Part 7 (1/2)

And I rather think I'll have to be there, eventually, to dig you out again.'

She smiled and, by mutual, unspoken consent, they decided to leave it at that. As the coffee started to bubble and hiss the bus's speakers crackled into life and Abba came on.

'Someone come and talk to me!' Sam yelled down the aisle. She turned in surprise as Gila slipped into the chair beside her, and started to tell her about the good old days, when his mutant vigilante squad rode the highways, sailed the seas, and had adventures that she could only ever dream about.

The Doctor strolled down the aisle and sat thoughtfully on a seat at the front. As Gila's story came to an end, the Doctor said, quite out of the blue, though no one had asked him,'Oh, I'm sure he's fine out there in the desert. I don't suppose his Empress would let a fine precious pelt like his go to waste.'

Sam gave him an odd look, wondering who he was justifying himself to.

Sometimes he seemed to have to do this.

Sam is having a go on the camcorder. She corners Gila in the kitchen, where he is searching through the tiny fridge.

Sam tells him,'Your eyes are flicking about all over the place.'

'I'm starving. Looking for something to eat.'

'You look all intent. Tell me what you're thinking.'

'I'm not thinking about anything.'

'n.o.body doesn't think about anything.'

'What?'

'I mean, n.o.body thinks nothing.'

'Well,'he sighs, closing the fridge,'I do.'

'Is that usual, though? I wish I could empty my mind of all thoughts.

Have you asked anyone if they're like you?'

'No.'

'Don't you wonder?'

'No, I don't. Have you asked anyone if they can clear their minds?'

'No. But I'm asking you now.'

'Well, I can. Lucky me.'

That night, once they had a.s.sembled blankets and the rough makings of a camp in a hollow of sand by the roadside, Iris started to regale them with more of what she knew about the Gla.s.s Sultan. Another cool blue fire caught them in its lambent spell, and they fell to listening to the old woman's warm, quite hypnotic tones.

'Do you know how she gets her seers?'

'I've heard the stories,' said Gila. 'Vague rumours. She has a room full of them, doesn't she? She keeps them locked up, all of them prophesying the future?'

'The Scarlet Empress has a mania for knowing the future,' said Iris.

'Which is why she keeps coming after me, I think. She is horrendousty paranoid that one day someone will come and depose her and put an end to her cruel exploits and her languorous, malign rule. So she seeks out these people who have the sight, who have a particular, bright blue cast to their eyes...' Here Iris stared across the fire into the Doctor's eyes. 'And she imprisons them. She pops them in a cauldron of oil, of some sweet, prepared, corrosive oil, and here they stay for forty days, drugged out of their skulls. All their flesh dissolves and drops away, their organs melt into the oil and their poor, astonished heads are left, perched atop a calcified skeleton. When the whole series of rituals enacted around them is over, these heads are snapped off at the first vertebra. The head is placed in a room with the other seer heads she has cultivated over the years, a circular room. And there it is set to work, to flatter and cosset her with consoling tales of the future. And also to bring dire warnings.'

Sam gulped. 'That's disgusting.' She stirred at the remains of her dinner.

The cooling coils and spirals of onion in a vegetable-based sauce.

'The families of these seers are honoured. But they don't know what goes on. All they hear is that their loved ones are living in the lap of luxury, serving the Empress with their rare gifts.'

They sat for a while, thinking about this.

'No one can see the future,' said Gila at last. 'It's with barbaric practices like that that the Empress keeps this world, and her city, enslaved - by pretending that we're all in some dark age, full of mysticism and magic.

Here, they all believe you can do anything with sorcery, with spices and potions and evil intent. It is a determinedly backward world.'

The Doctor said softly, 'Hyspero, the city and the world, are a law unto themselves. You shouldn't be too dismissive of the dark powers that certain people here have harnessed, Gila.'

'Come off it, Doctor,' said Sam.'You're not going to say you believe in magic and sorcery, are you? You of all people.'

'The proof is generally in the pudding, Sam,' he said. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It means that once upon a time I thought rationality was everything. That you could understand everything if you pushed at it with enough clear-headed logic and refused to give in to superst.i.tion. I thought it was all claptrap. But these days...' He sighed.'l would describe myself as an ethnomethodologist. It's still science. But it's about setting yourself within the parameters of the society you are visiting. Thinking from their point of view. Looking at their consolatory myths and ideas from within. I'm not so quick to dismiss the arcane, the apparently magical. Look at vampires, Sam. You must have grown up with an idea of vampires existing only in horror stories, in vague, musty legends. But you met them; they're real. They exist within their own terms. They are both as fabulous and ordinary as you are.'

Sam didn't know whether to feel flattered or not.

'Some kind of sorceries appear to work here on Hyspero,' the Doctor continued, lying back. 'And they conform to a system of belief and science about which I know very little. Even to me they seem magical.

When we're tourists like we are, we just have to entertain and respect the bizarre logic of each new experience as we get to it.'

'It's a h.e.l.l of a world,' said Iris. 'IVe had a few peculiar run-ins here.'

'So you think the Scarlet Empress really can tell the future?' Sam asked the Doctor. 'By asking her roomful of mummified heads?'

'Who's to say?' he said airily, infuriatingly.

'If she hears anything from their heads it must be her own delusions,'

said Gila.'It's all inher head. She makes it up.'

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'But isn't it in the nature of tyrants to impose their wills, their imaginations, their versions of the world on everyone else?

We all do that to lesser or greater degrees.'