Doctor Who_ The Infinity Doctors - Lance Parkin [99]
‘The past is a mystery to us, as the future is to you.’
‘But the past has happened, hasn’t it, that’s the difference.’
‘It must appear odd from your perspective, but your predicament is more odd. At least we have a record of the past. You hurtle blindly into the future.’
‘And I wouldn’t have it any other way. So you cope by writing your diary… but you do it the night before. “Tuesday: Tomorrow I’m off to the zoo, and I’m writing this because by the time I get back I’ll have forgotten I’ve been.”’
‘Our memories are like yours, they merely face in the opposite direction. We are not infallible… something might happen tomorrow that slips our mind, but we all have vivid memories of events a decade from now.’
‘There’s the slight difference that if you lose your keys, all you’d have to do is remember where you’re going to find them and go there first… but I suppose you’d say the same about me, that all I’d have do is remember where I left them.
It’s still a logical absurdity. What if you told me that…’
‘The future has happened. We’d tell you the correct answer: thirty-five.’
‘If you’d let me finish. What if I were to ask you to tell which number I was thinking of? You’ve just said what it would be. Fine. In that case I say something different. I’d say… thirty-five.’
The Doctor hesitated. He’d not said ‘thirty-five’, he’d said a different word, and then before that, they’d said it, so he’d said a different number, so they’d said it. It was an endless sequence, like trying to name the biggest number, or working out whether the chicken came before the egg. He could understand what was happening, but the answer remained just one step out of reach. It was a simple question with an infinite answer.
The past is as malleable as the future. We see the future, we do not affect it. It might seem paradoxical to you, but as a time traveller you must understand something of the complex nature of the universe. There have been occasions on your travels when you have seen the past unfurling around you, just as you remember reading would happen. Time is relative.’
‘The observed past does not change,’ the Doctor objected.
‘That is one of the fundamentals of time theory.’
‘You have free will,’ Willhuff assured him, ‘in the past, the present and future. Nothing is fixed, nothing that can be remembered can’t be forgotten.’
‘But how can you say that I’ve got free will when you know what my actions will be?’
‘We will stop you.’
‘Doing what? Ah, but of course. You know why I am here.
You know that I’m looking for the doors, and you’ll try to stop me.’
‘You will fail. From our perspective you already have.’
‘You’ve read a few pages ahead, is that it? Life’s just a book that you can flick through. Well, I may rewrite the history books yet, you know.’
‘We have our sacred duty. This is a place of great power, and there are those in the universes that would have that power for themselves.’
‘So you kill anyone that comes here, like poor Norval. And you knew where his TARDIS would end up when it made that random jump. You fired your weapon even before your target arrived. No wonder the Maltraffi steer clear of you.’ He sat looking at their faces, watching them in the firelight.
Willhuff pointed to the back of the room. ‘You spend the whole night in that corner, in a self-induced coma.’
‘We bring you closer to the fire in the morning,’ Palant said.
‘Then, just as you are regaining consciousness, your colleagues come down and rescue you.’
Helios smiled. ‘Wander off if you want, we already know that don’t reach the Door, and exactly how you spend the night.’
‘You’ll not try to stop me?’ The Doctor was already pacing away from them, his mind juggling the various possibilities.
Lying in that corner asleep? That didn’t sound like him at all.
It had always been the same since his very earliest days: if someone told him to do something, he would do