Fic: De Librorum (text version) (Doctor Who, Ten/Martha if desired)
I'm posting a text version of this fic for archiving purposes - it was originally podfic over at onlysensible , read by the marvelous the_oscar_cat after uber-betaing by omglawdork and smittywing .
Fandom: Doctor Who: Ten, Martha - shippiness only if you want to read it in
Rating: PG at worst
Spoilers: for Family of Blood (mild)
Author's Notes: The story idea and a fair helping of dialogue are cobbled from The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges (read it here).
Summary: "The Library is total and its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books." Oh, and also? The TARDIS - which is a Very Bad Thing indeed.
The last Librarian of Babel puts pen to paper and writes.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.... There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope....
Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, useless, incorruptible, secret....
The old man finishes his epitaph. Laying the scraps of paper on the nearest shelf, he opens the sleeping cupboard, steps in, and shuts the
door. He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Twenty-three minutes later, with a hiccup and a sigh, the last Librarian of Babel dies. Twenty-three minutes and one infinitesimally small unit of time later, the Library of Babel wakes.
The TARDIS is landing.
"That's weird."
"What?"
"She's never done that before."
"Done what?"
Once upon a time.
"Doctor."
"Shh. Listen."
"Doctor."
"No really, just listen."
Once upon a time.
"There. D'you hear it?"
"Hear what?"
Once upon a time.
"That. A... voice, a whisper, a nearly subaudible commentary just within the range of human hearing."
Once upon a time.
"Oh. Yes."
"Oh dear."
"Oh dear, what?"
"Hang on!"
ONCE UPON A TIME.
The TARDIS shrieks.
The air is full of the sound of books. Pages ruffling. Covers thumping. Words whispering, a multitude of languages jostling past her ears as sense and nonsense slip out into the open, eluding dust jackets and sturdily-bound spines. She can't see anything - the Doctor had grabbed her hand tight before the TARDIS gave a weird sideways jerk that nearly left her stomach behind, but she can't feel his hand on hers anymore. Martha opens her mouth to shout, and then the world turns upside down and she blacks out. Then life gets really confusing.
Once upon a time, there was a girl with dishpan hands and an aching knee, set to scrubbing wooden floors while young men of wealth and
privilege mocked the color of her skin.
"Bollocks to that," says Martha, and closes the book.
But not soon enough.
Once upon a time, there was a man-who-wasn't-human, particularly considering the whole two hearts thing, who knew exactly what he was
doing and how many innocents unwittingly bore the cost.
"Ah," says the Doctor, and rips out the page.
Once upon a time, there was a box that was bigger on the inside, the whole of time at its heart, hurtling through the universe.
YES, says the Library, and binds it up in a book.
Martha wakes up in a closet, which is not something she's ever done before. Traveling with the Doctor has broadened her horizons so much she's lost sight of them, but as a new and exciting experience, this one's rather lacking. So is the closet, she realizes, because it's
basically four walls and a door with a knob and a marked lack of the normal clutter gracing most storage cupboards of her acquaintance. The walls are padded, comfortable enough to sleep on, apart from the standing-up issue, and she's seen enough of jail cells to chalk that up as relatively posh. She tries the door, more out of stubbornness than actual hope, and is pleasantly surprised when the knob turns easily in her hand.
When she steps out of the closet-cell-room-thing, she's overwhelmed in a way that reminds her of the first time she walked into the TARDIS, only less... friendly, somehow. The light's bad - just shy of bright enough and a hazy shade of yellow that makes her eyes hurt. Looking around, she realizes she's standing in front of not one, but two doors; there's a loo behind the second. On either side of those, there are low railings. They stand on either side of a narrow, mirror-lined hallway that connects to another room that looks the same as the one she's standing in. From what she can see, all of the rooms look exactly the same: hexagonal, with two sides given over to hallways.
Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover the remaining walls. Through the room is also a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.
"Oh my god," yelps Martha, looking around wildly. "Get out of my head. Who are you?"
There's no answer.
"Doctor?" she calls. "Doctor, can you hear me?"
Nothing but echoes.
Martha swallows, gives herself a shake. "Right," she says. "Room full of books - maybe one of them's a guide." She pulls a book off the
nearest shelf and cracks it open, only to stare at the page. It's gibberish - so is every other page in the book. "It's just... letters," she mutters in disbelief, leafing through. "Pages and pages of utter rubbish." She looks at the spine, which says only Axaxaxas mlö.
Martha grimaces, and reaches for the next volume - this one, at least, has a title she can read, even if it doesn't mean much: The Combed Thunderclap. The inside is even less helpful. She grabs another one, and another, and another, stamping down hard on rising panic. There's nearly a whole shelf tossed on the floor when she finally gives up. "It makes no sense," she says, frustrated. "All these books and not one word of something useful."
Each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. The letters on the spine do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say.
"Yes, right," she snaps. "Got that. And stop it," she shouts, whirling. "Who's there?"
Not a word. It is utterly, utterly silent. There's a distant niggle at the back of her brain, as if she's forgotten something sort of but not
terribly important - like whether she closed the windows before she left her flat. She realizes she can't remember if she ever changed the
curtains over to orange like she'd been planning, but it's really not important right now, and besides, she's been away from home a while. She's not going to get home, either, not unless she finds the Doctor.
Martha starts to walk.
Somewhere else, sitting in a hexagon and fiddling with the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor mutters to himself. Finally, satisfied, he
stands up and flicks the screwdriver on, pacing the room until he finds the spot where it hums the loudest. "Gotcha," he says, and grins, and heads for the stairs. He pauses, his foot on the first step down, and darts over to grab a book off the shelf. Flipping it open, he tears out
a page, crumples it, and tosses it onto the floor. When he looks up, his eyes are cold. "I'm going to find the TARDIS," he says quietly, "and Martha." When there's no reply, he grins again and dashes down the stairs, leaving another balled-up page in his wake.
Martha's been walking for what feels like hours, although it's a little hard to tell when every room looks entirely the same and there's a
distinct absence of clocks. Her head aches from the light, and she's been trudging through hexagon after hexagon long enough that
she's lost count. Every so often, she shouts for the Doctor, but there's no reply. Each time she leaves a room, she pulls a book off the shelf nearest the hallway and tosses it to the floor, on the off chance that he'll cross her path. The scenery's surreal - books and stairways and railings repeating over and over and over.
The hallways are worse - she hurries through them, trying not to look in the mirrors, half-afraid she won't be able to look away from that
infinitely looping reflection. She feels like she's in a movie - one of the really creepy ones by that bloke whose name she can't seem to remember right now, where everything seems normal and yet is terribly wrong. She distracts herself for a while, trying to think of his name - she knows she ought to know it, has a vague recollection of being dragged to some film festival on some date with some bloke. Martha can't remember the name, though - can't even remember the person she went with; finally, she just gives up.
Eventually she gets bored of slogging along in a straight line and heads for the stairs, dropping a book behind her as she heads up. The
stairs are steep, and don't show any signs of stopping, so she only goes up a story before stepping into a new hexagon. This one, at least,
is different. There's a little pile of papers on one of the shelves; she walks over and picks them up. They're covered in handwriting, a crabbed, shaky hand.
"Like all men of the Library, I have wandered in search of a book; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die
just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly
and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite."
"That," Martha remarks, "is just creepy." She's aware that she's really quite scared, but the feeling's sort of... distant. It's like those pub
games, she thinks, where someone has to try and sing a song, but just the melody, not the words, and you know what they're singing, and you know you know it, only you can't nail it down enough to get a fix on the title. She shakes her head, staring down at the papers in her hands. "Who were you?" she murmurs. "How did you get here? What is this place?"
To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which the fallible hand scrawled on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
"Oh ho," Martha says, louder. "So you're a god, are you? Well, your Holiness, if you don't mind my asking - who the hell are you?" The Doctor's going to have something to say about all this, she thinks. If she can find him, that is. She can't remember how she lost him, and
thinks that maybe she's not quite worried enough about that fact, but the voice in her head distracts her.
The divine Library.
She blinks. "You're - this - it's the library talking in my head? Where did you come from?"
The Library exists ab aeterno. This is truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world.
Martha shivers at that - but again, some small part of her points out, she's not nearly as alarmed as she should be. "You've always been here? But - how? I mean, how are you even talking to me?"
This wordy and useless conversation already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons.
"So you're just reading aloud," she muses. "All right, fine. I'm talking to a library with delusions of grandeur. So," she asks, without
much hope, "any chance you'll kick me out when you close up for the night?"
The Library is unlimited and cyclical.
"But you can't just go on forever," she argues. "There's got to be a way to get out"
The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Martha tries to fathom that statement and it makes her brain twist up oddly. She looks around, trying to remember what it was she was doing before she got sidetracked into this conversation. "The Doctor," she says firmly. "I need to find the Doctor, and then we can sort this
out." She shoves the bunch of papers in her jacket pocket without really thinking about it and sets off. She forgets to pull a book off
the shelf as she goes.
The Library says nothing.
Somewhere else, the screwdriver stops humming for a moment, then resumes. The Doctor throws the empty book - nothing but a cover and binding - over his shoulder and cocks his head. He revolves in place, listening hard as the screwdriver transmits the same blip, just in
front of one of the two doors. "Ah ha!" he cries, and flings it open. His smile fades as he takes in the narrow space, the padded walls, the
frail, elderly corpse staring at him from the corner. "I'm sorry," the Doctor says, and closes the door.
He listens to the screwdriver. "Come on, old girl, where are you?" he mutters. Grabbing another book and tearing out a page, he hurtles off
down the next hall.
She's so tired she can't even think straight. "Can't hardly remember my own name," she mutters, swallowing a yawn. A voice in the back of her head is shrieking at her, but Martha's too exhausted to care. "I just need to sit a bit. That's all." She leans against a shelf and slides
down to the floor, resting her head against her knees. She can't rest for too long though. There's something she's supposed to be doing. She knows there's something - it's nagging at her, urging her to keep going - she just can't put her finger on what.
For four centuries men exhausted the hexagons... Obviously, no one expected to discover anything.
"Who said that?" she demands, raising her head. "Well, you're wrong," she says flatly, and that's right - she was supposed to be looking for
something. When she thinks about it, though, she can't remember what it is she's so certain she's going to find. She shifts restlessly, and
raises her head when her hand brushes against paper. Vaguely curious, she picks it up, smoothing out the crumpled ball. Looking around, she sees another, just barely visible on the first downward stair. "Oh dear," she murmurs, "someone's damaging the collection. That's bad."
The Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal.
"Human," she muses, running her finger over the rumpled page. The word wanders around, bumps up against an idea. "But he's not human." She struggles to her feet as a memory surfaces. "He's not. The Doctor's got two hearts. And I have to find him." She forces her tired body to move, stumbling over to the stairs.
The possibility of a man's finding his Vindication can be computed as zero.
She's not entirely sure what that sentence means, but the basic message is clear. Still - she may have lost her tenuous hold on her own name, but this is written down deep in her bones. "Sod off," she growls. "I'm going to find the Doctor."
In adventures such as these, you will squander and waste your years.
"Yeah, right," she says, scrubbing angrily at tears of frustration. "Because it's already so much fun."
Many wandered in search. They exhausted in vain the most varied areas.
"I don't care," she snarls. "The Doctor's there somewhere." She heads downward, following the trail of paper.
Somewhere, in some book on some shelf, some sentence suggests that the Library's lack of further comment is rather... smug. In another book, not too far away, an author remarks that the atmosphere isn't just smug, it's anticipatory. The Library itself just waits.
The Doctor rounds a corner and stops in his tracks, staring in delight at a book on the shelf that doesn't look like any of the others. "Found
you!" he crows, dropping his half-decimated tome and dashing over. This book is locked up tight, pages entirely inaccessible - the sonic
screwdriver is blipping frantically until he turns it off and stows it back in a pocket. "Clever girl," he says, voice fond, and fumbles for a
key that, he realizes, he doesn't have. "Martha," he breathes, and his eyes grow dark. "You know," he says to the empty room,
"you lose any minuscule chance at mercy you may presently enjoy if I find out you've hurt her." The Doctor shrugs. "You've been warned."
"Well, old friend," he says, settling himself in relative comfort on the floor, holding the book, "now we wait. Martha Jones is very bright,
after all. And quite determined. I have the bruise to prove it," he concludes, rueful, rubbing his cheek.
There's only silence.
She's cautious as she picks up the last piece of paper; she's just high enough on the stairs to see into the next room. There's a man there, a man with an untidy mop of brown hair, dressed in a suit and wearing trainers, sitting with his head propped up on his hands, his elbows
resting on his knees. His eyes are closed. She thinks he's probably asleep. She looks down at the wad of paper in her hand. Her head is
pounding. That man - there's something about him, something that prods some far-off emotion she doesn't really recall well enough to name. She can't even remember why she's looking for the next piece of paper; just that it's something she has to do. She's so tired.
She'd really rather just sit down on the stairs and nap a bit, but just then her head throbs with particular insistence. She flinches, hand
tightening around the paper, which crackles. She ducks down at the noise, just in case she's woken him up.
She crouches there awhile, listening hard, but there's no sound of movement. She straightens - only to freeze. He hasn't moved, except to
open his eyes, and he's staring straight at her.
"It's all right," he says softly. He gets to his feet, never taking his eyes off of her. "It's all right, Martha," he reiterates, stretching out a hand.
"Who is Martha?" she asks, honestly baffled. "Is this hers?" she says, holding out the ball of paper. "She's dropped a great many of them, if
so."
His eyes are very brown, and very dark. "What did you do to her?" His voice is very, very quiet. She's not sure, for all that it seems like
it, that he's actually talking to her.
For centuries, there were official searchers, inquisitors. They disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways. Others went mad.
The words in her head hurt more than the headache, and she gasps. It's like something's crumbling, some sort of wall or barrier or she doesn't know what. It's getting hard to think.
"She's gone mad?" the man asks, almost lazily, holding the book tight to him. "I don't believe that. Irrepressible, that Ms. Jones. Acres of
common sense."
"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." That's her voice. The words have taken her voice. She can feel them crowding in her head, stamping over her panic, treading it down into a dull ache. She can feel them running through her
muscles, moving her feet up the stairs with ease, fluidly, as if they belonged to the voice, as if she's the stranger in her own body. Maybe
she is. She really can't remember.
There's a stubborn spark though, somewhere deep down, that's rebelling against this casual occupancy. Pain flares as it surges, and some small part of her seizes the initiative, jamming her hand into her jacket pocket and thrusting the papers she finds there out at the man staring her down. Then the opportunity's gone, as whatever it is shoves that impulse away, throttles it. She feels it happen, inside her head, and feels little more than idle curiosity.
Across from her, the man is shuffling through the papers at lightning speed. "Oh - oh, yes!" he shouts, eyes wide. "Oh, of course. That's it."
The thing in her body moves her a step closer and his head snaps up. He's talking a mile a minute now, but he's focused on her face, almost as if he's looking for something, "You're a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, aren't you - used to be libraries were places for stories and knowledge and answers, and names are just a short form for that, meant to give things a handle, so we don't have to call each other things like 'grew-up-six-blocks-west-of-the-butcher's-went-to-uni-to-be-a-doctor.' Only it's all gone twisted - they lost the point so badly they ended up somewhere they'd never meant to be. Because suddenly they had a library that stored everything - anything - any way and order
you could smack a set of letters together, and all that pressure, all those words and non-words and possible words crammed up together,
well," the man is pacing around the room, gesticulating wildly, "they stopped being just words and turned into the Library. And the Library - you had a life of your own, producing sense and nonsense and unprecedented languages and everything else."
The voice, or whatever it is, stretches her lips in some kind of grin. "Yesss," it hisses through her. "There is no combination of characters
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate
a syllable which is not filled with fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god."
"Yes, yes," the man shouts, clapping a hand to his forehead, the papers in his grasp drifting, forgotten, to the floor. She feels much like
those papers. "And words are power. Of course they are - you remember that, don't you, Martha?" He reaches out and taps her once on the forehead, hard; the voice growls, a rumble in her throat. "All those powerful words in one space - no wonder the Library came to life - and then, then, and this is really rather brilliant, I have to admit, you realized that you could expand yourself faster, further, if you just stole the names and stories of the people meant to be your keepers. You started eating names, and your Librarians just withered away, one by one by one by one, until they were all gone, and it was just like stories and names had never even existed. Only you couldn't stop, could you, and you knew if you kept on the way you were -" he grimaces, "you'd swallow yourself up, eat your own name, and then poof! There you are, winked out of your own existence. You must've been pretty desperate, I suppose."
The thing in her head roils; fear and hunger, words she thought she'd forgotten, coat her throat as the words tumble out. "Let them be
outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let the enormous Library be justified."
"So," the man says, pointing at her/it/them, "when the TARDIS brushed by your little pocket of infinite space-time, you realized that she was
the perfect solution. Get her story, bind her up in one of your books, and every time you got back to the beginning, you could just loop back round to the end. Eternal second helpings. So you swallowed her up - but my ship's more than just clever. She put a lock on. Closed herself away - so you had her, but couldn't read her, not without - oi!" he shouts, but the thing - the Library, she says, the name dusty and unfamiliar in her head - dances her body away, out of his reach, and it's holding the locked book, stolen away while the man was distracted.
The voice moves her hand, reaches into her pocket and pulls out a key, dangling on a string.
"Not without the key, and it was so very, very easy to get her to bring the key. Because you knew I'd find the book, and that she'd find me."
the man says flatly. "Martha," he says, in a very different tone, and he's staring at her again. "Martha, listen to me. I know you're in
there still. Your name is Martha Jones, and you're studying to be a doctor, and you used to be at Royal Hope until it took an unexpected
side trip to the moon." He's speaking so fast, and he's watching her like this is a message of utmost importance. She realizes, with a jolt,
that she wants to understand. "You have a sister named Tish and a brother named Leo with a little baby who calls you Aunty Marth. You have a father with alarming taste in women and a mother with a solid pitching arm and a Machiavellian streak that, frankly, worries me a little."
"The Library is total," the voice roars, and it hurts, but the funny thing is, it's not the only thing she can feel anymore. Ever since the man rapped his finger against her head, she's been feeling strange - well, she's been feeling. That recalcitrant little spark in the back of her head is still burning, apparently; she can feel it starting to spread, slowly seeping into her tired limbs. The thing in her head shifts her hand toward the book. Something inside her balks, wrestles against the impulse, and stops the key just shy of the lock.
The man doesn't falter - just keeps talking, looking her in the eye like he can see her staring back at him from a distance. "Your name is Martha Jones, and you're bossy and stubborn and you came along for a ride with me after I showed you the cheapest trick in the book. You came along for a ride and got zapped by a witch and nearly eaten by giant crabs and kidnapped by pigs and let's not talk about the thing with the human-scorpion and your sister and a scene I'm very glad old Victor's going to leave out of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I like you, Martha Jones."
The voice in her head is fighting against her; the hand holding the key is shaking with the force of it. "I do," he repeats, and she
can see it's true, can see it in his face, "and I wouldn't have trusted you with my life in a pocket watch if it weren't true."
The pressure's building in her head; people and places and stories she thinks might be hers swelling up from where they've been crammed down, clamoring for form and shape and she's so close to knowing they're hers for sure. She's hammering at the barrier holding everything back, pounding at it, but she's so tired, and it might not be enough. She's got enough control over her own body now that she can wet dry lips, that she can ask him, in a desperate whisper, "But who are you?"
He grins, slow and sweet, "I thought you'd never ask." The voice in her head is screaming so loud it's hard to hear him. "You did tell me,
once, that I was everything. Although I must say, the last little while has rather knocked my ego right on its rump." He pauses for breath.
"Hello, Martha Jones," he says. "I'm the Doctor."
The voice in her head is screaming, and the rush of memory thunders in her blood. She drops the book, drops the key, and drops to her knees. She can't hear over the noise. she can't see for the tears streaming down her face, but she can feel, and she can think, and she can
remember. The Doctor's hand grabs hers, doubly welcome for the fact that it's familiar, and he tugs her forward, wrapping an arm around her when she falters. Then somehow the TARDIS is there, and they tumble inside, and it's all she can do to cling to the struts as the voice
rages outside. The Doctor flips levers and cranks dials like mad and then they're off, away, and safe.
The Doctor walks back over, puts a hand to the side of her head, and looks at her carefully. "Rest, I think," he says thoughtfully. "Need a hand?"
"Yeah," Martha Jones manages to say, and the Doctor helps her all the way to her bedroom door.
When she wakes, he's in an armchair she's pretty sure she's never seen before, reading a paperback novel, his feet propped on her bed. "My mum'd smack you for that," she says sleepily.
He looks up over the edge of the book. "Can't have that," he mutters, scowling and sitting up as she smiles. "We're in the Vortex. Just
idling. It wouldn't hurt you to sleep a bit longer."
She's already fading. "Doctor's orders?"
"Something like that." He grins at her and stands up.
"The Library?" she asks, and he pauses.
"Vanished," he replies. "Without the TARDIS, and with all the sentient life gone, it collapsed in on itself not long after we escaped."
She closes her eyes and hears him walk away.
"Doctor?" she says, and the sound of movement stops.
"Martha?" he answers, and she struggles for the right words.
"Thanks," she says finally. "I'm glad you remembered. You know. What I said. From 1916."
The last thing she hears before she falls asleep is the Doctor's voice, low and content, murmuring, "I'm glad I did too."
A week later, she's wandering through the shops in Buenos Aires on Christmas Eve eve, 1938, and realizes it's nearly dark. She meets up
with the Doctor at the small cafe he'd told her about earlier, just as he's walking out the door. He looks back and waves at a middle-aged man with a lean, rectangular, slightly-lopsided face, who smiles back with unguarded pleasure, holding, in his other hand, a small pile of faded papers, covered in writing. "What was that all about?" she asks.
"Oh, you know," the Doctor says, gesturing expansively, "had to warn a man about a book."
She stops in her tracks. "About a book?" she demands, skeptical.
The Doctor shrugs. "We-ell. Or two. Or a library-full. You know." He walks off.
Martha looks at the Doctor, vanishing into the dark, looks back at the man sitting in the cafe in a pool of yellow light. She pauses,
considers, and laughs, then runs off after the Doctor. Later, remembering, she'll recall that the emotion she feels just now is hope.
Fandom: Doctor Who: Ten, Martha - shippiness only if you want to read it in
Rating: PG at worst
Spoilers: for Family of Blood (mild)
Author's Notes: The story idea and a fair helping of dialogue are cobbled from The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges (read it here).
Summary: "The Library is total and its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books." Oh, and also? The TARDIS - which is a Very Bad Thing indeed.
The last Librarian of Babel puts pen to paper and writes.
When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness.... There was no personal or world problem whose eloquent solution did not exist in some hexagon. The universe was justified, the universe suddenly usurped the unlimited dimensions of hope....
Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, useless, incorruptible, secret....
The old man finishes his epitaph. Laying the scraps of paper on the nearest shelf, he opens the sleeping cupboard, steps in, and shuts the
door. He leans his head back against the wall and closes his eyes. Twenty-three minutes later, with a hiccup and a sigh, the last Librarian of Babel dies. Twenty-three minutes and one infinitesimally small unit of time later, the Library of Babel wakes.
The TARDIS is landing.
"That's weird."
"What?"
"She's never done that before."
"Done what?"
Once upon a time.
"Doctor."
"Shh. Listen."
"Doctor."
"No really, just listen."
Once upon a time.
"There. D'you hear it?"
"Hear what?"
Once upon a time.
"That. A... voice, a whisper, a nearly subaudible commentary just within the range of human hearing."
Once upon a time.
"Oh. Yes."
"Oh dear."
"Oh dear, what?"
"Hang on!"
ONCE UPON A TIME.
The TARDIS shrieks.
The air is full of the sound of books. Pages ruffling. Covers thumping. Words whispering, a multitude of languages jostling past her ears as sense and nonsense slip out into the open, eluding dust jackets and sturdily-bound spines. She can't see anything - the Doctor had grabbed her hand tight before the TARDIS gave a weird sideways jerk that nearly left her stomach behind, but she can't feel his hand on hers anymore. Martha opens her mouth to shout, and then the world turns upside down and she blacks out. Then life gets really confusing.
Once upon a time, there was a girl with dishpan hands and an aching knee, set to scrubbing wooden floors while young men of wealth and
privilege mocked the color of her skin.
"Bollocks to that," says Martha, and closes the book.
But not soon enough.
Once upon a time, there was a man-who-wasn't-human, particularly considering the whole two hearts thing, who knew exactly what he was
doing and how many innocents unwittingly bore the cost.
"Ah," says the Doctor, and rips out the page.
Once upon a time, there was a box that was bigger on the inside, the whole of time at its heart, hurtling through the universe.
YES, says the Library, and binds it up in a book.
Martha wakes up in a closet, which is not something she's ever done before. Traveling with the Doctor has broadened her horizons so much she's lost sight of them, but as a new and exciting experience, this one's rather lacking. So is the closet, she realizes, because it's
basically four walls and a door with a knob and a marked lack of the normal clutter gracing most storage cupboards of her acquaintance. The walls are padded, comfortable enough to sleep on, apart from the standing-up issue, and she's seen enough of jail cells to chalk that up as relatively posh. She tries the door, more out of stubbornness than actual hope, and is pleasantly surprised when the knob turns easily in her hand.
When she steps out of the closet-cell-room-thing, she's overwhelmed in a way that reminds her of the first time she walked into the TARDIS, only less... friendly, somehow. The light's bad - just shy of bright enough and a hazy shade of yellow that makes her eyes hurt. Looking around, she realizes she's standing in front of not one, but two doors; there's a loo behind the second. On either side of those, there are low railings. They stand on either side of a narrow, mirror-lined hallway that connects to another room that looks the same as the one she's standing in. From what she can see, all of the rooms look exactly the same: hexagonal, with two sides given over to hallways.
Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover the remaining walls. Through the room is also a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances.
"Oh my god," yelps Martha, looking around wildly. "Get out of my head. Who are you?"
There's no answer.
"Doctor?" she calls. "Doctor, can you hear me?"
Nothing but echoes.
Martha swallows, gives herself a shake. "Right," she says. "Room full of books - maybe one of them's a guide." She pulls a book off the
nearest shelf and cracks it open, only to stare at the page. It's gibberish - so is every other page in the book. "It's just... letters," she mutters in disbelief, leafing through. "Pages and pages of utter rubbish." She looks at the spine, which says only Axaxaxas mlö.
Martha grimaces, and reaches for the next volume - this one, at least, has a title she can read, even if it doesn't mean much: The Combed Thunderclap. The inside is even less helpful. She grabs another one, and another, and another, stamping down hard on rising panic. There's nearly a whole shelf tossed on the floor when she finally gives up. "It makes no sense," she says, frustrated. "All these books and not one word of something useful."
Each shelf contains thirty-five books of uniform format; each book is of four hundred and ten pages; each page, of forty lines, each line, of some eighty letters which are black in color. The letters on the spine do not indicate or prefigure what the pages will say.
"Yes, right," she snaps. "Got that. And stop it," she shouts, whirling. "Who's there?"
Not a word. It is utterly, utterly silent. There's a distant niggle at the back of her brain, as if she's forgotten something sort of but not
terribly important - like whether she closed the windows before she left her flat. She realizes she can't remember if she ever changed the
curtains over to orange like she'd been planning, but it's really not important right now, and besides, she's been away from home a while. She's not going to get home, either, not unless she finds the Doctor.
Martha starts to walk.
Somewhere else, sitting in a hexagon and fiddling with the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor mutters to himself. Finally, satisfied, he
stands up and flicks the screwdriver on, pacing the room until he finds the spot where it hums the loudest. "Gotcha," he says, and grins, and heads for the stairs. He pauses, his foot on the first step down, and darts over to grab a book off the shelf. Flipping it open, he tears out
a page, crumples it, and tosses it onto the floor. When he looks up, his eyes are cold. "I'm going to find the TARDIS," he says quietly, "and Martha." When there's no reply, he grins again and dashes down the stairs, leaving another balled-up page in his wake.
Martha's been walking for what feels like hours, although it's a little hard to tell when every room looks entirely the same and there's a
distinct absence of clocks. Her head aches from the light, and she's been trudging through hexagon after hexagon long enough that
she's lost count. Every so often, she shouts for the Doctor, but there's no reply. Each time she leaves a room, she pulls a book off the shelf nearest the hallway and tosses it to the floor, on the off chance that he'll cross her path. The scenery's surreal - books and stairways and railings repeating over and over and over.
The hallways are worse - she hurries through them, trying not to look in the mirrors, half-afraid she won't be able to look away from that
infinitely looping reflection. She feels like she's in a movie - one of the really creepy ones by that bloke whose name she can't seem to remember right now, where everything seems normal and yet is terribly wrong. She distracts herself for a while, trying to think of his name - she knows she ought to know it, has a vague recollection of being dragged to some film festival on some date with some bloke. Martha can't remember the name, though - can't even remember the person she went with; finally, she just gives up.
Eventually she gets bored of slogging along in a straight line and heads for the stairs, dropping a book behind her as she heads up. The
stairs are steep, and don't show any signs of stopping, so she only goes up a story before stepping into a new hexagon. This one, at least,
is different. There's a little pile of papers on one of the shelves; she walks over and picks them up. They're covered in handwriting, a crabbed, shaky hand.
"Like all men of the Library, I have wandered in search of a book; now that my eyes can hardly decipher what I write, I am preparing to die
just a few leagues from the hexagon in which I was born. Once I am dead, my grave will be the fathomless air; my body will sink endlessly
and decay and dissolve in the wind generated by the fall, which is infinite."
"That," Martha remarks, "is just creepy." She's aware that she's really quite scared, but the feeling's sort of... distant. It's like those pub
games, she thinks, where someone has to try and sing a song, but just the melody, not the words, and you know what they're singing, and you know you know it, only you can't nail it down enough to get a fix on the title. She shakes her head, staring down at the papers in her hands. "Who were you?" she murmurs. "How did you get here? What is this place?"
To perceive the distance between the divine and the human, it is enough to compare these crude wavering symbols which the fallible hand scrawled on the cover of a book, with the organic letters inside: punctual, delicate, perfectly black, inimitably symmetrical.
"Oh ho," Martha says, louder. "So you're a god, are you? Well, your Holiness, if you don't mind my asking - who the hell are you?" The Doctor's going to have something to say about all this, she thinks. If she can find him, that is. She can't remember how she lost him, and
thinks that maybe she's not quite worried enough about that fact, but the voice in her head distracts her.
The divine Library.
She blinks. "You're - this - it's the library talking in my head? Where did you come from?"
The Library exists ab aeterno. This is truth, whose immediate corollary is the future eternity of the world.
Martha shivers at that - but again, some small part of her points out, she's not nearly as alarmed as she should be. "You've always been here? But - how? I mean, how are you even talking to me?"
This wordy and useless conversation already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons.
"So you're just reading aloud," she muses. "All right, fine. I'm talking to a library with delusions of grandeur. So," she asks, without
much hope, "any chance you'll kick me out when you close up for the night?"
The Library is unlimited and cyclical.
"But you can't just go on forever," she argues. "There's got to be a way to get out"
The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.
Martha tries to fathom that statement and it makes her brain twist up oddly. She looks around, trying to remember what it was she was doing before she got sidetracked into this conversation. "The Doctor," she says firmly. "I need to find the Doctor, and then we can sort this
out." She shoves the bunch of papers in her jacket pocket without really thinking about it and sets off. She forgets to pull a book off
the shelf as she goes.
The Library says nothing.
Somewhere else, the screwdriver stops humming for a moment, then resumes. The Doctor throws the empty book - nothing but a cover and binding - over his shoulder and cocks his head. He revolves in place, listening hard as the screwdriver transmits the same blip, just in
front of one of the two doors. "Ah ha!" he cries, and flings it open. His smile fades as he takes in the narrow space, the padded walls, the
frail, elderly corpse staring at him from the corner. "I'm sorry," the Doctor says, and closes the door.
He listens to the screwdriver. "Come on, old girl, where are you?" he mutters. Grabbing another book and tearing out a page, he hurtles off
down the next hall.
She's so tired she can't even think straight. "Can't hardly remember my own name," she mutters, swallowing a yawn. A voice in the back of her head is shrieking at her, but Martha's too exhausted to care. "I just need to sit a bit. That's all." She leans against a shelf and slides
down to the floor, resting her head against her knees. She can't rest for too long though. There's something she's supposed to be doing. She knows there's something - it's nagging at her, urging her to keep going - she just can't put her finger on what.
For four centuries men exhausted the hexagons... Obviously, no one expected to discover anything.
"Who said that?" she demands, raising her head. "Well, you're wrong," she says flatly, and that's right - she was supposed to be looking for
something. When she thinks about it, though, she can't remember what it is she's so certain she's going to find. She shifts restlessly, and
raises her head when her hand brushes against paper. Vaguely curious, she picks it up, smoothing out the crumpled ball. Looking around, she sees another, just barely visible on the first downward stair. "Oh dear," she murmurs, "someone's damaging the collection. That's bad."
The Library is so enormous that any reduction of human origin is infinitesimal.
"Human," she muses, running her finger over the rumpled page. The word wanders around, bumps up against an idea. "But he's not human." She struggles to her feet as a memory surfaces. "He's not. The Doctor's got two hearts. And I have to find him." She forces her tired body to move, stumbling over to the stairs.
The possibility of a man's finding his Vindication can be computed as zero.
She's not entirely sure what that sentence means, but the basic message is clear. Still - she may have lost her tenuous hold on her own name, but this is written down deep in her bones. "Sod off," she growls. "I'm going to find the Doctor."
In adventures such as these, you will squander and waste your years.
"Yeah, right," she says, scrubbing angrily at tears of frustration. "Because it's already so much fun."
Many wandered in search. They exhausted in vain the most varied areas.
"I don't care," she snarls. "The Doctor's there somewhere." She heads downward, following the trail of paper.
Somewhere, in some book on some shelf, some sentence suggests that the Library's lack of further comment is rather... smug. In another book, not too far away, an author remarks that the atmosphere isn't just smug, it's anticipatory. The Library itself just waits.
The Doctor rounds a corner and stops in his tracks, staring in delight at a book on the shelf that doesn't look like any of the others. "Found
you!" he crows, dropping his half-decimated tome and dashing over. This book is locked up tight, pages entirely inaccessible - the sonic
screwdriver is blipping frantically until he turns it off and stows it back in a pocket. "Clever girl," he says, voice fond, and fumbles for a
key that, he realizes, he doesn't have. "Martha," he breathes, and his eyes grow dark. "You know," he says to the empty room,
"you lose any minuscule chance at mercy you may presently enjoy if I find out you've hurt her." The Doctor shrugs. "You've been warned."
"Well, old friend," he says, settling himself in relative comfort on the floor, holding the book, "now we wait. Martha Jones is very bright,
after all. And quite determined. I have the bruise to prove it," he concludes, rueful, rubbing his cheek.
There's only silence.
She's cautious as she picks up the last piece of paper; she's just high enough on the stairs to see into the next room. There's a man there, a man with an untidy mop of brown hair, dressed in a suit and wearing trainers, sitting with his head propped up on his hands, his elbows
resting on his knees. His eyes are closed. She thinks he's probably asleep. She looks down at the wad of paper in her hand. Her head is
pounding. That man - there's something about him, something that prods some far-off emotion she doesn't really recall well enough to name. She can't even remember why she's looking for the next piece of paper; just that it's something she has to do. She's so tired.
She'd really rather just sit down on the stairs and nap a bit, but just then her head throbs with particular insistence. She flinches, hand
tightening around the paper, which crackles. She ducks down at the noise, just in case she's woken him up.
She crouches there awhile, listening hard, but there's no sound of movement. She straightens - only to freeze. He hasn't moved, except to
open his eyes, and he's staring straight at her.
"It's all right," he says softly. He gets to his feet, never taking his eyes off of her. "It's all right, Martha," he reiterates, stretching out a hand.
"Who is Martha?" she asks, honestly baffled. "Is this hers?" she says, holding out the ball of paper. "She's dropped a great many of them, if
so."
His eyes are very brown, and very dark. "What did you do to her?" His voice is very, very quiet. She's not sure, for all that it seems like
it, that he's actually talking to her.
For centuries, there were official searchers, inquisitors. They disputed in the narrow corridors, proffered dark curses, strangled each other on the divine stairways. Others went mad.
The words in her head hurt more than the headache, and she gasps. It's like something's crumbling, some sort of wall or barrier or she doesn't know what. It's getting hard to think.
"She's gone mad?" the man asks, almost lazily, holding the book tight to him. "I don't believe that. Irrepressible, that Ms. Jones. Acres of
common sense."
"The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms." That's her voice. The words have taken her voice. She can feel them crowding in her head, stamping over her panic, treading it down into a dull ache. She can feel them running through her
muscles, moving her feet up the stairs with ease, fluidly, as if they belonged to the voice, as if she's the stranger in her own body. Maybe
she is. She really can't remember.
There's a stubborn spark though, somewhere deep down, that's rebelling against this casual occupancy. Pain flares as it surges, and some small part of her seizes the initiative, jamming her hand into her jacket pocket and thrusting the papers she finds there out at the man staring her down. Then the opportunity's gone, as whatever it is shoves that impulse away, throttles it. She feels it happen, inside her head, and feels little more than idle curiosity.
Across from her, the man is shuffling through the papers at lightning speed. "Oh - oh, yes!" he shouts, eyes wide. "Oh, of course. That's it."
The thing in her body moves her a step closer and his head snaps up. He's talking a mile a minute now, but he's focused on her face, almost as if he's looking for something, "You're a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, aren't you - used to be libraries were places for stories and knowledge and answers, and names are just a short form for that, meant to give things a handle, so we don't have to call each other things like 'grew-up-six-blocks-west-of-the-butcher's-went-to-uni-to-be-a-doctor.' Only it's all gone twisted - they lost the point so badly they ended up somewhere they'd never meant to be. Because suddenly they had a library that stored everything - anything - any way and order
you could smack a set of letters together, and all that pressure, all those words and non-words and possible words crammed up together,
well," the man is pacing around the room, gesticulating wildly, "they stopped being just words and turned into the Library. And the Library - you had a life of your own, producing sense and nonsense and unprecedented languages and everything else."
The voice, or whatever it is, stretches her lips in some kind of grin. "Yesss," it hisses through her. "There is no combination of characters
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning. No one can articulate
a syllable which is not filled with fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god."
"Yes, yes," the man shouts, clapping a hand to his forehead, the papers in his grasp drifting, forgotten, to the floor. She feels much like
those papers. "And words are power. Of course they are - you remember that, don't you, Martha?" He reaches out and taps her once on the forehead, hard; the voice growls, a rumble in her throat. "All those powerful words in one space - no wonder the Library came to life - and then, then, and this is really rather brilliant, I have to admit, you realized that you could expand yourself faster, further, if you just stole the names and stories of the people meant to be your keepers. You started eating names, and your Librarians just withered away, one by one by one by one, until they were all gone, and it was just like stories and names had never even existed. Only you couldn't stop, could you, and you knew if you kept on the way you were -" he grimaces, "you'd swallow yourself up, eat your own name, and then poof! There you are, winked out of your own existence. You must've been pretty desperate, I suppose."
The thing in her head roils; fear and hunger, words she thought she'd forgotten, coat her throat as the words tumble out. "Let them be
outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let the enormous Library be justified."
"So," the man says, pointing at her/it/them, "when the TARDIS brushed by your little pocket of infinite space-time, you realized that she was
the perfect solution. Get her story, bind her up in one of your books, and every time you got back to the beginning, you could just loop back round to the end. Eternal second helpings. So you swallowed her up - but my ship's more than just clever. She put a lock on. Closed herself away - so you had her, but couldn't read her, not without - oi!" he shouts, but the thing - the Library, she says, the name dusty and unfamiliar in her head - dances her body away, out of his reach, and it's holding the locked book, stolen away while the man was distracted.
The voice moves her hand, reaches into her pocket and pulls out a key, dangling on a string.
"Not without the key, and it was so very, very easy to get her to bring the key. Because you knew I'd find the book, and that she'd find me."
the man says flatly. "Martha," he says, in a very different tone, and he's staring at her again. "Martha, listen to me. I know you're in
there still. Your name is Martha Jones, and you're studying to be a doctor, and you used to be at Royal Hope until it took an unexpected
side trip to the moon." He's speaking so fast, and he's watching her like this is a message of utmost importance. She realizes, with a jolt,
that she wants to understand. "You have a sister named Tish and a brother named Leo with a little baby who calls you Aunty Marth. You have a father with alarming taste in women and a mother with a solid pitching arm and a Machiavellian streak that, frankly, worries me a little."
"The Library is total," the voice roars, and it hurts, but the funny thing is, it's not the only thing she can feel anymore. Ever since the man rapped his finger against her head, she's been feeling strange - well, she's been feeling. That recalcitrant little spark in the back of her head is still burning, apparently; she can feel it starting to spread, slowly seeping into her tired limbs. The thing in her head shifts her hand toward the book. Something inside her balks, wrestles against the impulse, and stops the key just shy of the lock.
The man doesn't falter - just keeps talking, looking her in the eye like he can see her staring back at him from a distance. "Your name is Martha Jones, and you're bossy and stubborn and you came along for a ride with me after I showed you the cheapest trick in the book. You came along for a ride and got zapped by a witch and nearly eaten by giant crabs and kidnapped by pigs and let's not talk about the thing with the human-scorpion and your sister and a scene I'm very glad old Victor's going to leave out of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and I like you, Martha Jones."
The voice in her head is fighting against her; the hand holding the key is shaking with the force of it. "I do," he repeats, and she
can see it's true, can see it in his face, "and I wouldn't have trusted you with my life in a pocket watch if it weren't true."
The pressure's building in her head; people and places and stories she thinks might be hers swelling up from where they've been crammed down, clamoring for form and shape and she's so close to knowing they're hers for sure. She's hammering at the barrier holding everything back, pounding at it, but she's so tired, and it might not be enough. She's got enough control over her own body now that she can wet dry lips, that she can ask him, in a desperate whisper, "But who are you?"
He grins, slow and sweet, "I thought you'd never ask." The voice in her head is screaming so loud it's hard to hear him. "You did tell me,
once, that I was everything. Although I must say, the last little while has rather knocked my ego right on its rump." He pauses for breath.
"Hello, Martha Jones," he says. "I'm the Doctor."
The voice in her head is screaming, and the rush of memory thunders in her blood. She drops the book, drops the key, and drops to her knees. She can't hear over the noise. she can't see for the tears streaming down her face, but she can feel, and she can think, and she can
remember. The Doctor's hand grabs hers, doubly welcome for the fact that it's familiar, and he tugs her forward, wrapping an arm around her when she falters. Then somehow the TARDIS is there, and they tumble inside, and it's all she can do to cling to the struts as the voice
rages outside. The Doctor flips levers and cranks dials like mad and then they're off, away, and safe.
The Doctor walks back over, puts a hand to the side of her head, and looks at her carefully. "Rest, I think," he says thoughtfully. "Need a hand?"
"Yeah," Martha Jones manages to say, and the Doctor helps her all the way to her bedroom door.
When she wakes, he's in an armchair she's pretty sure she's never seen before, reading a paperback novel, his feet propped on her bed. "My mum'd smack you for that," she says sleepily.
He looks up over the edge of the book. "Can't have that," he mutters, scowling and sitting up as she smiles. "We're in the Vortex. Just
idling. It wouldn't hurt you to sleep a bit longer."
She's already fading. "Doctor's orders?"
"Something like that." He grins at her and stands up.
"The Library?" she asks, and he pauses.
"Vanished," he replies. "Without the TARDIS, and with all the sentient life gone, it collapsed in on itself not long after we escaped."
She closes her eyes and hears him walk away.
"Doctor?" she says, and the sound of movement stops.
"Martha?" he answers, and she struggles for the right words.
"Thanks," she says finally. "I'm glad you remembered. You know. What I said. From 1916."
The last thing she hears before she falls asleep is the Doctor's voice, low and content, murmuring, "I'm glad I did too."
A week later, she's wandering through the shops in Buenos Aires on Christmas Eve eve, 1938, and realizes it's nearly dark. She meets up
with the Doctor at the small cafe he'd told her about earlier, just as he's walking out the door. He looks back and waves at a middle-aged man with a lean, rectangular, slightly-lopsided face, who smiles back with unguarded pleasure, holding, in his other hand, a small pile of faded papers, covered in writing. "What was that all about?" she asks.
"Oh, you know," the Doctor says, gesturing expansively, "had to warn a man about a book."
She stops in her tracks. "About a book?" she demands, skeptical.
The Doctor shrugs. "We-ell. Or two. Or a library-full. You know." He walks off.
Martha looks at the Doctor, vanishing into the dark, looks back at the man sitting in the cafe in a pool of yellow light. She pauses,
considers, and laughs, then runs off after the Doctor. Later, remembering, she'll recall that the emotion she feels just now is hope.