Doctor Whom or ET Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Parodication (7 page)

On the other hand, you
can
go sideways in space. I’ll prove it

What do we deduce from this? That
spacetime
, the theory advanced by Albert Einstein, is erroneously mistaken. You see, time is a
different sort of thing
from space. This is a really important point in the story I’m about to tell. I’d like you to bear it in mind, if you can.

Who am I?

My name is Prose Tailor. I tailor prose, I cut it to shape, fit it together. This prose you’re reading now is my work. I was a companion of the Dr.
The
Dr - that’s right. Him. I was there when he uncovered the essential mystery at the heart of the cosmos, the answer to the big question. I saw with my own eyes the solution.

You are about to read my story.

 
The Dr belonged to that ancient race of beings called the Time Gentlemen. Alone of all the myriad races of the galaxy these austere and wise beings possessed a degree of mastery over time. Not a master’s degree, neither, but a PhD, and sometimes even postdoctoral qualifications. The most important time of my life was spent in the company of one of these Time Gentlemen, known as The Dr.

It is the duty of the Time Gentlemen to protect the grammar of time.

You didn’t realise that time has a
grammar
? Ah, you deluded and ignorant fool. To master time, you need to understand the difference between a time noun and a time verb, a time subject and a time object. You need to understand tense and mood without getting tense or moody. Time is things happening in a particular order, according to a particular system of rules. Start breaking those rules and soon the whole fabric of time would unravel. The morrow would not longer follow the day; the day would not longer follow the yester. The yes. I mean yesterday. With the result that yesterday might come after tomorrow, and everybody would get very confused. The processes of life would break down; thought itself would become meandering and untenable.

‘Time is
story
,’ the Dr said to me once. ‘It’s a narrative. If the narrative gets all tangled up, then the story becomes impossible to follow. That’s why the Time Gentlemen are so important. Because we preserve the proper line of the story.’

Here is a story. A child is born on Earth of the twenty-third century. And who is this child?

It’s me, of course.

I grew to adulthood in
You-’K?
, a small country that is part of the continent of
You-Rapper !
, itself merely a component of the World Wide Federation of Hip Humanity, our glorious global government. After school I went to the Prose College where I learned to shape, snip and tailor prose. After my graduation I worked as a prose tailor, out of a little shop in the Reefer Barn (the main mall for all You-Rapper’s Reefer needs). It was tough work. Few people in You-’K? have any use for prose. Of course, state regulation requires every citizen to possess a dozen personalised lyrics by the age of majority, and
Rap
Tailors do good business. But I never had the knack for rap. I was rap-knack-less. My parents were ashamed to see me follow the ignominious path of the Prose Tailor, writing little pieces of legalese, or perhaps the liner notes for other people’s albums. I barely earned a living: money was always tight, and I never had enough for the little luxuries that make existence bearable. Worst of all I never had enough cash to be able to
travel
. . . to voyage to far countries, as I dreamed of doing! To visit the home of our Global religion, the great nation of
You-Say!
, the holy land, where the power of sayin’ was first mooted - where it was first determined that every ordinary person, no matter how inarticulate, ugly or stoopid, could have their say. But I would never be able to see that exotic land nor travel to the Progrok paradise of
Rush?Yeah!
, nor the teetering, foul-mouthed antipodian continent of ‘
Oz’ - Ausbourneia
.

My life was trapped in narrow grooves. Waking, working, eating, sleeping.

And then one day I answered an advertisement for assistant-stroke-companion to a Time Gentleman, and everything about my life changed.

My life, up until that moment, had been empty. I shuffled to work and shuffled home alone at the end of the day. My days were without colour; my life was as hopeless as a soap-on-a-rope that has lost its soap and is only rope thereby becoming hopeless
as
soap in the shower. You can’t wash yourself in rope, after all.
I
was ropey.

As you can see from this, I’ve never been a very
good
prose tailor.

Until I joined the Dr and his apprentice, Linnaeus Trout. The three of us together had a series of extraordinary adventures. And ultimately I was with him when he discovered the secret at the heart of time; and fate - in the shape of a malign ET and his Dr-killing weapon - forced us apart.

This is my story.

But although I was anxious that the Dr was injured, perhaps fatally, in fact things took a much stranger path. Not to put too fine a point on it: I was privileged to witness one of the Dr’s ‘re-new-generative episodes’. You see, unlike most other life-forms the Time Gentlemen do not die. At least, they don’t die in the normal course of things. Instead their bodies ‘re-un-degenerate’. One ‘incarnation’, or ‘iteration’, or ‘actor playing’ the Dr passes away, and an entirely new one takes its place. I
know
! It’s almost too incredible. It’s almost
beyond
belief. But there you go.

I watched as the Dr fell to the floor, although not so carelessly as he was likely actually to injure himself. He lay there, and his face went all - fuzzy. I can’t think of a better way of describing it. For a moment it looked as though he possessed two faces, but then his features settled into a new configuration. His hair took on the lifeless, shaggy appearance of a bad wig, and then it too seemed to disappear revealing a short crew cut. The Dr had changed into a tall, bony man with a large nose.

He sat up. ‘Ey-oop,’ he declared.

‘Doctor . . ..?’ I hazarded.

‘’Appen Taylor! Ey-oop Linn!’ he said, clambering to his feet. ‘Oo I
say!’

‘Doctor! You’re alright!’

He nodded, smiled, and then a look of concern crossed his face. He burped, noisily. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘I do apologise.’ Again he belched. A sour smell of eggnog became palpable in the air of the TARDY. ‘You have to understand,’ said the Dr, embarrassed, ‘that the process of re-un-degeneration carries with it some—’ He burped again.

‘Some?

‘Some difficulties. My body has
changed
, you see.’

‘Doctor what’s happened?’ I cried. ‘I was sure you’d
died
!’

‘No, no. Almost impossible to kill me. Instead of regular death, my body re-
un
-degenerates. What this means is that all the cells that make up my body change. Anything imprinted with my DNA becomes part of a different body.’

‘But your DNA . . . it’s not human . . .’ I said, trying to grasp the enormity of what I had witnessed.

‘Of course not,’ said the Dr. ‘It’s Time Gentlemen DNA. But it’s there, in every cell, and during the process of re-new-generation it undergoes a sort of shimmy, or cataleptic shudder, and it marks out a new form for the body. But, you see, not
everything
in my body contains my DNA. That’s just as true of me as it is of you.’

‘Really? You mean there are cells in my body that don’t even contain my DNA?’ asked Linn.

‘Of course,’ said the Dr, his skin acquiring a rather green tinge. ‘For instance, your gut flora. Now, you need your gut flora to digest your food. It’s a thoroughly necessary thing. But the bacteria out of which one’s gut flora are composed carry their own, independent DNA. They are fine-tuned to existing in the set up of their host’s body, and when that body radically changes they ... don’t like it. Stomach-upsets, diarrhoea and nausea are the
least
of the symptoms.’

‘What was the business with the “ey oop” and the “ ’appen” when you came round from your trance?’ I asked.

‘A momentary grammatical aberration,’ said the Dr, looking distinctly queasy. If you’ll excuse me, I must rush to the toilet.’ He hauled himself to his feet and ran from the control room, making a series of repeated
bluuerCA’H
! noises as he went.

 
After a half hour or so in which Linn and I did nothing but idle around the control room, peering at the gleaming controls and trying to make small-talk, the Dr re-emerged from the toilet. The intervening period had been marked by the background noise of a grown man attempting, apparently, to force his spleen up through his throat and out into the toilet pan by using the muscles of his diaphragm alone. It was not a pretty sound.

‘There,’ said the Dr, looking pale. ‘I think that’s got that sorted out. Better out than in, I suppose. I do apologise for that. It’s the cerum aerobic bacteria in the lower gut that . . . mostly . . . oh no.’ He put his hand to his mouth and his cheeks ballooned out like a jazz trumpeter’s. ‘Excuse mee
eurrkh
,’ he blurted.

He rushed from the control room.

Once again Linn and I sat in the control room, looking pointedly in other directions than one another’s faces. From time to time we made eye contact and smiled, weakly, at one another. ‘Well,’ I said, at one point. ‘This is all very interesting, isn’t it.’ And she replied, ‘yes, it is.’ I asked, ‘have you seen him do this before, then?’ and she replied, ‘no, actually, not,’ and I said, ‘ah!’ We sat in silence for a while. All the time, however, we were accompanied by a cacophonous soundtrack of what sounded like a pig trying to give birth to a much larger, and much more noisily unhappy, pig in the next room.

Eventually the noises died away and the Dr emerged, even paler than before but wearing a brave smile.

‘Again I apologise,’ he said. ‘It is an unfortunate side-effect of the DNA mutation, the broad-spectrum change of cellular germ plasm impacts very sharply upon the gut flora, with concomitant isolation of the Lactobacillus plantarum and an anti-Candida emetic that involves certain projectile gut-spasm implications,’ said the Dr, in a sober voice. ‘Also I was puking like a dog.’

‘We heard,’ said Linn.

‘Anyway, anyway, anyway,’ said the Dr, trying to rally the situation by smacking his hands together and rubbing the palms up against one another. ‘It’s all behind me now. At least it will be, as soon as my lower bowel catches up with the more immediate negative reaction of the stomach and intestinal changes. But we don’t want to worry about that now. We need to get
on
.’

We stepped through into the meeting chamber. It was a splendidly appointed and decorated chamber; every surface was either gilded, silvered or bronzed: except for the floor which was decorated with verdigris, or ‘verdigreased’ as the phrase goes. On tiered platforms arranged in a horseshoe shape about the central podium as many as a hundred Time Gentlemen were sitting on their official benches. When I say ‘as many as a hundred’ I mean ‘as few as a hundred’, which is to say, a hundred. There was a distinctly pompous and official air.

‘Right, you two,’ the Dr said to us. ‘Best behaviour, alright? This is an
official
Time Gentlemen’s Convenance. It’s not a place for mucking-about-in. Not,’ he corrected himself, glancing about himself nervously as if conscious that the grammatical exactitude expected of all Time Gentlemen applied most particularly in this space, ‘not an environment in which mucking can be allowed about.’ He looked at the floor and tried one more time. ‘Not about
in of which
, there can, now, be allowed, any mucking. ’

‘We understand,’ said Linn.

‘Convenance?’ I queried.

‘What?’

‘You sure that’s a word?’

‘Of course I am.’