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The Adolescence of Time was the forty-second Bernice Summerfield audio story released by Big Finish Productions. It was the second story of the ninth season.
Publisher's summary
Earth is still suffering the after-effects of the asteroid (or something) which collided with the planet many years ago: the dust cloud which blots out the sun shows no sign of settling and the dinosaurs are doomed. Above the cloud, colonies of winged reptiles – more intelligent than any we know of – are fighting to survive. A strange creature calling itself Summerfield appears in their midst: is it destined to save them?
Plot
Padra Tektekachuan repairs a Time Ring, inside of which the Wurm now lives, and sends it 65 million years into the future to find and bring back its former mistress, Benny. It instead travels to Peter and pulls him back in time, but he is able to fight it enough to deviate from the course and he is instead found by Madra Celethua, who summons the diplomat Ixotta to help given his initial distress. Peter suspects that he was pulled back by a malevolent will which is now blocking the ring from taking him back to the 27th century.
Tektekachuan, Celethua, and Ixotta are members of an intelligent pterodactyl-like species and they live in a colony on a rock floating in the Earth's sky, held above the poisonous Cloud by the Wildfields, psychic forces released from the Earth when it was hit by an object. Celethua and Ixotta privately discuss the possibility that Peter has been brought back by the Wurmcallers as a sacrifice to the Wurm or as part of a revenge plot and Celethua believes that he could be their saviour. Peter, overhearing them, agrees to help and Ixotta takes him on a mulo after giving him one of her people's telepathic pendants to wear on his head as they do. During the flight, Ixotta warns Peter not to use words that the pterodactyls cannot understand as it hurts them and confuses the mulo.
Ixotta takes Peter to her home of Kahathli, a sky colony in the Farm Belt, and introduces him to Padra Chulcullum, whom Peter cannot understand due to him having been born before the Cloud's formation and thus unaffected by the Wildfields. The Wurmcallers attack the colony and Peter gets everybody to fight them using the mulos as weapons, despite the concept of battle being alien to the pterodactyls, who interpret the Wurmcallers' attacks as weather. Realising that the Wurmcallers are following him, he flies through the Cloud to the Wurmcallers' colony to draw them away and threatens to drop the Time Ring into lava, believing that that is what they want. He is wrong, however, and tells Ixotta to flee whilst he is captured.
Tektekachuan orders Peter to be fed to the Wurm in the Crucible of the Ring even when he learns that he is not Benny, but the sky colonies attack and Peter manages to get away, albeit without the Ring which he dropped in the lava when he was captured. Despite Tektekachuan's warnings, he opens a pipe which releases the voice of the Wurm, a liquid, and damages the area, causing Tektekachuan to fall. Peter is surprised to be saved by a mulo-riding Benny, who recovered the Time Ring from the rock in the future and used it to travel back to save him, and runs whilst she draws off the Wurmcallers. He encounters part of the Wurm, a lump of the strange liquid with a mouth, and realises that it is not actually dangerous; the real danger is when people listen to its cries of hunger.
Accepting that he is the one who has caused all of the deaths, Peter walks into the lava and uses the liquid to return to his own time, not caring about the reason that the Wurm wanted his mother. Benny too leaves prehistoric Earth. With the Farm Belt destroyed, the pterodactyls start having to hunt animals beneath the Cloud and, needing a way to bring themselves all back together, build a statue of Peter with an inscription reading "Peter the Summerfield, abomination and destroyer".
Cast
Crew
- Cover Art - Adrian Salmon
- Director - Lisa Bowerman
- Music - Martin Johnson
- Producers - Eddie Robson and Jason Haigh-Ellery
- Sound Design - Thea Cochrane
- Writer - Lawrence Miles
Worldbuilding
- Chulcullum has had his wings torn off.
- Peter claims that rapid eye learning is too slow for him.
- The Wurm was released from within Earth by the asteroid impact that drove the dinosaurs extinct.
- The Chicxulub are cousins to the Silurians and Sea Devils, who are still living below the Cloud.
- The Chicxulub use mulos to transport cargo.
- Peter likens the Chicxulub's telepathy pendants to wearing an infolink.
- Peter has done a fast-track module on simulated battle tactics and miltary history.
- The colonists are in the middle of an extinction event.
Notes
- The story was recorded on 1 December 2007.
- Lawrence Miles commented on the story in a 2010 blogpost.[1]
I wrote a Bernice audio about pterodactyl-folk struggling to survive after the K/T event ("Bernice Summerfield and the Sky Silurians", essentially). I never used the word in the dialogue, but the script named the starring reptiles as the Chixulub, after the location of the crater that's now thought to be Dinosaur Ground Zero. Since there's a proud Doctor Who tradition of attaching spurious human aesthetics to prehistoric races, I went further down this path by using character-names which suggested a Central American background. As it happens, a name like "Tektekachuan" makes exactly the kind of clacking (or K-KLAK!ing?) sound you'd expect to hear from a pterodactyl's beak, but the starting-point for this - the notion that prehistoric reptiles might have the same sort of language as the human culture which coincidentally develops on the site of the impact crater - is utterly berserk.
Continuity
- Peter speaks of when the time ring found him as a child. (AUDIO: The Grel Escape)
- The Wurm's effect on the Chicxulub is similar to the transformation of humans into Primords when exposed to Stahlman's ooze. (TV: Inferno)
- A portal to the Spiral Yssgaroth is at the centre of the Earth. (PROSE: Interference - Book Two)
References
External links
- The Adolescence of Time at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
- Official The Adolescence of Time page at bigfinish.com