‘Much, much larger. The size of this room.’
The Doctor had reached the desk. He glanced down at the tray with his stuff in and, as nonchalantly as he could, confirmed the TARDIS key was there.
‘Your scientific credentials are certainly impressive,’
the man said, indicating the wallet containing the psychic paper. ‘My name is Jeffip.’
‘Professor Jeffip?’
‘The children call me that, yes.’
‘I’m the Doctor.’
‘Yes. So Alsa’s told us.’ He raised his left hand, clearly the local greeting.
‘Alsa…’ Just hearing the name made the Doctor’s head throb more.
‘She and Gar brought you here.’
‘She’s a smart child.’ The Doctor said. He’d pulled his shirt from its hanger and was slipping it back on.
‘Yes. One of mine, I think. She’s smart and angry. Not a terribly appealing combination.’
‘No. So where’s Alsa now?’
‘She’s not yet risen.’
‘Teenagers, eh?’
‘She and Gar were very tired. They brought you a long way in a wheelbarrow.’
‘Did they? Did they? A wheelbarrow. Fancy that.’ The Doctor whistled as he buttoned up his jacket.
‘Alsa couldn’t begin to explain where you had come from.’
‘You’ve already gathered that I’m not from Arcopolis?’
the Doctor ventured.
‘The two hearts and pockets full of items which aren’t from this planet gave it away,’ Jeffip confirmed, reaching for a walking stick made from a sawn-off piece of aluminium pole. ‘Would you like some breakfast?’
Jeffip’s laboratory was in just one of about a dozen similar structures of various sizes and shapes. This settlement was a shanty town, albeit a rather posh one. It had been laid out in a large flat expanse of parkland at the heart of the city. It reminded the Doctor a little of Hooverville.
There were a lot of children around. A lot of them. A remarkable number. Like a dozen school trips had shown up at the same time. They were all under 10, as best he could make out. The only adult the Doctor had seen so far was Jeffip.
The pathways were festooned in bunting, paper lanterns and sculptures made of scrap metal and bits of dead robots. Anything to brighten up the place.
‘Are you all right, Doctor?’
The Doctor turned to Jeffip. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’
‘You look worried those robots are going to come back to life.’
The Doctor tried to sound casual. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘I wish they would. We could do with the help.’
They passed the comm mast, which stood in the middle of the settlement like a totem pole. Everyone was stopping or at least looking up as they passed. The Doctor smiled a lot, tried to look friendly.
‘We always knew there must be extraterrestrial civilisations,’ Jeffip was saying. ‘We never made contact with any. Until the Fortress appeared. And now you, of course. How’s the head?’
‘It feels like something made contact with it,’ the Doctor said lightly.
Jeffip nodded, smiling. ‘I have many questions, of course. A few practical ones. You’re here alone? Why have you come to Arcopolis? How did you know we were here and learn our language? Is that your natural form?’
‘What’s wrong with my form?’
‘Oh, nothing. Much. It’s just that it so closely resembles our own. I wondered if you’d adopted it to blend in. Like a chameleon.’
‘I’m from a world that was almost identical to this one.
Same size, so same gravity. Same atmosphere, just about.
Orange sky, not green. I like your sky, by the way. Don’t see many green ones. Our superficial physical similarity is down to natural selection and coincidence. The same patterns repeat themselves across the universe. I’m here alone. I travel, and I’ve learned millions of languages on my travels. Never bothered with Welsh – didn’t think I’d ever need it. Just goes to show.’
‘Was?’
‘I’m sorry?’ The Doctor had just looked down and noticed his shoelaces were undone.
‘“A world that was”. Past tense.’
‘You’re a very perceptive man, Professor Jeffip.’ The Doctor was bending down, tying his laces.
‘What do you know about this world, Doctor?’
‘Well…’ the Doctor began, ‘I know that I saw a boy killed yesterday. Touched by a ghost. I tried to save him, but couldn’t. I’m sorry.’
Jeffip grunted. ‘A shame. But at least it wasn’t a girl.’
The Doctor let that remark go for the moment.
They were approaching running water – the Doctor could hear it. They passed through the gap between two tents and then they were on the paved bank of a very narrow, fast-flowing river. Upstream, there was a large waterwheel, fixed to the side of a brick building that had probably once only been ornamental. From the crashing and clattering coming from inside, the Doctor guessed the wheel was powering a drive shaft that, in turn, must have been running things like a small milling wheel, a loom and a lathe. Jeffip confirmed that and added that there wasn’t room in there for much industry. Its main purpose was to irrigate the fields.
‘You don’t generate electricity?’
‘Not yet. We’ve had other priorities.’
Set a little way from the water was a long picnic-style bench. There were three women there: a blonde, a redhead and a brunette; all of them looked around 40, perhaps a little younger. They wore similar outfits, almost like thick saris, all of them patched and mended. They were attending to a cloud of children, all under five, all with bottles of juice. Two of the women were at an advanced stage of pregnancy.
‘Ladies,’ said the Doctor, smiling, sitting down.
The children were, despite the women’s best efforts, something of a law unto themselves.
‘These aren’t all yours, are they?’ the Doctor joked.
‘Who else’s would they be?’ one of them asked, too confused to be offended.
The Doctor, at the second attempt, managed to count seventeen young children. It was mathematically possible, he supposed.
Jeffip was dishing out a couple of bowls of soup from a large stone pot. It was watery, but looked like lemongrass and mushroom. When the Doctor tried it, it tasted surprisingly strong.
‘I’m the Doctor, by the way,’ the Doctor said to the one who didn’t look pregnant, the one with blonde hair.
‘Dela.’ She raised her left hand, then returned her attention to wiping the mouth of a 2-year-old. The children all knew to drink up their soup and eat their mushrooms.
‘How many children do you have? If you don’t mind me asking?’
‘Sixteen,’ Dela told him, too busy to look up. ‘I’m between at the moment.’
‘Hard work,’ the Doctor suggested.
Dela turned her head and raised an eyebrow.
‘You knew that already,’ the Doctor said.
‘I knew that already,’ she confirmed, giving him a nice smile.
‘We have to repopulate.’
The voice belonged to a new arrival, a woman as old as Jeffip, so around 60. She was scholarly-looking, with thinning grey hair. ‘Welcome to New Arcopolis. I am Jennver.’
‘And do you have children?’ the Doctor asked, turning away from Dela.
‘Not for fifteen years,’ Jennver said, without emotion.
‘Ah. Yes… I understand.’
What had once been raw had been smoothed away over the years, like pebbles in a stream. Before the Fortress arrived, all of the grown-ups here would have had jobs and friends, families and an expectation of what the future was going to be like. All taken away in an instant. The Doctor wondered what they’d been like before.
‘As I’m too old to have children and too weak to work the fields, I occupy myself as leader of the Council.’
Jennver beamed and raised her hand.
Jeffip was smilin
g. ‘Jennver is also our only obstetrician.’
‘Delighted to meet you,’ the Doctor said. This was the first time for centuries he’d heard the word “obstetrician”
twice in twenty-four hours.
‘You are also a doctor,’ she asked – a little warily, the Doctor thought.
‘I am.’
‘Alsa told me a little about you last night. The hologram she took wasn’t terribly flattering.’
‘She didn’t get my good side,’ the Doctor suggested.
‘Given that it was a 3D image, that’s just unforgivable.
Kids, eh? You must have a terrible time controlling them.
They must outnumber you ten to one.’
‘They all come to understand their duty to posterity.’
‘Duty?’
‘Well, yes. None of us have any choices. The—’
‘—women have to have lots of babies, and it doesn’t matter so much if the boys are eaten by ghosts?’ the Doctor finished for her. ‘Either way, you don’t need to teach them to read.’
The Doctor looked over to Dela for support, but she was studiously looking the other way.
Jennver bristled, but managed to stay civil. ‘Our society faces exceptional circumstances, Doctor. We were left with thirteen women of childbearing age. Everyone, men and women, lost privileges and rights. None of us have the life we would ask for. We retained a functioning society. There are now 148 girls and women. The eldest of the children will soon be adults, and have children of their own. There will not be the same pressure on them.’
‘I calculate that an average of ten children will suffice,’
said Jeffip. ‘Then six for the generation after that. We can’t expand beyond the settlement’s ability to feed itself, of course.’
‘It is not how I would organise an ideal world,’ Jennver conceded. ‘We have never mistaken this situation for the ideal world. We have adopted a clan structure, one that seems to hold together.’
The Doctor nodded. His attention had wandered back to the Fortress. He needed to get on with what he’d come here to do.
The park was roughly triangular, probably two miles on each side, surrounded by skyscrapers and other huge buildings. The Fortress was visible, but further away than ever, a dark island almost lost in a sea of architecture. The Doctor was confident he could make a break for it, but he wanted as much of a head start as possible, so he was waiting for an opportunity to sneak off without alerting anyone.
They’d finished breakfast and left the mothers looking after the children. Now, an hour or so after he’d woken, the Doctor was following Jeffip and Jennver as they walked among the tents.
‘I’d love to hear your thoughts on where the Fortress came from,’ the Doctor told them.
Jennver looked dismissive. ‘I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure.’ She’d taken against him, the Doctor was sure of it.
The old man leant more firmly against his walking stick. ‘Shouldn’t stop us asking the questions, Jennver.
I’ve been doing that for fifteen years. Certain facts are self-evident. It is the product of a civilisation far in advance of ours. That civilisation is aggressive and paranoid. They operate on a scale that I know I can’t even comprehend. Their agenda is entirely unknown and their methods do not, as far as I can tell, have any precedent in our history. It is probably alien.’
‘Only probably?’ the Doctor asked.
‘It may have time travelled from our future. In which case, it may have been built by our descendants for no other reason than that they knew it appeared when it did.
The destruction of our civilisation may have been a necessary step in the creation of theirs.’
‘I tend to the belief that time travel is a logical absurdity,’ Jennver said.
The Doctor nodded approvingly. ‘Oh, absolutely. In fact, I was saying the exact same thing to a bloke down the pub just next week.’
‘They did something that wiped out 200 million people in an instant. And it obscured nine of the stars. Did you know that? I have drawn up star maps, compared them with ones from the last fifteen years.’ As Jeffip said that, the Doctor remembered the box of scrolls back in his lab.
‘The nine nearest stars to this world – apart from our own sun, of course. An atmospheric effect, I think.’
‘Not everyone is so sure any stars have vanished,’
Jennver said gently. ‘None of us were even amateur astronomers.’
‘Surely there are records?’
‘Every database is dead, powerless.’
‘There must be old books in museums and libraries?’
‘We have different priorities.’
The Doctor’s jaw must have dropped, because Jennver looked annoyed.
‘Museums and art galleries had controlled conditions, all dependent on their power supply. We needed to plant and harvest. We couldn’t afford to waste any effort.’
‘So every masterpiece of all the great artists of Arcopolis is sat mouldering?’
‘Rather them than the crops in the field. You can’t eat books.’
Jeffip had the decency to look ashamed.
‘Most of the statues and sculptures are still there,’
Jeffip noted. ‘We did want to bring Dance of Days to the settlement, make it a feature of our square, but it’s solid bronze. It was just too heavy. Shame, as it’s pretty inspiring.’
‘It’s not going anywhere,’ Jennver muttered. ‘We were right to start afresh.’
Jeffip was also clearly keen to change the subject.
‘Doctor, we were once a proud people. We thought Arcopolis had reached the pinnacle of technology and society. But the only conclusion I can reach is that we were caught in the crossfire of some intergalactic war that had nothing whatsoever to do with us. We were an anthill run over by a tank.’
The Doctor pursed his lips, but decided not to say anything.
‘Who was Jall?’ the Doctor asked Jeffip later on in the morning.
Jeffip nodded, upset to hear the name. ‘A lovely girl.
One of the first to be born, she’d just come back to us.’
‘I gather she was killed.’
‘By ghosts, yes. Her body was found the day before yesterday, by the Ground Wing. It’s a shame. She was old enough to start thinking about having kids of her own.’
‘Alsa wanted to know if I murdered her.’
‘She thought you were a ghost at first, didn’t she?’
‘Yes.’
‘There you are, then. She’s angry and she’s a child, Doctor – not objective.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s odd. So much death, but that was only the third body I’d ever seen.
Everyone taken by the ghosts vanished. We lost a couple of people early on. Couldn’t take it. Selfish. We’ve been lucky since then, in the settlement.’
That puzzled the Doctor.
It was gone midday.
Beyond the tents, the park had been ploughed up and various crops planted. The fields were full of people –children, mostly – just like pre-Industrial Revolution farms in Europe. At least on Earth they’d had horses and oxen to pull ploughs. The only mechanical sound he could hear was the splash and creak of the water wheel, on the other side of the tents.
The Doctor was keen to get back in Jennver’s good books before he left. The leader of the Council was at the edge of the fields, deep in conversation with Dela.
A crowd of children – a little older than the ones he’d met at breakfast – were picking what looked like blue strawberries. A little boy offered the Doctor one, and he gratefully accepted.
‘Tasty,’ he said, and meant it. It actually tasted a little meaty, like beef. A little. He had another.
‘So, Doctor,’ Jennver said. ‘You knew about the Fortress before you arrived. Did you know Arcopolis had been destroyed?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you know that we had survived?’ Dela asked.
‘No,’ the Doctor admitted.
Dela and Jennver
shared a glance.
‘Now you know about us, you have new plans.’
The Doctor was puzzled for a second or two, mainly because it hadn’t even been a question. ‘Well, yes, of course,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Um… what do you mean?’
‘Alsa said you fixed her comm,’ Dela said. ‘A man of your abilities would be very useful around here.’
‘Um…’ He floundered for a moment. ‘Oh, I see. Yes.
I’m happy to do what I can to help out. I’m up for odd jobs, tinkering, fixing up. Anything, really.’ He looked over at Dela and smiled. ‘Within reason. Nothing that changes things too much, of course. I’m not meant to interfere, but, well, that ship sailed a long time ago.’
Jennver was smiling and nodding, keen. ‘That’s settled.
See what you can do. We’re having a Council meeting tonight. You should come to it.’
The Doctor checked his watch, looked back over at the Fortress. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.
By mid afternoon the Doctor was getting itchy feet. He was a traveller, he liked travelling.
Dela was pleasant company, and now she was showing him around, introducing him to people. She’d just had him shake hands with a brawny, bearded man called Fladon, the blacksmith, although he was away from his workshop.
Fladon was in his late forties, dressed in a jumper knitted from reeds and what looked like a PVC kilt. It wasn’t a look the Doctor would be rushing to adopt.
Fladon suddenly shouted: ‘Come back have you?’
He was calling out to Gar, who’d just come swaggering round the corner and had his hands back in his pockets.
He didn’t come over, or answer Fladon’s question, he was just wandering through.
‘What’s he doing out?’ Gar scowled when he saw the Doctor. ‘That’s the Ghost Doctor, that is.’
‘He’s a man, Gar,’ Dela said.
‘Frad’s dead,’ he called out, either indifferent or successfully feigning indifference. He’d passed by, now.
‘Boys will be boys,’ Dela sighed, picking up a bottle Gar had dropped.
‘Children shouldn’t be running around outside getting exercise, they should be inside playing violent computer games and eating junk food,’ the Doctor agreed.
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