And then well talk about the rest of the human race -
obviously I’m not going to undervalue myself.’
‘I…’ Jane opened and closed her mouth a couple of times, then motioned to a Symington, who, very gently and cautiously, as if expecting some kind of trap, took a watch from his pocket and fastened it around the Doctor’s wrist Andrew’s watch strap unfastened itself-he just managed to catch it before it hit the floor.
‘I’ll take that I think, Andrew,’ said the Doctor, and put Andrew’s discarded watch around his right wrist.
‘Doctor, what are you doing?’ muttered Amy.
The Doctor shrugged. ‘At least you’re all free now.
The Symingtons and Blenkinsops can’t do anything to you at all now you don’t owe them time. Well, they can attack you, but they can’t just suddenly take away all your time. And…’ the Doctor motioned to the huge glass sculpture and dropped his voice very low, so that only Amy could hear ‘and I suspect that may be what Sameera would call a liquidity fund. You can work out the rest I don’t know what you’ll do without me, Amy,’ he said, raising his voice again, ‘but I know that whatever it is, it’ll be smashing.’
A Symington and a Blenkinsop put a cold hand on each of the Doctor’s shoulders.
‘You really must come with us now, Doctor,’ said Jane. ‘I know some people who’ll be very excited to see you.’
Amy had felt broken-hearted before. Miserable, even depressed. But there was no feeling she could imagine worse than the desolate hollowness of watching Jane and her Symington-and-Blenkinsop army lead the Doctor away across the atrium.
‘Where do you think they’re taking him?’ muttered Rory.
Amy shrugged.
At the far end of the atrium, a Blenkinsop patted the Doctor down with surprising courtesy. Blenkinsop removed several objects from the Doctor’s pockets and put them on the floor. He turned back to Jane and nodded.
Amy had expected the escort party to turn out
into the street, or perhaps summon a spaceship or something. But, she realised, she’d been thinking three-dimensionally again - an annoying habit of her brain. As they reached the far side of the building, Jane turned a dial on the Doctor’s watch, and they all just vanished. In the spot where they’d been was just a small heap of the Doctor’s belongings - an apple, some string, a swanee whistle and the sonic screwdriver.
‘Doesn’t matter where they’re taking him,’ said Amy, staring down at the sad little heap. ‘I think the important question is: “When?”’
The building was all but deserted now. The street had been cordoned off by the police, who were interviewing the security guards, the people responsible for the outside broadcast and senior staff. No one was bothering about anyone junior - a lot of people had left. Even if Sameera’s self-sacrificing act had only been broadcast to the televisions in conference rooms around the building, it had been enough for everyone who’d borrowed time to understand that something bad was going on. And almost everyone who hadn’t borrowed any still understood that there’d been a massive fight at the Chancellor’s speech, and that this probably meant that no one would notice if they sneaked off a bit early to deal with something vital like spending time with their children, sleeping for more than four consecutive hours or seeing someone about those recurrent chest pains.
The Symingtons and Blenkinsops seemed mostly to have gone too - apart from a few dozen stationed at key points around the building, Amy, Rory, Sameera and Andrew found that they could walk the halls mostly without being disturbed. But instead they sat in Andrew’s office disconsolately.
‘He’s given us a mission,’ said Amy.
‘He could be dead,’ said Rory.
‘He’s not dead,’ said Amy.
‘He could be…’
‘I’d know,’ said Amy. ‘If he was dead, I’d know. OK?
And he’s not.’
Andrew looked out of his window at the glass sculpture in the atrium.
‘So we’re supposed to, what, destroy some advanced alien technology?’ said Andrew. Amy noticed that Andrew’s hand was still casually resting on Sameera’s shoulder. Even though she was about 65 now - that was some kind of friendship.
‘And what good is it going to do? She’s got the Doctor,’ said Rory.
Amy shrugged.
‘The Doctor said something about a “liquidity fund”,’
she said, ‘but I don’t know what that is.’
Andrew and Sameera looked at each other.
‘A… liquidity fund…’ murmured Andrew.
‘It makes sense,’ said Sameera.
‘What is it?’ said Rory.
‘No, look,’ said Sameera. ‘Jane hasn’t called in all the debts yet, right? Most people are still wearing the watches and walking around perfectly normally. They might owe 55,000 years -‘ Andrew grimaced - ‘but so far they haven’t had to repay a minute, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So it’s like she kind of “has” that time - in the sense that people owe it to her - but she can’t use it because she hasn’t actually taken it. It’s sort of… frozen. Solid.
Can’t move like a liquid.’
‘Right!’ said Amy, finally understanding. ‘So how is she moving through time? How are the Symingtons and Blenkinsops able to fold back on themselves in time?
She can’t be doing all that with the few accounts she’s called in.’
‘She must have some time stored up already,’
said Andrew. ‘Maybe she had it before, maybe she’s borrowed it from somewhere else, some kind of Time Market? It doesn’t matter - the point is she needs a pool of time that she can actually use. Which is a liquidity fund.’
‘So if we smashed it…’ said Amy, ‘I don’t know how, well work that out, but if we smashed it somehow…’
‘It wouldn’t affect the fact that loads of people still owe her time,’ said Sameera.
‘But it could cause her some problems moving around, might get rid of a few Symingtons and Blenkinsops even,’ said Andrew.
‘A liquidity crisis,’ said Sameera, ‘can be very nasty.’
‘But seriously, it’s going to be protected, isn’t it?’
said Rory.
Sameera nodded. ‘He’s got a point. It is advanced technology.’
‘Really advanced,’ said Andrew. ‘We don’t understand how any of the bits of it work.’
‘What’s that on your desk?’ said Amy.
Andrew glanced over to his desk. His beloved eBook reader was sitting in its protective sleeve on top of a pile of papers. He’d saved up for that reader and the envious looks it got from other commuters gave him great joy.
‘My eBook reader?’ he said.
‘Do you know how it works?’ said Amy.
‘I… um… it’s a computer? And a touchscreen?’
‘But you don’t know how any of the bits of it work, not on the inside?’
Andrew shook his head.
‘But that’s different, that’s…’
Amy reached over and grabbed the eBook reader.
She held it above her head with both hands and before any of the others had time to react, she brought it down hard on the edge of the desk.
There was a loud crunching bang. The screen smashed into crazed fragments. Tiny pieces of glass flew across the desk. Amy flipped the reader back over in her hands. The screen was half-detached in one corner. It was totally destroyed. Andrew stared at her with disbelieving wide eyes.
‘Just because you don’t know how something works,’ she said, ‘doesn’t mean you can’t break it. And don’t look at me like that,’ she said to Andrew. ‘You borrowed 55,000 years from some aliens. That reader was just collateral damage. Come on, let’s go and break some glass.’
Chapter
19
The view on the monitors was dark. Occasionally, a line of numbers scrolled past, faster than any human eye could have followed them. But mostly, it was dark. It was dark, in a sens
e, all the time. But then, ‘all the time’
is a relative concept. A lot can happen in a slice of time too infinitesimally small to be measured on any human scale. So, occasionally there was a burst of frenetic activity. But mostly, it was dark.
The monitors were set up around a central well, which was empty. Well, mostly it was empty. Occasionally, for an infinitely tiny period of time, it was more full than would have been possible if some very advanced trans-dimensional physics weren’t being used.
Officially, no one had stood in that hall - with its huge glass domes radiating a tiny amount of light, and the enormous tall arched windows with their view of three blood-red moons - for a very long time. Everything that had ever happened there had happened in the past.
There were occasional checks and monitors to make
sure that remained the case. A cordon in time had been placed around it.
But time travel is sadly far more complicated than that, and even the Shadow Proclamation had failed fully to understand what a very clever team of experts with extremely advanced degrees were able to do by repackaging time. A vast amount of time engineering and accountancy had gone into making sure that everything that would ever happen here stayed in the past.
Once you can slow down time, almost anything is possible.
The market was due to be open between 24:26:95:01:03
and 24:26:95:01:04, Galactic Standard time. This meant a certain amount of preparation. For subjective days, the participants had been arriving or setting up their remote links. The market operators - strictly hush-hush, there was nothing remotely legal about this operation - had been setting up the rules of operation. They’d taken their time over it. At least two additional milliseconds on either side of the market open window. They’d heard there was something special coming in. They’d wanted to make a fuss.
So, at the appointed moment, there was a raised platform made of glass in the centre of the trading floor.
And around the raised platform were rows and rows of glass bricks, each one with a warm beating movement at its centre. The ripple of owed time slowly accumulating.
Most of the beings in this room could read a glass brick as easily as Andrew Brown could have read a newspaper.
These blocks read very well indeed. There was time to be made here, they could feel it. And that was before the
star attraction was shown to the crowd.
On the raised platform was a thin glass sheet. A screen, viewable from both sides. And, in the brief millisecond that the whole place became alive with traders, the screen flickered into life. And all the little screens around the outside turned on too. They all showed the same image, broadcast from a storage room under the Millennium Dome in London, Earth. It was a man, fastened to a time-harvesting device, held at the throat and the wrists and the ankles. The room drew a quick, sharp breath. Some of them had enough residual instinct to know what they were looking at before the voice came over the speakers and told them.
‘This,’ said the voice of the thing that had called itself Jane Blythe, ‘is the last of the Time Lords.’
Her face came into view at the edge of the screen, a thin smile on her lips.
‘The very last Time Lord to survive the Time War,’
she said. ‘What am I bid?’
And then a great clamour rose up from the creatures in the pit, a sort of wailing, aching, sobbing shout, something between grief and desire and mad excited hysteria. And the trading began.
There was an inevitable flurry of early bids. That was only natural. It wasn’t even clear whether Jane Blythe wanted to sell the Time Lord, but a good round of early bidding would give a rough idea of what buyers were willing to pay for him - an estimate of value. They settled at around five inhabited galaxies - about fifteen sextillion lives - before anyone even bothered to ask the obvious questions.
‘What’s the mileage of this Time Lord? How do we even know he is one?’ came the message over the wires from several of the highest bidders at once.
It was unlikely that anyone would try to cheat the market - the penalties were too severe, the price exacted, in both directions in time, too high for many to try. But a Time Lord? One slightly used Time Lord? The possible rewards might be enough to make someone young enough and stupid enough give it a go.
‘How did you find him?’ they said.
‘What did you pay for him?’ one asked.
‘Where can we get another one?’ someone joked.
And eventually an Old Member of the market, someone who remembered how it had been long ago asked a question. This member could still recall when the market had sold regenerations piled high like apples on a grocer’s stall, when renegade Time Lords - and there had been a few - had risked a great deal to purchase dirty time in this highly respectable chamber. This Old Member typed a request into a keypad with a yellowed claw. It flashed up on the screen for all to see.
‘Let the Time Lord speak,’ it said.
This was extremely irregular. This was a market on which lives were bought and sold, yes, but amalgamated, in great slices, as if they’d been pressed together and turned into a pate. No one wanted to see the individual people who made up those slices of life-terrine. No one wanted to hear them speak. Imagine if they objected! Of course, they should have done that before they agreed to sign whatever contract it had been to borrow whatever they’d borrowed at the expense of their very lives. No one whose life was traded on this market ever addressed
the trading floor.
But this was a unique situation. A convocation was held, instantly, between a dozen different time-traders, the grand old beings of the market. And it was agreed.
In this case - and seeing that the Time Harvester in question was using the Time Lord as collateral for her various borrowings even now - it seemed the most sensible course of action. The message was relayed.
‘The Time Lord will speak.’
Some things are obvious when you think of them. So obvious that the moment you’ve thought them, it’s hard to imagine how you managed not to see them before.
Like seeing a face in the pattern of the curtains, like finding out you’ve been mispronouncing a word all your life. Like imagining that house prices will go on rising for ever, and basing all your financial calculations on that. Some vulnerabilities are invisible until you see them, and once you see them you can’t begin to imagine how the people in charge haven’t seen them too. You can’t believe that they haven’t already taken action to prevent anyone exploiting them. Some weaknesses in the system are so big that once you notice them, you can’t see anything else.
‘They must have thought of this,’ said Andrew, grappling with a metal handle already slippery from sweat. ‘They’ll have put up a force field or something’.
‘Put your back into it,’ said Amy. She was directing operations, which Andrew noticed meant that she wasn’t actually doing any of the lifting. Even Sameera and 10-year-old Nadia were carrying a couple of metal drawers each. ‘We’ve got to get it done fast or they’ll all
see us and come back to now and stop us.’
‘But,’ said Rory, heaving on the rope he’d nicked from the mailroom and slung around the filing cabinet, ‘as they’re not here, doesn’t that mean they definitely don’t come and stop us?’
Amy gave him one of her devastating wide-eyed hard stares. ‘Doesn’t work like that,’ she said, ‘and you know it. If they come back, well just have two memories of right now. Or something. And anyway, they might be back at any time, so heave!’
There was no way to get to the glass sculpture from below, that was certain. Nadia had gone to check it out.
A ring of Symingtons and Blenkinsops surrounded the sculpture, weaving and shifting like fish in water, blending into each other and re-separating again and again. But the sculpture reached its icy glass fingers up all the way to the eighth floor through the central atrium of the building. All the offices looked out onto it. And on the tenth floor - the executives’ f
loor, abandoned now by all the staff - there was a huge round balcony looking down past all the floors onto the sculpture. An unguarded balcony with a waist-high rail.
Amy had stood at that rail when she’d seen Brian Edelman collapse. She’d looked down onto the sculpture, seen the tiny flickering movement at the centre of it.
She’d wondered even then why no one had ever thrown a brick down on it. She just had that kind of brain.
‘How much further?’ panted Rory.
Amy squinted down the corridor, pouting.
‘Maybe another six metres?’
Rory and Andrew groaned in unison.
‘You can do it!’ said Sameera, lending her muscles
to give the filing cabinet another heave. They’d picked the biggest, heaviest one they could find. It’d be great at smashing stuff - not so easy to move, though.
‘Come on,’ said Nadia, ‘or they’ll find us!’
‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Blenkinsop, very softly, just behind her.
The conversation, of course, was not like a normal conversation. No creature that can travel in time would ever negotiate in a normal way. Why would you, when you can travel forwards to see what position the other side is going to negotiate from, and backwards to pre-empt them?
Questions were put, via the system. They were deemed unsuitable. They were changed, in the past, to something more satisfactory. Jane scrutinised the Doctor’s answers, blocked him from replying in ways she thought would be unsatisfactory. They tried again.
And again. And again. The same tiny piece of time - ask a question, get an answer - over and over again.
‘Don’t you get bored,’ asked the Doctor, ‘of trying to engineer one perfect moment in time? Can’t you just wait and see what happens, like everyone else does?’
Jane shrugged. ‘Time Lords always did abdicate their responsibility for almost everything. Why is it that you keep on pretending to be normal?’
‘Not pretend,’ said the Doctor. ‘I’ve never pretended.
Almost everyone in the universe lives forwards. One thing, then the next, then the next. No second chances, no revisiting. Always onwards. It’s better, in the end.
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