Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘I’ll miss them.’

  ‘They’ll miss you.’

  ‘There’s a wee problem. It’s going to look a bit odd when I pop back again.’

  ‘You must have been lost at sea,’ the Doctor said. ‘That’s the only explanation. And it very likely happened at the height of the Sild crisis. All we have to do is bring you back a bit after that, and no one will be any the wiser. Say, a day or two. I’ve already got the coordinates locked in. I’ll drop you at a convenient stretch of deserted coastline, let you find your way inland. Provided you look sufficiently tired and bedraggled, there’s no reason for them not to accept your story.’

  ‘In these clothes?’

  ‘Have a rummage in the TARDIS wardrobe. I’m sure you’ll turn up something suitable.’

  ‘That’s not the main problem, though. This is.’

  McCrimmon took off her glove, held up her hand for the Doctor’s benefit.

  Four fingers and a thumb. All present and correct.

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘The Infinite Cocoon didn’t just make me younger. It fixed me. Put right that old injury.’ She waggled her new digits. ‘How the heck am I ever going to explain this?’

  ‘I suppose I should apologise. But the Master and I had slightly more on our minds than making sure you ended up with the right number of fingers. You could always keep wearing the glove, you know. People will just assume you’ve become self-conscious about the missing fingers. It won’t ever cross anyone’s mind that the fingers have come back!’

  ‘A glove, Doctor? On just the one hand?’

  ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ll start a fashion.’

  A weary Lethbridge-Stewart was making his way down the grey corridors of UNIT headquarters, much on his mind – it was going to take months to clear up this latest mess – when something caught his eye, fluttering in the breeze from a draughty window. It was one of the posters they had been putting up, when the crisis had been building. To the Brigadier’s knowledge all the others had been removed, but this one had obviously escaped attention.

  The Brigadier paused and read the heavy text, scanning down the authoritative words until he reached the last two lines.

  TOGETHER WE CAN RESIST THIS INFLUENCE! REMEMBER THE MASTER!

  Remember the Master, indeed. It was strange now to think that they had ever needed to be encouraged into that act of recollection. The hard part, indeed, was going to be remembering a time when it been hard to hold on to the Master as a concept. That whole episode would come to seem surreal and faintly dreamlike. But there was no doubt at all that it had happened. The Master had begun to slip from their minds, like water running out of a sieve. To begin with, it had been possible to resist the forgetting – the posters were part of that, and the armbands, and the simple strategies like wearing one’s wristwatch the wrong way around. But none of that had really made a jot of difference in the long run. The Brigadier remembered how terribly, terribly hard it had become near the end, when the Sild were breaking into Durlston Heath. Just trying to hold the idea of the Master in his head for the duration of a sentence had required phenomenal mental fortitude. Ultimately, it was not a battle any of them could win. Even the ink on the posters had begun to fade and smudge at an accelerated rate. In a week or two all they would have been was blocky smears of unreadable grey, like some dreadful piece of modern art.

  But the process had begun to undo itself. The posters had begun to un-fade, un-blur. The Master had begun to pop into the Brigadier’s head, unbidden. He began to have less and less difficulty reconstructing the sequence of recent events. The Master had been in prison, now the Master was somewhere else. But at least it was clear that there was a Master and that the chap was a thoroughgoing nuisance.

  Whatever injury had been done to time, it was evidently in the process of healing itself again. All was well with the world, in other words. Until, with grim inevitability, the next crisis popped up. How would they cope, the Brigadier wondered? There had been a time before the Doctor, it was true. But it was impossible to imagine how they could manage without him now. The Doctor could also be a thoroughgoing nuisance, but at least he was their nuisance.

  Was it time to face the inevitable: that the Doctor was gone for good? Lost in time, his fate unknown – assuming he had not died that day at Durlston Heath. But no, something had happened, somewhere in time and space – or else why would the memory of the Master be coming back so strongly? If that was not the Doctor’s doing, then …

  The Brigadier ripped the poster from the wall. He scrunched it up into a tight little ball, mashing the Master’s leering face. On the way to his office he passed a red wastepaper bin.

  Good bloody riddance.

  But as the paper hit the bin, something gave the Brigadier pause. It was a distant sound, but clearly coming from within UNIT headquarters. A familiar rushing, wheezing noise, as of some clapped-out machine about to give up the ghost.

  It sounded very much as if it was coming from the laboratory.

  The Brigadier did not hasten there, but instead continued his way to his office, where he settled himself behind his desk and picked up one of his several telephones. He asked the operator to put him through to the army medical centre, where he knew Mike Yates was recovering from his injuries on the platform.

  ‘Lethbridge-Stewart here, Miss Grant – I thought I’d find you at the hospital. No, no, I … Yes, I appreciate it’s late. Indeed. But I think you may want to come here with all haste. Yes, I can send a car. Good news, Miss Grant? Yes, I rather fear that may be the case.’

  The Brigadier placed the telephone back down on the handset and allowed himself the briefest of smiles. In a little while his world was going to get awfully complicated and irritating again, as it was inclined to do.

  But he would not have had it any other way.

  EPILOGUE

  The Doctor brought Bessie to a halt next to one of the white generator lorries owned by the many television companies covering the McCrimmon press conference. The lorries were all modern and large, some of them functioning as miniature studios and broadcast suites. Some of them even had satellite dishes on their tops, aimed at the drizzling grey sky. Although the exact nature of Edwina McCrimmon’s statement was still a matter of speculation, word had already got around that it was going to be something big, implying a major shake-up of both the company and its objectives. Stocks were jittery, not just in London but all around the world. The other players in the petrochemical industry looked on warily. Sudden press conferences made everyone nervous. It wasn’t the way things used to be done. Say what you would about Big Cal, and he’d made his share of enemies over the years, but he’d never have kept everyone in the dark like this. There’d have been a quiet whispered word in the smoking room, fair warning. A good man, Big Cal. Not like that upstart daughter of his and her new ideas.

  Jo and the Doctor fought their way through the thicket of press and oil people crowding the McCrimmon Industries lobby. It was like a cold Scottish sauna, with all the drizzle that people had brought in on their anoraks and umbrellas turning to steam. It was standing room only in the main conference room, and the frustration of those who couldn’t get in was palpable. Jo felt a little guilty, using her UNIT accreditation to barge her way through the hordes. But then there were very few doors that a UNIT pass wouldn’t open.

  McCrimmon was already part way through her speech when the Doctor and Jo shuffled into the back of the room, Jo having to tiptoe to see over the shoulders of a pair of burly oilmen stationed in front of her. McCrimmon was standing up on a platform, with a lectern in front of her – it had the McCrimmon ‘M’ fixed to the front on a piece of card. She wore a colour-coordinated blouse and skirt. Her gently accented voice was being picked up by a microphone and amplified through the speakers at the back of the room.

  ‘… simply not sustainable in the long term,’ she was saying. ‘We can pretend otherwise, but the problem won’t go away just because we bury our heads in the sa
nd like ostriches.’ Behind her, projected down from the ceiling, was a photograph of a cluster of oil platforms at twilight, almost pretty with their yellow lights and orange flames, against a cloud-streaked pink sky. ‘We are sucking a resource out of the Earth that exists in a finite, non-renewable quantity – it cannot go on for ever. But even if it could, we would still need to change our game. Our dependence on fossil fuels cannot continue indefinitely. We are polluting our planet, warming our atmosphere, and worst of all we are doing so with dreadful inefficiency!’

  The image behind her changed. Now it was a shot of some gridlocked American multi-lane superhighway, with cars nose to tail all the way to the horizon, under an orange-brown sky of pure smog. ‘We at McCrimmon Industries understand that things can’t change overnight. It will take many decades to move from this to something more elegant and less polluting. Electricity, perhaps, or hydrogen power. But make no mistake. History will force this change on us whether we like it or not – at least if we want to retain something resembling a global technological civilisation. But why wait until things are desperate? Why not begin to adapt and anticipate now, while there is still time? We have lost many of our platforms, suffered great damage to others. We have no choice but to rebuild – but why not seize the chance to do things differently, for once? Those of us at the forefront of the petrochemical industry have the influence to begin making these changes now. What we lack is courage and imagination. The problem is that we see ourselves in the oil industry. Really, though, we’re in the energy business. Oil has served us very well, but it’s no way to carry things forward. I happen to be very proud of the company my father built up, but I don’t want to see that company become obsolete by the turn of the century. No, I want us to become stronger, more competitive – more agile. And fully able to face the challenges ahead of us, however difficult they may be.’

  ‘She’s in for a rough ride,’ Jo whispered.

  ‘No rougher than the one she’s already been on,’ the Doctor said. ‘She’ll cope, I’m sure.’

  The picture behind McCrimmon had changed again. Now it was that famous photograph taken by the Apollo astronauts, of the Earth, rising above the Moon.

  ‘Lately,’ McCrimmon said, ‘I’ve had a chance to put things into perspective. I think it fair to say that it’s given me a fresh slant on things. I’ve had … I won’t call it a vision, because you’ll all start thinking I’m mad. But a very forceful realisation of what could happen to this planet, this Earth of ours, if we keep going down the wrong road. I’ve seen a world drained of its resources, literally sucked dry. A dry and barren rock, all but lifeless. But it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make the right choices, starting here and now. We can choose our own future.’ McCrimmon paused, and lowered her hand to the top of the lectern. ‘McCrimmon Industries is committing itself to change, to bringing about a better world. But we can’t face up to the future while we’re burdened with the past. I am proud of my name, proud of who I am – proud of the man who built this firm up from nothing. But McCrimmon Industries is a name for the twentieth century. We need to start looking further ahead than that.’

  The ‘M’ dropped away from the front of the lectern. Behind it, hidden until now, was a second card on which an entirely new corporate logo had been printed.

  It was an arc of grey cratered landscape, and above that the rising Earth. But the blue and green globe was also the sun. It threw off yellow rays. Beneath the arc, in pale red letters, was a single word:

  Praxilion

  ‘This is the new name for what we are, what we do,’ McCrimmon said. ‘Praxilion is much more than just an oil company. In fact, I confidently predict that our oil activities will take up a smaller and smaller slice of our business. Energy is what we’re about, ladies and gentlemen. Finding new ways to generate, store and utilise energy – ways that will help our planet, not harm it. It’s not going to be easy, I know. Aye, as matter of fact it’s going to be awfully difficult! But what are the alternatives?’

  She thanked her audience, and reminded them that brochures were available, and that she’d be ready to take questions from the audience. There was a smattering of lukewarm applause, mixed in with some discontented muttering from certain quarters.

  ‘Praxilion,’ Jo heard someone say. ‘What an absolute load of cobblers!’

  ‘Well, that went down about as well as I expected,’ the Doctor said when they were out in the lobby again, jostling cameras and big, fuzzy microphones.

  ‘They didn’t like it much, did they?’

  ‘No, Jo, they didn’t. Not at all. But I doubt very much that Edwina McCrimmon anticipated anything else. She’s well aware that people take a long time to come round to genuinely new ideas.’

  ‘Do you think they will, in the end?’

  The Doctor smiled. ‘For the sake of your planet, I sincerely hope so.’

  ‘All that time she spent in the future … does she remember any of it?’ Jo was flicking through one of the Praxilion brochures. It was all very glossy and vague, like a political manifesto.

  ‘If she remembered all of it, it would drive her quite insane. But she remembers enough, I think. She had the strangest dream, Jo – a dream that seemed to last a thousand lifetimes. She was the queen of a dying civilisation. She saw all the mistakes a world can make, through ignorance and greed. Now she has the chance to make sure we do a little better.’

  ‘I feel sorry for the Praxilions.’

  ‘Remember, Jo, they haven’t evolved yet. History is fluid. A tiny input here, a tiny change there, can make a vast difference to the outcome further down the line. The Time Lords were supposed to stop that sort of chaotic disruption from growing too large, but Praxilion lies far beyond their reach. The Sild’s own actions may have introduced a perturbation sufficiently large to change Praxilion’s destiny.’

  ‘So they might avoid all that the second time round?’

  ‘More or less.’

  Jo closed the brochure and left it on a table for someone else to pick up. She couldn’t tell if the Doctor was just saying all this to cheer her up. It was hard to know sometimes. Being a Time Lord meant seeing the best and worst of what creation offered. Light and darkness, evil and benevolence, existence and annihilation. All were unified in the Time Lord’s unwavering gaze. She wondered how it was possible not to grow a little hardened and detached at the prospect of something as thoroughly inconsequential as a single human life. If a Time Lord could feel indifferent to fate of an entire civilisation, then what did a person mean to them?

  ‘Any thoughts, miss, on what you just heard?’

  It was a bearded BBC reporter, shoving a woolly microphone under Jo’s chin.

  ‘Good luck to her, I say.’

  ‘Some of our listeners will naturally assume that you’re just saying that because you’re a woman.’

  ‘No,’ Jo corrected patiently. ‘I’m just saying that because I’m a not a complete—’

  The Doctor had taken the opportunity to snatch the microphone away from his colleague. ‘I trust your listeners will be intelligent enough to make up their own minds. The fact of the matter is that I’ve just heard more sense coming out of Edwina McCrimmon than from almost any personal acquaintance of mine since Leonardo da Vinci.’

  ‘Leonardo da Vinci.’ The reporter winked at his sound man – they had a right one here, obviously. ‘Met him, did you, sir?’

  ‘Met him?’ The Doctor feigned grave personal offence. ‘I was his personal instructor in the arts of draughtsmanship, fencing …’

  Jo tucked an arm around the Doctor’s sleeve. ‘C’mon. We’re leaving. Before you get yourself locked away.’

  ‘Doctor! Jo!’

  It was Eddie McCrimmon, barging her way through a thicket of microphones to reach the two of them.

  ‘We thought you’d be a bit busy after all that!’ Jo said.

  ‘I will be – Q and A session in ten minutes – but I wanted to speak to you before you left. Thanks for everything, both of y
ou.’

  ‘You’re the one who should be thanked,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘The hard work’s still ahead. But look, something amazing happened. Jo: do you remember those books I told you about, when we were on the platform?’

  ‘The ones your dad threw in the bin?’

  ‘He called me yesterday. He knew about the press conference going ahead, so I thought he was going to give me a hard time about steering the firm in a different direction, letting down his legacy, all that sort of nonsense.’

  ‘And?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘There was none of that. It’s like he’s finally decided to let go. That whole business with Callow and Lovelace … I think that was the last straw for Big Cal. He’s withdrawing from direct control of the company’s affairs, letting me run the whole operation … it’s as if he’s seen the light, after all these years.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘But that’s not all. He could barely contain himself. Said Morag had found something, when she was tidying his office – a little plastic bag with nine books in it, tucked away at the back of a desk.’

  ‘Your books?’ Jo asked.

  ‘I haven’t seen them yet. Dad and I are meeting up tomorrow. He’ll give them to me then. But he says they’re mine. He says it’s my writing in them, my drawings … but that’s not possible, is it? Those books went in the bin when I was 12. I know! As soon as I found out what he’d done I went tearing down the road, trying to catch up with the bin men. But it was too late – they’d gone in the back of the lorry, with that big crushing thing! There’s no way these books have just turned up now, all these years later. How is that possible?’

  ‘How indeed?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘But if Big Cal says they’ve turned up …’ Jo said.

  ‘I’ll find out tomorrow, I suppose. And if he’s right …’

  ‘You could start to forgive him,’ the Doctor said gently.