Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice

by Stephen Baxter

  Phee had stared at him, wondering, when he said things like that, talking about things he couldn’t possibly know.

  Whatever was inside the hull was functioning, conscious. But was it alive? Even the Doctor hesitated to use that word.

  ‘And now we’re going to try to speak to it,’ Phee said.

  The Doctor looked up from his preparations. ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Sorry, Doctor. Thinking out loud.’

  ‘Well, that’s the plan. But we are rather improvising,’ he said with some pleasure, and Phee got the impression he was having a lot of fun. ‘The Arkive is very old, and it’s been stuck in this moon for a very long time. Embedded. The very substance of its hull has seeped out into the ice – that’s where the bernalium came from. It’s old and complicated. And the way we will have to communicate with it is old and complicated too… Now, the Arkive clearly has some straightforward communications systems, of which its neutrino beam is surely just one option. I suspect it’s been a very long time since it’s had a reply. Technologies to detect such beams are still in their infancy in this solar system.’

  ‘Then why does it keep trying?’

  ‘Probably because it can’t help itself. And because neutrinos are important to it, given the circumstances of its birth. Neutrinos are produced in floods when a supernova detonates – a massive star explodes – and I rather suspect that’s a clue to the Arkive’s origins. Such choices aren’t made for entirely logical reasons, Phee. These, after all, seem to be cries for help.

  ‘And then there’s the gravitational perturbation of the ring particles. I rather suspect that’s an unconscious process. The entity in there, in the dark, forever alone, tosses and turns—’

  ‘Like having bad dreams?’

  ‘Yes! And those dreams, those dark thoughts, are stored in the tidal patterns of the rings. It must be able to sense those patterns, in a way; it must be aware of the subtleties of the planet’s wider gravitational system, the tidal harmonies of Saturn’s sixty moons… There must be feedback loops in place. But I’m hoping that those perceptions will be greatly enhanced when we start giving it a visual representation of the patterns, a picture of this great buffer of its own dark thoughts. It may be like an expansion of consciousness.’

  ‘You mean, we might wake it up.’

  ‘Exactly, Phee! Well, let’s hope so. Now then…’ He tapped his control console. ‘It’s all going to be a bit complicated. As soon as Zoe’s translated neutrino data starts to come through, and that will be any minute now, I will start to hear it in my suit speakers, and read Zoe’s interpretation and commentary on the screen here. Meanwhile MMAC will feed back the ring images directly to the flag here, with translations. I’m going to try to put all this together, and then I’ll speak back to the Arkive.’

  ‘Speak? How?’

  ‘How? Why, with my own rather resonant voice as usual. On the assumption that First here can hear what I say, and can pass that straight back to the Arkive. For it’s clear that they are in contact. The simplest way is always the best… Ah. Here we go. It’s begun.’

  The flag lit up with a swathe of ring paths, covered with a scrawl of symbols, notes and equations.

  The Blue Doll started, as if given an electric jolt.

  And Phee felt the black holes inside the Arkive twist and roll, felt it deep in her stomach.

  The Doctor leaned down and faced the Doll. ‘Arkive. Hello. I’m the Doctor. I can hear your words, in neutrino pulses. I can see your dreams, in swarms of ice grains… I’m here to speak to you. Answer any way you like, I’ll be able to hear…’

  There was a kind of flash, like the spark when the Doll had touched Phee’s amulet.

  And information, words and diagrams, began to pour across the screen, too fast for Phee to read.

  The Doctor, staring into the screen, jolted upright, as if shocked. ‘Oh!’

  ‘Are you all right, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes – yes, I’m all right. But the flood of information—’

  ‘Doctor?’

  ‘Its mind is bigger than mine, Phee. Bigger, and older. So much older! And it is in such pain…’

  INTERLUDE

  ARKIVE

  I

  She had sensed their coming. Others. Responding at last to one of her lures.

  And she had detected the lure’s own signal, timed to sound three times in every one of the gas giant’s years. She exulted. Somehow the long wait for this response made her triumph all the sweeter.

  She remembered how she had created the lures, oh so long ago…

  Fifty million years ago:

  Resilience. Remembrance. Restoration.

  All that she was, all that survived of her – and she was all that survived of Home – was embedded in an ice moon. A moon orbiting a planet, a ball of roiling gas, that itself orbited a feeble sun.

  This solar system itself had no value for her, no interest. Nor did the life forms that swarmed and died on the surfaces of its planets. A sculpture of debris and rubbish, the system owed its very existence to the destruction of Home.

  She had survived in this system of garbage for billions of years. Survived though she was damaged. The detonation of the star that had destroyed Home had been too severe. It had caught her, it had overwhelmed the elaborate survival mechanisms given her by her designers.

  She had not demonstrated Resilience. She could not be certain of the veracity of her Remembrance. And she could not be sure she could fulfil her ultimate goal of Restoration. She could not fulfil her mission.

  And so she had formulated a plan. A strategy. If she could not fix herself, if she could not fulfil her mission, then she would return to the arms of those who made her. Who had perished billions of years before. Who had entrusted her with all that they were, all that they could have been. Who would grant her forgiveness.

  She would bathe in the light of a long-dead sun. And she would try again.

  She would reach through time, even though it would take the sacrifice of this pointless little moon to do it.

  She even prepared a fall-back.

  Deep in the heart of the moon, a kind of clock ticked. Attached to a kind of bomb. Which was meant to open a kind of door, in space and time. It was all terribly crude. Wasteful. But it might work.

  She readied herself for the moment, aware that she herself might not survive what was to come. Or if she did survive she might be damaged, her mission further compromised.

  But she had a backup plan. That was part of the designers’ wise conditioning: always prepare a fall-back.

  There was intelligence in this system now, a reptilian race that swarmed upon the surface of the third world from the central star. They meant nothing to her. Nothing but an opportunity for exploitation. So she had prepared lures. If she awoke still trapped in this system, then at least, if even just one lure worked, the past would have been changed. And those reptilian beasts would come swarming out here to help her. Laying aside all that they were, all that they aspired to be, to help her effect an escape. Even in her moment of failure they would come, an independent intelligent species, and become her acolytes. The spearpoint of a changed history –

  Searing light.

  The detonation was visible from Earth. And, through a telescope, the scattering of the moon’s fragments, quickly gathering in a ragged ring around the parent gas giant.

  Across planet Earth, faces were lifted to the light, crowds looking up with intelligence, with curiosity, but with a cold-blooded stillness that would have seemed eerie to any human observer. Pale unblinking eyes watched, and wondered.

  But for these people there was a greater emergency. A rogue planet was swimming towards the Earth. Already the reptilian race was withdrawing into the great hibernation caverns that they hoped would protect it from the calamity. The explosion was a light in the sky, soon forgotten.

  And so no Silurian eye ever saw the Arkive’s lures, most of which were destroyed, but one of which survived to sail through branching ruptures in spa
ce and time to travel deeper and deeper into the past…

  II

  One hundred million years ago:

  From a distance the animal might have looked like a horse, to human eyes. But humans would not evolve for a hundred million years. Even the age of the Silurians, a reptilian intelligence, lay some fifty million years in the future, on the other side of the blinding termination that was the asteroid impact that would smash a biosphere.

  All that for an unimagined future. For now there were more pressing matters. Hunger. Thirst. Fear for one’s eggs. Fear for oneself.

  On all fours the beast followed a water course towards a muddy swamp, raising her head to graze on stubby cycads and dwarf trees. Near the water she stood up on her powerful hind legs to reach a succulent branch, balancing with her massive tail. Her front paws had five digits, with hoof-like claws on the fingers and a spiked thumb. She chewed complacently. She was in fact one of the first animals on Earth to have evolved the ability to chew, and that small advantage was the reason there were so many of her kind on the planet.

  There was a rumble, like a distant engine.

  The chewer stood stock still. Massive as she was, there were predators in this world bigger than she was, killers that could run impossibly fast, with disembowelling claws the size of scimitars. It paid to be wary.

  And then she saw the light in the sky, dazzling and bright, like a second sun high above this humid, warm, water-logged proto-England. For an instant it appeared as if a navel had puckered the sky, like a tunnel trying to form. But the navel closed with a brighter detonation of light, and the browser looked away, dazzled.

  She did not see the object that followed the wavefront of light, coming from the explosion in space.

  Did not see the streak of brilliance it cut across the sky, entering Earth’s atmosphere.

  Did not feel anything when, almost gently, the object, small, dark, massive, ended its two-billion-kilometre journey by slicing through the chewing browser’s brainpan.

  Her body fell forward, already lifeless, and her front paw settled over the Arkive’s lure.

  III

  The tunnel through time to Home did not open.

  And the reptile creatures did not come for Arkive.

  Alone, for long millennia no more than half-conscious, she brooded on her multiple failure.

  While on Earth, kingdoms of life rose and fell.

  And at last the Others came to her moon.

  She sensed their presence. Their noisy drilling. Their crawling into the moon.

  She created a thing that could see. She used the factory, the womb, a facility intended to resurrect her makers, to make this crude thing, an eye on a tripod.

  The seeing thing met one of the Others, in a deep tunnel. A child. It was not afraid of the tripod.

  She created again. This time, beings like the child. She sent them out in their turn, to observe, to learn, to explore.

  Had the Others been drawn here by the lure? Perhaps. But rather than seeking her out, finding out how they could serve her, they seemed to be drilling for her hull metal, her bernalium, which over aeons had seeped into the cold ice around her.

  She bellowed protests, blasts of pure neutrinos.

  None heard her. None replied.

  In frustration, her substance twisted and turned in the recesses of her hull, and her agonies, transmitted by gravitational perturbations, were recorded in the roiling rings that surrounded this gas giant. Her biography, written in whirling bits of ice.

  At least these Others had come with technology. Materials that could be adapted to her purpose: to build a way to the past, a more subtle design this time. She instructed her creatures to take what they needed. To bring it to the moon from the Others’ own constructs.

  And to build a device, a doorway deep into the past. A doorway to allow her to go home, at last.

  Once again she would pour what was left of the mass-energy of a moon into this endeavour, and more. Whatever was needed. She did not care what she destroyed in this system. The whole system was garbage, a secondary product of the detonation which had destroyed Home. Let it burn, as long as it bought her escape.

  But her creatures were slow and stupid. (Or I am.) They tried but failed to build the machine she wanted. (Or I have failed.)

  Then more of the Others came probing. Digging. Stealing the bernalium of her flesh, once again. She made more creatures, purely destructive now, to defend herself.

  But still they came. Burning, blasting her soldiers. She drove them out of the moon. Her moon. For a brief time she was alone once more, with her creatures, her half-built time machine, and her brooding.

  And then one of the Others came to her. Looked into the face of her creature, so Arkive could see. Spoke, so Arkive could hear.

  Hello. I’m the Doctor.

  43

  ‘NO MORE!’ THE Doctor dropped the control console and staggered back, clutching his head. He stared at the Blue Doll. ‘And to think she once had the capacity to recreate a civilisation. And all she was capable of, in the end, was you. Oh, you poor creatures…’ His big hands covered his face.

  The Blue Doll watched impassively.

  Phee ran to him, took his arms, and settled him in one of the fold-out chairs. ‘Doctor? Come, sit down… Do you want some water, or—’

  ‘So alone. So alone!’ And he lowered his hands from his face. He had been weeping, she saw, those deep blue eyes brimming with tears. ‘The emptiness – to be alone for nearly half the age of the universe…’

  Phee could think of nothing to do but hold him.

  And when he was done, he told her the story.

  ‘It needed to apologise, I suppose,’ the Doctor whispered. ‘And, above all, it wanted a chance to try again. To try to launch itself into the past.

  ‘Its first attempt to build a time machine caused nothing but the destruction of a moon – and the creation of the rings of Saturn. It must have been a crude effort, a wormhole, perhaps. But it did at least succeed in sending an allohistorical lure deep back into time, which, after going wildly off course, brought you and your family here. And now it’s attempting to build another machine, to take it home at last. A more subtle design, but one likely to be just as destructive… What extraordinary determination, by this blind, crippled thing, sustained across aeons! Hammering away at the same simple objective – to find a way home, back to the lost past.’

  ‘We must help it,’ Phee said.

  The Doctor was recovering his self-control. ‘Yes. And the Blue Dolls, come to that. What a plight for them – to know you are a made thing, and made by something itself mad! For everything about the Arkive is worn down, faulty, misfiring. Its artificial womb should have been capable of so much more than these shabby travesties. Well, I have achieved one thing – no more conflict. No more armies of Blue Soldiers rising up to strike down the human invaders. I feel assured of that – as long as we keep good faith.’

  Phee was trying to work all this out. ‘So the supernova that ended the Arkive’s civilisation gave birth to this solar system. To Earth.’ She looked at her hands. ‘To me.’

  ‘Yes. The very atoms of your body were baked in the fires of supernovas.’

  ‘But at what cost? Did they have to die so I could live?’

  He folded her hands in his. ‘That’s a question not the greatest philosophers of all the ages could answer – not even the philosophers of my own people, who lived beyond the ages altogether. All life relies on the death of others, one way or another. One must merely make the best of the moment, I suppose.’

  ‘And remember those who went before.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Phee. Always that—’

  An alarm sounded in their suit speakers.

  The Doctor tapped a button. ‘Yes? What is it?’

  It was Jo Laws. ‘Doctor – is Phee there? Are you both all right?’

  ‘Yes, she’s safe with me.’

  ‘Good. Now listen to this. It’s a recording, we picked it up a moment a
go…’

  The voice was a breathless whisper, from a mouth held close to a small skinsuit microphone. ‘This is Luis Reyes. PEC ident 287/856-78. I’m on the surface of Mnemosyne. Near a mine facility, ah, Building Number 4-A, in Quadrant Four. And I’m in the rocket hulk Florian Hart brought down to the surface. The old Demeter missile. Florian’s up to something. I’m amazed her goons let me climb around in this thing in the first place. Maybe they thought I wouldn’t understand what I saw.

  ‘Listen, whoever’s out there. The missile was armed. It clearly carried a warhead. I say “carried” – I’m in the nose cone now and I can see fresh cuts in the wiring, scarring on mounts that have been sawn through, a panel cut out of the hull to take away the warhead. I know these old hulks were supposed to be made safe before being brought to the Wheel. I don’t know how it got here with a warhead in the first place. I can only tell you what I’m seeing. There was a warhead in here, and now it’s been taken out by Florian and her goons…’

  As Phee listened to this in horror, she saw that the Blue Doll, First, was reacting. Leaning in to listen.

  Luis continued, ‘I think it’s clear what’s going on. Florian sees whatever is in the heart of this moon as an obstacle to her ambitions. All she wants is to be rid of it, regardless of the cost, human and cultural. And I think she’s going to use this old warhead. I’m rusty on century-old ICBMs. The Demeters were armed with Z-bombs, weren’t they? Planetbusters, they were called. I don’t know how much harm might be done if she manages to set the thing off. She has to be stopped. And I – oh. Hi, guys. No, don’t shoot! I’ll come quietly. Empty hands, see? Oh, by the way, I’m sorry I called you goons. I meant the other goons…’