Message in a Bottle

I have an almost unnatural love of the planet Earth and its stubborn, xenophobic, noble, mundane and fascinating humans. How many times have my companions and I, or I alone, visited some planet full of hopeful humans fleeing their dying home, or descended from those who fled, long after Earth’s death? My companions were often shocked, always sad. I, who love Earth, who have fought for Earth with a fervor that makes me question my sanity, feel nothing after the fact. Planets and stars come and go, but I come and go too. Long after it has ceased to exist, Earth, like any planet, will still always have existed in its timestream. Why, then, does it anguish me so to know that one day Gallifrey will be destroyed? How can I bear to hear my planet’s last gasps, see my people murdered, witness the pulverizing of my planet?

I did, though.

We had intended to hit Baltimore, October 11, 1969, and watch the first game of that season’s World Series. The TARDIS, with her usual accuracy, got the date right but materialized on Schell, a sweet little planet where I am known as D-A-C-D-A-A. “Schellans communicate entirely in musical tones,” I told Nyssa and Tegan.

“Should I sing?” asked Nyssa.

“No, just talk. The TARDIS will take care of the rest. Besides, if you sing, you may say something you’ll regret!”

“Easily offended?” guessed Tegan.

“Not at all. In fact they are among the most peaceful people in the universe. I was just joking.”

We didn’t want to be rude so we decided to stay a while and enjoy Schellan hospitality, all on land despite our mammalian hosts’ preference for sea living. There was a bandstand, a lovely pavilion built by loving hands that had never devolved away from the flippers that supported them, a festive picnic, surfboards provided just for us, a poetry reading planned for the evening, and a late meal of Schellan crustaceans and sea vegetables.

We didn’t get to enjoy any of that. We were dressing for the festivities when the TARDIS began to wheeze and groan, and off we flew: recalled to Gallifrey!

I was furious! I wouldn’t have minded being asked politely. Why was I always dragged back like a rebellious teen being grounded? As soon as we landed I set coordinates right back to Schell. Unfortunately the TARDIS reversed tactics and got the place right and the date wrong… by exactly five years. We arrived on a wreckage of a planet, the immediate aftermath of savage assault. It had to have come from off-world; there wasn’t a hostile bone in any Schellan body. Now there was nothing but bodies; the seas were still red. The landscape was leveled.

“What happened?” whispered Tegan. Nyssa didn’t need to ask.

Against my better judgment, I set off to explore. Surely there were survivors? Nyssa couldn’t bear to look at the devastation and returned, with Tegan, to the TARDIS; I turned away from the red sea and started walking. There were some natural caves in the distance; perhaps someone had managed to take shelter there.

Someone had indeed: a child, barely well enough developed to walk on land. Her thick skin had not yet turned magenta and was a sickly pale pink. How had she ever made it to the cave? She knew me (although I didn’t know her) and sang my name, then died in my arms.

I carried her to the sea. I found Nyssa and Tegan back outside, waiting for me, with another survivor, an adult female I knew slightly, whose name was A-Bflat-A. She took the child from me and sang “D-A-Gsharp-E-Dsharp”: Dalek. She walked back into the sea.

The Daleks don’t operate underwater; they’d rust, I thought, somewhat inanely. Drown, then rust. They must have waited for the Schellans to come up for air.

“I can’t bear it,” wailed Nyssa. Tegan held her protectively.

“Come on,” she said, with a glance at me, leading Nyssa back to the TARDIS. I followed them.

“I’m all right,” said Nyssa, once inside. “A child, though. Sorry, it got to me.”

“Why,” I asked myself, aloud, “would Daleks attack Schell? They don’t want it; they don’t need it. They didn’t stay. It was a hit and run. Why?” Then I started wondering why I had been recalled to Gallifrey. Even if you laugh at legend, mock myth, retcon rumor – and on Gallifrey there’s a whole lotta retcon goin’ on - you hear it all, repeatedly, not just with your mind but with your – how shall I call it? – your soul. The Time War legends become as much a part of you and your reality as the floor under your bare feet when you get out of bed, or your mother ’s kiss before you speed outside to play (and why was this thought more a lump in my throat than a comfort?) The Matrix was full of them, and prophecies as well, all conflicting of course but when you’ve heard them your whole life…. “No, I whispered. “It can’t be!”

“What is it, Doctor?” Tegan observed me anxiously. “You’ve gone white as a sheet!”

“Collateral damage,” I said, “Or a test run. Either way, trouble….”

The battle in which I next found myself was untenable. My opponents outnumbered and outwilled me. Nyssa alone could have defeated me; with Tegan by her side I had no chance. “We’re not leaving you,” growled Tegan.

“You cannot go to war without me,” insisted Nyssa.

“Don’t go to war at all!”

Nyssa agreed with that. “Don’t go at all!”

I tried to explain. “I don’t want to go. The last thing I want to do is fight. I don’t want to kill and I don’t want to die. But it’s my planet. It’s my planet.”

They understood completely. They whispered together for a moment but I didn’t try to listen; I was thinking hard about what to do, when and where to go, how to prepare, so I didn’t notice Tegan leaving the console room, but she must have, because I saw her come back with a large coil of rope hung on one shoulder. Before I could process this, Nyssa charged me like a bull and knocked me down, flat on my back. She and Tegan flipped me over, sat on me and tied my hands behind my back. I won’t repeat what I yelled at them but they ignored me and just proceeded to tie my legs together.

“Sorry, Doc,” Tegan whispered. “We just can’t let you do this.”

“You have no right,” I whispered back.

“We’re responsible for you!” was all she replied.

Nyssa fetched a sheet and the two of them rolled me onto it. It was difficult for them to drag me out of the console room and all the way to my quarters, but they managed. I wasn’t helpful but my attempts to impede their progress were also futile. I tried rolling about but they just lifted up the edges of the sheet. I could have drawn my knees back and then kicked out and got Tegan in the stomach but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Besides, they had already threatened to hogtie me if I got too rowdy. At last I just let myself be hauled off like a prisoner of war and dumped onto my bed. They did sit me up with a pillow behind me but they left me there, all alone, as alone as I’d ever been. I don’t cry easily but I cried then, in frustration and, yes, in guilt.

When I had calmed down somewhat I started thinking. I was certain I couldn’t set coordinates from bed but I was pretty sure I could talk to the TARDIS. “All right, old girl, we’ve got work to do.” The TARDIS vibrated slightly. I’d been heard! “Now I know you won’t be happy about this but you must trust me. I am placing myself in your care.”

The TARDIS whirred and quivered. I could tell she was upset. I can always tell.

“I need you to let me see into your heart. I need access to the Matrix. I need to see clearly. You know I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important. Beyond important. Life and death. Please.” I’d heard that some Time Lords had failed to survive looking even briefly into the heart of the TARDIS. I’d heard, too, that some had survived but gone mad. I’d never heard of anyone walking away unchanged. “Please,” I begged the TARDIS. “You have to trust me.”

She shuddered so violently that the pillow was dislodged, I slid forward a bit and then hit my head back against the headboard. Nyssa and Tegan came running in and I suppose they saw my glazed eyes, as I saw them but could not focus. “Doctor, what have you done?” cried Tegan. Nyssa replaced the pillow but that was the last I knew of the self I left behind as the TARDIS held me in limbo, deciding whether or not to let me in. She held me that way for what seemed an eternity. I think she was making sure I was okay(ish). She was not unjustified in her hesitation: I was, after all, the boy who had run away from the untempered schism. I couldn’t run away from this.

She let me in.

I know my eyes were closed when the light burned through. I opened them and was completely blind for an instant. Then my vision was consumed with yellow light through which at first I could see nothing. There is not much difference between being blinded by seeing nothing and being blinded by seeing everything at once.

The TARDIS was pulsing oddly. I’d never heard her make that sound. It struck me as a “ready and waiting” signal so I tried, “Are you waiting for me to ask a question? I have lots of questions!” Of course that was not my question, so she just kept pulsing. “All right, I need to know about the Time Wars. When and where.” My vision cleared immediately, and I became aware of my body, not the one tied up on my bed but the one my mind had produced to function in the landscape that had materialized around me. Where was I, anyway? The sky was orange and clear, the grass in the distance was red and unsullied; I was in the drylands of Gallifrey. There was no sign of any kind of attack, not a glimpse of a Dalek on the ground, no hint of anything amiss. “Wrong place? Wrong time?” Then I added, “Or just plain wrong?” I knew that was unlikely. I’d seen Schell’s fate with my own eyes. There had to be a connection. Daleks don’t pick their targets at random.

Maybe the Matrix picked its revelatory moments at random - or maybe I was asking too much, blinding the Matrix by asking everything at once (no, that’s silly). How could I be more specific? Would it make any difference? I was not in control here.

“Is it real?”

I was knocked down by the shock of an explosion 75 yards away, scrambled to my feet to find myself engulfed in flames, closed my eyes, flew through them, rolled and leapt up again just in time to be buffeted by another blast. I was in a defenseless town, neither a city nor the drylands, but a central hub for villages, the kind of place about which you say “I’m going into town, do you need anything?” and now barely a town, in fact in the process of ceasing to be a town; it was rapidly becoming an inferno, as missiles tore into it and set it ablaze. A burning lintel missed me by inches. I ran, only vaguely aware that it was night; that my lungs and eyes were full of smoke, that I was tripping over the pits and pebbles that had been streets and bridges and footpaths, the rubble and ash that had been buildings, homes and libraries, schools and potion shops and cafes; that I was being jostled by men, women, children, people carrying other people, people carrying pets and livestock, crashing into each other, too, trying to escape. Missiles tore them to shreds before my eyes. I was too stunned to consider that I might, at any moment, be shredded too. I did think to look up through the smoke and flames: it wasn’t night at all. Tiny patches of orange sky could still be seen through rare gaps between the Dalek ships that blotted out the suns.

“Can I stop it? Can I prevent it?” My voice was hoarse; I was having a good deal of trouble breathing and as much difficulty maintaining consciousness. It was only when I covered my mouth with a hand, then noticed the blood on my palms, that I realized I had been crawling rather than walking for some time now. I crawled right over the edge of a crater and would have cried out as I hurtled into its blackness except that my breath, such as it was, was knocked out of me.

The TARDIS spat me out like a bone. Returning to my body, no longer in bed, apparently no longer bound but sprawled on the floor, was like being an ice cold, piercingly vibrating tuning fork, struck by lightning and on fire. No, it was more like being skinned alive. So this, not what preceded it but the return therefrom, was what killed, or maddened: so am I dead or mad? That was my half-formed thought as I let go of all thought and allowed the pain to swallow me whole.

When I awoke I was neither dead nor, I hoped, mad. “Thank you,” I whispered to the TARDIS, and passed out again.

“He’s alive,” said a voice I didn’t recognize, in Schellan: music to my ears. I opened my eyes and blinked into focus not only the owner of the voice, D-D-E-A (A-Bflat-A’s husband, father of the child who had died in my arms), but Nyssa, Tegan and two adolescents I hadn’t met. They were all hovering so close that I started and they all leapt back a foot. It was funny, and I laughed. I think that scared them.

“Doctor!” I focused on Nyssa’s face. “You’re back!” I was astonished; how could she have known I’d gone anywhere? Oh, she just meant back to consciousness, or maybe back to life. She was trying to smile but she still looked frightened. I reached for her hand and was surprised that my hand already had been taken, by Tegan. Was I going to be restrained again? No, Tegan was stroking my hand, comforting, not constraining. Nyssa took my other hand; I pulled it away and looked at it. I saw no blood but my palms were raw. I quickly slipped my hand back into Nyssa’s and she smiled - tentatively but it was a real smile.

“Do you think he has a concussion?” asked Tegan.

“You can’t get a virtual concussion,” I started to say, then felt my palms smarting.

“I’d feel better if he’d say something.”

“Must you talk about me as if I weren’t here? I’m here!” I looked around. “I’m here on the floor. Why am I on the floor?”

I underplayed the risk I’d taken in wheedling my way through the heart of the TARDIS into the Matrix, but I didn’t underplay what I’d found. “There wasn’t anything to fight. It was just slaughter. You can’t fight a ground war against Dalek ships. In the Citadel there are such weapons; on the ground all you can do is run and hide, and what good does that do when it’s a debellation? Zero-sum! You may as well throw yourself over a cliff.”

“I hope this means you’re not running off to war, Doctor,” said Tegan, somewhat aggressively.

“I still don’t know when it is,” I admitted.

We were still on the ruins of Schell. My foray into the Time War proper had been brief, but I had been unconscious for 36 hours. Slowly, survivors had emerged from the deep, taken stock, begun the arduous task of rebuilding global communications on land and meanwhile using sonar to locate other survivors. Some of them noticed the TARDIS still standing on the shore and thought to check up on us. Nyssa and Tegan had taken turns watching over me so each could eat and sleep, but neither had born the burden alone; shifts of Schellans, mourning friends and family, nonetheless had sat with me as well, brought food, sung encouragements and, in short, been their usual welcoming selves despite their shock and grief. Now that I was “back,” I was surrounded by enough caregivers to staff a medium-sized clinic, plying me with liquids and roe.

To keep myself from thinking, I helped the Schellans rebuild land infrastructure, of which there hadn’t been much. I listened without comment as they debated, peacefully of course, abandoning the idea of establishing a viable land culture for themselves. Inevitable, some said. Too vulnerable to attack, insisted others. On no other planet I knew had creatures migrated, over incredible stretches of time, from sea to land and then back again. Evolution appeared, everywhere else, to be a one-way ticket. Schellans were aware of this too. Should they throw away this incredible anomalous gift, or should they ignore it until it withered away? Nyssa and Tegan, assisting both physically and advisorily, were as lively as the Schellans in their efforts, but I couldn’t help them in their debate; my mind was bubbling, exploding, with conflicting, useless half-plans, heroic plans of course, to save my own planet. Everything-at-once doesn’t just blind; it paralyzes.

A few Schellans came out of the sea to relieve the land workers, and they were appalled at how much labor was involved in repairing the communications system. “We may not know for a while how most of us fared.” Schell was, as planets go, small, but a small planet is still dauntingly large.

I suggested sending messages in bottles. They stared at me, not rudely of course, but not quite understanding. “The beauty of a message in a bottle,” I explained, “is that you don’t know who will find it. No one expects to find one, and no one who sends one knows where it will end up. A message in a bottle is full of hope.” I realized that my suggestion was absurd: there was no written language on Schell. Songs were preserved through oral tradition. It was, therefore, my turn to be surprised and confused, because they understood me and began to discuss the feasibility of sending messages in bottles, en masse, to see if any were received and answered. Then I got it: the messages didn’t have to be written, or sung, or recorded. They could be objects. One could send a sock (not that they wore socks) or a feather, anything that, by virtue of being contained in a sealed bottle, was easily recognizable as a message.

“We are alive. We exist. We can still put a feather in a bottle!” was a good message… with an implied “And you?”

As night fell, almost everyone retired to the sea and vanished under the protective waves. A-Bflat-A visited us in the TARDIS; we offered her Tegan’s special Australian pie floater and, of course, tea. We sat chatting well into the night. A-Bflat-A spoke at length, dry-eyed, about her child, how eager little B-B had been to explore the beaches and beyond, how she had declared her interest in land architecture, how she had especially wanted to meet D-A-C-D-A-A: me. Apparently, I am legend on Schell. All of this was difficult for me to hear, under the circumstances. What had I done for Schell? I’d got the date wrong and hadn’t been there to defend these gentle people any more than I had been able to defend my home (and did I still consider Gallifrey “home”? When had I stopped thinking of it that way?) I had scrambled for my life like everyone else.

Long after A-Bflat-A had bid us good night and returned to the sea, to her husband and to their loss, Nyssa found me standing at the console, doing absolutely nothing, one hand on my forehead and the other floating above the door lever, or at least that’s how she told me I was; I wasn’t really there. I was trying to stitch together my jumbled, disconnected thoughts, and none of them made any sense. “Doctor?” she said, gently.

I turned toward her and then away. “Am I a coward?” I asked her.

“No! No!” She turned me toward her and made me look into her face. “Doctor, you are the bravest man I have ever met! How could you even ask me such a thing?”

“Did I save your planet?”

“No, but you saved me.”

I scoffed. “Did I save Schell?”

“Schell,” said Tegan, who had heard some of this, “is saving itself, and yes, you helped.”

“In my little way.”

“It’s not as if you saw the Daleks coming and ran away!” Tegan reminded me. “You got recalled!”

“And ran away from that.”

“Good move, I say!”

Nyssa added, “Doctor, I’ve never heard you speak this way. What can we do to help you?”

“Don’t tie me up again,” I said brusquely, and left the console room.

I hadn’t meant to hurt my friends’ feelings. Now I could add that to my list of dispiriting accomplishments.

The next day we made our farewells and decided to try again for the first game of the 1969 World Series. My heart wasn’t in it but I agreed with my friends that it might cheer me up for a short while. Baseball isn’t really my game but this particular Series was historic, I’d never been to Baltimore, Tegan seemed interested and Nyssa was at least curious. The TARDIS was cooperative and we were in the right place at the right time, or at least the right date; we had a couple hours to enjoy the warmth of early autumn Baltimore. We’d landed in the parking lot of Memorial Stadium (itself destined for demolition), set right in the middle of a residential area through which we casually strolled. We hadn’t got far before I saw something that almost stopped my hearts: a Dalek, rolling down Ellerslie Avenue. No one else gave it so much as a glance. I turned and ran.

Nyssa and Tegan ran after me, calling to no avail. I stopped after a couple blocks to catch my breath, turned to face my friends, saw how confused they were and suddenly doubted what I had seen. “Dalek,” I said, leaning heavily against a stop sign; it wobbled. Alarmed, they looked in every direction, then back at me.

“No, Doctor, I’m sure not,” said Nyssa.

“No, back there! I saw it! You must have seen it….”

Tegan and Nyssa both slowly shook their heads.

“I’ve gone mad.” I gripped the stop sign tightly, then let go and dropped down onto the curb. “What they say is true. It drives you mad.”

Nyssa and Tegan sat on the curb on either side of me and regarded me with such sad faces that I was overwhelmed by the pity I saw there and covered my own face with my hands. “Let’s get him back to the TARDIS,” whispered Nyssa. They helped me to my feet and we walked together in silence.

We had almost reached the TARDIS, in the already-crowded stadium parking lot, when I spotted something between two parked cars. I was already walking slightly ahead of my friends - my legs are longer – so I just turned and went to investigate. “Hey,” said Tegan, not shouting, just surprised; she and Nyssa followed me. A middle-aged Asian woman in an orange, black and white jumper, brand new jeans and an Orioles cap was sitting between the cars, her legs straight out in front of her, her eyes unfocused but aimed more or less at the ankle that was twisted.

“Hello,” I said, bending down so she could see me and look up. “I’m the Doctor. Is this your car?” I tapped on the slightly open door. She nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Cindy. Cindy Tran.”

“Let me help you, Cindy.” I picked her up and moved back so that Nyssa could open the back door for me. I made the woman as comfortable as possible on the back seat. Seeing that the keys were still in the ignition, I got in, and as soon as my friends joined us, Nyssa in the back with the injured woman and Tegan up front with me, I drove us out of the lot and into the first gas station I saw, where I was informed that Johns Hopkins Hospital was nearby, and given directions.

“She says she’s diabetic,” Nyssa called to me from the back seat. “She passed out and fell out of the car. She’s worried about her cap.”

“It was on her head. Check the floor.”

“Got it!”

We stayed with Cindy until she was out of the E.R. waiting room and in a small curtained-off cubicle, being looked after. (Tegan made sure Cindy got a stamped parking voucher; I wouldn’t have thought of it.) On our way out we passed a pair of young policemen, one black, one white, each with a firm grip on an older white man who was making a racket, shouting incomprehensibly and struggling to free himself as they tried to get him into the emergency room. “Easy, fella,” said the white cop, and the prisoner responded by breaking free, grabbing Nyssa and backing out through the big glass doors. He had stopped ranting but his ragged breathing was painfully loud. The cops drew their guns but dared not shoot.

“Let her go,” I said, resisting the impulse to shout. Instead, I smiled. “She hasn’t harmed you.” He crooked an elbow across her throat. Tegan, behind me, gasped. “Her name is Nyssa. I’m the Doctor. This is our friend, Tegan. We are all unarmed. Can you let her go now, please?” All the while I’d been closing the ground between us, inch by inch. “Are you injured? What’s your name?” This confused him enough that he stopped backing up, which is good because he was at the curb and a car was pulling up. Nyssa elbowed him, slipped out of his grasp and ran to me. I had to hand her off to Tegan because the policemen had not lowered their weapons. The man was backed against the car, holding his solar plexus instead of raising his hands. I put myself between him and those weapons. “There is no need for that,” I said. I turned to face the man but had to look down, as he was now sitting on the curb. I briefly saw my face in his; hadn’t I been sitting on a curb with despair written all over me, how long ago, a few hours now? We’d missed the first pitch. I stooped down and took the man’s face in my hands. “It’s going to be all right. We’re not dead yet.” The man laughed and let me help him up.

It was a long walk back to the TARDIS and we were all exhausted. Still, we sat up a bit, not talking much, just sitting calmly in each other’s company, sipping a little tea. (The presence of the TARDIS in the stadium parking lot caused only the tiniest stir; I think we got a parking ticket but it must have fallen off the door when we went into hover mode.) The TARDIS found us a pretty good FM radio station and we listened to a bit of rock and roll. Tegan got up and danced, to Nyssa’s delight. Finally, I said, “I suppose I should find out why I was recalled to Gallifrey.”

“It could be important,” Tegan agreed.

“Do we have to go there right away?” asked Nyssa, anxiously. Our last visit had proven somewhat traumatic.

“I suppose we could just send a message in a bottle.” At this I laughed. It felt good to laugh but I stopped myself.

“No, it’ll keep,” I told Nyssa, “but maybe not for long. I should go.”

"We should go, Doctor,” Tegan corrected me.

“Yes, of course.”

“You still don’t get it. We’re a team, Doctor.” I put down my cup and thought about that.

“Still,” I insisted, “It’s my job to keep you lot safe.”

“And it’s our job to keep you safe.”

“Well,” I admitted, “you’re better at your job than I am at mine.”

Nyssa frowned. “No, Doctor, Tegan is right. We’re a team. We keep each other safe, and we don’t keep score.”

“I couldn’t keep Gallifrey safe. I couldn’t even start. Even now I have no idea where or when or how to do this.”

“What do you say, Doctor, when we can’t change something?” Tegan thought. “Fixed point, that’s it. A fixed point. You can’t change a fixed point.”

“Why not,” I grumbled, unreasonably. I knew why not. I didn’t care. “You know why I’m a bad Doctor? I lost the patient. That’s why.” I wondered briefly whether I was, somehow, drunk on Earl Gray.

“You’re a good Doctor,” declared Nyssa. “Gallifrey lives.”

“For now….”

“And where there’s life…” Tegan brightened.

I finished her sentence. “There’s hope.”

Before we set off for Gallifrey, we got the TARDIS’ full cooperation and landed in New York in time for the last game of the 1969 World Series. Proving Tegan’s point, the Mets won.

THE END