Doctor Who - The Wheel of Ice Read online

  ‘Order! OK, Karen, the floor is yours…’

  48

  ‘ZOE! IT’S GUID tae hear yer voice again. And ye’re back in yer Mars shuttle?’

  ‘Yes. Hello, MMAC! It’s become a sort of home from home for me in here. I have to thank you again for coming to save us when we were flying off into space.’

  ‘Och, don’t mention it. Though I have tae warn ye—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a mighty monster sleepin’ not a metre behind ye.’

  ‘Oh, you mean Casey. Or rather, the Karkus! She just won’t get out of the costume her sister made for her. Her mother’s going to have to peel it off her when it’s time for a wash, I think.’

  ‘Ye’ve a way with kids, Zoe Heriot.’

  ‘Have I? I mean – I don’t know anything about children—’

  ‘Believe yer uncle MMAC. Ye’ve a way. They’re all in the big house talkin’ about the future, is it?’

  ‘Yes. The constitutional convention. Which is why I’m babysitting, again. And it’s what I’ve come here to talk to you about, MMAC.’

  ‘The future.’

  ‘Yes. Specifically your future.’

  ‘Ah, whisht ye. What future? I’ve always done my job tae the best of my ability. And, well, I’m still handy in an emergency. But I’m obsolete, Zoe. Just a rottin’ hulk whose day is done.’

  ‘MMAC! Let me get a word in. It’s not just your future I’m concerned with but the Arkive’s.’

  ‘Och, another relic who’s run out of purpose! Mind you, they’ll look after some bit of old alien kit better than anythin’ made on the Clyde, I shouldnae wonder. Put her in a museum, will they?’

  ‘Well, no, the Doctor has worked out something rather better than that for her. But it’s all going to rely on you.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘It’s going to take dedication.’

  ‘Ah’ve plenty of that.’

  ‘And a long time.’

  ‘I’ve more than enough o’ that.’

  ‘MMAC, have you ever heard of a substance called taranium?’

  ‘No…’

  Taranium, the Doctor had told her, was one of the rarest, and most unstable, substances in the universe. It was capable of storing tremendous amounts of energy – and had been used in time travel applications. The Daleks, the Doctor said, had once used the substance to make a ‘time destructor’ which was capable of sending, not just vehicles like the TARDIS, but whole regions through time.

  Zoe gave MMAC an edited version of this.

  ‘Time travel, ye say? Well I nivver.’

  ‘Now the good news is that one of the few sources of this stuff taranium is in the solar system. The planet Uranus!’

  ‘Uranus? Why, that’s right next door.’

  ‘Yes! But the bad news is that it takes a long time to extract. Decades. You’d have to process a billion tonnes of ore just to retrieve a milligram.’

  ‘That really will take decades!’

  ‘I imagine you’d have to take up orbit around Uranus. Perhaps use some of the scoopships Bootstrap use to extract deuterium from Saturn. Set up a very long-term operation…’

  ‘Ye’re makin’ me slaver, lassie! That’s right up MMAC’s street. As ye ken verra well, don’t ye? But I still don’t understand. How will time travel help yon Arkive?’

  ‘Well, that’s just it, MMAC. She’s already tried. She failed in her mission to preserve the culture that sent her out, escaping the supernova – through no fault of her own, but she’s consumed by guilt. So she’s been trying to go back, back in time, to confront her makers and—’

  ‘And tell them she’s sorry.’

  ‘Yes! You understand. She tried once before – well, at least once. She didn’t have taranium—’ Or the Doctor’s own TARDIS technology.

  ‘So now the Doctor wants to help her go back. Is that the idea?’

  ‘Well, not quite. Even with the taranium, to go back would be unadvisable. The Doctor says it’s never a good idea to cross your own timeline. I mean, to go backwards and—’

  ‘Meet yersel’ comin’ forward.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Knows a lot about time travel, yon Doctor, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh, ha ha, it’s all just theory. Goes back to Einstein, you know! And there’s another problem. We couldn’t send the Arkive back even if we tried! Because of what she is – or rather, what she’s become.’

  ‘Ah. All that information in the rings.’

  ‘Yes. The Arkive has been stuck in that moon for billions of years. And in all that long time she’s become – embedded. The elements of her hull, including bernalium, have seeped into the ice. Unconsciously, she has learned to store her thoughts in the shifting gravitational field of Saturn and its moons. How could we possibly transfer all that? And the Doctor speculates that there may be other natural storage media. The Arkive has done a lot of thinking, and has had a lot of memories to hold onto. Saturn’s magnetosphere, for instance; you could write information into fluctuations of the magnetic field. And who knows what else, that we haven’t thought of yet?’

  ‘I see what ye mean. You can’t send the whole of Saturn back in time! So the Arkive can’t be moved. But what’s the point of this taranium then?’

  ‘Well, the Doctor has suggested something smaller scale. The Arkive can’t go back. But she could send a message. A kind of journal – an autobiography. It could be sent back to the moment after the Arkive herself was dispatched, so there would be no timeline-crossing, no time paradox. And as a stream of information it would be much cheaper to send, in terms of taranium.’

  ‘A letter home. She would have the chance to say sorry after all.’

  ‘And to say what became of her.’

  ‘Perhaps it will give her some peace, then.’

  ‘That’s the idea. And then, maybe, she can move on, and we can learn something of the people of her lost world… This is going to be a strange project, MMAC. The Arkive will surely be preserved where she is, here in her moon. There will be scientists studying her, and so forth. And all the while you’ll be out at Uranus. But you’ll have to come up with some cover story. The Doctor says this taranium is not stuff you’d want to fall into the hands of – well, of someone like Florian Hart.’

  ‘Och, I understand.’

  ‘This will take decades, even centuries, but—’

  ‘But that willnae matter to me. Or to a creature that’s already waited billions of years.’

  ‘Yes. So will you help, MMAC?’

  ‘Try an’ stop me! And Zoe – thank him fer me.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Doctor.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Ye ken verra well what for.’

  ‘I should go, the Freedom March is due to start soon… Oh, I almost forgot. Speaking of letters home – MMAC, do you remember you told me about how your mother wrote to you from Glasgow? And then the letters stopped?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, I was suspicious about that. Why should they just stop like that? I wondered if somebody had put a block on them deliberately.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. For reasons of economic efficiency, probably. You’d get more work done if you weren’t taking up precious time and processing power reading letters from your mother—’

  ‘Ye’ve found ’em, haven’t you?’

  ‘As soon as we had access to Unity House in Res One, which was Florian’s own residence, I hacked into the computer store. And guess what I found…’

  ‘Fifteenth of June. Cristal Street, Glasgow. Dear MMAC, It’s been a few weeks since your last message reached me but I thought I should write again. There’s too much news to be kept in my head! To begin with there’s your old pal Tommy Burns, who’s just been selected for an apprenticeship at Clavius Base on the moon…’

  ‘It’s her voice.’

  ‘Your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘These are yours, MMAC
. Uploading now… done. You read them through. We can talk about them later if you like…’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You must know how sorry I am about what we did. All the lies. But it didn’t feel like lies at the time! You were just my little boy. Even though you were in a sort of virtual-reality tank, and I couldn’t hold you or kiss you…’

  ‘I’ll leave you to your memories, MMAC. And don’t miss the March.’

  49

  THE FREEDOM MARCH was magnificent. Practically the whole population of the Wheel of Ice, permanent and temporary, gathered in Res One before the great front of Unity House, the corporate headquarters where once Florian Hart had enjoyed intimidating workers, elected officials, and representatives of Earth’s governments. Now it was a palace claimed for the new nation.

  Then they all paraded anticlockwise through the whole of the rebuilt Wheel, through the six sectors, marching through the gleaming bubbles of Mnemosyne ice, squeezing with much jostling and laughter through the interleaving space hulks and fuel tanks.

  Zoe, having taken longer over her conversation with MMAC than she’d planned, ended up joining the March in Recreation, the last sector before the return to Res One. Once this had been one of the most bleak and joyless places Zoe had ever seen, with corporate messages pumped out from display flags, and cinemas showing nothing but uplifting sagas of happy, toiling workers, and sports pitches and play halls where you had to pay for everything. A mixture of work camp and theme park. But now the company flags were gone, the fences around the football pitches torn down, and the March, surging through, was a mass of disorderly colour.

  By now MMAC was providing a noisy commentary over the Wheel-wide PA system. The March as a whole was made up from all the Wheel’s communities, the grey-clad As, purple-clad Bs, green-clad Cs, the squat Earth-born adults mixed in with their low-gravity-tall kids, wearing sunglasses to protect eyes adapted to the dim light of Saturn.

  Zoe wasn’t at all surprised to see Jamie front and centre, bagpipe blaring. Sam Laws, with Dai and Sanjai and others, flanked him, plucking at home-made harps and hammering drums. Even the Doctor was there, piping away on his recorder, though Zoe couldn’t hear him over the din.

  Once back in Res One, the March returned at last to Unity House, where Jo, Sonia, Luis and others stood on a balcony. Standing under a rank of flagpoles, Jamie led the musicians in one last air: ‘The Wearing of the Green,’ an old Jacobite marching tune.

  And MMAC’s commentary gave way to uncontrolled blubbing.

  The Doctor put his recorder into his pocket, and quietly beckoned to Zoe and Jamie. They slipped unnoticed out of the crowd, and, with the Doctor leading the way, went around the grand house to a small storage building at the back.

  MMAC was still weeping into the PA. The Doctor held his hands to his ears. ‘Oh, what a racket! I told Walter Scott that all that sentimental stuff about the tartan and the heather would lead to no good. I told him! And now we’ve got to put up with this – a caterwauling Modular Autonomous Component!’

  ‘Well, he has got a lot to weep about, Doctor,’ Zoe said cheerily. ‘You’ve just sentenced him to a century’s hard labour, mining taranium from Uranus.’

  Jamie was taking his pipes apart. ‘Uranus! Not yon King George’s planet! That’s nae place for a good Scot!’

  ‘Oh, don’t be absurd, Jamie. But what a day it’s been.’ The Doctor sniffed the air. ‘Freedom! Can’t get enough of it. I do admire people like this, you know, at this sort of juncture in their history. People who build things – a home, a city, a world, a nation. Not something I’ve ever done, or ever could do, I suppose. Now, look what I’ve found for you…’ He opened the storage building’s unlocked door to reveal the TARDIS.

  ‘The ship!’ Zoe said. ‘I thought she was impounded in Utilities somewhere.’

  ‘Well, I suspected Florian would have had her moved. Perhaps as a long-term way of manipulating us, whom she saw as enemies. Or perhaps as an acquisition of what she may have recognised as high technology. At any rate it didn’t take me long to find her, I’ve been popping back for this and that – for I have the key!’ He produced it with a little jig of pleasure. ‘And she’s ready to depart. The inhibitor circuits that locked us down because of the threat to the continuum have cleared now. So here she is,’ he said, stroking the TARDIS’s battered frame. ‘Grumpy, grouchy, unreliable, and with a mind entirely her own. But ours again!’

  ‘Och, I coulda used my own pipes instead o’ yon museum piece on the March,’ Jamie grumbled.

  Zoe felt mildly shocked. ‘Oh, must we go now? Without saying goodbye?’

  ‘Well, goodbyes lead to good questions, Zoe, and that’s never advisable for us. And besides – look over there.’ He pointed to the flagpoles fluttering in a fan-assisted breeze before Unity House. ‘The flag at the end – just been hoisted… Don’t you recognise it, Zoe?’

  Zoe saw a rather grandiose circular crest: a globe, an outstretched hand, a spaceship pointing at the stars. ‘That’s the insignia of the International Space Command.’

  ‘Yes. And it’s been hoisted because the inspector that you cleverly requested to get us out of the jug, Zoe, is about to arrive. Earlier than expected. Been whizzed here aboard a brand new Delta-class interplanetary freighter, I’m told.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jamie. ‘Talk about chickens comin’ home to roost.’

  ‘Quite so, Jamie. And so you see…’

  Jamie touched Zoe’s arm. ‘I know ye made a friend, lass. The wee bairn’ll miss ye. But maybe ye’ll see her again some day.’

  ‘I somehow doubt it,’ Zoe said, trying to keep a tinge of bitterness out of her voice. ‘That’s not how we live our lives, is it?’

  The Doctor patted her on her shoulder. ‘But at least we have each other. Now then, all aboard – I don’t think anybody’s watching us…’

  In that, he was wrong.

  The blue box disappeared. Just like that.

  And a girl and a robot saw everything.

  Phee Laws wore a jumpsuit she’d been given by Zoe, neither grey nor purple nor green but panelled with pastel colours. She walked up to the storage building, now empty, and inspected a square patch of vacated floor, dust-free.

  ‘MMAC,’ she murmured.

  MMAC spoke in her ear. ‘Aye, lass?’

  ‘I followed them. I thought they were up to something. Did you see that?’

  ‘Aye, I did.’

  ‘I wonder who they were.’

  ‘Aye. And where they went.’

  ‘I expect Marshal Paley will be interested in this.’

  ‘Oh, aye.’

  ‘But she’ll probably lock me up and interrogate me.’

  ‘Aye. And impound my records.’

  ‘Do you think we should just let them go, MMAC?’

  ‘Thought ye’d ne’er ask. I’ve forgotten ’em already. But, Phee…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Ye’ve got some explainin’ to do to your little sister.’

  EPILOGUE

  TARDIS

  In the vortex that lies beyond time and space tumbled a police box that was not a police box.

  The brilliantly lit control room was empty, silent save for a hum of unseen engines. On the gleaming floor, in one corner, lay two modest musical instruments, a wooden recorder and a bagpipe’s practice chanter.

  And beside them was a ragged doll, blue, made of scraps.

  Somewhere an alarm chimed faintly.

  Distracted from their different pursuits, the ship’s three crew hurried towards the control room.

  ‘Och. What now?’

  ‘Which of you has been meddling with the controls this time?’

  ‘Doctor – Jamie – look at the scanner! What’s that?’

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  Published in 2012 by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.

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  Copyright © Stephen Baxter 2012

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