#watchmakers

make things out of sin

Manson is as innocent as he looks

make things out of dust

we are all in the bottle and one day the bottle will break

interference

nothing is real and nothing to get hung about

the more you play with this toy the weaker everything gets

fallen angels

dorian is a spotty twat

christine on a rational planet

the watchmakers are the men who will not be blamed for nothing

chris has been removed from the scene and you are the blond girl

midoctober

Besides the song lyrics and the messages from the sphinxes, “Interference” and “Christine on a Rational Planet” are obviously both references to the titles of Lawrence Miles’ past novels, and as I’ve previously noted the line about breaking the bottle is a direct quote from Alien Bodies.

But right now I’m mostly interested in the line “the watchmakers are the men who will not be blamed for nothing”. It’s one of many references in the novel to Jack the Ripper: the message “The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing” was originally scrawled in chalk on a wall beside a piece of bloodied clothing from one of the Ripper’s victims. For the sake of the plot, these words have obviously been changed to reference the “watchmakers”.

To recap, the word “Watchmakers” had been previously used in Miles’ first Doctor Who novel, Christmas on a Rational Planet. Matheson Catcher believed himself to be an agent of a mysterious force called the Watchmakers; later, the Carnival Queen – an entity from the start of the universe, built of all the discarded, irrational parts of Time Lords’ souls – used the term to refer to the Time Lords. She also called Rassilon the “first King of the Magestic Clockwork”. Not to be confused, of course, with “the Clockworks”, the home of the Lords Temporal and Iris Wildthyme’s people in her series. (Or maybe exactly to be confused.)

However, these words are changed in the Faction Paradox edition of the book to read “the great houses are the men who will not be blamed for nothing”. On the one hand, this rather clears up who the Watchmakers are supposed to be, if there was still any doubt. On the other hand this is a real shame, since the term “Houses” is used elsewhere in the novel to describe the Time Lords, so it subtracts from the delicious ambiguity of the original “watchmakers”. In fact, I’d say the second edition’s usage of “Houses” itself detracts from the portrayal of Cwej’s employers, previously described solely as “aliens” or “time-travellers”. Just compare

In all the time I knew him, I never once heard Cwej call his employers by their name. I think he was scared to.

to

In all the time I knew him, I never once heard Cwej call his employers by name. He talked about “Houses” sometimes, as if the people who gave him his orders had cliques and families and feuds of their own, but names? He never used names. I think he was scared to.

Doesn’t the idea of internal squabbles among the gods make them just seem a little less ... godlike? At the very least, it lowers them to the level of the all-to-human Olympian pantheon, as opposed to the incomprehensible, all-powerful God of the Old Testament. Doesn’t it?

Of course, this is an incredibly minor nit-pick. At least it’s cleared up that little “watchmakers” business, right?

... or maybe not. Because the Watchmakers aren’t mentioned only in Christmas on a Rational Planet. They also pop up in Simon Bucher-Jones’ Ghost Devices.

Ghost Devices is about Bernice Summerfield getting horrifically tangled up in a titanic paradox that revolves around a giant building serving as a sort of lynchpin to a multitude of mutually-contradictory futures. And at the end, as the timelines spiral out of control, the story “zooms out”:

A millennium hence, or back, or sideways, on a world that it is unwise to name, two creatures watched from behind their walls of solidified time.

They might be called Watchmakers, but even that word might be better avoided. The sort of watches they might make would not be the ones whose construction once appealed to Einstein as a valid moral alternative to involvement in the development of nuclear weapons. Next to anything they might build, nuclear weapons were, comparatively speaking, planks with nails in them.

Their bodies were slices of chronology, which to a three-dimensional viewer might, at certain intersections, be termed humanoid. From the right angle, which was not a right angle, they appeared to wear dinner jackets and could from a distance of years have been mistaken for the newsreaders of a stuffy holovision station. Call them continuity announcers, if you must have a term for them.

The two of them chat about whether the paradox has the potential to penetrate the “infinitely stable wonderwalls” of their “Reality Sphere”. They also spend quite a bit of time talking about muffins, which one of them was recently exposed to during a visit to the “Barbarous Times”, courtesy of their Home Era’s “new liberalism”.

The one familiar with muffins is then revealed to be David Foreman, a character from earlier in the novel, who edits time in such a way to make sure Bernice doesn’t die. During this, he wears a “thing on his wrist that was connected to Time”, which variably “formed an eye and winked at him” and “burped rudely with a red-lipped mouth”. Finally he disappears by “flipp[ing] sideways and stretch[ing] into a multitude of dimensions”.

What are the Watchmakers? Are they the Time Lords, in which case there’s been a whole, hitherto unrecognised Gallifreyan subplot to the latter New Adventures? Or are they something much more powerful – with interesting implications for the identity of the Great Houses?