Memoirs of a Timelord (30 page)

       

       I was on a sort of sabbatical for a few years.  Sounds better when I say it that way.  Truthfully, I'd been ditching work on an epic scale.  I'd been MIA for a few years after dropping out of a project on Cerebreus.  Sure, I could go right back to the spot where I left off and pick up like I was never gone, but it was a boring project and I had better things to do.  Who gives a shit if the Damaculites evolve socially?  They're a spedly race who still believe in idolatry.  Those knuckleheads spend most of their lives on their knees praying to a big rock shaped like Colonel Sander's head.  They're not gonna like it when I introduce science to their culture.  Theologically motivated societies never do.  There'll be lynchings, people burned alive for heresy, and all the usual fun stuff associated with early scientific enlightenment.  

       So rather than deal with all that bullshit I just dropped out for a while.  I'd pick up where I left off in a few years.  With absolute recall, I would remember every detail of the operation so I could resume without a hiccup.  That left me a lotta time to look for home.   

       Like my previous trips, it started with a quick jaunt to a nearby galaxy...just to check.  Then another, and another until I was so far away I couldn't even see the DuNai empire.  Just one galaxy after another.  I got to going so fast that I never even set foot on solid ground in most of 'em.  I'd materialize just within the galactic disk and query the Guf, then POOF, I'd be on to the next one.  It was like speed dating.  

       I finally spun out after about a decade of pretty relentless searching.  I'd really begun to detach from reality, what with the endless parade of galaxies flashing by.  I'd had so many Guf in my head that I'd forgotten what it was to be a corporeal being.  I didn't need to eat, sleep, defecate, or even take a break.  At the speed of thought I could adapt to any environmental conditions imaginable.  I'd plunged into gas giants, and swam with solar plasma worms.  I could convert matter with a touch, and absorb energy directly from any source.  Yet for all of my fancy DuNai technology, I was still lost and far from home.

       I kept thinking of Crazy Lester of the Red Cauldron galaxy, how it must have been for him to search all those years.  He prolly spun out too, just dropped out of transit mid-jump and crashed landed on some little planetoid.  I was far from calling it quits, but the image scared the piss outta me all the same.  I just kept my daughter's picture burning brightly in the back of my mind, like a shrine to light my way through the blackness.  I know that finding home is going to be a challenge, and every Timelord I have ever subbed for has told me that it is unimaginably difficult, yet I am still shocked by just how hard it has been. Holy fuck, you try having an intimate chat with a million people, having them into your mind, a new one every thirty seconds or so.  So many Guf, but none of them the right one.  I gotta take a break...

       So I'm sitting in this saloon in a dirty little town that doesn't even deserve a name.  Let's call it Shitsville, that'd be an appropriate name for this bronze-age village on the edge of the Gort frontier.  They're a warm-blooded insectoid species with an exoskeleton and eyes that see in near darkness.  It wasn't my first time as a bug.  Creepy at first, but you get used to it after a few years.  Bug mating rituals are another story though.  A divorce usually involves eating your mate head first.  In some places you get to eat his lawyer too.

       Anyhow, I'm sitting at the bar drinking Annula, which is actually a secretion from a bug's ass.  Not a Gort's ass, but a Zumiclite's ass, so it'd be the equivalent of a human drinking poodle piss.  Sure, they refine it and cure it for a year in a cistern, and it's reeeeeeallly good when it's done, but ultimately you are drinking excrement.  Bugs do stuff like that, you can't think in human terms on alien worlds.  It just doesn't apply.

       I'm taking a sip of my drink when I get this sudden sensation of danger from the local Guf.  Immediately I went into zero-time and ran a high resolution scan of the entire town.  Seeing nothing, I was just about to ask Zelda what she was talking about.  During my short stay in this galaxy I had grown chummy with the local Guf, even given her a name.  She was lonely and we'd hit it off right away. 

       That's when the door slammed open.  Really, it was a big hole cut in the mud by the proprietor who was a Trapdoor Spider.  The hardened clay plug swung on a buncha vines that had grown into it.  

       Standing there in the door is this mean looking little motherfucker and two big bugs behind him.  My DuNai eyes see nothing but three bugs, so I am starting to think these guys are trans-corporeal beings, or Ethereals.  The way the little one looked at me as he strode up purposefully said that he knew I was from outta town.  My polymorphic disguise didn't fool him for a minute. 

       "Strangers ain't welcome." He told me from just a few inches away.  I could taste his chemical dispensers as he flapped his inner jaw; this was definitely the bug way of telling me to git.

       The place started to clear out quick as the henchbugs spread out.  No one had any guns, so they were just trying to intimidate me.  Three big manly bugs versus one little girly bug, oh my.  

       "I'll leave when I'm damned well ready." I buzzed with my antennae, sure sign that I wasn't going to budge.  

       "What're your intentions?" Shorty asked.  Something told me he was the whole show.  The goons were prolly just illusions.  Hell, this guy was an Ethereal; the whole scene could be in my head for all I know.  

       "Just passing thru, on my way home.  What's it to you?  You writin' a book or something?" I scowled by deflecting my incisors downward.  Bugs have a lingo all of their own.

       "Book?" he seemed unsure of the reference until I felt him lifting the concept from my brain.  "The Gort cannot read, why would I write a book?"

       "Shaddup." I shook my head as I talked to Zelda in the back of my mind.  Her whisperings helped paint a picture of what was going on.

       It was all taking a minute to put together, but I was finally able to see the situation for what it was.  These guys were the hillbilly brothers and I was the big-city suitor, here to court their sister.  It all began to make sense.  Remember when I said Ethereals were smart and dumb at the same time?  They had plucked the image of these rednecks from my head as a way to communicate their intentions.  These guys were concerned about the way I'd been cavorting with their spinster sister.  Imagine that?

       I'd heard of it happening.  This galaxy had very few sensitives, and not a single prophet.  That had left the Guf alone with her ethereal caretakers for nine billion years.  In fact I got the distinct impression that I was the first extragalactic visitor.  I would have figured that at least one other Editor woulda popped by this place.  It was a pretty galaxy from the distance, with its nearly perfect pinwheel configuration that terminated in a little galactic smudge at the ends.  Along each arm there were many worlds that would develop into blooming civilizations.  I had seen it when I made my first pass of the place.  It was a beautiful little galaxy, really.  If ever I coulda given up my quest for home, Zelda would have been my first choice.  We just clicked.

       "Bring us the one that's meant fer her.  But stay any longer and it'll just hurt her more when ya go." Shorty spit a globule of puss onto the floor between us.  I thought about telling him to go fuck himself inside-out when suddenly there was this image in my mind.  

       It was Zelda and me, running hand in hand through a meadow of green grass and flowers, happy and contented.  It was an idyllic picture.  But then it gets dark as I realize that she's getting a little too serious, too clingy.  Nine billion years with no one to talk to but Ethereals makes a girl lonely.  Suddenly I had that feeling you get when you wake up in the morning and realize you slept with the fat guy, and now you have to chew off your own arm so you can get outta there without waking him up.  Y'know, that feeling...oh shit what was I thinking last night?  But then the image shifted its focus to Zelda in the wake of my departure, and I could see that she would be deeply hurt by it all.  For all the power and intensity of a Guf, she was really just a fragile young girl at this stage.  Composed mainly of energy from lower life forms like plants and jellyfish, with a hint of Gort, she was a bumpkin. 

       In a flash I could see that Shorty was right.  No good would come of my protracted stay.  But there was another quandary to this situation.  If this was unclaimed space, then what was to keep me from doing exactly as Shorty had asked; bring them the one who is for her, bring them their Timelord.

       And why not?  It's not like I don't live in a factory for Temporal Editors.  I had access to the resources, I even knew the guy who ran the place.  Sure, I could make it happen; I could give Zelda someone to talk to.

       Pulling back to the outer rim, I began advancing through time at a fair clip.  Picking up speed I could feel the galaxy's drone as it changed over the years while its civilizations bloomed and blossomed, filling the Guf with higher beings.  That's when I saw it, or really felt it, the tinge of another mind in the Guf for the briefest moment.  Backing up a half million years, I found that spot.  I could feel their wake, hear Zelda whispering to them.  It was all so familiar.

       Jon Rundar was third son of a carpenter.  Their people, the Homus Felicitous, were a primitive bunch, living in trees and swinging on vines.  Pre-industrial, they were more of an agrarian society who learned to farm parasitic plants at the highest levels of the forest canopy.  But I'll tell you what; they had the most awesome tree houses.  Like something halfway between a nest and Swiss Family Robinson.  

       Jon had a happy life and Zelda kept him clear of any danger with her whisperings.  He matured and became husband to a poly-dynamic family that numbered in the hundreds.  Jon Rundar lived a truly idyllic life there in the trees.

       But in the end something gets us all.  Jon died after a long bout with Chlorplasmia, a disease that leads to toxins in the blood.  Your own body poisons you.  It was terrible watching him for a year as his veins burned while being racked with nausea.  So many times I wanted to pull the plug and just harvest his ass.  He was gonna die eventually, hadn't he looked into the brink long enough?  But then I had to remember the basic philosophy of the DuNai; everything in life, including death itself, is a learning experience to be carried to your next existence.  As painful as it was to look back on my own death, I have to admit that I did come to understand some truths about the universe in those last weeks of my life.  When you're dying you learn a lot about yourself too.

       Finally, I watched that last breath, as his bladder sacks stopped pumping and his limbs finally lay still.  He was done in this life, and his pain was finally at an end.

       Holding out the buffer, I pulled him into it while cleanly replacing his body with a replica.  All around me I could feel Zelda's eyes, her concern, and her fear.  I could also feel her loneliness.  Billions of years punctuated by one brief existence.  The average lifespan of a Homus Felicitous was a blink of the eyes for a Guf.  It was like teasing a starving woman with a few crumbs.

       From there I made one very long jump directly to the House.  It seemed like an eternity that I was in transit.  Really, insertions are temporally ambiguous; the movement itself is actually made outside of time-space, where Einstein's theories are a little less applicable.  Nonetheless, it seemed to take forever to get home.  Heh, I called the House home.  I guess I did live there six times as long as I ever lived on Earth.

       Stomping through the mansion I find the Boss having dinner with Bara and the trainees.  Meesha was there too; my morphic daughter was in school to be a Galactic Engineer. 

       "You have been out there for a while." The Boss said with a smile.  He had looked at my chronometer automatically.  I prolly looked like hell.  I hadn't rephased in a couple of Terrans.

       "I brought you something." I grinned, knowing that I would finally surprise that unflappable sumbitch.  "Here, it's your next apprentice." I beamed as I held out the buffer.

       The Boss was surprised alright, but not a good surprise.  Shifting in his seat, he leaned back as he clearly considered how to continue.

       "There was to be no successor; you are my last apprentice." His eyes said he was not kidding.

       I glanced back and forth between him and Bara, not sure if there was something I missed. 

       "Lucinda is entering ascension.  Very soon I will be joining her as I complete my life's work."  His tone was level as he spoke.  I could see that Bara was as surprised as I was; he even knocked over his Cree!  

       "But there are millions of galaxies out there that have not been assigned." I thumbed back the way I had come, "is no one gonna take care of those galaxies and see them rise to ascension?" 

       "You will." He looked directly at me, then to Bara.  "I have had many students, and they will all contribute to maintaining the school for future generations.  And there are the other Masters, I am but one of many that remain still.  That young soul you have in the buffer is not my next apprentice, but your first."

       I just stood there, stunned, with that damned matter buffer in my hands.  It was just inconceivable, a world without DorLek.  Suddenly I didn't feel like such a know-it-all.  It actually scared me, the thought of trying to keep all of this going on my own.  Sure, I knew a few parlor tricks, but I could never be the Zen master that the Boss was.  Honestly, at that moment I felt like I didn't know shit from shinola when it came to doing what the Boss did.  Funny thing, I could feel the same thoughts from Bara, and he was an experienced Editor.