Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 1

DOCTOR WHO.

The Slow Empire.

by Dave Stone.

No, no, I couldn't possibly. I'm as stuffed as a Moblavian ptarmigan, which as all of us well versed in the Natural Sciences know, is known for ravening its way across the mighty fjords of Moblavia and eats itself into extinction by the simple expedient of stuffing itself with nuts and berries and the suchlike readily available comestibles until it bursts. I couldn't eat another mouthful, honestly.

Well, all right, another slice of that roast if you insist, and a few of those radish-like things to add a touch of piquancy. My word, are they really? A couple more, then. And possibly a spot of that rather nice brandy to wash it all down...

Now where was I?

Ah, yes, I was telling you of what was, perhaps, my strangest adventure of all and I say this advisedly, having been a slave of the Big-footed People of Robligan, a bondsman to the Grand Kalif of Hat and a servant of a rather more intimate nature than otherwise to the Domina of the Hidden Hand herself.

Quite so, since you mention it. The wages of sin, and a life of perpetual slithering depravity, is death, I quite agree. And personally I found her 'matchless beauty' a little overdone in the slap-andbatter department, if you take my meaning, and nothing to compare to that of a good, honest serving wench such as you'd find in you're a pretty little thing, aren't you? You must allow me, should some later time permit, some explanation of how the so-called Ruby Lips, Coal-dark Eyes and so forth of the Domina cannot hold a candle to your own. Especially the so forth.1 As I was saying, the tale I will relate is in all probability the strangest in my experience or any other and so it should come as no surprise that it involves, to some degree, none other than the man who merely called himself the Doctor.

Aha! I see you recognise the name. You have no doubt heard the stories of this magnificent, ill.u.s.trious and quite obdurately enigmatic personage and wondered if they can by any way be true. Well, as a close acquaintance and valued confidant of the man in question, I am here to tell you that each and every one is as true as the day is long on Drasebela XIV, a place where as even the most ignorant and parochial know the sun and thirteen rather extraordinarily luminous planets never set.2 Except, of course, for those stories that aren't. But then, there's no helping those. Except, of course, for those stories that aren't. But then, there's no helping those.

My tale, as I say, concerns the Doctor and what we once called the Empire those Thousand Worlds of which we all once had the honour (some might say the dubious honour) of being a part. Much has been forgotten, long forgotten, in the years since those Worlds were sundered and the Empire pa.s.sed and I must, here and now, confess that I myself had in some small way a hand in that pa.s.sing...

The Story So Far

Once, there was a man called the Doctor, although he was not precisely a man and that was not his real name. He travelled in s.p.a.ce and time in a marvellous craft he called the TARDIS, and had adventures, and fought monsters, and in general made the world that is, the universe of what we know and all we can know of a better and safer place.

Then, for quite some time, he didn't. Something happened to him, something that he cannot now recall. He found himself stranded on the horribly primitive planet Earth though primitive compared with quite what what is hard to say with any great accuracy his memories in shreds, his mind close to insanity, his body somewhat closer to death. is hard to say with any great accuracy his memories in shreds, his mind close to insanity, his body somewhat closer to death.

Not to put too fine a point upon it, he got better. After a fas.h.i.+on. Slowly, over a hundred years, he drew the skeins of memory about himself, knitted them together into something halfway complete, rediscovered something of who, and what, he once was if those things, in fact, had ever actually existed in the first place. For the moment or so he thinks this is enough.

So now the Doctor travels again in his marvellous blue box. For the moment, his concerns are simple. All he needs to do is return one of his travelling companions to the time and place from which, more or less, she was taken by mistake. That's all he needs to do, really.

Things, however, and as ever, are never quite that simple.

Now read on...

1.

On Shakrath

The desert sunlight flashed and sparkled dazzlingly on the firegem-inset3 minarets of Shakrath, bright enough to scar the eyes permanently if one looked at them for too long. It was noon, on the brightest and hottest day of the year, and in the streets the crowd sweltered and burned. Strangely enough, rather than wear the light muslin more suited and common to the climate, every male, female and child was hung and piled with every kind of finery he, she or it could afford every fur and brocade, every splendid ceremonial weapon and headdress, every sc.r.a.p and bauble trading off the distinct possibility of collapsing and dying from heat stroke with the rather fainter possibility of being minarets of Shakrath, bright enough to scar the eyes permanently if one looked at them for too long. It was noon, on the brightest and hottest day of the year, and in the streets the crowd sweltered and burned. Strangely enough, rather than wear the light muslin more suited and common to the climate, every male, female and child was hung and piled with every kind of finery he, she or it could afford every fur and brocade, every splendid ceremonial weapon and headdress, every sc.r.a.p and bauble trading off the distinct possibility of collapsing and dying from heat stroke with the rather fainter possibility of being seen seen.

An Amba.s.sador had been chosen, and today he would be sent out into the Empire. Quite which world of the Empire he was being sent to was neither here nor there the important thing was that he was going among the backward heathen, bringing them such news of the Centre as would make their eyes (or whatever optical organs said backward heathen might have) light up with the sheer wonder of it all. News of the Imperial Court and all its manifold intrigue, including the most surprising use the Emperor had recently made of his nefariously plotting mother and a team of wild stampede-beasts. News of the great advances made by Shakrath artificers, including the network of ca.n.a.ls and aqueducts that were even now making whole new areas of the Interior habitable. News of the splendid fas.h.i.+on sense of even the most common Shakrath citizenry, which of course the backward heathenry would soon be attempting to copy in a quite touchingly inept manner.

And now the new Amba.s.sador himself came, in his carriage drawn by piebald stampede-beasts broken to harness, as opposed to being used to pull an Imperial matriarch apart in opposite directions. He stood in the carriage, in his rather plain black suit, looking for all the world like some miscreant on his way to being depended, flayed and trisected rather than the dignitary he was. A young man he was, for all his dignity of bearing, meticulously trained from the age of swaddling for the function of his office. Names had no meaning as such for an Amba.s.sador, representing as he did Shakrath in its entirety, though partway reliable rumour had it that his name was Awok Dwa, originally from a family in the Fruiterers' Quarter a source of cautious pride for redgrocers and those with a someway similar name alike.

The face of the new Amba.s.sador was impa.s.sive, his eyes steady, as he took in the heaving, frantically waving crowd, giving no indication as to which of the screamed imprecations that a.s.sailed his ears might be noted or recalled later: '...them Durabli better not come and try to take over us with them their warlike ways!'

'...cloth! Finest cloth in all of the Empire...'

'...to send food! Cannibalism Statutes posted in the h.e.l.l's Quarter! Baby farming found there! For the G.o.ds' sake have them send us...'

'My name's Sma! Sma, I are! Remember the name Sma...'

His progress took him through several of the smaller streets, turning this way and that so that it seemed that all of those who packed them might have a chance to see him face to face, before the carriage turned into the main thoroughfare leading to the Mendicants' Square outside the Imperial Palaces. The 'mendicants', a Shakrath racial subset in themselves, had long since been eradicated by pogrom, but the food and souvenir stalls that had supplanted them had been removed, the area cordoned off from the crowds and filled with members of the Imperial Band. Shakrath did not have soldiery as such, that function being performed by those who were ostensibly the Emperor's personal musicians, all seven hundred thousand of them, and those smartly uniformed examples of the Band gathered here were those who could actually play. Even so, several of them were still trying to blow into their instruments in the wrong direction, and a number of drums were being beaten with a quite suspicious degree of enthusiasm.

The ma.s.sive ironwood doors of the Imperial Palace stood open, as they had done for centuries through custom. For this occasion, the specially designed blade machines just beyond them, which would instantly slice to shreds anyone foolish enough to enter without permission, had been disabled. The new Amba.s.sador left his coach and strode up the Pet.i.tionary Steps into the Palace, an honour guard of Bandsmen falling into step behind him.

A stately progress through the Outer Court, through corridors hung with tapestries depicting the exploits and accomplishments of a thousand Emperors dating back to the fabled Manok Sa himself, took the new Amba.s.sador to the Conclave of Governance, that chamber existing on a point between the Outer and the Inner Courts, where the Emperor would leave his private enclaves to oversee the administration of his Shakrath at the hands of his various functionaries and n.o.bles. Both sides of the Conclave were filled for this occasion, though there was none of the gaudy confusion and brawling of the rabble outside. Plain black suits, rather like the one the new Amba.s.sador himself wore, were the order of the day, so as never to detract from the splendour of the Emperor himself.

The Emperor might once have had a name, as all men do, but, since the time of Manok Sa, even to think think that he might have something so prosaic as a name was forbidden. He was the Emperor, plain and simple or, rather, magnificent and like unto a G.o.d. He sat there now, on his sea-jade and tourmaline throne, between the serried rows of the two Houses of Governance, wreathed in a corona of fine-spun cloth of platinum and girded with the greaves, breastplate and helmet of golden armour so finely constructed in its articulation that even a cat could not have looked upon the body within with the aid of a telescopic sight. that he might have something so prosaic as a name was forbidden. He was the Emperor, plain and simple or, rather, magnificent and like unto a G.o.d. He sat there now, on his sea-jade and tourmaline throne, between the serried rows of the two Houses of Governance, wreathed in a corona of fine-spun cloth of platinum and girded with the greaves, breastplate and helmet of golden armour so finely constructed in its articulation that even a cat could not have looked upon the body within with the aid of a telescopic sight.

Standing modestly beside the Emperor was his Chief Functionary, Morel, dressed not merely in una.s.suming black, but in a black of the same cut as that of the newly chosen Amba.s.sador. A member of the Amba.s.sadorial Corps himself, originally hailing from the distant world of Taroca, Morel had by his years of service and staunch advice risen to become the Emperor's most trusted aide, speaking for him in an almost Metatronic fas.h.i.+on that is, Morel made the wishes of the Emperor known. The words and wishes of Morel and the Emperor were one and the same.

Morel was a bald man not through having lost his hair in any natural sense, but in that his scalp was simply pale white skin layered over bone, with none of the complex patterns of follicles that might have produced so much as a single sprout of hair in the first place. The features of his dead-white face seemed somewhat rudimentary and unremarkable, save for the complicated lines etched into them in complicated, jet-black whorls and spirals that seemed on first glance to be tattoos, but upon closer inspection should such closer inspection ever be permitted would be seen as being integral to the skin itself, as though he had been born with them. And of course, in a certain sense, he had.

Now the body inside the Imperial Armour stirred, and a muttering issued from within the enamelled, fiercely snarling war mask of the helmet. Morel inclined his swirl-etched face to the Emperor, then turned it to the newly chosen Amba.s.sador standing before the throne.

'His Extreme and Divine Potency, the Light before which the Barbarity and Ignorance of the Infidel are burned away, the G.o.d that walks among the World as Emissary, the Primateur of all things Holy in the Sight of Man, the Emperor,' said Morel, 'wishes you a pleasant trip. It is also his wish that I accompany you to the Chamber of Transference, the better to instruct you upon the fine details of your mission. There are certain aspects of your duties that must remain for your ears, and your ears alone.

'You will no doubt,' said Morel, 'in your studies at the Amba.s.sadorial Academy, have been given a thorough grounding in the workings of the Empire: the geography, history and sociopolitical status of any number of its worlds from the savage tribes of pygmies subsisting in the fungus jungles of Glomi IV, to the caterpillar-treaded barquentine cities of the Barsoom sand ca.n.a.ls, to a number of quite astonis.h.i.+ng tales that have attached themselves to the Dominion of the Hidden Hand. Well, Amba.s.sador, I am here to tell you certain things that are not generally known and one of them is that such studies are worth about as much as the parchment sc.r.a.p for the sick note getting one out of them. Save in the most general of terms.'

The new Amba.s.sador regarded Morel with slight surprise. The formal part of the Procession was long since over, and now he and Morel were alone save for a pair of Bandsman guards, walking down a narrow and utilitarian tunnel that would take them from the Palace to the Chamber of Transference. Since leaving the Imperial environs, Morel had adopted a more informal, almost chatty manner, but this was the first thing of note he had actually said.

'The fact of the matter is,' Morel continued, 'that our Empire is vast, spanning a thousand times the distance light itself may travel in a year. Communication between our worlds, Transference Transference between our worlds, can operate only at the speed of light. Thus it is that the further out from the Glorious Centre of Shakrath, the more backward and barbarous other worlds seem to be. You are to be sent to the mining colony of Tibrus, for personal example, which is one hundred and twenty-four light-years from Shakrath. You will therefore not arrive for one hundred and twenty-four years and all you can possibly know of that brave colony shall be two hundred and forty-eight years out of date. Your function there, upon arriving, will be, to procure s.h.i.+pments of bauxite ore, lithium and such refined transuranic elements as might be produced, and arrange, for their continuous Transfer to Shakrath...' between our worlds, can operate only at the speed of light. Thus it is that the further out from the Glorious Centre of Shakrath, the more backward and barbarous other worlds seem to be. You are to be sent to the mining colony of Tibrus, for personal example, which is one hundred and twenty-four light-years from Shakrath. You will therefore not arrive for one hundred and twenty-four years and all you can possibly know of that brave colony shall be two hundred and forty-eight years out of date. Your function there, upon arriving, will be, to procure s.h.i.+pments of bauxite ore, lithium and such refined transuranic elements as might be produced, and arrange, for their continuous Transfer to Shakrath...'

'Morel,' the new Amba.s.sador said, feeling a little presumptuous at using the name, though Morel had no t.i.tle other than it, 'if this is true then the first s.h.i.+pment will not arrive until '

'The life of an individual man is short,' Morel said. 'The Empire is Eternal. As a great thinker once said in more cavalier times, "Stuff come in, stuff go out, and it's a bad idea to worry Joe Soap with the details of when every bit of stuff was sent." Our Empire has functioned on this basis for a billion years I beg your pardon, I have a slight head cold for a million years, and as such we can only play our own small part...'

They had reached the end of the tunnel, which now opened out into the Chamber of Transference itself although a more fitting term might be Cavern: a vast rock dome open to the sky, into which towered the Transmission Pylon the mirror-bright spire of some immutable alien material. The Pylon, together with the cl.u.s.ter of mechanisms housed in cabin-like constructions around its base, was older than Imperial dynasties in their thousands. Not one record remained on Shakrath or any other world of the Empire as to who or what had left these artefacts scattered through the known worlds. There were some scholars, indeed, who had examined the complex workings of the mechanisms and declared them a kind of inorganic life, the true nature of which was ultimately incomprehensible and their usefulness to the worlds of men no more than the sweet, sticky stuff that surrounds a sandflower seed and has it being spread and fertilised.

Such scholars, of course, tended to be promptly put to death for heresy. The mechanisms of the Chamber of Transference had, as any fool could see, been made for men by the G.o.ds.4 There was the continuous, half-heard throbbing of alien engines somewhere underground. Off to one side of the Chamber, banks of conveyor belts ran from the receiving mechanisms to loading bays. A number were inactive, some carried a seemingly unending stream of ore, roughly packed bales or loose grain. One conveyor belt seemed devoted entirely to a stream of smallish, brightly wrapped parcels with little ribbon bows and tags.

A contingent of heavily armed Bandsmen were decamped around those cabins containing mechanisms that were designed to receive living creatures, whether livestock sent from some outflung colony or actual men. The newly chosen Amba.s.sador was vaguely aware that Shakrath's colonies and protectorates must occasionally send representatives of their own, but such men had never been mentioned, and far less met, in all the years of his schooling.

Accompanied by their own brace of Bandsmen, Morel and the new Amba.s.sador circ.u.mvented the Chamber perimeter, pa.s.sing through manned checkpoints and those that might seem to be unmanned, but which gave off the distinct impression that they were capable of dispensing instant, hidden death to any who might try to pa.s.s through without explicit Imperial permission. At length they came to a collection of cabins smaller than most, in fact little more than a row of upright booths, each the size of a man. Morel touched a seam on the surface of one of them. The seam opened up to reveal nothing but blackness within not merely shadow, but a solid wall of some black stuff that seemed to suck upon the eyes.

The newly chosen Amba.s.sador appeared nervous, for all that years of training had prepared him for this moment. Morel merely smiled. He seemed rea.s.suring.

'The journey of years begins with but a single step,' he said, 'but it's a step you have to take alone.'

The new Amba.s.sador stepped into the booth. It was as though he were walking into a pool of vertical oil, which swallowed him up. There was a multiple das.h.i.+ng sound that may or may not have been a set of manacles being triggered, the whirr of some mechanism activating itself and the hiss and pop of searing flesh.

'Of course,' said Morel, to no one in particular as a number of screams issued from the booth, 'that first step, I must confess, tends to be something of a killer.'

When the sound of burning skin stopped and the screams had subsided into a gentle whimpering, Morel repaired to a control box connected by cabling to the booth and made to set the Transfer itself in motion.

It is at this point, I must confess, that words fail me a little. Hard to believe, I'm sure, but true. How can one possibly describe the sensations of the Transfer to those who have never experienced it and never will, now, of course. I'd as lief describe the taste of a Hekloden spline-mollusc (the most scrumptious flavour known to any seasoned connoisseur of molluscan taste, I'll have you know, to which not even the fabled zowie-whelk of Bretalona Maxis can compare) to a member of that unfortunate race known as the Zlom, who are born without tongues or suchlike sensual gustatory members.

I shall, therefore, simply detail the way by which men adapted the process of the Transfer for their use in general-terms: First, immediately before the Transferral itself, the face of the subject was generally branded, scarified or tattooed with distinctive markings, whether by hand or in some automated manner on Shakrath this was done by mechanised automata, within the booths of the Chamber of Transference itself, though without such anaesthetic as was used on other worlds as a matter of Imperial policy. I mean it was the Emperor of Shakrath's policy, as we'll learn, to inflict pain as a matter of course. This marking of the subject was not strictly necessary, but quite desirable, for reasons that I'll come to momentarily.

Now came the time for the Transfer. s.h.i.+eld gratings and suchlike were retracted from conduits running to the Pylon and the unknowable engines within, bathing the subject in an effulgent light, which quite burned the flesh from the bones and charred those bones to dust. (And again, I must say, Shakrath was remarkably lax in the supplying of tinctures that might ease the discomfort of such a transubstantiation.) The subject was, in short, reduced to the very atomies that so I gather are the very basis for all things. Said atomies were promptly swept up and saved for later, on the basis of 'waste not, want not'.

Not the most salubrious of trips, one might think, not to mention pointless and a little short save for the fact that the Soul of Man exists as something quite other than the atomies that make up his gross physical frame. It was this Soul that the Chamber of Transference harvested, and then transmitted via its Pylon to be housed in some reconst.i.tuted body at its eventual destination.

Of course, as we shall see, such a body might be quite different from the one with which one started out and this is the reason for marking one's face distinctive, and why these marks must still be fresh in the memory. The true Soul of a man must be burned upon his face, however much that face might ultimately change....

'It's remarkable, really,' said the Doctor. 'I mean, in a certain sense. I remember how, even so much as a few decades ago, I'd have found it quite remarkable.'

'Where did you find it?' Anji asked, peering at the item the Doctor was holding: a medium-sized, battered yellow umbrella with a handle strangely curved in the manner of a small, ebony question mark.

'I found it while I was tidying a few things away,' he said. 'It was hidden in the back of a wardrobe with some other junk. It's a silly little thing, but look: if you twist the handle in a particular way...'

The Doctor twisted the question-mark handle in a particular way and pulled it from the stem to reveal a length of tempered steel fully half as long again as the umbrella itself.

'It's a bit like an eighteenth-century sword stick,' he said, flouris.h.i.+ng the blade with a cheerful ineptness that had Anji jumping back a step despite herself. 'I can tell by certain signs that it was never drawn, but it was in there all the time.'

'What signs are those?' Anji asked. 'How can you tell it was never drawn?'

'Certain ones,' said the Doctor. 'I just wish I could remember if it was ever actually mine.'

He regarded the slim blade frowningly for a moment, then tossed it negligently over his shoulder. Somewhere in the shadows of the console room there was a thunk thunk and the flicked-ruler sound of a blade vibrating in the floor. 'Oh, well. Back to the fray.' and the flicked-ruler sound of a blade vibrating in the floor. 'Oh, well. Back to the fray.'

The Doctor busied himself with the complicated array of readouts and control mechanisms that was the console, his lean form silhouetted against the s.h.i.+fting, blinking lights. Not for the first time, Anji tried to make some semblance of sense of the specifics of this tinkering, and failed. It seemed more like the intuitive handling of a horse which just happened to have taken the form of an octagonal a.s.semblage of gear levers, valve-radio parts and the kind of pub-quiz machines where one presses a virtual b.u.t.ton to guess the country where maracas come from than the actual operating of machinery. Every so often a murmur of encouragement escaped from the Doctor's lips, as though he were guiding the TARDIS down some peaceful country lane rather than hurling it through the chaos of the vortex.

'How long have we got?' Anji asked.

'Mm?' The Doctor flicked a switch, then flipped it rapidly back and forth as it appeared to do absolutely nothing, shrugged to himself and turned his attentions elsewhere.

'How long until we materialise?' Anji said patiently. 'You said that this was going to be a short hop to get our bearings after all that recent unpleasantness.'

The thought made her shudder a little, involuntarily. The recent unpleasantness, in the way of such things, had been very unpleasant indeed. The things that had happened, Anji thought, would be hard to get out of her mind. She'd be thinking of them for quite some time to come.

Unlike the Doctor, it seemed, who more than occasionally seemed to be relapsing into the paramnesia that had at one time plagued him to the point of complete debilitation. He turned to look at her for a moment as if completely unaware of what she was talking about, then gave a vague little shrug of dismissal.

'Well, you know how it is in the vortex...' he said, and once again frowned in a way that Anji who had once been subjected to every episode of Quantum Leap Quantum Leap, one after another, by her boyfriend of the time thought of as a man confronting a sudden hole in his Swiss-cheese memory. 'That Is, I seem to recall knowing what the vortex is like, if you get what I mean.'

The Doctor tapped a small screen, which showed a rudimentary graphic of the police-box TARDIS exterior surrounded by concentric, s.h.i.+mmering coronas of light and looking like nothing so much as a video echo effect from a 1970s Top of the Pops Top of the Pops.

'We seem to be travelling through an atypical infraspatial region at the moment,' he said cheerfully. 'The laws of time and s.p.a.ce as such don't apply to the vortex in any case but here they're not applying in a different way. It's a bit like flying into turbulence or a sudden headwind. We'll get where we're going eventfully, but subjectively it might add a bit of duration. Could be just a few minutes, could be hours.' He seemed completely unperturbed. 'Could be years.'

Networking, Anji thought as she wandered the TARDIS corridors: that was the word. It was a peculiarly eighties word when you came to think about it but like so much else from the eighties it had spread its baleful influence all through the decades after, becoming the new baseline for a leaner, meaner, crueller culture of the new millennium. Through school and university and the sort of money-market career that owed its very existence to the era of Greed being Good, she had not so much made friends as contacts, not so much built relations.h.i.+ps as acquired and maintained them. The mobile phone as personal lifeline. The distinctive millennial gesture of something bleeping in a crowded room and everybody looking at their pockets. She had networked.

Of course, this was just a way of describing the basic fact of living in the world, of moving through it and being connected to it and, in the time since meeting the Doctor, Anji had become increasingly and uneasily aware of a sense of disconnection. Of being cut off from the support structures of society and community, such as it was in any case. Of finding oneself suddenly out of the loop. It was akin to that moment when the wheels of a 747 leave the runway for the first time and one is suddenly hit by the loss of something so basic and unheeded as contact with the ground. Whatever adventure and excitement one might betaking the 747 to to, it takes a while to come to terms with that fundamental dislocation and the reaction can come out in unexpected, uncharacteristic ways.

These feelings of dislocation, for Anji, became worse when the TARDIS was in its dematerialised state, when even something so simple as cause and effect did not necessarily apply. Dimensional disparity was not a problem in itself: it was more the feeling that things were quietly s.h.i.+fting themselves around the minute your back was turned, and the fact that the s.p.a.ces through which they s.h.i.+fted seemed to have been put together by a postmodernist architect on methyl-dex, made it all the more disconcerting.

The TARDIS seemed to be growing. More than once Anji had been walking through a hitherto familiar if decoratively mismatched corridor to find a junction she'd missed, leading into an entire maze of new corridors which in some strange way had always been there. Out-ofthe-way corners seemed to gravitate towards the centre, while still in some sense staying in the same place and suddenly becoming vast halls and galleries into the bargain. The swimming pool was even more problematical there only ever being one of it but in a continuingly s.h.i.+fting position and with ever-changing decor. It was as if it were uniquely vital to the scheme of things and the TARDIS were forever trying to find the perfect version of it.

Some doors were locked, some corridors and pa.s.sageways were blocked in a peculiarly definite and immovable way that suggested that whatever lay behind these barriers was something one would be better off not even thinking about. Of course, in the manner of the celebrated Blue Camel, that only made one think about the possibilities all the more. The sense of something hidden and biding its time, waiting for the moment when it could crawl out from under the figurative bed and pull the blankets from your head...

In the times before her career path had had her flying business cla.s.s as a matter of course, when she had found herself stuck in the centre of a cattle-cla.s.s airline aisle, Anji had without exception been struck with a kind of very vocal claustrophobia that had flight attendants falling over themselves to find her a window seat. At those times she'd merely felt a vaguely guilty pride at putting on an act that had got her what she wanted, and only later realised as the flight attendants knew perfectly well that her feelings of near-hysterical panic had been genuine. In a pressurised ballistic canister five miles up, some people simply have have to be able to look out of the window and in much the same spirit Anji was now heading for the chamber of the TARDIS she had privately dubbed as the Stellarium. to be able to look out of the window and in much the same spirit Anji was now heading for the chamber of the TARDIS she had privately dubbed as the Stellarium.

The faux-retro arrays of old TV tubes and dials in the console room may be understandable to the Doctor, but the noise-tosignal muddle of them was too fragmented for the ordinary human mind. There was also the occasional porthole literally, in some abstruse interdimensional manner, allowing one to see what was directly outside the TARDIS at any given time. When not on an actual planet, these portholes were almost literally useless in the same way that a clear piece of gla.s.s in the side of an interplanetary s.p.a.cecraft would be useless the wildly disparate lighting conditions and the distances involved between objects meaning that one effectively saw nothing.

In the same way, so Anji gathered, that the commercial s.p.a.cecraft of The Future supplied 'viewing ports' which displayed to their pa.s.sengers false but aesthetically pleasing images and which bore about as much relation to the actual conditions outside as Bugs Bunny does to the proliferation vectors of myxomatosis the Stellarium factored external electromagnetic and gravmetic readings to produce an image with which the mind could more or less cope.

From the inside it seemed like a big crystal dome, through which one saw spectacularly flaring starscapes and actual planetary systems, as opposed to mere pinpoints of light or blinding sunflares; the bright, majestic swirls of nebulae rather than the black-onblack dark matter of which such nebulae really exist. Had the TARDIS found itself in the middle of a s.p.a.ce battle it never had, and Anji devoutly hoped it never would then the Stellarium would show an exciting panorama of s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps zooming about and firing laser beams and appropriately evil-looking guided missiles rather than, again, mere pinpoints of light and sunflares followed by absolutely nothing as an evil guided missile hit.

The vortex, here in the Stellarium, was dazzling in a sense quite other than the literal: a churning a.s.semblage of luminescence through which points of image and a.s.sociation detonated like exploding gems. For all the chaos of it, the vortex seemed to have order, in the same way that milk swirls through coffee or the way that a galaxy, seen from a distance, swirls through the void.

There appeared to be an additional element to the mix, not incongruous as such: more like a stream of variegated light skeening out and interweaving with the other forms, vibrating at a pitch to set up eddies and swirls of secondary harmonics. There was a juddering, unearthly sound that for a moment Anji thought was caused by the stream of light itself.

Then she realised that in the splendour of the relayed vortex she had completely failed to notice Fitz.

He was sitting against the small console that controlled the Stellarium, playing chord progressions on a battered Fender Telecaster, picked up on their immediately previous adventuring outside of the TARDIS, which he had plugged through a portable amplifier into the console itself. From the vibrations in the stream of light, it was obviously being generated by the guitar Anji wondered what the effect would have been had the source been a true musician rather than an enthusiastic amateur.

Fitz became aware of her presence and looked up with a friendly grin. 'It's something I heard when I spent some time in the mid-sixties,' he explained, running through the chord progression quickly to give the gist of it. 'I can't believe believe I missed all that the first time around. You know, in the natural course of things. I was in this place called UFO which put coffee bars and Mandrax to shame, believe you me. "Interstellar Overdrive", I think it's called, from some R'n'B beat combo called Pink Floyd.' I missed all that the first time around. You know, in the natural course of things. I was in this place called UFO which put coffee bars and Mandrax to shame, believe you me. "Interstellar Overdrive", I think it's called, from some R'n'B beat combo called Pink Floyd.'5 Fitz played an absent arpeggio. Anji faded him into the background of her own attention and wandered through the dome. The musical accompaniment may not exactly be expert but it was pleasant enough; Anji watched as bright sparkles appeared that may or may not be the result of single notes. It was the kind of thing one could relax with and lose oneself in for a while...

There was a jarring, discordant crash as behind her Fitz dropped his guitar.

'Ug it!' he shouted, sucking at his fingers as, though they had been burned. 'Ug ugging ing ave e a ock!'