MEMORIES REVISITED
She remembered - so long ago, but the memories of that day were so clear. The day that everything changed. Her husband had long since died in battle. She had mourned him for months on end, for in spite of everything, she had truly loved him. And now that part of her life was lost. She had continued in her role as a Warrior Queen, having been coached in those duties for when that time would eventually come. And for many years she had served her kingdom well.
And then, the day came when she heard a sound she thought never to hear again. Like an ancient engine coming to life, becoming louder as the shape of a London Police Box solidified before her. A shape she recognised as the TARDIS. He had come back for her.
But when the doors opened, there was no one there to greet her - no errant Time Lord in a patchwork frock coat, nor in cricketing whites. No one.
Only when she had stepped inside did she feel the coldness hit her. This was not how it should be, she realised. But as she turned to leave, the doors had already closed, blocking her exit. Repeated attempts to open them using the control lever she recognised had proved useless.
And as the time rotor began its rise and fall, she knew that she was trapped. And she would never again return to her kingdom - so long ago, but she still remembered.
Her reverie was broken by a commotion outside. The door burst open and Zzorrann burst in. "Mother! Everything is falling! Decay is striking us down!"
"No! It cannot be!" She rose from her makeshift throne. "He has done this! And he shall live to regret his actions!"
*****
Everywhere, the story was the same - the once pristine streets of Paris were now showing their age, and decaying at a remarkable rate. The Doctor looked around for some form of sanctuary. "The TARDIS!" he suddenly remembered. "Jamie, help me with the Brigadier."
It began as a run, but as they drew closer to the ship their steps faltered, until even Jamie could go on no longer. "Oh no, this is all my fault. Unless - wait there, both of you." The Doctor sprinted the last few yards to the TARDIS, diving inside as soon as the key was in the lock.
Jamie sank to his knees, staring. Surely he wouldn't leave them?
Then a circle of power emanated from the TARDIS, halting the decay, and then reversing the process in a localised area. Gradually, Jamie and the Brigadier began to recover their strength. The Doctor hurried out from the ship, quickly checking on his friends, then herding them into the TARDIS.
Once inside the relative calm of the console room, the Doctor mopped his brow. "Well, that was a near thing." Activating the scanner, they watched as the desecration played itself out. "Thank heaven I was able to extend the TARDIS force field. Otherwise we'd never have made it."
"Aye, but while we're safe in here, what about all those people?" Jamie chimed in.
"Yes, and what exactly is going on?" demanded the Brigadier. "What did you do out there?"
"Oh crumbs," the Doctor groaned. "I didn't realise it at the time, but those globes, as well as providing light for the city and climate for the flowers, also kept the people in a form of stasis."
"Do you mean suspended animation?"
"Of a sort, yes," he continued. "Only instead of freezing their bodies, their ageing was held in check." The Doctor pulled out his handkerchief, and opened it out to reveal a tiny microcircuit. "When I placed this against that column, the idea was to generate an opposite signal to what it was used to - a kind of feedback. What I didn't expect was a chain reaction effect, shutting down all the globes."
"And because of your fooling around," Jamie stated bitterly, "those people out there are dead."
"Oh no, I wouldn't say that," the Doctor insisted. "Aged yes, but not dead. As for the society itself, it was an illusion." He pointed toward the picture on the scanner. "See how the buildings are changing, becoming less than perfect."
"But this is incredible, Doctor," Lethbridge Stewart exclaimed. "It's all so real. And I've lived here for years."
"Interesting." The Doctor fixed him with a steely glare. "How many years exactly?"
"Well, I . . ." he paused. "I can't seem to remember."
"Just as I thought," the Doctor confirmed. "You've been held under a form of mind conditioning, remembering only what you're supposed to." He continued to stare into the Brigadier's eyes.
To the former UNIT officer, it was as though the Doctor's eyes were boring into him. And he could not turn away from that gaze. "Brigadier, you can hear only my voice. Is that clear?"
"Your voice." The reply came out as a mumble.
"Good. Now, when I count to three, the mind control over you will be gone, and you will remember everything you had previously forgotten. One - two - three!"
The Brigadier shook his head, as though to clear it, then he looked up. "I remember now. I'd retired from UNIT, and got a job as a teacher. After few hairy moments at the beginning, everything settled down to a normal routine.
"Then one day - it was morning, as I recall - I was driving along the country lanes, when I blacked out."
"But you didn't crash?" the Doctor prompted.
"No," he recalled. "The next thing I remember, I was here on Aerht. In a facsimile of Paris in 1902." Then he realised. "I must have transported here in some way!"
"But why? For what purpose?"
"That, I don't know. Nothing to do with the conditioning I went through - I just wasn't told."
"And then they - whoever they are - planted in your mind this sort of fake identity, which you believed and accepted."
"Yes." Lethbridge Stewart's voice faltered for a moment. "Of all the . . . to take someone out of a life they knew, and implant a new one in its place - it's like a violation. It's barbaric!"
The Doctor and Jamie waited, allowing the Brigadier time to collect his thoughts. His own thoughts, for the first time in a long time. "If you want to talk about this later . . .?" Lethbridge Stewart gave a slight nod at the Doctor's kind offer.
"So what happens now?" Jamie wondered. "Do we get out of here?"
"No, Jamie. I don't think so," he answered. "After all, we still have to account for those deaths the Brigadier told us about earlier."
The Brigadier pulled up short on this. "Hold on a minute, Doctor. Do you mean to say that life out there will continue as before?"
"Not exactly, no," agreed the Doctor. "The people you knew are still there. It's just that your perceptions of them will be a little different." He pondered for a brief moment. "There is still a terrible mystery to solve. And someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you here, and to stage all of this." He opened the doors. "Shall we go?"
******
Zzorrann sat at the corner of the main table of the grand council chamber of Paris. The Council was made up of the elected representatives of the various wards of the city. Twenty men and women of human, lizard and mixed race sat around the table, discussing events.
Mayor Guilliam, a ruddy faced human with silver hair, sat at the head of the table with Zzorrann sitting quietly behind him.
"I have been assured that the globes are being restored and the people's memories of recent events are being erased from their minds as we speak," he informed the Council.
"And what of these reports of another power source temporarily maintaining a field close to the launch site?" asked one of the councillors.
"We are investigating this and we are convinced that we will be able to resolve the situation," Guilliam assured him.
"Why can we not tell people the truth about what is happening?" protested another councillor.
Zzorrann placed his hand on the Mayor's shoulder and the room fell silent. The meeting was at an end.
******
Later Mayor Guilliam sat at his desk with his old friend Herzz sitting opposite him. Herzz was from an ancient and noble lizard family. House Greengill, as the Humans had come to call it. They had been involved in the planet's politics 1000 years before the humans had first started arriving. Guilliam trusted Herzz with his life.
"Herzz my old friend, have you ever heard of the Medici?" asked Guilliam.
"No."
"They were a family of bankers in the ancient human city of Florence. Florence was a republic with a ruling council of elected citizens just like our Paris," Guilliam explained. "The Medici were one of a dozen rich banking families in the city. Eventually they became richer than everyone else and this made them so powerful that they were able to rule the city like princes while maintaining the facade of being just ordinary citizens and bankers".
"This seems familiar," Herzz noted.
"Yes just like the Medici in Florence, Zzorrann and his ancestors have ruled this city for 750 years while posing as humble bank managers and businessmen. It was his family that first brought us humans here, for some purpose I cannot yet understand, and still they sit there managing the people like banknotes in their bank". Guilliam sighed. "And just like the Medici who married into foreign royalty to ally themselves with other powers and to bolster their authority, Zzorrann's father kidnapped Queen Perpugilliam and married her to expand his influence with the human planets and to humanise his heir."
"I see the parallels," said Herzz. "We have the humble banker Zzorrann sitting at the edge of our council and directing our decisions, just like his father."
The human and the lizard sat looking at each other in resignation.
"So shall we fight back and reclaim our City?" asked Guilliam.
"No, just like our own ancestors, we will fall in line to protect out own power and position," said Herzz.
They nodded in grim acceptance.
"We should just be thankful that his mother is still not in charge, like she was when Zzorrann was still too young to manage things after his father's death," Guilliam observed.
"Yes. But I will never forget the day Zzorrann's father died," said Herzz.
"No, neither will I. Strangely," Guilliam added, "it is difficult to forget the image of a small human woman getting up in the middle of a council meeting and ripping off her Lizard husband's head with her bare hands."
******
It had been a marriage of convenience, nothing more. But still she had borne a son, and she loved him. But the pregnancy itself had unforeseen complications.
As well as being one of the first humans to sire a child of mixed race, she had also undergone a transformation of sorts. The physicians never fully understood the cause - whether it was a biological reaction to the pregnancy, or the act of lovemaking between two different species, no one was sure. But over the course of time, her body began to mutate. It was barely noticeable at first, the initial change being a gradual increase of strength, to an extent unknown in a female. When she began to recognise the full horror of what would occur, she began to despise her husband all the more. He had done this to her, and he would suffer in turn.
That was when, during the Council Meeting, she stood up and calmly ripped his head apart. The Council had been so shocked that they barely noticed when she took her leave of the meeting, supposedly never to return. The rumour was that she had killed herself in remorse for her actions. Instead, she had retreated into the darkness, as the changes to her body became more pronounced.
But she was still watchful of events. And now she sat quietly, listening to her son's report of the meeting. "So the emergency has been contained?"
"Yes, mother," Zzorrann assured her. "There are some repairs still to be competed, but the people will remember nothing of what happened."
"That is good," she smiled. "Yet I sense there is an unease about you."
He knew he could not hide anything from her. The bond they shared made sure of that. "There is growing unrest within the Council," he informed her.
"Which will be calmed, in time. What else?"
"The military man - this Brigadier." Zzorrann hesitated. "His conditioning has been broken."
"Ah." She rose from her throne. "The Doctor - I should have expected as much. But it changes nothing," she assured him. "Our plan continues. And soon, even the Doctor will be powerless against me."
"Why are you so confident that his meddling will make our hold more powerful?" asked Zzorrann.
"Because I know the Doctor," she replied. "He is used to toppling dictatorships that rule through fear and violence. I was by his side a dozen times when he did such things. But our rule here is different. We have no titles and no secret police. We rely on our subjects' own greed and self-interest to maintain our position."
"But the mind control, won't that draw his attention?"
"Indeed it will. But it is the Council that controls the technology, and they are elected precisely to manage that responsibility, to hold back decay and free people of the burdens of fear and mistrust. Our tools of bribery and old-fashioned corruption are buried deep in the souls of human and lizard alike." She smiled at the irony. "The Doctor can destroy a mind control device, but he cannot destroy the failings of the human soul."
Zzorrann nodded. "So what do we do now?"
"We wait and watch the Doctor follow the false lead of the globes and mind control. He will follow them to the Council and if we are lucky he may topple them. Then when they are replaced and he has gone, we will simply step out of the shadows again and wrap out purse strings around the neck of the new Council."
"So nothing will change?"
"Oh yes, it will. The memory of the chaos his revolution will create will linger in people's minds and the new Council will no longer have the mind control to wipe people memories. They will be frightened and will be desperate for security - and we will still be here to provide it". And she smiled at the thought.
********
The Doctor, Jamie and the Brigadier were standing in the main hall of a villa on the outskirts of the city. The floor was polished marble and the intricately modelled ceiling was nearly twenty feet above their heads.
"So this is your home here," said the Doctor.
The old soldier nodded and then resumed his story of his time on this world. He remembered when he first arrived here and how the authorities had apologised for kidnapping him. Kidnapping was apparently an ancient tradition amongst the lizard race. Males did not get engaged, they simply kidnapped a bride.
Long ago the lizards had become aware of the ever expanding earth empire and other humanoid power blocks. One day an old man had arrived in a Police Box. When he heard this story the Brigadier had recognised this as the Doctor. The old man had said that he had lived many lives, but that he had now almost reached the end of his time and was waiting for a quiet place to die.
The lizards had tended him in his final days and in return he had told them about the humans. Then silently he died. The lizards buried him with great ceremony, but did not fulfil their promise to him to bury with his Blue Box.
Instead they spend generations studying it until they could pilot it themselves. They used it to kidnap resourceful humans from all over time and space and then they brought them back here to integrate into lizard society by breeding with them. Only in the last few generations had this finally resulted in the human/lizard hybrids.
All this was so that when the human worlds finally made contact the lizards' world would be ready to meet them on their own terms as a sister race.
Then about twenty years ago, one of the city's leading bankers had used the Blue Box to capture an alien Queen as his bride. She had eventually consented to the match and had become the first human woman to have a hybrid child. But the birth had taken its toll and she disappeared from public life. Zzorrann was her son.
It was then that the city had begun to decay and that the humans had begun to rot. None of them ever died, they just became more rotten. But science came up with a solution. The globes to hold off the decay and the mind control to fend off the fear and memories of the monsters they had briefly become.
When the decay had begun the Brigadier had, like everybody else, been given a choice of death or submitting to regenerative power of the globes and the City Council's mind control. For the sake of his new wife and children he had submitted.
The Doctor stood beside the Brigadier and took in all that he had heard. "This leaves two very important questions. What caused the sudden decay in the human population and the fabric of the city? And if my future self does come here to die where is his TARDIS now?" the Doctor wondered.
"They didn't know the answer to the first question," said the Brigadier, "but the kidnapped Queen made the city promise never to kidnap humans or use the ship again."
"So what happened to it?" asked Jamie.
"It just disappeared," said another voice from the corner of the room.
The Doctor and Jamie turned to see another human/lizard hybrid with long red hair entering the hall.
"Ha. Doctor, Jamie - let me introduce my eldest son, Alistair Jnr."
*****
She waited until Zzorrann had left the room. When he had gone she climbed up from her chair and hobbled over to a curtain covering an alcove in the room. She pulled back the curtain to reveal a dusty Police Box and an open coffin with a decayed body inside it. She brushed her fingers across the surface of the TARDIS and then went up to the body in the coffin. Then she let her fingers run around the hollow eye sockets.
"Ah, Doctor. Are you ready to have a visit from you past self? Not many people get to pray at their own grave. But you always were exceptional."
To be continued . . .
She remembered - so long ago, but the memories of that day were so clear. The day that everything changed. Her husband had long since died in battle. She had mourned him for months on end, for in spite of everything, she had truly loved him. And now that part of her life was lost. She had continued in her role as a Warrior Queen, having been coached in those duties for when that time would eventually come. And for many years she had served her kingdom well.
And then, the day came when she heard a sound she thought never to hear again. Like an ancient engine coming to life, becoming louder as the shape of a London Police Box solidified before her. A shape she recognised as the TARDIS. He had come back for her.
But when the doors opened, there was no one there to greet her - no errant Time Lord in a patchwork frock coat, nor in cricketing whites. No one.
Only when she had stepped inside did she feel the coldness hit her. This was not how it should be, she realised. But as she turned to leave, the doors had already closed, blocking her exit. Repeated attempts to open them using the control lever she recognised had proved useless.
And as the time rotor began its rise and fall, she knew that she was trapped. And she would never again return to her kingdom - so long ago, but she still remembered.
Her reverie was broken by a commotion outside. The door burst open and Zzorrann burst in. "Mother! Everything is falling! Decay is striking us down!"
"No! It cannot be!" She rose from her makeshift throne. "He has done this! And he shall live to regret his actions!"
*****
Everywhere, the story was the same - the once pristine streets of Paris were now showing their age, and decaying at a remarkable rate. The Doctor looked around for some form of sanctuary. "The TARDIS!" he suddenly remembered. "Jamie, help me with the Brigadier."
It began as a run, but as they drew closer to the ship their steps faltered, until even Jamie could go on no longer. "Oh no, this is all my fault. Unless - wait there, both of you." The Doctor sprinted the last few yards to the TARDIS, diving inside as soon as the key was in the lock.
Jamie sank to his knees, staring. Surely he wouldn't leave them?
Then a circle of power emanated from the TARDIS, halting the decay, and then reversing the process in a localised area. Gradually, Jamie and the Brigadier began to recover their strength. The Doctor hurried out from the ship, quickly checking on his friends, then herding them into the TARDIS.
Once inside the relative calm of the console room, the Doctor mopped his brow. "Well, that was a near thing." Activating the scanner, they watched as the desecration played itself out. "Thank heaven I was able to extend the TARDIS force field. Otherwise we'd never have made it."
"Aye, but while we're safe in here, what about all those people?" Jamie chimed in.
"Yes, and what exactly is going on?" demanded the Brigadier. "What did you do out there?"
"Oh crumbs," the Doctor groaned. "I didn't realise it at the time, but those globes, as well as providing light for the city and climate for the flowers, also kept the people in a form of stasis."
"Do you mean suspended animation?"
"Of a sort, yes," he continued. "Only instead of freezing their bodies, their ageing was held in check." The Doctor pulled out his handkerchief, and opened it out to reveal a tiny microcircuit. "When I placed this against that column, the idea was to generate an opposite signal to what it was used to - a kind of feedback. What I didn't expect was a chain reaction effect, shutting down all the globes."
"And because of your fooling around," Jamie stated bitterly, "those people out there are dead."
"Oh no, I wouldn't say that," the Doctor insisted. "Aged yes, but not dead. As for the society itself, it was an illusion." He pointed toward the picture on the scanner. "See how the buildings are changing, becoming less than perfect."
"But this is incredible, Doctor," Lethbridge Stewart exclaimed. "It's all so real. And I've lived here for years."
"Interesting." The Doctor fixed him with a steely glare. "How many years exactly?"
"Well, I . . ." he paused. "I can't seem to remember."
"Just as I thought," the Doctor confirmed. "You've been held under a form of mind conditioning, remembering only what you're supposed to." He continued to stare into the Brigadier's eyes.
To the former UNIT officer, it was as though the Doctor's eyes were boring into him. And he could not turn away from that gaze. "Brigadier, you can hear only my voice. Is that clear?"
"Your voice." The reply came out as a mumble.
"Good. Now, when I count to three, the mind control over you will be gone, and you will remember everything you had previously forgotten. One - two - three!"
The Brigadier shook his head, as though to clear it, then he looked up. "I remember now. I'd retired from UNIT, and got a job as a teacher. After few hairy moments at the beginning, everything settled down to a normal routine.
"Then one day - it was morning, as I recall - I was driving along the country lanes, when I blacked out."
"But you didn't crash?" the Doctor prompted.
"No," he recalled. "The next thing I remember, I was here on Aerht. In a facsimile of Paris in 1902." Then he realised. "I must have transported here in some way!"
"But why? For what purpose?"
"That, I don't know. Nothing to do with the conditioning I went through - I just wasn't told."
"And then they - whoever they are - planted in your mind this sort of fake identity, which you believed and accepted."
"Yes." Lethbridge Stewart's voice faltered for a moment. "Of all the . . . to take someone out of a life they knew, and implant a new one in its place - it's like a violation. It's barbaric!"
The Doctor and Jamie waited, allowing the Brigadier time to collect his thoughts. His own thoughts, for the first time in a long time. "If you want to talk about this later . . .?" Lethbridge Stewart gave a slight nod at the Doctor's kind offer.
"So what happens now?" Jamie wondered. "Do we get out of here?"
"No, Jamie. I don't think so," he answered. "After all, we still have to account for those deaths the Brigadier told us about earlier."
The Brigadier pulled up short on this. "Hold on a minute, Doctor. Do you mean to say that life out there will continue as before?"
"Not exactly, no," agreed the Doctor. "The people you knew are still there. It's just that your perceptions of them will be a little different." He pondered for a brief moment. "There is still a terrible mystery to solve. And someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to bring you here, and to stage all of this." He opened the doors. "Shall we go?"
******
Zzorrann sat at the corner of the main table of the grand council chamber of Paris. The Council was made up of the elected representatives of the various wards of the city. Twenty men and women of human, lizard and mixed race sat around the table, discussing events.
Mayor Guilliam, a ruddy faced human with silver hair, sat at the head of the table with Zzorrann sitting quietly behind him.
"I have been assured that the globes are being restored and the people's memories of recent events are being erased from their minds as we speak," he informed the Council.
"And what of these reports of another power source temporarily maintaining a field close to the launch site?" asked one of the councillors.
"We are investigating this and we are convinced that we will be able to resolve the situation," Guilliam assured him.
"Why can we not tell people the truth about what is happening?" protested another councillor.
Zzorrann placed his hand on the Mayor's shoulder and the room fell silent. The meeting was at an end.
******
Later Mayor Guilliam sat at his desk with his old friend Herzz sitting opposite him. Herzz was from an ancient and noble lizard family. House Greengill, as the Humans had come to call it. They had been involved in the planet's politics 1000 years before the humans had first started arriving. Guilliam trusted Herzz with his life.
"Herzz my old friend, have you ever heard of the Medici?" asked Guilliam.
"No."
"They were a family of bankers in the ancient human city of Florence. Florence was a republic with a ruling council of elected citizens just like our Paris," Guilliam explained. "The Medici were one of a dozen rich banking families in the city. Eventually they became richer than everyone else and this made them so powerful that they were able to rule the city like princes while maintaining the facade of being just ordinary citizens and bankers".
"This seems familiar," Herzz noted.
"Yes just like the Medici in Florence, Zzorrann and his ancestors have ruled this city for 750 years while posing as humble bank managers and businessmen. It was his family that first brought us humans here, for some purpose I cannot yet understand, and still they sit there managing the people like banknotes in their bank". Guilliam sighed. "And just like the Medici who married into foreign royalty to ally themselves with other powers and to bolster their authority, Zzorrann's father kidnapped Queen Perpugilliam and married her to expand his influence with the human planets and to humanise his heir."
"I see the parallels," said Herzz. "We have the humble banker Zzorrann sitting at the edge of our council and directing our decisions, just like his father."
The human and the lizard sat looking at each other in resignation.
"So shall we fight back and reclaim our City?" asked Guilliam.
"No, just like our own ancestors, we will fall in line to protect out own power and position," said Herzz.
They nodded in grim acceptance.
"We should just be thankful that his mother is still not in charge, like she was when Zzorrann was still too young to manage things after his father's death," Guilliam observed.
"Yes. But I will never forget the day Zzorrann's father died," said Herzz.
"No, neither will I. Strangely," Guilliam added, "it is difficult to forget the image of a small human woman getting up in the middle of a council meeting and ripping off her Lizard husband's head with her bare hands."
******
It had been a marriage of convenience, nothing more. But still she had borne a son, and she loved him. But the pregnancy itself had unforeseen complications.
As well as being one of the first humans to sire a child of mixed race, she had also undergone a transformation of sorts. The physicians never fully understood the cause - whether it was a biological reaction to the pregnancy, or the act of lovemaking between two different species, no one was sure. But over the course of time, her body began to mutate. It was barely noticeable at first, the initial change being a gradual increase of strength, to an extent unknown in a female. When she began to recognise the full horror of what would occur, she began to despise her husband all the more. He had done this to her, and he would suffer in turn.
That was when, during the Council Meeting, she stood up and calmly ripped his head apart. The Council had been so shocked that they barely noticed when she took her leave of the meeting, supposedly never to return. The rumour was that she had killed herself in remorse for her actions. Instead, she had retreated into the darkness, as the changes to her body became more pronounced.
But she was still watchful of events. And now she sat quietly, listening to her son's report of the meeting. "So the emergency has been contained?"
"Yes, mother," Zzorrann assured her. "There are some repairs still to be competed, but the people will remember nothing of what happened."
"That is good," she smiled. "Yet I sense there is an unease about you."
He knew he could not hide anything from her. The bond they shared made sure of that. "There is growing unrest within the Council," he informed her.
"Which will be calmed, in time. What else?"
"The military man - this Brigadier." Zzorrann hesitated. "His conditioning has been broken."
"Ah." She rose from her throne. "The Doctor - I should have expected as much. But it changes nothing," she assured him. "Our plan continues. And soon, even the Doctor will be powerless against me."
"Why are you so confident that his meddling will make our hold more powerful?" asked Zzorrann.
"Because I know the Doctor," she replied. "He is used to toppling dictatorships that rule through fear and violence. I was by his side a dozen times when he did such things. But our rule here is different. We have no titles and no secret police. We rely on our subjects' own greed and self-interest to maintain our position."
"But the mind control, won't that draw his attention?"
"Indeed it will. But it is the Council that controls the technology, and they are elected precisely to manage that responsibility, to hold back decay and free people of the burdens of fear and mistrust. Our tools of bribery and old-fashioned corruption are buried deep in the souls of human and lizard alike." She smiled at the irony. "The Doctor can destroy a mind control device, but he cannot destroy the failings of the human soul."
Zzorrann nodded. "So what do we do now?"
"We wait and watch the Doctor follow the false lead of the globes and mind control. He will follow them to the Council and if we are lucky he may topple them. Then when they are replaced and he has gone, we will simply step out of the shadows again and wrap out purse strings around the neck of the new Council."
"So nothing will change?"
"Oh yes, it will. The memory of the chaos his revolution will create will linger in people's minds and the new Council will no longer have the mind control to wipe people memories. They will be frightened and will be desperate for security - and we will still be here to provide it". And she smiled at the thought.
********
The Doctor, Jamie and the Brigadier were standing in the main hall of a villa on the outskirts of the city. The floor was polished marble and the intricately modelled ceiling was nearly twenty feet above their heads.
"So this is your home here," said the Doctor.
The old soldier nodded and then resumed his story of his time on this world. He remembered when he first arrived here and how the authorities had apologised for kidnapping him. Kidnapping was apparently an ancient tradition amongst the lizard race. Males did not get engaged, they simply kidnapped a bride.
Long ago the lizards had become aware of the ever expanding earth empire and other humanoid power blocks. One day an old man had arrived in a Police Box. When he heard this story the Brigadier had recognised this as the Doctor. The old man had said that he had lived many lives, but that he had now almost reached the end of his time and was waiting for a quiet place to die.
The lizards had tended him in his final days and in return he had told them about the humans. Then silently he died. The lizards buried him with great ceremony, but did not fulfil their promise to him to bury with his Blue Box.
Instead they spend generations studying it until they could pilot it themselves. They used it to kidnap resourceful humans from all over time and space and then they brought them back here to integrate into lizard society by breeding with them. Only in the last few generations had this finally resulted in the human/lizard hybrids.
All this was so that when the human worlds finally made contact the lizards' world would be ready to meet them on their own terms as a sister race.
Then about twenty years ago, one of the city's leading bankers had used the Blue Box to capture an alien Queen as his bride. She had eventually consented to the match and had become the first human woman to have a hybrid child. But the birth had taken its toll and she disappeared from public life. Zzorrann was her son.
It was then that the city had begun to decay and that the humans had begun to rot. None of them ever died, they just became more rotten. But science came up with a solution. The globes to hold off the decay and the mind control to fend off the fear and memories of the monsters they had briefly become.
When the decay had begun the Brigadier had, like everybody else, been given a choice of death or submitting to regenerative power of the globes and the City Council's mind control. For the sake of his new wife and children he had submitted.
The Doctor stood beside the Brigadier and took in all that he had heard. "This leaves two very important questions. What caused the sudden decay in the human population and the fabric of the city? And if my future self does come here to die where is his TARDIS now?" the Doctor wondered.
"They didn't know the answer to the first question," said the Brigadier, "but the kidnapped Queen made the city promise never to kidnap humans or use the ship again."
"So what happened to it?" asked Jamie.
"It just disappeared," said another voice from the corner of the room.
The Doctor and Jamie turned to see another human/lizard hybrid with long red hair entering the hall.
"Ha. Doctor, Jamie - let me introduce my eldest son, Alistair Jnr."
*****
She waited until Zzorrann had left the room. When he had gone she climbed up from her chair and hobbled over to a curtain covering an alcove in the room. She pulled back the curtain to reveal a dusty Police Box and an open coffin with a decayed body inside it. She brushed her fingers across the surface of the TARDIS and then went up to the body in the coffin. Then she let her fingers run around the hollow eye sockets.
"Ah, Doctor. Are you ready to have a visit from you past self? Not many people get to pray at their own grave. But you always were exceptional."
To be continued . . .
