Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [23]
‘That’s the course of his travels. There’s also a list of all the planets he’s visited.
I tried to put them all in chronological order, but it’s impossible.’
Rachel looked for patterns. Marnal had carefully marked points on the line with numbers. He sipped at his coffee as she studied it.
‘There’s a long straight line here,’ she ventured.
49
‘After he destroyed Gallifrey, he hid out on Earth for over a hundred years.
That was when he started to claim his memory had been erased. It was during that period that the incident with the Provider happened.’
‘What’s this gap just before that?’
‘There’s a discontinuity. A piece missing. Right at the moment Gallifrey was destroyed. Three minutes seven seconds’ duration. It’s like an area of space-time has been boxed off.’
‘Because of the temporal warp. . . factor thing?’
‘The violence of the destruction of Gallifrey, yes. It must be. Look at the rest of the Doctor’s time-stream, though. It’s meant to be a neat line. The entire history of this incarnation is one of temporal orbits, retcons, paradoxes, parallel time lines, reiterations and divergences. How anyone can make head or tail out of all this chaos, I don’t know.’
Rachel certainly couldn’t, not from this.
‘As for his future. . . he has three ninth incarnations. I’ve never seen anything like it.’
Marnal was rubbing his eyes.
‘Have you slept?’ she asked. ‘I mean. . . do you even sleep?’
‘So much to know,’ Marnal said. ‘So many facts to keep straight.’
‘You’re a writer,’ she reminded him. ‘I know your novels were all based on reality –’
‘They were reality,’ he snapped. ‘They were perfect unless some damnfool editor got his pen to them and –’
‘Yeah. OK. But you’re thinking about it like, I don’t know, a novel. A biography. At the moment, you’re writing a biography. What you want is something more like a clinical assessment. You don’t really care about where he’s been, and who he met. It’s now that you’re interested in. You want to understand how his mind works, you want to know who he is, and why he did what he did.’
Marnal looked at her for a moment.
‘Obviously,’ she continued, ‘his past and his background and all that are factors in making him who he is. But you’re getting obsessed with history. If you want to know your enemy, you don’t worry about what presents he got for his tenth birthday, or what he had for breakfast three weeks ago. You want to know how he’ll act. He has things he values, he has strategies for achieving goals, he has strengths and weaknesses. A psychology. You’re asking “Doctor what?” when you should he asking “Doctor who?” Does that make sense?’
Marnal nodded. ‘Yes. There is a certain pattern to his behaviour.’
‘There is for everyone. It’s psychology.’
‘You’ve studied this discipline?’
50
‘Well, a bit, yes, as part of my nursing. I don’t have a degree in it.’
For the first time, Marnal looked interested in hearing from her.
It was dark and raining.
Fitz stepped out of the TARDIS and splashed mud over his shoes and trousers.
‘Where are we now?’
‘The TARDIS detected a complex shape here.’
‘A shape?’
‘One end of a five-dimensional object, according to the instruments. A vastly long, very narrow tube, sculpted from history. Some kind of wormhole.’
‘Uh-huh.’ That didn’t sound very interesting. Not worth, as the expression went, getting out of bed for. Fitz glanced over at Trix, who was looking around and trying to get used to the dark.
‘What’s causing it?’ she asked.
The Doctor had some sort of Geiger counter-type thing in his hand and was half-heartedly waving it around. ‘The signal’s not very strong, but there’s a huge amount of disruption in hyperspace and I don’t really understand why.
It may be evidence of another time-traveller. On the other hand, there’s always a chance it could have been an echo, or some fleeting piece of rogue energy.
Or. . . er. . . well, it might