Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles Part 1

THE GALLIFREY CHRONICLES.

by LANCE PARKIN.

Prologue.

'No doctors!'

That made a few of the relatives on the edge of the group jump, then look back at each other self-consciously. One of the aunts turned away, opened the window a little. The old man on the bed glared at her as the cold air drifted in, but said nothing.

Rachel was sitting by the bedside. The relatives were little more than silhouettes. Black outlines of people. Men in suits, women in tailored jackets, small, restless children in their Sunday best. She couldn't see how many there were. Almost all of them, though. Crowding round.

Circling.

'This is such a lovely house,' another aunt said. She was standing at the window looking down over the lush, green garden.

'Surprisingly large,' an uncle agreed.

'Too dark,' a woman's voice said.

'Cluttered,' another chipped in, to a general murmur of agreement.

There was a touch like a b.u.t.terfly's at Rachel's wrist.

She looked down at the old man. Rheumy eyes stared back, unblinking. It had worn him out just lifting his hand. He'd heard every word.

'Don't let them destroy the books,' he said, loud enough for everyone to hear. 'They're my life.'

There wasn't much of that life left now. He twisted a little on the bed, the pain in his back surging for a moment, coursing through him. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Rachel hadn't known him that long, but in the last month he had clearly begun to fade. He was very old how old the agency had never told her, but she'd always thought he was in his eighties with thin white hair and thinner white skin. He had an aquiline nose and high forehead. He had beautiful blue eyes, even if they were a little watery today. He hadn't stood for a long time, he barely even sat up now. When she'd first given him a bed bath, she'd been struck that he was smaller and lighter than she had thought.

She'd seen his picture on the inside of one of the dust jackets once. Before, there had been so much dignity.

'A good innings,' one of the grandsons said softly.

3.'He was a friend of H.G. Wells,' another whispered to his wife. 'Wrote science fiction before it was even called that.'

'Do you have any of his books?'

'I have have some of them, it doesn't mean I've read them,' the man replied, eliciting a guilty chuckle from a couple of the other relatives. some of them, it doesn't mean I've read them,' the man replied, eliciting a guilty chuckle from a couple of the other relatives.

'Not all of the new ones were published,' the old man tried to explain.

'No,' the grandson said, sympathetically. 'But that didn't stop you writing, did it?'

'Pen,' the old man demanded.

Rachel pa.s.sed him the blue biro and the notepad. A couple of the relatives glanced nervously at each other. There was still time, after all, for him to change his will.

Once again, he tried to draw it. He started with a circle. Then a sort of broken figure-of-eight inside the circle, one with little swirls at the side. It looked vaguely Celtic. He gave up trying to get it right, again. This was the furthest he'd got with the shape for about twenty pages. He was nearly through the notepad. He could fit two, three or four circles on each page.

He dropped the pen. Rachel caught it before it slipped off the bed, and tried to hand it back. The old man refused to take it, or couldn't summon the strength.

'No,' he said.

Rachel smiled. 'You said it was always quite difficult to draw,' she said gently.

'Two hundred feet in diameter,' he said, angry with himself. 'Machonite inlaid in bone-white marble. A circle like that. . . should be. It filled the whole centre of the. . . the hall. The big hall. The one with hexagonal walls and statues the size of tower blocks. The. . . d.a.m.n it d.a.m.n it! I want to get it right.

When I close my eyes, I can see it all. But I can't even remember the name of the. . . I can't remember it. I was born there. Spent lifetimes there. It's important important.'

The relatives were s.h.i.+fting their feet. Embarra.s.sed by the outburst or worried that he had more life left in him than they'd thought.

The old man looked around, almost apologetic.

'I only wish I could remember the name,' he explained. 'I'm the only person on Earth who even remembers. Except. . . except I don't. You understand, don't you?'

Rachel made an attempt to look positive. But whenever he'd tried to explain this before, there had been just too much of it to get her head round. She thought he was sincere, that was the thing, but she didn't understand him.

'I believe you, Marnal,' she whispered. It was his pen name. Since the breakdown, he had insisted on being called that, although no one ever did.

4.He sighed, returned his head to the pillow. Screwed his eyes closed, wring-ing out a tear. Drew in a breath.

'Now I don't have the time. Lord, I wish I could remember the name.'

His head slipped back a little, his face relaxed.

Rachel watched him carefully for a minute, then held the back of her hand close to his nostrils, like she'd been taught. She placed a finger on the side of his neck and waited a whole minute. One of the relatives, a man in his thirties, looked at her, not daring to ask the question.

She nodded. 'He's gone.'

One by one, the relatives filed out. Most at least glanced back at him; one of his daughters made a show of kissing his cheek, inspiring his other daughter to do the same.

Then they had gone. Rachel imagined them all downstairs, perhaps taking a room each and sorting the contents into plunder and litter.

She turned back to Marnal. He looked even smaller and older than before.

Peaceful, though. It felt like she should pray for him or something. Instead, she went over to the window and closed it. The garden was so colourful this time of year. A little overgrown, but with splashes of yellows, reds and purples among the dark green. Great trees. A couple of the younger children had already found their way outside, and were climbing them like nothing had happened.

'Life goes on,' she said.

Rachel turned back to the old man. His skin had some colour to it. She hadn't expected that, but then she hadn't known what to expect. None of her patients had ever died on her before, not right in front of her eyes. She'd been told that dead bodies could do strange things.

There was something. . . the old man's skin was glowing. Ever so faintly, at least at first, but too brightly to be any trick of the light. She didn't think that was normal. It was like an overexposed photo now, his eyebrows and the exact lines of his nose and mouth bleached out.

She stared at the old man's face, and when it stopped glowing it was a young man's face.

Brown eyes snapped open.

'Gallifrey,' the young man said.

5.Notions of heroism have always been problematic, but now heroes appear quaint relics of an age when a white man could save the day just by walking into a room and imposing his moral values on the 'bad guy'.

Following the attacks of September 11th 2001, 13 we all know the problems of the world aren't so easily defined, let alone solved. Heroism is not relevant to the current international paradigm, and seems out of context in domestic political situations. It is no coincidence that the 'heroes' of modern narratives, while often good family men and patri-ots, 14 are often troubled, flawed characters with fragmented, traumatic pasts, 15 endlessly condemned to nightmares and flashbacks of some loved one they couldn't save. 16 A post-modern hero, 17,18,19 then, is on a journey of self-examination and self-validation. He is darker than the world around him, condemned to enact a revenge fantasy that will merely restore the world to imperfect, pluralist normality for an indifferent general population, 20 rather than to spread his virtues to inspire a 'better society'. Rather than 'Holding Out for a Hero'21 it is easy to conclude that most modern observers would actually find all the forms and attributes of traditional heroism old-fas.h.i.+oned and actively undesirable.

Extract from a book of essays by a prominent popular historian, 2003

Chapter One.

New and Missing Adventures

The walls were meant to be soundproof.

Mondova had spent a great deal of time and money trying to block out the noises and sights of the vast city below. The terraces of his palace had been built miles high so that they enjoyed a cool breeze, not the mephitis that belched from the armament plants, germ foundries and war-robot factories which clung to the narrow streets. Here, although the air was thin, Mondova rose above the concerns of his subjects.

Now, though, as he stood on the edge of the very highest terrace, he could hear the loudspeakers telling people to stay in their homes. Worse, he could hear that those proclamations were being drowned out by cheering crowds.

Laughter and insolence. Music was being played. Mondova hated music, and had banned it as his first act as monocrat, over two hundred years before.

Slogans were being chanted. He could hear what sounded very like a vast statue being toppled. On this planet, there were only statues of one person.

Was it the one in Victory Square, Mondova wondered, where he was holding a spear aloft in one hand, a peasant's head in the other? That was his very favourite.

'Crallan!' he yelled. 'Crallan, what in the name of the Seven Systems is happening?'

His chancellor ran into the room, already cowering, almost tripping over his dark grey robes.

'My Lord Mondova.'

'Where are my bodyguards?'

'They've fled, my lord.'

'Sc.u.m! I knew they would be unreliable. That's why I had my Kyborgs built.

Deploy them in the streets. Wipe out this resistance.'

'The Kyborg legion changed allegiance to the rebels, my lord. That's why the bodyguards fled.'

Mondova hesitated.

'Then I have no choice. Call in the s.p.a.ce fleet. Order them to atomise the city.'

'The s.p.a.ce fleet has gone, my lord.'

9.'Gone? Gone where?'

Crallan shrugged. 'We haven't managed to figure that one out yet.'

'It is the most powerful s.p.a.ce navy in the galaxy. It has snuffed out stars, Crallan. Civilisations spanning whole sectors of s.p.a.ce have surrendered at the mere thought I would launch my fleet against them. It has campaigned, unbeaten, for over two centuries.'

'No longer, sir. It's. . . gone.'

The cybernetic regulators of Mondova's stomach skipped a track.

He lurched at Crallan, grabbed him with one armoured hand, lifted him into the air.

'We have to regroup. Gather those still loyal to me, bring them here to the sanctum! I'm not defeated, you hear me?'

He dropped Crallan, who picked himself up and dusted himself off. 'Of course, my lord.'

'Find my daughter,' the monocrat growled, concerned with little else now.

'I'm here, Father.'

She was so beautiful. The slits, folds and colours of her exquisitely tailored outfit contrived to make her long legs longer, the curve of her back more graceful, the blue of her skin more delicate, the white of her hair more vivacious.

Her eyes burned with gold fire, just as her mother's had done.

'I have been persuaded of the error of my ways, Father. For twenty decades you have bullied your subjects, killed them on a whim, sent them across the universe to die in your name.'

It was impossible to see Mondova's face behind the burnished-steel mask, so he didn't seem to react as Crallan pushed his way past his daughter to flee the room.

The monocrat's voice sounded calm, when it came. 'Persuaded by whom, may I ask?'

She smiled. 'He only arrived here this morning, but. . . he opened my eyes, Father. He showed me what was really going on in the city. He's given the people down there hope.'

Mondova watched her carefully. There was defiance in those opened eyes.

A joyfulness he'd never seen before.

He had lost her.

He toyed with the idea of reaching over and snapping her neck. 'Who?' he asked instead.