Part 1 (1/2)
DOCTOR WHO.
Beltempest.
By Jim Mortimore.
Prologue.
Even stars die.
They may grow old, they may seem inconceivable when held against the flickering candle of our own existence, yet they too have lives that are shaped by the same universe, the same immutable laws as are our own lives.
In the measure of Deep Time the brief moment of existence of all the stars in the universe is as the moment a b.u.t.terfly lives compared with all the summers that will ever be. for the red giant, galactic summer is over and winter is approaching. Its hydrogen fuel long since exhausted, this old, mad sun has consumed its inner worlds and barely noticed their absence. Burning helium now as a lingering precursor to death, the red giant prepares to shrug off its outer mantle of remaining hydrogen and take its remaining family of planets with it into oblivion.
Within the star, a schism: its core shrinking and growing ever hotter even as its outer layers expand and cool. Soon now will come the moment of death, of explosion - the surviving solar matter burning in a tiny incandescent lump at the heart of a nebula composed of the tattered shreds of its own corpse.
Still from death comes life. A truth unchanging while there is yet energy in the universe.
While the red giant continues slowly to die, life on its many worlds continues to grow and evolve.
It was an old world, one from which the fire had gone. A dark backwater, an eddy in the current of life, with no bright future or destiny, forgotten by any who might once have observed it or experienced it for however brief a moment.
Its chill plains and freezing mountains, its spa.r.s.e black vegetation and cold-sculpted animal life were left to just one pair of eyes to study: a single mind to look up at the sky and wonder if it would kill those who lived beneath it today, or play with them a while longer before dismissing them from this life.
Skywatcher glanced at the iron-grey clouds that sc.r.a.ped the tops of the White Mountains and tried to work out how long it would be before the snow on the ground covered the tracks of the fast-moving herd of hornrunners. Skywatcher and his brother, Fastblade, had been tracking the herd for three days. It was his responsibility to make sure the sky would allow this kill. If Fastblade did not find the hornrunners' winter nest before the snow concealed it from view, then many would die from starvation in the coming months, and the hornrunners would emerge from their hibernation to a world cleansed by cold of all but the most isolated - probably cannibalistic - pockets of human life.
Skywatcher pulled his furs more tightly around his chapped face, his nose clogged with the greasy stink of animal fat smeared upon his skin to protect it from the biting cold. Fastblade had no such protection. Fastblade needed every sense clear and unclouded. Whereas this weather was, for Skywatcher, the fear and wonder of a cruel friend, the same weather for Fastblade was little more than a tool with which he focused his mind acutely on the task at hand. The tracking of the nest.
Two very different men, then, Skywatcher and Fastblade. Yet, though the sky affected them in different ways, it made them brothers, too. For without the sky to determine their actions they would surely be little more than mindless animals living easily from an endless bounty of summer food. Skywatcher had heard many of the village curse the sky, the s.p.a.ce above, the endless night drawing close about their world. He had heard the prayers to a dying sun, swollen with cold crimson light, whose nearness brought little comfort beyond the beauty of dawn and sunset across the frost-laden plains. But, unlike his fellow men, Skywatcher was not afraid. Not of the sky. How could he be? The sky was his friend and loved him. The sky brought him life in the form of birds too cold to fly, of snow to make water, of berries and meat preserved in the frost from one season to the next. Skywatcher knew where life came from on this world. And he loved the sky in turn for making every day a challenge, for making every hour and every moment linked and full of meaning, like the crystal spokes of a single snowflake.
Fastblade thought it was all birdlime, of course.
Fastblade hated the cold. Hated having to hunt. He took no pleasure in experience. He seemed little able to observe and think, and make connections, and totally unable to wonder about anything beyond where the next meal would come from to fill his belly. It had been many seasons since the moment when Skywatcher first realised that the number of people who thought like Fastblade was increasing with every generation, whereas the number of people like himself was growing smaller. It was a moment that had shaped his life. But it was also one of which he had told n.o.body - for who would understand his view, or care?
In that moment of realisation, Skywatcher knew his people were dying. Not as individuals but as a species, unable to adapt to the conditions prevalent on their world, conditions that grew harsher every desiccated season. Sometimes he wondered what would follow after they had all died - whether there would simply be nothing at all, or whether some other form of life would take their place to hunt the hornrunners beneath an ever more swollen sun.
It was a question to which Skywatcher knew he would never have an answer. But that did not matter. For the question itself was simply one more experience, one more crystal spoke on the snowflake that was his world and his life.
Hunting food was, too - as Skywatcher was reminded when a young hornrunner erupted from an early nest a man's length from him and, defending that nest, charged him with all seven horns articulated into the position of attack.
Fastblade saw the movement of snow a heartbeat too late. Veiling a warning to Skywatcher, he launched himself across the snow, dagger drawn, teeth exposed in a furious scream.
Skywatcher was frozen in place before the animal bursting from the snow in front of him. Fool. Dreamer. If he died the tribe died with him. Did he not know this? Did he not care?
Wasting no time on recriminations, Fastblade lurched across packed snow, his furs a c.u.mbersome demand on his reserves of energy, even while protecting him from the killing cold. Above, the iron-grey clouds were moving ever closer, bringing a murky crimson darkness with the promise of more snow. Closer, the hornrunner had now emerged from its burrow and was skimming the ground on six triple-jointed legs, the pads that served for feet slapping almost silently against the snow and sending swirls of white powder into the heavy air.
Quick as Fastblade was, his eyes were quicker. Even as he ran they were searching the tableau for an advantage. There was none.
The hornrunner reached Skywatcher, who now tried to hurl himself clear of the enraged animal. All seven horns had locked forward into the attack position. The hornrunner was a young animal, ma.s.sing barely twice as much as Skywatcher - but still it would be enough to kill him should even one of those horns bite home into his body.
Skywatcher dived - and the hornmnner caught him with three horns while still in midair.
A moment later Fastblade leapt clumsily on to the animal's back and drove his dagger into the furred gap between the bony plates at the base of the animal's skull. The hornrunner reared and Fastblade found himself flying through the air. The ground punched the breath from his body. He looked up to find himself eye to compound eye with the hornrunner. It was dead of course. He knew that from the l.u.s.tre of the many lenses in the eye, the coating of frost already forming there as the animal's body heat was leached away by the wind and the storm of snow its own death had thrown into the air.
Fastblade retrieved his dagger, cleaned it, then staggered to where Skywatcher lay moaning on the ground.
One of the runner's horns had snapped cleanly off and emerged from the bloodstained furs cladding Skywatcher's thigh. More blood leaked from wounds in his shoulder and arm. But the worst wound was in his chest. Blood pumped sluggishly, staining the furs there, showing no sign of abating.
Skywatcher blinked, his face pale even beneath the layer of animal fat. More blood flecked his lips. He tried to speak. No words came, just an animal-like moan of pain. His eyes closed and opened spasmodically.
Fastblade ripped open Skywatcher's furs and began to pack handfuls of freezing snow against the chest wound. Skywatcher groaned. Fastblade wasted no time on words. If Skywatcher died the tribe died with him. If he lived - well, there would be time enough for blame then. Otherwise - Fastblade packed the snow as tight as he could against Skywatcher's chest. But even as he did this he knew the effort was useless. For every handful of fresh white snow he brought, the balance was stained pink by the release of Skywatcher's lifeblood. A weak movement beside him stopped Fastblade's activities. Skywatcher's hand grasped feebly at the furs at his wrist. Fastblade batted the hand aside and continued with his work.
Then he looked into Skywatcher's eyes. They were gazing mutely at the sky from which he took his name.
Blood bubbled at chapped lips. Skywatcher was trying to speak. Fastblade leaned closer but Skywatcher's voice had no strength. Instead his finger managed to point upward.
Following his indication, Fastblade looked up. His mouth dropped open in mute astonishment.
Through a jagged break in the iron-grey clouds Fastblade could see the sky. And the sun, a swollen crimson globe partially obscured by three circles of darkness - a triple eclipse, impossible on a world that knew only one moon.
Cradling his brother in his arms, Fastblade gazed in stupefaction at the impossible sight and cried aloud. If he felt Skywatcher's life depart he did not know it.
The three dark circles conjoined, obscuring the swollen girth of the sun and plunging the world into unexpected darkness.
Fastblade had seen an eclipse before. He sank to the ground beside his dead brother, his eyes aching from the sudden lack of red light, and waited for the light to return.
When it finally reappeared the sun was dark, a seething black sh.e.l.l with occasional bursts of light from within.
Fastblade prayed for his brother as the night grew colder and darker. He waited for morning to bury Skywatcher, but morning did not come for more than a year.
Skywatcher planted the bone spade and tipped a last stack of snow across the grave. Fastblade had been the last hunter to die. Like the others he had died night-blind, raving in his sleep from fever and the visions. Now he joined them in endless sleep, their bodies preserved for ever by cold in a world that had known but a flicker of light for more than a year.
Skywatcher remembered the stories Fastblade had told him of his, Skywatcher's, father and how he had died because he was careless. Now Fastblade himself was dead. He, Skywatcher, was the eldest now - even though in Fastblade's eyes he had been little more than a child.
A child who had seen a sun die and a world end. Who had seen crops fail and people kill each other in their mad desire for food. A child, now a man, who waited only for death.
The last spadeful of snow hit the grave and Skywatcher patted it down. Then he looked up at the cloudless sky and at the stars - and the circular patch of darkness shot through with occasional threads of fire which marked the position of the dead sun. He wondered if his father would have known what this meant. The sky had changed with his father's death - as though the two events were linked. But were they, really? And did it matter? Skywatcher barely had the strength to lift the spade. There had been no food for half a season and most the tribe was dead.
Skywatcher put down the bone spade. He sat beside the grave. What should he do now? His mind, having been occupied by the work of digging, now returned to its long fear: that with no food there remained no choice but to wait for death.
Skywatcher felt madness take him then. He jumped up and began to dance, a clumsy lurching movement in the agonising cold. He began to sing, too - nonsense words, children's words.. He felt like a child, felt on the verge of something he could not name, felt his heart sing in his chest, beating a rhythm to which his life kept time. A tiny part of his mind wondered what would happen when his heart lost the beat - whether he would notice the end of the song. Whether he would notice his own death. Then the song took him again and he lost himself in the madness. So it was that he missed the miracle: others witnessed it and later told him of it, but Skywatcher, in his madness, missed the moment for which he had taken his name. The moment in which light and life returned to his world, with a new, impossible sun.