Time Is The Fire brings us to a significant parting, the death of Mai Li Tuo. It was not originally going to BE a two part story, but I decided to extend the morning after scene, with all the revelations about who Li Tuo really is, so it made a split feasible. Part One is concerned with what occurs in the evening leading up to Li Tuo’s death. Part Two deals with the aftermath.
There was a kernel of Part One archived in my drabble folder
for some time. The scene where Chrístõ plays multi-dimensional
chess with Li Tuo. Li Tuo’s death was meant to be the story that
occurred shortly after Chrístõ met Julia, but I gave him
nearly another year. I then had a bit of a puzzle about how to open the
story, then came up with the idea of Li Tuo remembering his youth, when
he and Chrístõ’s father were young. This is the first
time, incidentally, that the name of Chrístõ’s grandmother
was mentioned – 
Aineytta
the herbalist, a Caretaker who married above herself. At that point I
hadn’t really thought of the Marion and Kristoph series, in which
Aineytta would play a larger role, but her basic biography was set out
in these paragraphs.
This story takes place on Chinese New Year, 2008, February 7th, when the Year of the Fire Pig becomes the Year of the Earth Rat. That is two years on from The Year of The Dog, which began on January 29th, 2006, and featured in the story of the same name. It went online a week later than the 2007 Chinese New Year. But Li Tuo is not destined to see The Year of the Rat. He knows it.
He is taking his time about it, even so. He manages to take tea with his friends and say goodbye to them before he has to take to his bed.
Li Tuo’s flashback scene is counterpointed by Chrístõ’s flashback when he thinks about the day he first met Li, on his first visit to Earth. Of course, those who have followed the Marion and Kristoph series will realise that there is a bit of a problem with the time frame. Marion first meets Li in 1992. Chrístõ turns up to see him in the early 200s. But in those ten years Li has lived a lot more. The Marion and Kristoph stories reveal that he often takes weekend trips to ancient China which last the lifetime of the women he falls in love with there. He gets a lot out of his life.
The flashback gives the title to the double episode.
Time is the school in which we learn. Time is the fire in which we burn.”
The poem is by an American poet, Delmore Schwartz, called
simply, Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day
By Delmore Schwartz
Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
(This is the school in which we learn ...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn ...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(... that time is the fire in which they burn.)
Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
Why does it sound so familiar? Because it was quoted by Tolian Soran in Star Trek Generations, a film which has already had an accidental echo in the Time Ribbon in Missing Years. THIS time, it WAS deliberate. I looked up the quote and found the poem online and found that it did have a theme that Time Lords as well as humans might take note of, especially OLD Time Lords.
The Rite of Mori is one of those ideas that has been passed around a bit. I first mentioned it in the Unfinished Business story, Mindflip, where the Ninth and Tenth Doctors together found a crystal used in the Rite. It is later done in the New Lords of Time story, Prototype, when Davie Campbell goes to the future and finds himself receiving The Doctor’s soul through the Rite when he dies. This story was written between the two, and in the timeline of Chrístõ de Lœngbærrow’s life, it is his first experience of it.
The snag with the Rite of Mori is explained in this story – it leaves some recipients of the older Time Lord’s soul with schizophrenic tendencies. Some readers have pointed out that Davie, in fact, receives TWO souls in one. Chrístõ – later to become The Doctor – receives Li Tuo, and in turn passes his own soul to Davie. But that’s another story. Here, Chrístõ is the recipient.
In the second part of the story, Chrístõ is notably changed by his experience. His friends notice him using gestures they had associated with Li Tuo. But more importantly, he briefly holds all of Li’s memories, and there is a story to be told.
So, lets work this out for the confused.
There were three sons in the house of Oakdaene.
The eldest was the man now known as Maestro, who gave up his title to become a contemplative monk. He is Penne’s grandfather.
The second eldest was the man known to all as Mai Li Tuo. He became a renegade and was expunged from the family tree.
The youngest was Rõgæn Koschei Oakdaene senior, father of Epsilon, now dead.
So Penne is actually Epsilon’s nephew, not cousin, but cousin is an acceptable epithet between noble families.
What matters is that Penne is actually a member of the
Oakdaene family, and so is Maestro. Two people that Chrístõ
loves and trusts implicitly belong to the same family as his worst enemy.
Something for him to learn to live with.
Li Tuo’s funeral arrangements are complicated. The removal of his hearts is a little gruesome, but it is the only way he gets to go home to Gallifrey and to China, the two places he loves. Chrístõ agreeing to fulfil the second part gives me an opportunity for a follow up story.
I didn’t go into that much detail, but Li Tuo’s funeral would have taken place at the crematorium in the Liverpool district of Anfield. There was no reason not to mention the name of the crematorium, but I decided not to. A lot of famous Liverpudlians were cremated there, so he was in good company.
The last thing to be done, was the disposal of his TARDIS. Chrístõ did what he needed to do – removing the Eye of Harmony and leaving it as an interesting architectural feature of the garden that now belonged to Bo and Sammie. And that was the end of it, at least until the opening story of the New Lords of Time series, when The Doctor returned with Chris and Davie, his young Time Lord candidate great-grandsons, who needed a TARDIS of their own. Then the last chapter of Li Tuo’s story was written.
http://www.anfieldcemetery.co.uk/crem/history.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmore_Schwartz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year
http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/doctorwho/74mindflip.htm
http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/newlordsoftime/039prototype.htm
http://www.pearsecom.co.uk/newlordsoftime/001thechinesetardis.htm
