Memoirs of a Timelord

by Ralph Rotten

  So anyhow, I was poking around in Engineering one day (pretending to be looking at the engines but really looking at the engineers...) when I notice this one very handsome Lieutenant working on a compressor flow valve. I'd never seen this gorgeous young engineer. But then again, I was seeing a lotta new faces because this was Zeta shift. Usually I was here during beta or gamma shifts when m' girl Roxy was awake. But this was the middle of the night, and truth be told, I was there at that late hour so I could do a little hunting on my own. It was tough to man-shop when I had Roxy or Veena with me. Every guy on the ship wanted a date with them, but not so many wanted to go out with their plain brown sister. I'd been trying to master my morphic abilities, but I still couldn't make anything I was willing to wear outside of the house, and definitely nothing that could compete with those two. Sometimes I felt invisible with them around.

  Sorry, I got a little off track, again. Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, the cute Lieutenant on Zeta shift. Yeah, him. Anyhow I was just eyeballing him, about to go introduce myself when my eyes picked up an odd detail.

  Remember back when I mentioned how Timelords can see your Aura, measure it, all that? Well, if you have two people who have identical auras, or perfectly complementary auras, these people will be highly compatible. Actually I understate that. It'd be damned close to Shakespearean love at first sight. In humans an exact match of biorhythmic auras would trigger hormonal releases that would chemically pair-bond the two lovers. If the cyclic frequency of their auras were stable, or changing at the same rate, then they would be bound together for life.

  Now you gotta understand that it's extremely rare to find an exact match between two individuals, mebbe one in a million or worse. But my eyes were telling me that despite astronomical odds, I had just discovered a perfect match right here on the ship. A matchup this close, and we are talking identical within .00000009nJ, is extremely rare on populated planets. For it to happen within a crew of just over 1100 was almost a complete statistical impossibility. When I checked to see who held the other half of the golden ticket, I had to sit down; Lieutenant Dreamy was a perfect biometric match for my sister from another galaxy; Roxy.

  On one hand I was so incredibly happy for my sister. This was like winning the lottery big. How else do you say it? Anyone who has ever been in love knows that this would be the mother lode of all relationships. A perfect match? Their life would be like an endless series of Harlequin novels. And it would still be burning bright fifty years later when they drop dead in their matching rocking chairs. Yes, this would be a life-changing event for my sister.

  On the other hand, I knew what a relationship of this magnitude would do to our happy little trio. We'd lose Roxy. I'd seen it happen before with friends. They meet someone, get married, and the two of them complete each other so they don't need their old friends as much. Then there's the endless sex and cavorting in dangerous places, and next thing you know you haven't seen your girlfriend for a year. I felt like I was reading the end of Where the Red Fern Grows. It had all been so perfect and we had the whole sister thing going on...and now it was over. I felt guilty for even thinking of ignoring the data. What kinda asshole stands in the way of something like this? I loved my sister and even if it meant losing her I was gonna do the right thing and use my vast powers as a Temporal Editor to get them together. Besides, it was good practice for my upcoming Causation training. Really, when you think about it, this little matchmaker job was exactly the kind of work Timelords do on a regular basis. We are the unseen hand, we manipulate your world with invisible fingers. [Cue ominous music]

  In the end, it really didn't take very much of my super-Timelord-powers to get the job done. All I had to do was ask Veena if the next time she had her thighs clamped around the Captain's head, could she ask him to transfer Lieutenant Rogars to Beta shift. Heh, like five minutes later it was done. What can I say, Veena had some impressive thighs.

  After that it was easy, all I had to do was get them in the same room and it was Westside Story all over again. But there was a hitch: Lieutenant Dreamy was a bookworm who spent his time in the Library or Stellar Cartography. Roxy was a physical person so she was either on a security patrol, in the gym, or drinking in the club with her sisters. Even on the same shift, these two swam in different circles. She was Command Staff, he was Engineering Staff. The only time these two would cross tracks is if there was a security problem in Engineering.

  So I decided it was time for a fire drill.

  See, it was actually perfect timing. Veena, Aldoo and I all had an assignment due for Alien Species. We had to carry out a native function while impersonating another species.

  See, there were several layers to this whole Species training we undergo, starting with sampling a few hundred races, then spending a few hours as an alien species, and on up the scale until you eventually spend years living as a foreign lifeform. Actually, by the time I was done with Species training I had lived as fourteen different species for the combined equivalent of sixty-three Terran years. Before you can become an effective Editor, you have to possess a solid understanding of what is to be the other gal, right down to her panty shields. How can you hope to have a real perspective if you spend your entire existence as the same genus? You can't just empathize; you have to live it to truly understand a species.

  But this was back in my very early days of Polymorphic training. I'd studied the theory and Sociological aspects of foreign species, but I'd only been a few different critters myself. Veena was really good at this, but Aldoo and I were still pretty green. Anyhow, we three had an assignment due and this seemed like the perfect time.

  By this point in our new lives, all three of us had our own hot rods, custom enhanced by m' boy Morbesta, so it was easy for us to appear to be Klath ships. I knew from their database that they had been given fair warning and detailed analysis on the owners of the domain they were about to pass thru, so when they saw our ships I'm pretty sure they shit their pants. The Klath were some verrry bad dudes. The kinda species that took pride in wearing your face to a costume party. They were absolutely xenophobic, ruthless, and through plunder they had acquired a significant technological edge that they used to thwart anyone who entered their domain. At least that was the rumor the crew had been fed. The real Klath had been significant a century ago, but by this time on the calendar they were just a buncha clowns with a killer rep. Not only that, but we were years away from modern Klath space. It'd been fifty years since their borders were this far out. But they don't know this.

  So we steam in like axe murderers, neutralize their weapons and shields, zap their engines with an ion blast, and they are dead in the water. Next we breach the hull in Compartment 32, and pop thru the hole as a raiding party.

  It's odd being another species. I remember seeing people I knew, attractive people, and through the eyes of a Klath they were gross, sticklike creatures. And this was not just the spectral shift of Klath eyes. Another species is different right down to their aura. In this case, the modulation of the human exo-energy was a perfect mismatch. It was the opposite of a complimentary aural signature. For the Klath, being around humans drove them crazy. It was like nails on a chalkboard every time I got near a human. I wanted to bash brains, break bones, and rip their flesh. Being less experienced at morphing than my classmates, I had a hard time controlling the rage and playing my part. But in the end I convinced them I was a terrifying beast, intent on a murderous rampage. Half a dozen security officers fired on me before I finally slowed down enough to let Roxy blast me, saving young Lieutenant Rogars from certain death in the process.

  I gotta say, my girl Roxy fought like a champ. She put three shots into me, then a good, solid boot to the head. I played dead until she wasn't looking, then attacked again, but this time it was Prince Charming who KO'ed me with a torque wrench. He didn't just hit me once...he really clubbed me like I was a baby seal, and kept pounding the living shit out of me until I was good 'n dead. That got him noticed by m' girl Roxy. E
ven from where I was on the ground (with my head caved in) I could see that they had this moment, mebbe three seconds long, where they locked eyes before they went back to kicking ass and taking names. By the time Roxy was done she'd nearly vaporized Veena and Aldoo. Good thing the Onkx has good shields, or they woulda both been incinerated.

  But finally we three scrambled back to our ships. A few seconds later and all three Klath vessels were leaving at a high rate of speed. The crew cheers, everyone is happy, and the damage to their ship is minimal. Yaaayyy.

  But in the end Roxy got a medal. Prince Charming too. Veena and I were MoxSai at their wedding. I guess it's sorta like being bridesmaids, except that we took a blood-oath to torture her husband for twenty days and nights if he ever strayed or mistreated her. Yes, it is true: Voh marital traditions were a little weird, but I gotta point out that there's not a lotta domestic violence in their culture.

  There is an interesting story to how a planet in the KayMus system came to be named after me.

  In the year after my sister Roxy settled down with Prince Rogars, Veena and I still haunted the ship regularly. We had lotsa other friends on the Mata, including the Captain who always looked forward to seeing Veena. We assisted with fuel harvesting enroute, car-pooled their scientists on scouting missions, and generally helped out wherever we could. The Mata was really like an adopted family to us. Some people had a cabin in the mountains, Veena and I had the KuluMata. Sometimes Aldoo came along too, but he was a bit of a tech snob and being on something as archaic as the Mata seemed to nag the perfectionist in him. Things were on and off between us lately, so he stayed home mostly.

  It was their arrival at the mission's first checkpoint that I got a flavor for true space exploration: Ankrom.

  It was beautiful to see these two stars bound together in a symbiotic orbit that would not degrade for millions of years. Orbiting a massive black hole named Singulus, the binary star system was indeed rare. The phenomenon was due largely to the singularity's incredible rate of spin. This was a mature black hole, with a fully formed singularity at its core. Hence, the thing had more than enough power to capture a pair of stars. Eventually it would consume both, and their mass would slowly be back-fed into the universe through weak spots in the fabric. Essentially the black hole would burp, creating stellar nurseries, nebulas, feeding stars, and even other singularities. It was cosmic renewal at its finest.

  Ankrom is a peculiar twin-solar system. You have two small stars sharing an oblong orbit in such a way that they balance each other out as they loop around Singulus. At the far end of their orbital path they each pass through the singularity's zone of influence. Y'see, Singulus spins at a fantastic rate, creating an effect known as frame dragging. As this singularity rotates at 1439rpm it drags time and space around with it in this turbulent whirlpool. The more mass it gains, the faster it spins. So the whole region was prone to gravitational time dilation. Not only did time slow down, it would come to a crawl. Get too close and time began to run backwards. The experience is actually a not as cool as it sounds. Here's what backwards time looks like: As you first enter the effect time slows. You don't notice this because you are slowing too. Mebbe things look a little faster when you look out the window, but that's about it.

  But once time starts running backwards, everything runs backwards. You live backwards, you think backwards, you are yanked about like a marionette by your own history, and the whole time your own voice is backmasking in your brain, for years at a time. It can drive you crazy, literally, stark raving mad, so I recommend staying well clear of Singulus's accretion disc. Not a fun experience in there at all.

  So up to that point in my training I had a lot of book learning, but this was my first time playing around a singularity like this. The Captain wanted to avoid the Orion system because it was currently within the influence of Singulus so they were way out of time with us. Going there would slow them down exponentially. What would feel like a quick trip would be a decade or more once they reemerged into normal space. Besides, Orion was a crazy little neutron quark star. No more than fifteen miles across, she was a pinpoint of light that blasted her solar system with toxic levels of x-rays. She had been a proud star once, before Singulus siphoned off enough of her photosphere to destabilize her. In the end, what was left of the star collapsed on itself into a super dense star with a quark core. Very rare configuration. I'd read about them but never seen one. I wanted to go toss asteroids into it, y'know just to see what happens when you throw a 400 mile long rock into a sun that's smaller than Manhattan, but the whole system was under the influence of Singulus for another fifty years. I wasn't going anywhere near that thing again. The frame dragging in there was crazy.

  With our trajectory set to take us past Jaynar, the big gas giant, we were going to deploy probes and snap pictures as we went by, but no stopping in. There was no chance of colonizing a gas giant at their technological level, and the moons were all rocky chunks of debris, so no point in even slowing down for that planet. Surveys had told us that the other big planet in the system, MoTar, was another gas giant with a wonderfully low density and some really beautiful rings. But also worthless for Voh habitation.

  So that left the little watery planet of X-OB32. It was so titled because it was never named. Stellar observatories and advanced probes had only glimpsed it and sampled the spectral data a handful of times. Hence, it had yet to be formally named. The Mata's mission plan had been to make the diversion to Ankrom only if they spotted viable fuel or resources for future vessels. Needless to say, when the ship's sensors picked up a planetoid completely covered in salt water orbiting in the green zone around KayMus, we all got a little excited. You can do a lotta things with water. Drink it, split it into hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for breathing, bathe, grow crops, etc. Large quantities of NaCl were useful as well. A whole planet of the stuff in liquid form was solid gold. We had to drop in and explore.

  Now you have got to understand that there isn't some prime directive in place out here in uncharted space. Nothing said I had to be strictly an observer. Sure, we couldn't give them any protected technology, but nothing said we couldn't give 'em a ride. See, to keep the KuluMata from burning up too much gas by dropping out of transit speed, they would continue on their course over the top of the system while Veena and I ferried about forty scientists and security officers down to X-OB32. Our hotrods were easily fast enough to catch up with the slow moving Mata when we were done, so no worries there.

  Roxy was assigned to head the security detail and strapped into the cockpit beside me. Giving a glance back, she shook her head with wonder at how the tiny little craft had expanded to include twenty more seats.

  "Neat trick. Someday you gotta tell me where you're really from." Roxy smiled as she settled in.

  "Earth." I said simply. "I'm from Earth, born in Tucson, Arizona. United States of America, nineteen eighty-two. I was an Air Force brat until I was five."

  She never believed me when I told her. It was like telling someone on Earth that you were from Atlantis or the Garden of Eden. To the Voh, Earth was legendary. It was a fable you tell your kids about when you tuck them in. But no one believed it was real. I think she had always just assumed I was kidding. My sense of humor was a little dry at times.

  "So Veena said she was gonna name the place by being the first to set foot on it." Roxy smiled as she fastened her helmet in place with the visor up. Her bulky space suit crinkled as she shifted position in her chair. I was still wearing a purple tank top and bike shorts. We don' need no steenking space suits!

  "Did she now?" I asked as my mind queried the Guf for confirmation. Sure enough, the voices told me she was planning on scrambling as soon as she could get her passengers aboard. The Captain was riding as her copilot and they wanted to be first. Looking back I noticed a few stragglers who seemed to hang back from the boarding process. I figured right away that the Captain prolly told them to sand bag me so he could get the jump on us.

  "Watch." I held up a
finger to Roxy just before I reversed the ship a few meters, effectively scooping up the stragglers as they were forced to jump onto the boarding ramp or be run over. From there I just slammed the doors and jumped straight up through the bulkhead, fully phased. I wasn't surprised to see my sister Veena there already, moving fast towards the distant sun below. I throttled it and left a ring of burnt plasma for her to fly through.

  But Veena liked a good race and she remodulated her engines before fire-walling the throttle. There was something so surreal about the whole experience. We were there in deep space, outside of any appreciable gravitational influence from the distant stars or Singulus, and free of most cosmic debris. Plunging at a dizzying rate, our descent was silent for the first few minutes. Then we felt it; the first hint of the stellar bodies that lay ahead. You can go flat-out in open space, but things change when you approach something with the mass of a star, and this system had three of them if you count Singulus. Between the gravitational waves and the stellar headwinds, the ship gave a shudder at our excessive speed. Really the ride was comparatively gentle, but the closer you get to light speed, the more time is dilated. Essentially time slows down for those aboard the vessel. But this creates an illusion that the world outside is moving incredibly fast, when really it's just you who is going super slow. It's a lot like watching the trip at 50x speed. Even subtle course corrections seem rough and abrupt at that rate of perception. But to a stationary observer watching in the distance it took you two hours to make that course change.

  I just upped my field integrity but never let off on the throttle. Sensors told me that Veena was doing the same. She knew she could take the stress of a hot approach, though I doubt her passengers believed it.