Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  The Doctor nodded – he could see the possibilities, even as it appalled him to think of what else the Infinite Cocoon could do. ‘But only if the queen lets us use it,’ he said.

  ‘That is a chance you must take,’ the Red Queen answered. ‘I can guarantee that without her assistance, the Master will surely die.’

  The Doctor nodded slowly. He had come to the same grim conclusion. From the moment the TARDIS was sucked into the future, they had always been meant to confront the Sild. This audience with the Red Queen, at the dismal end of her reign, was merely a postponement of that confrontation.

  He stooped down and picked up the tachyon ring. He thought of its counterpart, ten million years in the past. In a sense, they were the same object, existing co-temporaneously. In the absence of the Time Lord reference signal, a bound-tachyon pair offered the surest aid to long-range chronic navigation.

  ‘Thank you for waiting,’ the Doctor said, pocketing the ring.

  ‘I have a question for the Master, before you depart – and then one for you, Doctor.’

  The Master stood with his hands clasped behind him. ‘I am waiting.’

  ‘The ship is abandoned. It served its purpose to the Sild, as have you. Now all it does is orbit Praxilion, a monument to a crime greater even than the entire sum your misdeeds.’

  ‘Continue,’ the Master said.

  ‘My robot … the one that brought you here. Long ago it was able to implant a destructive device at the heart of the ship.’

  ‘A bomb?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘The Axumillary Orb. A weapon so potent it was among those made safe and locked away in the Consolidator itself. But we found it and made it very unsafe.’

  The Doctor and the Master exchanged glances. Both knew of the Axumillary Orb, and its fabled destructive potential. The energy to turn a world into a cloud of gravel, in a device small enough to slip into a pocket.

  ‘You have the means to trigger it?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘In an instant, I can end ten million years of torment.’

  ‘And me,’ the Master said.

  The Red Queen nodded at this blunt assessment. ‘You are already on the point of not existing, Master. The destruction of the ship would change very little. But it would be a final kindness.’

  The Doctor said: ‘This can only be your decision, not mine.’

  ‘Of course,’ the Master said.

  ‘Do you want a moment alone with the queen?’

  ‘If you’d be so … kind.’

  ‘I’ll start hooking up the tachyon pair,’ the Doctor said decisively, glad that it gave him an excuse to depart. ‘It’ll take a few minutes.’

  ‘I have one question for you, before you leave. I cannot speak for the Master. But there is a chance you will return to your own time – or whatever remains of it, after the Sild have rewritten history. Back to the EMTT, the Epoch of Mass Time Travel.’

  The Doctor glanced at the Master. He hardly dared speculate about their mutual fates. ‘It’s a bad habit, but I always try to look on the bright side.’

  ‘It seems so long ago now, the EMTT. But it must have been something to behold. All those worlds, all those civilisations. All the wonder and terror of life and possibility, more than any living thing could ever begin to tire of. It must have been glorious.’

  ‘It was,’ the Doctor said. ‘It was and is and always will be.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  At last the two remaining helicopters of the UNIT expedition came within visual range of Mike Oscar Six. They had survived the rest of the crossing, despite another time rupture opening up very close to Jo’s helicopter. For a moment, they had been pulled toward that sucking absence. But the rupture had snapped shut and the pilots had been able to wrestle their craft back under control.

  There was good news and bad news, Jo reflected.

  The good news was that there was still a rig. It hadn’t been sheared off at the legs like some of the platforms they had passed, and it wasn’t totally ablaze, like a torch held up from the waves. The bad news – actually, the very bad news – was that the rig was indeed on fire in places, and there was ample evidence of structural damage to the main block, with parts of it sagging away from the whole, and what appeared to be a pronounced and worrying lean to the entire rig, as if the seabed itself had ceased to offer any kind of firm foundation.

  But still. There was a rig. And just as crucially, the helipad looked more or less intact. The UNIT forces would have abseiled onto the platform if they hadn’t been able to land, but this made life easier.

  ‘Still no contact,’ Yates said. ‘And no welcoming party, either.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll have the run of the place,’ Benton said optimistically.

  Jo pointed down at a red craft bobbing in the water. It was a saucer-shaped lifeboat, completely enclosed, the kind that could be dropped from the rig in emergency conditions.

  ‘Somebody made it out. Should we see if we can help?’

  ‘They’ll have to take their chances for now,’ Yates said. ‘If they’ve survived, they should be safe in that thing for a while. It’ll have an emergency beacon, so we can leave the rescue team to pick them up later. I’m afraid our priority now is to disable the MERMAN equipment.’

  While the helicopters completed a circle of the burning rig, Yates called back to base and updated the Brigadier on events, including the loss of the third helicopter. He listened carefully, then signed off. ‘The Brig says McCrimmon’s mainland office had a wireless transmission just before they went off the air – they had an idea Edwina McCrimmon was being held in the secure zone reserved for the equipment. That’s obviously the first place we’ll look. The Brig’s also had our people talk to Callow.’

  Jo remembered the name from the briefing notes. ‘One of the men working for the project?’

  ‘Callow weaselled his way back to Whitehall, but he’s in a spot of bother now.’

  ‘Aren’t we all!’

  ‘I mean, Callow’s going to be in hot water even if the rest of us get out of this mess. Turns out him and Lovelace have been up to some very naughty business indeed, breaking ministerial rules left, right and centre to get their test up and running – blackmail, theft of government materials, the lot. Callow’s career’s all but over. But he’s given us the likely code for the MERMAN secure zone. Even if Lovelace locked the doors, we should be able to get through.’

  ‘Provided Lovelace didn’t change them,’ Jo said.

  ‘Well, that’s what plastic explosives are for,’ Yates said. ‘And we’ll use them if we have to.’

  Rotors almost meshing, the two helicopters settled in towards the helipad.

  The Master was alone. He had ventured outside, onto a small balcony projecting from the side of the queen’s tower. Miles above the ground, the balcony lacked walls or railings. The air that he breathed was trapped by a field which extended only as far as it needed to: he could push his hand through the field’s gentle resistance and feel the hard vacuum beyond, clawing at the fabric of his glove.

  It was late in what passed for the afternoon. The dying red sun hung low behind the Master, pushing the buildings’ shadows out to an impossibly sharp, airless horizon. Here and there, tilted at odd angles, were the technological ruins of earlier ages. It was hard to tell what had once been rockets, what had once been cities. Time and physics had turned them into abstract sculptures.

  Above the horizon, the sky was a magnificent black, its absolute absence of light marred only by a dismal clutch of weary stars. The Master imagined worlds around those stars, just as barren and exhausted as Praxilion. There had never been a time when the universe had not felt entropy’s hand, reminding it that all processes, all histories, all hopes and dreams, must eventually come to an end. For billions of years, though, life managed to delude itself that it had some gambit or strategy capable of outwitting entropy. It was a fallacy, as this cheerless spectacle confirmed. Late in the afternoon of both this world and time itself, entropy
’s touch had become an iron death grip. The universe was a clock winding down to its last exhausted tick.

  The Master chuckled. It was a thought to stir the soul.

  But now he made out the swift rise of another star. It was so dim as to be almost invisible, but the Master had been expecting it and he had known where to look.

  This was the Consolidator, and if the name of the ship was correct, it carried the most infamous cargo in all of history.

  Early in their existence, the Time Lords had taken a momentous decision. From across the galaxy, from across many eras, drawing on their combined wisdom and influence, they had gathered much that was evil or dangerous or destabilising. Not just weapons or technologies, but – where such collection was feasible – even entire species.

  By their nature, the Time Lords were not about to be seen to be engaging in open warfare or xenocide. They were cleverer than that. They sought, instead, those hostile alien cultures that had already been locked away or entombed. Rather than leave these aggressive species lying around the galaxy, at risk of being rediscovered, they were brought into the limitless holds of the Consolidator. There, kept frozen or in stasis, they would wait out the centuries like a kind of toxic waste. The ship was built to stop its cargo from escaping, and armoured against intruders. Self-repairing, autonomous, it was designed to last indefinitely.

  But that wasn’t enough.

  The Time Lords squabbled. Some thought that the Consolidator should be destroyed, now that it contained all the galaxy’s old evils: smashed into a star, perhaps, just to be sure. Others argued that many of the dark technologies and sciences contained in the ship might turn out to have as yet unforeseen benevolent applications. It was even suggested that some of the hostile species might be subject to rehabilitation, perhaps to the point where they could be allowed to re-join civil galactic society.

  Argument raged for centuries. No agreement could be found. In the end, a tawdry compromise was settled on.

  If the Time Lords of the present could not decide what to do with the ship, the problem would be handed down to their distant descendants. A time rift would be opened, large enough to swallow the Consolidator. When it emerged, the Time Lords would have had long enough to ponder their ultimate decision – and in the meanwhile, traversing the time rift, the Consolidator would pose no risk to galactic stability.

  But there was a problem. Even Gallifreyan science was not up to generating a rift of the required dimensions.

  When orthodox approaches had failed, when the finest senior minds had admitted defeat, two young candidate Time Lords, promising graduates, were assigned the task of finding a mathematical solution to the problem. Both struggled with the arcane demands of the exercise. One of them was an undisciplined but brilliantly intuitive thinker. The other was a meticulous logician, able to view the thorniest problem in startlingly transparent terms.

  The Doctor and the Master were friends and rivals. Both had their doubts about the wisdom of the Consolidator scheme, but they had been given a chance to prove their worth and so they put aside their private concerns. But the work proved almost beyond them. Opening a rift was hard enough, but maintaining it, achieving stability and a fixed temporal lock at either end, seemed to demand a completely new approach to the mechanics of time travel.

  When at last it seemed that they had explored every possibility, to no avail, the Doctor confided in the Master that he was not necessarily sorry. Perhaps it was best to fail, rather than succeed and be complicit in the cowardly decision to foist the problem of the Consolidator on their descendants.

  But the Master had a wild idea. For once, he was the intuitionist, not the Doctor. Gripped with the thrill of the hunt, the driven young man soon closed in on a possible solution. The collapse of the right kind of supermassive star could in turn create a black hole with a rare balance of charge, angular momentum and Hawking temperature … enough to cleft open time.

  The Doctor checked the Master’s work. It was watertight.

  The Doctor begged the Master to abandon his work, to put aside thoughts of personal glory.

  ‘Easy for you to say, when you are not the one who saw the solution,’ the Master said.

  ‘I will always know it was you. And you will always have that satisfaction. You don’t have to prove your genius to the world. It’s enough that I’ve seen it.’

  ‘For you, perhaps.’ He did not call him Doctor then, just as the Doctor did not call him the Master. They had other names: strange and lovely as poems. ‘For me, that would never be enough.’

  ‘I beg of you.’

  ‘I owe this to Gallifrey. I cannot un-imagine what has already come into being. I have seen time from a new perspective. It is both vastly simpler, and yet vastly more complex, than our foolish peers have ever dreamed.’ The Master had paused, gripped by a sudden charitableness. ‘I offer you this. Put your name to the work, and we will share it. I could not have found my way to this solution were it not for the blind alleys and dead ends you have already blundered down.’

  ‘That’s very magnanimous of you,’ the Doctor said. ‘But no. I don’t want any part of this. And if you’ve a shred of decency left in you, you shouldn’t either.’

  ‘There’s your answer, then. I am clearly beyond salvation.’

  So the Master had taken his work to the High Council. There it had been subjected to thorough scrutiny – dismissed at first, then taken gradually more seriously as, one by one, he was able to answer his critics, to defend his most outrageous deductive leaps. Valiantly sure of himself, the Master remained steadfast in the face of the sternest cross-examination. In time, as he had always known it would be, the validity of his theory was accepted.

  The Master, on the back of this work, could not help but be awarded the highest academic merit in his chosen discipline. And the Doctor, who had not won the academy’s favour, was seen as something of a disappointment.

  To the Master, that was as nothing. But it went some way to explaining the Doctor’s lifelong sense of intellectual inadequacy, as measured against his old school friend.

  As for the Consolidator, a star had eventually been found which was near to critical core collapse. On the moment of its implosion, the ship was sent hurtling toward the newly forming event horizon, exactly in accordance with the Master’s scheme.

  That was when everything went wrong.

  The star’s supernova collapse had not been perfectly balanced, and that in turn had led to an asymmetry in the formation of the event horizon … enough to spoil the perfection of the original calculations. Instead of falling into the time rift, the Consolidator had come in at an angle … and been destroyed in a mass-energy conflagration sufficient to rip every atom in the ship to its constituent particles.

  It was a catastrophe, but it was also something infinitely worse than that. It was an embarrassment. The Time Lords had worked hard to maintain a façade of infallibility. There was only one possible resolution to the Consolidator fiasco. The whole sorry business had to be hushed up. Quietly, the entire existence of the Consolidator was pushed first into obscurity and then secrecy. No mention was to be made of it, ever again. There would be no punishment of those involved, because punishment would require the tacit acknowledgement that it had happened in the first place. Hands were washed, consciences salved. Everyone went free.

  And time did that thing it was good at doing, which was to pass. The Master and the Doctor, in their different ways, broke free of Gallifrey. And no one, not even those involved in the Consolidator affair, dared to think that the ship might have survived.

  How had it happened, the Master wondered now? Could the mass-energy conflagration have been misinterpreted? Had his calculations, far from being in error, been more correct than anyone had ever imagined? Had the Consolidator skipped not merely centuries, not merely thousands or tens of thousands of years, but millions of years?

  Had it fallen through time while solar systems came and went, only to pop back into normal space on some un
accountably remote day, so far into the future that the EMTT was a golden glow at the beginning of creation?

  So, on the evidence of his eyes, it would appear.

  It was almost a crime to destroy such a thing! It was, he knew, not too late to rescind the instruction. If he were to return inside, and make his case to the Red Queen, she would cancel the destruct order. This testament to his intellect would remain.

  It was not like the Master to have doubts. But here they were. Second thoughts. Grave misgivings. These were novel feelings for him. He had been inside his own head long enough to think he had the measure of it. This was like finding a secret doorway, an aperture into some unknown part of himself.

  The Master was psychic. All Time Lords had that talent, nurtured across patient generations of genetic intervention. It was a question of neural congruence, sympathetic resonance. Science, not magic: albeit science of a difficult, slippery kind. Some felt it more than others. Generally, the mental bond was strongest between Time Lords and their own kind. The literature on psychic communication between Time Lords and their own incarnations was, to say the least, sparse. Generally incarnations were prevented from meeting, but that was not to say that it had never happened. In times of crisis, in moments of great cosmic emergency, those appalling hypocrites on Gallifrey had been known to bend the odd rule or two.

  The Master, speaking for himself, had never knowingly felt the psychic influence of his own counterparts.

  Until this moment.

  He had seen the versions of himself on the Consolidator, and known that many of them were dead. But that still left hundreds who were maintained in some quasi-life, with just enough mental activity to grasp that they were still alive, still captive, utterly without hope. They had been like that for ten million years.

  He felt them. Their presence manifested as a kind of tight headache, above and beyond what the Sild contact already made him feel. The headache was like a weathervane. Its axis was tilting, keeping track of the rising star.