T H E N E W A D V E N T U R E S ETERNITY WEEPS Jim Mortimore *** First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Virgin Publishing Ltd 332 Ladbroke Grove London W10 5AH Copyright © Jim Mortimore 1997 The right of Jim Mortimore to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 'Doctor Who' series copyright © British Broadcasting Corporation 1997 Cover illustration by Peter Elson ISBN 0 426 20497 2 Typeset by Galleon Typesetting, Ipswich Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham PLC All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. *** Author's Note For Colin Booth Mortimore When I was a kid I used to write stories. Doctor Who stories. I used to type them up painstakingly on an old Smith-Corona manual and draw a little felt pen cover for them and show them to Dad, who would duly read them and comment on them for me. One day he read this dumb pile of crap I'd written about monsters and the end of the world and all the rest of it and he said, 'Why don't you do Doctor Who like Charles Dickens?' I didn't have a clue what he meant. But I recognized that Dickens wasn't a name to be bandied about lightly. He was classical, but popular. He was serious, but humorous. Grown up, but childish. An astute observer of what we have come to :call the human condition. I never did write a Doctor Who book like Charles Dickens. But I did write others you may have read. And Cracker. And Babylon 5. And hopefully, eventually, I'll write more original stuff. Dad died just after Christmas 1995, a few weeks before this book was commissioned. Eternity Weeps will be the first book he won't be giving me his own particularly dry brand of feedback on. So. If any of you have read anything else I've written, and if you've liked it, then June, Jonathan, Joanne and myself will be very grateful if you would give a moment of your time, in silence, in respect of the man whose words gave birth to the words you have enjoyed so much. Thanks. Jim Mortimore, Bristol, June 1996 ************************************************ ************************************************ From the journal of Professor Bernice Summerfield-Kane, April 2003 Exploding suns, molten sand, sulphuric acid seas; soldiers, senseless violence, civilian casualties; singularities and sheep. Blimey - what a holiday. If you're lucky it's all over by now. If you're lucky you won't have been living in Delhi or Bangladesh or Mombasa; you won't have been crushed by crowds trying to escape the quakes. If you're lucky you won't have been in Turkey, where the first nukes detonated, or on the moonbase when the singularities broke free. If you're lucky you won't be dying of napalm burns or alien biomatter infection or X-ray fallout; wondering if your children will be deformed or stillborn, or what diseases they might die of if they live beyond the next few years, or if they do live whether they'll be strictly human any more. If you're lucky you'll be rich enough to build a wall around your home to keep a few square metres free of the four hundred million homeless Third World immigrants; to have a direct mail drop for medical supplies so you can avoid the plagues sweeping the globe from the hundred million dead bodies littering the plains of India, Africa and Asia; to have a solar power source for your household atmosphere filters so the remaining biomatter won't reach you. If you're really lucky you're already dead. But I'm getting ahead of myself. And although I've never particularly been one to subscribe to convention, I suppose if this is to make any sense at all I'll have to start at the beginning. Not the beginning of my story, or of Jason's or Chris's. Even the Doctor came late to the page, as it were. No. The real story starts on a planet orbiting the star 16 Alpha Leonis, six billion years ago. That's about one decade for every death, in case you're counting. *** Prologue 16 Alpha Leonis One, six billion years ago 16 Alpha Leonis One is not exactly what you might call honeymoon potential. It's a bit like Venus. Not the Venus of Burroughs or Bradbury. The real Venus. The Venus where they used to remember things by eating each other's brains. The Venus where the sky consists principally of carbon dioxide and the seas are boiling sulphuric acid, and what little solid ground you might find is really nothing more than the peaks of a chain of highly active volcanoes girdling the planet's equator. Ah ha, I hear you thinking. Life here sounds like a rough ride. Well maybe you're right. Any species capable of evolving intelligence and basic technology in such a volatile environment is one I wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley at midnight. Then again, if I did meet a member of this particular species in a dark alley at midnight the chances are it would be as dead as you or I would be if caught unprotected on its world. That would be a shame because, despite looking like three-metre-wide, crystal-armoured sea anemones, the Cthalctose are really rather a civilized species. It's true. Their culture is fairly well developed - philosophically about the level of the ancient Greeks. The Cthalctose have reasoning minds, a knowledge of principles such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, even astronomy (they do it by feeling tidal movement in the sulphuric acid seas). But like the ancient Greeks they are playing with the ideas as intellectual amusements. Their level of practical technology doesn't even encompass something as sophisticated as a steam engine. It's a shame really. If they'd had the steam engine they might have made it in evolutionary terms. Well, made it without all the damnable fuss and bother I've just been through, that is. The Cthalctose live in buildings shaped like coral reefs. They 'bury' their dead by leaving them on the projecting atolls to decompose in the acidic atmosphere. The dead bodies thus form a steady rain of food for the young, which are born attached to the sides of the reefs. On this particular day, some six billion years ago, the Astronomer Royal lazed in the deepest trench of the deepest ocean and watched the sky. Well, he didn't think of it as the sky as such, not having eyes. But he knew it was there. He could feel it move tides of sulphuric acid around his three-hundred-metre-long tentacles. A land-based species; one possessing eyes, might have thought the sky an empty mess of murky clouds. Not the Astronomer Royal. To him the sky was as full as the oceans with movement and life. Masses which moved in intricate patterns, with rhythms which added and subtracted to shape the seas around him; a vast design, of which small parts might be reiterated once or twice in an average lifespan. He could feel the movement of the sun and the moon though he would never know their light or warmth. They were quite close and moved relatively quickly. Further away were the two large gas giants which acted as shepherd moons to a ring of stellar dust about six times their combined mass. He could feel the distant tug of a third, even larger gas giant beyond that, and then the delicate ripples of the Oort cloud right at the very edge of the Solar System. The Astronomer Royal was very good at observing the sky. He had spent the last three hundred years planning a performance of his observations to the rest of his species. Performance art wasn't a new thing to the Cthalctose, but when you spend half your life fixed to a large reef and the rest dodging predators there were really only a limited number of things about which you could perform. The Astronomer Royal was going to change all that. He wanted to put on the best show in the history of Art. No more romances or mythic battles for him. His performance would encompass the sky itself. Three centuries of it to be precise. Each of his hundreds of tentacles would move in precise patterns which would duplicate the patterns of the masses in the sky. He'd have to speed the performance up a bit of course: performed in real time it was likely to become boring, and some of the older citizens might even die before it was finished. But even so it would be a thing of beauty and intellect. A thing never before seen on his world. The Astronomer Royal was nothing if not an Artist. If he hadn't been the Earth would have been a very different place. Breathing sulphuric acid and straining from it the edible remains of the recently dead, the Astronomer Royal waited and watched as the, sky moved around him. He was waiting for a particular mass - one he had been watching for nearly a hundred years. He concentrated on the tides produced by this Other. The Astronomer Royal observed the tides for many hours as he fed and breathed and allowed himself to be cleaned by the corrosive action of the sea. He watched the Other and he thought hard about it. The Other was new to the Solar System. It hadn't always been there. It had appeared nearly a century ago at the very edge of the Oort cloud and had stayed there for a long time. Then, about fifty years ago, the tides produced by the Other had begun to increase in strength. Either it was increasing in mass or it was moving closer. Perhaps it could be the focal point of his performance. He wondered which of the two theories was correct. Was it getting heavier, or moving closer? That night's observations brought the beginning of an answer. In fact, both theories were correct.. The Other was perceptibly heavier since the last observation. And its place in the pattern of the sky had changed. It was moving closer. The Astronomer Royal spent three months observing the new change, wondering how he would incorporate it into his performance of the sky. When he finally worked out its significance he almost died of fright. If he had died life on Earth would have been very different. If there had ever been any human life, that is. *** Chapter 1 We were in Dogubayazit looking for the Ark of Ages when the Flood came. Why? It was just one of those days, that's all. Marriage is weird. You spend half your life wondering about it and the other half wondering what the hell it was you were wondering about. The order of the day is confusion, insecurity, dependency. Trapped somewhere in the middle of this emotional slushpile is the thing that drove you to it in the first place: that corky of Devil called Love. Marriage to Jason Kane is all the above, squared and cubed. Sometimes it's worse. On really bad days it's almost good. These days sneak up on you. They lull you into a false sense of security. On days like these you know what he thinks about you. You know what he feels about you and wants from you. You even have a reasonably good idea what you want from him. Then he eyes up some bit of totty in the Eiffel Tower gift shop and it all turns to doggie poo and you don't know why, and you spend all night trying to make it up but he's too guilty to get it up, and you he awake till morning and tell him you've had enough emotional bullshit for one honeymoon and you're off to Turkey to find Noah's Ark or drown trying, and would he seriously consider staying the hell out of your life for the conceivable future and as much longer as he can manage? It's as much as you can do not to chuck the ring at him as you go. No, not that one, stupid. The wedding ring. And he had to pay the hotel bill too. Ha ha. Turkey was exactly the opposite of what I expected. As a historian, archaeologist and sometime adventurer I really ought to know better by now. I expected beautiful mountain views, clear skies, adventure, possibly a handsome stranger or two to ease my husband-shattered ego. What I got was a nasty little border war, a nasty little rash, a mountain of sheepshit, and an apparently endless supply of warm Pepsis. And that was before I even unpacked my trowel. My ride landed at three o'clock local time. There hadn't been any commercial flights because of the war (the last having been shot down by a malfunctioning Scud) so, I hired a crusty Norwegian pilot named Sven (no last name given) to fly me to where the action was in a mothballed Russian Army chopper which was at least ninety years older than God (and a couple of years younger than Sven, at that). The flight cost me eighteen hundred for Sven, another nine for the chopper, six hundred for fuel and six hundred and fifty for repairs to the tail rotor bearings before I'd let the bugger take off. I charged the lot to Jason's card. Not that he'd ever notice - the Doctor had left us with a mountain of plastic - but it made me feel better. Oh yes, there was the fifty I bunged Sven to keep his hands off me and on the joystick where they belonged during the flight. An even forty grand to get me from Jason Kane to just five kilometres south of the most famous mountain in the world. It seemed a lot of money and it was. Then again everyone has their little problems. The Captain of the Titanic had his iceberg. Noah had Ararat. Now I had Ararat too. I was rubbing my hands as I stepped down from the chopper. Only half of it was due to the cold. The other half was due to relief at having survived the flight. The third half was glee: I was alone. No tourists. No French totty. No Jason. Just Ararat. Seventeen thousand feet, two peaks, snow, rock, one large boat. All to myself. I should be so lucky. Me and a Chartreuse Microbus full of Jesus freaks, a shipping engineer who should by rights have been trying to salvage the aforementioned Titanic, an astronaut with a dose of religion so bad I've been taking preventative medication, and half the Iraqi army. I'll tell you all about them in a bit. Sven grinned a mouthful of crusty teeth at me and said something that sounded like, 'It vos immense pleasure by Gott to heff you in my aircraft, yes, Miss Professor? Ve do lunch sometime ya, by Gott? I smiled in confusion, waved, shouldered my rucksack, turned towards the village. The chopper had set down in a field of pumice and sheepshit. My original snakeskin Liz Lewitt pumps were knackered before I'd got three yards. Ditto my shoulders where the rucksack straps had rubbed through my Soochi blouse. And my lungs were raw from fuel fumes and threats screamed at Sven when he'd tried it on in the chopper. See what easy living will do for you? The chopper lifted, hung for a moment at head height spraying me with dirt and powdered sheepshit as Sven waved from the cockpit, coughed black smoke from the engine cowling, banked and roared away. After a few seconds it lifted enough to clear the adobe wall at the south edge of the field. I sat down on a lump of pumice to take stock. After a few moments the sheep ambled back to investigate . I say investigate. They bumped me a bit and blinked occasionally. One of them snuffled. Model of evolution, this lot. Spurning modesty I changed into my only spare shirt, pulled on a pair of hiking boots and tied my stinking blouse and Liz Lewitt originals by their sleeves and laces respectively around the neck of the nearest sheep. Let the locals make what they will of that, I thought with savage amusement as I began to walk towards the village. Lock up your sons and your fossils. Professor Bernice Summerfield was here - and you better believe it. Well, the sheep believed it anyway. From the air Dogubayazit had seemed no more than a ridge or two away. Like hell it was. Sven had the hands of a child molester and the unerring navigation skills of a malfunctioning Scud. I walked for two kilometres before I found the road. I walked along it for a kilometre or so. I fretted. I sweated. I swore a death oath to pilots in general and Norwegian ones named Sven in particular. I shouted abuse at the sheep and Jason. I stamped my feet. I nearly twisted my ankle twice. Half an hour later I left the road. After this the going got better. ' My temper didn't. By the time I had walked another kilometre I was hot, dusty, thirsty and obsessively muttering, 'A bus, a bus, my kingdom for a bus', in progressively louder and angrier tones. Just when I was absolutely sure I would die from heat prostration having never again heard the sweet sound of an internal combustion engine, there came from .behind me an alarming set of noises. Chugging. Rattling. The clash of grinding metal. The machine-gun rattle of almost continuous backfires. I looked back along the road. Something was coming. The something in question was knackered to buggery, lathered with dust, and covered with about a million wobbling wing mirrors bolted haphazardly to every outside surface. It was, nonetheless, unmistakably a jeep. It screeched to a stop beside me and a youngish guy took off a motorcycle helmet emblazoned with a really bad airbrushed portrait of Paul Weller from the Jam and peered at me. The lad had short, curly hair, old eyes and huge teeth in an even bigger grin. He pointed at me. 'Pretty view,' he said in broken English. I glanced at the dusty grey hills sloping away from the road and shrugged with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. 'If you say so.' He nodded happily. I sighed. Time was when I could have blended inconspicuously with half a hundred alien species on worlds as distant as the Galactic Rim. Right now I might as well have been walking along the road with a sign round my neck saying: Tourist. Easy money. Please rip me off. His grin widened. 'You go Ararat? You go Dogubayazit? I take. Five million Turkish lira only.' He added, optimistically in my opinion, 'I give very good bargain, yes?' I shrugged. 'Five million huh? You see a suitcase anywhere?' The lad frowned. 'Beg pardon?' I shook my head. 'Never mind. Will you take dollars?' The grin was back in an instant; the lad almost quivered with joy. 'Yes. I take dollars. One hundred only. You get good bargain.' 'So you say.' I handed over half the money and climbed into the jeep. It rocked and the gears clashed horribly as the lad accelerated back along the road the way I had just come. I sat down suddenly on something sharp. Grabbing the offending article I saw it was one of my Liz Lewitt originals. The other, and my shirt, rested on the back seat. I glared in outrage at the lad driving the jeep. 'You've been following me all this way? You watched me walk three kilometres in the wrong direction and you didn't offer me a lift?' Another thought struck me. 'You watched me change my clothes?' He grinned. 'Pretty view.' To this day I have no idea how I stopped myself killing him. - - - The lad's name was Dilaver. He drove on in silence broken only by the clashing of gears and the muttering of distant guns. Dogubayazit was (I use the past tense deliberately: check your World Atlas of Nuclear Explosions for more info) a village built on the ruins of a village. The original had been largely destroyed twenty years before by the same border war which was currently raging - it seemed only the technology had changed, and that not much. The soldiers had bigger guns and they fired different slugs - but they'd still kill you. In many ways I was grateful that I had a guide through the troubles. Even if the silly boy did have the bad taste to like the Jam. Present-day Dogubayazit was probably little different in all important respects from the original. A muddy main street bordered by two-storey concrete prefabs. Thin streets winding between wasted buildings, While the village was fairly clean everything was coloured by the ever-present dust so that the general impression was of a jumble of kids' building blocks which had been extruded from the ground. Colour was provided by stunted trees and scrawny grass growing in small gardens, together with clothes and sheets hanging from windows and flapping on washing! lines. Noise came from transistor radios playing German industrial house music in three different languages, a scatter of dogs yapping incessantly at teasing children and the distant mutter of helicopters and gunfire carried on a fitful breeze. Nervous tension was provided by the villagers, who either sat or stood in their doorways and stared at us as we drove through the village. I say stared at us. Actually they were staring at me. Dilaver noticed this in about ten seconds flat and grinned. 'Pretty view' my sainted aunt. Leaving the dogs to argue over some old scraps, the children clustered around the jeep. Clashing gears horribly the lad slowed down and waved at them. They pointed at me. Dilaver beamed. I poked him in the shoulder. 'I'm not a bloody trophy you know.' He immediately looked concerned. 'Pardon?' I shook my head. One of the scrawniest kids climbed into the jeep. I could tell she was a girl only by the fact she was wearing a dress. I picked her up and made as if to throw her out. Dilaver said, 'My sister.' He pointed at me. 'Lady go Ararat. I take. She pay good.' He waved a fist full of dollars at the kids. Immediately about half a dozen more scrambled aboard. 'Hey son, I should warn you I puke in crowds.' 'Beg pardon?' By this time the kids were chattering excitedly and leaping up and down on the seats and poking interestedly at my rucksack and running their fingers through my hair and hugging me. The lad gave one ten-year-old who was jumping on my shirt a backhander and he toppled from the jeep on to the road. I looked around in concern but he was up and running after us in a moment, yelling indignantly. Dilaver flipped the kid the bird. I poked the lad again. 'Is there somewhere to stay here?' 'Beg pardon?' I removed a scrawny kid from my lap, pulled another off my rucksack, disentangled my hair from a third and gave my hair slide up as a casualty of war. 'Hotel. Motel. Bed and breakfast. Flophouse. Dive.' Dilaver beamed. 'Hotel. Yes. My uncle, he owns. Much good price. Two million Turkish lira per night. You get good deal. I make sure no cockroaches in bed.' I scowled. 'I bet you would, given half a chance.' 'Beg pardon?' This time I joined in with the punchline and he laughed. A few minutes later we screeched to a handbrake stop outside the Hotel Royal. I use the words royal and hotel advisedly. If I had a lawyer I've no doubt she would advise me that the word hotel was in fact technically in breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. I got out of the jeep. Dilaver was there first, holding out his hand. I paid him off and shook my head emphatically when he offered to escort me into the hotel. The last I saw of him he was revving up in pursuit of nine-year-old twins who had swiped my shoes from the back seat of the jeep. I shouldered my rucksack and turned to enter the hotel. Unfortunately for me, at that exact moment someone else happened to be coming out. The slatted wooden door took me full in the face and I sat down with a surprised yelp and proceeded to bleed copiously on to my only remaining clean shirt. With a great effort I gathered my wits enough to dab the blood from my nose with the back of my hand. After. a second or two I noticed the same someone who had knocked me over was holding a hand out to help me up. You guessed it. Jason flaming Kane. There is a God and she definitely hates me. Jason smiled - that idiotic smile he gets whenever he's been naughty and needs to apologize. I hit him with the Summerfield combo: a two-minute French kiss immediately followed by a straight left to the jaw. The combo left him grinning like an idiot and bleeding from both nostrils. 'That's because I love you and that's because I hate you,' I told him as I walked into the hotel. 'And don't forget the bags.' I tried not to let him see me crying. I suppose you could be forgiven for thinking that I would have passed Go, collected two hundred pounds, and leapt immediately into either a dramatic adventure in which the fate of the world hung by a thread or, at the very least, straight into bed with my wretched, abjectly apologetic and slightly bloodstained husband. You'd be right too, on both counts. But not straight away. Oh no. Life's never that easy. Not mine, anyway. First of all I had to survive the most intensely boring, frustrating and downright irritating nine days of my life. I could tell my plans for solo archaeological indulgence were all beginning to go pear-shaped when the young woman behind the registration desk beamed so widely at Jason when he followed me into the foyer that I thought her teeth would fall out. (They didn't of course; I told you God hates me.) Adding insult to injury the woman, who could hardly have been of school-leaving age, practically had a fit of concern when she saw the blood around Jason's nose. It was ten minutes of wet flannels and girly faffing before anyone even noticed I was present, let alone in a similar, blood-dappled position. I thought seriously about registering us in separate rooms. Then I looked at the woman carefully wiping the blood from Jason's face and thought better of the idea. I wanted my husband where I could keep an eye on him. This, as it turns out, was a seriously bad move. Because all he wanted to do was apologize. That first night, he tried to apologize so long and so earnestly that I didn't even notice the thirty or so cockroaches that gathered to be entertained by the show. Finally I couldn't stand it any more. Have you any idea how annoying a man can be when he's trying to apologize? Especially when all you really want to do is lay him out with a two-by-four - or just lay him - and anyway you're just too annoyed by what he's done to think straight? The fact that he cannot understand why you are upset simply adds fuel to the fire. Here's how that evening's conversation went. Him: Hey, Benjy-bunny. You look sad. Cheer you up? Me: (I say nothing. They hate that.) Him: Don't be like that. I want to apologize. Me: (Nothing.) Him: Bernice, come on. I made a mistake, OK? I'm sorry. At least talk to me will you? I'll wait outside the bathroom all night if I have to. Me: (Nothing.) Him: Benny, look. I'm sorry. I followed you four thousand miles to apologize. Doesn’t that count for anything? Me: (Nothing.) Him: Do you know how much it cost me to rent a suborbital? I blew half the Doctor's plastic. And I threw up on the plane. You know how I hate flying. Ha. I was like a big kid. The stewardess really had her hands full. Me: (Nothing.) Him: Jesus, Bernice, what the hell have I done!? Me: (Nothing.) Him: Don't you love me any more? Me: (Nothing - but not answering almost killed me.) Him: Oh this is ridiculous. You can't stay in there all night. No one can brush their teeth for an hour! Me: (Nothing - but I came out of the bathroom.) Him: Bernice. Honey? You want to talk about it now? Me: I'm going to get drunk. I slammed the bedroom door on the way out; I wanted to kill something really badly and three cockroaches offered themselves up as sacrificial victims. Leaving three really first-rate dying squishes and a frustrated husbandly whine behind me I made for the bar. I call it the bar. The tables were packing crates. The chairs were the folding garden variety (with holes in the cloth and rot in the wood). The only pool table was booked for about a month and wobbled. The room held about a dozen people, mostly American or European. They were all ages. They were loud. They were sober (which makes being loud worse, as I'm sure you know). And every damn one of them had a dose of Ark fever which would make Typhoid Mary look like she had a dose of the flu. '- telling you the flood was real -' '- and I both know there's no evidence to confirm -' '- day of judgement is -' '- day of the warm Pepsi more like -' '- presence of the amomum flower within the structure proves -' '- and money searching for the Ark on the wrong damn mountain -' '- you mean it's my round -' '- it's too wide and it's not a rectangle and -' '- God says four hundred and fifty feet not the -' '- cubit is measured by the length of the forearm not the -' '- work of Alvarez Lopez in Physics and creation and -' '- Alvares Lopez is talking out of his goddamn -' '- water. Anything so long as it isn't -' '- the photos to prove I -' '- ever see a warm Pepsi again I swear I'll -' '- messed up pixels of a malfunctioning spy satellite more -' '- like it? I'd rather drink goat's milk -' '- you weren't such a goddamned fundamentalist -' '- straight from the damn goat before I have -' '- the philosophical implications, it's the cultural -' '- boat shape and it's sitting on the side of a -' '- want it on the mountain the Bible says it's on not some damn -' And on. And on. The bits of conversation made about as much sense as talking to a lawyer while drunk and stoned.