Obligation

Someone is killing Time Lords – not specific Time Lords, out of personal animosity, but any Time Lord, just for being a Time Lord. I am at once proud to be a Time Lord and averse to spending any time at all with other Time Lords; when they’re not busy frustrating me to tears they’re engaged in boring me to pieces. As long as someone is killing Time Lords, though, I must be one. It’s the only possible attitude to assume.

A Jewish friend of mine who also happens to be an atheist once told me that although she has an affinity for many aspects of Judaism, and even more aspects of Jewishness, she often does feel like a stranger among her own people (at least in large gatherings -- and of course, not believing in any deities could threaten to put a serious crimp in her Yiddishkeit}. So what keeps her self-identifying as a Jew? “The fact that somewhere in the universe there’s at least one person who hates me and wants me dead without knowing that I individually exist. It’s an obligation. A mitzvah.” Yes, that’s how it is with me. I could be anything. I’m still young, only in my 800s. I have most of my lives ahead of me. Today I have to be a Time Lord.

Self-hatred being the most virulent type of hatred, it occurs to me that the entity killing Time Lords is a Time Lord.

The Master being who he is, it occurs to me that he might be the Time Lord killing Time Lords.

Knowing what the Master is, it occurs to me that he can’t be the Time Lord killing Time Lords. Whoever is killing them is providing swift, clean, almost merciful deaths. The Master is never merciful.

(Besides, if the Master was killing Time Lords, I’d be at the top of his hit list. I don’t know if this killer has a hit list.)

So while I do feel obligated to be a Time Lord – I mean not just be one, but to act like one – do I have to be Sherlock Holmes to boot? That’s a kick when you don’t have to, but a drag when you do. (And wasn’t Holmes a consulting detective? No one has come to me for help yet.) Why is it up to me to figure out who this killer is?

Oh, yeah. Because I’m the Doctor. I just can’t help myself.

It is not easy to kill a Time Lord for good unless that Time Lord is at the end of the regeneration cycle. You have to catch the Time Lord unawares and not give him or her the slightest chance to regenerate. A beheading, for example, would work. Poisoning: not so much. An effective TLK (Time Lord Killer) would need to be consistently good at creeping up behind, placing land mines just so or at least grenade-tossing. So far, in the last six days, five Time Lords have died suddenly and violently, their killer or killers remaining anonymous. Not one has died on Gallifrey. Two died on Earth, two thousand miles apart but both (bizarrely) of having a chandelier fall onto them as they ate. Their heads were smashed. One died in a lava flow on Io. One was shot through both hearts simultaneously on the planet Sherwood, not during a competition but alone, in the middle of the night; an apple was found glued to her cranium. You could say the fifth one caught my especial interest as it was quite personal to me: no one has yet figured out how she died, but she did so in a packed university stadium on Earth Six, watching a kendo match. One moment she was applauding and the next moment she was sitting there with her hands on her knees, dead and unregenerated. I was there. I was the one who’d invited her there. My friend Gordy was in that match and the Time Lord who died in the seat next to me, while I was silently cheering my friend on (it is bad form to cheer), was a friend, too.

I first met the Arborist when I was planning to steal a Venusian magnolia tree from a tree-abuser on Gallifrey. She wasn’t the Arborist then; we were both young, but she wasn’t even a Time Lord yet and I just called her Tommi. I thought she and Gordy might get along well for a silly reason: they were both young. Well, I wasn’t matchmaking or anything! I just thought it might be beneficial for each to have a friend within their own specific maturity bracket. Gordy’d had his heart broken recently and Tommi… I’d sort of lost track of Tommi over the last century or two, but she seemed eager enough to get off of Gallifrey and live a little. That’s not what ended up happening. As I say: personal.

There was no use trying to hide the fact that someone in the audience had died. We were sitting in the middle of the row. I just picked her up and carried her into the aisle. Some people gasped; others didn’t notice anything unusual.

I’d left the TARDIS in Gordy’s dressing room. There wasn’t much dressing room left over (properly it wasn’t Gordy’s, but he and three other fellows had the use of it that evening; properly it wasn’t a dressing room at all, but a storage closet for sports equipment, all of which recently had been stolen). I carried her into the TARDIS, set up the pull-out bed in the console room, laid her out on it and kicked myself for not having been able to think of an alternative to leaving the scene of a crime while I had access to the very spot where Tommi had died.

She wasn’t going anywhere. I ran back into the TARDIS interior to fetch some of my more Holmesian tools, various strips to collect and analyze blood, DNA, fingerprints, toeprints, buttprints, nose prints, hair samples, soil, building materials, mold, I forget what else, but a very thorough sort of tool. Slipping back down the row as if perhaps I had just accompanied my friend to her designated private area, I found my own seat and casually withdrew some test strips from my breast pocket and nonchalantly swabbed her seat with each of them. A glance at the stage told me that Gordy’s match was over; new contestants were glaring at each other, to the audience’s delight. I slipped back out, hoping I would reach the TARDIS before Gordy did. Although he no longer traveled with me, he still had a key. Friends near, friends far, friends are friends.

He had preceded me there and was staring, horrified, at Tommi’s corpse.

“I can explain” can be a touchy way to start a conversation.

“Is… was this your friend?”

“Yes,” I sighed. “She was looking forward to meeting you.”

“She’s a Time Lady?”

“Time Lord. It’s a species, not peerage.”

“So why didn’t she regenerate?”

“It happened too fast.”

“What happened?”

“That,” I said, “is what I shall have to find out.”