by Dan Abnett
One day Pierre looked up from his sextant, and said that they must nearly be there. ‘Below us, gentlemen, is the North Pole. What do you think, Doctor?’ But the Doctor just looked at him grimly.
‘How can you tell?’ asked Martha. ‘We can’t even see land.’
‘We’ve been travelling at a steady rate of twenty knots these past two months. Always on the same course, the winds have been constant.’
‘Wait a moment,’ said Martha. ‘These past months? How long do you think we’ve been travelling for?’
Pierre frowned. ‘Four, maybe five months. What’s your estimate?’
Martha felt like laughing. ‘That’s ridiculous. It can’t be more than a fortnight.’
‘What do you think, Doctor?’ asked Pierre again.
Martha looked at her old friend. ‘Yes, Doctor, how long have we been doing this?’
The Doctor licked his lips. Spoke quietly. ‘It’s been years. Years and years, I lost count. So many… I’ve tried to shield you from the worst of it, took so much concentration. I’m sorry.’
His companions looked dumbly at him.
‘Entire lifetimes, crouching here in a basket. And yet,’ he said, and took out his sonic screwdriver. Martha had never been so pleased to see something so safe, so familiar. The Doctor pointed it over the side of the balloon, aimed downwards. A blue light pierced through the white, it lost none of its intensity as it burned ever downwards, illuminating the way. And hundreds of feet below them… shapes to make out… yes! Martha could see the snow. And the ice. And the hampers of food they had jettisoned.
‘And yet,’ continued the Doctor, ‘it’s been no time at all.’
‘They’re not even frozen over,’ said Pierre, hushed. ‘They’d have frozen over in minutes.’ He looked up at the Doctor, and his face was suddenly livid, and Martha thought he might actually hit him. ‘It’s impossible! That’s the North Pole below us! It has to be. And I shall write as much in my journal!’
‘Your journal is nothing but lies.’ But Pierre stomped over to the book anyway, sat down, and picked up his pen.
‘What is it, Doctor?’ asked Martha.
‘It distorts time,’ said the Doctor. ‘Running the same seconds back over and over. We’re literally frozen in them. The perfect larder. Where the meat stays fresh and never runs out.’
Pierre couldn’t speak. He tried, but the words just didn’t come out, his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. So he had to pass his journal to the Doctor dumbly. The Doctor looked inside. All the pages were filled. They’d been filled many times over, one diary entry over another over another, until all the words were illegible, a mess of black ink.
‘I don’t think this is your first expedition to the North Pole,’ said the Doctor. He handed the journal back to Pierre, who dropped it listlessly to the floor. ‘Let’s find out.’ He raised the sonic screwdriver high and, as he pushed down just once, there was the smallest of beeps – and the giant gas balloon above them popped open. There was a whoosh of hydrogen into the arctic sky, so dense that Martha could actually see it, and then the silk covers that had kept them afloat fell away and were lost in the white. Martha steeled herself for the fall, the inevitable crash upon the ice below – but, ridiculously, they just hung there in mid-air. She looked down, but the ground just sat there, out of reach, stubbornly refusing to obey the laws of physics. And then she looked up.
She’d not been able to look upwards for so long. The balloon had been her sky, it had blocked out everything else above them. And now she could do nothing but gawp. The Doctor and Pierre were already doing the same.
They were not alone.
Balloons. At first Martha thought there was a dozen of them, and that was impossible enough – but then she saw there was a layer above that, and the layers kept going on and on – there were hundreds of balloons, maybe thousands, a whole flotilla of them blotting out the sky. And that wasn’t the strangest thing of all.
‘They’re my balloon,’ said Pierre. ‘The same insignia, the same design…’ And there he stopped, because he didn’t dare carry on, he knew if he said it aloud his mind might crack – but the same Pierre too, standing at the edge of each basket, flanked always by two different crewmembers.
‘What did I do?’ he heard himself ask.
‘What’s been done to you,’ corrected the Doctor. ‘It’s caught you in a loop. Each time you set out with companions, and each time it sends you back to the beginning for new ones. The same polar expedition over and over, always doomed to failure.’
‘But why?’ asked Martha. ‘What possible reason could it have to do that?’
‘All it can do is eat,’ said the Doctor. ‘That’s all. And so it’s everything humanity isn’t. Because you all have aspirations, desires, the urge to reach out and be something greater than you are. And that’s what it feeds on. Human ambition. The very thing that makes you think or feel. It’s obscene.’ He turned to Pierre. ‘It’s reached into your very dreams, made you want to be an explorer, made you hunger to come here again and again.’
Pierre’s face was an agony. ‘Are you saying that all that desire I had to explore… to add to the sum of human knowledge… it wasn’t even mine in the first place?’
The Doctor said nothing, because he had no answer to give.
Pierre wobbled on his feet, he looked as if he might faint, he grabbed hold of the edge of the basket to steady himself. And then he gripped it harder, his knuckles flared, and he shouted out into the frozen wastes.
‘I wanted to be somebody special…’ The ice bit at his face and made his eyes water. ‘Come to me,’ he said. ‘Come to me right now, and tell me I’m not to my face.’
The Pierre Bruyère in the balloon above tilted its head in what looked like consideration. Then it shrugged. It sat itself upon the edge of the basket, and swinging its legs over the side, lowered itself down. Soon it was hanging there only by his fingernails, some nine metres above the real Pierre Bruyère’s head. It looked downwards, seemed to tut in irritation to see how far it still had to go. And then the fingernails grew, they stretched out like elastic, only it wasn’t elastic, it was ice, they’d become ten long icicles and Pierre was dropping gently into the basket beside them.
‘How much of me is really me?’ one Pierre asked the other bravely. ‘Could I ever have been a great man at all?’ His counterpart was speckled with frost like icing sugar, his hair frozen to his head, his teeth chattering, his eyes hard flint. ‘I’m so cold,’ this Pierre said, almost apologetically, and with something like tenderness brought his hands up to the other’s cheeks, and drained the life out of him.
‘My turn, I think,’ said the Doctor. And the Pierre Bruyère monster turned away from the frozen corpse he had created.
‘I’ve felt you buzzing away around my dreams. You want to know what’s inside, don’t you? You want to know my hopes and desires, where I’ve explored.’ He stepped closer; the ice cold of Pierre’s face didn’t even change expression. ‘I’ve navigated the North West Passage, stepped on the moon, been to Mars, Venus, planets you’ll need three tongues to pronounce. I’ve sipped tea on the rim of burning constellations that were lost millennia ago. And I’m not done yet. I’m not done yet. So, if you want to feast, you’d better be hungry.’ And he didn’t wait, he grabbed hold of Pierre’s hands, drove them into his cheeks, and held tight.
The white darkened. Turned red. Turned purple like a bruise. ‘Can you feel it?’ gasped the Doctor. ‘All those dreams you’ll never know. That you’ll never understand.’ And he cried out. ‘Martha, I made a mistake. I thought I could weaken it, could fill it to bursting. But it’s so cold, and it’s so hungry.’
And Martha didn’t hesitate, she put her own hands upon the Doctor’s cheeks too. She felt how cold they were, and she was so warm against them, and she pushed harder until she could feel she’d reached the Doctor’s warmth too, she knew it must be deep inside somewhere.
‘And I’ve been to the moon too,’ she spat i
n Pierre’s face. ‘I’ve not sipped tea at half so many constellations, but I’ve sipped at a good few. But that was never my dream. I’m not an explorer. I just wanted to put people back together again.’
There they stood, the Doctor and Martha, clasped together, embracing the monster. And with a dull crump, the sound of a footfall in heavy snow, time unfroze, flung backwards, and the wounded sky burst like a berry.
And one day Martha did visit the North Pole.
‘We never did get there, did we?’ asked the Doctor. ‘What with everything else going on. Well, soon fix that!’ He set the controls, gave the pump a particularly vigorous workout, and a minute later he opened the doors. ‘Bit parky out there,’ he said. ‘Won’t stay for long.’
Martha stepped out into the snow. She hugged herself against the cold. She looked at the white, stretching out in all directions.
‘It’s just a place,’ she said at last.
‘Just a place,’ the Doctor agreed. ‘Sometimes the destination isn’t half as interesting as the ambition to get there.’ He pointed at where she’d left footprints. ‘Look at that. It’s 1890, give or take a year or two. You’re the first person to have stood at the North Pole. Martha Jones, pioneer!’
She laughed.
‘Come on,’ he said. And before they left, he smeared away their prints carefully. ‘Don’t want to spoil it for anyone else. Let’s go and get something to warm us up.’
He took the TARDIS to exactly the same place, a mere two hundred years later. The North Pole Experience was an interactive museum, with exhibits that the children could play with, and a gift shop filled with ‘I’ve Been to the North Pole’ T-shirts and clockwork penguins.
‘Still don’t have penguins in the Arctic,’ said the Doctor.
He bought them both overpriced coffees in the café, found them a nice table in the observation lounge, and they looked out the plastic windows at what had been the most isolated place in the world.
And he told her what he dreamed. How, on his planet, the maps never said ‘Here Be Dragons’. Because his people had explored the universe, they’d been everywhere and everywhen. At one moment there they’d been, charting the stars, and the next, it was all over. That was time travel for you. When he’d been a child, the Doctor had wanted to be an explorer. But there was nowhere left to discover. They told him he shouldn’t leave home, what was the point? But he’d found a point. He’d found a point. And whenever he forgot it, he’d close his eyes, he’d dream again, and there it would be.
Pierre Bruyère never got to visit the North Pole, of course. When he was 6 years old he complained to his parents, ‘I never dream of anything. When I sleep, nothing happens.’ Everybody else dreamed, what was wrong with him?
His parents took him to a doctor. ‘Dreams are a nuisance,’ he was told gruffly. ‘You’re better off without them.’ Privately the doctor was annoyed that he’d been bothered by something so trivial. He’s the son of a baker, he told himself. What great things was he ever going to dream about?
So Pierre worked in his parents’ shop. He never smiled.
‘Put a bit of love into it,’ his mother advised him gently, ‘that’s what I do.’
But Pierre couldn’t see what there was to love about croissants and baguettes and Belgian buns that would never even see Belgium, they’d never explore as far as even that.
One day Pierre made a pastry. He sprinkled on the icing sugar. He looked it over. Needs more sugar, he said to himself. He poured on another layer, then another. The little flecks of white covered the bread, covered the counter, his hands were speckled with white. After he’d used three entire bags of icing sugar, and drowned the pastry completely, he wondered why he’d done that.
But that night he began to dream again. Just flashes of white, little glimpses of it, and what he could be. And he began to smile at work, to look forward to the rest at day’s end. Once in a while he’d feel inspired to cover pastries so thick with cream you’d think that it had been snowing. And sometimes he’d make buns in the shape of balloons, so light and fluffy you could almost have sworn they could rise up to float in the air.
Her nerves were frayed and her exhaustion was fathomless, but Martha was quietly pleased to discover that her story had hit a nerve.
‘They all want another, tonight,’ Hito told her through the mesh.
‘I don’t know, Hito…’
‘Oh, please, Martha.’
‘I’m so tired,’ Martha groaned.
‘We’re all tired,’ said Tokami.
‘Your story’s already spreading though Aka,’ said Hito.
‘All right, all right,’ Martha said, sitting up on her bunk. ‘I’ll tell another story tonight, but you have to promise me you’ll bring workers in from other sections. I need to get the stories to spread and sink in, you understand?’
‘Yes, Martha,’ said Hito.
Martha lay back on her metal cot again, hoping to grab another half-hour’s sleep. She realised there was someone standing in the doorway of her cage. She looked up.
A big man with a scarred face was looking down at her from the doorway. It was the same scar-faced man who had chased her across Europe and the Middle East.
Martha gasped and scrambled back into the corner of her cage.
‘Martha? What’s the matter?’ asked Tokami through the cage wall.
‘It’s him. It’s him!’ Martha hissed.
‘Hello, Martha Jones,’ said Griffin. ‘We meet at last.’
Griffin sniffed, folded his arms, and leaned casually against the door frame.
Martha didn’t move.
‘I heard you were here, so I thought I’d introduce myself,’ Griffin said. ‘The situation being so… ironic.’
Martha didn’t answer. She stared at him, and past him, into the walkway. Where were his men? Where were the armed UCF squaddies to back him up and drag her away?
She swallowed. The scar-faced man was alone. Was he intending to simply finish her himself, then and there?
‘Don’t you think it’s ironic?’ he asked. Martha didn’t reply. The man nodded to himself. ‘I had a hunch you might not be particularly chatty with me.’
‘You spent six months pursuing me across the face of the planet,’ Martha said quietly. ‘You’ve tried to kill me. What do you expect?’
‘Fair point,’ the man replied. ‘My name’s Griffin, by the way.’ He showed her his UCF identity card. ‘What happened to your fancy perception filter?’ he asked.
She said nothing.
‘You lose it, or did it break down?’
She remained silent.
He shrugged.
‘I’m only making conversation,’ he said.
‘Just get it over with,’ said Martha.
Griffin stared at her. ‘You think… you think I’ve come to kill you or something?’
‘Or drag me off to the Master,’ she said.
‘If only,’ Griffin snorted. ‘Sorry, Martha Jones, I thought you’d realised.’
‘Realised what?’
Griffin showed her his colour-coded wristband. ‘I’m a prisoner too, just like you,’ he said.
Martha stared at him. ‘What are you talking about?’
Griffin sat down on the far end of her cot. ‘I’m a prisoner. A labour slave. A raid patrol picked me up and brought me in a few days ago.’
‘Stop it,’ said Martha.
‘Stop what?’
‘This is some kind of trick. A ruse to wrong-foot me. You want information or something.’
‘No. Honestly, no.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Martha. ‘You’re just trying to get information out of me. You’d have just shot me or extracted me to the Valiant otherwise.’
‘I’m telling the truth, woman,’ said Griffin.
‘Rubbish! You’re UCF! You’ve got the credentials to prove it—’
‘Yeah,’ mused Griffin, looking at his ID, ‘the guards here don’t seem very impressed by that.’
�
�Why would the UCF lock up one of their own?’
‘It’s a puzzle, all right. I can tell you, I was surprised,’ said Griffin. ‘There’s only one explanation I can think of.’
‘And what’s that?’ asked Martha.
‘The UCF isn’t running this place. The guards might wear the uniform, but they don’t answer to the Master. Someone else is in charge here.’
It was another two shifts before she saw Griffin again. He found her waiting in a post-shift food line, queuing for a ration of noodle soup.
‘Thought any more about what I said?’ Griffin asked.
Martha ignored him.
‘Oh, stop it with the cold-shoulder treatment, Jones. Really, it’s getting old. I understand that we’re never going to be friends, and we have a history on the outside. But in here, in Aka, we’re just another couple of lost souls. And something’s going on here.’
‘I don’t know what you expect me to say or do,’ Martha replied.
‘Listen to me for five minutes,’ he suggested.
‘For the last six months,’ Griffin said, ‘all I’ve wanted to do is catch you. There was a lot riding on it: big promotions, the favour of Our Master.’
‘Yours maybe, not mine.’
Griffin shrugged. ‘Anyway, things have changed. Right now, I personally don’t care what happens to you. I just want to get out of here alive. And I reckon being trapped in here is kind of messing up your mission too.’
Martha looked at him, mocking.
‘What? So we team up and escape? Is that what you’re suggesting?’ she asked.
‘You put it like that, it sounds stupid,’ said Griffin, ‘but I reckon my chances of getting out of Aka will be a whole lot better with you on board.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re the famous Martha Jones, and for Our Master to want you quite so badly, you must be a serious operator.’
They were sitting in her cage and eating their meagre food.
‘Go on, then,’ Martha said. ‘Five minutes.’
‘There’s something going on here. Our Master doesn’t—’