Big Bang Generation (2 page)

Sometime in the early part of the twenty-seventh century, after one of a series of galactic wars, a planet on the furthest reaches of, well anywhere really, was colonised, inhabited and civilised.

Frankly, ‘civilised' was not a word that was used by those that ended up there – mainly because, after an early attempt to create a city, the rest of the planet went significantly ignored. And partially because the ‘dark side' of the planet was dead scary. This was called the ‘dark side' because the planet rotated very slowly creating an almost permanent daytime, and thus the ‘dark side' only rotated towards the rest of the galaxy once in anyone's lifetime. If they were very old.

And also because no one could be bothered.

Once you had bars, stores and a couple of dodgy establishments that nice people didn't talk about, why bother going beyond Main Street?

So a spaceport, a few bars and stores and an awful lot of criminals were what made the planet well known. That
and the fact it was called Legion – not the most hospitable of names for what really was the least hospitable of planets.

Most of the galaxy opted to stay away. Even law-enforcers rarely trekked out there – after all, what was the point. If the people they were pursuing ended up on Legion, they weren't going anywhere else so could be caught on leaving. Or more likely, they'd die in a bar fight, or getting caught in one of the storms that lashed the place ninety per cent of the time.

Now, one of the more popular bars – popular because it had the best beer and the lowest body count – was the White Rabbit. Odd name for a bar but then the owner was pretty odd, so the Doctor had heard.

He was musing on this as he walked up Main Street, dodging an ostrich-sized Land Crow that sped by, its rider clearly drunk and singing loudly. Then the rider fell off, but the Land Crow kept running.

The Doctor was level with the crumpled rider, who was still singing, lying in the mud of the road outside the entrance to the White Rabbit. With a last look at the tuneless wailer, the Doctor pushed the grubby saloon doors apart.

‘Well, well, well, look what the cat finally dragged in,' said a high-pitched and rather irritated-sounding voice.

The Doctor looked across the not-terribly-busy bar, and realised the speaker was addressing him.

She was small, about four feet tall, slumped in a stained and cigarette-burned green velvet armchair, a glass of
fizzy water in her hand. The Doctor knew that because he knew that these days that was all Ker'a'Nol the Pakhar (Keri to her friends) drank. Ever since…well, that was a whole different lifetime ago. Literally.

To humans, Pakhars tended to resemble giant hamsters – tubby bodies, short arms, slightly longer legs. Their paws were clawed and their noses constantly twitching. Keri's eyes were brown like her fur and she wore a figure-hugging set of combat fatigues (purely casual, she was no warrior – although in a fight, she'd had proven to be quite a good, if noisy, scrapper).

Her left leg was resting on a small occasional table that had been put out especially for her, encased as it was in plaster. A lot of plaster. Clearly Keri had broken her leg.

The Doctor waved an arm around the seriously tacky surroundings they were in. ‘Nice place,' he lied.

Keri drained her glass. ‘Of all the places to choose, why Legion, yeah?' she asked.

The Doctor sighed. He'd forgotten Keri's little ‘yeah?' tick in her speech. It could get very wearing. ‘Ummm…' He gave her a quizzical look. ‘Ummmm, no,
you
chose it. You wanted to see me.'

Keri Pakhar sank back into her seat with a sigh. ‘No Doctor,
you
wanted to see
me
. You sent me a postcard saying you were coming.' Keri reached over to the heavily glass-ringed table and scooped up the card in her paw, waving it at him. ‘See? Postcard. Forwarded on from the Mail and Package Archive on somewhere called Ardethe Four – wherever that is. With too little postage on it,
by the way, so you owe me money. I had to pay a not-insubstantial fine to collect it. From the Legion Post Office (who knew, they have a Post Office here!). Anyway it wasn't easy. Not with this!' And Keri jabbed the postcard towards her plaster-encased leg..

The Doctor opened his mouth a couple of times, to speak, but then didn't. Instead he knelt down by Keri's leg.

‘I wouldn't,' the hamster-like Pakhar hissed. ‘You have no idea what's been on that floor. Or indeed what might still be on the floor. The White Rabbit isn't exactly hygienic, yeah?'

The Doctor stared over at the flickering neon sign above the bar – at least two tubes were on the way out. The whole bar was covered with more dust and dirt than the Doctor had seen for a long time. And was that blood on that stool?

In one corner, an old human with no teeth and an old-style prospector's hat was talking to himself and laughing at an imagined joke. The Doctor looked in the other direction. A couple of Killoran mercenaries were getting slowly drunk. Between them, a little scared looking, was a Tahnn rolling an eight-sided die. Platinum-lined credit chips were piled up in front of them. The Tahnn clearly wasn't doing well.

‘It hasn't mended?'

‘No it hasn't mended.'

The Doctor whipped out his sonic screwdriver.

‘Don't you dare,' Keri hissed.

‘I just wanted to see if it could help.'

‘How is that going to help, yeah?'

The Doctor frowned. ‘I don't know. Maybe something has changed the atomic structure of your bones and so the sonic might knit things together faster?'

Keri slumped back in her chair, gripping the big arms in her little paws, trying not to yell at him. After a moment she just smiled. ‘You know what you could do for me?'

‘What's that?'

‘Buy me another glass of water. Dash of lemon.'

The Doctor stood up. ‘I'm not here to buy you drinks.'

‘Is that because you don't carry money, or because you're just mean?'

He looked shocked. ‘Of course I'm not mean. It's just that right now I have better things to do than stand around in bars on Legion, playing servant. To someone who broke their own leg. Being clumsy.'

‘I wasn't being clumsy. I was ice skating, yeah.'

‘You told me you'd been ice skating before. You said you knew how to ice skate. In fact, you said you were a champion ice skater! So it wasn't my fault you fell over.'

Keri closed her eyes – took a deep breath – then quietly repudiated his facts one by one, counting them off on her claws. ‘I told you I went ice skating, yes. I told you I knew enough not to fall over on an ice rink, yes. I actually told you I won a school certificate for ice skating when I was a pup. And yes, it was your fault I fell over because you forgot to tell me that the place we went ice skating wasn't a rink but a living, breathing animal that looked like an ice
planet. So when it had a coughing fit I, and everyone else, fell over.'

‘I didn't fall over.'

‘You were the one making it cough! Of course you didn't fall over.'

The Doctor started walking around the armchair and hen leaned over the top, so Keri had to look straight up, craning her Pakhar neck as best she could. ‘Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it and I accept your right to look at it that way, of course.'

‘I should have known something was fishy when you told me the planet was called Torvalundeen. How did I not see through that, yeah?'

The Doctor pointed at her. ‘Ha! I knew you'd like that. Not many other people there that day got the joke.'

‘Not many other people there that day have studied Earth history, so of course they didn't. Who named it Torvalundeen anyway?'

‘I did. I mean, you didn't think anyone else out there would make that kind of pun? Its actual name is K-174-B but that's really boring. Well, I think it's boring, so I called it Torvalundeen. It seemed to like the name. And it wasn't coughing, it was laughing.'

‘Why was it laughing?'

‘Because I told it how I'd given it that name to amuse you.'

‘How did it know who Torvill and Dean are? Were? Whatever? It was an alien in another solar system.'

‘TV.'

‘What?'

‘Human TV signals. They go out, into space, for ever. Somewhere in the Kraxis Nebula someone's watching an episode of
Juliet Bravo
. Somewhere a bit closer a couple of Weave are probably watching the first ever
X-Factor
final. And wondering what is going on. So a couple of Olympic ice skaters, well something that clever, that stylish and technically proficient, that gets noticed in the greater universe. Mind you, somewhere out there is a planet that currently thinks The Wurzels on the Christmas Day 1976
Top of the Pops
is the height of human cultural achievement, so swings and roundabouts.'

Keri looked like she wanted to bang her head on the chair hard, maybe enough to knock herself out. But she didn't, probably because her leg was hurting.

The Doctor reached down and scooped up Keri's tablet that was resting at her hip. He tapped and swiped a few times. ‘You have some nice Get Well messages here, very artistic, very…Oh, that one isn't so much artistic as rude. Oh, and I see your Litter Matriarch is still blaming the Pakhar Emperor for everything. Including your leg.'

‘She thinks I tripped over a paving slab outside work. That seemed significantly easier than “Yeah, I was on another planet, on an ice rink that was actually a laughing ice monster!” Funny that.'

The Doctor replaced the tablet beside her. ‘Never understood Get Well Soon cards. I mean, what are they for? No one's going to send a “Stay unhealthy, please die quickly” card, are they?'

Keri just sighed. She waved the postcard again at him, trying to change the subject. ‘So anyway, what did you mean in this card, yeah?'

‘What card?'

‘This card!' and Keri tossed it at him. Being a postcard, flight was not a skill it possessed naturally, and it merely spun a couple of times and fell limply to the floor in front of him.

‘Physical postcards. How quaint.' He picked it up.

Hope the leg is getting better. On our way soon from the depths of outer space and inner time. Just had tea with Charlie at his investiture.

He looked at the postmark. From 1969. Postage 4d. ‘Those were the days.' He sighed. ‘So what's with all the space and time stuff?'

Keri bared her teeth. ‘Oh, there are times when I could throttle you quite easily. I. Don't. Know.
You
sent it.'

‘Did not.'

‘It's your handwriting.'

‘How do you know that's my handwriting? That looks nothing like my handwriting.'

Keri reactivated her tablet and swiped to a GalWeb mails server page and tapped her account.

The Doctor leaned over again to look, started swiping through, muttering as he did so.

‘Gas bill. Electric bill. Credit card bill – what do you spend your money on? Council Tax. Water. Polling Card – don't vote for any of them, least of all her! Would You
Like To Receive Galaxy Five's Reader's Digest For A Year? The last bastion of print media and no, Keri, you won't have won ten thousand credits. A private email. Oh, and another.'

Keri put down the tablet, scrabbled round and produced two more postcards.

‘Two more physical postcards, you are lucky.'

‘Read them, yeah.'

The Doctor flipped them over a few times. ‘Nice photos,' he said, but the dark eyes of the Pakhar shrank even more than normal and, had she had eyebrows, they too would have narrowed, so the Doctor opted to read, as instructed. He picked the first:

Hey you. Coming to visit soon, just as soon as we can get the right time stream, don't want to end up in a parallel reality where everyone has a horse's head. Mind you, everyone here is wearing fluorescent shell suits. 1991 is a bad place to be!

And then:

Don't worry, not forgotten you (or your poor leg). Picked up a nice box of celebratory chocolates from the big new just-opened-yesterday Westfield in Shepherds Bush, hope you like dark, milk, white and tomato chocolate.

PS: Not sure that *is* tomato chocolate. Not sure tomato chocolate is actually a ‘thing'. But you never can tell in these primitive times and places.

‘Do you like tomato chocolate?'

‘I don't know what tomato chocolate is and, to be honest, Doctor, I don't think I want to try it very much.'

‘Wise move.' He looked back at Keri. ‘Why are you showing me these anyway?'

‘I want to know why you sent them.'

‘And you're wondering where your chocolate is, yes?'

‘No, not particularly. It just seems…'

‘Yes?'

‘Odd. Odd is what it seems. Physical postcards. From. You. When you have the TARDIS. And just where is this Scunthorpe place?'

‘I'm really not sure I've ever actually been to Scunthorpe, you know,' he said. ‘And whilst that looks a little bit like my handwriting, it isn't. I don't cross my “t”s like that and I can't bear doing little curvy bits under “y”s.'

‘So if you didn't send me those postcards, who did?'

‘Your Matriarch?'

‘If my Matriarch had sent them, they'd be about suing paving stone layers. And they wouldn't have come from Earth.'

‘True. How about your lovely old grandad? He's a bit whoop-whoop-whoop…' The Doctor tapped his temple. ‘He probably thinks he lives in outer space most days anyway.'

‘Oil'

‘Unless…'

‘Yes?'

The Doctor stared at Keri for a moment. ‘No, no, I'm sure it's nothing.'

‘Doctor?'

‘Well, I have this friend…'

Keri sighed. ‘I can see the quote marks around “friend” from here.'