Heart of Tardis

by Dave Stone

  Rudolf Hess is in Spandau now, and it’s only a matter of time before he lets slip about the real cargo of that plane, all those years ago, the mystery machine-codes that not even the Enigma-crackers of Station X could begin to crack.’

  The man sighed, a little regretfully. ‘And additionally, certain of my, ah, predilections, shall we say, are now exciting more notice than is seemly - I’d have introduced the world entire to the joys of Thanatos and Tantra, of Daphnis and Thelema, if it hadn’t been for those damnable youngsters... The forces of local authority, quite frankly, are on the scent and closing in as we speak. I have little time left if I am to take the appropriate measures.’

  Little time left full stop, thought Haasterman, given your age and obvious infirmity. A year or so at the most, I’d guess. So what does the Section ultimately have to lose? ‘OK,’ he said out loud. ‘0K. Let’s say we can, uh, disappear you. What do we get in return?’

  ‘Why, you get me,’ the other said, simply. He opened the thick tweed of his coat a little and Haasterman finally saw what lay within. What on first sight seemed to be a crystal chalice, a pulsing and ablative light glowing from within. ‘And you get this.’

  Chapter One

  The Creature from Existing Stock Footage [and the Unfortunate Consequences of Paratemporal

  Bravura)

  In her antigravity Throne Dome of purest lapis lazuli and onyx, the High Queen of the Snail Women puffed out her tempestuously heaving chest under the voluminous and scintillatingly glittery samite of her shift, and waved her slightly dubious-looking ceremonial pigsticking spear.

  ‘We have no need of your humanly ways, Colonel!’ she cried imperiously. Thousands upon thousands of your puny Earth centuries ago, we gave our men a special soup of rennet, lichen and koogie-boola beetles to sap their virile manly pride, and threw them into fetid and unending penal servitude!’

  The High Queen gestured languidly towards several of the lightly oiled and spiky-collar’d serving boys, who were crowding to observe the scene and twittering excitedly amongst themselves. One of them waved furiously at the camera until one of the others dug him viciously with an elbow.

  ‘Jeepers, Captain!’ the runty adolescent with the outsized tinfoil spacesuit and the unfortunately protruding ears exclaimed to Colonel Crator in a tense, hoarse whisper. ‘A planet full of... a planet full of fairies with the women in control! What in the wide, wide wastes of Proxima XIV are we going to do?!’

  ‘Hold hard, Scooter.’

  Captain Crator scratched his blue-black chin with the back of a butch and blocky hand. ‘No mere if fetching and extremely pulchritudinous female will ever get the better of a highly trained squad of EarthForce Combat Rocket Science Space-Marines! Have no fear of that, boys, for I have a plan...’

  ‘Your so-called “plan” will avail you not!’ cried the High Queen. ‘Guards!’

  The Queen of the Snail Women snapped her fingers and a rounded dozen top-heavy girls in patent leather and heels tottered forward, tentatively prodding the marines with their spears, looking for all the wide, wide wastes of Proxima XIV

  as if they didn’t know quite what to do with them.

  ‘Take them away!’ commanded the Queen of the Snail Women. ‘Throw them into the Pit of Utter and Excruciating Torture...’

  ‘Take your hands off me right this minute, Norman,’ said Myra Monroe. She said it lightly and with irony, but there was no mistaking that she meant it. Myra had distinct ideas about what she would allow when fooling around, and had no problem being friendly but entirely firm about it. A hand under the angora sweater was perfectly acceptable; a hand under the bra was not.

  Norman Manley allowed the offending organ to make a tactical withdrawal and sat back on the Plymouth’s seat, his other arm resting companionably about Myra’s shoulders. On the Lychburg Drive-o-Rama screen, Captain Crator of the EarthForce Combat Rocket Science space-Marines was being monochromatically shackled to a steel rack suspended from a winch, by a pair of domino-masked women in plastic bikinis.

  Companionable, yeah, Norman thought. That was the word, he supposed. It was weird, when you came to think about it. It was like the way that Myra didn’t really explain much, in the way that girls in the movies explained everything that was happening, everything they were thinking - but you somehow got exactly what she meant without having to think about it. He was turned on by her like you wouldn’t believe, it went without saying, and she had to knock him back on a constant if-he hoped - a slowly relaxing basis, but he’d found himself slightly unprepared for the real-life complexities of something so simple as being turned on, when it happened with some real other person, in real life.

  Like any other male from the year dot, he liked to shoot the buff with the other guys at the Lychburg Food and Drug soda counter about his conquests amongst the female population of Lychburg High, but in fact Myra was Norman’s first real girlfriend. In the two weeks since he had first asked her out, standing there outside her Home Ec. class, cold-sweat stammering all the while and wishing that the ground would open under him for the endless instant before she said yes, he had found himself completely unprepared for the easiness of manner they were establishing, the sense of mutual, friendly regard. It was something that the movies had never really touched upon, for all their flash and fireworks, and Norman Manley was coming to the vague realisation that the movies - Any movie he had ever actually seen, in any case - hardly ever really touched upon things that were real and important, the things that really mattered way down deep. He didn’t quite know what he should be thinking about that.

  Myra arched her back to stretch it a little, then laid her head on Norman’s shoulder and looked up at him. ‘Do you know what I want? Do you know what I really want?’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Norman.

  ‘I want a chocolate malt,’ said Myra. A. double chocolate malt with extra chocolate. And I want a corn dog, too.’

  * * *

  For a moment, Victoria allowed herself a moment’s pleasure in the impossibly smooth feel of the Chinese lacquer of the pen, the solid weight of it in her hand, the expertly crafted gold of the chasing and how it caught and held the light. In general form, the pen reminded her of the one that had resided on an especially constructed brass and ivory stand fixed to her father’s study desk, costing an entire nineteen guineas and which - as a child - she’d been forbidden to approach by so much as three feet on pain of out-of-hand infanticide. This pen, in some subtle and indefinable sense, made even the memory of the other pale; one could imagine it costing in the region of a hundred pounds, even a thousand, if such a thing were possible... as though it had in some way been formed from the transmutated material of some unearthed burial treasure of Sumatra. As an object, in and of itself, it seemed to carry some archetypical and priceless quality that might approach the classically tutor-taught ideals of Plato.

  Some while ago, though, when she had asked for something with which to write, the Doctor had simply and absentmindedly pulled this same pen from a pocket and tossed it to her without a thought, or, indeed, a second glance.

  Now, Victoria turned her attention from the item in her hand and returned it to the Journal spread before her, in which she was recording certain events attendant to her latest adventures, attempting to put herself in the correct frame of mind to set them down, in some relatively clarified form, before she crawled beneath the counterpane and slept.

  Mindful that (should she eventually return to her proper place and time) the contents of this Journal might have her dispatched to the confines of some conveniently out-of-the-way sanatorium without delay, she had inceptionally attempted to form them as a variety of fantastical Romance in the manner of Mr Verne, but had been defeated by the fact that the events detailed had been too true - too real in their particulars - to appear as some innocently convincing fabrication. Instead, she now settled for verisimilitude, distilled through certain minor fictions and evasions:

  ‘...and with the Baleful Influence o
f the Orb remov’d,’ she wrote, ‘it seemed as though the foul Glamour that had turned the ordinarily virtuous and kindly People under it to purest Evil likewise dissipated. I am compelled to admit, it teas something of an experience to see these poor Souls awaken to their true selves and propensities, and it gave me some small, salutary pleasure to participate in their resulting Celebrations. The people of Ma –’

  Here, Victoria thought for a moment, then continued:

  ‘The people of Madagascar, I feel, are decent Souls at heart, though frightfully Warlike in the way that they express themselves, if not in actual Fact. This is, says the Doctor; an Integral part of their Culture, and as such he fears as to the consequences when the Missionaries of Civilisation encounter them, and mistake the Warlike pronouncements of their Tribal Elders for the literal Truth...

  ‘But this, says the Doctor is a matter for Another Day As for ourselves, we at last repaired to the vehicular contrivance that had brought us here in the first place, the experimental dirigible that continually seemed to be blown off course...’

  The floor under her lurched.

  For an instant, with a superstitious pang of fear, Victoria imagined that the TARDIS had in some strange manner been aware of her calling it a mere dirigible, had taken umbrage and was warning her that it would soon exact its Horrible Revenge. Then the room around her shook again - not with in air of imminent disaster, but with a feeling similar to that you might encounter in a hansom cab when the horse is startled, and uncertain as to which direction the jarvey wants it to go.

  Victoria sighed. Obviously, the Doctor was tinkering with the inner workings of the TARDIS again - something he seemed to do with a remarkable if, in her opinion, rather inept regularity. Having only a passing acquaintance - as the Doctor himself would be the first to admit - with the technicalities of the processes by which the Scientists of his people had built the conveyance in the first place, the man seemed insistent upon divining them himself by a process of trial and error... an occupation which had thus far, uniformly and without exception, simply had the effect of turning things from bad to worse.

  Sleep now did not seem to be an option. Discarding her William Morris bathing robe, Victoria opened her closet and selected a brightly coloured costume of some smooth, synthetic material. Donning it, she noted that the hemline was of such a cut as to leave her legs bare to the knees and recalled with a smile how, upon first encountering people from another time, she had been shocked and mortified to see how women had displayed so much as their ankles. At some point, she reflected, she would have conquered the effects of her upbringing to assay the wearing of an actual pair of trousers.

  The TARDIS lurched again. Victoria glanced at herself in the mirror and decided that she might for this once forgo the application of cosmetic compounds in favour of seeing just what, precisely, the Doctor thought he was about.

  * * *

  The lovely young Proximan guard was all of a fluster obviously having never before been exposed to the virile manliness of a so-called puny Earthling. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what is this thing that you Earth men call “kissing”?’

  ‘Allow me to demonstrate, my dear.’ said Professor Saunders, twirling his moustache and stepping forward to take her hand. ‘When the time is slightly more propitious...’

  There was a thump. The girl’s eyes rolled up in her head and she swooned somewhat ungracefully out of shot, as though already in the process of working out how she was going to break her fall.

  ‘Well done, Scooter,’ Professor Saunders remarked, as that same youth appeared, hefting a component of Proximan religious sculpture that for some reason appeared remarkably similar to a baseball bat.

  ‘Now we must find the good Captain - I fear that we have little time to lose!’

  Captain Crator meanwhile, his sinews cording like tensile steel, fought against the rather more intractable steel of the nick. ‘You’ll never get away with this!’ he snarled through clenched teeth.

  ‘Oh, but we will,’ said the High Queen, from her levitating raffia and tourmaline viewing pagoda. ‘The denizen of this is a Ruul from the fetid swamps of Xanfax, the most abhorrent and bestial creature in all of Proxima XIV, trapped by our skilful hunter maidens and kept in a state of perpetual starvation - purely to deal with such irritants as you...’

  A strangely archaic portcullis set in the side of the Pit rumbled upwards... and something came out of the gate. It load the body of a large and slightly moth-eaten gorilla suit and the head of a deep-sea diver’s helmet, from which protruded a multiplicity of antennae and eyes on stalks. As it lumbered forward, its monstrous arms flailing randomly and the zipper up its back clearly visible, Captain Crator began to struggle all the more...

  Norman headed back from the concession stand clutching his cargo of rustling foodstuff-packaging and paper cups, picking his way through the darkly, obviously occupied automobiles by the light from the screen.

  Off to one side he saw a collection of motorbikes. Leather-jacketed riders were lounging next to them and passing around a flask of liquor while their girls, in identical pink blouses, held some private and animated conversation of their , own. The East Side Serpentines: well-known juvenile delinquents and the bane of Police Chief Tilson’s life. ‘They didn’t seem out for trouble, but Norman decided to avoid them anyway He turned back the way he had come - and for an instant stared directly at the movie screen that had, the last time he looked at it, been showing Attack of the Space Women from Proxima Fourteen.

  The screen was a shimmering blaze of colour. Complex, organic-looking shapes replicated themselves and expanded, their ragged edges becoming distinct as other shapes similarly replicated and expanded in a recurring and seemingly infinite succession. The effect was like some tangible force of suction, physically sucking at his eyes and pulling his body forward , along with them. Norman moved towards the shifting light, unaware in any physical sense of the steps his feet were taking. It was as if he were in some way drifting...

  Abruptly, the screen stuttered and blanked, to be replaced by the slightly overexposed slate-greys and whites of Space Women. It was as if the screen itself had suddenly realised that Norman was looking and had hastily covered up at a rate of twenty-four frames per second. Crator, the Professor, Scooter, a number of Proximan guards and, for some reason, the high queen herself in her distinctly down-to-Earth-looking underwear, were running through a tunnel as plaster flagstones showered around them. Rebounded off them, in several cases.

  Norman stumbled, sticking out a hand to crush a package of Fritos against the wing of a pristine Mercury.

  ‘Hey, watch the car, man!’ The occupant was a BMOC from the Roaches, the Lychburg High football team. Norman knew his name as Joey Maven, and knew that Joey Maven wouldn’t have recognised him from a dead dog. Maven was here with one or another of the cheerleaders, whose name Norman didn’t know what with them being kinda interchangeable, and who looked at him with a kind of speculative spite as though considering whether to sic her boyfriend on him or not.

  ‘Sorry...’ Norman mumbled, noting that he was automatically ducking down his head and hunching his shoulders, just like the pack animals they were learning about in Mr Hecht’s biology class. He slunk back towards his Plymouth and Myra - feeling kind of sick inside, as if his stomach were trying to tie itself in knots. The vision he had seen on the movie screen was lost in a complex, messy, animal mix of fright, embarrassment and subconsciously buried, completely unacknowledged white-hot rage.

  * * *

  The console room, Victoria had always privately thought, was In some sense inviolate. No matter what the past upheaval, no matter what the damage one might have seen when one was last in it, stepping into it again was to be presented with its perfect interplay of flat, white, pristine planes constructed from some substance reminiscent of ivory, extruded from some manufactory of the Alien and the Future. So much so, that even when she came into it from the minor lived-in disarray of her own neat and tidy apartment-cha
mbers, the contrast between the two was a not unpleasant, but active, shock. The room was a place that contrived almost by its very basic nature, it seemed, to be impervious to disorder. Now the scene was different. Cover plates on the surrounding walls and the console had been removed, great tangles of vulcanised black rubber tubing snaking from the one to the other. Galvanistic discharges stuttered and flared within the innards of the console itself, affording brief illuminations of workings Victoria could not even begin to describe, never having known the words. In her time with the Doctor, she had come to recognise the electrics, electronics and even cybernetics of times more advanced than her own, but the workings of the TARDIS did not seem remotely similar to these, even in kind. While not organic, the forms she could chiefly make out seemed to give the impression, in some sense that she could not quite define, of being alive.

  The central column of the console (the time rotor, Victoria gathered, from some previous and off-hand Doctorial explanation) juddered and lurched through its usually smooth and graceful cycle, flashing with a fitful light that seemed to be forever on the point of catching into constancy, but never quite able to manage it. On the flickering zoetropic screens ranged about the room, Victoria saw the now-familiar chaos of the Vortex, that pulsing swirl of energies and masses that formed the very unformed magma of Creation - but it was jerking strangely, as though her point of view were constantly shifting and transposing.

  Jamie was standing by the wall beside the outer doors - and Victoria’s attention latched on to him gratefully. There was something about his solid, kilted, reassuring form that helped to counter the confusion of the surroundings. Of course, this might have been purely because he was tucking gloomily into a plate of cheese sandwiches - and it is slightly harder than otherwise to feel fear in a situation in which someone is comfortable enough to eat a cheese sandwich.