the Long crossover

[scarfman]

Highlights of a story I never drew, a crossover between the works of Heinlein and everything else I'd ever crossed over at the time, about 1990. (I assume these are the highlights because they're what I remember.) Set after the then-latest episode for each of the properties.

Panel 1 of four. Interior Long compound on Tertius. Aged vegetable KIRK in his Pike-like support chair is wheeled into the rejuvenation clinic by ISHTAR as LAZARUS and 24th-century MCCOY look on.
MCCOY So how long does this procedure of yours take?
LAZARUS A few weeks. But it doesn't matter.
Panel 2. Two shot, MCCOY and LAZARUS.
LAZARUS Because of the importance of this operation, we mounted a timegate in that doorway. Kirk'll be back out in a moment.
Panel 3. Same long shot as the first panel. MCCOY and LAZARUS see ISHTAR walk KIRK back out the door, but now KIRK is young and walking and even back in his yellow Starfleet uniform.
KIRK Hello, Bones.
Panel 4.
MCCOY (to ISHTAR) If I let you do that to me, will you show me how?

THE MASTER Killing isn't evil, Doctor; ask your friend Lazarus Long. It is merely uncivilized. And civilization itself is a mass self-delusion.

It's mid-July and I've begun starting preliminaries in working on the fanfiction site's season premiere.

Comments

[blinovitch.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong to want to read the rest of this story?

[scarfman]

Only if wrong equates with impossible. This story is so old, the household computer it was kept on was an Amiga 500; I might just possibly still have the disks somewhere, but nothing I own can read'em. However you do prompt me to recall a little more of it.

In the fanfiction Dailies of the day, each property's chronology was prorated to all the others' (as opposed to the absolute chronology I usually employ, described here), and each property was reflected on the other's planes as fiction. Anyone who remembers my print cartoonzine of the time 500 Year Diary, that's the same multiverse. I think this was one of the Dailies reprinted there:

Panel 1
ROMANA Why don't you ever traveled to the planes of Heinlein's stories?
DOCTOR I have - read Coventry sometime. But you're right, I usually avoid that corner of the holism.
Panel 2
ROMANA Why avoid it?
DOCTOR Because I don't wish to meet Lazarus Long.
Panel 3
DOCTOR He and I are both such charismatic heroes, such the center of our respective universes, that we couldn't help but abrade each other. Yet if one believes in universe-as-fiction one must be resigned that it'll happen eventually.
Panel 4
ROMANA Why's that?
DOCTOR Because the dialog would be such fun to write.

This story was set, as noted above, at the end of everyone's recorded history. The premise was that Lazarus Long and the Circle of Ouborous recruited the Doctor into their battle to conserve their own history when they learned that the rival time-manipulators they'd codenamed "Time Lords" (Number of the Beast? The Cat Who Walks Through Walls?) were, in fact, the Time Lords. The Doctor recruited all his quasi-fictional buddies into Ouborous' Time Corps from the end of their recorded lives. James T. Kirk became commander of military operations and Hawkeye Pierce was in charge of the medical corps. More fourth-panel dialog returns to me:

HAWKEYE How can you order these people out there when you know some of them will only come back in casualty reports?
KIRK If it wasn't me, it might be someone who doesn't read casualty reports.

In the climax, the Doctor and Lazarus Long enter the Matrix in the Citadel on Gallifrey, where they discover the Master, who confesses that all his supposedly stand-alone plots which the Doctor ever foiled were only elements of a grander scheme. During Trial of a Time Lord the Master moved his consciousness into the Matrix permanently. "Any encounters you may have thought you had with me since then - or with the Valeyard, whom I did away with - were actually with a biological construct which I created once I was here, and which I programmed to actually be the jumped-up thug I'd always led you to believe I was."

At the climax, when it looks like the Master is going to destroy the Doctor and Long, a vision of Rassilon appears and blows the Master away; and Superman (whom students of my work will have been expecting to show up all along) rescues the Doctor and Long from the explosion.

While this story was conceived as the swan song and capper to any and all stories set in the 500 Year Diary crossover multiverse, it nevertheless closed with only an implication by Long that the Doctor is, somehow, really Rassilon; unlike The Circle of Time, which was conceived as a capper to the crossover universe I write online, which closed with the unambigous disclosure that the Doctor is, somehow, really Rassilon.