Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [9]
‘Well, no one’s written your obituary,’ Rachel interrupted. ‘And they probably think “Marnal” is a pseudonym like, I dunno, Hergé or Saki or Iain M.
Banks or something.’
Marnal waved his hand. ‘What I need is in one of these books, but I can’t remember which one.’
‘What? I thought you had your memories back?’
‘I have a good memory, but not total recall. That’s one of the reasons I wrote all these. There had to be a record. Help me to look. I think it’s in one of the Arrows. A paragraph describing the main temporal monitoring chamber.’
He reached up and pulled down an armful of colourful paperbacks. Rachel took them. They all had lurid covers variously depicting bronzed men in 19
flowing robes standing over scantily clad (but not too scantily clad) women, spaceships shaped like egg timers, monsters that looked like trolls, vampires and icky worms.
‘Whatever the books’ literary merits, their covers were always a problem,’
Marnal conceded. ‘Come on – we have work to do.’
20
There was structure, the universe was a web made not of spider’s silk but of space and time.
But in such a cosmos, one of fluxing quad-dimensionality, who was to say what was cause and what was effect? Even the newly woven children of his world understood the solution to that solemn inquiry: there was no history, don’t you see, only established history. Time was an ocean of broth, rich in elements and possibilities. Observations could be made to spot trends and to predict, for the oceans of time were subject to the laws of temporal mechanics. But these were projections of reality, not the reality itself as long as the Lords of Time remained in their Citadel, merely watching. Yet, if a single one among them were to cease observation and to step out into the universe, they would freeze time wheresoever their feet touched the ground, wheresoever they drew breath from the atmosphere. At that moment, their mere presence would change time, from a fluid to a solid thing. If one of the Lords of Time but glanced into the night’s sky, the stars would become true in the instant they were seen, and thence back for every picosecond of the ten thousand years of the stars’ photons’ journey. When a time-traveller swam in this ocean, it solidified around them, crystallised, became trans-muted into that which could never change. And so was written the most sacred law of all – for even the softest touch of a Lord of Time could condemn a man to existence or nonexistence, bring empires into being and destine them to ruin, and blot out the sky or fill it with heavenly radiance. Observe. Never interfere.
Extract from The Hand of Time (1976) by Marnal Chapter Two
Gone
Rachel put the book down. She wasn’t sure that ‘destine’ was really a word, or that ‘flux’ was a verb, but they might have been. Marnal had been a writer for a hundred years longer than she’d been alive, so she was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
She was skimming through the gaudy paperbacks, looking for the words
‘temporal’ (which appeared a lot, almost as often as ‘anomaly’ and ‘eldritch’),
‘monitoring’ and ‘chamber’. It was like a one-armed bandit, she thought –
every so often one of the words would spin into view, but not all three of them at once in a row. So she hadn’t hit the jackpot. Marnal was making slow work of it. Reverentially lifting the books, opening them ever so carefully, treating them like medieval parchment.
‘This is the entire history of Gallifrey,’ he explained. ‘Or at least everything I remember. A record of the greatest civilisation the universe has ever seen.’
‘If they’re stories,’ Rachel began, ‘then, er, how true are they?’
Marnal glared at her.
‘Because every time you write something down you, er, well it’s like you say here. You crystallise it. If you do that, you change it. Yeah?’
Marnal was still giving her that stare of his.
Rachel dug herself