Five-Minute Fiction

Discomfort Zone

by Ewen Campion Clarke

The Doctor knew it was always a gamble to set random coordinates, especially as a maiden voyage for two new travelling companions, but the TARDIS had done them all proud. They’d fetched up somewhere in Earth’s distant future on a verdant planet called E’et’han, materializing in a magnificent city sculpted out a single piece of something resembling polished marble.

No sooner had the Doctor, Nancy and Jacko stepped from the police box they had been met by the natives – pale blue androgynous humanoids with almond-shaped eyes and light silver robes. Their leader, Is’tar, had welcomed them without incident, accepting their strange arrival and odd appearance with inscrutable pleasantness. There was no accusations of spying or trespass, and despite the rather formal introductions, everything seemed friendly enough.

Jacko was still gossiping with Is’tar, still finding it hard to wrap his mind around the lack of clear gender among aliens but he at least was talking to them. Nancy, meanwhile, was just sitting on a bench and staring out across the countryside.

The Doctor dropped down onto the bench beside her. “Hey-up,” she grinned. “What do you think of the landscape eh? Makes a change from all those foggy cobbled streets and workhouses, doesn’t it?”

Nancy stared blankly ahead, motionless and silent.

“You know, according to our tour guide over there,” the Doctor went on, nodding at Is’tar, “this is the only city on the whole planet. Everything else is just mountains and meadows, rivers and woods. Very big lakes, but no actual oceans, but there’s no pollution, nothing. Just a communist society of institutionalized happiness. Of course, there’s probably some giant gas-eating crabs running it all behind the scenes, but it looks very nice at the moment, huh? Beautiful. And double the suns, double the sunsets!”

Still Nancy said nothing.

“All right, lass, what’s wrong?” sighed the Doctor. “This place is beautiful, if only on the surface. Worth cracking a smile, huh?”

“This is hell,” said Nancy quietly.

“You what?”

“This isn’t the world I know,” she said, tears trickling down her freckled cheeks. “A city made out of bone and filled with demons. The sky is the face Satan himself.” She drew her legs up to her chest and buried her face in her knees.

The Doctor glanced up at the sky. True, it was a rich cherry red colour and the twin suns vaguely recalled two burning orange eyes, but it was hardly demonic. “Come on, Nance,” she chided. “You’ve seen sunsets and dawns. The sky can turn red all the time. And this sky is red all the time, that’s all.”

“The sky should be blue!” fumed Nancy. “This isn’t right! This is the devil’s work!”

“Oh come on! There’s no devils, no great satanic mills…”

“This isn’t right!” Nancy insisted. “Why did you bring us here?”

The Doctor considered her answer. Reminding the barmaid of the random coordinates issue probably wouldn’t help. “I thought you’d like it,” she said simply. “You asked me about all the strange things I knew. Well, I found it out by going places like this. Worlds on the other side of the sky.”

“This is the underworld,” Nancy said. “Only the wicked would ever want to come here, where the sky’s the colour of blood and no men or women live here, just those monsters with their dead blue skin…”

“They’re not monsters, Nancy. They’re people.”

Nancy laughed bitterly. “Just how far must you have fallen to see them that way?” she demanded. “Just when did you stop seeing this as evil?”

The Doctor wasn’t smiling now. “Nancy, listen. You’ve been living in one part of one town in one country of the world. You’ve spent your life looking at shadows on a cave wall, you haven’t even seen the fire that’s casting them. You don’t even realize you were in a cave. I thought if I got you to see where you were, to realize that there is a world above the caves, that there’s more out there… I thought you’d like it. Would you really like to stay in the dark?”

“Yes!” sobbed Nancy, smacking her fist against the bench with enough force to crack a knuckle bone. “I want to stay in the dark! I don’t want to see these things that are in the light!” Her anger dwindled down into tears. “Please, Doctor. Take me back home. Please.”

The Doctor sighed. “Okay, Nance. Back to London 1888. No charge.”

“Why couldn’t you leave us there?” Nancy sobbed.

The Doctor said nothing, musing on that question. She barely remembered much of the last few days since her last regeneration. The confused witch hunt on a copycat of Jack the Ripper had required companions for her to get to the truth, and Jacob and Nancy had been caught up in events already. The stifling male-dominated society had rubbed the newborn Time Lord up the wrong way, and she’d been eager to get away to somewhere else. Anywhere else.

And since Jacob and Nancy had ended up in the TARDIS, she’d brought them along for the ride. Widening their perspective with a display of Gallifreyan time technology usually impressed her travelling companions.

Usually.

Was expecting some 19th Century Londoners to automatically accept and embrace life on the TARDIS actually closed-mindedness on her part? She stubbornly believed Nancy would be better off exposed to the vastness of infinity, just as Nancy stubbornly believed she was been plunged into hell. Which one of them was right? Didn’t Nancy have the right to reject life with the Doctor? Was believing she was automatically superior unique to this latest incarnation, or had the Time Lords always been like that?

The Doctor patted Nancy on the back. “Come on, let’s find Jacob and get you two home,” she said gently. Together they rose and went looking for Is’tar and the others.

Maybe I’ve been the one looking at the shadows on walls. Seeing the fire for the first time isn’t always a good thing, is it?