Tomorrow was very dull. I willed to have got up, went to work, came home and I willed to go to bed without willing to have spoken to anybody. I don’t think I’ll bother with tomorrow. Let the grey wanderers sort it out. I am leaving the angry man again. He is loud and furious, a balloon of multicoloured light and emptiness. As a child, I loved this moment. As an adult, I understand more of what he has to say, and the comedy is diffuse somewhat. Still, an Oscar winning piece of life.

*

"You don’t know?!" The Doctor boomed. "You haven’t the faintest idea where you come from, or what you are?" He fixed Jonathan with a rather critical stare. "Given your rather individualistic approach to life I hardly find that credible!"

"It’s very simple. I have never looked."

"Well, then I suggest you do so. Now." The Doctor raised his jaw and glowered at the other man. Jonathan could just see the flickers of death around that face, but so far away. Strange. How long could the Doctor live?

"No."

"Why not?" The grey wanderer- a term somewhat apocryphal to this one’s garb- leant back in his chair and sipped at a glass of orange juice. Jonathan looked around the pub evasively. In an alcove, several students were preening themselves about some past dramatic feat at the Burton Taylor. Flicker of light. The playlet is at best ironically self aware, at worst nervously self-conscious nonsense. Flicker of light.

"Well, goodbye, Doctor. Our paths will cross again." Flicker of light.

"This conversation will end quite soon."

"I’ll take your word for that. You still haven’t answered my question."

"Nor do I intend to."

"I see. Strictly speaking, of course, you made a slight grammatical error at that point."

"I shall correct it in past." The grey wanderer leant forward, irritated.

"What proof do I have that you are conducting this conversation in the right order, hmm?" He frowned, momentarily confused.

"None, other than common sense." To conduct more than a few isolated chunks of conversation out of sequence would invite confusion of the highest order. The Doctor nodded, understanding. The conversation lapsed into trivia for a while. Jonathan had already been through this several times; he wasn’t presently in the mood for idle chatter. Flicker of light.

"If we could return to the topic at hand?" The Doctor rubbed his hands together, nervously.

"Provided that we return to the true topic at hand, I have no objection. Why do you interrogate me about my past when what concerns you is your future?"

"How do you know about that?" A start of surprise, a moment of fear. A moment to treasure again and again.

"Because you reacted in that manner."

"You’re out of sequence!"

"There is no rule, merely that it is advisable to restrict such behaviour in the interests of clarity. Restrict, not remove. You are here to have your fortune told, are you not?"

"I’d phrase it a little less… occultly than that, but that is the general idea, yes."

"The Valeyard."

"How… oh. Yes, the Valeyard."

"Why are you here?"

"Don’t you know?" Jonathan winced. His reply came through gritted teeth.

"Not until you… have answered the question." The Doctor frowned, looking at the youth speculatively, then rubbed his cat badge, smiled ruefully, and spoke.

"I assume that you can pick up enough second hand knowledge to understand who the Valeyard is, and what he means to me."

"Of course. I can even tell you how you will become him, if that helps."

"Yes. I need to know that."

"So you can prevent it? Oh no. We’re dealing with rather different concepts of time, Doctor, one flexible, one inflexible. If the two intermesh, mine has priority. It cannot be stopped."

*

There! That is the moment. The grey wanderer, the brightest, most free of all of them collapses in, his pride kicked down in a moment. I live it several times, and then move on. It might be just as well to savour the full experience of that meeting.

*

"The archive files on Gallifrey did not mention that." The Doctor’s voice has stiffened somehow, as he holds back the cloud of dark horror in his mind. "They did go into great detail however. You are something of an irritant to them, you know. Well done!" The Time Lord studied Jonathan dubiously. Several thousand years ago, temporal control had detected a minor anomaly on late twentieth century Earth, one person whose timeline seemed… somehow wrong. It had taken them five centuries to understand the terrible reason why. Flicker of light

The stout man in the pantomime costume marched into the Mitre, loudly ordered an orange juice, circumnavigated a meeting of the local Professor X Appreciation Society, sat down opposite Jonathan and said that he was an alien.

"Specifically, I’m a Time Lord. I believe you know them as the ‘grey wanderers’."

"How are you aware of that?" The answer was already known, but causal continuity had to be maintained- therefore, the question must be asked.

"You had a nervous breakdown about three years ago."

"Indeed. I always find it a most charming period to visit."

"The words: ‘Grey Wanderers won’t tie me down’ were inscribed on your bedroom wall. Fifty times. Proof of a somewhat unstable personality, I’d say."

"What, precisely, would you expect. I go there to relax." Flicker of light.

"I’m rather surprised the Time Lords haven’t dealt with you by now. Obviously, you aren’t doing anything technically dangerous- you don’t try to live alternate futures, or to alter your past, but you do bend the rules rather a bit. I would have thought they would have tried something at least mildly unpleasant."

"Oh, they are doing. They just needed you to act as a guide… and a cover story. If anyone on Gallifrey ever exposes it, they blame you. As the most likely whistle blower is you yourself, it is a rather clever little gag."

"Then what…?"

"That potted plant happens to share one or two things with your own mobile phone box. A few seconds after you leave, a Celestial Intelligence Agent will emerge, shoot me through the left cerebral hemisphere with a rather sweet little pistol, and then presumably leave again. I can’t swear to the leaving- I’m not usually in a fit position to judge at that point."

"I see. This doesn’t concern you?"

"No more than the ending of a good, if short, book. You don’t understand, do you?" Jonathan leant forward, eyes suddenly blazing with passion. "There is no ‘present’ to me. No present, no choice, no hope." You might expect me to try to get away, to fight, to try… but why? Your time is flexible, wanderer, mine is not. At the instant of my conception my entire lifetime was set absolutely in stone, and my mind left free to wander along it as I choose. It’s a diversion… nothing more. No past, no present, no future other than the order I flick through the pages, just glimpses into a broken mirror, that is all." He sat back again. The Doctor massaged his lower lip with one finger.

"I don’t understand. I don’t understand how someone like you could exist in our universe." He stopped. Jonathan looked quizzical. The truth was that there was one, chillingly simple explanation. Maybe Jonathan wasn’t the exception, maybe we are all as he is… transtemporal observers, maybe we just haven’t yet learned any path through our mental lives other than the chronological. Maybe none of us have free will of any kind. Only one explanation. But isn’t it an experimental principle to take the simplest theory which explains all the facts? There isn’t an exception to avoid accepting the most unwelcome explanation is there? After all he had done, all he had thought and believed, could it all really be just the illusion of freedom? He shook his head violently.

"Are we the observer or the doer?"

"What?"

"Your thoughts. Roughly translated from the body language, at least." Jonathan sighed. "Well, goodbye, Doctor. Our paths will cross again." He stood up. "Not in the chronological future, obviously"- he gestured to the pot plant- "but in your personal future. Here, in Oxford. That meeting will be rather unpleasant for you… and will be that point of personal transition you were so worried about." He nodded. "As for me… well, like our dear fans over yonder, I shall experience old experiences anew. This is not the first time I have been at this point."

"How can you just accept it?"

"I told you once before." The Doctor rose, looked darkly at the plant, and followed Jonathan to the door. They stood there, and exchanged a look of mutual pity and incomprehension. "I do not have a choice." Jonathan closed the door again, and turned back to face the assassin.

*

How many times? How many times have I seen people screaming, desperately scrambling to get out of that man’s line of fire, seen him raise his gun and point it straight at me? I can see right down the barrel. I stay at that instant, waiting before plunging into the future. I can dimly sense the thoughts of all the other times I have been here, all the other times of me, past and future, all awaiting the moment of death, then skittering lightly back to some other point of life, nothing new, nothing different. I remember the Doctor’s panic. There is no future for me, nothing to do that I have not already done, already experienced. I realise suddenly that there is a terrible thirst in me for this unknown, this sense of experiencing something new, something I have not felt for longer than I can recall. Twenty-two years and the tiny, unfocussed snapshots of those so pitifully few people whose lives have brushed mine; it is not enough. I lied that I had not seen my past, lied because it would do the Doctor no good to know how I came about, to know whose responsibility it is that I must be as I am, but there is nothing left, nothing that has not been seen and done for such an infinity of times that I cannot even recall the moment when I first experienced it.

Except death. I have always gone back from my death, always searched for some new moment of life, but perhaps there is something more? The immortal soul? Is that what I, what my mind is? Something independent of my body? I don’t know if there is anything beyond, if I will just find myself shuffling back once more, striking an unbreakable barrier, I don’t know if, should I breach the barrier, I will be able to return, but all this is now irrelevant. It is time to move on.

The assassin fires.

THE END