Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [52]
‘You kicked that one-armed man in the head.’
‘He was just about to conquer the universe.’
‘I can’t believe you know martial arts. You don’t look the type.’
108
‘Well, lucky for you, I’m afraid I forgot all that when I forgot everything else.
Shame. It could come in quite useful from time to time. As a last resort.’
She asked him if he wanted anything for breakfast.
‘Rachel,’ he replied instead, ‘I need to get to my TARDIS. The answer is in there. I didn’t know that before, but I’ve just been thinking, and I realised that after –’
‘The answer is in your TARDIS?’ Rachel repeated.
‘That’s right. There’s a. . . well. . . a back wall. I didn’t know what it was before. Not entirely sure what it is now, truth be told. I know it’s time to find out. Marnal will want to know about this too.’
‘I will tell Marnal what you said. He’ll decide what happens from there.’
‘Let me go,’ the Doctor pleaded. ‘You heard him before. He doesn’t care about humanity, he doesn’t like human beings.’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ Rachel said.
‘What?’
‘Look at me. Look at what I do all day, and it barely covers the credit card bills. You don’t even remember me, do you? Do you think I’m pretty?’
The Doctor sighed. ‘I don’t see what –’
‘Translation: no. I used to think I was. I used to get home and still have a bit of life in me. Went out, had boyfriends. All three of them ended up dumping me after a month or two, and then saying it wasn’t anything to do with me.
Every time, I thought it was going well. I was telling them everything, and falling in love. I was reading the signs, I thought. Giving them more than they wanted. So why. . . ?’
The Doctor looked as if he wanted to put his hand on her shoulder. He looked her in the eye.
‘Most people don’t have lives like that,’ the Doctor said.
‘You’re joking,’ Rachel hissed. ‘Everyone has a life like that. Everyone I know, anyway. We try to pretend we don’t, we try to pretend it’s like an advert and that if we buy a new pair of shoes, or some DVDs, or a wedding ring then we’ll be happy for the rest of our lives, but before we’re even home we feel more guilty than we did, because we spent all that money. So we just get on. And none of us talks about how effing miserable we are all the time, because when we do it feels so self-indulgent and self-centred and so petty. So we go out and get hammered and try to lose ourselves for just one evening, or we pray to a god we know deep down doesn’t exist. But the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time, just sit at home glued to some television show we don’t even like that’s showing us nothing, scared that the plane we can hear above us is about to fall out of the sky, or that the water’s polluted or that some idiot we didn’t even vote for is going to get us all killed, or we 109
just worry that next month the overdraft will finally run out. Because that’s the world.’
‘No,’ the Doctor said simply.
‘No? That’s it, is it? “No.”’ She turned to go.
‘There are marvels out there, Rachel. Domed cities, rocket ships, Tech-nicolor jungles. Walls built with time itself. Smiling robots, flying women, reptile kings. People who look like every animal you can imagine, and quite a lot you can’t. Seas of diamond water, landscapes carved from ice and gold.
So much music, so much laughter. Ingenuity – races that can pluck a star from the heavens and place it in the palm of their hand. False gods and their games, machine minds with such purity of thought. But despite all that, this Earth is the most wonderful place in the universe.’
She turned round.
‘Yeah, because speed cameras and cancer –’
‘“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” I heard that line the very first time it was delivered. All of us, every single one of us in that audience, listened to Burbage and knew the truth of it. I’ve spent a lifetime here, and there’s so much more than even I have known. Have you ever seen a whale’s tail-fin breaking the surface of the ocean, or the sun rise over the Great Wall of China? Have you walked with ten thousand