by Gary Russell
‘You are the Doctor. Welcome, Time Lord. That is a vast and powerful domain to claim lordship over.’
The Doctor smiled wryly. ‘Some would say differently.’
‘Some would be wrong. Time is everything. Time is all. Without Time, nothing can exist, no flow, no flux. Destruction.’
A little light glowed off to the right and the Doctor could see some shapes. It was Bernice and her friends, but they were in slightly different clothes. Globb, Kik the Assassin, Jaanson and some military types were there too – all of them, frozen in a moment of time.
‘They disturbed us,’ said the voice by way of explanation.
The Doctor tried to see the speaker, looking beyond the shapes closest to him, but he couldn’t. It was as if reality shifted to accommodate his attempts, ensuring he could never truly feel comfortable.
‘I take it you are the Ancients?’
‘To you, that may be how we are defined. To ourselves, we cannot be defined for we are ageless, infinite, eternal, forever—’
‘Well, before you get all thesaurus-y on me, let’s just accept that’s who you are to me, OK? Good. Now then, I have to ask before we go any further – because a lot has happened and people have died trying to find this out – where the hell have you been?’
—
The Doctor was suddenly in yet another place. A vast alien arena, a thousand eyes watching events at the centre. Two vast beings from different worlds, fighting to the death.
He looked around. The crowd was made up of aliens from a hundred different worlds, cheering, gambling, being savage. Then his eyes focused on what it was he was looking for. Sort of. Across the auditorium was a blur, like watching someone interviewed on television but, because they’re wearing a T-shirt or baseball cap with a logo on it, the TV have to blur it out, pixelate it to a soft mass of colour. That was what the Ancients were to the Doctor here. Unfocused blurs. But he could tell from the way they were positioned, they weren’t joining in. They were bored.
—
The arena melted around him and he was on a spaceship in the throes of war, a dozen ships firing upon him. Around him, the Federality of Bandril were taking hit after hit. A couple of bridge officers weren’t Bandrils, they were blurred, unfocused Ancients again, but clearly the Bandrils didn’t see them as anything unusual.
—
Reality warped once more. The Doctor was in a night-time street, lots of noise, raucous merry making. Humans, mostly male, were in the streets and open-fronted bars, singing and yelling and occasionally fighting or throwing up. Relentless house music pumped from each bar, competing with the other bars trying to drown them out – it was a dreadful, nightmarish world.
‘Oh god, I’m in Ibiza,’ the Doctor muttered.
He looked across at one bar and sure enough, making as much noise as the humans, towering above them, blurred as always were the Ancients, knocking back mojitos and piña coladas by the dozen.
He understood. The Ancients had, as always rumoured, gone out into the universe in disguise and partied. Then, bored of that, got into fights. Then, bored of that, sat and watched the universe go by. Then, bored of that…
‘We created this null space in which we could sleep. Rest. Chill out, man.’
The dark room was suddenly illuminated by soft shapes floating around the walls, like reflected globs of gel from lava lamps. Soft ambient music started up and the Doctor could see scatter cushions, bean bags and incense burners.
‘Ah the chill-out zone of Lymnos,’ he nodded appreciatively. ‘I brought Jamie and Zoe here once. Tried to explain the concept of relaxation and switching your mind off to the world to Zoe. She never got it, you know.’
‘Why are you here, Doctor?’
‘Tell me where we really are and I promise to answer that.’
The blackness returned. ‘We are in our end-place, one microsecond beyond the destruction of time and space, beyond the collapse of the multiverse, beyond the absence of all.’
‘Well, that explains why I managed to track you down, then. Because you’re no longer in any of those things.’
‘Explain?’
‘You left a device behind, on Aztec Moon. A portal to this place. You assumed no one would find it, access it, use it.’
‘The pyramid is impenetrable.’
‘Hullo, I’m right here. If it was impenetrable, how did I get here?’
‘Why did you access it?’
‘I didn’t. Others did. Foolish beings who were only interested in personal glory and, well, curiosity. The last bit I get, I’ve been guilty of that myself once or twice or sixty-eight times. But I digress! Your pyramid was accessed, moved and therefore weakened.’
‘To be used successfully, it needed the trigger device. We did not leave that in the pyramid on – what did you call it? Aztec Moon.’
‘No. No, you didn’t. You took it with you, yes?’
‘Indeed.’
‘And you planned to hang on to it, making sure no one could ever use the power within the Pyramid.’
‘Indeed.’
‘So what happened to it?’
‘We do not understand the question.’
‘Yes, you do. You lost it, didn’t you?’
‘It became separated from us.’
‘Lost it.’
‘It was misplaced in time.’
‘Looooost it.’
‘It became disconjoined.’
‘Oh, do stop all this nonsense. You lost it fair and square. Want to know where?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then read my mind.’ And the Doctor closed his eyes. Then as he felt a brush of air on his cheek he smiled and opened them. ‘Welcome to Sydney’s Blue Mountains,’ he breathed. ‘One of the most beautiful places on planet Earth.’
He was aware that he was surrounded by a large number of blurred unfocused Ancients. Two, ten, a hundred? Who knew?
‘It’s 36,000 BC, give or take a century or ten. Look over there.’ He pointed to a rock formation to the north. Four menhir-shaped rocks pointed up into the sky, like prongs on a fork. ‘Created by erosion from the wind, the rain, all the elements of this primordial world. If you stare into the bushland below, you might find examples of this country’s settlers, the Gundungurra as they’ll eventually be called. And they are busy creating legends. Right now they are deciding if those are entombed people or great beasts or any number of other things. But any second now, their worldview is going to be changed because of you. Look.’
The Doctor pointed to the sky and, sure enough, through the clouds, three blurred shapes, three Ancients, like a three-pointed star, dropped towards Earth.
‘Skydiving. One of your many pastimes, no doubt. “Hey, guys, I’m bored. Let’s go skydive a primitive world, see if we can be mistaken for gods, or monsters or anything to dull the unending tedium of eternity.” ’ The Doctor shrugged. ‘I mean, that might not be word for word what they said, but I bet I’m pretty damn close. And then, there’s a problem.’
The skydiving blurs separated, and went in different directions, one of which included straight down. The blurred Ancient smashed into the menhir-shaped rock formation, shattering and slicing away the outermost. The other two blurs joined their compatriot and quickly shot back up into the sky, leaving the mountains forever changed.
‘And somewhere, down there, whichever of you it was, had keepership of the trigger device to the pyramid on Aztec Moon and you dropped it.’
The Doctor realised he was no longer alone. Beside him was Lue. He cast his head down.
‘I failed,’ he said simply.
‘You did,’ said the Doctor. ‘And as the centuries rolled by, it sank deeper into the base of the mountain until sometime around the 1930s, when some idiot decided to invent a backstory to those rocks, which had become called the Three Sisters, and treasure seekers from across the southern hemisphere came to dig, root around and generally mess with the landscapes here. Oh, in time it became a marvellous tourist spot, protected and honoured
for both the Australian people and the Gundungurra people.’
The air shimmered around them all and the whole Blue Mountain area was now swarming with humans.
The Doctor pointed as he said, ‘I’m getting the hang of all this. Now look, down there: Tomas G. Schneidter, Bavarian archaeologist. He found your trigger. He touched it. It did something to his mind because he was the first non-Ancient in history to touch the device. He called it the Glamour. It cost him dearly and he was forced to become a renegade from his homeland, lost his wife and lived out the remainder of his life in an asylum. The Glamour was sent, by his grandson’s son, to a museum in Sydney. And there it stayed under his family’s protection for decades. They didn’t know why they had to protect it but, on some level, some subconscious level, it spoke to Schneidter, and his descendants, the Taylors as they are now, have looked after it for you ever since.’
‘That was good of them.’ Lue looked up at the Doctor, and his features blurred as he became what he truly was – one of the Ancients of the Universe. He disappeared, joining his out-of-focus fellow Ancients…somewhere else.
The Doctor wasn’t surprised. ‘Yes, yes it was very good of them. Until some idiot from three thousand years in the future wandered into your now unguarded pyramid and activated it, and it promptly decided to seek out its missing component. And, well – here we are.’
Then the Doctor was back in the Ancients’ darkness.
‘And now it has been activated, the universe is gone, time erased, and I’m here because it’s the only place left to go.’
‘So what?’
‘So what?? So, put it right. Turn it off, reverse the polarity of its neutron flow, turn it off and turn it back on again, I don’t know. But you have to resolve this.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m already the last of the Time Lords, I really don’t want to be the last of everything ever.’
‘That is of no interest to us.’
‘Then think on this. When all that’s left is you in this little pocket existence, one heartbeat out of sync with reality, one day you might want to step back outside, see, feel, breathe again. One day you might want to see the skies, swim in the seas. You might even want to have a night at Es Paradis back on Ibiza as you like pyramids so much. But you will be unable to do any of that, for eternity, if you don’t take control of your equipment and step back into the real worlds.’
‘It may be too late. You say the universe is gone.’
‘I’m a Time Lord. You’re the Ancients. You brought me here. You seriously think that together we can’t sort this out?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s a bit negative. How about you ask yourselves what you have to lose by trying?’
‘Mojitos,’ a new Ancient voice said. ‘I liked those.’
‘I liked the wars.’ Another new voice.
‘I enjoyed painting the trees and flowers.’
‘I like the music of the spheres.’
‘I just want to go home again.’
And the voices stopped.
And the Doctor waited.
And the Ancients blurred out of existence.
And the Doctor was in darkness again.
And…
—
The Doctor was pushing forward. It was like walking through treacle. Or jelly. Or treacle dipped in jelly.
All he could focus on was the hieroglyphs that had destroyed Professor Jaanson. Everyone around him was frozen by the time spillage. Kik the Assassin. Globb. Peter. Ruth. Jack. Even Bernice.
But surely…but last time…but what did ‘last time’ mean? Had this happened before?
As his hand reached out, ignoring the roar of time, ignoring the destruction of everything he held dear, the Doctor felt a new power behind him. He couldn’t turn; he couldn’t look. Every fibre of his being wanted to turn, to gaze upon the true face of the Ancients that he now realised were with him.
But he simply couldn’t. He had to trust that they were there.
His hand hit the controls. Pushed there by another, dark hand.
The Doctor turned slightly and saw Lue – although his features were still just a blur.
‘Told you we’d met again, right?’ Lue said. ‘And we will again. That will not be…pleasant. It is my job to look after you, Doctor, during something very bad that will happen in your future. I am…sorry.’
The Doctor looked back down at his hand, feeling pressure on it as another blurred hand hit it, pushing against the controls. And another. And another. Five. Ten. Twenty. He gave up trying to count how many blurs passed through his hand and into the trigger, the lodestone, the Glamour, whatever it was called.
Then he felt another hand.
This one he knew by touch.
Bernice Summerfield, fighting through time again.
This time he didn’t stop to wonder why or how because his memories were back. He knew he had indeed done this before, just as he knew the Ancients were helping.
There was a massive white flash.
—
A man in Marbella wasn’t a lump of coal.
—
A fish wasn’t a hamster.
—
Stacey Townsend and Ssard the Ice Warrior celebrated their anniversary on Mars with their kids intact.
—
The Big Bang happened. The Heat Death of the Universe happened.
—
In Sydney Harbour, the pyramid, the wrecked bridge and a fairly significant amount of water vanished and reappeared instantaneously on Aztec Moon. The water bled into the cold, red surface and, above the bridge, parts of the planet, undisturbed in millennia, were flung up into the air and floated like rust-coloured boulders around the tops of the pylons. In this reality, nothing yet lived on the planet and so there was no one to see this amazing spectacle.
Just as instantly, the Sydney Harbour Bridge reassembled, fully repaired. Then it, and the water that came with it, were gone, snapped back to Earth like they were on cosmic elastic. History returned to the right path on both planets, although this time the pyramid stayed on Aztec Moon, encased in a mountain that hadn’t been there micro-moments previously.
In Sydney, life carried on as before – nothing that had happened would be remembered as more than a bad dream. No one ever talked about the pyramid they dreamed they might have seen for fear they would be considered fools.
—
Senior Sergeant Rhodes’s police station was never attacked. The Arcadia Hotel never had rooms booked by the weirdo Summerfield group. And the Power Station was never burgled, because the Glamour was never there. In its place the curator, Thomas Gordon Taylor, was proud to display, as he always had, an ancient Aboriginal artefact that the eminent archaeologist Tomas G. Schneidter had found in the Blue Mountains in 1934 and which was kept on display with the full support of the Gundungurra. It was a simple painting from thousands of years ago, showing an Indigenous man wearing white hide.
—
In a Stormcage in the fifty-first century, Kik the Assassin delivered herself and Cyrrus Globb up for re-arrest, aware that only they knew what had transpired.
—
In 1934, a dark-skinned man in an open-necked white shirt and chinos, smiled and nodded his thanks to something unseen and walked into the rainforests of the Blue Mountains.
—
In the fifty-first century, Colonel Sadkin of the Church of the Papal Mainframe stared as Professor Jaanson and a Talpidian digger tried to protect themselves from the rain.
There was a flash and, for a brief second, he thought he saw the outline of a door on the side of the mountain. He blinked. No one else mentioned it.
‘Professor Jaanson,’ he grunted. ‘I think this mission needs to be aborted before the weather turns.’
Horace Jaanson opened his mouth to argue, then shrugged. ‘You’re probably right, Colonel. Without a decent archaeologist to help us, I don’t think we’ll find anything here. I’m beginning to doubt that Aztec Moon
is even the right location for the Ancients of the Universe.’
And, much to his satisfaction, Colonel Sadkin and his Clerics were able to pack up and get away from Aztec Moon before the rains took an even worse turn.
—
The TARDIS was flying through the space-time vortex, the Doctor rushing around from side to side, flipping buttons, punching switches (or maybe it was the other way round, although if that was what he was doing, it probably explained why the TARDIS rarely did as she was meant to). With an almighty flourish, the whole ship lurched on its side and the doors popped open.
A beautiful blue sky could be seen through the doors as the TARDIS hovered somewhere on its side, like an open coffin.
After a second or two, something large and heavy dropped towards the open doors. Beyond that, something larger and heavier struck a mountainside, and the TARDIS was pelted with rocks and rubble. But the only thing that fell into the ship was a small rock with crystal lines running through it.
The Doctor caught it like a rugby ball, allowing its momentum to swirl him round, back towards the TARDIS console, which he thumped. The ship’s interior righted itself, and the TARDIS dematerialised from the ancient Australian Blue Mountains area.
—
The Doctor was back in the dark void. This time he knew what to expect.
As the blurred Ancients loomed up, he held out the trigger device. ‘Now no one other than me has ever touched this.’
And it winked out of existence.
‘Will they remember, or has time been reset?’
‘Nothing involving our technology will have happened. Has happened. Could happen. Did happen. Time has changed; tiny chronological events have been rewritten to alter the histories of those involved with our error. Our mistakes. But no one will ever know.
Again the Doctor thought back to his tutor at the Academy on Gallifrey. He had always hated the thought that ephemeral lives were unimportant enough to affect the Web of Time. But right now, he had to admit, it was for the best.