THE GALAXY REELED.
The planet Krikkit was empty. The battleships had gone, the crowd had fallen silent, watching. Lights began to blaze in the distant heavens, so bright they shimmered briefly through the Dust Cloud. Somewhere beyond, the stars started to burn.
Silently, and rather sullenly, a doorway appeared.
The Doctor opened it. ‘Let’s get a move on,’ he said. ‘The next bit’s not going to be fun.’
After they’d gone, the sea and the burning clouds faded sadly away, leaving behind only the indecisive grey of the Matrix and those lingering giant letters.
THE GALAXY REELED.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MORE ON THE GALAXY REELING
As luck would have it, at this time the Galaxy was enjoying a period of great harmony and prosperity. It was that rare thing – a happy Galaxy.
It was one of those rare times of universal peace. And by rare, best we say really, since you mention it, one of those pretty much unique times of universal peace.
Universal peace came about because – well, a lot of fine speeches were made by various presidents, leaderenes and definitely democratically elected supreme ones about how they were pleased to have played their part in the dawning of a glorious golden age of harmony, the death of the eras of boom and bust. There were even meetings and conferences where the various universal power brokers posed, looking tired but victorious, while they took pictures of each other shaking hands, standing against nobly fluttering flags, or even staring wistfully into hopeful sunrises.
In truth, of course, universal peace came about pretty much by accident. To start with, all the terrible old races from the Dark Times had died out. The Racnoss literally ate each other. The Jagaroth finally blew themselves up. The stone-hearted Kastrians crumbled. There was a whole string of such ironically appropriate endings. Even the Great and Deathless Vampires died out. Some people argued that it was proof that there was a divinity which shapes our ends, etc., etc.
A mad soothsayer told a story. He claimed to have been at the final, awful dissolution of the Insoluble Ancients. He met an old man dressed in white, standing under a white umbrella (to protect him from the acid rain). The old man was holding a cocktail in one hand and something else in the other. The soothsayer really only noticed the cocktail.
‘That looks nice,’ he said, for he spoke only the sooth.
‘It is,’ smiled the old man in white, regarding his drink pleasantly. He seemed to be regarding most things pleasantly. He handed his to the soothsayer. ‘I can always make another,’ he said, his eyes twinkling in a way that suggested they always twinkled. He invited the soothsayer under his umbrella.
The cocktail tasted marvellous. It made the acid rain bearable as it ate into his shoes. Very improbably, a dove flew past, making its startled, agonised way through the air. Perhaps attracted by the umbrella, or by the only bit of shelter for miles around, the bird drew close. It flapped around, tapped its beak against the cocktail glass, and then settled on the wise old man’s head.
‘Oh dear,’ said the wise old man in white, ‘Perfection can’t last for ever, can it?’ He chuckled and the soothsayer laughed along, partly because he liked to be seen to be clever, but mostly because, well, you know, the man in white had a dove on his head.
Whilst trying not to look at the dove, the soothsayer’s eyes alighted on the other thing that the man in white was holding. At this point, he did some quick mental arithmetic and failed to reach an answer as to how exactly how the man in white was managing with just the two arms to hold an umbrella, a cocktail, and a large square crystal.
‘What’s that?’ the soothsayer asked.
‘Oh, I’m afraid I can’t give it to you,’ chuckled the wise old man, with the annoying chuckle of someone who enjoyed a lot of private jokes. ‘I can’t make another, you see. This is the Key To Time,’ he announced. ‘It brings balance to the universe.’
‘Is such a thing possible?’ asked the soothsayer. The dove gave him an ‘Ooh, you’re brave’ coo.
The old man in white held up the crystal, turning it around until it caught the reflections of the distant burning cities.
‘I should say so,’ he declared. ‘Today’s a rare day. I’ve brought perfect balance to the universe.’ He tossed it up into the air and the crystal vanished. ‘Don’t mess it up,’ the old man said to no one and everyone in particular. He walked away.
The soothsayer found himself holding an umbrella and an empty cocktail glass.
That was one story about how universal peace came to be. For those who didn’t like their triumphs to include a mysterious white man with a magic cube, there were the Galactic Rationalists who argued that all the aggressive races had blown each other up; the subjugated ones didn’t have the firepower to blow out a candle; there really wasn’t that much life elsewhere in the universe; and, as the Time Lords had now run out of interestingly aggressive races to kidnap and torment in a wet quarry, they’d had to come up with a new hobby of having a sit down and looking smug.
Basically, the Galactic Rationalists argued that universal peace had come about fairly naturally. Planets ticked along amiably with each other. Everyone discovered that they had something their neighbours needed and their neighbours had something they quite fancied and that this balanced out reasonably harmoniously. Occasionally some people became obscenely rich, but then their children would eventually mess it all up, and so it balanced itself out.
Also, it had to be said, the universe was quite smug about the peace thing. No one quite got around to putting up a sign saying ‘192 days since an interstellar war’, but they did the next best thing.
As often happens when people are happy, they made a symbol out of it, something to show that they all felt life was good. It was called the great Wicket Gate, and it stood for the prosperity of the Galaxy. To show how everyone these days got along by relying on each other, it was heavily symbolic. It consisted of three vertical sticks with two shorter horizontal ones balanced between them.
The three vertical sticks consisted of a Steel one, to represent Strength and Power, a Perspex one to represent Science and Reason, and a Wooden one to represent all the Forces of Nature. The two short sticks they supported were the Gold Bail of Prosperity and the Silver Bail of Peace. As well as the great Wicket Gate itself, you could buy versions of this symbol all over the place and in all sorts of sizes. You could put one on your mantelpiece, hang one round your neck, get one tattooed on your hide, and you could even – if you were rich and right-minded enough – live in one, though it was very expensive and you spent most of your life in elevators.
That, then, was how the Galaxy was, peaceful and prosperous – particularly for the people who manufactured the decorative Wicket symbols that everybody wanted so much. And that is why, when the forces of the Army of Krikkit hit the great Wicket Gate from behind a tiny and remote Dust Cloud, the Galaxy reeled like a man getting mugged in a meadow.
This is what the Galaxy was faced with, and why the Galaxy reeled.
When the Krikkitmen came through the Wicket Gate, it wasn’t actually a targeted attack on a symbol. It was simply the first nice thing the battle fleet came across.
The Wicket Gate was one of the Wonders of the Universe. It looked so very nice and people came to admire it and said that, despite its inherent fragility, it also represented something that would last for ever. Well, until the invading forces of the Krikkitmen smashed through the Wicket Gate and burnt their way across the stars.
Precisely ten seconds before this happened, the Doctor, Romana and K-9 glided out of the Matrix Door and onto the asteroid. They looked up at the Wicket Gate towering over their heads.
‘The symbol of universal peace,’ said Romana sadly.
‘Seems quiet enough,’ the Doctor remarked, even though she’d begged him not to say that.
At that moment, inevitably, Krikkitship after Krikkitship shot out into the universe, pushing through the separating wreckage of the Wicket Gate. In seco
nds they’d demolished the gate, annihilated the VIP queue, then the ordinary queue, then the gift shop, and finally the visitor parking. All were gone in seconds. Those that weren’t blasted to pieces by the grenades were stabbed, sliced, or shot; or stabbed, sliced and shot. The Krikkitmen were thoroughly wiping out everything they found.
There followed a thousand years of horrifying carnage which, in order to give it all the attention which horrifying carnage deserves, we will skip quickly over. Anybody interested in horrifying carnage could do worse than to read Dr P.L. Zoom’s book Krikkit: The Horrifying Carnage, or Rad Banchelfever’s Carnage Illustrated, Vols 7,8 & 9: The Krikkit Wars, or Ag Bass’s book Krikkit: The Statistics of Death, or Bodrim Holsenquidrim’s much later statistical work Krikkit: Still Counting After All These Years. The most serious and substantial work of the hundreds of thousands of books which have been written on the Krikkit Wars is, of course, Professor San’s monumental thirty-volume history entitled simply Why, Why, Why?.
The slaughter was immediate, immense and indescribable. Romana couldn’t help flinching, and even the Doctor closed his eyes to the horror the Matrix showed them. The noise the Krikkitmen made did not help. The Daleks killed with a sneer, the Cybermen killed silently, but the Krikkitmen applauded each other. Civilisations who had forgotten how to fight perished, others vowed never to make the same mistake again. They mustered what they could and fought back.
The Krikkitmen marched on, and the Matrix shifted the Doctor and Romana from planet to planet, filling each world with acrid smoke, screams, and desolation.
Rather unnecessarily the burning words reappeared in the sky:
The wars wreaked havoc throughout the known universe.
The Matrix then showed them a few more burning planets, just to make quite sure it had got its point across.
They walked through the sharp winds of Pibo towards the shattered crystal towers. They trod around the molten remains of the Steel City of Vlastin, and the unmourned desolation of the Intergalactic Tax Office on Kopek Var.
And still the Krikkitmen marched. As time passed, the vistas changed – sometimes there’d be the odd disabled robot sparking in the dust, or crawling drunkenly from a crashed ship. But mostly it was just a lot of devastation. The problem was that the universe had forgotten how to fight, and was relearning in a haphazard and rather desperate fashion.
Romana surveyed it all very sadly. ‘This was the first great test of Gallifrey, wasn’t it?’
The Doctor nodded. The words in the sky agreed, remarking:
This was the first great test of Gallifrey.
Gallifrey had, at about this time, adopted its strict policy of non-intervention. In many ways, this was a sign of their growing maturity – having acquired a mastery of the Laws of Time they’d also realised that they weren’t necessarily all that good at tinkering with it. As such, they’d vowed to keep themselves to themselves, peering over infinity’s fence but never doing anything about the buddleia.
For a long time, they’d been really good about it. This was made easy enough because there were no wars to get involved in, just the odd taxation skirmish which even the Time Lords couldn’t find interesting.
Then the Krikkit War broke out, and the Time Lords did their best not to notice. The problem was that, as the fighting raged for a millennium, people kept asking them, ‘What is to be done?’ For the first few centuries it was enough to say, ‘Well, we’ve discussed this already,’ but as the years passed and the death toll grew and the sound of exploding planets rang ever louder, it just kept on being raised. Until, eventually, someone pointed out that it was all very well ignoring the rest of the universe, but you actually needed a rest of the universe in order to be able to claim you were ignoring it. There was even more humming and hawing than usual in the vaulted halls of the Time Lord Panopticon, until eventually they admitted the sense of this.
The Time Lords sent an emissary to meet with the remaining species, to suggest that, perhaps, just this once, they might be willing to help, so long as everyone agreed not to harp on about it.
Or, as the great glowing words in the sky put it:
After a thousand years of warfare, the Galactic Forces, after some heavy initial losses, rallied against the Krikkitmen.
This was illustrated by a mighty army of Krikkitmen marching across the surface of a planet. All around them rained death and destruction. In front of them was a city, teeming with people. All of them doomed and marked for destruction. As the Doctor and Romana watched, the very first line of soldiers entered the city, and exploded. A fierce curtain of allied firepower poured down on them. No Entry, it seemed to say. A second wave of Krikkitmen marched through the curtain and exploded. Followed by a fourth, then a fifth.
When the sixteenth wave went through and the energy showed no signs of running out, the leader of the seventeenth wave paused, inserting his hand into the curtain. It watched, dispassionately, as its hand burnt away, followed by the wrist and then the arm up to the padded elbow. And then it stopped. And behind it the entire army stopped.
‘That was repeated across the Cosmos, I believe,’ remarked the Doctor. ‘The ancient Time Lords devised an impenetrable barrier which they placed between their allies and the Krikkitmen – same basic principles that they used to seal Gallifrey off from the rest of the Universe.’
‘Impressive.’ Romana sucked a thumb and tapped the force wall. ‘Although you’re jumbling Galaxy, Cosmos and Universe rather freehandedly.’
‘Am I?’ the Doctor shrugged. ‘Well, they’re pretty much the same thing.’
‘Negative,’ put in K-9.
‘Anyway –’ the Doctor strode off across the battlefield – ‘the point is they extended the barrier, forcing the Krikkitmen back towards their own territory. Bye bye!’ He waved at the robots and sauntered off in search of a Matrix Door. He paused before it and glanced sourly up at the official history dangling in the blood-coloured sky.
The Galaxy won, by might, by the sheer scale of the forces it was able eventually to deploy, and by the skin of its nerve-wracked teeth.
But it then had to face a terrible dilemma: what was to be done with the vanquished people of Krikkit? They were, after all, simply the victims of a cruel trick of history.
The solution, when it was finally arrived at, struck some as clever and humane, and others as stupid and barbaric. But it was, at least, novel. What no one could quite agree on was where the solution had come from.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SO MUCH FOR UNIVERSAL PEACE
‘We can’t skulk around in the Matrix all day, not when the Universe is in danger,’ the Doctor said, breezing out of the Matrix.
‘Has it told you what you wanted to know?’ demanded Borusa.
The Doctor shook his head. ‘The Matrix is playing its cards close to its chest.’ He broke into a winning grin. ‘I always find official history unreliable and whimsical. We’re off to sample it for ourselves.’
‘You’re going back to the Krikkit Wars?’ Borusa stared. ‘Isn’t that terribly dangerous?’
‘We’re just nipping to the last page to find out who did it. And anyway –’ the Doctor’s smile widened – ‘I’ve always been very lucky. Oh …’ He paused. ‘Mind your head on that door, Borusa. You could fetch yourself a nasty bump.’
‘The thing about the end of the war against the Krikkitmen …’ The Doctor was at the controls of his time machine. ‘… is that, whatever the stories are, they all skip over exactly how it was solved.’
‘Typical hero-myth,’ said Romana. ‘A complacent people are attacked, band together, and triumph. Isn’t that right, K-9?’
The dog nodded.
‘And yet –’ the Doctor held up a finger – ‘we now know the Krikkitmen are real. So why is the Matrix avoiding telling us the real truth?’
‘Good point,’ Romana agreed.
The TARDIS landed with a thud. The Doctor strode to the doors. ‘You may not like what’s outside,’ he intoned. ‘They call it dip
lomacy.’
The Great Hall of Endless Debate was full of species talking. Now that the battle was won and everyone had stopped screaming, the shouting was in full flow. There were representatives from every surviving species spread across the chamber, and, in the corner, at a discreet, managerial distance, several Time Lords were gathered. Officially, they were there purely as (what else) observers, but from time to – well, obviously – time, one of them would cough gently and lean over to mutter in the ear of one green being or another. Sometimes their whispers would be met with a nod and a smile, sometimes by a terrified shudder.
The main purpose of the meeting was to work out what could be done next. They’d gathered in the Galaxy’s largest extant meeting hall – which was, it had to be said, missing only a little bit of roof and merely mildly fire-damaged in a few places. The surviving leaders were crammed in and, although they’d finally agreed a protocol for the Peace Talks, the several thousand representatives couldn’t resist keeping up a low background buzz of chatter, murmuring and occasional wailing. The screaming was directed towards the five representatives from Krikkit, who glowered in a small force cage, staring at the sweltering mass of Other Life with furious hatred.
Currently on stage was Velspoor of the Endless Karrick, who had lost three of their continents, a moon, and none of their pomposity.
‘What we have to face before us, is, shall we call it, the Great Dilemma, namely that the unswerving militaristic xenophobia of the Krikkitas precludes us from the possibility of reaching any form of modus vivendi and peaceful settlement or harmonious co-existence with them.’
There were roars at this point, some of agreement, and many of ‘KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!’ A Time Lord tutted gently at this and started writing a memo.
Velspoor of the Endless Karrick turned, theatrically, to address the force cage. ‘Have I, would you say, summarised your position correctly, gentlemen?’
Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen Page 6
