Still reeling from his encounter with the Cybermen, the First Doctor stumbles through the bitter Antarctic wind, resisting the approaching regeneration with all his strength. But as he fights his way through the snowdrifts, he comes across the familiar shape of a blue police box, and a mysterious figure who introduces himself as the Doctor…
Thrown together at their most vulnerable moments, the two Doctors must discover why the snowflakes are suspended in the sky, why a First World War Captain has been lifted from his time stream moments before his death, and who is the mysterious Glass Woman who knows their true name. The Doctor is reunited with Bill, but is she all she seems? And can he hold out against the coming regeneration?
Paul Cornell has written some of Doctor Who’s best-loved episodes for the BBC, as well as the novel Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks with Dan Abnett. He has also written on a number of comic book series for Marvel and DC, including X-men and Batman and Robin. He has been Hugo Award-nominated for his work in TV, comics and prose, and won the BSFA award for his short fiction.
For Tom
‘Doctor, I let you go.’
Once upon a time, 709 episodes ago, there was an old man who lived in a police box with his friends Ben and Polly. They had many adventures together. But then came one particularly dangerous and exhausting encounter, one that the old man could not survive.
So, in short, he didn’t. But there was also a longer version of the story, one that took a long time to be told, one that the old man himself didn’t remember, not until right at the end.
But he still ended up living happily ever after.
It was hopeless, to begin with.
Through the snowy emptiness of Antarctica strode a man who was not a man. He wore a long cloak fastened at the neck and a fur hat. Though old, he was still alert and vigorous, and the eyes in his heavily lined face blazed with fierce intelligence. ‘No, I can’t go through with it,’ he was muttering to himself. ‘I will fight it. I will not change.’
This was the mysterious traveller in time and space known as the Doctor, and he had just experienced a terrifying encounter with the Cybermen, emotionless silver giants who had tried to invade the Earth. The battle had taken its toll. The Doctor had felt his strength drain from him as the Cybermen’s home world, Mondas, had attempted to leech energy from this planet. And he had already pushed his old body to its limits. The Cybermen had finally been foiled by their own cleverness, and he had been little more than a spectator. He had known from his studies of history how the battle would play out, and had blearily watched, making sure that it did, ready to step in, but knowing all the time that, if he stayed, the attack of Mondas would take its toll. So, he had done the right thing, but … but it had not felt like he had done anything much at all, except place a burden around his own shoulders. Once the Cybermen had been defeated, he had quickly headed out here into the emptiness of the Antarctic wastes to find the TARDIS, leaving his two companions, Ben and Polly, rushing to get into their coats, somewhere in the buildings that the snow had already obscured, far behind him. ‘It’s far from being all over,’ that’s what he had said to young Ben. And yet … and yet … he somehow could not find the hope he needed to surrender himself and regenerate.
‘Hello?’ called a voice from in front of him. ‘Is someone there?’
The Doctor squinted to try to make out what was ahead. A figure was kneeling in the snow, close to the welcome shape of the blue police box that was the TARDIS. ‘Who is that, hmm?’
‘I’m the Doctor,’ said the mysterious figure.
The Doctor almost laughed at the coincidence. ‘Oh, I don’t think so! No. Oh dear me, no.’ He stepped closer to get a good look at the kneeling man. He was a tall, stark figure, with a shock of silver hair, his features a surprising mixture of joy and sorrow. He was dressed in a black velvet suit and a white shirt, the clothes as tattered and careworn as the man himself seemed to be, and he must surely be on the verge of hypothermia. This was surely some unfortunate survivor of the Cybermen’s attack. ‘You may be a Doctor, but I am the Doctor. The original, you might say!’
This medical man slowly got to his feet, staring at the Doctor in astonishment. He seemed, for a moment, so pleased to see him. ‘You! How can it be you?’
‘Do I know you, sir?’ There was something about the stranger that felt oddly familiar.
Bizarrely, the man turned to the TARDIS and shouted at it. ‘Did you do this? Are you trying to be clever?’
Now the Doctor was sure the man must have been left befuddled by his terrible experiences. Why else would he be addressing what was, for all its miracles, still a mere vehicle? However, there was the possibility that his next move might be to attack it. ‘Step away from that machine!’
The stranger seemed suddenly to be lost in thought, continuing to address the blue box. ‘No, wait, hang on. Where have you brought me?’ He bent to pick up a handful of snow, and, ridiculously, tasted it. ‘Oh, minty! This is the South Pole! We’re at the South Pole!’
‘Well, of course we are!’ exclaimed the Doctor, beginning to find this eccentric behaviour extremely tiresome. Here he was, dying, and rather than elegiac grandeur the universe seemed intent on providing him with comic relief. ‘Don’t you know that?’
The man turned to look at him, those sharp eyes suddenly fixed on him like a predatory bird. ‘This is where it happened.’
‘Where what happened?’
‘This is it, the very first time that I, well … you … we regenerated! You’re mid-regeneration, aren’t you?’ He took a step closer and stared even more intently at the Doctor. ‘Your face, it’s all over the place.’ Before the Doctor could protest at these impertinent questions about such personal matters, let alone wonder how he knew so much, the man had grabbed his hand and turned it over to look at his palm. In the very centre of the Doctor’s hand was the visible sign of the feeling that had been gripping him for the last few hours, a tiny, sacred, flame of regeneration energy, fluttering in and out of vision. ‘You’re trying to hold it back.’
The Doctor tore his hand away. The effrontery of this stranger! ‘What do you know of regeneration, sir? Are you a Time Lord?’
‘You know who I am. You must!’
A terrible fear gripped the Doctor. He couldn’t imagine why this man now saw fit to grin at him in that inane matter. He marched over to the TARDIS. ‘Have you come to take the ship back?’
The strange individual seemed even more delighted by his words. He skipped over to stand between the Doctor and his vessel, beaming. ‘“The ship”! You still call it a “ship”!’
But now the Doctor had noticed something even more worrying. ‘Dear me, what have you done to it?’
‘Nothing.’
The Doctor stepped round his machine, examining it. Why would a Time Lord fix the chameleon circuit, which had been jammed since that landing in London, only to make such trite alterations? ‘The colour, it’s all wrong! And look at the windows! They’re the wrong size!’
Now the man was talking to himself! ‘I don’t remember this. I don’t remember trying not to change. Not back then.’
The Doctor tried to bring the man’s attention back to the matter of his TARDIS. ‘Look at it! It seems to have … expanded.’
‘Well, all those years of “bigger on the inside”, you try sucking your tummy in that long. Why are you trying not to regenerate?’
The Doctor had never taken kindly to being questioned, and the man’s tone, both authoritative and foolish at once, was impudent. He drew himself up to his full height. ‘Oh, I’ve never approved of the idea.’ Which was true. He had made a point of living on in the same form, even as his body failed him. Some of that was because he had wanted to see his granddaughter, Susan, once again, in this form, as the old man she had loved. That was not all there was to it, of course. But he wasn’t about to share truths he had barely acknowledged himself with a complete stranger. ‘I have the courage, and the right, to live and die as myself.’
‘Too late. It’s started. A few minutes ago, you were weak as a kitten, right? Now, you’re fine. We’re in a state of grace, both of us. But it won’t last long. We have a choice. Either we change, and go on … or we die as we are.’
The Doctor could tell the stranger knew this process intimately. That he must have regenerated himself, for he obviously was privy to the terrors of it.
Now, however, the man’s tone had become fearful: ‘But if you … if you die here, if your future never happens, if you don’t do the things that you are supposed to do, the consequences could be—’ And now he was angry, and the Doctor was about to take enormous umbrage at that, but suddenly the stranger had stopped, halted mid-sentence, as if realising something. ‘The snow!’
And indeed, the Doctor could feel it, something had suddenly changed. ‘The snow?’
‘Look at it!’
The man laid hands on him again, and spun him around, pointing at one of the snowflakes that … was not descending through the air, but hanging there, suspended. As were they all. ‘How extraordinary!’
The man reached out a spindly, finely veined hand and flicked the snowflake with his finger. It bobbed away for a moment, then resumed its place. ‘Everything’s stopped.’
This felt to the Doctor very like something the Time Lords might do. Worryingly so. ‘But why?’
‘Maybe it’s us. Maybe it’s something else. But somehow, something has gone very wrong with time!’
Suddenly, a new voice called out through the suspended blizzard. ‘Hello?’
The Doctor turned to see a figure stumbling towards them. The snow swept aside like a curtain to reveal a handsome young man in military uniform. He had a neatly trimmed moustache, and his hair was rather brutally parted. His handsome face had a look of warmth and surprise about it. He had in his hand a pistol, and he was vaguely pointing it in their direction.
What new strangeness was this?
Archie had no idea where he was. He had a vague suspicion this might be the afterlife. However, if it was, it was a deuced unorthodox version of it, and his method of arrival had been decidedly non-traditional also. This felt like neither the Hell he feared or the Heaven he was satisfied that his conduct still deserved.
He had been in the shell crater. That was where things had become strange. Before that, things had been merely terrifying. He and his lads had been laying field telephone cables, one freezing December day, in front-line territory that had been created by a recent barrage, near Saint-Yvon in Belgium. The war against the Germans and their allies had been going less than six months, but already Archie felt that events had bogged down to a degree where it was hard to see how a sudden advance or breakthrough might be achieved. God willing, he had been thinking, the politicians on both sides would see that, and they’d all be going home soon. In the meantime, he was just doing the best he could. That had been what was in his noggin as he heard the terrifying sounds from above, of shells descending. He had shouted to his lads to get into cover. They’d scattered. Someone had yelled something about the Germans breaking through. Archie had been flung off his feet, rolled on landing, and had looked up to find himself staring straight into the face of a German soldier, equally surprised, and equally lost, all on his own, not part of some sudden advance. The chap had handsome, dark features and was clutching his chest; he had a wound of some sort. Archie had gone for his gun and the German had too, and then, both struck by the same dread in the same instant, they had, thank God, both hesitated. They had lain there, weapons aimed at each other. After a few moments, Archie had decided to attempt conversation.
‘There is something I should like to say. That is, there is something I should very much like you to understand. I do not have the slightest desire to kill you.’ The man had given no sign of comprehending him, but Archie had soldiered on. ‘The only possible reason I would do so would be self-defence. However, since you are aware I might kill you in self-defence, there is the strong possibility you will kill me in self-defence, before I can kill you in self-defence.’ Archie had doubted his classical ethics prep was getting through to the man, but he had to say something. ‘But that’s what this whole shooting match is about, really, isn’t it? Who kills whom in self-defence first. God must look down and laugh, don’t you think? Or weep. I think weep.’ And there it had been, he had gone from attempting some civil distance to desperately trying to find fellow-feeling in this equally terrified stranger. The German had remained obstinately silent. ‘Does rather make me wish that you understood English,’ Archie had said, finally.
‘Bitte,’ said the German, ‘hau ab! Lass mich einfach hier. Ich will dich nicht töten bitte geh.’
Which had sounded plaintive. ‘Or that I spoke German,’ Archie had admitted. ‘War is hell, eh?’
Which was, ominously, given his present situation, the exact moment that the strangeness had begun. There had been the sound of another shell descending, far too close. Right above them. He had had that sudden sickening sensation in his stomach that here came death, from a new direction. But then he had felt a weird stillness to the air. He had realised that the German’s gun, which had been shaking in his hands, had ceased to do so. The man’s face had frozen into immobility. Archie had looked closer and found, to his astonishment, that a single bead of perspiration, detached from the man’s nose, was hanging in the air, caught in the moment of falling.
Was this a miracle? He had always wanted to be present for one of those. Carefully, keeping his gun on the German, he had gotten to his feet. Then he had seized his chance to scarper. He had scrambled quickly out of the shell crater, with the intent of finding as many of his lads as possible, and dragging them, if he had to, back to the British trenches. He’d stopped for a moment to take in the vision before him. For the first time in his experience, the battlefield was silent. The plains of war stretched endlessly, explosions frozen like flowers in the distance. A single bird hung in the air, its wings motionless. Small fires all around were like stilled depictions of flame. He had been startled to see how close his lads were, in a nearby shell hole. They had, of course, got a brew on. One of them had lifted his mug halfway to his lips. Archie had never felt so lost, and yet inspired. He felt hope to see all this, as well as terrible fear. It had been like looking at an oil painting of his life. He had turned, staring at the beautiful horror of it all.
He had turned to see, standing there, the woman made of glass.
What was a statue doing here? That’s what he’d thought. Perhaps he had simply gone cuckoo. About time, if so. Quite a relief, actually, that it had turned out to be this entertaining. The statue had its back to him. He had approached it, wondering at such a fragile thing remaining intact, wondering if perhaps the battle had stopped in order for it to do so.
Which was when the statue had turned and looked at him.
She had raised her hand, and for a moment Archie, though terrified, had been sure that here was some divine visitation, who had put a halt to the horrors of war, and was about to take him home to the poppy fields of East Anglia. Then he was somehow somewhere else, somewhere he had just a moment to glimpse was a sort of giant stone chamber. He had struggled to fit that into any belief system, but then, a moment later, he had fallen sidelong, it had felt, into a white room, something like an operating theatre. It had felt like something was going wrong, as if something had somehow struck him and sent him off course. He had had another moment to react in horror at the white room, when suddenly all around him had become red, lights flashing into his eyes and mind, and a calm lady’s voice repeating, ‘Timeline error, there is a timeline error.’
Then blackness.
He had awoken, if that process could be called waking, because he was pretty sure that hadn’t been a dream, with his back on snow. He had heaved himself up, expecting to be either once again in the fields of war, or in one of the strange worlds he had glimpsed. But he was in neither. He was freezing even more than he had been, the chill around him terrifying in its intensity. He had quickly started to move, feeling that this cold would cut him down in moments. He had never felt a cold like it. And yet the landscape seemed like something one might expect in … Norway? Iceland? Was he perhaps at one of the poles? Except … the snow was literally hanging in the air, just as the explosions had been frozen on his battlefield. Fortunately, he had quickly seen lights ahead, had heard voices, and they had been speaking English!
He had hailed the two figures he saw ahead. Now he saw them turn to watch his approach. ‘Sorry. So sorry,’ he said as he reached them. He now felt sure he must have had a head wound, hence all his absurd thoughts about the afterlife, for these were no angels. He had perhaps returned to his right frame of mind having wandered to a different part of the battlefield. A very different part. ‘I don’t suppose either of you is a doctor?’