  They also sent him a fifth card.

  And later later, when the adrenaline had worn off and the silence had returned, the nervous energy that the Doctor usually poured into bad jokes and rescuing the universe propelled him, as it always did, to the door. The door he wouldn’t open. The door he hadn’t opened since trading his former self’s clothes for a battered coat and the first T-shirt he could find, old boots crunching on a carpet of broken glass.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Fine.’

  He opened the door and stepped inside.

  There were many phrases on Earth that did not translate to Gallifrey. One of those was the notion of a walk-in wardrobe. The costume room of the TARDIS was not a walk-in wardrobe; it was a walk-about wardrobe. A walk-for-miles wardrobe. Even the Doctor didn’t know how far it stretched. Sometimes he wondered whether the TARDIS was always quietly adding to it because it liked dressing him up in new clothes.

  There were a lot of mirrors in the costume room. All of them were broken.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ he said.

  The TARDIS did not respond, but the grumble of the engines smoothed just a little at his words.

  ‘I don’t even really remember doing it. My memories are fuzzier than they should be.’ He stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it. ‘Timelines grating off each other. My future selves changing things. Messing around. Messing things up.’

  He looked down at the floor.

  The Time War. Gallifrey’s ending. The version of himself who did these things, and all the other versions who were to come.

  ‘I worry they’re still grieving.’

  He noticed there was a broom in the corner. It hadn’t been there before. The timeship could have repaired all the mirrors itself, folded away the broken glass as if it had never been there, but the TARDIS knew the Doctor. It knew moving was better than standing still.

  The Doctor began gently sweeping up the glass.

  ‘The old things feel different. My adventures don’t feel right. It’s like Gallifrey was always there. It was my forwarding address. It was the star I guided myself by, even when I didn’t agree with it, or didn’t approve of it, or defied it entirely. Where do I go from here?’

  Something caught in his broom. He looked down.

  It was another envelope. Small and scuffed and brown, tucked underneath one of the largest shards of glass.

  ‘If I don’t want cards from my future selves,’ the Doctor said, ‘then I definitely don’t want one from you. I left you behind. You’re the me who did this. This is your fault, and now I have to clean up the mess.’

  He snatched up the envelope, angry now. Angry enough to tear it open and pull out the card.

  It wasn’t a Christmas card.

  It was small, and Moveomax-branded. The little shape on it spun and sparkled in its field of black.

  The Doctor stared at it. He had seen a lot of planets. There were square planets. Living planets. Planets made of song. He was from a planet that was as red and orange as a fire agate – so red you could almost feel its heat from space. The planet on the card was blue and green. Not particularly impressive. Not particularly large. The script on the card read WISH YOU WERE HERE.

  The Doctor looked around the room, at the costumes he had worn and might wear, and then he looked at the one place he had always gone no matter how lost he felt.

  ‘Home,’ the Doctor said. ‘A place that always needs saving.’

  He closed the card.

  ‘Merry Christmas to me.’

  12

  The Paradox Moon

  1

  Before

  23 June 2007, UNIT Aircraft Carrier Valiant

  It was the Master’s utopia, so of course it was the end of the world.

  Geneva was burning. Tokyo was aflame. The President of the United States of America had just been vaporised live on TV. A demented Time Lord had conquered the Earth, and a rift had opened in the sky – a blood-red scar the length of a continent, disgorging a rain of invaders that giggled as they killed.

  Extravagant, Sibling Same thought. He was on his knees, gasping at the cold metal deck. Everything felt too real and not real at all – the warble of alarms, the tremor of marching feet, the crackle and pulse of distant guns.

  Just for an instant, he saw the grating through his fingers, as if he were on the verge of fading away.

  Get up, he thought. This is nothing. You survived the war, didn’t you?

  It was an ironic little mantra. Technically, nobody had survived what a grateful universe was now calling the Last Great Time War. Technically, it had never even happened; wiped from existence by a do-gooder Time Lord and their truly colossal sense of entitlement. A fitting end for a war in which time itself had become a battleground, so torn by constant interference that eventually you couldn’t even trust one second to follow the next.

  Staggering to his feet, wiping drool away with a translucent hand, Sibling Same set out, trying not to think about how the red light of the alarms was painting him crimson from the inside out. There was a lot of commotion. Soldiers were running. Civilians were panicking. He could hear radio chatter and intercom announcements, coming fast and loud and panicked:

  ‘Repeat, repeat! The Doctor has been captured!’

  ‘This is London! We’re under siege. Oh God, what do we do?’

  And then, over everything, a voice, thunderous with manic satisfaction. The voice of a child with no limits to its spite or its hunger:

  ‘– and I looked down upon my new dominion, as Master of All –’

  For a weak, sentimental moment, Sibling Same wished he could tell them: None of this had ever happened. Oh, it was happening right now, obviously – people were dying, a world was on fire – but it wouldn’t be happening for long. Someone was going to turn the clock back, and cut away this timeline the way a child might snap a dead twig. Like a gardener. Like a god.

  Sibling Same limped to a closed metal door and forced it open. He was still weak from the effort of breaking into a timeline about to be undone. Beyond, cast in a halo of scarlet light, was a blue police box with its door wide open, hundreds of cables spilling out into towers of machinery that pulsed a deep, infernal red.

  Gardens were meant
to be plundered, he thought, moving forward. That was a mantra, too. Gods are meant to be robbed.

  2

  Now

  Possibly December, definitely the Shadow Proclamation HQ

  ‘It’s the moon, if you must know,’ the Shadow Architect said, a note of accusation in her voice. ‘But I know nothing about any distress call.’

  She had a good voice for accusation, the Doctor thought. Of course, that was practically a job requirement. The Shadow Proclamation bound nearly forty thousand planets in a shared agreement of laws, jurisdiction and cooperation, and at the centre of that viciously complicated tangle was this pale, chilly office and this pale, chilly being.

  The Shadow Architect was lean and graceful, with skin the colour of parking tickets and eyes the shade of drying blood. It was hard to tell, behind that praying-mantis poise, but she looked just as confused to see the Doctor as the Doctor was to see her.

  ‘Well, I didn’t show up just to say hi,’ the Doctor said, mostly to the Architect but also, crucially, to the eight Judoon guards stationed around the cavernous marble office. ‘No offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ the Shadow Architect said icily. The Judoon kept their weapons raised. There was no love lost between the Doctor and the Proclamation. It wasn’t that the Doctor didn’t approve of laws as a general concept, but she was also very aware that law was a fragile thing, and it changed depending on where you stood. Right and wrong, and kindness and mercy, on the other hand, were portable, durable and, in the Doctor’s opinion, valid just about everywhere.

  The Shadow Proclamation did not approve of the Doctor at all. This was for many reasons. The Doctor popped up in strange places. She didn’t recognise any jurisdiction but her own. Worse, she was a living symbol of that half-mythical age when law and order had in fact been the provision of the Time Lords. That hadn’t ended well for anybody, least of all the Time Lords themselves.

  ‘I had a whole day of minor maintenance planned,’ the Doctor said, pointing at her TARDIS in the corner of the room. ‘Nothing major. Just little tweaks. TARDISes are a lot of work. Like jellyfish.’

  The Shadow Architect placed a long graceful finger on her temple. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Not in shape, obviously. And you’d be hard-pressed to find a jellyfish that contained a library, though I could tell you stories. But because a jellyfish isn’t just one creature – it’s part of a collection of creatures that all support each other. Just like a TARDIS. Translation matrix, chameleon circuit, ambiguous resolver … It’s a full-time job keeping them all going. What’s the word? Oh, it’s a great word …’

  ‘Siphonophores,’ one of the Judoon grunted, before looking slightly sheepish – an impressive feat for a humanoid rhino. The Architect gave them a long, appraising look.

  ‘Fam-inals,’ the Doctor said. ‘Easier to say. Point being, I have things to do. I’m only here because I received a distress call.’

  ‘And I am telling you,’ the Shadow Architect said, ‘that we did not send it.’

  She rose from her seat, bidding the Doctor follow her through one of the office’s many gloomy archways. On the other side, standing out against the headquarters’ faded marble glory, were banks upon banks of data-monitoring equipment.

  All of it was aflame. Some terminals sparked sulkily under drifts of anti-fire foam. Others blazed defiantly, their screens and keyboards blown out. Parchment-skinned acolytes ran back and forth, trying to splice cables or recover charred read-outs, but it was clearly a lost cause.

  ‘Our entire communications network is down,’ the Architect said. Her long fingers twitched, as if she could feel all that information slipping between them. ‘We cannot contact our fleets, and our member planets cannot contact us. The Shadow Proclamation is blinded, Doctor.’

  It clearly stung the Architect to say this, and the Doctor could understand why. The Shadow Proclamation was a blunt instrument – slow, unwieldy, and as subtle as a brick to the face when it came to matters of right and wrong – but it also mainly, mostly managed to keep a certain type of peace. It was certainly better than nothing, but now nothing was exactly what nearly forty thousand worlds were getting.

  ‘It’s the moon,’ the Architect said again, pointing up through the chamber’s transparent domed roof to the white orb above, murky and pearlescent as a blinded eye.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘We don’t have one,’ the Architect said simply. ‘Or we didn’t, until about six hours ago. It just appeared, and the resulting gravitational distortion blew out every single defence shield and communications array we had. We’re lucky it didn’t shatter our headquarters completely. As it is, it will take us months to rebuild.’

  The Doctor stared up at the rogue moon. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘We do not know.’

  ‘Has it tried to communicate with you?’

  The Shadow Architect scowled, once again pointing at the ruin of their communications equipment. ‘We sent a data-boat up, but there’s been no response. Further data-boats are in transit to our closest outposts. A fleet will be raised to blow this thing from the sky. Unless our own guns come online and do it first.’

  ‘Do you always have to enforce the law at the barrel of a gun?’ the Doctor said. ‘Is there, in fact, a law against moons showing up out of nowhere?’

  The Architect frowned. ‘I imagine there is. At the very least, you need a permit. Why? What are you proposing?’

  The Doctor grinned. ‘Let me take a look.’

  ‘Absolutely not!’

  ‘Why not? I’m supposed to be elbow-deep in some artron cabling right now. The door on the TARDIS is a little stiff from our last crash-landing. Two of the showers are producing chocolate instead of water. That’s fewer than normal. I have lots to be doing.’

  ‘If you’re that busy, then why do –’ The Architect’s eyes narrowed. ‘Oh. You want a distraction.’

  The Doctor shrugged. ‘I didn’t become the time traveller I am today by thinking about maintenance. Takes all the fun out of things. Neatening things, doing accounts, tying up loose ends – that’s boring. No offence.’

  ‘None taken,’ the Architect said again. It didn’t sound any more believable the second time around. ‘Doctor, you seem to be forgetting that you have no authority here. Your presence is unasked for. The Shadow Proclamation does not call on time-travelling vagabonds who cause just as much chaos as they prevent. We enforce treaties. We lay down sanctions. We raise armies if need be. We do things properly.’

  The Doctor sighed. ‘The thing about “properly” is it discounts all the things that are not proper. Like moons showing up out of nowhere. This seems like a very improper situation, honoured Architect. Let me take it off your hands.’

  The Shadow Architect stared at the Doctor with eyes that had judged civilisations and found them wanting. ‘Doctor,’ she said, ‘do you know something we don’t?’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ the Doctor replied immediately, and hoped those suspicious eyes couldn’t tell she was lying. Thanks to the TARDIS’s arcane sensors and its translation circuit, distress calls could arrive at the console room in a number of ways: not just through the millions of frequencies it could detect, but through telepathic calls, hypercubes or phone calls from Winston Churchill. The Doctor thought she had experienced all the myriad ways the universe could ask for help.

  She’d never heard anything like the call that had brought her here.

  A word. A curse. A threat.

  Paradox.

  3

  Before

  26 June 2010, somewhere in the United Kingdom

  ‘You know you’re going about it the long way round.’

  Sibling Different was tall, and striking, and her red hair spilled around her golden mask like the heat corona around an eclipsed star.

  When the war had ended – when it had been ended, Sibling Same reminded himself, crossed out like a wrong answer on a school exam – the line that had been drawn h
adn’t just gone through places and timelines. It had gone through people. Sibling Same and Sibling Different had ended up on one side of that line, and their past had ended up on the other. He no longer remembered who he had been before the war. He didn’t think Sibling Different remembered either.

  She spoke like she did, though. She spoke with steely confidence. Every idea she had was the right idea. Every whim, the only course.

  ‘Kill the Doctor,’ she said. ‘Take what we need. Simple.’

  As she spoke, she flickered, her skin flashing to a negative of itself. That had been happening a lot more lately, like the warning light of a battery about to fail. The war had changed them, which in itself wasn’t a surprise. War transformed people. That was what it did. Mostly, it transformed them from alive to dead, but it had made the Siblings something else entirely:

  Ghosts, of a timeline that never was. Ghosts, on the verge of fading away.

  ‘It’s too risky,’ he said, scanning the empty street. ‘My way is better. Safer.’

  It was almost impossible to explain what it felt like to stand in a dead timeline before it was erased. The closest comparison he could make was that it was like stepping into a display home, or the sample family photos in a picture frame. There was no one thing you could point to. Everything felt real; arranged as it should be. And yet, there was a falseness to it. A hollowness, as if the very atoms in the air were going through the motions until the clock turned back.

  Or maybe, he thought, that’s just how Leadworth feels all the time.

  The houses were settled and comfortable, stacked beside each other like seat cushions. It was nearly midnight, and all the lights in all the windows were out. Cars sat on driveways, still warm to the touch from the sun.

  Sibling Same let his hand linger on a car bonnet, trying to soak up the heat. Sometimes he worried they were ghosts. That they hadn’t managed to escape the Time War after all. That this was the afterlife, and they had died. Dead souls wandering dead timelines, wanting …