by Adam Roberts
‘We’ll contact them,’ the Dr said. ‘Recruit them . . . as reinforcements.’
‘Recruit them how?’ I boggled.
‘Tell them the truth! They can send people aboard this craft. It looks like an affluent ship: they’ll surely have gold. That’s what we need to defeat the Cydermen - gold.’
‘So,’ I summarised. ‘You’re suggesting we radio a strange ship, tell them that we’re the only survivors aboard a secret Naval experiment that nobody has ever heard of, and that they must come aboard with all their gold to help us fight a race of implacable cyborg creatures who otherwise will conquer the Earth?’
‘Yes!’
‘There’s the chance,’ I said, ‘—and I appreciate that it’s only a chance - that they might not believe us.’
‘The future of the whole world is at stake! They must help!’
‘The radio,’ said Linn, ‘is broken, I’m afraid.’
The Dr and I looked at the radio. It was a charred mass of twisted metal and burnt wood.
‘There’s nothing for it,’ cried the Dr, grabbing the ship-steering-wheel-y-thing and hauling it as far to starboard as it would go. Or to port. I’ve never, if I’m being honest, been quite sure which is which when it comes to those two directions.
‘Doctor! What are you doing!’
‘It’s our only chance. I’ll pull this ship across their bows. Bump into them, if necessary, to attract their attention. ’
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘And by sure I mean, absolutely insane?’
‘Certainly not,’ said the Dr. ‘Drastic measures are called for. The fate of the whole world is in the balance.’
We all three of us peered through the forward viewing hatch.
‘We seem to be powering directly towards the ship now,’ said Linn.
‘So we do,’ agreed the Dr. ‘Well, the rudder is hard down, as far as it will go. I suspect that we’ll keep turning, and pass in front of their bows soon.’
We stared anxiously forward.
‘We seem,’ said Linn again, ‘to be heading straight for them still.’
‘Hmm,’ said the Dr. ‘That does seem to be the case.’
‘Doctor . . .’ I said, increasingly alarmed. From behind us the ooo aur ! ooo aur ! chanting was becoming ever-louder.
‘This Habbakuk-type ship seems to be much less manoeuvrable, ’ said the Dr, in a worried voice, ‘than I had anticipated. Perhaps we should . . .’ and he seized hold of the steery-wheely-circle again. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘This seems to be . . . more . . . sort of . . .uh! uh!’—he was heaving with all his might—‘stuck,’ he concluded.
We were almost upon the hapless other ship.
‘Watch out!’ cried Linn. But it was no use.
With a massive shuddering cacophonous crunch we collided with the mystery ship, careering into its side in a glancing but nevertheless catastrophic blow. I was knocked from my feet and slipped about in the cold pools of the bridge floor. The whole structure trembled and shook, and a rain of ice chunks plummeted from the ceiling.
The Dr was supporting himself by clinging onto the big steering wheel. I hauled myself to my feet hand over hand on one of the consoles, barely keeping upright as the bridge shimmied and shook. Straight ahead I saw the black flank of the other craft sliding past us, close enough to touch.
And then the shuddering stopped, and we were floating free again.
Linn screamed, pointing to the door.
Behind us the Cydermen were crowding in at the entrance to the bridge. ‘Oo Aur !’ they bellowed, levelling their guns at us.
‘We’re doomed!’ cried the Dr. ‘Hide!’
Then everything happened very quickly. The three of us jumped behind the steering column. The leading Cyderman fired a volley from his thumb, and it thudded into the floor of the bridge a few metres in front of us, exploding in a violent burst that turned the pools of water to steam, and sent shards and shrapnel of ice spraying everywhere. Then there was a moment’s silence, just enough to hear a deep, distant groan pass through the fabric of the ship, a vast deep sound like a gigantic beast moaning in pain. Then - like a giant diamond crystal struck in exactly the right place by the jeweller’s hammer - the mighty craft began to split. Jarred and sheared by the impact with the mystery ocean liner, this explosion (to the front of and along the dead centre of the craft) proved the tipping point. A crack spread the length of the bridge. In moments it widened, gaping and parting for all the world like a huge grin. ‘Hold on!’ shouted the Dr as the ice groaned and heaved. We clung together, and felt the angle of the bridge floor tip as the left side separated from the right. The oo-aurs of the Cydermen had taken on alarmed tones, and then everything was blotted out by a massive crumbling roaring symphony of structural collapse.
The floor rocked left, tipped right, rocked left again and finally turned through ninety degrees, sloughing us all off. We fell into the blackness of night, plummeting through cold air until we struck the icy black water with a swallowing splash of cold agony. The water felt like it was cutting all parts of my body at once. It was bitterly and agonizing cold.
Momentarily we were submerged, and I felt my chest constrict. Then we broke the surface, still all clinging together, gasping and crying.
I blinked the seawater from my eyes, and tried to look around. The two portions of the Icetanic were falling away from us on either side, rotating slowly in the choppy water as they searched for their new points of flotational equilibrium. The swell from this motion buoyed us up. The twin halves of the ship slid and rolled steadily away from us.
‘The cold!’ cried Linn. ‘The water is so cold !’
Then I saw the Cydermen. They were tumbling from the slippery ice, shelled out of the internal chambers and caverns of the mighty ice-structure like peas from a great white pod. The distant calls of ‘Ooo! Aur!’ were cut short with gloop! and glurg! noises, and then they disappeared.
They were all falling into the freezing waters and sinking into its depths.
‘What,’ I gasped, through chattering teeth, ‘what will happen to them?’
The Dr was treading water by kicking his legs in froggy motions. ‘Straight to the bottom,’ he said, grimly.
‘Will they drown?’
‘Dear me no,’ said the Dr. ‘They’re far too toughly designed to drown.’
‘Well - will the pressure down there kill them?’
‘Certainly not. They’ll gather themselves and start walking - slowly but surely - for the shore.’
‘Then the Earth is doomed!’ I moaned. ‘We have failed!’
‘Well,’ said the Dr, kicking more furiously as the swell dipped us all down, ‘I don’t think so. They’ll all be dead long before they reach the shore, you see.’
‘But how?’ I gasped.
‘The sea water of course,’ snapped the Dr. ‘It’ll poison them. They’ll be walking through a fatal medium.’
‘I thought you said that only gold could kill them?’
‘That’s quite right. There’s a surprisingly large amount of gold dissolved in the ocean, you know. Approaching two milligrams per tonne. And if that doesn’t sound like a lot, then consider how many tonnes of seawater there are in the world . . . something like one and a third billion cubic kilometres of the stuff. The Cydermen will have to march through billions of tonnes of the stuff, and all that gold will accumulate in their chest-grills. They’re doomed.’
‘That’s good news,’ I said. Actually what I said was ththththats gg ggg ggood n-news attshOOO!. But I feel sure the Dr and Linn understood me.
‘What about the ship we hit?’ asked Linn.
The swell carried us up, and we caught a glimpse of the mystery ship over the top of the still slowly tumbling right-side half of the Icetanic. It was sailing away, apparently unharmed. ‘Looks alright, don’t you think?’ said the Dr.
‘I suppose so. But what about us?’
‘I think we need to find the . . . ah there we go - there she is: the TARDY!’
&nb
sp; ‘Can the TARDY float?’ I asked, shiveringly. I was thinking how very heavy it must be.
‘When you consider the relationship between the compact external shape of the thing, and the amount of air inside the structure,’ said the Dr, ‘the TARDY may well be the most buoyant object in the history of the universe.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it like that,’ I said.
‘Come on.’
We broke apart, and swam, our limbs aching with the ferocity of the cold, towards a rectangular shape. The Dr was right: it was so buoyant, in fact, that it was in effect standing on top of the water. We opened the door and crawled up onto the floor inside, shivering and soaking but alive.
It was a relief beyond words to shut the door on that freezing environment.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ said the Dr, pulling towels from the central console and passing them around. ‘I do believe we’ve done what we came to do . . . averted catastrophe once again.’
PROLOGUE
Time.
Have you ever really thought about it? Neither had I, until I met the Dr.
What is time? Whither time? Whence? Thither or hence? Who knows? And whom? And why does Whom know?
What?
Hold up: go back a mo. Start again.
Let us define time. Time is the difference between a hot cup of coffee and a cold cup of coffee. It is the difference between a cold beer on a hot day, and a warm beer on a hot day. It turns young to old, and via the mystery of parturition it turns old into young. It’s what makes yesterday different to today: it’s the difference, in other words, between yester and to. Since to is the opposite of fro, it follows that yester and fro are the same thing. Yesterfro. What am I talking about?
Time will tell.
Time began at the beginning. This is why, strictly speaking, we should call it the beganning.
Time is a dimension.
But (and pay close attention, for this bit is really really important) - even though it is a dimension, Time is not space. This is because one day in time you will die. That’s coming closer and closer, I’m sorry to say. You can’t avoid it by moving around in space. You can’t take three steps to the left and watch your death slide past you, shaking its fist in impotent rage like a bobsleigh-man who’s lost control of the steering. It doesn’t work like that. Time is a two-dimensional, not a three-dimensional, thing. You can move along it from before to after, and if you’re clever enough you can move from after to before. But you can’t go sideways in time.
On the other hand, you can go sideways in space. I’ll prove it
There!
What do we deduce from this? That spacetime, the theory advanced by Albert Einstein, is erroneously mistaken. You see, time is a different sort of thing from space. This is a really important point in the story I’m about to tell. I’d like you to bear it in mind, if you can.
Who am I?
My name is Prose Tailor. I tailor prose, I cut it to shape, fit it together. This prose you’re reading now is my work. I was a companion of the Dr. The Dr - that’s right. Him. I was there when he uncovered the essential mystery at the heart of the cosmos, the answer to the big question. I saw with my own eyes the solution.
You are about to read my story.
The Dr belonged to that ancient race of beings called the Time Gentlemen. Alone of all the myriad races of the galaxy these austere and wise beings possessed a degree of mastery over time. Not a master’s degree, neither, but a PhD, and sometimes even postdoctoral qualifications. The most important time of my life was spent in the company of one of these Time Gentlemen, known as The Dr.
It is the duty of the Time Gentlemen to protect the grammar of time.
You didn’t realise that time has a grammar? Ah, you deluded and ignorant fool. To master time, you need to understand the difference between a time noun and a time verb, a time subject and a time object. You need to understand tense and mood without getting tense or moody. Time is things happening in a particular order, according to a particular system of rules. Start breaking those rules and soon the whole fabric of time would unravel. The morrow would not longer follow the day; the day would not longer follow the yester. The yes. I mean yesterday. With the result that yesterday might come after tomorrow, and everybody would get very confused. The processes of life would break down; thought itself would become meandering and untenable.
‘Time is story ,’ the Dr said to me once. ‘It’s a narrative. If the narrative gets all tangled up, then the story becomes impossible to follow. That’s why the Time Gentlemen are so important. Because we preserve the proper line of the story.’
Here is a story. A child is born on Earth of the twenty-third century. And who is this child?
It’s me, of course.
I grew to adulthood in You-’K?, a small country that is part of the continent of You-Rapper !, itself merely a component of the World Wide Federation of Hip Humanity, our glorious global government. After school I went to the Prose College where I learned to shape, snip and tailor prose. After my graduation I worked as a prose tailor, out of a little shop in the Reefer Barn (the main mall for all You-Rapper’s Reefer needs). It was tough work. Few people in You-’K? have any use for prose. Of course, state regulation requires every citizen to possess a dozen personalised lyrics by the age of majority, and Rap Tailors do good business. But I never had the knack for rap. I was rap-knack-less. My parents were ashamed to see me follow the ignominious path of the Prose Tailor, writing little pieces of legalese, or perhaps the liner notes for other people’s albums. I barely earned a living: money was always tight, and I never had enough for the little luxuries that make existence bearable. Worst of all I never had enough cash to be able to travel . . . to voyage to far countries, as I dreamed of doing! To visit the home of our Global religion, the great nation of You-Say!, the holy land, where the power of sayin’ was first mooted - where it was first determined that every ordinary person, no matter how inarticulate, ugly or stoopid, could have their say. But I would never be able to see that exotic land nor travel to the Progrok paradise of Rush?Yeah!, nor the teetering, foul-mouthed antipodian continent of ‘Oz’ - Ausbourneia.
My life was trapped in narrow grooves. Waking, working, eating, sleeping.
And then one day I answered an advertisement for assistant-stroke-companion to a Time Gentleman, and everything about my life changed.
My life, up until that moment, had been empty. I shuffled to work and shuffled home alone at the end of the day. My days were without colour; my life was as hopeless as a soap-on-a-rope that has lost its soap and is only rope thereby becoming hopeless as soap in the shower. You can’t wash yourself in rope, after all. I was ropey.
As you can see from this, I’ve never been a very good prose tailor.
Until I joined the Dr and his apprentice, Linnaeus Trout. The three of us together had a series of extraordinary adventures. And ultimately I was with him when he discovered the secret at the heart of time; and fate - in the shape of a malign ET and his Dr-killing weapon - forced us apart.
This is my story.
Chapter Seven
THE DR RE-UN-DEGENERATES
But although I was anxious that the Dr was injured, perhaps fatally, in fact things took a much stranger path. Not to put too fine a point on it: I was privileged to witness one of the Dr’s ‘re-new-generative episodes’. You see, unlike most other life-forms the Time Gentlemen do not die. At least, they don’t die in the normal course of things. Instead their bodies ‘re-un-degenerate’. One ‘incarnation’, or ‘iteration’, or ‘actor playing’ the Dr passes away, and an entirely new one takes its place. I know! It’s almost too incredible. It’s almost beyond belief. But there you go.
I watched as the Dr fell to the floor, although not so carelessly as he was likely actually to injure himself. He lay there, and his face went all - fuzzy. I can’t think of a better way of describing it. For a moment it looked as though he possessed two faces, but then his features settled into a new configuration.
His hair took on the lifeless, shaggy appearance of a bad wig, and then it too seemed to disappear revealing a short crew cut. The Dr had changed into a tall, bony man with a large nose.
He sat up. ‘Ey-oop,’ he declared.
‘Doctor . . ..?’ I hazarded.
‘’Appen Taylor! Ey-oop Linn!’ he said, clambering to his feet. ‘Oo I say!’
‘Doctor! You’re alright!’
He nodded, smiled, and then a look of concern crossed his face. He burped, noisily. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I do apologise.’ Again he belched. A sour smell of eggnog became palpable in the air of the TARDY. ‘You have to understand,’ said the Dr, embarrassed, ‘that the process of re-un-degeneration carries with it some—’ He burped again.
‘Some?
‘Some difficulties. My body has changed, you see.’
‘Doctor what’s happened?’ I cried. ‘I was sure you’d died !’
‘No, no. Almost impossible to kill me. Instead of regular death, my body re-un-degenerates. What this means is that all the cells that make up my body change. Anything imprinted with my DNA becomes part of a different body.’
‘But your DNA . . . it’s not human . . .’ I said, trying to grasp the enormity of what I had witnessed.
‘Of course not,’ said the Dr. ‘It’s Time Gentlemen DNA. But it’s there, in every cell, and during the process of re-new-generation it undergoes a sort of shimmy, or cataleptic shudder, and it marks out a new form for the body. But, you see, not everything in my body contains my DNA. That’s just as true of me as it is of you.’
‘Really? You mean there are cells in my body that don’t even contain my DNA?’ asked Linn.
‘Of course,’ said the Dr, his skin acquiring a rather green tinge. ‘For instance, your gut flora. Now, you need your gut flora to digest your food. It’s a thoroughly necessary thing. But the bacteria out of which one’s gut flora are composed carry their own, independent DNA. They are fine-tuned to existing in the set up of their host’s body, and when that body radically changes they ... don’t like it. Stomach-upsets, diarrhoea and nausea are the least of the symptoms.’