by Dave Rudden
Right now, that didn’t seem likely. Not just because there was a gun pointed at the Doctor’s head – she was used to that – but because the Time Lord found herself beset by a precise and steely rage.
‘These are pieces of my TARDIS,’ she said. ‘My TARDIS.’
Mae was angry too. The Doctor could tell. For all her smirking bravado, her fingers were trembling on the butt of the gun. Anger and … fear?
‘But Sibling Same convinced me we were better off flying under your radar until we were properly up and running,’ she said, as if the Doctor hadn’t spoken. ‘Appearing in front of the Proclamation was a test run. Sharpest eyes in the galaxy, and they never saw us coming.’ The sardonic mirth in her voice vanished. ‘But you did. We picked up your arrival on the scanners. That’s why I had to infiltrate them. How did you know we were here?’
‘Pieces of my TARDIS,’ the Doctor said again. She was distantly aware neither one of them was really listening to the other but was far too angry to care. ‘Where did you get them?’ She pointed. ‘Synapse link for a translation matrix. I know I’m not missing that. I was working on it this morning. How is it here?’
‘Kill your grandfather.’ The voice echoed through the cavern, and the Doctor saw a second figure emerge from behind one of the tottering stacks. It was a boy; barely in his teens, his face hidden behind a mask of bone – a fearful, inhuman thing with long fangs and dark eye sockets. ‘Kill your grandfather and vanish from existence. Then reappear because you never killed him at all. So back to work. Lots to do. Grandfathers to kill.’
‘What are you –?’
‘And you think those timelines vanish, but they don’t.’ Mae turned her face away, replacing her helmet with a mask – the long avian skull of some vicious carrion crow. It could have been the light, but for a moment she appeared faint, like a drawing someone had tried to rub out. ‘It’s like extinction. When a meteor impact kills everything on Earth, those creatures don’t go anywhere. They fall, and get buried, and passing time crushes them to a line of strata in the ground. Life moves on, ignorant of all the dead under their feet.’
‘Sibling Different and I have seen them,’ the boy said. ‘All the timelines you’ve ended in your long and illustrious career. You come down like a comet, Doctor, and there are many, many skeletons under your feet.’
‘That’s where you got these pieces,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘The moon – it’s just a shell. You’re building a TARDIS from … from pieces of its alternate selves.’ It wasn’t just her signature she could see on the components littered around them. She could see scars from Cybermen blasters, burns from Dalek guns. Damage, from battlefields she knew she had undone. ‘You’ve stitched it together from the shrapnel of its own destruction. From timelines my TARDIS undid.’
Mae – Sibling Different – executed a short, mocking bow. ‘Well, TARDISes don’t have grandfathers. Sibling Same and I had to do the best we could.’
‘Why?’ The Doctor said. It was a weak word to convey the disbelief and horror in her heart, but it was all she could think to ask. ‘Why would you do this?’
‘Because you killed us,’ Sibling Same said, and now he flickered too, warping like a reflection in a broken mirror. ‘You ended the Time War. Changed all of time and space. Did you really think there’d be no loose ends? We’re just outlines, Doctor. Shadows burned into a wall. And even that is fading away.’
‘Unless we change the timeline,’ Different said. ‘Our next run will take us through time, all the way back to the War. History is written by the victors, Doctor. You get to do it all the time. Why shouldn’t we?’
Her lips twisted in a grin beneath the hooked beak of her mask.
‘Paradox victorious.’
‘I’m genuinely impressed,’ the Doctor said, placing each syllable slowly and carefully, like someone defusing a bomb, ‘with just how catastrophically that is not going to work.’ She waved a hand at the great machine surrounding them. ‘Your little practice run blinded a world –’
Sibling Different snorted. ‘Collateral damage. They got off lucky –’
‘Yes,’ the Doctor interrupted. ‘They did. They should be thanking their lucky stars. I’m amazed this thing hasn’t exploded already and taken half the universe with it.’ She stalked towards them, ignoring the rifle in Different’s hands. ‘And even if it doesn’t pull itself apart, even if you manage to enter the Time Vortex with this … ailing, contradictory mess of a ship … I have no idea what would happen if you tried to go back and undo my decision. I genuinely don’t. I don’t have room in my brain to figure it out. Do you remember the War? Do you remember what it was like?’
Sibling Different stuck out her jaw like an insolent child. ‘Yes. I do.’
Was it the Doctor’s imagination? Did she hear … uncertainty?
‘Then you remember it was hell. Whole civilisations vanishing. Timelines crumpling like paper held to a flame. And all that destruction will be a picnic if two meddling idiots decide to go back and start it all over again.’
‘Tough,’ Different snapped. ‘Sibling Same. Activate the machine.’
‘Are you sure?’ the boy said. He definitely sounded uncertain. ‘Just travelling in space nearly used me up. We need more time to –’
‘Now!’
He ran. It took the Doctor a second to recognise that what she had taken for another pile of detritus was in fact a console – a twisted creation of warped pillars and fused-together instrument arrays, as mangled as a Frankenstein heart.
‘Don’t do that,’ the Doctor warned. ‘Don’t –’
Sibling Same pulled a rusting lever, and the world went mad.
The towers above them spasmed, expanding and contracting as if trying to make a fist. Metal charred. Sparks spat. A blinding knot of light bloomed above the console, wrenching itself from side to side as thorns and vines of energy spiked outwards, fighting for purchase on a reality that knew this machine could not exist.
It was horrible to watch. The Doctor’s TARDIS was a living thing – a graceful creature born to dart and dive through the currents of time. This was like watching a sickly animal try to stagger up a hill, falling and rising and falling again. The whole chamber trembled, and the Siblings collapsed against each other, the light catching on their masks and turning them a blinding, hateful white.
‘I told you!’ the Doctor shouted. ‘This machine cannot work. The pieces you’ve assembled know they’re not meant for this timeline –’
Sibling Different flickered out entirely – just a bundle of lines drawn on the air – before resolving again and collapsing. The boy left the console and rushed to her, kneeling by her side.
‘You’re using yourselves up,’ the Doctor said. ‘Using your paradox energy to anchor this machine. To force it to be real. It’s killing you.’
‘Not if we make it work,’ Sibling Same snapped, but the anger drained from his voice as he stared down at Different. A great arc of eye-achingly bright light lashed out from between the towers, scratching a crazed line of destruction across the walls.
The communicator in the Doctor’s pocket buzzed. ‘Doctor? Doctor!’ Interference and anger had turned the Architect’s voice into a staticky bark. ‘We’re detecting a massive energy build-up. The gravitational distortion is a hundred times worse. A fleet is inbound. They have orders to open f–’
‘Oh good,’ the Doctor said. ‘Well. We’ll probably have blown up before then.’ The towers were vibrating with the strain of trying to contain the force that crackled and spat between them. The moon would tear itself apart trying to do what the Siblings were asking of it. The Doctor had seen what happened when a TARDIS exploded. She never wanted to see it again.
‘OK,’ the Doctor said. ‘Yeah. Disassemble a living TARDIS on the brink of exploding before it gets shot out of the sky. Can definitely do that.’ Sincerity Value ten per cent, she added in her head. ‘Sibling Same!’
The boy flinched from her outstretched hand.
‘You coul
d help,’ the Time Lord said. ‘This TARDIS shouldn’t exist. It doesn’t want to exist. Your energy is what’s holding it together. If you let it go, the pieces might snap back to their own timelines. You can undo the machine. Please.’
‘I … I don’t …’
‘Then why call me here?’
Sibling Different jerked up, gasping as if she had just broken the surface of the sea. Her body solidified, and she pushed Same away.
‘We didn’t call you,’ she hissed. ‘Why would we –’
And then the Doctor understood. ‘You didn’t call me here,’ she said. ‘She did.’
The TARDIS. Her TARDIS. Her poor, tortured girl.
The Doctor ran to the console. Sibling Different tried to rise and intercept her, but weakness and the chamber’s shaking sent her spilling across the floor, and Sibling Same went after her. The roiling supernova that was building above the console spasmed and spiked, and beneath the guttural roar of tortured space–time the Doctor could hear it – the sound of a TARDIS in agony. The distress call that had brought her here.
‘I know I’ve changed things,’ the Doctor said, her fingers racing across the controls, searching for something, anything she could do to ease the timeship’s pain. ‘I’ve made choices. I’ve ended wars, and started them, to my shame, and I have made decisions nobody should ever have had to make.’ Her voice shook, and the TARDIS shook with it.
‘But you’ve got it wrong. I don’t do it for myself. I don’t do it to win.’ Another quake shook plumes of sparks down around them. One of the towers came loose with a groaning shriek, swinging like a guillotine on its cables to smash another tower free.
‘I do it because I want there to be another tomorrow, and then another one, and then another one after that. And I know they come with a price. I remember all these battles. All these scars.’ She stroked the console beneath her. ‘I remember all those cries for help. And so does she. I’m sorry for what happened to you, but if you don’t at least try to see past it, there will be so much more pain to come.’
‘No!’ Sibling Different snarled, raising her gun. The Doctor flinched as she fired, but the shot went wild, deflecting from some invisible barrier around the Time Lord. No – not invisible. Materialising. ‘You don’t get to win! You don’t get to just escape again!’
‘There’s no escape,’ the Doctor said, as her own TARDIS began to shimmer into view around her. She had taken her hands away from the controls now, and was just looking up, bathed in the hideously bright light. ‘Not from this. She just wants to be with me. At the end.’
Sibling Different raised her rifle again, but Same grabbed the barrel.
‘We have to let it go,’ he whispered through translucent lips. ‘If we don’t, it’ll kill us and millions of others. Think of the destruction we’ve seen. Do you want to cause more?’
‘If that’s what it takes.’ Sibling Different’s mask had come away, and Same winced as he saw the inky black unswirl of paradox energy beneath. Had they ever had faces? It was becoming harder and harder to remember. ‘My timeline. My victory. Or none at all.’
‘I understand,’ Same said. He could feel the Paradox TARDIS straining against them – every piece they had so laboriously collected trying to pull themselves apart and return to where they were supposed to be.
I’m sorry, he thought, and began to let them go.
‘What are you doing?’ Different snapped. She could feel it too. The true timeline was starting to reassert itself. With a roaring crack, one of the towers dematerialised, pieces folding into themselves – vanishing as they returned to where they were supposed to be.
Second chances, Same thought. Not everybody got them. Not everybody should.
And you were selfish if you tried to take them for yourself.
‘You know, for a while I really believed we could do it,’ he said, withdrawing the last of his energy from the Paradox TARDIS and sending it into his sibling in a crackling vein of light. ‘But that timeline is dead. I won’t see you die with it.’
‘NO!’ Different screamed, as the detonation of uncoiling paradoxes threw them apart. Sibling Same had just enough time to see her land at the Doctor’s feet a heartbeat before the walls of the true TARDIS solidified around them. His last thought, as the towers above faded away, as rubble fell through him to smash on the floor, as the chamber’s roof collapsed, was that he didn’t feel hollow any more.
And then even that was gone.
7
Now
Possibly December, definitely the Shadow Proclamation HQ
When Sibling Different woke, the Doctor was standing over her.
‘Tea?’ the Doctor said.
Different staggered to her feet, clutching for a rifle that wasn’t there.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ the Doctor said, taking a long sip from her own mug. Sibling Different stiffened as she looked around her. She had spent what seemed like her entire life staring at the outside of the TARDIS, coveting it, pillaging its past. Actually being inside it was …
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Really beautiful.’
‘I know,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’d do anything for her.’ She held out a mug and Different took it without thinking. That was when she realised that she was solid. The flickering inconsistency of her form was gone. ‘Sibling Same. He gave the last of himself to stabilise me.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘And, providing you don’t use that energy to delve into dead timelines or build an impossible time machine, it might actually last long enough to give you a normal life.’
They stood in silence for a moment.
‘So,’ the Doctor said. ‘You want the chance to change things. To edit the universe, the way you see fit. So let’s do that.’
Different pulled away her mask, revealing a long, freckled face and an explosion of curls. ‘What do you mean?’
The Doctor pointed at the door. ‘Beyond that door are about fifty praetorians. I don’t know what you did with the real Mae, or if there was a real Mae at all, but you could go back and be her. If you want. Or I can drop you on pretty much any world you want in pretty much whatever century you want. Do you remember who you were before the war?’
Different gave an imperceptible shake of her head.
‘There was a group, in those wild times,’ the Doctor said. ‘They chased paradoxes. Wore masks. I thought most of them had left this universe far behind before the first shots of the war were even fired. Maybe you were one of the fraction who remained. We could go looking for them, if you like.’
‘Why?’ Different snapped. ‘Why would you help me?’ Her eyes were red.
‘Because you’re right,’ the Doctor said. ‘Why should I be the only one who gets to change things? You can choose who you want to be. Take my help or walk through that door. Your choice.’
It took Mae two tries to stand up, scooping the bone mask from the floor. She crossed to the door of the TARDIS in three long strides, ignoring the eyes of the Doctor on her back, and opened the door halfway.
Then she threw the mask away and closed the door behind it.
‘OK,’ Mae said. ‘Where to?’
Canaries
In the small alpine village of Verbier, there is a museum for things that shouldn’t exist.
It doesn’t look like much; just a little house at the end of a long lane, with low eaves and a green door. You mightn’t notice it at all except for the neat little sign in the window. When people think of museums they think of marble floors and pillars and security guards and gift shops, but the world is full of neat little signs in windows, put there by hobbyists with skin wrinkled as walnut shells, to draw you into a room you might wander around for five minutes on holiday and then never think of again.
The Shanghai Museum of Propaganda Posters is cloistered in the basement of an apartment block. The Darwin Twine Ball Museum is just a community centre with a four-metre ball of twine outside. The Bendery Military Museum is a converted Soviet steam train beside a disused st
ation in a country that officially no longer exists.
Any building can be a museum if someone cares enough about the things inside it.
The Verbier Museum of the Impossible is run by Anke Von Grisel. Arthritis has made Anke’s knuckles big as baby turtle shells, and it takes her longer and longer each morning to wrap a tie around itself and fit the knot to her neck. As proprietor and sole employee of the museum, the opening hours are whatever Anke likes, but Anke likes being punctual, and so she unlocks the front door at exactly a quarter to ten each morning, and most days there is at least one curious tourist outside.
This is because of the sign. The sign reads;
VERBIER MUSEUM OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
ESTABLISHED 2044
NO TIME TRAVEL PLEASE
‘Yes, yes,’ she says, by way of welcome. ‘We begin.’
The Museum is a single room at the front of her home. The floor is white pine and the walls are hung with age-faded tapestries in wool and cotton and silk. Twelve exhibits sit on plinths around the room. Anke makes these plinths herself from the native Verbier birch. Word is that Gunther, whose museum two towns over houses a collection of seventeenth-century marionettes, orders his plinths online.
This horrifies Anke. Anke has standards.
‘Now,’ she says carefully, taking her position at the first plinth. There are small indentations worn into the pine floorboards, and the heels of her hiking boots slip into them with a sigh. ‘This is a pipe.’
It is. It’s fifteen centimetres long and entirely ordinary. The only thing remarkable about it is that it has been laid out on a square of gleaming white silk. All the exhibits are. Anke’s standards are exact.
‘Polyvinyl chloride,’ Anke explains. ‘Nothing exciting. Made in the Eighties. Never fitted or used.’
Anke has a very particular way of speaking. Clipped. Careful. Like everything she says is taken from a cue card, and there are only so many words that will fit.