Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [42]
No response from either party, they didn’t even turn to face him. They sat watching each other suspiciously across the table. There were no weapons here, both sides knew that, but they still suspected that this was a trap of some kind.
For another ten, agonising, seconds no one spoke.
‘What language are we to use?’ one of the Sontarans growled.
‘Whichever you want to hear,’ the Doctor explained, grateful. ‘One of the advantages of holding a conference here on Gallifrey is that there will be no difficulties with translation.
Your races have different names for planets and units of measurements. The planet the Sontarans call New Quentar, the Rutans call Sisswurgplok. We classify it as Procyon. You will always hear a name you understand, you will not be forced to use the name coined by your enemy.’
The Rutan gurgled. ‘It is not as straightforward as that in all cases, as our units of time are based on the rotational period of our homeworlds and a Rutan year is three times the length of a Sontaran year and a Gallifreyan year is different again.’
‘Oh yes,’ the Doctor said, brightening. ‘Take the way that Gallifrey measures an hour. In the ancient days, we used sundials, divided up into nine periods. We called those
“hours”, after an ancient sun god. There were also nine hours of darkness, measured by candle, or hourglass. Nine Bells is always dawn in the morning and dusk in the evening. A very simple system, but also very complicated. Out planet is slightly tilted on its axis, so there is more daylight in the summer than in winter. But whatever the time of year, the sundial would divide the daylight period into nine hours, So hours vary in length from forty-five minutes in the depths of midwinter to one hundred and ten at midsummer. At the moment, this being towards the end of the eleventh month of the year, each daylight hour is about fifty-five minutes long, each hour of the night is about one hundred and five.’
The Rutan snorted, which was a rather extraordinary sight.
‘Illogical, unscientific.’
The Doctor nodded. ‘Oh yes, especially now that we live under the Dome, and never see the sun anyway. But that’s still the way we do it, for the most part. Some Time Lords operate their own systems, based on their own body clock or the needs of their job. My point is that the phrase “one Gallifreyan hour” is pretty meaningless at the best of times, and would take the best part of a day to explain to non-Gallifreyans. But everything is translated for you. If I say
“one hour”, the Sontarans would hear it as ‘Four subLunar cycles’ and you would hear it as “Sixty-Three Million Beats”.
We would all understand which period of time was meant.’
‘We would expect the Time Lords of all the universal races to understand that time is relative,’ the Rutan said.
General Sontar gave a gruff laugh. ‘It would be irony indeed if they did not.’ Either out of etiquette, or because they were slower on the uptake, the other Sontarans waited for Sontar to finish before chuckling themselves. It was an odd sound, like the revving of a motorbike engine, and not without a hint of malice.
The Doctor smiled broadly.
The Rutan had cracked a joke and the Sontarans had laughed. There was hope for them all yet.
Larna was dreaming, she knew that because sunlight didn’t stream over the Capitol’s roof gardens and it wasn’t Outside either, it wasn’t wild enough to be the place that she’d read about. She knew she was dreaming because really she was safe in the Doctor’s bed.
There were no paths here, no carefully laid out flower-beds or mazes or hedgerows. But the purple grass was neatly manicured, and there was a bench by the side of the pool. There was a delicate mist in the air, one that hid the rest of the world from her, and her from the rest of the world.
But the sky was blue, cloudless, and the air was warm. She wondered whose garden it was, and how she had got here.
She wondered what she was wearing, and noticed that she wasn’t wearing anything at all. But there were no Time Lords here to disapprove, only butterflies, and this