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The TARDIS landed and the Doctor stepped out with his companions, Ace and Hex. They were in a desert somewhere, and they had landed in a village of brightly-coloured tents the size of bungalows. An old man greeted them in a language they didn't understand.
"That's Akkadian," muttered the Doctor. "It's an ancient Sumerian dialect. It’s taking the TARDIS longer than usual to translate… ah, there we are." The man’s words were now comprehensible.
"Yes, well, that's what I was telling you," said the man. "My name is Ea."
"Hello, Ea. We can't stay. We're looking for someone."
"I know who you're looking for," said Ea. "I will show you. Follow me."
Ea led them to a tent. "This is the apothecary," he said. "Her name is Gimbara."
"Oh, the apothecary? Of course it would be an apothecary. Come on, Doctor."
"Wait, Ace! Hex! Where are you going?"
"We've been here before! You know what it's going to be!"
"You've been here before?"
"Yes, you know we've been here before! We're all going to get killed by the monster in the tent, just like before!"
"Calm down, Ace. What are you talking about? You know what’s going to happen?"
"’Course, we remember. Don't we, Hex?"
"Yeah, we’re not so forgetful that we can’t remember what’s just about to happen."
The Doctor was baffled.
The apothecary turned out to be a young woman, and she was very scary-looking. She had a strange way of talking, and when Ace asked her something in Akkadian, she replied in a language different from Akkadian. The Doctor was trying to figure out what language she was speaking.
"It sounds like... Nabataean. A language like that..." The Doctor was lost in his thoughts for a moment, before shaking it off. "Well, Ace? You know what happens. What do we do now?" he asked
"It's nothing. We'll just go into the next room and find Nabataean writing on the wall. We’re already going to have been here, remember? We’ll see it before it happens.
"Before what happens?" the Doctor.
“You OK, Doctor? Not got heatstroke, have you?”
“No, no, I’m fine… I suppose you mean before we get killed by the monster, naturally?
"What else would we mean?”
"And you're just going to sit there and allow yourself to be killed."
"You're right. I'm staying here. The walls have been written on, but they haven't been painted. That's because we're in the past."
"What do you mean, we're in the past?"
“The writing on the wall, Doctor. It was painted over by the time we got here. If we can see it, then we must be in the past."
"Well, that's obvious, isn't it?” said the Doctor. “And the monster isn't going to get you because it hasn't happened yet."
"But it will happen. You will be killed by the monster in the tent, just as you've been told. I've already seen it."
"Yes, I know that. It's all lies. Nothing will happen the way we expect it to happen. Everything will happen exactly the way it does. Take another look at that writing.”
"The only thing written on the wall is the time and the date,” Ace said.
“The time and date? Are you sure?”
“Yes. Look, it even says ‘calendar’ above it.”
“But Ace, calendar is a word derived from Latin, not Nabataean. And how could a written time ever be accurate in this time period? The time constantly changes. There would need to be someone updating it at all times. And in any case, they wouldn’t use a system that you would recognise.”
“So… it isn’t the time and date. And it isn’t Nabataean at all.
"Oh, I see. So this isn't Nabataean at all."
"No, it's Middle English. Very similar to your native tongue."
"You mean, this is the language of the Saxons," said Ace.
"No, it's derived from the language of the Angles, as well as French."
"I'm not talking about all that. I'm talking about the language on the wall." Ace
"It's written in Anglo-Saxon."
"But it's not in Anglo-Saxon with Anglo-Saxon letters. It's all in Nabataean."
"I'm not arguing with you about the language. I'm just saying, it's written on the wall." The Doctor
"Fine. It's written on the wall. But it's written in Nabataean. Nabataean letters. Nabataean text. About Nabataean figures."
"You're missing the point. It's a calendar. It's a calendar with the months of Nabataea. And the day and the year and the time and the date." The Doctor
“I don’t understand,” said Hex. “Why is it written in Nabataean? Isn’t it just gibberish?”
“Gibberish to you or me, Mister Hex, but not to native speakers. But it isn’t written in Nabataean. It’s written in Middle English. For some reason, you two view it as Nabataean. Ace thinks she can understand it, but Hex knows he can’t. You also both think you know the future, you’re talking about it as if it were the past.” The Doctor turned around and picked up a bone box. He poured out the bones and water onto the floor of the tent. “Remember this moment in history,” the Doctor said. Ace and Hex watched him walk away from them. “See those puddles? Look carefully.” The two companions could see words suspended on either side of the pools of water, reflections of themselves. The words seemed to shift semantically as they looked at them. Water, drop, fumble, beflum,replumb, plumber, leak, kale, iron, noir.
It continued in this way for a quite, jumping between words that were connected in meaning or letters or sound, anagrams and synonyms and palindromes and homophones and rhymes. Sometimes Ace struggled to spot the connections, not least because the words flashed by at a dizzying rate.
"What's this?" Hex asked Ace, as they watched from the edge of the pool.
"That's a little different from what we got last time."
"How do you mean?" asked Hex.
"Last time, I'm sure it was more terrifying than this."
"More terrifying than words, you mean?"
“Oh, shut up, you.”
“Will the pair of you stop bickering for a moment?” said the Doctor.
“Sorry, Professor. What’s up?”
“My theory, and it is still just a theory, is that this water is some sort of distillation of the idea of perception itself. Do you ever think about how we perceive the same thing in different ways depending on our perspective?”
“You mean like the blind men and the elephant?”
“Precisely, Mr Hex.”
“Ey? Blind men and the elephant.”
“It’s an old story, Ace. Imagine six blind men all try to investigate an elephant using only touch. One grabs its leg and declares that it is a tree. One pats its side and declares that, no, it is a wall. The others grab the trunk, or tusks, or ears, or tail, and each gets an entirely different view of the elephant.”
“Good job none of them grab its… you know.”
“Let us assume that the elephant is a female. Anyway, throughout our lives we are often like those blind men. We see things differently as we grow up, our circumstances change, we learn new things, or we simply stand in a different place.”
“So this water is… a way of thinking differently?”
“No, Ace, it’s more than that. It is the essence of perception itself. For some reason, the universe has taken an action which is performed by all living creatures and given it a material form, a physical metaphor. It’s a manifestation of an abstract concept.”
“I don’t get it. How do you think these things, Doctor?”
“Ever since we landed here, the two of you have been remembering the future. The only explanation is that your perception must have been mixed up somehow. In your memories, do you become immersed in the water at any point?”
“We jump in so we can save Gimbara’s wife,” Hex said, pointing down into the pool. And now it was the Doctor’s turn to peer gormlessly. For sure enough, the pool was deeper than he had perceived, and a woman’s body lay at the bottom, dressed in ragged grey robes.
“Is she dead?” asked Ace.
“No, not yet,” said Hex. “Or… sorry, yeah, she’s dead right now. I got a bit confused for a second there, like.”
“Why… why is she in there?” the Doctor asked. He hated not understanding something, and he hated it even more when Ace and Hex knew more than he did.
“She will think she’s lost her baby,” said Ace. “Don’t you remember? She will think that her baby will have died because of her, but he will actually just be sleeping under wrapping cloths at the marketplace. The guilt will be unbearable. She drowns herself.”
“It’s time, Ace,” said Hex.
“I know,” Ace said. They both seemed short of breath. They began to gasp, louder and louder. The Doctor called out to them, but it didn’t make a difference, and then they both jumped backwards, feet first, into the pool.
The Doctor bent over the pool and peered down helplessly. His companions sunk slowly, even as they tried to swim back up. The Doctor shouted their names in despair. When they reached the bottom, their attention turned to Gimbara’s wife, who, astonishingly, responded to Hex’s touch. After a few agonising seconds, Ace and Hex were lifted back up towards the surface feet first, as if there were ropes tied around their ankles and someone was pulling them back in. They both struggled to swim back down, but it was no use. They rose back to the surface, leaving the woman down there. When they broke through the surface, they performed strange reverse swan dives and landed on the shore.
“Ace! Hex! Are you both alright?”
“We’ve got to help her!” said Ace.
“You tried your best. There’s nothing else we can do.”
“I’m a nurse,” said Hex. “This is all I do.”
There was a splash, and Kimpara’s wife emerged from the pool.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I just cannot bear this anymore.”
“You don’t have to do this!” the Doctor said. “Just go back to the market! You’ll find him there!”
“What?”
“He is safe and sound, under some wrapping cloths! Trust me!”
“Sorry about the Professor,” said Ace. “He sometimes says things he doesn’t understand.” She turned to the Doctor and hissed. “Her baby is dead, can’t you be sensitive for once?”
“What? Ace, my understanding is… oh. Oh, that’s very clever, Doctor, well done.”
“My love!” the apothecary said, dashing straight over the puddle to embrace her wife. “I know this is hard, but together we shall pull through…”
The Doctor was no longer interested in the domestic affair. He realised that this reversal of time was not something a human would ever be able to properly understand. If Ace and Hex’s memories worked in reverse, their brains would be fried with Artron energy. Only a Time Lord would be able to survive.
His friends weren’t living backwards. He was. But even his brain, his mighty Time Lord brain with all its extra senses and processing power, had struggled to make sense of all the contradictions. And that meant… that he, and not they, was the one intertwined with the perception puddle.
The Doctor dropped to his knees and sipped at the puddle. There was a taste of bile in his mouth, a tiny bit of acid reflux. He took a big gulp, and then another, and another, and found that he couldn’t stop himself from drinking the whole puddle, even as it made him sicker and sicker. The water disappeared faster and faster, the bottom of the puddle rising up to meet the Doctor. And then, when he took the final sip, he blacked out.
The strange thing about this particular incident was that no one remembered exactly what happened after that day - whether or not it had happened at all. No one remembered why Gimbara walked across these puddles and entered the apothecary's tent afterwards, or how Ace got here with another companion called Hex; or how two of them had ended up back on board the TARDIS without any explanation as to how they'd got there. No one knew what had happened between then and now except for them. Ea, Gimbara, her wife and their son forgot about the strange visitors. Hex and Ace had some clouded memories at first, but when they tried to explain it to the Doctor, they found that they couldn’t remember it either.