17 - Beltempest
VIP免费
2024-12-24
0
0
374.61KB
133 页
5.9玖币
侵权投诉
DOCTOR WHO
Beltempest
An Eighth Doctor Ebook
By Jim Mortimore
Contents
Prologue
Part 1:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Interlude
Part 2:
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Epilogue
for
Steve
'Because I draw on the temporal psychic energy of all spankings through the ages '
Cole
- definitely
one of the good guys
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
butterfly 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 sparse 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 scraped 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 space 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 nobody - 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 cumbersome 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, massing 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 lustre 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 shell 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.
The old red giant is gone, in its place a younger, warmer star.
A momentary flush of life on the innermost planet is replaced by another threat of extinction, this time not
from cold but from heat.
Centuries pass. Aeons. Throughout the solar system other changes are taking place. Old life, dying among
the outer planets, is given another lease by the heat and light of this newer, more temperate star. New life on
the innermost world is placed under threat. The evolutionary imperative for survival throughout the changing
solar system is renewed.
While the yellow main-sequence star itself progresses slowly through a second impossible infancy, life on its
many worlds continues to grow and evolve.
It is a process observed fleetingly by three planet-sized masses as their orbits carry them beyond a solar
system now flourishing with the new life they have inadvertently made possible.
Part One
Chapter One
There is only one truth and that truth is endless and that truth is death.
Eldred Saketh rehearsed his final speech in his head, bringing the 'corder close by to ensure it caught every
passionately enunciated word and pious expression as he stepped out on to the lava field to die.
His face was calm despite the torturous heat rising from the molten rock amid clouds of toxic steam. His
farewells and preparations were said, his life was now surrendered gladly so that he might enter his Endless
State.
Saketh knew he had only moments to live. He had no regrets. If his life had taught him anything it was that
life itself was simply a muddled and inaccurate definition of that which was not Endless - a state of emotional
frenzy with no clear focus or objectives, a state that did little more than dilute the truth and purity of the
Endless State of Unbeing which was death.
Truth and purity were best for people. The thousands who had preceded him on to the surface of Belannia II
had understood that. Yet still there were millions - billions - who did not understand. Their lives were small,
insignificant points of no dimension, circumscribed by their hollow loves and self-serving desires. They did not
understand the truth. Life was fear. Life was confusion. Life was helplessness. Life was pain.
The Endless was the removal of such pain. Those who were Endless now understood that. So too would the
billions to come once they had experienced at second hand the glorious inception of his Endless State.
Of course you couldn't put it quite like that. You had to tell the truth in terms they could understand. You had
to quote scriptures and mention rewards and eternal life after death. It was a process Eldred had found over
the years to be both rewarding and frustrating in equal measures: a perfect balance - and a perfect illustration
of the unnecessary and impure complexity of anything not Endless.
Now, in recognising his frustration and anger at the need to obscure the truth with pretty lies in order to give
people the greatest gift of all for free, Eldred also recognised his own weakness, his own fallacy, his own
state of impure complexity. It was time to purify himself and therefore his message.
The Message.
Eldred carefully rehearsed his final words again. They were the most important words he would ever speak.
The future of his belief depended upon them. The speech was beautiful in its simplicity. It could not possibly
fail to be understood by anyone who beard it.
Seeing no reason to wait any longer, Eldred began to speak. He spoke the words slowly, with gravity befitting
their importance, rejoicing in the near-intolerable pain the toxic air brought to his throat and lungs in exchange
for their utterance.
Then, screaming in what he told himself was exultation, Eldred Saketh fell convulsing upon the very edge of
the lava field and waited impatiently to die.
And waited. And burned. And screamed. And waited. But he did not die. Instead he found a new Message.
This new Message even had a Sign.
Above Eldred Saketh's frenziedly thrashing body, above the lava fields and the toxic air of Belannia n, the
ferocious yellow ball of incandescent hydrogen, which for thousands of aeons had provided life and stability in
a system already old beyond its time, began once more to change.
***
Eyes closed, elegant fingers loosely clasping copies of bothHospital Station by James White andGreen
Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss, which he had been reading simultaneously, the Doctor stretched out one leg
from his sand-locked, palm-shaded deck chair and nudged the replay button he'd recently wired into the
Ship's gramophone with the toe of his left shoe.
The stretch was a bit of an effort, but not as much of an effort as moving the chair closer to the music system
- also sand-locked a little further up the beach from the sun-brightened waves -would have been.
At his touch, the button - a bright, red, palm-sized emergency shutdown control removed from the drive
generator of a junked sandminer - sank home with a satisfying clunk and, after the appropriate attendant
clashing of gears and slippage of gramophone needles across sandy wax, the music system obligingly began
to warble a repeat of Louis Armstrong's 'We Have All The Time In The World'. The Doctor sighed happily.
Exactly 6,000,000,215 nanoseconds and one line of poignantly enunciated lyric later, a woman's voice said
quietly from the sand beside him, 'Wouldn't it be easier just to put ten copies of the record on to the spindle?'
The Doctor stretched luxuriously. 'You know what I like most about you, Sam?' he said, then immediately
answered his own rhetorical question: "The way you ask such challenging questions.' Samantha Jones
frowned. In the same quite, adult tone of voice, she said, 'Thank you, Doctor. And I really like the way you
still, think of me as a child.'
The Doctor leapt to his feet. The motion was effortless, the speed dizzying. He bounced lightly on his toes for
a moment, relishing the feel of gravity fighting with his own inertia. 'My dear Sam, the aquatic Crocodilians of
Aquaatus VI are subjected to such terrible physical trauma from their environment that their intelligent,
telepathic embryos are born so brain-damaged their only useful function is as a protective host for another
intelligent, telepathic embryo.'
'That,' Sam said, 'is utterly distasteful.'
"The point being: childhood is relative.' The Doctor considered, then added rapidly,'Except, of course, when
the child in question is also a relative, in which case the relativity becomes relative and, er, well, you do see
where we're going with this, don't you?'
Sam affected nonchalance. 'No. But wherever it is we're making good time.'
The Doctor casually studied the relative levels of quartz and fossilised animal matter present in fifty-three of
the closest grains of sand.'Relatively speaking, Sam, nothing is going nowhere. And, given the current energy
state of the universe, nothing is definitely going nowhere with a relative speed greater than the most excited
subatomic particle.' The Doctor stopped bouncing and instead began to pace. He did this with the same
manic intensity with which he did everything, including thinking. The fifty-three grains of sand - along with
several thousand others -were displaced by his feet as easily as they were displaced by his mind.
Sam sighed.'Manifestly,' she said with all the patience she could muster.
The Doctor stopped pacing suddenly. 'I don't suppose you're old enough to have offspring yet, are you?'
'Children, you mean?' Sam blew out her cheeks and huffed mightily. 'Now there's a conversational leap of
biblical proportions.'
The Doctor waited.
Sam said, 'I love you when you're in a rhetorical mood. Kids. Well.Yeah. Sure I want them. Doesn't everyone?
Don't you?'
The Doctor opened his mouth to respond but Sam was already continuing,'Don't worry. The question's
rhetorical. The idea of all that pain bringing forth new life is horrible but - you know - kind of interesting. I
mean, why does it have to hurt like that? I mean -it's hardly pro-evolution, is it? If women were sensible they'd
all have babies in test tubes and nobody would need to be hurt again, right?'
The Doctor frowned. 'Tell that to the test tube.'
Sam giggled. 'You what?'
'Just my morbid little joke. Forget it.'
Sam frowned. 'Whatever. Anyway... what about you? Do you have a family?'
摘要：
展开>>
收起<<
DOCTORWHOBeltempestAnEighthDoctorEbookByJimMortimoreContentsProloguePart1:Chapter1Chapter2Chapter3Chapter4Chapter5Chapter6InterludePart2:Chapter7Chapter8Chapter9Chapter10EpilogueforSteve'BecauseIdrawonthetemporalpsychicenergyofallspankingsthroughtheages'Cole-definitelyoneofthegoodguysPrologueEvensta...
声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！
相关推荐
-
架构演进：小米的经验分享VIP免费
2025-03-31 5 -
Massive particle interferometry with lattice solitons Piero Naldesi1Juan Polo2Peter D Drummond3Vanja Dunjko4Luigi Amico2Anna Minguzzi5and Maxim Olshanii4 1Université Grenoble-Alpes LPMMC F-38000 Grenoble
2025-05-02 0 -
Averaged Solar Torque Rotational Dynamics for Defunct Satellites Conor J. Bensonand Daniel J. Scheeres
2025-05-02 0 -
Preprint MASS M ULTI -ATTRIBUTE SELECTIVE SUPPRESSION Chun-Fu Richard Chen1 Shaohan Hu1 Zhonghao Shi12 Prateek Gulati13
2025-05-02 0 -
Preprint IN-CONTEXT REINFORCEMENT LEARNING WITH ALGORITHM DISTILLATION
2025-05-02 0 -
Portfolio optimization with discrete simulated annealing Álvaro Rubio-García1Juan José García-Ripoll1and Diego Porras1 1Instituto de Física Fundamental IFF-CSIC Serrano 113 28006 Madrid Spain
2025-05-02 1 -
Polynomial Equations Theory and Practice Simon Telen Abstract Solvingpolynomialequationsisasubtaskofpolynomialoptimization.This
2025-05-02 0 -
Polarization Spectroscopy of High-Order Harmonic Generation in Gallium Arsenide SHATHA KAASSAMANI1 THIERRY AUGUSTE1 NICOLAS
2025-05-02 0 -
Phase diagrams of lattice models on Cayley tree and chandelier network a review
2025-05-02 3 -
Performance of Quantum Preprocessing under Phase Noise Zuhra Amiri Boulat A. Bashy Janis N otzel
2025-05-02 1
分类：外语学习
价格：5.9玖币
属性：133 页
大小：374.61KB
格式：PDF
时间：2024-12-24
相关内容
-
Portfolio optimization with discrete simulated annealing Álvaro Rubio-García1Juan José García-Ripoll1and Diego Porras1 1Instituto de Física Fundamental IFF-CSIC Serrano 113 28006 Madrid Spain
分类：图书资源
时间：2025-05-02
标签：无
格式：PDF
价格：10 玖币
-
Polynomial Equations Theory and Practice Simon Telen Abstract Solvingpolynomialequationsisasubtaskofpolynomialoptimization.This
分类：图书资源
时间：2025-05-02
标签：无
格式：PDF
价格：10 玖币
-
Polarization Spectroscopy of High-Order Harmonic Generation in Gallium Arsenide SHATHA KAASSAMANI1 THIERRY AUGUSTE1 NICOLAS
分类：图书资源
时间：2025-05-02
标签：无
格式：PDF
价格：10 玖币
-
Phase diagrams of lattice models on Cayley tree and chandelier network a review
分类：图书资源
时间：2025-05-02
标签：无
格式：PDF
价格：10 玖币
-
Performance of Quantum Preprocessing under Phase Noise Zuhra Amiri Boulat A. Bashy Janis N otzel
分类：图书资源
时间：2025-05-02
标签：无
格式：PDF
价格：10 玖币
渝公网安备50010702506394
