‘How do you think I feel?’ the Doctor muttered glumly. ‘I’ve just remembered I’m the President.’
‘Oh yes. So you are.’
Romana, along with every other Time Lord, found it quite easy to forget that the Doctor was Lord High President of Gallifrey, Regulator of the Eye of Harmony, Keeper of the Great Seal of Rassilon and the Etcetera of Etcetera. The simple reason was that this inconvenient fact was appallingly accidental. During a previous visit, the Doctor had, quite by chance, killed off the only other candidate in a Presidential election. It had all been part of an elaborate plot by the Master to steal a black hole hidden under the carpet in the Panopticon.
The Doctor had briefly tried out being President. Some wag had pointed out that, while the Doctor had been exiled on Earth, that planet had been invaded every week, so perhaps Gallifrey shouldn’t expect any better. True to form, they’d been invaded twice in a fortnight. Declaring it his worst holiday ever (and he’d been to Majorca), the Doctor had left shortly afterwards, and, strangely, Gallifrey had not been invaded since.
‘I’d completely forgotten you were President.’ Romana was grinning.
‘So had I,’ the Doctor ruminated. ‘Makes waking up without screaming so much easier.’ He rearranged his jacket and tapped Romana confidentially on the nose. ‘Strictly speaking, Romana, since we’re here, you should probably address me as Lord President Doctor. So long as that doesn’t sound too absurd.’
‘It does.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ The Doctor escaped from the clutches of the sofa and slithered awkwardly onto the floor. ‘You know, I bet the old goats have forgotten I’m in charge.’ He rubbed his hands together. ‘This could, actually, be quite fun. Especially if they arrest me. Which they’re pretty much bound to do.’ He looked expectantly from left to right. ‘At any moment.’
Some people can tell when it’s about to rain. The Doctor knew when an armed guard was on the way.
He and Romana stood and waited for the arrest. There was, now you mention it, a distant alarm on the wind, and a clatter of distinctly military shoes. The Doctor checked his watch. ‘They’re late. I blame the new guy.’
‘That’s you.’
‘Oh, I know.’ The Doctor whistled a bit. ‘Tell you what. There has to be a lovely thing we can do with “Take me to your leader.”’
‘What?’
‘An Earth expression. Whenever a flying saucer lands, the chief alien always says, “Take me to your leader.” They promptly taxi him to the nearest soldier. Now, if that were real, they’d send him to the Inland Revenue.’
‘Also,’ said Romana, ‘flying saucers are the worst.’
‘Oh, absolutely. Anyway. Where were we?’
A squad of Chancellery Guard marched round the corner and aimed their weapons at the pair. The Doctor threw his hands up theatrically, and edged in front of the sofa in case a stray bullet mercifully took it out.
‘I’m your leader!’ he declared. ‘Take me to me.’
Romana shook her head sadly.
The Doctor always enjoyed being marched around by the Chancellery Guard. They reminded him of brightly wrapped Christmas chocolates, with their postbox-red uniforms and pinstriped capes. Occasionally they had remarkable hats that made him worry that somewhere on Gallifrey was a farm full of angry, bald peacocks.
‘I’ve been gone too long,’ Romana thought. She had always rather admired the pomp and splendour of her home planet, a world where every door was a portal, and you called a spade ‘the Spade of Rassilon’. Now, as they were led through interminable grand chambers, she found herself stifling the urge to giggle. She’d one day found a children’s book in an unswept corner of the TARDIS. The book had been about an abandoned library, now run by the bookworms. The worms all had jolly names, and spectacles, and embarked on a series of adventures solved through teamwork, cooperation, and the knowledge they’d gleaned from the books they ate. This was, of course, absurd, and Romana had read it from cover to cover immediately. The idea of a microcosm devouring the very knowledge it championed fascinated her. She’d mentioned it to the Doctor. He’d laughed. ‘But what about their glasses?’ he’d said. ‘How do they stay on their heads?’
As they went deeper into the Capitol, the buildings assumed a grimmer hue. There was a brief flirtation with murky brown before they were into chambers of sinister emerald green.
‘I’ve never been here before,’ said Romana.
‘Of course not,’ the Doctor said. ‘This is where all the business is done. No sofas.’
‘They were awful, weren’t they?’
To the Chancellery Guard, this was baffling. When you were marched by them it was normally what they called a ‘No-Way Trip’. At the end of your journey, you’d cease to exist, your whole timeline erased, so that someone could better use your portion of infinity. The people who’d barely paid any attention to you as you’d passed would now have never paid you any at all. The process was called, inevitably, the Rassilon Erasure, although, actually, someone else had invented it. History has curiously forgotten them.
Instead of being cowed or intimidated by the process, these two prisoners were talking about the soft furnishings – laughing at the inflatable ones, the over-stuffed ones, the ludicrously purple ones. The Doctor was wondering if one day a whole lot of hairdressing salons had woken up to find themselves robbed, Romana was asking if it was perhaps some kind of cunning plot by the Master. ‘If it is,’ the Doctor chuckled, ‘it’s surely his most successful one. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, shall we?’
Finally, they arrived in a hallowed vastness. The furthest reaches of it suggested a stony echo, but mostly it was just a huge blackness. In (presumably) its centre was a toppled monolith of a stone table, so long and grim it could only have been owned by unhappily married goblins. At the far end of the table a small man slumped in his ceremonial robes, a school nativity wise man in a duvet cover. He had pushed his wire-framed spectacles out of the way to rub at his tired eyes.
‘Oh it’s you,’ he groaned.
‘Who’s been sitting in my chair?’ the Doctor barked with delight. ‘Oh look, it’s Borusa!’ He nudged the little man in the ribs. ‘Keeping my seat warm for me, eh? Romana!’ he cried jubilantly. ‘It’s Cardinal Borusa. He’s my old tutor!’
‘Um,’ said Romana, surprised. ‘Mine too, actually.’
Fuldanquin Borusa, Archprime Cardinal of Gallifrey, had recently led a series of unlucky lives. Time Lords have thirteen lives and, with careful husbandry, can eke them out to a very long lifespan indeed. Cardinal Borusa had spent several thousand years shinning slowly up the greasy ladder of Gallifreyan academia and had made a stately, elegant leap onto the slimier pole of politics. This had all been achieved with grandeur, poise and caution. Borusa had previously only regenerated when his revered and ancient bodies had finally worn thin at the elbows.
Recently, however, and without wishing to dwell, he’d started racing through his remaining regenerations at a rate of knots. It was as if a lifetime’s prudence and good luck had been knocked away. He’d consulted a Causal Therapist who’d sniffed his Artron energy and asked if he’d recently been exposed to a high degree of improbability. Sadly, Borusa had: the Doctor.
Up until that moment, Borusa had always had a something of a soft spot for the Doctor. He had, in his long, long career, trained a fair number of successful Time Engineers, Quantum Mechanics, Relativity Archivists and so on. All respectable Time Lords going into respectable careers, and all of them were so terribly easy to forget unless you needed a favour. The Doctor stood out. A little like a sore thumb, it was true. One did not like to have tutored too many renegades, but the Doctor always made for interesting small talk at parties. The Doctor did so love a scrape, and threw himself into all sorts of unlikely events at such a pace that it was sometimes impossible to keep up with whatever he was doing badly. His deplorable old TARDIS was forever shuddering from one hot spot to the next. Yet the Doctor had proved to be singularly luck
y – considering the number of times his life had been placed in imminent danger (he was constantly being chased, shot, tortured, hurled into black holes, dropped through time storms, taken over, exterminated and lightly vexed) he always seemed to be, at the very last moment, annoyingly none the worse for wear.
His dress sense was not only horrible, it was a celebration of his indestructability. The Doctor really liked wool. Short of a nylon miniskirt, he couldn’t wear anything more flammable, and yet the Doctor strolled out of cataclysms unscathed. If Borusa had been in the Doctor’s patent leather shoes, he’d have worn an asbestos suit and ditched the scarf immediately.
Borusa had met his worst student twice recently. Firstly, there had been the time when a black hole had got loose in the Panopticon chamber. Then there was that period when Gallifrey had been invaded quite a lot. Both occasions had placed the Doctor in great peril; he’d emerged fine, but – and here was where Borusa’s Causal Therapist had leaned forward, fascinated – things hadn’t worked out quite so well for the Cardinal.
The Causal Therapist put it like this: ‘Supposing we were to accept that there were such a thing in the universe as luck, you’d have to accept that there was a finite quantity of it.’ (The Causal Therapist had a style so dry you could toast and butter it.) ‘If that was the case, we can only assume that the Doctor is blessed with a large amount of luck. Luck which must, therefore, be inducted from the sum total of luck available around him. The Doctor is a complicated space-time event. If I were you, in future lives, I’d stand well back.’
The Doctor’s deaths were a matter of grand heroics. However, in the last few years, Borusa had had to regenerate because of a falling stack of books, a missing decimal point, and an infected toenail. Borusa’s deaths had become frequent and absurd.
As though the world was trying to even things out, his political progress accelerated. The Doctor had pretty much strolled into and out of the Presidency as though it were a tea tent. Running the most important civilisation in the universe clearly didn’t matter a hoot to him. Borusa had, cautiously and not at all enviously, stepped into the breach. If the Doctor was squandering power, he wasn’t the man to let it go to waste. So what if he, Borusa, had spent millennia gently ascending and the Doctor had marched in and treated the presidency like an unwanted Secret Santa gift? He may as well get some use out of it. Borusa had spent some fun aeons as Acting President, tutoring the more interesting Time Lords, and gently researching ways to stay alive. Because he knew that the Doctor was, sooner or later, going to turn up again, and he was worried about what the consequences would be – if not for the universe, then very certainly for him.
He’d recently mildly enjoyed tutoring the Time Lady Romanadvoratrelundar. She was bright certainly, traditionally ambitious, and had about her a kind of icy dullness which assured Borusa that she’d go far, but not too far. The thing she lacked was a spark. He’d been rather surprised when she’d left Gallifrey for a short mission, and even more surprised when she hadn’t come right back, vowing never to leave the Capitol again.
But here she was, after a long absence, bobbing along in the Doctor’s wake. The change in her was startling. It wasn’t just that she’d regenerated, but that she’d acquired the spark she’d been lacking. She was dressed in an immaculately tailored tweed suit, there was a bounce to her step, and a sharp intelligence shone from her eyes. Oh dear. Romana was now, regrettably, a force to be reckoned with. The Doctor had done it again.
True, she was looking just a little bit sheepish, but that was only to be expected. Borusa had spent several hundred years perfecting a glare that immediately made previous students worry that they were seventy years late with an essay. Only the Doctor was immune to this, and that was because he’d never managed to hand in an essay in his life.
The Doctor also knew by now that he could cause a considerable upset on Gallifrey simply by strolling into a room, acting as if he owned the place. Because, in theory, he did. He didn’t give a hoot about it, but he did so very much enjoy how much it annoyed everyone else.
‘Now then, Borusa,’ he announced, his voice so loud that the Cardinal shot an alarmed glance up at the chandelier swinging over his head, ‘I’ve something very important to tell you.’
‘Have you now?’ Borusa suddenly felt even more terribly tired. This wasn’t going to be good.
‘You see …’ the Doctor began, and then shuddered. ‘What I have to tell you is so terribly, terribly painful—’
‘The Krikkitmen are back.’ Romana ruined his fun.
It is, of course, absurd,’ said Borusa as he led them to what was either a really small tanning salon or an open-ended transmat beam.
‘Absurd? Absolutely,’ the Doctor agreed.
‘Quite,’ said Romana, solemnly.
‘And to think that you actually went to a cricket match.’ Borusa shook his head. Little lights danced past them as they were transported deeper and deeper into the planet’s data core.
‘I really couldn’t avoid it any longer,’ the Doctor said. ‘I’ve always had a nagging doubt.’
‘Doctor, sometimes your fondness for that planet surprises even me. Some of their customs are merely reprehensible—’
‘Lemon in tea? Jigsaws? Blackpool?’ suggested Romana.
‘Quite,’ Borusa nodded his approval. They were three things he simply didn’t understand. ‘But Cricket – really. To take the universe’s most appalling belief and turn it into a game …’
‘The thing is,’ the Doctor said, ‘Perhaps we’ve been looking at it the wrong way round.’
Borusa shook his head and flashed his weary academic smile. ‘No Doctor, I think you need to accept that your pets are guilty of a heinous lack of taste.’
Of course he’d timed his remark perfectly so that the Doctor’s protest was cut off by the shimmer of the transmat’s arrival. The air outside the booth was even more august and chilly. The walls were carved from an ancient stone that would have made a hideous bathroom suite. Suddenly, the transmat booth felt warm and snug and friendly – and lifts should never feel that.
They stepped out into the Great Matrix Chamber. It was here that the disembodied souls of dead Time Lords hung around eager to give their descendants a telling off. This manifested in a distant but sharp whispering. The Matrix contained the accumulation of all Time Lord knowledge, hoovered from the souls of the recently departed. These souls liked nothing more than to say that everything was going to rack and ruin, but, as Gallifreyan society never changed, there really was nothing more for the departed to do than linger around being disgruntled.
Technicians scurried around with the weary expressions of people who are constantly being gossiped about. A distant bell tolled glumly.
Romana had only been down to the Great Matrix Chamber once before, on a school trip. They’d walked in a strict crocodile formation and been ordered not to touch any dead relatives. The atmosphere hadn’t appealed to her younger self (she’d only just turned 60 at the time; still a babe in arms, really). She’d been unable to describe it properly until the Doctor had taken her to a cathedral, the last remaining ruin of a once noble civilisation. The cathedral had been home to a god who had correctly prophesied that the planet would be destroyed. With the apocalypse having been and gone, the cathedral had a sharp tang in the air, as of someone who had been proved very right, but now had no one left to boast to.
Coming back to the Matrix with the Doctor, Romana no longer felt intimidated. ‘It’s all so miserable,’ she exclaimed.
The Doctor beamed at her. ‘Exactly! Terribly unfriendly, isn’t it?’
‘But this is the summit of Time Lord Achievement!’ Borusa thundered.
One of his ancestors shushed him.
The Doctor ran a finger along the ancient computer banks. ‘They don’t dust down here much, do they?’ he remarked, which Romana thought was a bit rich.fn1
The Doctor watched Borusa striding around the archive issuing orders. He chewed a lip thoughtfully. Well,
all right, he’d left Gallifrey in the old buffer’s hands. But the Doctor also felt something wet and fishy flopping around in his soul – surely not jealousy? It is one thing to leave the last fig roll out on the plate because you don’t fancy it. It’s quite another to find someone’s polished it off and pocketed the plate. What he needed was something to take Borusa down a peg or two.
Something bumped against the Doctor’s leg. He glanced down.
‘K-9!’ he beamed.
The robot dog wagged his tail. ‘Master,’ he said, pronouncing the word like ‘what kept you?’
The Doctor squinted, just to make sure it was the right K-9. Somewhere on Gallifrey was an earlier version of the dog, together with an earlier version of Romana. Well, her predecessor as the Doctor’s travelling companion – a rather formidable amazon called Leela who even now was prowling the Beige Wastelands wearing a scowl and some window cleaner’s rags.
Romana patted the dog’s ears. ‘Have you found anything out?’
The Doctor enquired if he’d met any nice computers, but the dog ignored this in favour of answering Romana’s question. ‘I have established a solid portal into the Amplified Panotropic Network.’
‘Good boy, K-9.’ Romana rubbed his tin nose.
The Doctor nodded. He wasn’t quite sure what the dog had done, but wanted to look knowing. ‘And about time too,’ he said, waving a hand in Borusa’s direction.
The Acting President found himself being politely ignored by a cluster of Memory Archivists. Blessed with long lifespans and infinite patience, Gallifreyans could ignore each other almost indefinitely. One of the reasons their Golden Age of Technology had stagnated was that people spent so long waiting in for the telephone engineer. During one such interminable period, Bardak the Flighty had invented the wireless wrist communicator and Time Lord Society had moved on with a leap and a bound. Time Lord Society had promptly vowed never to do anything of the sort ever again.
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 4