Doctor Who: Big Finish - Short Trips [016] - Farewells by Jaqueline Rayner

Author:Jaqueline Rayner
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science-Fiction - Doctor Who
Publisher: Big Finish
Published: 2006-03-02T22:15:41+00:00

Life After Queth

Matt Kimpton

An Adventure of the Fifth Doctor,

with Tegan Jovanka

Queth lurched towards its fate, threading an n-dimensional line through existence towards its inevitable termination.

Of course, in another, rather more accurate sense, it did no such thing. The idea is frankly asinine. There can be, by definition, no change in n-dimensional phase-space, where time is just another unchanging axis, the infinity of events a static block of fact, the marvellous tracery of the universe fixed and complete. There is no movement. No was, will or could be. Only is.

This is why phase-space is so dull.

Nevertheless, the world moved. As the plane of the present slewed on through the slab of history –for all that neither of them existed or did any such thing – the planet edged ever closer to its destiny. And then, some would say, a box appeared. This too is patently drivel. Things can’t appear in phase-space. They’re either there or not.

Nevertheless – the box appeared. This is why real life is so exciting.

‘Extraordinary! What’s this green stuff?’ asked the woodlouse.

‘Moss,’ said Tegan wearily. She’d said a lot of things wearily recently, from ‘Just a wall’ to ‘Roundels, apparently’ to ‘I don’t know, leave it alone’, all of which were apparently desperately exciting to their current, hopefully soon-to-be-ex, passenger.

Oh, yes. Passenger. Their hideous, alien, gravity-controlling insect passenger, which had tried to kill all of them on Frontios, and which the Doctor had viciously dealt with by inviting it into the TARDIS and giving it a lift somewhere else.

The thing gaped at her, antennae quivering in excitement. ‘Moss! What is moss?’

‘Well, not this, if we’re going to be technical,’ came a distracted-sounding voice from somewhere in the vicinity of Tegan’s knees. ‘I’d have said more of a liverwort, really. See the rhizoids? Very simple structure. No sign of protonemata, either, although that could be the time of year…’

Tegan glanced down. The Doctor was kneeling against the stained, rocky wall of the cave opening, where the alien liverwort was no doubt making a terrible mess of his period knees. He was frowning at the wall through half-moon glasses, fingering a few leafy fronds of what Tegan had so casually and erroneously dismissed as moss. He held some up to the light, presumably for the woodlouse to get a better view of the laughably simple rhizoids. ‘What do you think?’

The giant woodlouse – it was actually a Tractator, Tegan recalled, and called itself the Gravis, although she wasn’t sure why she was supposed to care – shuffled forward, body swaying with the weight of its bulky shell. Its slanted, almond-shaped eyes, with wavy lines in place of pupils, gave it a thoughtful, cunning air. ‘I don’t know, Doctor… What’s a year?’

Tegan sighed. Her own limited stock of patience had been exhausted about twenty minutes into the trip, when the woodlouse’s boundless enthusiasm for learning about the TARDIS had run up against the limits of her knowledge of it – which pretty much amounted to how the bit in the middle went up and down, and what you pulled to open the door.

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