Doctor Who_ Alien Bodies - Lawrence Miles [25]
God, it was a hell of a day for questions. ‘Well, they were kind of... I don’t know. They didn’t make me feel anything, much. Oh, right. I think I know what you’re getting at. Every time I’ve been near an alien so far, I’ve been able to feel it. Like there was something different about them. Present company not excepted.’ The Doctor looked indignant, much to Sam’s satisfaction. ‘But those two didn’t make me feel anything. They might as well have been a couple of people in masks. Right?’
The Doctor peered along the tunnel after the skull-people. ‘They were a couple of people in masks. The Faction recruits agents from all sorts of races.’ He wriggled his shoulders, feigning a shudder. ‘I’m still picking up biodata traces. More intense than usual. Being in contact with that machine must have heightened my senses.’
‘The Faction?’
The Doctor seemed suddenly irritated, as if the thrill of explaining things to stupid humans had finally worn thin. He reached into his jacket. ‘Faction Paradox. It’s a family affair.’
‘A what?’
A book emerged from the arcane depths of the Doctor’s inside jacket pocket. It was a small paperback, and it looked as though it had spent the last couple of centuries hanging around in a loft somewhere. His eyes still fixed on the passage, the Doctor pressed it into Sam’s outstretched hands, although Sam was sure her hands hadn’t been outstretched the last time she’d checked. Strange thing number eighty-nine, she decided.
The cover of the book was black, marked with hundreds of tiny white wrinkles and speckled with cartoonish drawings of galactic spirals. Or were they swirls of DNA? Whatever. Splashed across the cover, in blocky white letters that might have been used for the titles of a biblical epic starring Charlton Heston, were the words GENETIC POLITICS BEYOND THE THIRD ZONE. Under that was the author’s name – GUSTOUS R THRIPSTED – and, in smaller letters, the words HARDCOPY POCKET EDITION. A dead wasp was stuck to the spine.
Sam flicked through the yellowed pages. Yellowed by spilt coffee, she guessed, not age. There was no sign of an index, but the corner of one page was turned down, close to the end of the book. She skim-read some of the text there. Not an easy task, in this light.
Even in primitive cultures, where temporal physics is considered to be little more than science fiction, people are aware of the problems time travel can cause. Perhaps the most famous of all the fourdimensional conundrums is the so-called “Grandfather Paradox”. Suppose, goes the argument, I were to travel into the past and murder my own grandfather, as a young man. If I did this, my father would never exist, and so – logically – neither would I. However, if I never existed, I could never have travelled back in time and murdered my grandfather. Hence, my father did exist, and so I did travel back in time and murder my grandfather... and so on and so forth.
But in time-active cultures such as that of the Time Lords, these paradoxes are more than mere fantasy. To them, the perils of time travel are harsh realities, and Time Lord folk stories are full of cautionary tales about characters who inadvertently murder their own ancestors, or disobedient children who break the First Law of Time (though there is some disagreement in Time Lord society as to what the First Law actually is). For Gallifreyans, the word “Paradox” has the same connotations that the word “Sethite” did for the ancient Osirans, or that the word “Satan” still does for many human tribes. “Paradox” is the greatest imaginable evil, the dark side of the time-travelling lifestyle, a horror never to be mentioned in polite society...
Paradox. As in, Faction Paradox. The folded page was an introduction to the Faction. Sam looked up, to ask the Doctor if this was pure coincidence, or if he’d planned it that way.
But the Doctor wasn’t there. Sam scowled, and squinted into the gloom at the far end of the passage. Halfway along it, she spotted a blur of green velvet, striding off into the depths of the ziggurat, apparently