An ultra short story
Vaguely inspired by Alfred Bester's The Men Who Murdered Mohammed (and to a lesser extent Norman Spinrad's Carcinoma Angels, I guess) and written pretty much on the fly in about half an hour.
The Doctor was on a downer again. This was one of his Churchillian Black Dog downers, involving six months doing very little but sitting on the doorstep of the Tardis, hanging there somewhere outside the Horsehead Nebula (which he'd remodelled into a Mount Rushmoresque tableau of his first 93 incarnations), watching a globular cluster tearing itself apart by day, and attending the same Pink Floyd gig at the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road in 1967 every night. He occasionally wished that all that wonderful late-sixties acid had an effect on his brain other than giving him a splitting headache.
By his calculation, he’d encountered every sentient race in the cosmos at least twice, seen the birth and death of over seventeen million inhabited planets, been a God approximately forty three thousand times, died and regenerated on three hundred and fifteen separate occasions, totally smashed the barriers between reality, possibility, fiction and fantasy, and personally caused the total annihilation of the Master, the Meddling Monk, the Celestial Toymaker, the Rani, the Daleks, Cybermen, Vashta Narada, Silastic Armorfiends of Siterax, Weeping Angels, Inland Revenue, the Electric Light Orchestra, puffball skirts, mobile phone ringtones, any elements beginning with the letters M to Z, odd numbers, even numbers, the sixth through to fifteenth dimensions inclusive, Morlocks, Klingons, Borg, Vorlons, Cylons, Nylons, Vl’Hurgs, Jagrafess, Jatravartids, Belgium, the M4, all the rectangular states of the USA, Australian soap operas, Shoggoths, Vugs, and even on particularly bad days the Humans at least a dozen times each.
He had debated the subtlest points of philosophy with Aristotle, Sartre and a sentient being made entirely from his own navel fluff; he had mastered the most abstruse physics with Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Hawking and darts legend Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor. He had made love to Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Margaret Thatcher (for a dare and because he was feeling kinky at the time), six clones of the real Billie Piper (although he'd made them do the Rose accent and wear the Secret Diary of a Call Girl lingerie), and Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. He had caroused into the night with Jesus, sailed over the edge of a flat world with Columbus, helped Hitler with his watercolours, singlehandedly rescued Apollo 13, written three uncredited and unbroadcast episodes of “Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt” and convinced Vashti Bunyan to go back into the studio.
But there was only one thing he’d never managed to do. He’d fought millennium-long wars to attempt to destroy it. Failed. He’d slammed planets into each other like cosmic billiard balls to try to prevent it. There it was. He’d tinkered subtly with evolution to try to delay it. It always happened. He’d even fiddled with the Big Bang itself in an attempt to create a cosmos bereft of life. But still it came.
Somehow, whatever he did, the Pestilence always reappeared somewhere in the universe. It might be chanted by uncomprehending acolytes at strange crystalline alien rocks; it might be sung by Ood in a blaze of transcendent luminosity. It might be scrawled on a pub toilet wall. It might appear as a strange pattern of mountains visible only from high orbit. It might be a gravitic-wave vibration in aeons-slow morse, twisting the fabric of whole galaxies. It might be encoded in the DNA of a promising new species. It might be written across whole constellations in flaming wisps of blazing star-stuff. It was a quest he was fated to take on whatever the teeming multiverse threw at him.
He’d never managed to rid the cosmos of the script of Love and Monsters.
The Doctor was on a downer again. This was one of his Churchillian Black Dog downers, involving six months doing very little but sitting on the doorstep of the Tardis, hanging there somewhere outside the Horsehead Nebula (which he'd remodelled into a Mount Rushmoresque tableau of his first 93 incarnations), watching a globular cluster tearing itself apart by day, and attending the same Pink Floyd gig at the UFO Club on Tottenham Court Road in 1967 every night. He occasionally wished that all that wonderful late-sixties acid had an effect on his brain other than giving him a splitting headache.
By his calculation, he’d encountered every sentient race in the cosmos at least twice, seen the birth and death of over seventeen million inhabited planets, been a God approximately forty three thousand times, died and regenerated on three hundred and fifteen separate occasions, totally smashed the barriers between reality, possibility, fiction and fantasy, and personally caused the total annihilation of the Master, the Meddling Monk, the Celestial Toymaker, the Rani, the Daleks, Cybermen, Vashta Narada, Silastic Armorfiends of Siterax, Weeping Angels, Inland Revenue, the Electric Light Orchestra, puffball skirts, mobile phone ringtones, any elements beginning with the letters M to Z, odd numbers, even numbers, the sixth through to fifteenth dimensions inclusive, Morlocks, Klingons, Borg, Vorlons, Cylons, Nylons, Vl’Hurgs, Jagrafess, Jatravartids, Belgium, the M4, all the rectangular states of the USA, Australian soap operas, Shoggoths, Vugs, and even on particularly bad days the Humans at least a dozen times each.
He had debated the subtlest points of philosophy with Aristotle, Sartre and a sentient being made entirely from his own navel fluff; he had mastered the most abstruse physics with Archimedes, Newton, Einstein, Hawking and darts legend Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor. He had made love to Cleopatra, Lucrezia Borgia, Margaret Thatcher (for a dare and because he was feeling kinky at the time), six clones of the real Billie Piper (although he'd made them do the Rose accent and wear the Secret Diary of a Call Girl lingerie), and Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six. He had caroused into the night with Jesus, sailed over the edge of a flat world with Columbus, helped Hitler with his watercolours, singlehandedly rescued Apollo 13, written three uncredited and unbroadcast episodes of “Oh No, It’s Selwyn Froggitt” and convinced Vashti Bunyan to go back into the studio.
But there was only one thing he’d never managed to do. He’d fought millennium-long wars to attempt to destroy it. Failed. He’d slammed planets into each other like cosmic billiard balls to try to prevent it. There it was. He’d tinkered subtly with evolution to try to delay it. It always happened. He’d even fiddled with the Big Bang itself in an attempt to create a cosmos bereft of life. But still it came.
Somehow, whatever he did, the Pestilence always reappeared somewhere in the universe. It might be chanted by uncomprehending acolytes at strange crystalline alien rocks; it might be sung by Ood in a blaze of transcendent luminosity. It might be scrawled on a pub toilet wall. It might appear as a strange pattern of mountains visible only from high orbit. It might be a gravitic-wave vibration in aeons-slow morse, twisting the fabric of whole galaxies. It might be encoded in the DNA of a promising new species. It might be written across whole constellations in flaming wisps of blazing star-stuff. It was a quest he was fated to take on whatever the teeming multiverse threw at him.
He’d never managed to rid the cosmos of the script of Love and Monsters.