Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [0]
LANCE PARKIN
Published by BBC Worldwide Ltd
Woodlands, 80 Wood Lane
London W12 0TT
First published 1998
Copyright © Lance Parkin 1998
The moral right of the author has been asserted Original series broadcast on the BBC
Format © BBC 1963
Doctor Who and TARDIS are trademarks of the BBC
ISBN 0 563 40591 0
Imaging by Black Sheep, copyright to BBC 1998
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Cover printed by Belmont Press Ltd, Northampton For Cassandra May, always.
This book and its author owe a great deal to Cassandra May, Mark Jones,
Mike Evans, Mark Clapham, Kate Orman, Jon Blum and Rebecca Levene.
Thanks also to Donald Gillikin, Patricia Gillikin, Elsa Frohman, Lawrence
Miles, Henry Potts, Benjamin Elliott and Gavin Standen.
Prologue
The Old Days
Each snowflake melted as it batted into the thick walls of the Citadel, but still they came, like an invading army.
Eighty-five storeys below, everything was black or white.
Only the tallest of the ruins were visible now, the snows covered the rest. Not that there had been much to see before the ice had come, merely the ancient temples and amphitheatres, the last evidence of a race that had ruled by the sword and built an empire planet by planet until it had spread across the universe.
When the temples had been built, the future had been an open sea. Gallifrey had been ruled by seers who remembered the future as they remembered the past.
Destiny was manifest, the bountiful cargo that filled the holds of a thousand thousand starships. The prophecies had been bound and bound up to be the charts used to circumnavigate infinity. Explorers travelled ever outward, apprised of the marvels they would find, aware of the dangers. Prospectors rushed to the stars, knowing where to look for gold. Heroes took great risks, certain of the outcome. The future had shone as bright as the moon, and had been just as incorruptible.
Those times had gone, swept away in a few short years.
The statues and towers had toppled and the fleets had been scuttled. The heroes had died, blind and alone, as all true heroes must. And as the temples and libraries had burned, the Books of Prophecy had been lost to the fire, along with all the other books. Only one fragment had been salvaged from the rubble. Now there were only memories of those definitive, intricate maps of what was to come. But the memory cheats, it steals, it lies, it tells you what you want to hear.
Today was a day to live in the memory.
The ships were a dream come true, and looked the part.
Just from the vivid coloration of their hulls it was obvious that they didn’t belong here – they hung like vast tropical fish amongst the half-submerged clock towers and minarets, light like the planet hadn’t seen for a generation pouring from their portholes and hatches and into the evening. No wonder that the crowds of Newborn thronged around the observation levels of the quays. The older generation were more sceptical, seeing the whole enterprise as wasteful, potentially catastrophic. The ships hadn’t been in the prophecy, they insisted. This was a betrayal, a calculated attempt to sever all links with the future they knew: it hadn’t been foretold that the Gallifreyan race would become sterile, there was nothing in the Fragment about Looms, Houses, Cousins, this, that or the other.
Only a handful of the Elders had ventured out here from the shelters, obvious from their stature, let alone their robes of office. Many of them still begrudged the decision that the ships would be crewed by the young, that only a handful of crew members would be over ten years old. But the announcement came as no surprise. Those born since the darkness had fallen were a race apart from their ancestors.
The young were eager, enthusiastic and their best days were still ahead of them. They didn’t dwell on the glories of the past, they wanted to live in the future, shape it, rather than merely remember. The new order was no longer shocking, indeed it was becoming comfortable, familiar. The Old