Doctor Who: Harvest of Time

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Eddie?’

  ‘I’m here! That was a bang and a half! I felt the whole rig shudder!’

  ‘It’s probably not helped matters! You’d better get back up to the pad as quickly as you can. We’re not far off!’

  ‘Get yourselves clear, just in case the whole place blows up. I’m not going to risk going back through C, it’s too dicey. I’m not far from the lifeboat station now. Can you see it?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Jo said.

  ‘Fly around until you can. It’ll be good to have visual confirmation that it’s still there. You can’t miss it, big red saucer-shaped thing.’

  Jo gesticulated to Benton, who in turn relayed commands to the pilots. The helicopter circled slowly around the rig, until the next face of the platform came into view.

  ‘Got it, Eddie. It’s still there. Can you get to it easily?’

  ‘Nearly there!’

  Jo watched the lifeboat, hanging on the rig like the last red apple on a tree, willing it to drop.

  ‘Remarkable,’ the Master said. ‘By my estimation, the width of that portal must be in the order of 500 metres!’

  ‘At least,’ the queen said. ‘It’s transient, of course – they only open for a few seconds or minutes at best. But the fact that they can do that at all …’

  ‘It speaks of impressive temporal control,’ the Master said.

  ‘Even more so when you know how far back into the past that portal extends.’

  ‘Billions of years,’ the Doctor said. ‘Back to a small blue planet I happen to know very well. The Sild are draining the air from Praxilion and feeding it back to Earth: thickening it up in readiness for their full-scale invasion through time!’

  ‘Not just the air,’ the queen said. ‘Our oceans, too. For every suction portal they open in the sky, there’s been another in our seas. You’ve seen what’s left of them. Before very long, they’ll have been drained away completely. Praxilion will be as dry and airless as an asteroid.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re correct,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘The fault is mine. If I had not arrived on this world, the Praxilions would still be living in peace, with all they need.’

  ‘You showed them how to use the old technologies?’ the Master asked.

  ‘Yes, although I barely understood them myself. But I gave the Praxilions the courage to try, to relearn the old secrets for themselves. That was really all they needed. Guidance. A shove in the right direction. Before very long they were on the way to a full-scale industrial revolution.’

  The flier was accelerating away from the suction portal. As they watched, the swallowing mouth snapped abruptly shut. Where it had been, the sky was still wrinkled with knots of furious cloud, flickering with lightning discharges.

  ‘They’ll open another soon enough,’ the queen said. ‘And another. Their control has been improving all the while. But still they want to do more than this.’

  ‘And the Consolidator,’ the Master asked. ‘It just … arrived?’

  ‘Found its way to us. It was very old, as we later learned, and it had been wandering the galaxy for an unimaginable length of time, its creators dead, its ultimate purpose forgotten. I think it was lonely. Or possibly a little insane. Whatever the case, our industrial activity must have drawn the ship’s attention. We altered the chemistry of our atmosphere, warmed our world – unmistakeable indicators of intelligent activity. The Consolidator sought out Praxilion and fell into orbit around our world.’

  ‘With, one assumed, the Sild aboard,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘Yes, but we didn’t know that at the time. In fact we didn’t wake the Sild until centuries after our first exploration of the Consolidator. To begin with, we could only find our way into small areas of the ship. It was huge, like exploring a lost continent. But even in those first few years, what we found was enough to change Praxilion out of all recognition. New technologies, new materials … the life-extension equipment was one of our early finds. Fortunate for me, or I’d never have lived to see what came after – I was already old when the ship came.’ The queen qualified herself. ‘If you can call that fortunate …’

  ‘Stasis alone cannot account for your age,’ the Doctor said, thinking of the creature he had met at the end of time.

  ‘No, it’s true. There were also therapies – drugs, regimens, strange machines. They held death at bay, even reversed its progression, for a little while. But always time would find a way to win.’

  ‘It has a habit of doing that,’ the Doctor said. ‘I suppose you never took a chance with the Infinite Cocoon?’

  ‘I was never that courageous, Doctor. I have seen what it can do.’

  ‘Tell us of the Sild,’ the Master said, with a note of irritation. Perhaps he did not care to be reminded of the hazards that awaited him in the Infinite Cocoon.

  ‘It was six thousand years before we found our way into that part of the Consolidator. Six thousand years! Of course I saw only a fraction of it. The Praxilions woke me only when they needed my counsel …’ The Red Queen faltered in her account. ‘But the error was mine. I should never have advised them as I did. I should have seen that it was a trap.’

  ‘A trap?’ the Master asked.

  ‘We sent two explorers into that part of the Consolidator. Their names were Hox and Loi. They were very brave: both had accepted to be altered by the Infinite Cocoon, so that they might pass as humanoid. Many volunteers preceded them, but they were … less fortunate. They either died or had to be euthanised.’

  ‘Why did you have to put them through that?’

  ‘The Consolidator was built by humanoids, Doctor. There were parts of the ship where only a humanoid could safely pass. So the Praxilions had to become humanoid.’

  ‘And you didn’t think of volunteering yourself?’ the Master asked.

  ‘I was too frail. Believe me, I would have done anything to spare the world another of those screaming abominations created by the Infinite Cocoon.’

  ‘And what became of Hox and Loi?’ the Doctor enquired.

  ‘They were not looking for the Sild. They didn’t even know about the Sild. They were looking for the secret of time travel: the means to reconnect Praxilion with the glory of the past.’

  ‘Various forms of time manipulation,’ the Master mused, ‘would certainly have been among the restricted secrets placed aboard the Consolidator.’

  ‘Placed there for a good reason!’ the Doctor said vehemently. ‘Some of those time-travel techniques are extremely dangerous!’

  ‘You were masters of time,’ the Red Queen said. ‘You had that capability. Why should we not have it as well?’

  ‘A fair observation,’ the Master said, with a supercilious smile.

  ‘It scarcely matters now. Hox and Loi failed. They were tricked into releasing one of the Sild, in return for information about the time apparatus. Hox was taken over – became the first Sild host. Loi managed to survive long enough to get word to us. But by then it was too late. With Hox under their control, the Sild were able to release the rest of their kind. It was the beginning of the end. They were free, and they had ready access to all the deadly technologies aboard the Consolidator. Including rudimentary time travel.’

  ‘Rudimentary enough to delve back into time and scoop incarnations of the Master out of history,’ the Doctor said. ‘But that was only the beginning!’

  ‘With the Assemblage, there was no limit to their power,’ the Red Queen said. ‘The Master’s intellect gave them ultimate control of time!’

  ‘I have always chosen my enemies well,’ the Master said, as if this was something to be proud of.

  ‘You made it easy for them. From your prison in the past, you injected a distress message into time. You imprinted your own psychokinetic signature on the transmission, like a fingerprint, so that your authenticity would not be in doubt. But you made a terrible mistake! When those signals interacted with other versions of you, the psychokinetic imprinting set up resonances – ripples on the psychic
sea. Flares in the night! That was enough for the Sild to lock on to your counterparts – all your other incarnations, strewn through space and time. They could begin their harvest! They could begin unstitching you from history, as if you had never existed!’

  ‘They failed to capture me.’

  ‘They did, eventually,’ the Doctor said. ‘We saw your counterpart, aboard the derelict. The Sild triumphed!’

  ‘They always triumph,’ the Red Queen said. ‘But at the present moment, here and now, they do not yet possess your current incarnation. And they need it, to make the Assemblage function at its maximum effectiveness!’

  ‘They won’t cut you a deal, you know,’ the Doctor said. ‘They’ll take the Master and still turn Praxilion into an airless, waterless husk – only faster than before! That’s how they operate!’

  ‘When you only have one bargaining chip, you had better make the best of it,’ said the Red Queen. ‘The Master is the only thing I have that they want.’ She paused. ‘Once upon a time I used to think that running a planet would be easy. But it isn’t, you know. Not at all. It’s the hardest thing imaginable.’

  Jo clenched her fist in delight as the lifeboat dropped from the side of the rig. Her emotions were so heightened that time seemed to slow, the lifeboat taking an agonisingly long time to fight its way down through the air, through the smoke and the flames licking from the platform’s lowest levels, toward the surging grey waves below. Eddie was all right, though. That was all that mattered.

  There was a crackle from the walkie-talkie, something garbled coming through.

  ‘Eddie!’ Jo said excitedly. ‘We can see you – you made it!’

  Her reply was crackly but audible. ‘That was a bump and a half! They make us use these things in training, but I’d forgotten how far down it is!’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Aye, I think so. Boat’s watertight, I’ve a few bruises but nothing that won’t mend.’

  ‘Pilot says we’ve got to leave!’ Benton said. ‘But there’ll be search and rescue people out here as soon as possible.’

  ‘Did you get that, Eddie? You shouldn’t have to put up with it for long.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m clear of the rig now and I’ve got rations and water to last a good couple of days. Probably a nice drinks bar somewhere here if I look hard enough. If you could speed up things a bit, that would be great.’

  ‘It’s not going to take days,’ Jo said.

  ‘You think it made a difference, that big bang?’ Eddie asked.

  ‘We’re just going to have to wait and see,’ Jo said.

  Benton grinned. ‘You’re starting to sound like the Doctor!’

  ‘One of us— wait.’ Jo was looking at the sea with ominous expectation. The lifeboat was bobbing up and down, being carried away from the platform by the swell. But something was opening up in the water next to it. A growing absence, walls of water being pushed apart by an invisible barrier, defining a hemispherical void in the sea itself.

  ‘It’s a rupture!’ Benton shouted. ‘The Sild are still coming through!’

  ‘No,’ Jo said, disbelieving. ‘Not now. Not here! Eddie – can you hear me?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Can you … steer that lifeboat?’

  ‘Oh, sure – I’ll just open one of the windows and use this little plastic cup as an oar. No, it’s a lifeboat. Um – is there a problem?’

  ‘There’s a time rupture right next to you.’

  The void was growing, its circular edge expanding to meet the tiny red disk of the lifeboat.

  ‘I can’t see it. But there’s a heck of a swell here, feels like I’m going over the top of a rollercoaster—’

  ‘She’s going in! Get us down!’ Benton said. ‘Maybe we can get the winch on—’

  ‘It’s too late,’ Jo said. ‘Eddie!’

  And it was. The rupture appeared to have reached its maximum aperture, holding back a circular cliff of sea. Over the sharp lip of this aperture, the lifeboat toppled and fell. They watched it tumble. The rupture began to collapse. In an eye-blink, the lifeboat was simply gone. It had not vanished under the waters. It had ceased to be.

  The walkie-talkie had gone dead. Jo squeezed the talk switch a couple of times. ‘Eddie? Can you hear me? Eddie?’

  But there was no answer.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ‘No greater evil has ever existed,’ the Red Queen declared. ‘But we have never had the courage to destroy it, as we should have done. Perhaps it would never have allowed us, even if we’d tried.’

  ‘You could have locked it away,’ the Doctor said. ‘Buried it underground, or something.’

  ‘No, it was always too useful for that. When it wasn’t making monsters. We never had the strength of will to place it beyond all use.’

  The Infinite Cocoon was smaller than the Doctor had been expecting. He had read of it before, seen reconstructions, life-sized holograms. But his memory had tricked him. The marbled grey machine was only just large enough to take a human form, lying down inside it. A large creature, such as an Ice Warrior or Judoon, would never have fitted within. So it was not Infinite at all, but in fact rather depressingly finite in its potential. Just another piece of over-inflated advertising, in other words. The universe was full of things like that.

  The Master pecked at the control panel, jutting from one end of the machine. ‘Simple enough, Doctor, I think you’ll agree. I recognise most of these pictograms from our schooldays, and the meaning of the rest is easily inferred. Linear C, with some digression into the D and E variants.’

  ‘We never understood more than a fraction of the controls,’ the Red Queen said.

  ‘Then it’s no wonder you were in the habit of making monsters,’ the Master said.

  ‘Don’t underestimate it,’ the Doctor said warningly. ‘The Praxilions weren’t fools.’

  ‘Fortunately, neither are we.’ The Master was quickening the pace of his inputs. He had started with just his index fingers, hunting and pecking like a novice typist, but had now progressed to all five fingers of both hands. The keypad clattered. Patterns of illuminations surged and ebbed across the control matrix. The Infinite Cocoon hummed and gurgled in eager anticipation of its next guest.

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

  ‘It’s my brain, Doctor. I trust you’ll accept that I am the one best placed to repair it?’

  ‘He’s already entered a far more complex stream of instructions than any of my technicians,’ the Red Queen said.

  ‘The damage done by the Sild is not trivial,’ the Master said, pausing to look up from the panel.

  ‘Can I help?’ the Doctor asked.

  ‘You will help by arranging my delivery to the Sild. When I emerge from the Cocoon, I expect to experience a degree of functional impairment.’

  ‘Let’s hope they don’t mind damaged goods.’

  ‘I assure you that the damage will be temporary, Doctor. Now if you would both allow me to complete my work?’

  In fact it did not take the Master very long to complete the entry of his string of commands. He stepped back from the console, appraised it guardedly, then nodded. ‘I am done. The Cocoon is prepared. There is no sense in delaying matters.’

  ‘I wish there were another way,’ the Doctor said.

  ‘I will die unless I submit to the Cocoon.’

  ‘Perhaps that would be better than becoming part of the Assemblage.’

  ‘You might make that fatalistic choice, Doctor. Please leave me to make mine.’

  ‘Of course.’

  The lid of the Infinite Cocoon slid off to one side, until it was supported along one long edge. Yellow light spilled from the machine’s interior. The Master braced two hands along the open side, ready to climb in. ‘The process will begin automatically, once I am inside. There will be no need for outside intervention.’

  ‘Nonetheless,’ the Red Queen said, ‘my technicians are standing by.’


  ‘Tell them not to touch a thing.’ The Master made to climb over the lip, but at the last moment his strength seemed to escape him. The Doctor moved to his side and gave support. ‘Good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Sincerely meant, Doctor?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Then I take it in the spirit with which it was intended.’

  The Doctor helped the Master into the box. The Master settled himself inside it, arms crossed over his chest. The lid began to close on him.

  The Doctor stepped back. He had glanced at the control matrix and recognised the form and meaning of many of the symbols. But the Master’s knowledge of such matters was superlative. The Doctor knew that he would be powerless to offer much assistance if the process began to go wrong.

  The lid shut tight. The machine increased its humming and gurgling. It rocked slightly.

  ‘When my people submitted to the Cocoon,’ the Red Queen said, ‘we were always ready for the worst. We had a retinue of guards on hand ready to kill the thing inside.’

  ‘Hopefully that won’t be necessary. The Master isn’t trying to turn himself into a completely different form, just repair damage done to his existing body. That should offer less scope for error.’

  ‘You hope he comes through, don’t you?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘You and he are hardly allies. I’ve learned that much.’

  ‘You need him alive at the end of this, to hand over to the Sild. Of course I don’t want him to die.’

  The machine continued its gurgling work. Patterns played across the input console. The Doctor could only assume that matters were proceeding according to the Master’s intentions.

  But what now remained of the Master, he wondered? The Cocoon might not be turning him into a completely different form, but to access the deep structures of his brain it must still be dissolving him down to a more basic level. The Doctor imagined a soup with the half-formed shape of a man floating in it, a kind of gooey homunculus. His greatest adversary, reduced to a kind of living stew. The Infinite Cocoon was formidable and ancient technology, but it was surely not invulnerable. If he sabotaged it now, or just entered a random string of commands, that might be the end of the Master.