The Celestial Harmony Engine (short story)

The Celestial Harmony Engine was the sixth short story in the Short Trips anthology Short Trips: Defining Patterns. It was written by Ian Briggs. It featured the Seventh Doctor.

Summary
A strange chime heard in the TARDIS, takes the Doctor to mid-Seventeenth Century Seville. He visits the navigational engineer Senor Carlos López who he finds putting the finishing touches to a “Celestial Harmony Engine”. This beautiful and intricate machine uses sub-chronic resonance to map the motion of the cosmos and then uses the information to make astonishingly accurate predictions about the future. Naturally, the Doctor becomes worried: this machine is so far in advance of the Earth’s technology that it will irrevocably alter the history of the planet. Lopez explains to the Doctor that he got the idea for the Engine from a Berber traveller aboard a ship when he was a boy. The Doctor is puzzled that Lopez could remember the many intricate measurements needed to recreate the Engine. López ignores the Doctor’s warning about the threat that the Engine poses, he has become so obsessed by his desire to complete it and to give it to his wife that he has become oblivious to all else, including the fact that his wife, Dona Isobel, is about to embark on an affair with Don Ramiro, an emissary of the royal household. When he sets the Engine to life its song is so beautiful that it transfixes the Doctor and the engineer until they realise that it is singing a song of death in a woman’s voice. Meanwhile, Isobel is about to surrender herself to Ramiro, thinking that the scar on his body is an ‘ H; from when he was branded for heresy. Almost too late the Doctor realises that the scar was the wrong shape, originally it was a ‘V’, indicating that Ramiro was a rapist. Racing to Isobel’s rescue as Ramiro holds her at knife point the Doctor and Lopez seem to have arrived too late. Lopez smashes a device that he confesses to having stolen from the Berber all those years ago: the blueprint for the Engine, which he had given to his wife as an ornament. Self-realisation hits Lopez: his obsession has made him betray and neglect his wife, even giving her a gift which she treasured as a token of his love when he knew it was merely a way of hiding the plan for his greatest work. López smashes the Engine, and then vows to devote his remaining years to Isobel. As the Celestial Harmony Engine dies, the Doctor observes that the song of death was that of the machine, predicting its own demise, and that the ‘Berber traveller’ was probably an alien visitor to Earth, a masculine looking female, which is why the Celestial Harmony Engine had a woman’s voice.

Characters

 * Seventh Doctor
 * Carlos López
 * Isabel de Andújar
 * Ramiro de Lerma y Hierro

Continuity

 * The Doctor mentions quantum chronometry. (PROSE: The Infinity Race)