by Doctor Who
‘Oh!’ said Vanni suddenly, ‘I hope he doesn’t materialise anywhere where there are people. . . ’
The laughter stopped, but Martha kept dancing. ‘Nope,’ she said.
‘He’s gone to that warehouse on Earth. I recognised the coordinates.’
And then she realised something too and stumbled to a halt. ‘But we never got Eve’s password from him!’ She turned to the Doctor in dismay.
‘What do you need Eve’s password for?’ Tommy asked. ‘All those animals on Earth,’ Martha told him. ‘The ones that got. . . accidentally transported there.’
‘What about them?’
‘I’m going to return them all,’ said the Doctor. ‘Once I get into the central computer.’
The Earthers all looked delighted, and Tommy nodded. ‘Oh, right.
Lucky I have access as head of the Earth team.
The password’s
“Hr’oln”. H, r, apostrophe, o, l, n. Eve’s first pet, apparently.’
The Doctor looked very slightly sheepish.
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THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
GREAT AUK
Pinguinus impennis
Location: North Atlantic
The Great Auk is a flightless bird that resembles a penguin. It lives in the sea but comes ashore on islands to breed. It has a black back and head with a white underbelly, and white patches above its large, slightly hooked beak.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: AD 1844.
Cause of extinction: hunting by man.
I-Spyder points value: 800
The medical computers reported that Tommy was well enough to leave the infirmary, but I couldn’t bring myself to entirely trust non-sentient doctors, so I insisted on giving him a thorough check-up first.
But it only confirmed the computers’ verdict, so I wagged my finger and told him to be more careful in future, and then let him get up.
The Doctor had already dashed off to Eve’s office; Tommy suggested we all meet up in the Earth section afterwards. So the remaining six of us – seven, if you included Dorothea – trooped off and waited for him by the empty dodo case. It seemed rather appropriate.
We’d been standing there for a few minutes when I spotted the Doctor approaching. Well, there wasn’t anything to mask his approach. As far as the eye could see, the Earth section was still absolutely empty.
‘You couldn’t do it?’ I asked him, trying to keep the dismay out of my voice.
‘Yes, I could,’ he replied.
Everyone looked puzzled, and I’m sure I did too. ‘So. . . it didn’t work,’ Rix said.
‘Oh, I think it did.’ The Doctor appeared rather pleased with himself. ‘Thing is, when I said I was returning everything, I didn’t actually 171
mean I was bringing them back here. They’ve all gone home. When you’ve got a time machine in the mix. . . ’
‘You sent them back to their own times!’ I exclaimed.
Then I realised what that meant.
‘To die alone. . . ’
I hugged
Dorothea.
But the Doctor was still smiling. ‘Well, I may not have got it spot on,’ he said. ‘You know, tricky to get these things exact. It’s entirely possible that they may have arrived quite a few years before they left, when members of their species were plentiful.’
I gaped at him. Wasn’t that the sort of thing people were warned about, in science-fiction stories and stuff? ‘But. . . couldn’t they end up being their own grandparents or something?’
He shrugged. ‘Maybe. I don’t think it’ll worry them that much. No one’s going to get out the family photo album and say, “Hey – that jellyfish looks familiar.”’
And then I thought about how Eve had been willing to freeze the Doctor and me. ‘But there might have been, you know, people.’
He looked suddenly serious. ‘Then I hope they’ll forgive me.’
I thought about it for a second, about how I’d feel if it were me. But I couldn’t imagine it.
‘So. . . sort of a happy ending,’ I said, but I couldn’t feel completely happy inside. I knew that not every animal would have got back home. Because of me.
‘Which ones were those?’ the Doctor asked, but the guilt was hitting too hard for me to spot the twinkle in his eye.
‘You know – the ones that landed in the sea and stuff on modern Earth.’
‘Ah, yes.’ Now I couldn’t fail to notice that he looked happier than events warranted. ‘While you were down on Earth – did you notice a single dinosaur apart from that Megalosaurus?’
‘Er, yes,’ I said. ‘They were the big ones with teeth on the TV, weren’t they?’
‘Ah, not the dromaeosaurs, they were clones,’ he said. ‘Like the sabre-toothed tigers and the dodos. Funny thing, when I came to think about it – the news reports, TV, all over the world – not a sign of 172
anything other than those three species, which was a bit odd, considering that 300 billion creatures should have just materialised. In fact, the only non-clone seemed to be the Megalosaurus, which, funnily enough, was the one that gave me the idea in the first place.’
I was possibly not following this quite as well as I’d have liked.
‘Come again?’ I said. ‘Words of one syllable might be a good idea.
How come the animals weren’t there? I sent them all back.’
He grinned. ‘You did. And I hijacked them all on arrival.’
‘So not only did you send them back to a time before they were collected. . .
‘I picked them up a few hours before I’d had the idea of doing it in the first place. Them and any strays left over from Frank’s business empire. Little Mervin the missing link, for example.’
‘So what about the Megalosaurus?’
‘Well, I knew I had to make an exception for it, because without it the pendant would never have had anything to track back to twenty-first-century Earth, so I’d never have met it, and I’d never have had the idea to send the animals back to before their own times which I had to exclude it from.’
Sometimes, listening to the Doctor, you got the impression that someone had taken a perfectly sensible, straightforward thought and then cut and pasted it at random all over the place. I just nodded and went ‘mm’, The others did too.
For a moment, everyone just stood around going ‘mm’, Then Nadya said, ‘You know what this means? We’re all out of a job.’
‘Probably get a transfer to another section. . . ’ said Vanni.
‘Ah.’ That was the Doctor, in his ‘spanner in the works’ voice. ‘When I said I was returning everything – I really did mean everything.
Seemed a waste, being in the central computer for the whole museum and not taking advantage of it. . . There are no more sections.
There are no more exhibits.’
‘No more MOTLO?’
‘Nail on the head, that girl.’
The Earthers all looked a bit lost. Cancel that, a lot lost. ‘So. . .
what happens now?’ asked Celia. ‘Things will still be going extinct.’
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I nodded. ‘Yeah,’ I said. I had a thought.’
‘But it’s OK to feel passionate about it. Like how you attacked the poacher who was trying to shoot the rhino? Why not try to stop the extinctions in a different sort of way?’
She sniffed, and I suppose that had been a bit patronising of me.
But I’d noticed a spark in her eyes while I was speaking, and I think it might have hit home. Perhaps for all of them.
And you’d think that would be it. The end of the story. Goodbyes said, and loose ends all wrapped up. Eve and Frank defeated! The Earth saved! The animals returned home! Back to the TARDIS for tea and crumpets and on our way to another adventure.
But it wasn’t. There was more to come. And quite a surprising more it was too.
The Doctor and Martha headed back to the TARDIS. ‘Oh,’ said Martha as they arrived in the relevan
t corridor. ‘Um. . . I don’t actually know how to open the secret door from this side. Frank sort of let me in the first time.’
‘And I didn’t use the door at all,’ said the Doctor. He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of his pocket. ‘Luckily I have a key that fits any lock. . . ’
The screwdriver hummed, and to Martha’s relief the secret door clicked open.
And so did the other secret door.
It was on the opposite side of the corridor, and led into a very small, spartan room. Inside was a clear case, the same as all the other ones in the museum – and there was one single, solitary exhibit frozen inside.
Martha frowned. ‘I thought you sent everything back,’ she said to the Doctor.
He was frowning as well. ‘I thought I did too.’ He took a couple of steps closer, and his eyes widened in recognition. ‘Do you realise what this is?’ he asked Martha.
She shook her head. ‘Should I?’
He pulled the pendant out of his pocket and held it up, displaying the MOTLO logo. A line drawing of a creature’s head, a creature with 174
tusks and triangular eyes.
Martha took the pendant and edged nearer, peering intently at the head of the creature inside the case. ‘It’s the same thing,’ she said.
‘Except. . . this one looks like it’s crying. There’s a tear on its cheek.’
There was a label, not a neat computer-generated one like the other exhibits had had, but small and handwritten. Martha bent down to read it. “Hr’oln”,’ she said. ‘Hang on, h, r, apostrophe, o, l, n. That was Eve’s password. Her first pet, Tommy said.’ She looked again at the animal. It reminded her a bit of the Steller’s sea cow she’d seen in the museum, although only a quarter of the size of that giant animal and with arms instead of flippers. ‘Not exactly a cat or dog.’
‘I think,’ the Doctor told her, ‘that it’s Eve’s very first “specimen”, the thing she built the museum around. If it was never collected in the first place, my watchamadoodles with the computer wouldn’t have affected it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get it home.’
He took out the sonic screwdriver and used it to switch off the stasis field.
The tusked head slowly lifted and, after 500 million years, the tear fell. The creature opened its mouth. ‘Eve?’ it said.
175
THE I-SPYDER BOOK OF EARTH CREATURES
ANKYLOSAURUS
Ankylosaurus magniventris
Location: North America
The herbivorous Ankylosaurus walks on four legs. It is about five metres long and 1.5 metres high. It is extensively covered with bone including bone plates on its back and head and bone spikes on its tail and legs, and has a distinctive club at the end of its tail, also made out of bone.
Addendum:
Last reported sighting: late Cretaceous period.
Cause of extinction: environmental changes.
I-Spyder points value: 650
My name is Hr’oln, and I am the last of the Cirranins. The Doctor has persuaded me that it is important to write down my story. He himself appears in the story, although not until the end – but I do not think that is the reason he wants it told. I believe the Doctor has been in many, many stories, and has no particular need to be recognised through one more.
No, I think he wants me to tell my story as an act of remembrance for my people. It is a thing that I must do, but not yet. It may have been hundreds of millions of years but, for me, the pain is still raw.
So for now I will just explain how I got to be here.
I am – was – a scientist, back on my home planet. We were a technologically advanced people, which proved to be our undoing.
There was a terrible, final war. The whole planet was destroyed and everything on it – every Cirranin, every Vish, every Elipig, every Grun.
But. . . there was me.
I was a pioneer, I had flown to the stars. I had been expecting a hero’s welcome when I returned home. But there was no home to return to.
Grief-stricken, I flew on. My shuttle was still experimental, not built for long distances but, just as it began to fail, I found a new world.
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This world. It was not all I had hoped for – the people were few, and they were primitive. My appearance scared them, so I constructed an android in their image to interact, and named it Eve. I gave it all my technical knowledge, equipped it with circuits that would allow it to develop and grow and build on what I had taught it. Between us, we began work on a teleportation system that would allow me to visit other planets, perhaps find others closer to my own kind – although the loss of my people was a wound that would never heal.
And then disaster hit this planet too. Not, this time, through manu-factured annihilation, but through nature’s curse: plague.
Medicine was not my field, but I thought that there might be a cure out there, somewhere. I began work on a process of suspending life functions, of keeping a living being in a state of continued existence.
In this way, they could be preserved until the solution was found.
I was too late. On the day I completed the process, the last native died.
My alien physiology may not have been affected by the disease, but my heart began to burst.
Up to that point, the people of this planet had meant little to me, but I realised then that they meant everything. With my teleport not yet complete, they were the only living beings I knew. Eve was my constant companion, and I had designed her – by that time I thought of her as ‘her’ – to be indistinguishable from an animate individual, but she was in reality nothing more than a construction. After losing my own people, I could not bear the idea that another species was gone for ever. The thoughts that I had been trying to contain erupted inside me. The universe would never know another Elipig, The Grun would fade into myth and legend – if that. Generations of children would grow up on a million worlds, but not one of them would ever stroke a pet Fruzin or take it for a walk. And now this race, too, was lost.
I cried for three days.
Then I said to Eve: We must stop any more species dying out.
She said to me: How do you know when a species is dying out?
And I suddenly thought: My species is dying out. I had thought of it 178
as dead, but it isn’t, not yet. I said this to her, I said that I was the only one left and when I was gone my people would be no more. I see now that she took me at my word. In her eyes, a species was dying out if and only if there was only one example left. I should have talked to her about conservation, education, helping a species to continue. But I didn’t.
I told her that these species mustn’t be lost. That the rest of the universe must know about them. Everyone must be preserved. Every planet must be remembered.
And she said to me: I understand. Your species is dying out. It must not be lost. It must be preserved. Your planet must be remembered.
I didn’t realise what she meant, not until it was too late. And as I realised, I shed a tear for my people, who had no future, and that is all I knew for millions of years.
Then the Doctor came into my story. He was there when I awoke, although to me it did not seem that I had slept, just that I blinked and the world changed. The news was broken to me of where and when I was, of what Eve had done at my unwitting behest. You would think a person could not take it in, 500 million years passing in an instant, but when you have already lost the planet you knew, to lose the universe you knew seems barely a step further on.
But. . . it did not have to remain lost. The Doctor made me an offer: he could send me back to my own world, before it was destroyed. My heart sang. To be with my own people again!
But I could not change history, he told me. I could not prevent the planet’s destruction, I could not warn my people.
I said to him: if this were you, would you do it? He looked sad for a moment, and then told me it had to be my decision.
And though I had thought I would trade everything for anot
her glimpse of a Kivurd or Fuffox, I realised that I couldn’t do it. How could I live every day, knowing what was going to happen yet being unable to stop it? I would stay here, and try to make up, in some small measure, for what my creation had done.
Eve’s collection was no more, the Doctor told me, and although I knew why he had done what he had done, my heart felt hollow for all 179
those species condemned to non-existence. I told the Doctor, and he smiled. There were DNA samples, he said. There was Eve’s cloning apparatus. And there was a whole planet going spare.
I do not know if I can learn the skills required in the time I have left. I will rebuild Eve, and give her a new task. But this time, I will be careful. This time, things will be different.
So here I am. The last of the Cirranins. When I am gone, my people will be no more. The Doctor has other stories to go on to, but mine approaches its end. So I will, soon, do as the Doctor suggests and tell my tale, and then the Cirranins will live on, in a way. Perhaps, even, my own DNA. . . Well, I shall think on it.
I thought Hr’oln was going to cry again when we took her into the laboratory and she saw Eve lying there, but whether it was for herself, or for the dead android, or at this further evidence of what her few ill-chosen words had led to, I couldn’t say.
‘She was my only friend once,’ Hr’oln said, ‘and I think I have need of a friend again. We will work together to repopulate the planet.’
She gestured round her at the scientific apparatus and the dodo pen.
‘After all, no one knows better how this all works.’
