The vortex of wind became even stronger. "It is too late! Artemis cannot be stopped now! Besides, you've got an execution in order!" the Monk exclaimed. The Doctor looked around. Where the Vardans had been, a Dalek, a Cyberman and an Ice Warrior were standing.
"They're not real!" the Doctor shouted, his words tearing through the air.
"Don't try to fight it!" the monk shouted furiously. "Both you and I know that a Vardan can very easily overpower a simple minded fool like yourself!" he exclaimed.
"You're all the same!" the Doctor shouted. "Listen to me, you have to stop Artemis and you have to stop it now!" the Doctor shrieked.
"It is too late Doctor... Artemis... is here!" the monk burst out into insane laughter that grew with the wind that had started to become extremely violent.
And then, with the sound of a thousand voices shrieking, Artemis arrived. The Doctor tried to look away, even as he tried to fight off the mental onslaught of the Vardans. But niether was of any use. His eyes were drawn inexorably back to the glorious, horrifying spectacle of the chronovore as it ripped space and time asunder, twisting the very existence of Meridan/Varda through a billion years of time, sending it back into the distant past and moving it to a new location.
He was still trying to comprehend how the Monk could control her when the Vardans caused an embolism in his brain and he died.
He knew his enemy was in London, in 1976. A clue had been placed in his path, like a worm wriggling on a hook. 'Danny Pain', the Master of the Land of Fiction had said. A name that he'd only heard once, and that in a very different context. Still, it was the beginnings of a plan, and his mysterious enemy might not know how he knew of Danny Pain and Plasticene. Or at least, he was hoping for it. He wondered how Benny would like being a punk rocker...
"So what's next on the Hit Parade?" Ace asked as she entered the room. She was still wearing the combat suit, he noted disapprovingly, but he said nothing. Relations between Ace and himself had been somewhat strained of late, especially after the incident in the Land of Fiction, and he was loath to put a further strain on them.
"Earth," the Doctor said. "London. 1976."
"And that's all you'll say, isn't it?" Ace sneered. "Going to play it close to the vest again, with another plan to save us all from ourselves. Like that's worked so bloody well before. Well, as far as I'm concerned, you can--"
And then the Doctor disappeared.
"Anywhere in the universe, and all through time," the Doctor said as he rubbed at a monitor with a damp cloth. "My people, the Time Lords, invented it long ago to observe the rest of the universe."
"I dunno," Wil said. "It seems kind of dangerous to me. What if you went back and changed history so that you never existed?"
"That simply couldn't happen, Wil," the Doctor said very calmly. "The laws of the universe prevent that sort of paradoxical effect. They--"
And then the Doctor disappeared.
The Vardans kneeled before him, their bodies flickering in and out of the visible spectrum. "What shall we do with the body of the demon?" one of them asked.
"Destroy it," the Monk said coldly. "Make certain that it can never again attain life."
One of the Vardans turned to the body, as the Monk started to journey back to his TARDIS. He did not look long enough upon it to notice the glow that suffused its features.
"--tell me what you need to, Doctor. I trust you. After all we've been through together, the five of us, how could I not?"
The Doctor blinked. "Five?"
"Well, counting little Raph, of course. I know, I know, he usually stays here in the TARDIS while we're off adventuring, but I can't help counting him. After all, he is my son."
The Doctor looked at Dorothy closely, taking in her close-cropped brown hair, her flower-patterned dress, her soft smile. He frowned slightly, then looked down at his own long, delicate fingers. Reaching up, he touched his own face, running his fingers into and through his luxurious brown hair. "Something's wrong," he uttered in horror.
"Something like what, Doctor?" Jan asked as he entered the room.
"--render it quite simply impossible for that kind of change to happen," she continued quite calmly.
Jadi shrugged. "I guess you're the expert, Doc. So where are we going next?"
The Doctor shrugged. "It all depends on the TARDIS, really...sometimes I enjoy just setting a random string of co-ordinates, and leaving it all up to the universe to decide. It's a form of synchronicity, you see...we go where the universe needs us to go."
She looked down at the console, and her face hardened into a grim expression. "And right now, it appears we need to go to the home of my old enemies, the Vardans."
"This isn't right!" he shouted, ducking under another bolt that singed his dark hair. "I shouldn't have died just now! I shouldn't have regenerated!" Another bolt passed just where his head would have been, if he'd been as tall as he once was. The Vardans continued their relentless onslaught, and without cover, the Doctor knew he was doomed.
"None of this is supposed to have happened!"
"Why are you calling me that?" Dorothy asked as she slipped her arm around Jan. "I haven't called myself Ace since the wedding."
Benny grinned. "Well, not since the bachelorette party, at any rate. I still can't believe you managed to fit the whole sausage into--"
The Doctor shot her a glance that read nothing but grim seriousness. "I mean, whoever our mysterious enemy is, he's struck again. At my--our past, this time."
"You mean like the alternate Earth?" Jan asked.
"Not...exactly," the Doctor said, trying not to meet Jan's eyes, terrified of seeing the taint of the Hoothi in his retinal print, even more terrified that he wouldn't. "He caused me to die prematurely again, that much I know. But unlike that universe, I was allowed to regenerate this time. The changes made to the timestream were relatively minor--in fact, they seem to have been beneficial in some ways."
"Like what?" Dorothy asked.
"I'm not entirely certain," the Doctor said. "I retained some limited knowledge of the changes made, as a Time Lord...but this incarnation doesn't have the peculiar knowledge and unique skills that my previous one did." The Doctor sighed. "I'm not Time's Champion anymore, Ace...and I'm afraid that it might be for the best."
"What is, Doctor?" Jadi asked, trying not to notice the way that the Doctor's hips swayed as she moved around the TARDIS console. At least when Chris and Grace were here, they provided a bit of a distraction from the Doctor's body. But Grace left them to care for Wil, back on Paracastria, and Chris went to study on a planet called Dellah with that Braxatiel guy. Now it was just him and the Doctor, and keeping his mind off of her was getting to be tough. He'd be grateful for a few aliens to shoot.
"Our visit to Varda. The Vardans have always been a tenacious group of opponents, to say the least--it wasn't until the Time Lords managed to time-loop their home planet that I freed Earth from their grip. I've always wondered what made them the way they were, and how they discovered and conquered Earth, but I never seemed to have the chance to find out. Now I do, and..." she rubbed her temples slightly, pushing the wire-rimmed glasses back up on her nose. "Sorry, I keep losing my train of thought. Something's nagging at the back of my head, and I can't quite figure out what it is."
"Er...yeah. I kind of know what you mean. It's like someone walked over my grave."
"Exactly!" the Doctor exclaimed. "Only in my case, three times over..." She looked down at the console. "No time to worry about it now. We've arrived."
Then the TARDIS materialized in front of him, and terror was replaced by curiousity and indignation.
The Vardans' energy bolts ripped into the TARDIS, which simply absorbed them like drops of water into a pond. A woman stepped out, with auburn hair tied up into a bun, and wire-rimmed glasses. She wore a man's tuxedo, in apparent defiance of conventional fashion, and was followed by a slightly scruffy man wearing stained and dented Adjudicator's armor, on which various slogans had been spray-painted. He fired a few shots at the Vardans, to no apparent effect. Then the woman turned and pulled out a small, hand-held device--his sonic screwdriver, he realized--and activated it. The Vardans shrieked and fled, their energy wavelengths dissipating.
"Ah," she said in a rich, cultured tone, "it's nice to see that some things still haven't changed." Her smile vanished as she took in the sight of the Doctor standing before her. "Oh, dear," she whispered. "What's a guy like me doing in a time like this?"
Staring at her, the Doctor had a very similar question.
"Of course," the Doctor said, pulling a last lever. "Benny, Ace, if you could just wait in here? Jan and I need to get some equipment, and then we'll head out." Benny and Dorothy looked up from their conversation long enough to nod, then resumed their discussion. A stab of anguish pierced the Doctor's heart as he watched them speak, closer than sisters. They trust me, he thought, even as he led Jan deeper into the TARDIS.
When they got to the laboratory, the Doctor started bundling devices and supplies into his pocket. "What did you want to speak to me about, Jan?" he asked, still trying to avoid looking at him directly.
"Well..." Jan sighed. "It's just that the time I've had here, with Dorothy, it's been really...it's been wonderful. I've had so much given to me, and I owe it all to you. You stopped the Hoothi, you saved my life, you did so much for me..."
"And?" the Doctor snapped tersely, hating himself for listening.
"And all of these alternate realities we've seen, all of the changes that have been made to the timestream have been making me think how close it was. It'd be really easy for this guy, whoever he was, to make it so that I died back there on Heaven. I don't even want to think about what that would do to Dorothy, or Benny for that matter."
The Doctor nodded, trying to keep the pain from his face.
"But the thing is, you can't let that stop you. Whoever this guy is, he's not out for power, or eternal life, or whatever. He's doing all of this just to torment you. And I'm sure that he can make your life a living hell. Don't let him." He clapped a hand on the Doctor's shoulder. "I owe you my life, Doctor. If you need to take it back, it's yours to take. Remember that."
The Doctor looked at Jan, seeing him through the eyes of this universe, remembering a maturity and wisdom that had surprised his past counterpart, after he'd joined the TARDIS crew. He remembered Dorothy's happiness, her pregnancy, their child. Then he remembered dying at the hands of the Monk..."Thank you, Jan. I'll do my best to keep everyone safe."
"No, we don't," the Doctor said angrily. "I don't remember being here, on Varda, and I don't remember dying."
"Of course you don't," the Doctor said. "Blinovich Limitation Effect, remember? When you're in the middle of experiencing your own past, you can't remember it because the amount of mental energy required is literally infinite. Whereas I can conjecture with ease, because that takes virtually no mental energy at all. You're my future incarnation, my ninth self. The Monk's altered history to make you come into being prematurely...and somehow, he's made you a woman, which shouldn't have happened at all."
"The Master tried to take over my eighth body," the Doctor said. "Chris--a future companion, you haven't met him--stopped him, but the damage done to my DNA was irreversible. I was dying when the TARDIS landed on Earth; Chris did the only thing he could and took me to a hospital. The doctor who treated me was a human female named Grace Holloway--when she touched me, the nanites in my bloodstream used her DNA as a pattern to rebuild my own."
"I see," the Doctor said. "And this would be Chris?" he said, pointing to the man in armor.
"No," Jadi said. "I'm Jadi Morok. See, after the Doctor regenerated, he travelled with Grace and Chris for a while. The Celestial Toymaker tried to capture her, but I helped her stop him. After that, I kinda hooked up with the group."
"And you're an Adjudicator?"
"No, Chris was. He lent me a set of armor that used to belong to his partner, Fenn Martle. I customized it a little, gave it some personality."
"I see. Well, Jadi, I'm the Doctor--the seventh, now, it appears, and the timestream has sent you to me to help defeat an old enemy of mine--"
"The Vardans. Yeah, she told me."
"No, not the Vardans. They're a minor threat, next to the--"
"Minor?" The ninth Doctor trembled in indignation. "They managed to conquer the Earth...and kill the Brigadier in the process!"
Nelson's Column had been demolished, replaced by a swirling, twisting multi-dimensional antenna that glowed with sheer power. Humans walked from street to street in a daze, their heads encased in black globes that seemed to prevent all sensory input. Nonetheless, they managed to avoid obstacles in their path. Large television screens were on every building, showing indistinct, flickering images that gave the Doctor a headache when he looked at them.
"This is 1976, Doctor?" asked Dorothy.
"No, Ace, it isn't," the Doctor said. "This is another alternate reality--and now I know who's behind it."
"Ten seconds out of the TARDIS and you know who's behind it?" Benny smirked. "That's a record, even for you. Care to enlighten us?"
"Two old enemies of mine. One of them is a race of beings known as the Vardans; I recognize their electromagnetic transference patterns from the screens."
"And the second?" Jan asked.
"A renegade Time Lord known as the Meddling Monk," the Doctor replied. "I recognize his style."
"OK, so now we know who's responsible for all this," said Dorothy. "How do we stop him and fix all this?"
"We don't," said the Doctor. "Not here. We need to go back to the source of all this...to Varda."
"Um...we're on Varda," Jadi said.
"Not Varda now," the ninth Doctor said. "Varda in the future, although I can't imagine why we need to go there."
"Because," the Doctor said, "when I stopped the Vardans from invading Gallifrey, I time-looped their home planet. They should have stayed trapped in that time loop--and it's pretty easy to understand how they were freed."
The ninth Doctor nodded. "Yes, the Monk freed them with his chronovore. I discovered that long ago. But there wasn't anything I could do about it...as long as the Monk had that creature in his possession, I couldn't do anything to stop him."
"What finally happened to the Monk?" Jadi asked.
"He got bored with tormenting me, took over Gallifrey. I haven't been back there since...I don't want to think about what the place must be like with him in charge."
"But don't you see?" cried the Doctor. "All of your memories are due to the artificial timeline created when the Monk killed me. If we can catch up to him at one of the points of divergence--one of the times when he uses the Chronovore to alter time--we might be able to stop him. And right now, there's only one definitive point in reality where we know he's heading."
The ninth Doctor pushed her spectacles further up her nose. "To unloop Varda."
It hadn't been a second, of course. It had been years. But to the Vardans, it had seemed like the same second had passed, over and over. They were unaware of the rest of the universe passing them by, of the Time Lords' revenge on them for the first successful assault on Gallifrey in millions of years. But now, they were aware once more.
And the first thing they were aware of was the Meddling Monk standing in their midst.
"Vardans!" he cried, in a deep, booming tone. "Children of time, children of light, children of reality! Your creator has returned! In your hour of need, he has released you from the bondage of time! And now, he will lead you into new heights of conquest and glory!"
The Vardan Grand Council materialized before him. "Actually, you're a Time Lord yourself," their leader said sardonically. "You didn't 'create' us; you merely mutated the species that we were into this one to create an army you could control. And as you are, in fact, a representative of the species that imprisoned us, you'll excuse us if we don't hasten to follow you."
The Monk's face fell. "But...you were supposed to worship me!"
"The Benevolent Order of the Monk has been discredited centuries ago. The Planning Council for the invasion of Gallifrey uncovered your link to the Celestial Intervention Agency, and we've been expecting the 'false Messiah' trick. So there's really no reason why we shouldn't simply tap into your brain, take the information we want, and destroy you."
The Monk smiled. "I can think of one..."
"Oh, really?"
The Monk snapped his fingers, and Artemis manifested behind him. "Her." His grin widened. "Now...we can either do the new heights of conquest thing, or I can ensure your species never existed."
"Varda," the Doctor said. "Obviously, the Monk freed them and set them loose on Earth. I'm hoping that if we can arrive at the right time, we can catch up with him and settle this once and for all." He looked down at the console studiously, setting one control after another.
"And what exactly do you mean by 'settle'?" Dorothy asked.
"That depends on the Monk," the Doctor said, hating himself for lying.
But ask a poet, and he will inform you that time is most definitely elastic. A summer's day can breeze by all too quickly, while the split-second ecstacy of an orgasm can last forever in the mind. Time, they would insist, is all in the mind of the beholder.
As the TARDISes converged on the world of Varda, time stretched like elastic.
And then it snapped.
"So..." said the seventh Doctor, "here we all are. Of course, none of you will remember any of this."
"I certainly don't," the ninth Doctor said.
"I do," the eighth Doctor whispered quietly.
"You do?" said Dorothy, looking at her Doctor strangely.
"I do," he repeated. "My...patron...protected me from the worst of the time-ripples. I remember both continuums perfectly. I know what was, and what was meant to be. I am still Time's Champion, Ace..." He looked at her with a perfect, still sadness in his eyes. "I'm sorry."
"And well you should be," the Monk said sardonically, as he stepped out of the doorway of a nearby building. "A position you never earned, that you've abused recklessly, and that's caused nothing but grief to those around you. By contrast, I have given Jan back his life, given Dorothy a child, and given you, Doctor, a very pretty ninth body. Not a bad deal, all in all."
The ninth Doctor bristled. "Well, I'm afraid that you've taken more than you've given, by far. I remember what you did to the--"
The eighth Doctor cut in. "Meridans. They were a peaceful species, and after you exposed them to the predatory goals of the Spinward company, you mutated them and time-warped their planet!" He directed a subtle glance to the ninth Doctor, who looked puzzled for a brief moment, then nodded slightly.
"Yes, I did do all that. And I'm ready to do more. The Vardans are ready to invade Earth, Doctor. They'll begin by infiltrating your beloved UNIT. Then your beloved London. And finally, they'll destroy the minds of your precious humanity."
"No," said the seventh Doctor. "I'll remember this, and I'll stop you."
The Monk laughed. "No, you won't. Blinovich's Limitation Effect, remember? You'll need an infinite amount of mental energy to remember your own future."
"And I," the eighth Doctor said, drawing himself up to his full height, "am Time's Champion. The Eternal I bargain with is beyond infinites. I do remember all this. And I have already laid a trap on Earth for you."
"I removed your traps, Doctor."
"No, you removed the ones you knew about. You used the Chronovore to scan through all possible realities, to determine all the ways I would handle the Vardan invasion. But you couldn't have anticipated a timeline where I knew you'd scan the timelines. You couldn't have prepared for this event, because by creating it you've altered the nature of the timestreams you've scanned. You've prepared for nothing but your own defeat, Mortimus." He smiled coldly. "At my hands."
The Monk glared at him. "No, I have not! I can still make sure that you don't have that foreknowledge! I can..."
"You can do exactly what I want you to do," the eighth Doctor said coldly. "Undo the death of my sixth self. The chronovore gives you the power. You sacrifice a minor advantage, but you keep from me a major one."
The Monk grimaced. "All this just to keep yourself from becoming a woman, Doctor? Very well. I shall use the chronovore--I will undo your death, and then invade Earth. Your seventh self will meet me there, and we will have our final battle. But, of course, you won't remember any of this..."
"They're not real!" the Doctor shouted, his words tearing through the air.
"Don't try to fight it!" the monk shouted furiously. "Both you and I know that a Vardan can very easily overpower a simple minded fool like yourself!" he exclaimed.
"You're all the same!" the Doctor shouted. "Listen to me, you have to stop Artemis and you have to stop it now!" the Doctor shrieked.
"It is too late Doctor... Artemis... is here!" the monk burst out into insane laughter that grew with the wind that had started to become extremely violent.
And then, with the sound of a thousand voices shrieking, Artemis arrived. The Doctor tried to look away, even as he tried to fight off the mental onslaught of the Vardans. But niether was of any use. His eyes were drawn inexorably back to the glorious, horrifying spectacle of the chronovore as it ripped space and time asunder, twisting the very existence of Meridan/Varda through a billion years of time, sending it back into the distant past and moving it to a new location.
He was still trying to comprehend how the Monk could control her when his brain shut down as a defense mechanism.
"--stuff it," Ace said, storming right back out of the room.
"Ace, wait, please--" But it was no good. She was lost to him, he feared. Why couldn't she understand how much she meant to him?
And why did he get the feeling there was something he was missing?
"--render it quite simply impossible for that kind of change to happen," he continued quite calmly.
"Well, I hope you're right," Wil said. "I'd hate to think that my entire existence keeps switching back and forth every time we time travel."
The Doctor smiled, as though finally remembering something he'd forgotten. "Don't worry, Wil...the universe has a way of taking care of these things." Silently, though, he breathed a sigh of relief. It had been a bit of a shock, remembering the alternate realities, but once the breach had been fully repaired to the present point of his timestream, it was only natural that it would all come back to him.
It was a bit risky of his eighth self, he thought, risking everything on a wild bluff to get the Monk to switch things back. He couldn't have known that he'd win against the Monk in the regular timestream.
Then again, he was in mental rapport with the other Doctors. He must have known of the Monk's ultimate victory, and decided it was a risk worth taking.
Odd, he thought. He couldn't remember who had been behind it all. Probably a side effect of fighting the Vardan mental attack. Still, he had a feeling that it wasn't altogether resolved.
As he returned to his TARDIS, he took a final look around the world of Varda, formerly the planet Meridan. So much death, so much change...he supposed it was no wonder that the Vardans had turned out the way they had.
He only prayed that someday, he could find some way to bring peace back to this world.
THE END....
[ Part 9 | Home | Back to the Collaborations | Up to index ]