Chapter Three:
From earth herbs, from herbs food, from food seed, from seed man.
Man thus consists of the essence of food
-Taittiriya Upanishad
It took a few minutes to take a deep breath and bring on some sort of mental equilibrium. He and the TARDIS had stopped moving—to the relief of both. They recovered in the quiet hum of the timecraft's "idling" mode, and he straightened himself up and dusted off some non-existent dust off his battered coat.
"My word that was a close one." The Doctor muttered to himself. He checked over the Console, satisfied that the only casualty was that poorly-installed Fault Locator. No tears lost. Never had fit very well; surprised it lasted this long…
There were probably enough supplies in the bits and bobs between the Power Room and the Workshop that he could cobble a new one together…perhaps he should have just done that instead of let those children tweeze this new bit in?
The little Time Lord gently eased the still-smoking circuit board from beneath the TARDIS, and probably did not imagine he heard a sigh of relief. He frowned, turning the remnants over and over in his sturdy hands. The logic patterns on this newer model were not the same as what fit for the original '40's. Hmn.
"They make them more power efficient, but less adaptable, so they burn up extra power trying to adapt, and..." He sighed, sad for the future of Gallifrey if their educational standards insisted on square pegs for square minds. "Like concentrating on an athletic workout and ignoring one's scholastic achievement. Tch." He tutted, shaking his head. Goodness. He'd be better off looking up Watkins again! A sorry state of things when pre-Silicon Valley technology could keep a TARDIS going better than a Third Epoch repair shop on his own planet!
Stuffing the ruined thing in a pocket, he ambled to the Power Room to putter around until he found a reasonable Bypass Circuit in one of the drawers. It wouldn't do the job of a Fault Locator, but it would "plug the gap" so to speak, until he could finish the repairs.
From there it was a simple matter to send the TARDIS from outside the ship's hull to some place inside her depths. After that last jaunt, during which he was sure the TARDIS was convinced her pilot had been trying to create block-transfer computations, she was happy for something simple.
He was replacing the ruined screen with another model, and grumbling about how his later incarnations really needed to stop looking at flatscreens and liquid crystal technology like it was oh-so wonderful when really it was impossible to fix without a team of snow monkeys, a coal mine, and Rassilon's Dictionary of Euphemisms, when a dull GONG fluttered through the Console Room.
"Hmn?" The Doctor screwed his head down over his shoulder to look at the Console. He was standing on his comfortable old wooden chair, all the better to get to the scanner's housing. A colorful pattern of soft, flickering lights were making quite a display on the Environmental side. He frowned and pulled the tri-wing-bit screwdriver out from between his teeth. With a hop he scurried over for a closer look.
"Environment's all right," he muttered to himself. Oh, he wished Jamie and Zoe were here. They would provide a welcome distraction and caution about the unknown. And Zoe, for all her supposed limitations as a human, was rarely distracted from her eternal pursuit of numeric logistics. "How very odd." He stuffed the tri-bit in the pocket with the burnt circuitboard and paged up a few dialogs to see what was happening. "Hmn…now that's a little odd." He leaned back on his heels, thinking back in his considerable (if patchy) memory on what he knew about the class of cargo freighter such as the Third Zone's 'Sun.
Time Lords might gripe and fuss all they wished, but their brains were wired more like humans in construction and design. In other words, they weren't as delightfully linear or logically progressive like other species such as, say, Tharils or the Trakenites (whom they secretly envied and the number of Trakenites who'd been made Time Lords in their early history proved it).
Time Lords were not naturally evolved in the way other species were naturally evolved, to be blunt about it. They were unique among species not because they were the oldest race in the Universe (if you believed that), but the only race that had evolved in the constant presence of Time. TIME had been their developmental factor, not any particular innate superiority.
And didn't they hate that.
They had to train themselves to catalog information along the nice, neat commands of a dictionary or encyclopedia because their minds preferred to file everything in a multidimensional cataloging system.
He'd dawdled long enough. Time enough to do something…
Turning the incoming data over in his head almost absently, he shrugged out of his battered frock coat and hung it on the coat-tree next to the clock.
The Doctor's coats were "rather heavy" as Victoria delicately stated it once. There was good reason. He had all sorts of things in them. A bit of a magpie, the Doctor was also (alas for tailors) a bit of a dowser. He picked up things that struck his fancy, and more often than not, those things were useful later. Part intuition and part of his temporal sense, the Doctor could have anything in those depths.
Rather than enjoy those newfangled fads of transdimensional pockets and clothes that were bigger on the inside (the favorite of vain Time Lords concerned with how they fit in their robes), the Doctor merely had many more pockets than anyone else. He had the inspiration from not Gallifrey, but from his initial fascination with stage illusionists on Earth; all the way back in his heady youth with Susan.
It should come as no surprise that his seemingly poor and valueless frock coat for the shabby-genteel had been designed and made by a professional stage Illusionist, an ingenier of great craft.
The Doctor had pockets inside pockets; pockets where they had no place to be.
There were some things he never went without within those pockets. Smelling salts. A hand mirror, a spare handkerchief, his precious recorder…and of course, his 500-year diary.
"The question would be," he said absently, "Why would there be partial atmosphere on some decks, but livable atmosphere on others…" He shook his head irritably, and was suddenly, irrationally, and totally disgusted with himself at the pang of loneliness twisting his hearts into two little knots.
That was one thing you didn't learn in school—heavens, you didn't even learn it from your parents! Two hearts could certainly hurt twice as much as one! No one had even tried to prepare him for that experience, but it did give him some useful insight on the infamous "detached" personality of Newblood Time Lords. They might very well pull away to spare themselves the confusion of emotions.
The Doctor was approaching the end-pages of his 500-year diary, and he was frankly glad that his House was infamous for what the unkind element called "Post-Regenerative Selective Memory." Unlike those hidebound and boring old things, he had trusted his Original Self to whittle down his memory to the bare bones when he became this current Doctor in this particular body. Yes, it meant things could be at times frustrating, but the Diary helped nudge his ability to problem-solve…and anyway, it was much easier to sort things out when one's memory was no longer so horribly, horribly accurate.
Memory wasn't always the greatest ruler anyway. The older he got, the more he realized his recollections of events were faulty and from outside sources. That could only mean other Time Lords.
Time Lords relied on their memories too much anyway, he thought spitefully (his hands committing overly enthusiastic violence against his work on re-scanning the ship). Over and over, doing the same things, over and over again, consulting their memories only to make certain they always made the same decisions! "What nonsense!"
Oh. He'd just said that aloud.
For a moment he stood wrestling with himself, and himself won. He went to the old chair and sat in it, hands hanging loosely in his lap.
He didn't like being alone. He was used to solitude as a Time Lord—they were such remote species after all. But this…this was painful. He'd fled with Susan, and they'd seen so many wonders together, and then she left but she wasn't alone. And he still had travelling companions.
This was the first time in his life he'd spent any length of time without companionship.
He hated this.
Just a little longer, he reminded himself. They promised you could have them back. All you have to do is do what they say…
It made him feel dirty inside, and he was certain Jamie and Zoe wouldn't approve of his doing anything that made him feel compromised, but it wasn't just his need to have them back.
It was the fact that something deep inside him was warning him that…that something was going on. That after all their years together, it was wrong of him not to follow-up on the futures of the two humans who had known—and loved—him best.
The Time Lords didn't understand. They were remote enough with themselves! But the Doctor had learned some very hard lessons about wisdom and experience traveling with humans…and he didn't want to un-learn them.
From his glimpses into the future, he still had companions. And with the permission of the Time Lords! But that luxury was denied him. To keep him away from his close friends in this life was a condition of punishment far beyond his acceptance! No, he had to keep trying! If not for his own sake, then Jamie and Zoe's! Jamie in his own timeline could avoid trouble no more than a fly could avoid a spider. And Zoe was little more than a commodity to her own people with her high intellect and still-growing emotions. No, he owed it to them. He had to get them back, come what may.
With that in mind, the little Time Lord left his chair and went back to the Console. He was tired and wanted to sleep, but his conscience wouldn't let him rest. He had to see about those poor people aboard the 'Sun—
A low-frequency MMMMMMMMMMMMM shot through the TARDIS, stretching the psychoacousticals to the final limit. The Doctor jerked away from the Console, clapping his hands hastily over his ears. Before he could finish drawing breath the sound was fading away.
"That didn't sound good," he muttered, and the pun wasn't intended—or all that clever. The last time he'd heard that…it had been just before the attack by the Fiction Master.
That between-dimension was far, far from them now, so he needn't fear that. But…just as he grew and learned about himself, so did he learn about his TARDIS. The poor girl had many different ways of expressing herself; it looked like he had just learned a new one.
Part II:
Locus
Deep inside the Feathered Sun, two harried technicians were trying to do their jobs without getting distracted. The fact that their demise was more likely an outcome than the accumulation of their work was a fine distraction.
Phix was a tall, pale-skinned member of the Ance Rim, an artificial gravity chain around his star system's most important world. More used to lighter gravity, his people's cartilinigous skeleton put him at average strength of a Tellurian but not as strong. He compensated with flexibility.
His companion Tokish was a Perelecca from a rival chain. Even their appearances suggested they would be at odds: The Pereleccan was shorter, heavier, with gleaming brown skin marked with glowing white tattoos (whilst Phix was one of those people that bruised from a hard look). His mind was as weighty as his body.
Phix was currently using his better height to their advantage. He played his laser-scanner through the empty corridors, seeing flaws in the programming as Tokish lugged the "portable" data collator. It weighed as much as a fully-grown Kroton.
"This will be the last section." Phix blew out his cheeks in thankfulness. "Not too soon, eh? We'll be over and done with it, and a nice warm cup of your spicetea at the end of the day!"
"Sometimes I wonder if you aren't really a Perelaccan, my friend. You like my tea as though you were born inside the orchard-walls."
"I may have been born outside them, but I know a good cup when I taste it!" Phix thumped the darker man in the chest. "Really, you should talk to your Elders. The rest of the Galaxy is just waiting for that wonder on the tables."
"Phix, we talked a—"
"What's that!"
Phix froze, his fingers clutching at his tools. Tokish held his breath, aware that the sound of his lungs would distract the finer ears of his partner.
"Something just…showed up on the scans, and then it…went all gone." The taller alien gulped hard.
Tokish echoed the movement, as he remembered as well as Phix this same thing happened before…
"I don't know about this," Phix was muttering. "First we're all fine, then we're all dying, now we're all fine again…it's too soon to celebrate, I tell you. We'll be back to all dying before you know it."
"Sooner or later, I guarantee it." Tokish answered with long-standing patience. "But in the meantime, dead or alive, our families aren't getting our terms' wages if we don't clock out on time. So. Keep scanning."
"You just won't let me enjoy a good whinge."
"If I did, I wouldn't enjoy being able to stop you."
Phix' mouth opened for a new round of their old fuss, but the red laser beam wobbled. The technicians tensed. A new sound slid into their eardrums: A wheezing, grinding, off-kilter sort of noise that shouldn't have made any rhyme or reason to it, and yet it did. The laser briefly winked out, and then resumed brighter than ever.
But upon an object that had not been there before.
The technicians stared at the unfamiliar shape standing between themselves and their assigned goal.
"How did that T-mat here without a mat?" Phix wondered.
Tokish knew better. "Either there's a T-mat hiding under the floor-panels, or it got here through some other means."
"Captain will NOT like this…"
The strange box opened up, and something even stranger stepped out.
"Oh. Hello." The little man paused, his bright blue eyes falling on the gun-like laser scanner with initial suspicion. "Hello, how do you do. I say, your ship was in a bit of a bother just now, and I thought I might stop by and see if you needed any help."
Again the two crewmen looked at each other.
"We can't answer that." Tokish said truthfully. "Such questions would be properly addressed to Captain."
"Oh? Excellent!" The strange little fellow beamed, rubbing his hands together briskly (only five fingers, the poor thing). "Well by all means, if you would be so kind as to take me to your Captain?"
"That will be simple enough, er, what do you prefer to be called?"
That brought the little alien up short. By then Tokish and Phix had decided he was not one of those legendary Tellurians, but a similarly-designed species. He was also more peculiar than even the wildest nursery-tales of Tellurians.
"D'you know," their arrival said thoughtfully, "You may be the first non-Earthers to ask me that question." He tipped his head to one side, his dark hair ruffling from the motion. "But to answer your question, I'm the Doctor."
"Very good, sir." Phix said to that. Without another word he dropped his laser-director on top of Tokish' already heavy burden, and went to the opposite wall from the TARDIS to punch in a bewildering chain of code.
"Oh, let me help you with that, my dear fellow!" The Doctor exclaimed, and made as if to lighten the other's burden.
"No, no, I am all right." Tokish was quick to assure him.
"You're a Pereleccan, aren't you?" The dimunitive fellow (he came up to Tokish' collarbone) chirped cheerfully, but Tokish knew logically that anyone who had gotten through the deadly mine field of fast-moving orbital bodies to get into the Kirkwood Gap (how else would he get there) was not to be under-estimated.
"The last time I looked, yes." He said evenly.
The other's face melted like warm document-wax into an expression anyone would identify as contrition. "Oh, I wasn't being unkind! Do forgive me." And quick as a blink, he was tilting his head to Phix, still coding into the wall. "Is all of that really necessary for me to meet your Captain?"
"I'm afraid without the codes Captain can't be seen by anyone, least of all someone as unexpected as you." Tokish apologized.
"Oh. I s—"
GONG.
Phix quickly pulled away from the wall, and made haste to resume his old position. "There we are," he said just in time, and a hologram burst from the wall in a gleaming green light.
The Doctor had seen many holograms in his life, and many examples of artificial intelligence. This "Captain" was a bit different from his usual experience. To begin with, most programs had an idealistic representation that showed its creators in the most…well…enthusiastic and positive way.
The Captain was humanoid, biped, and overweight, dressed in black from top to toe and his hair was far past the length considered mannerly amongst the majority of Third Zoners.
How odd, the little Time Lord thought, his gaze sharpening in interest. He looks an awful lot like—
THIS IS THE CAPTAIN. WHAT SEEMS TO BE THE PROBLEM?
The Doctor and the crewmen cringed.
OH. SORRY ABOUT THAT. The awful volume diminished, but the Doctor's ears would be ringing a while yet. I WAS TALKING TO THE ENGINEER. HE'S ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CIRCUIT.
"Captain," Pix cleared his throat. "We have a visitor who wishes to speak with you."
Holographic eyes sank onto the Doctor. SO I SEE. AT LEAST I DON'T SEE YOU IN MY CREWS' ROSTERS, OR CARGO MANIFOLDS. WELL? IT WAS YOUR CRAFT THAT SAVED ME. IS IT THANKS YOU WANT? THE FEATHERED SUN IS AUTHORIZED TO GIVE FULL PAYLOAD VALUE ON—
"No! No! Not at all!" The Doctor waved his hands wildly, jumping up and down in his agitation. "Nothing like that. I was just being a concerned citizen." He took a deep breath. "I was tracking that ugly little pinhole that caused your problems in the first place, and I was wondering if I might be able to view your records of its impact?" He asked this most earnestly, his eyes wide and a guileless blue, hands clasped together meekly before his shirt-front.
IF YOU'RE TRACKING THAT LITTLE BLIGHT, YOU'RE WELCOME TO OUR DATA. IT WOULD HAVE KILLED US ALL SAVE FOR YOUR KIND INTERFERENCE. Captain said sternly. BUT PRIORITIES ARE PRIORITIES AND I HAVE TO SETTLE THE ACCOUNTS FOR THE CYCLE. YOU CAN SEE THE RECORDS WHEN THE MEMORY-ALLEY IS CLEARED. PHIX WILL SEE YOU TO SOME COMFORTABLE QUARTERS WHILE YOU WAIT. I STILL HAVE TO ALERT MY CLIENTS FOR THE STATUS ON THEIR ORDERS. THEY WON'T BE PLEASED AT ANY DELAY!
"Wait? Wait! I—"
The Doctor was speaking to vaporized internal atmosphere. Two sad, sympathetic head-shakes from two sympathetic aliens was his reward.
"There's no arguing with Captain." Phix said soberly. "He operates completely within his logic-patterns."
"So it would seem." The little man grumbled unhappily. He gnawed on the tip of his finger in thought. "But I confess I'm confused. What did he mean by the Alley? What does it have to do with memory?"
"Oh. The Alley is a temporary place for all incoming data. The computers input everything into the Alley first, and then from there it's decided where it goes." Phix turned briefly rhapsodic in his enthusiasm for computers, unaware that the newcomer's opinion of them were only a little more polite than his friend's opinion.
"Oh. How…very remarkable." The Doctor said with what his Companions (as well as all of his personalities, past and future) would have deemed "remarkable restraint."