Doctor Who: Lungbarrow (43 page)

'But you must be so bored,' said the Doctor. 'Buried in a state of perpetual Harmony, no wonder you play these games.'

'And what will you teach us with your manifold wisdom?' said Ferain. 'Whoever you are or were?'

The Doctor met the old man's eye. The wind stil ed.

'What do you want, Ferain? What do you want me to be? Shal I reveal my blazing power? Might that not fry you to a crisp? Shal I sweep away evil and chaos? Reorder the stars in their courses? Banish burnt toast forever?'

He paused.

'Well, I won't. I wouldn't if I could. Who do you think I am?' He thumbed his chest. 'I'm me. The Doctor. What I have been, someone might have imagined. What I will be, how can I tell? I'm not immortal. I shal go to this
Skaro
, collect the Master's remains and bring them back to President Romanadvoratrelundar.'

'With such backing,' said Ferain, 'how can she fail?'

The Doctor's eyes flashed. 'Be quiet, my lord. And remember your place!'

The birds had stopped singing.

Ferain was silent.

Romana cleared her throat. 'Please be careful.'

The Doctor eyed her sternly. 'The Daleks. The Master. Romana, who have you been talking to?'

***

Innocet sniffed the books one after another. The musty smells of the pages and covers had their own stories to tell.

One faded volume contained a picture of a tubby creature floating under a dirigible surrounded by a cloud of beatitude flies.

The words were unintelligible to her. A telepath translator could do the job instantly, but that would deny her years of painstaking work. Something to savour while the new House was nurtured and grown. She and her House. She hoped the Doctor would come to their wedding.

She looked round for the Doctor, but he and his companions were nowhere to be seen.

***

'Please,' the Doctor said, 'I didn't ask to be seen off.'

'Tough,' said Dorothée. 'You'd better have these.' She fished her last battered box of teabags out of her pocket. He took them and hugged her tight.

He looked fondly at Leela for a long time, peering into her eyes as if he recognized something there.

'This love thing,' he mused. 'Interesting. A father from Gallifrey and a mother of Earth stock. That's an unusual pedigree.'

She pushed back her hair and said awkwardly, 'I don't have anything for you, Doctor.'

'Just call him after me.'

She looked startled and then nodded.

'Who exactly is the terrible Zodin?' butted in Chris. 'Some sort of Galactic megalomaniac emperor?'

The Doctor's eyes went misty. 'Zodin was a celebrated sword-swallower at the Grand Festival of Zymymys Midamor. She had an amazing trick with a scimitar.'

Chris grabbed the Doctor, lifting him off his feet in a monstrous bear hug.

'Roz bet me that I'd never dare do this,' he said. Eventually he put the Doctor down again and picked up his hat for him.

'Give my love to Bernice,' said the Doctor, squeezing Chris's hand.

'And ask her if she wants to lecture at the Academy here,' said Romana.

She turned to the Doctor.

'I know. I'll be careful,' he said.

'I want you to have this.' She slipped a metallic object into his hand. 'It's my sonic screwdriver.'

He smiled. 'Thank you, Madam President. I shall see you soon. Back at the Capitol.'

He walked to the TARDIS, a small figure clutching his presents. He turned his key and went inside.

One by one they moved away.

'Will he come back?' said Leela.

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'Dorothee!' The Doctor's head re-emerged from the door. 'I just remembered. I haven't been Merlin yet!'

He vanished and the door closed.

'What?' chorused the others, as Dorothée began to laugh.

The light on the TARDIS flashed like a bright idea.

A flock of startled birds rose from the trees as the TARDIS grated out of existence.

Then they were alone on the sunny mountainside.

223

AUTHOR’S NOTES

You can find a quote in Shakespeare to fit most things, but the 'abysm of time' line from The Tempest seemed absolutely right here. The Tempest is also Shakespeare's last play and Prospero is another magical figure and arch-manipulator, not unlike the Doctor. Maybe he is a Doctor, 12th or 13th generation. Now there's a thought.

They do say that if Shakespeare was alive today, he'd be writing for television...

The Other's garden is reminiscent of the rose garden in which we see the First Doctor, Hartnel in Three Doctors and Hurndall in Five Doctors. It also reappears as the Doctor's imaginary garden in Auld Mortality.

According to Cat's Cradle: Time's Crucible, the Gallifreyans of the Old Time were all linked by telepathy. There was a continuous commentary in their heads reflecting the communal mood and public opinion. A bit like a telepathic chatroom. By the Doctor's time, that ability has declined to a mere remnant of its past, but it still exists within families. The Doctor and Susan were supposed to have a degree of telepathic empathy. The Doctor's Cousin Innocet has strongly developed powers. And the living House is in telepathic sympathy with its Housekeeper. And, of course, the TARDIS has telepathic circuits.

Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel were especially proud of the Hand of Omega, because it was old, battered and believable. Not the star spangled stuff of most tv science fiction.

"Eighth Man Bound" first appeared in Lawrence Miles's Christmas on a Rational Planet. It's a game played by students on Gallifrey, in which they foresee their possible future lives. The rhyme in Chris's head seems to list the Doctor's lives so far. The Doctor couldn't see beyond his seventh generation, and it worries him...

The scene with Badger is a bit of an info-dump to set up the location and family. But it also harks back to those magical childhoods in classic children's books. The start of a Big Adventure. It's very C.S. Lewis and Arthur Ransome. Al old houses and schoolrooms and sunlight. I thought it was the sort of childhood that the Doctor should have had. Even if he does look about twenty.

Badger is essential y the Doctor's first companion. When we needed a visual reference for the original book cover, I asked Mike Tucker to come up with a design. Mike, bless him, turned up on my doorstep with a complete plasticine maquette, rams horns, dangling eye and al . The Virgin cover design was a bit slimline compared to the original, but Daryl Joyce has gone back to the original for his wonderful illustrations here. Badger's zigzag fur comes from one of the skins worn by an Outler in The Invasion of Time.

The Paris branch of Marks & Spencers closed early in 2001, so I just got away with that one! WARNING!

FASCINATING FACT ALERT: But if you go to Woolworths in South Africa, you'l notice that it's a bit more up-market than Woolworths in Britain. The product range is all M&S. Strange but incontrovertible truth that alternative universes do exist... sort of.

If Dorothée was partying at the Cafe Momus on Christmas Eve in 19th century Paris, she might well find that the rowdy people at the next table who keep singing loudly are Mimi, Rudolfo and friends, the protagonists of La Boheme in Act 2 of Puccini's opera.

George Seurat, whom Dorothée, true to NA form, is planning a fling with, is the French pointilliste painter (1859-1891.) His paintings are made up of thousands of points of colour. In Stephen Sondheim's musical Sunday in the Park with George, which I love, Seurat's mistress is called Dot. Sorry, I couldn't real y resist.

Robert Holmes' Gallifrey is a cross between a comfortable gentlemen's club and the Vatican, and I've always seen that as my role model for the Capitol. It's so ancient it creaks. If society stopped, the on-going rituals would take centuries to wind down. There's a Byzantine proliferation of guilds, societies and strangely named officials, all stabbing each other in the back. Most of the workers have the factual y analytical minds of cataloguers, filled with a fascination for the detail of other people's events. They observe the Universe, annotating and revising their notes, while their leaders are locked in an endlessly shifting, complex and stately dance of power.

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Almoner Crest Yeux is pronounced Yooks.

Leela: what did she see in Andred? Why would she give up travelling with the Doctor? (We're talking about the character, not about Louise Jameson leaving.) The parts of Gallifrey she witnessed in Invasion of Time would hardly encourage her to stay. Maybe she recognised kindred spirits in the Outlers? Or mistook the grandeur and pomposity for some sort of mystical haven? Not very likely.

I suppose Andred is the only attractive and vaguely sparky person she comes across, but real y Leela's whole departure is a tagged on afterthought. Better to look at how a practiced warrior and woman of action would cope in such a potential y deadly dull place. So she's bored and the Doctor, the most important and influential person in her existence, has gone. What else do you expect her to do, other than dig up his past?

Romana returned to Gallifrey from E-space in Terrance Dicks' Blood Harvest. By the time we get to Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, she has been elected as Lord High President. She's a lovely character to write, by turn authoritative and frivolous. Lalla Ward stamped all through her like Brighton rock.

Leela doesn't know the name for the striped pig-bear creature she encounters in the Gallifreyan forest, but it might be to Badger what brown bears are to our own domesticated teddies.

In the original book, this used to be Chapter 4.

We've seen the TARDIS bathroom before, but somewhere, I like to think, there is also a glass roundel through which you can see all the Doctor's washing going round and round. One of the old Audio Visual plays, which featured Nick Briggs as the Doctor, ended with the Doctor in the bath and his plastic duck laughing at him in a chipmunky, Pinky and Perky, speeded up voice sort of way. I liked that a lot, so it's here too.

The two Aces - I wanted a sequence which would get Dorothée to come to terms with what she had become. If there had been another season on tv, Ace would only have had a couple more stories. As it was, her character stayed on into the book range and developed a long way further than anyone would have suspected. She grows up, becomes a bit of a maneater, leaves the Doctor, has a stint as a fighter in the Dalek Wars, comes back to the Doctor, and lands up living in 19th century Paris, able to commute through time using a time-travelling motorbike which belonged to Kadiatu Lethbridge-Stewart (black female descendant of the Brigadier!) So Dorothée and Ace have a night in with a bottle - one of those nights in where you start playing Truth or Dare and talking about forbidden subjects which always lead to trouble.

In the tv days, Ace's surname was Gale, as suggested by her creator, Ian Briggs. Then in the books it got turned into McShane, or Gale-McShane, or Gale again. It's a bloody minefield out there. Maybe the kidnapped Parisian Dorothée is McShane and her carbine-wielding tormentor is Ace Gale...

A Marsh Dalek appears in The Dalek Book, published in time for Christmas 1964. I really liked the Marsh Daleks and used to draw lots of pictures of them instead of doing my maths homework - they were lot easier to draw than the normal Daleks. They were quite sleek, resembling a sort of tin can on stilts with few external features apart from an eye and a gun, and they patrolled wetland areas on the planet Gurnian where ordinary Daleks couldn't go and kept the two-headed Horrokon monsters in order. I'm not entirely sure why they couldn't just send a hoverbout patrol.

The Great Gates of the Past or Future, under which the future slides or the past emerges, depending on which side you're standing, first featured in Time's Crucible. Plot dynamics so far prevent me from revealing who the woman in brown and the old harpy with an eypatch actually are.

So here we are at last in the House of Lungbarrow. Many people have compared the House to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, and I'd be the last person to deny any influence there. I love Peake's work very much, not just the Titus Groan trilogy, but the charming and quirky Mr Pye and a lot of Peake's poems and his illustrations.

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Both Houses are huge edifices that ramble for miles, as much characters in their stories as any of their inhabitants. Both Houses are prisons. But there are big differences too. Gormenghast is essentially a dead place, whose denizens perpetuate its endless rituals as if they might cease to exist if they stopped. But Lungbarrow is alive and an active participant in events. It's possessive of its inhabitants. It suffers from family pride in extremis. It has a violent temper and wil sulk for centuries on end. To walk along its passages is truly to walk on egg shells.

In the early days of working on Lungbarrow - the script, I put a note on the latest draft I was sending to Andrew Cartmel: "The furniture is getting increasingly predatory." Followed by the direction "The Drudges are herding tables into the Great Hall." I doubt the scene later on where the Doctor "surfs" on a runaway table could ever have been realised properly in studio, but that was the start of the House's character evolution. And the book allowed me to give full range to that. There are certainly elements of Beauty And The Beast here - not just the Disney version, but the ravishing Cocteau film before it.

As to the family? Well, families get everywhere. Not just the inevitable Groans and their retainers, but equally Robert Graves' Claudian family poisoning and politicking their way through Roman history; the completely batty Starkadder family from Stella Gibbons' gloriously funny Cold Comfort Farm - forget the softened up tv version, read the original. Even The Archers. Al soaps are filled with slightly crazy families, but any family would go mad if they had to live in the circumstances inflicted on the Lungbarrovians. Worse than Albert Square. You don't have to be mad to live in a soap opera, but it helps! One of the points of the book is: how could any family cope if the Doctor was a close relative?