Dr. Who - BBC New Series 48

by Borrowed Time # Naomi A Alderman

  Something has to die for something new to be able to live. Like regeneration. How long have you been living

  this same old looped existence?’

  She made her demand again: ‘Prove to us that you’re a Time Lord.’

  ‘Shan’t,’ he said.

  She went back and tried again.

  They were surrounded, suddenly, by ever-multiplying Symingtons and Blenkinsops. The creatures were muttering to each other, some entirely human, some entirely shark, some between one state and the other.

  ‘I do think,’ said a Symington, ‘that attempts to destroy private property must constitute a breach of contract.’

  ‘And even if not,’ said a Blenkinsop, ‘we must do our civic duty.’

  Amy looked round wildly. They were advancing up the corridor behind them and from both sides. They’d bo on them in seconds.

  ‘Rory! Throw me the camera!’ shouted Amy. ‘We haven’t got any time!’

  ‘There are too many of them!’ shouted Rory. ‘And there’s only one picture left!’

  Amy stared hard at him. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

  He threw her the camera, kicking a Symington hard in the shins as he did.

  Amy grabbed the camera, but didn’t point it towards the attacking Symingtons and Blenkinsops. She pointed it at herself, and at Rory, and at Andrew and Sameera and Nadia, and the filing cabinet. And she clicked the button, but she didn’t release it. Instead, holding it down, she ran.

  She ran forward, towards the rail around the balcony,

  not daring to look behind her to see if what she’d done was working. When she reached the balcony she held the camera out as far as she could over the rail and then dropped it. It hung in midair, suspended by its own Lucky Romance Time Bubble. She looked back. It had worked.

  Instead of a spherical bubble, the camera had created a long wobbling tube, stretching from where Rory, Nadia, Andrew and Sameera were standing with the filing cabinet all the way to the balcony and over the rail so that the camera was hanging directly above the glass sculpture.

  Outside the bubble, the Symingtons and Blenkinsops were gnashing their teeth in slow-motion fury. Of course, thought Amy, the camera prolonged moments, so things outside seemed to be slowed down. To the Symingtons and Blenkinsops they’d look as if they were working at a furious pace.

  Rory and Andrew looked at the bubble-tunnel around them.

  ‘Wow,’ said Rory. ‘That is clever.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Nadia, poking at the bubble with her foot, then her hand, then her tongue.

  ‘I didn’t know it’d work,’ said Amy.

  ‘Is that… alien technology again?’ said Andrew.

  ‘Nah,’ said Amy. ‘Earth, fifty-first century. Come on, put your back into it, it could collapse at any moment!’

  ‘You’ve borrowed heavily from the market, haven’t you?’

  said the Doctor in one of those many conversations that never happened.

  Jane shrugged. ‘Leverage. Now I’ve got you, I’ll make

  it all back and more.’

  ‘That’s how you can do all your time tricks. The time of everyone on Earth wouldn’t have been enough to bring both of us back here. You’ve borrowed more time than those watch-contracts are actually worth.’

  ‘Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Right now, the members of this market are willing to pay a lot for those contracts, and for you.’

  The Doctor smiled and said nothing. They went back and Jane tried again.

  In fact, there were three subjective hours before the camera’s final time bubble collapsed. Enough time for Rory to start complaining, complain at full volume, and then get bored with complaining, that she’d made them drag the filing cabinet so fast. Enough time for Nadia to start amusing herself making paper chains with the contents of some of the files and then wonder out loud whether she’d have done it anyway or whether her brain was regressing. Enough time for Andrew and Sameera to have a long quiet chat which Rory did his best to make sure Amy didn’t listen to by complaining loudly at her.

  Enough time, most importantly, for them to manoeuvre the filing cabinet over the guard-rail so that it hung in mid air above the very fragile-looking glass sculpture.

  They thought about trying to get the camera back.

  It hung just out of reach, producing occasional cheerful ‘Super Lucky Romance Days!’ messages on its screen and even playing a little tune which Amy was sure it had never done before - perhaps it was a feature introduced to distract from its short battery life. But they decided it was too dangerous to crawl out along the jelly-tube

  to fetch it. What if the force field collapsed just as they were suspended above the drop down to the ground floor?

  ‘If cameras had feelings,’ said Amy, ‘I expect it’d be pleased to go out doing its duty for the future of Earth.’

  When the bubble started to disintegrate, it seemed to happen both incredibly slowly and also too fast to take in.

  They were looking at the Symingtons and Blenkinsops through the bubble-wall, watching their hypnotic slow-motion movement as if they were in an aquarium, or a shark cage.

  ‘They’re quite interesting, when you’re not fleeing for your life,’ said Rory, ‘have you seen how they develop gills as they’re changing into a shark head but they never need to be in water. Do you think—’

  ‘Super Lucky Romance Moment almost over!’

  announced the camera in a cheery voice. ‘Put pants on!’

  ‘Did that always have a voice?’ said Amy.

  ‘Did it just say, “Put pants on”?’ said Rory.

  And then the wobbling orange mass surrounding them started to shimmer and decay, and the slow-motion shark-men outside started to speed up to real time and with a faint pop the bubble burst and the camera and the filing cabinet started to fall and the Symingtons and Blenkinsops were on them with a roar as loud as the ocean.

  Everything happened at once.

  Playing its happy little Lucky Romance Song, the camera tumbled down ten storeys of Lexington Bank, clattering against the side of the glass sculpture in honour of work-life balance before smashing on the

  marble of the ground floor into a thousand sprockets and tiny gears which UNIT would subsequently spend eighteen fruitless months trying to reconstruct.

  A Symington and a Blenkinsop grabbed Amy. They held her down on the floor.

  You’ve been a great deal of trouble to us, Ms Pond,’

  said one.

  ‘But you won’t be any trouble any more,’ said the other.

  And Amy struggled and kicked and screamed and fought as Mr Blenkinsop brought his face down towards her and began to bite into her arm, taking great gulps of something that she realised now was more precious to her than blood and she felt herself getting weaker and saw the world growing darker. She cried for help, but Rory and Andrew and Sameera and even Nadia were also shark food now.

  And very slowly, the filing cabinet poised on the edge of the rail teetered and overbalanced and fell. A dozen Symingtons and Blenkinsops tried to stop it but whatever they tried there just wasn’t enough time. It rotated as it tumbled and the sharp corner of its top hit the glass sculpture first putting a large crack in it. The filing cabinet bounced a little and came down with the full force of its long flat side on the top of one of the melted-wax-like fingers of the sculpture, crashing down into the centre of the thing, sending huge viciously sharp fragments of glass flying into the windows of the offices around it. And the cabinet fell forward, into the heart of the sculpture, utterly crushing the small flickering light at the centre of it releasing a bolt of warm energy which blew out all the windows on the ground floor and

  made each of the 326 people left in the building about 17

  months younger.

  There was a sound like a million cardboard boxes being suddenly flattened. A loud, dull crump.

  And all the Symingtons and all the Blenkinsops feeding off Rory and Amy and Nadia and Andrew a
nd Sameera suddenly disappeared. As if they had never been there to begin with.

  And, on the thin glass screen on top of that dais in the domed room, Jane stumbled. Under the implacable gaze of the blood-red moons, she blinked and stuttered and couldn’t quite gather her thoughts. It was time.

  ‘Traders of the Time Market,’ said the Doctor on the screen to the eager jostling crowd.

  Jane tried to pull herself back together, to go back to a point in time when she could stop him saying it. But she didn’t have enough spare time capacity. She barely had enough to maintain her escape route, let alone the intricate time-doublings she usually operated in. She was singular, moving forward through time. Always onwards, no going back. The feeling made her gasp.

  ‘Traders of the Time Market your attention please,’

  said the Doctor. ‘I don’t know what this woman has told you, but I would like to state very plainly that I am not a Time Lord.’ He paused, smiled slightly: ‘I don’t even know what a Time Lord is.’

  There was dead silence on the trading floor.

  ‘He’s lying!’ Jane managed to croak out.

  ‘I’m not, you know. In fact, she’s the one who’s lying and I can prove it. Take a look at the other wares she’s got for sale on this market. Take a good look. See those

  glass bricks?’

  There were glass bricks piled up around the Doctor.

  Some had been transported to the trading floor itself, some were in further storage compartments, and the traders could glance through the aggregated accounts of them on their video screens. The collective total was considerable.

  ‘They look pretty impressive, don’t they? Very healthy profits, almost no risk of any of the loans defaulting -

  she’s going to be raking in time on those. But let’s take a look at the account of… oh, I don’t know, how about this watch that I happen to have in my pocket here, recording the debt of one Andrew Brown. He owes, what, 100,000 years?’

  The Doctor held the watch up so they could all see its face. He was right, of course.

  ‘That’s not an unusual debt, I think you’ll agree, not in the accounts Jane’s been trading.’

  The traders looked at their screens. One hundred thousand years was a hefty debt - but it was only about ten per cent of what Jane stated in her briefing documents was a normal human lifespan. The humans would have no trouble repaying - and if they did, the owner of the contract could always foreclose on their life. It was purely a business transaction, all very simple and above board.

  ‘Now check your information systems.’

  ‘No!’ shouted Jane. ‘No, don’t! He’s lying, don’t listen to him, he’s trying to distract you so he can get away.’

  ‘Check your information systems,’ the Doctor repeated. ‘I know you tap into all the classified networks.

  Check what a normal human lifespan is.’

  There was a moment’s pause while a thousand claws and tentacles and pseudopods tapped on their screens for the information.

  There was another pause while they tried to understand what they were reading.

  And, as they understood the absolute worthlessness of the assets Jane had been trading on the market, there was a rising cacophony of shouting voices calling out.

  ‘Sell! Sell! Sell!’

  Chapter

  20

  There hadn’t been a run on a Time Market trader for as long as the longest memory on the floor of the exchange.

  None of them knew quite what would happen. Jane’s worth on the market dipped lower and lower. The contracts she’d aggregated for sale became worthless, less than worthless - traders were paying other traders to take them off their hands, frightened of what might happen if they were still holding them when the day’s trading came to an end.

  But there was a protocol, of a sort. There came a moment - an elongated moment, of course, the whole thing had taken less than a second - where she could no longer honour her obligations to the market. Where her value on the market was so low that she could no longer even maintain the basic time-travel capacities to continue to trade. Where her whole self started to unravel as the things that she’d done ceased to have been done, and the Doctor saw that at the far end of the long storage unit some of the glass bricks were starting to disappear.

  The Symingtons and Blenkinsops who had put those watches onto those wrists had never now existed. Time was undoing itself.

  Jane saw the dissolution too. She begged, via the screen, for trading to be halted, for the traders to believe her that yes, she had lied about the Earth lifespan, but she had a Time Lord here, a real Time Lord, probably the last one left alive, with a TARDIS of his own, and, if only she could get him to open it, she’d have access to all the time, all the time that there ever was or would ever have been - if they’d only just stop and listen, just listen.

  But it was too late. The panic was spreading through the market, wild and unreasoning. If Jane had lied to them, if they’d believed her, if they hadn’t spotted the fraud, what other lies might they have believed? Which others of these solid-gold assets were actually just pretty sparkling sand? They tried to sell, but no one was buying; they tried to call in old debts, but suddenly encountered doubt about whether the debt was worth as much as they’d thought.

  And then, somehow, the Time Lord was free.

  No one knew how it had happened. Someone said they thought they’d seen him shift one of his hands under the harvesting chair to find a small pen-like device concealed beneath the seat. But that was clearly impossible - he couldn’t have hidden anything there himself, the place was well guarded. And as everyone else had been paying far more attention to their rapidly diminishing fortunes, the question of how he’d got free was never answered to anyone’s satisfaction.

  But free he was. Jane herself was barely able to move. She kept flickering in and out of time, growing

  fainter as her ability to manipulate time decreased. As the Doctor watched, she flicked out of existence in that room altogether. Just as if she’d never been able to be there at all.

  The Doctor looked at the screen showing the chaos on the trading floor. He cleared his throat.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m the Doctor. I’m here to help.’

  And silence spread across the Time Market.

  ‘I wouldn’t usually,’ he said. ‘Usually I’d leave you to stew in your own juices - those of you who have juices, wouldn’t want to insult any gaseous life forms, you know what I mean. Usually, I’d walk away. I’ve started doing that more since the Time War. Walking away. And we all know whose dirty little trade kept that war going when it should have encompassed far fewer aeons, don’t we?’ His voice was very low. ‘We all know why your disgusting business was outlawed by the Shadow Proclamation centuries before it began.’

  There was a brief muttering at this, a slight hint of protest. The Doctor spoke over it.

  ‘But it so happens,’ he said, ‘that the lives of a planet I rather care about are mixed up in all this. So. I don’t care if every single one of you goes to the wall. Send each other Time-rupt for all I care. But before you do, who’d like to sell me their remaining Earth time contracts for, let’s say, one second a decade?’

  The pause was shorter than it is possible to measure without a timepiece far in advance of Earth technology before the floods of offers to sell came in. And the Doctor was soon the proud owner of the few remaining glass bricks in the storage unit.

  *

  No one at Lexington Bank knew how the sculpture had been broken. To be honest, none of the senior executives quite knew who’d put it there to begin with. Some of them had hazy memories of something - more like dreams than memories really - echoes of something that might have happened, but which seemed so improbable that it wasn’t worth mentioning at all.

  Police officers arrived very quickly at the scene of the damage, roped it off in the name of something called Torch wood. Those officers then had a prolonged argument with soldiers from someth
ing called UNIT, who arrived twenty minutes later and claimed that they’d been instructed by the Prime Minister, acting on information provided by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to take control of the area.

  The senior staff at Lexington Bank decided that the best idea was to call it a suspected gas leak, which had caused both the explosion and the strange memories many of them had of the few days before the blast.

  Everyone in the office would have a week off, to recover, they announced.

  Even those few who could remember - those who were still wearing time-harvester watches after the sculpture smashed - found that they could take the watches off now. That the faces read CONTRACT

  VOIDED’. That no matter how they fiddled with them, they’d only say that or, with a lot of tinkering, the words ‘THE OWNER OF YOUR CONTRACT, “DOCTOR OF

  GALLIFREY”, HAS CANCELLED YOUR DEBT would flash up once before disappearing for ever.

  On the top floor of the building, in an abandoned office filled with a shower of multicoloured post-it

  notes, five people were sitting. Two of them were a young married couple, one a man in his thirties, another a woman in her sixties, along with a 10-year-old girl.

  They had the look of people who’d slept on the floor for a night or two.

  ‘It’s been two days,’ said Rory. ‘We can’t live here on sandwiches for ever.’

  ‘You’re welcome to come and stay with me,’ said Andrew, ‘just until we work out what to do.’

  Amy shook her head. ‘The TARDIS is here. He’s coming back here. I know he is. Look what it said on all the watches of those people in your departments. He’s coming back.’

  ‘What if he can’t?’ said Rory. ‘What if he’s stuck on another planet or something. Look, it could be worse -

  we could be stuck on another planet! At least it’s Earth.

  All right, well overlap with ourselves for a while, but it’s fine… I don’t think we should stay here much longer.’

  Nadia kicked at some papers. She wasn’t 10. She knew she wasn’t 10. But her brain was working a bit like a 10-year-old brain, and she found herself getting bored more often with these stupid conversations.