Part 54 (1/2)

227.

Cousin Satthralope: The housekeeper is the medium between the House and its inhabitants. She's in telepathic empathy with the living building, responsible for the rituals and day-to-day running of the place and the Drudges are her servants. She embodies the House's possessiveness and sense of familial duty. There's a remnant of the ancient female Pythian rulers of Gallifrey in her role.

Ordinal-General Quences: The Kithriarch, head of the Family. The elderly parent who only wants the best for his offspring. He recognised the Doctor's potential long ago and had a career al mapped out for his protege.

Unfortunately the Doctor had his own ideas... An alternative Quences turns up in the close of the chapter, with Arkhew spinning on the orrery-like clock, the Cousins in complete panic below and the dark rising up the windows, was the very first visual image I had of Lungbarrow, before I even knew the story that went with it.

Chapter 8.This chapter starts with a collage of word pictures representing the aftermath of the House's actions. Maybe it comes from watching so much tv when I was younger, but my prose writing does seem to be very visual. In fact, I knew the stories of many literary cla.s.sics, not because I'd read them, but because I'd seen them on the tel y. I did go and read quite a lot of them afterwards, but even as I read the books, I'd see the characters from the tv version.

Patrick Troughton, magnificently evil as Quilp, Alan Badel as The Count of Monte Christo, Frank Finlay as Jean Valjean. A Disney film version of any story or fairytale tends, for good or bad, to eclipse any other interpretation.

But even on audio, I still find myself trying to create extraordinary sights; sights that the tel y could never afford.

These days I watch precious little television. Al presenters who believe they're more important than the programme they're presenting should be sentenced to watch endless loops of lifestyle programmes. And one particular garden designer, who prefers concrete to plants, should have been strangled at birth by a clematis.

The Doa-no-nai-heya Monastery is the retreat featured in the previous book in the NA series, Kate Orman's j.a.panese epic The Room With No Doors.

For this version of the book, I've hacked out most of the second half of the original Chapter 8. There was a cringe-making overload of information there, showing what the Doctor got up to while Chris was unconscious, and it was totally unnecessary to the plot. So it went.

Chapter 9.Gallifreyan nursery rhymes seem to be gloomy things that mourn the loss of the children. It's all down to guilt.

Children were so long ago that they've become the stuff of fairytale and legend.

The Drudges seem to have forgotten their place in the hierarchy. As maids, they are supposed to serve the Family, but since the House took things into its own ”hands”, they behave more like prison warders. The House has decided that it knows best, rather like high street banks that forget they are the public's servants.

After six years working in catering during the seventies, you'd think I have gone off kitchens, but I still like them a lot. They're the heart of any home. Things, both wonderful and weird, happen in kitchens. Chefs chase junior cooks with live lobsters. The kitchen staff are at permanent war with the waiters. The waiters live on a diet of filched oysters and smoked salmon. And I can't even tell you what I once saw in the dry food store in a seafront hotel in Southsea. Fawlty Towers only skims the surface, believe me. The things that other people have in their larders is just as fascinating as what they have on their book or video shelves. And what the Lungbarrow kitchen has in its larder is not quite so far from other kitchens as you'd like to think.

I like the fact that the Doctor is extremely cagey about admitting that he knows where he is. It puts a strain on his friends.h.i.+p with Chris, who behaves with utmost decency throughout. I'm all for a bit of antagonism between the regular characters. G.o.d knows, they live on top of each other enough, barrelling through harrowing situations which hardened troops would need counselling for. I love it when Barbara calls the First Doctor a stupid old man; when the Second Doctor deliberately has a row with Jamie about rescuing Victoria from the Daleks; or when Nyssa doesn't tell the Fifth Doctor that she's spoken to Adric in Castrovalva. You could write a whole book about Tegan's paranoias, and the Seventh Doctor has those little disagreements with Ace in Ghost Light and The Curse of Fenric. Chris Cwej is a really nice guy, but his trust of the Doctor is at odds with his training as an Adjudicator, which means he can't help but have a highly suspicious mind.

Innocet is such a stickler for tradition that she even puts on her hat and coat for a trip up the corridor. People wil do anything to cling on to the past. But really she's quite literal y shouldering all the blame and guilt in the House. If she's not careful, she'l land up an unsung martyr.

228.

Chapter 10.I've always had a soft spot for mushrooms ever since the sixties when a Russian spy, captured retrieving top secret information from a tree stump in somewhere like Ashdown Forest, insisted he was only looking for fungi.

”I'm only picking mushrooms” became a school catch phrase. Rather like the slogan on a sheer nylon tights offer with Paxo stuffing: ”Recommended by Anita Harris.” But I digress...

There's a sense that both the Doctor and Chris are getting out of their depth. Wouldn't it just be better to get the TARDIS back and go? But curiosity, always the Doctor's undoing, and a man in a stove get the better of them.

They're starting to get noticed.

The Doctor's catapult, emblem of a rascal y Dennis the Menace-style childhood. But I don't remember knowing anyone who actual y had one.

Any resemblance by the ”whisper softly” nursery verse to ”Christopher Robin is saying his prayers” is purely deliberate.

Chapter 11.Strange, isn't it, how something insignificant can s...o...b..ll? Does the Gallifreyan Celestial Intervention Agency appear in any other tv story? Not by name as far as I can recall. (By now you'l all be shooting off notes to the BBCi Who forum.) But when the CIA got mentioned in Deadly a.s.sa.s.sin, I'm sure it was just one of Robert Holmes'

throwaway line jokes. Yet it's ballooned into the all purpose, undercover, machinating power that lurks behind the pomp of the High Council. It's answerable only to itself and is responsible for all those times when the Doctor starts shouting threats at the empty air.

If the smug, serpentine interrogator of Leela seems familiar, it's because he appeared memorably in one of the tv stories. He's an historian, his statements are al couched in legalese and he seems to have nothing but contempt for anything that rocks the stately circular dance of Gallifrey. For purposes of suspense, his ident.i.ty wil not be revealed until much later on in the story. Meanwhile President Romana, representing the radical forces of liberal innovation, is already playing the forces of Gallifreyan conservatism at their own game.

Chancel or Theora's hairdo is not a symbol of the labyrinthine plot.

Chapter 12.Cousin Rynde is an unsavoury fel ow. He used to be in catering (that rings bells), but now he's more of a spiv into any sort of dodgy deal. He's always ready to sel you, under the counter, no questions asked, half a pound of tafelshrew and mushroom sausages that he's knocked off from the Drudges' kitchen. Don't touch them, they're well past their Best Before date.

Drat, another of the legion of games from Innocet's compendium, is a card game, probably the Gallifreyan equivalent of the German game Skat.

Wouldn't I much rather write an Earth-bound story? Wel , it certainly hands me a lot of minute detail on a plate. I know, and the readers know the references, rules and social structures for Earth. But I do love fil ing in the detail of alien societies. That's where the colour comes from and I can spend far too long getting myself into the right world for a story. I have to be inside it before I can write it. Even then, it still has to be recognisable for the reader. Real alien life could well be so alien that we wouldn't recognise it as life at al . On tv, we rarely see more than half a dozen woggly creatures to represent an entire race. So most tv alien societies can only be variations on an Earthly theme.

Are the living Houses a complete anathema to everything we've ever seen of Gallifreyan culture? I don't think so.

They are a throwback to the beginning of the Intuitive Revelation, which marked the end of the dark days of the Old Time. Like the Looms they house, they were conceived to protect a species threatened with extinction: the Gallifreyans themselves. TARDISes are very much alive; so is the old and battered Hand of Omega, itself a relic from another age. If you looked at the ancient culture of j.a.pan, before it adopted and outdid the invasive culture of the West, you might think it very unearthly indeed. The past is there to be respected, but there's no point in writing at all if you don't come up with something new.

229.

The body-bepple is a 30th century extension of tattooing or body piercing, allowing the fas.h.i.+on-conscious to remake their bodies into interesting (and exotic) forms. When Chris first appeared in Andy Lane's Original Sin, he was aptly beppled into the shape of a giant teddy bear.

Time Lords count their age in years and generations. Even over this, there seems to be rivalry. The Doctor keeps quiet when asked how old he is. He's going through his regenerations far too fast.

Chapter 13.Looking at the array of creatures that turn up in Lungbarrow, from gullet grubs to fledershrews, blossom thieves to scrubblers and neversuch beetles, it feels like time for someone to write a Flora and Fauna of Outer Gallifrey.

Natural history has always been one of my specialist subjects (see Ghost Light), and when I was about seven, I wrote to David Attenborough asking how I could go about being a zoo keeper. In those days, he presented the Zoo Quest series for the Beeb, exploring exotic locations in black and white and collecting animals for the London Zoo.

He even wrote back to me outlining his path through university and the BBC. My career never really followed the Komodo dragon path, but over forty years later, the man is still one of my heroes. There should at least be a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, even better a major planet, named Attenborough.

Meanwhile, we already know that there are cats and mice on Gallifrey, and tafelshrews first turned up in Time's Crucible as laboratory specimens on board one of the first Gallifreyan times.h.i.+ps. In Paul Cornell's Happy Endings, we learn that there is a Loom of Ra.s.silon's Mouse. But in The Invasion of Time, that load of couch potatoes, the capitol-bound Time Lords, are terrified of being cast out into the wilderness. Maybe it's the centuries of urban living that make them uncomfortable with the uncontrol able wildness of nature. They'd rather watch it on a screen.

We're back to David Attenborough again. Even so, the remote Houses have orchards and formal gardens, presumably tended by the Drudges, and we know that the Doctor used to high-tail it up the mountain to visit Mount Lung's local hermit.

I do like this image of looking up the chimney, staring up at a tiny disk of sky which must seem as remote as an unreachable planet.

The end of this chapter, with its revelation of what has befallen the House and its inhabitants, was the original end of the tv version's first episode. And as Innocet points out, a large part of the blame lies with the Doctor himself. All that being mysterious is final y catching up with him.

Chapter 14.The original TV storyline was a three-parter set exclusively inside the House of Lungbarrow, just as Ghost Light never ventured outside Gabriel Chase. It was a Seventh Doctor and Ace story, so none of the other companions in the book - Leela, Romana or the K9s - appeared. Chris Cwej is in the book by proxy as the Doctor's current companion, and a lot of his story was original y designated to Ace. The parts of the story set at the Capitol are only in the novel - the expanded book version was an excuse for plenty of political intrigue and conspiracy theory (at the time, we were all in the depths of X-Files mania.) Romana has spent quite a while with the Tharils in E-s.p.a.ce, so the leonine time sensitives are her obvious choice to serve as the first alien amba.s.sadors to Gallifrey for thousands of years. Haven't things changed a lot since the Fourth Doctor refused to take Sarah Jane Smith home with him?

The two K9s were a pretty irresistible idea. The Tharils must have overcome the problems that stopped Romana's K9 (the Mark II version) from leaving E-s.p.a.ce. So here they are, both wittering the obvious in those supercilious tones to anyone within hearing distance. K9's best feature is his ability to speak the unspeakable, unconstrained by the human vices of politeness and consideration. It's an endearing quality shared with Daleks and Cybermen if they're written properly and with the adorable Anya in Buffy. Two K9s are even better than one. Fortunately we're spared Sarah Jane turning up with her model as wel .

Leela has been having quite an effect on Andred, leading him not just up the garden path, but right out into the woods where all sorts of things can happen to an unsuspecting Time Lord. When Andred says that their physical relations.h.i.+p is the sort of things that other Time Lords watch on screens, has it occurred to him that he and Leela might also be the subjects of higher scrutiny? He can have no conception of the importance of their liaison. And talking of conception, Romana and her retinue have al been sitting round the screen with their fingers crossed.

230.

The courtroom visited by the Time Lord in black is the heart of the CIA's domain. It's also probably the chamber where the Second Doctor was tried at the end of The War Games. The courtroom in The Trial of a Time Lord was on that ma.s.sive s.p.a.ce station - or was it a time station? At least here, we are spared an inquisitor dressed as a wedding cake, complete with rampant doily as a ceremonial col ar of office.

There was a sort of inevitability that Leela and Dorothee should team up. Two strong women, both fighters skil ed in their respective weapons. But of course, to start off with, they don't get on. It seems to be standard procedure for Ace/Dorothee to be spiky towards other companions. She was the same with the Brigadier in Battlefield and although she and Benny are friends in the New Adventures, they are forever circling each other like a couple of very wary cats.

Few people get close to Dorothee as a person, and if she sees them getting between her and the Doctor, then a degree of jealousy tends to kick in. Meanwhile, if this catwalk cat-fight had been in the TV version, it would be the point when all the private cameras in the studio suddenly appeared, just as they did when Ace and Gwendoline wrestled on the bed in Ghost Light.

Chapter 15.How much blame must the Doctor take for his Family's plight? We know from experience that he has a catalytic effect on any situation he visits. No one who meets him, even for just a moment, walks away untouched, unscathed or properly mangled. His involvement is usual y beneficial, but in his Family's case it's downright catastrophic. If you trace back the disastrous events in the House, don't they all lead to the moment when the Doctor failed to come home? Or do they go further back to the moment when he left? Or stil further to the moment of his birth? Cousin Glospin suspects it goes even further than that. Perhaps the real problem is that the Doctor exists at al . Sooner or later he may final y have to start saying he's sorry.

Poor Satthralope, rudely awakened from her deep sleep. She is keeper of the keys, the spider at the heart of the House's web, lost and lulled in shadowy dreams like Aunt Ada Doom, who saw something nasty in the woodshed at Cold Comfort Farm. It takes time to wipe the sleep from her rheumy old eyes. But when she wakes, when she feels the shuddering protests of the House to which she is wedded, when she sees the transgression thrown along corridors of mirrors; then forbidden secrets, lost under the dust of centuries, wil be uncovered and the price of their hiding will be exacted. Far better for everyone, if she just turns over and goes back to sleep again.