'Everyone but me,' said Fitz.

85.'I have secrets,' she replied. 'There's a lot you don't know about me.'

'We saw a lot of death,' Fitz said. 'I always think of what we did as adventures, but so many people died.'

'More than the average number of deaths,' Trix said quietly.

'Yeah. But it's not that with Anji, it's that she's somehow ashamed of her time with the Doctor.'

'She's got a new life now. Come back down to Earth, to coin a phrase.'

'Does she really think that what was it they were talking about? offsh.o.r.e unit trusts and the European Declaration of Human Rights are more interesting subjects than giant robots and pyramids on Mars? We ended up talking about what colour to paint a kitchen at one point.'

'Isn't that the life we've just chosen? Normality?'

'No. We're not pretending it didn't happen. We talk about it. And I like to think we'll go places and, y'know, do stuff.'

'We both went through it,' Trix said. 'All that outer s.p.a.ce and monsters and stuff. Could you explain what it's like to anyone else?'

'I could see how it would be difficult to share with anyone who wasn't there,' Fitz agreed, 'Like all those Hollywood stars who have to marry other Hollywood stars.'

'And is she happy?'

'Anji's the happiest I've ever seen her,' Fitz admitted. 'I don't understand why he calls her "cap", though.'

'I imagine it's short for "Kapoor",' Trix explained patiently.

'But that's her. . . Hang on, he calls her by her surname? That's just screwy.'

'I thought Fitz was your surname for ages. Never mind about them. How about you? Are you happy?'

Fitz shifted on the mattress, dislodging Trix a little. 'I think I will be. It's a big adjustment. I know this is the right thing to do.' He looked into her eyes.

'It's a good start, from where I'm lying.'

It had been an hour or two.

The door to the cellar opened, then whoever opened it went straight back upstairs rather than showing themselves. Then Marnal and Rachel both came down the stairs, slowly and carefully, bringing an extraordinary contraption with them.

It was the big gla.s.s bottle he'd seen in the library, now connected up to a variety of electronic pieces, most of which were everyday items. Two things caught the Doctor's eye. The first was a small metal tube that was humming to itself and had cables pouring out of its top and bottom. The other was a component from the TARDIS scanner.

86.Marnal had managed to get into the TARDIS. The Doctor tried, and failed, not to panic at the thought.

Rachel helped Marnal set up the apparatus about five feet in front of the Doctor.

'I thought you said we couldn't use it to look at this,' Rachel said.

'I can use this image processor to help resolve the picture,' Marnal told her, plugging it into his contraption. 'It won't be perfect, but it should be enough to at least get a sense of it.'

'If this is The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds, I've seen it,' the Doctor said, trying to sound cheerful.

'You've seen this too,' Marnal told him.

The bottle grew dark. Then it resolved into the blackness of s.p.a.ce, with a few stars and the wisps of a nebula. Filling the sky, though, was something utterly alien. It looked like a six-leafed orchid, the colour of bone, or perhaps some bizarre six-winged moth.

'What is that?' Rachel asked.

'I don't know,' the Doctor and Marnal both replied.

Marnal was working the controls. He wasn't getting a very good signal.

'The coordinates are slightly off.'

Then there was a star, much like Earth's sun. The picture moved away, to one of its planets. The world had an atmosphere, three vestiges of oceans and tiny ice caps at its poles, but the large continents seemed to be mostly desert or broken mountain ranges. The Doctor knew from this glimpse that what he was looking at was an immensely old place, practically fossilised. The wide river beds were dry, there were fields of rubble. Scratched in the rock were marks of abandoned roadways and settlements. He also thought he saw the glints of crystal domes and metal spires.

'Gallifrey, Doctor. Our home planet.'

The Doctor looked at the image again, with new interest. This time, he saw countless dots of light ma.s.sed in orbit above the ancient world.

'This,' Marnal continued, 'is the day you destroyed it. . . '

87.Interlude The Last of Gallifrey The invaders were from beyond the future.

The Doctor and Fitz had known for some time that a war was coming. For months, as they'd gone about their travels, they had stumbled across hints and echoes of a battle fought in the future between the Time Lords and an unknown enemy. The Time Lords were losing. This was a war fought in five dimensions, across the whole of time and s.p.a.ce. The Doctor was forbidden to see his own destiny, but the future had sought him out. He had learnt he would die, he had learnt that Gallifrey and everything it now stood for would be destroyed.

Those that attacked Gallifrey today had travelled back from a time towards the end of the war. They were not the enemy, but they were members of one of the factions opposed to the elite that ran Time Lord society. In the Doctor's time Faction Paradox was a nuisance, a secret society of renegades obsessed with symbols and ritual, with breaking the rules.

In the future, they had become an army, and one that was used to fighting Time Lords. And because they were from the future, they already knew how they'd won this battle. Today, they'd already dissected every planetary defence system. Their war fleet circled Gallifrey. Above the dome of the Capitol, the seat of Time Lord power, hovered the Edifice, a structure the size of the dome itself that looked for all the world like a rare orchid. Now, Faction Paradox troops had launched a ma.s.sive ground a.s.sault.

The front-line Faction infantry wore costumes made from the bones of impossible creatures. Thick ribs protected their chests, plates of bone covered their shins and forearms. They wore masks that looked like the skulls of enormous bats. No two sets of armour were identical, although most had fierce spikes and stegosaur plates. The gaps between the bones were filled with a viscous, oily-black substance. What they wore resembled costumes worn for a voodoo ceremony as much as suits of armour.

These skulltroopers advanced quickly through the Capitol, each squad covering its comrades, always pressing forward. There was something inhu-man about the precision of each move. Where they encountered defences, they took them apart efficiently. They carried bulky guns that fired beams 89 of shadow that never seemed to miss. It was impossible to surprise them, and they always managed to dodge hostile fire. Behind them were the officers in their flowing black robes and more streamlined skull-masks. They were searching the Capitol, catching the strategic areas of the Time Lord's fortress as they fell. Meanwhile, the Faction's leather-clad a.s.sa.s.sins, the Uncles, hunted down unarmed old men and stabbed them through both hearts.

More than one race had tried to use brute force to conquer Gallifrey, a.s.sembling vast armadas that had been hopelessly dashed against its defences.

This attack was almost small scale by comparison, yet when the Time Lord tacticians ran what was happening through the Matrix simulators it was succeeding as well as the Faction's best-case scenario. The Faction were making no mistakes, yet perfectly exploiting their opponents' hesitations and weaknesses. The rumour among the city Watchmen was that data about the fight was being relayed to the invaders from the future. If one of the skulltroopers was about to miss, he was told how to adjust his aim. The officers were told where they would find what they were looking for, saving them the search.

Entry codes and pa.s.swords were learnt and transmitted to the past, allowing unhindered access to the Capitol. History was being retouched and redrafted.

Forewarned was forearmed.

The Gallifreyans guarding the Capitol had a few tricks of their own. They each had centuries' worth of familiarity with the battlefield, and knew all the ancient pa.s.sages and secret paths. This place had once been a fortress, and now it was a fortress again. The defenders were well drilled, with near-telepathic communications. If the guards managed to cut off a group of attackers, then hit them so hard and fast that there was nothing they could do to defend themselves, it didn't make any difference whether or not the skulltroopers knew what was coming. The staser pistols of the Watch were set to freeze time around the attackers, cutting them off from the rest of the universe. They dropped out of existence when they were hit, momentary grey silhouettes visible for a moment before the universe sealed over them. So battle was joined. To an outside observer, the fighting looked weird and fantastic, full of improbable, illogical events.

Fitz was with the president of the Time Lords, an apparently young woman named Romana, who had herself travelled with the Doctor before returning alone to their home planet. They had been joined by Mali, a member of the Time Lord military. Romana was pet.i.te, with black hair and a snub nose. Mali was tall and solid, with close-cropped hair. Fitz wouldn't say no to either or both of them. The two ladies, however, were more concerned with the alien hordes swarming across the capital city of their home planet.

Fitz himself had just been distracted by a hallucination, a vision of the walls running with blood, hundreds of screaming corpses trapped behind them.

90.This had dampened his ardour.

'The Matrix has restabilised. The Faction influence has been woven into its databanks,' Romana said quietly as Fitz's vision faded.

The Matrix was the Time Lord's central computer; it contained every sc.r.a.p of their knowledge and all the secrets of their power. Fitz thought someone had said something about how the memory of every Time Lord was loaded into its databanks when they died, but he might have been confusing this with something else. There were often a lot of things to keep track of on an alien planet.

'You were right, you stupid, ignorant primitive,' Romana was crying, 'you were right.'

'I was?' Fitz had guessed what the invaders were planning a little while ago, and no one had believed him. The satisfaction of knowing he'd worked out something that an entire race of immortal supergeniuses, every one of them more brilliant than the Doctor, had missed was tempered by the fact that Faction Paradox now had complete control of the entire universe of s.p.a.ce and time.

'There are nine Gallifreys!' Fitz reminded Romana and Mali.

It was true. The Time Lords had copied their own homeworld and secreted the copies around time and s.p.a.ce as back-up against just such an attack as this.

'No,' said Mali. 'There isn't even one one.'

The Faction had found all the back-ups, then written them out of existence.

Without anyone to stop them, their version of history was being imposed on the universe. Fitz could feel time itself being corrupted, but couldn't describe the feeling.

Something shadowy and unknowable was grabbing at him. At first, he thought it was just the sense that everything had gone wrong wrong. Then he realised he was being removed from the action. The skulltroopers were closing in on Romana and Mali, guns raised. The two Time Ladies were trying to make a break for it, but the world was melting around them.

As the world faded away around Fitz he heard Romana sobbing. 'We can't have lost. Everything I ever did was to stop this from happening. I can't have failed. I can't let this happen to my people!'

Then he heard two shots.

High above the Capitol was the Edifice. Inside the Edifice was a control chamber, and inside the control chamber was the Doctor. He was face to face with the leader of Faction Paradox.

The Doctor hadn't been able to sleep the night he'd first heard his name.

91.He'd been a very small child. He couldn't remember how old he was, but he remembered his mother's long red hair and her cut-gla.s.s voice. She was sitting at the side of his bed, reading from a storybook.

It was a tale about an adventurous youth who had gone back into his own past, to before his mummy and daddy were born. He knew, as everyone knew, that this was strictly forbidden. Travelling into the past was allowed, but not into your own own past. That part of your story had already been written, and there was no room for any new characters or incidents. But the adventurous youth didn't listen to his elders and his betters, and without any obvious motivation he used an ordinary knife to murder his own grandfather. past. That part of your story had already been written, and there was no room for any new characters or incidents. But the adventurous youth didn't listen to his elders and his betters, and without any obvious motivation he used an ordinary knife to murder his own grandfather.

The consequences were obvious, even to a small child: if his father had never been born, the adventurous youth would never be born. . . so couldn't go back and murder his grandfather. If his grandfather wasn't murdered, he was free to have a son. . . and the adventurous youth would be born, and would commit the murder. It went around and around.

Although this was the first time the Doctor had heard it, this was a very old legend. A fairy tale that had been written to frighten young Gallifreyans, to warn them of the dangers that their great powers could bring them.

So what happened to the adventurous youth? Well, no one knew, not even the wise men of the High Council, not even the finest minds stored in the Matrix, not even great Ra.s.silon himself. But there were stories that out there there, wherever that was, there existed a shadowy half-man, simultaneously alive and dead, murderer and victim. No one knew what he looked like, except that he had only one arm and no one could agree which one he had lost, or how it had happened. His name was Grandfather Paradox Grandfather Paradox, and if you were naughty he would find you and use you and destroy you, as part of his labyrinthine schemes against the Time Lords.

The Doctor had taken the story very, very seriously as a child. For months, perhaps even years, afterwards he had worried that Grandfather Paradox was under his bed, or lurking beneath the table in the refectory, or making the noises he could hear outside at night. Gradually, the fear had faded. For the best part of the last thousand years, the Doctor had blithely gone about his travels through time and s.p.a.ce, and had been afraid of Grandfather Paradox roughly as often as he'd worried about being mugged by the Easter Bunny.

So it was disconcerting to have Grandfather Paradox leering down at him, wearing the Doctor's own face. The Grandfather was his future self. He was everyone's future self. This was what you became if you didn't mend your ways. Anyone looking him in the eye would see themselves staring back. Consumed not with anything as lurid as evil, but with cynicism masquerading as cleverness. Self-absorption and pettiness, pragmatism and grudges, boredom and sadness. He is the person you vow you'll never become as an adventurous 92 youth, and he's always watching you, ready to strike.

Grandfather Paradox's heavy leather cloak was flapping as a gust of wind pa.s.sed through the Edifice. He stood framed in an arch made of bone, in a pool of milky light.

'I am your fate. The game is played out, and I hold all the cards.'

'Perhaps we could have a whist drive,' the Doctor suggested disdainfully.

Grandfather Paradox smiled. It wasn't quite his own face, the Doctor reflected. It was older and more cruel. Greying hair and skin. The same frock coat under the cloak, but faded and cobwebbed. The loss of an arm had changed his centre of balance, subtly altering the way he walked and moved.

The Doctor started talking to himself. Then again, who else was there to talk to here?

'It seems to me there are three directions this little tournament could move in,' the Doctor said.

'Oh really?' the Doctor replied.

The Doctor nodded. 'One: I can run. Leave the universe to it. What can I do to save Gallifrey now?

'Two: Surrender to this third-rate G.o.d in the machine here,' said the Doctor, pointing to Grandfather Paradox. 'Beg him to change his mind, to spare Gallifrey, to temper his visions for his Paradox hordes overrunning s.p.a.ce and time. Perhaps there's a chance.

'Or three. . . '

He tried to think what the third option might be. There was always another way. . .

They had never said how old the adventurous youth's grandfather was when he met him. When you hear the word 'grandfather' you picture wrinkles, false teeth and a white beard. But the whole point of the story was that the grandfather was a young man at the time. What if he was stronger than his opponent? What if he was more more youthful, youthful, more more adventurous? What if he'd heard how this story ended and didn't like it one bit? What if, when faced with a knife-wielding maniac from the future, he drew a gun and blew him away? That was one way to resolve a paradox. adventurous? What if he'd heard how this story ended and didn't like it one bit? What if, when faced with a knife-wielding maniac from the future, he drew a gun and blew him away? That was one way to resolve a paradox.

And, responding to the Doctor's thoughts, a bra.s.s lever sprang out of the mouldy remains of the control console in the middle of the chamber. The sound, like a bone breaking, startled both the Doctor and the Grandfather.

The Doctor could feel time, s.p.a.ce and gravity fraying around him. The laws of physics, of cause and effect themselves, were unravelling. This was going to be the paradox to end all paradoxes, but it would end the war to end all wars.

A moment later and Grandfather Paradox had leapt for the Doctor, his one arm stretched out like a pike. He grabbed the Doctor's throat, palm against his 93 Adam's apple, fingers pressed into the flesh of his neck. This was not simply holding him away from the lever, this was a murder attempt.

'I don't want to,' the Doctor choked. 'If I do, I lose everything I hold dear.'

Rather than listen to the Grandfather's reply, he tried to come up with a strategy that would get him over to the lever.

Knowing he was, by definition, as strong as his opponent the Doctor grabbed the stump of the Grandfather's missing arm in one hand, dug in until he could feel his nails breaking the skin and shoved himself and his opponent back across the room until they slammed into the control console. The Grandfather screamed out, but didn't loosen his grip. With his free hand the Doctor was searching the console. He found what he was looking for metal cubes he could pluck out of their control panel. Stabilisers. He took one, turned it in his hand, sliced the Grandfather's wrist with one of its sharp edges. Finally, he could breathe again as the Grandfather dropped him and withdrew. But before the Doctor could even take that breath, the Grandfather was on him, and he'd been kicked to the ground and in the ribs and stomach.

Time stood still. Not a metaphor, just a moment of discontinuity as the energies swirled out from the heart of the Edifice and into its control room.

It was all a question of inner calm and outer leverage. Finding and taking advantage of the Lagrangian points in a room with a shifting gravity field. Do that, and you could find the centre, the stability, the balance.

The Doctor jumped up, hung in the air, and time stood still long enough for him to perfectly line up his first strike, a flying kick to Grandfather Paradox's jaw, using all his strength and both his feet.

'Hai!' the Doctor shouted.

But the Grandfather brought up his hand to block, deflecting him, and it was the Doctor who found himself crashing to the floor. At the last moment he used his momentum to flip over, and landed facing his opponent.

Time returned to normal, then sped up.

The Doctor launched himself forwards, and made a series of fast, fast strikes. Vertical to the head with the blade of the hand, covered by a feint with the other hand. To the chest, each hand in turn. Grip the sleeve. A stamp on the right ankle, a high kick to the side of the neck. Straight punch.

Vertical to the head with the blade of the hand, no feint. Flat palm to the heart. Flat palm to the other heart. Diagonal to the neck. Straight punch.

Shoulder grip and vertical to the head. Feint a straight punch, then leap over his opponent's shoulders, land, strike at the back of the neck. Stamp on the ankle. Grip sleeve. Hip throw. Horizontal to the neck.

All deflected or dodged calmly by the Grandfather, who barely needed to move. As the Doctor made his last lunge, time returned to normal. Grandfather Paradox grabbed the Doctor's wrist and threw him, somersaulting, across 94 the room.

With no time to break his fall, the Doctor crashed into the back wall cracking the brittle material. He paused to take stock. Aikido stresses the concept of being in harmony with one's enemy, of synchronising, antic.i.p.ating and defusing, rather than simply defeating. But this was ridiculous. His opponent remembered this fight, he could counter every move.