Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
The Changing Face of Doctor Who
Dedication
8. The Night of the Doctor
11. The Flight of the Doctor
1. The War of the Doctor
10. The Love of the Doctor
12. The Leap of the Doctor
2. The Children of the Doctor
3. 400 Years of the Doctor
4. In the Absence of the Doctor
5. The Wedding of the Doctor
6. Dearest Petronella
7. The Day of the Doctor
13. The Doctor
Copyright
About the Book
When the entire universe is at stake, three different Doctors will unite to save it.
The Tenth Doctor is hunting shape-shifting Zygons in Elizabethan England. The Eleventh is investigating a rift in space-time in the present day. And one other – the man they used to be but never speak of – is fighting the Daleks in the darkest days of the Time War. Driven by demons and despair, this battle-scarred Doctor is set to take a devastating decision that will threaten the survival of the entire universe … a decision that not even a Time Lord can take alone.
On this day, the Doctor’s different incarnations will come together to save the Earth … to save the universe … and to save his soul.
About the Author
Steven Moffat is best known for Press Gang, Coupling, Steven Spielberg’s movie Tintin, and for the last few years being lead writer and executive producer on Doctor Who and for co-creating and co-writing (with Mark Gatiss) and executive producing Sherlock. He has 5 BAFTAs, 2 Emmys and in 2015 was awarded an OBE for services to drama.
THE CHANGING FACE OF DOCTOR WHO
The cover illustration portrays the Tenth and Eleventh DOCTORS, and the DOCTOR as he appeared during the Time War.
In memory of Sir John Hurt, who saved the Day
FEED CONNECTING
FEED CONNECTED
FEED STABLE
PLEASE ADJUST FOCAL LENGTH IF REQUIRED.
Oh, sorry, I’m early. You can skip this bit.
No, really, I’ll see you after the first chapter. Just turn the page.
Look, seriously, I just put my teacup on the SEND button. Please move on.
Oh dear, you’re still here. The trouble is, you see, I’m writing this live. The longer you keep reading this bit, the longer I have to keep writing it. You’re delaying the book for everyone.
Oh, and now you’re all giggling. I knew releasing a book on psychic paper was a mistake. But this lot, they love a gimmick. Please just turn the page. Or, if you’re listening to the audiobook version, fast forward. And those of you reading on one of those computer tablet things, please understand you are the only species in the universe who thinks they’re a good idea.
Oh for heaven’s sake. If you’re going to loiter about, I suppose I might as well do some introductions. Apologies for any typos—as I have been trying to explain, this section of the book is being written live, and I am connecting with the page in front of you through a psychic time-space link, and of course maintaining so many cognitive-paper-interfaces across the multiple time zones required for thousands of individual readers can play havoc with your spelling. Also I just spilled lemon sherbet on my keyboard, and the R is a bit sticky. But we’ll soldierrrr on, eh?
Sorry, but who’s talking? Please, don’t talk while I’m wrriting, it’s tremendously rude.
Thank you!
Oh, someone just closed the book, and put it back on the shelf. I think they were in a bookshop. Well that’s not very encouraging, when I’m just getting started. Never mind, we’re better off without them. Oh, they’re off to the Crime section now. Probably more their level, quite honestly.
Okay, the rest of you, eyes on page, we’re all in this together. Please don’t skip forwards or backwards, because I hate having to repeat myself. Especially in advance.
Now, the Doctor Papers, which form the bulk of this book, will not be written live. These bits are only live because I got a tiny bit sloppy about the deadline. In fact, I regret to inform you, that I’m writing to you from ten years in the future. Yes, I know, very poor, but there’s nothing like seeing your own book on sale to remind you to write it.
We’re going to start with Chapter Eight. Bit unusual, I realise, but this being the story of the end of the Time War, there really is no correct order in which to tell it, and the events on Karn are as good a place to start as any. Also I like the number 8. It’s bobbly, like two jellies on top of each other.
This chapter is known as The Night of the Doctor. It is a document from an unimpeachable source, written by one of the participants in that strange drama. The circumstances of its composition are complex and disputed, but the identity of its author should become clear in the reading. Indeed, this is your first challenge, students. Read with close attention. Our subject is authorship. Question 1 is: Who is speaking? See you afterwards for a full discussion of this, the first of the Doctor Papers. Or the eighth. Whatever.
What follows is the true story of how the Time War ended. Though not necessarily in that order.
(By the way, these pages should be appearing as italics. If not, please just give three light taps on any verb, and the page will reboot. And if you don’t like any aspects of my prose style, give the book a good shake. That should help you work off your irritation.)
Chapter 8
The Night of the Doctor
On the day I killed him, the Doctor was a happy man. Though since what made him happy was a distress call from a terrified woman who died less than seven minutes later, my conscience is clear.
At the time, he was in his eighth and final incarnation. My memory of his appearance is a little hazy, but I have a general impression of dark hair, urgent blue eyes, and a choice of clothing that was probably intended to be swashbuckling. I think there were long boots, possibly a waistcoat, and certainly one of those overcoats with the kind of collar that young men turn up against the wind in the hope that someone might use the word Byronic. He wasn’t young, of course: no one can be called young on the day of their death, when they are as old as they will ever be. But the voice echoing round the creaking, wooden cathedral of the TARDIS console room was young enough, and more than adequately terrified.
‘Hello, please, hello, can anyone hear me? This ship is crashing, please, is anyone there, can anyone hear me?’
It should be remembered, this was at the heart of the Time War, that endless savage conflict between the Daleks and the Time Lords that threatened every moment of the time continuum. It is strange to reflect that the deadliest conflict history will ever know began between a race of traumatised mutants sealed into tiny battle tanks, and an enclave of time-travelling academics, who had sworn never to interfere in the affairs of the wider universe. However, the day came when the Time Lords of Gallifrey decided that the Dalek mutants posed a threat to all reality, and so attempted to use their time-travel abilities to cancel them from existence. The attempt failed, and the Daleks used their own time-travel machines in a similar attempt to cancel out the Time Lords. And so time became a weapon in a war that could never end, and the conflict spread not only through space, but backwards and forwards through history. Days became battle lines, and century turned on century, and divergent time streams found themselves fighting each other for the right to exist. It was said, one soldier could die a thousand times in one day of that war, and discover he’d never been born the next. And so, when the Doctor heard that cry for help, there would have been countless billions across the universe suffering in exactly the same way. But this young woman had an advantage over all the others who, in that same
moment, were also screaming and begging for their lives. She happened to be in earshot of a man who mistook himself for a hero.
The Doctor had always loved distress calls. They appealed to his vanity. He lived for the thrill of stepping through a door, and seeing all those faces turn towards him in hope and wonder. The danger, too, was delicious. More than delicious; over time it had become necessary. Danger is the only true palliative for a guilty man. And certainly the only drug strong enough for the Doctor.
Setting aside his tea, it took him seconds to track the signal to a little gunship, tumbling towards a red planet. There was one life sign on board, and all the engines were phasing. Clearly, there was no possibility of deflecting the ship’s course, and a tractor beam would almost certainly shatter the hull, so a manual extraction was the only possibility. He would have to materialise on board, introduce himself as dramatically as possible, and get her into the TARDIS. She would be so happy and excited to see him. He wondered, briefly, how it would look if he took his teacup with him, but decided the risk of spillage was too great.
‘Please, please, somebody, please!’
The fear in her voice would have broken any heart. The Doctor grinned. For the very last time, he slammed the levers, roared the engines, and sent the TARDIS spinning to the rescue. Although there was no one else to hear, he laughed and whooped. If anything sealed his fate, in that final hour of his existence, it was his laughter. I never wanted to hear that laugh again.
The owner of the voice was a young woman, called Cass Fermazzi. She was clever and brave and doomed. In later years, when I was able to return her remains to what was left of her family, I learned that she had grown up on one of the farm planets of the Gazrond Belt, and had stowed away on a star freighter at the age of fourteen to see the wonders of the universe and found there were no wonders left. Instead there was a war that threatened all reality. At first she ran, but one day, helping an old soldier die in a crater full of mud snakes under a burning moon, she realised there was nowhere left to hide. The following morning, the kindly medtech who closed the soldier’s eyes unclipped the bandolier from around the dead man’s chest and gave it to Cass, perhaps mistaking her for a friend or relative. Cass took the bandolier, tightened it around herself, and decided to start running in the opposite direction.
Three months later, she was crewing a gunship. Four years later, she had survived the Nightmare Child, wept at the massacre of Skull Moon and fought in the ruins of the Ulterium. On the last day of her life, she and her crew successfully repelled a Dalek fleet from the feeding hives of the Vantross, but then, as they flew to safety, found themselves under attack from one of the Time Lord battle cruisers, now as indiscriminate in their slaughter as the Daleks themselves. They were blasted from the stars for no better reason, Cass realised, than that they were blocking the view of the retreating Daleks.
She’d been the only one who didn’t panic. She’d teleported the crew to the safety of the nearest planet and, with no one left to teleport her, and realising that a safe crash landing was now an impossibility, she’d finally asked for help.
‘Help me, please. Can anybody hear me—help me!’ She slammed the overheating console with both fists.
‘Please state the nature of your ailment or injury,’ said the medical computer.
‘I’m not injured, I’m crashing! I don’t need a doctor!’ Cass screamed.
‘A clear statement of your symptoms will help us provide the medical practitioner appropriate to your individual needs.’ A simulated face appeared on the screen and made an attempt at an encouraging smile only marginally less comforting than the cratered surface of the planet now filling the viewplate.
‘I’m trying to send a distress call, stop asking about doctors!’
It was a feed line that the hungriest ego in the universe could hardly be expected to resist.
‘I’m a doctor,’ came a voice behind her, ‘but probably not the one you were expecting.’
Cass spun round and saw a man, who was making a particular point of leaning casually against the wall. A thousand questions lit up in her head, but he was already stepping forward to the console. ‘Where are the rest of the crew?’
‘Teleported off.’
‘But you’re still here?’ His hands were now busy at the controls. Was he checking she was telling the truth?
‘I teleported them.’
‘Why you?’
‘Everyone else was screaming.’
He looked at her, and smiled like she’d passed a test. ‘Welcome aboard.’
‘Aboard what?’
‘I’ll show you!’ And suddenly he had taken her hand (when did she tell him that was okay?) and she was yanked out of the command chair.
The ship howled and creaked, and the main corridor was twisting and flexing, so it felt like running inside a thrashing snake. There was the harsh stink of molten metal and she could feel the heat of the floor thumping against her boots. Her sleep pod was ablaze and everything she’d ever owned was gone.
‘Where are we going?’ she managed to ask.
‘Back of the ship!’
‘Why?’
‘Because the front end crashes first, think it through!’
A joke? Was he joking? Was this man wasting breath on jokes, right now? And where the hell did he come from anyway? And hang on, did that mean he had a way off the ship? She felt a dangerous surge of hope. And in that moment, with a stomp of iron, the rest of the corridor disappeared. A blast door had slammed across in front of them, blocking their path, and finally Cass Fermazzi knew she was going to die.
‘Oh, why did you do that?’ she heard him muttering. But he sounded only mildly irritated, like a man trying to reason with a fugitive bar of soap in a bath.
‘Emergency protocols,’ she found herself explaining, like it even mattered now.
There was a silver rod in his hand, and he buzzed it at the door. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
Was he making conversation? Did he seriously think she was in the mood for a chat?
‘Cass.’ Oh, apparently she was.
‘You’re young to be crewing a gunship, Cass.’
No, she wasn’t telling him her life story, this was not the time. ‘I wanted to see the universe. Is it always like this?’ Why was she talking to him?
‘If you’re lucky,’ he grinned, and then the door was grinding open. Cass barely had time to wonder how he’d done it, before he’d grabbed her hand again, and they were stumbling to a halt in front of—
What the hell was that?
It looked like a tall blue crate, wooden, with panels and barred windows. Absurdly there were the printed words Police Public Call Box above a pair of doors, and was that really a light on top? And there was something else! Although Cass had never seen this box before, something stirred inside her like a race memory. Even a new-born knows to love the sunshine and fear the storm, and with that same ancient certainty, she knew what this battered old crate meant. To her, to everyone. It was purest evil.
He was pulling her towards it now. Instinctively, she pulled back.
‘It’s all right,’ he was saying, reaching for the blue doors. ‘It’s bigger on the inside.’
And then she understood the fear she felt. ‘What did you say? Bigger on the inside, is that what you said?’
‘Yeah, come on, you’ll love it.’
‘Is that—’ The word choked in her throat for a moment. Even on a crashing ship, moments from death, it was a word that felt too dangerous to speak out loud. ‘Is that a TARDIS?’
Oh, the look on his face. A wounded infant. The memory of better days and lost magic. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be perfectly safe, I promise.’
She wrenched her hand from his. ‘Don’t touch me!’
He started to reach for her again, but the look in her eyes stopped him cold. ‘I’m not part of the war,’ he said. ‘I swear. I never have been.’
‘You’re a Time Lord.’ He was, it was so obvious. The
arrogance, the presumption.
‘Yes, but I’m one of the nice ones!’ Oh, and now he thought he could be charming. Could they never understand what they were?
‘Get away from me!’
‘Look on the bright side. I’m not a Dalek.’
She looked at him, and felt the universe shift …
But no! This is too much. I am old, and perhaps I am getting carried away. Truthfully, no one can ever know for sure what was going through Cass’s mind in that moment, but I do think I can guess. For us all, there is a hill somewhere on which we would gladly die. If we are blessed, one day we will find it beneath our feet. That day had come for Cass.
‘Dalek, Time Lord, who can tell the difference any more,’ she said, and stepped backwards the through the door. She slammed her hand on the red button, and activated the incursion seal. Her ship, like all the others, had been proofed against Time Lords, and now was the time to see if it worked. She watched him through the plexi-panel, buzzing away with his silver rod. The door was shuddering, but it didn’t open. ‘Cass! Cass!’
‘It’s deadlocked. Don’t even try!’
‘Just open it. Please, I only want to help.’
To help? How could he think that anyone would believe that? ‘Go back to your battlefield—you’re not finished yet, some of the universe is still standing.’ Oh, the joy of saying those words, of seeing them impact.
‘I’m not leaving this ship without you!’
Those pleading blue eyes, that hunger to be trusted. More than that, to be worshipped, to be adored. Oh dear God, was she supposed to think he was a hero now? They were all the same, those vain, wilful children with their two hearts. But was he really going to stay, and burn with her? Well, if that’s what he wanted! Cass Fermazzi smiled and felt the last moment of joy she would ever feel, as she said: ‘Then you’re going to die right here. Best news all day.’
The ship was grinding and shrieking round her. The heat and light grew fiercer, but now it was exciting.
‘Cass!’ he was shouting. ‘Cass!’
Yeah, she thought, smiling into his silly, anguished face—say my name. Say my name, Time Lord, and die.
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