Part 7 (2/2)

Sam started to feel uncomfortable. 'You make me feel like there's no real world at all. Just a big ma.s.s of shared delusions.' He gave her a twinkling smile. 'But that's impossible!' she protested. 'Real things happen, you can get hurt, Gila broke that tattooed man's wrist. A couple of days ago you sprained your ankle!'

'Of course we feel things,' said the Doctor. ”The world impinges upon us.

But our imaginations have to collude with that world to make it happen.

It's all rather sticky.' Then he said something that surprised them. 'I feel like I've got my own chamber of disembodied heads, pa.s.sing out counsel, warnings and reminiscences. I've an interior set of seers: the seven previous me's, all stuck on spikes, all gossiping and telling me what to do. Now, are you going to say that's any different from the delusions of the Scarlet Empress? I can't afford not to listen to the intermittent, whispered comments of my other selves. I don't suppose the Queen of Jam can, either.'

Sam thought about this. She was sleepy. Somehow she knew she would end up dreaming tonight about severed heads and how they could be made to speak. The Doctor had unsettled her, talking like this about himself. Typical. He can't tell you anything nice about himself.

Sometimes she dreaded this usually hidden, darker side to his nature.

'Have you ever met your other selves, Doctor?' asked Iris.

He spluttered, and lied, as if she had asked him something rather shameful.'Of course not... That, um, contravenes the First Law of...' The old woman was grinning at him.'Well,' he said.'Once or twice. Only by sheer accident, and then a number of hideous catastrophes that necessitated our being brought into the same timestream as each other.'

Iris said. 'It happened to me. Seven of me were taken to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. Someone had reactivated the Games they used to play there. Each of my selves, present, past and future, was given a relevant companion and playmate, and we were forced to battle our separate, and then collective ways, past Ice Warriors, Ogrons, Sea Devils, Zarbi, Mechanoids and Quarks, to get to the Dark Tower. Good job we only got rubbishy monsters to battle, eh?' The Doctor was staring at her. 'It was that devil Morbius behind it all. The rogue was after Ra.s.silon's gift of immortality.' Iris chuckled at the Doctor's face. 'You're not the only one who gets to have terribly glamorous adventures, you know.'

After this, they started to go off to their sleeping bags. As Sam went off to use the bizarre, effective, but somehow unsatisfying sonic shower on the top deck of the bus, the Doctor muttered something to her, along the lines of Iris being such a show-off and name-dropper. She simply smiled at him but, as she washed and pulled on some exquisite yellow silk pyjamas Iris had produced for her, she felt a jab of sorrow for the Doctor.

He was having his thunder stolen somewhat. Tomorrow he was driving them, however, and maybe that would make him feel more in control.

Sam went back downstairs, and into the night, to sleep under the stars, and dream about bodyless seers, foretelling disaster.

Chapter Eight.

Any Vigilante's Life

As the days go on and establish their easy patterns, the mountains have come into view, savage and green, still days away from us. But we all know that soon we will be climbing. Only I know what to expect when we leave the desert and reach the ranges. Possibly Iris does too, since she claims to have explored these lands. She shows few signs of trepidation.

I think the old woman is full of false bravado. If anyone had gone through the rigours she says she has endured, they would be dead.

The Doctor and Sam have become careless and relaxed of late. We have had curious, concentrated days of travelling the plains. The Doctor points out birds and creatures to us, impressing us with his erudition. Yet you can see his mind is on other things. It seems that nothing escapes his attention. Sometimes I feel I ought to warn them of what is to come, in the mountains and beyond, but I cannot. Something stops me. The Doctor is so infuriatingly confident.

So we have these easy days, of replacing each other in the driving seat of the bus, this tireless vehicle that never seems to need fuel. Ms claims that it is powered by a vital green and pink, everlasting crystal, somewhere underneath the dashboard. It is certainly a remarkable vehicle.

We drive, we eat, we drink and we talk. No end of talking on this trip.

Sam tells us about London, a place so full of lives and preoccupations that it dwarfs even Hyspero. I can't imagine such a place, but the Doctor concurs: he has visited Sam's birthplace on numerous occasions. These recent days the Doctor himself has opened up and found himself talking and explaining about himself. Even to me, at whom he looked so distrustfully at first. The atmosphere about Iris's strange vehicle has worked on us like a charm, cohering us, making us a team. The turning point, I think, came with the capturing and expelling of the tattooed guard of the Scarlet Empress. That proof of her suspicion and enmity bonded us against the Empress, even as we act supposedly on her instructions.

Whenever I think of the Scarlet Empress, I remember the Throne Room, and when we were brought before her, ten years ago. The last time the Four were united. I never wanted to go back there. I think we may have to.

This company is not like the old days. It is not like being in a team like the Four. When we were together then, we didn't talk about ourselves.

How much did we really know about each other? Friends.h.i.+p, companions.h.i.+p never came into it.

Then, our ident.i.ties were secret to the world. We wore our mutant powers as badges, as masks - masks that carry out that paradoxical double function: to conceal our true selves and yet to render us conspicuous. Our essences, it seemed, were always elsewhere, which made the Four strangers to each other, as we were to the rest of the world.

We existed merely to carry out our function, which was to do whatever was demanded by our paymasters of the time. We laid our miraculous services before the highest bidder. And in any fracas, mission, quest or imbroglio, we were never bested.

The other day, when I told Sam about some of our old escapades, she seemed perturbed. 'But did you end up doing things you disagreed with?'

I said that naturally, we did. I said we had to suppress that part of ourselves that entertained moral qualms. If you offer yourself up for sale, then you can't afford to discriminate. At this Sam looked shocked.'So you just did what the person with the most cash asked you?'

I nodded. And, in our small craft, the Coriola.n.u.s , our team flew all over the world of Hyspero, flaunting our wares. And regularly, I said, antic.i.p.ating the girl's next question, we found ourselves fighting for one side of a conflict, and then, the following week, the other.We turned and turned again. Sabotage was our particular forte. In one small war, we ruined one party's weapons, and were then employed to put a stop to the other's. We set about battling our own shadows.

'That's madness,' said Sam.

'It was our life for years,' I told her. 'It's any vigilante's life. You don't stop to take breath or to grow soft on existential angst. And we became very rich.'

The way she looked at me I could tell she thought she had never met anyone more corrupt. The conversation ended there. I was driving at the time, and she went very quiet. She was disgusted with me and, truth be told, if she knew some of the things we were paid to accomplish, I don't suppose she would talk to me again. Now she thinks of me as vicious and amoral and yet... if I was those things, I would never have been strong enough to disband the Four when I did, citing exactly the kind of ethical problems Sam had tried to articulate. It wasn't that I had been without moral sense - I had merely repressed it, brutally, for many years.

So at the height of our wealth and the peak of our performance, I disbanded our team and told the others that we must spread far and wide. And the four of us should never meet again.

Until now, that is. This particular mission. Something is going on. Iris is in the thick of it. And I want in.

That night, when I appeared to disgust Sam with talk of my past, I pulled the bus to a halt and went off for a walk deep into the surrounding countryside. We were in a zone in which plant life was trying to reestablish itself.A primitive, stunted region. These were the foothills before the mountains; you could feel the land beginning to rise. Streams and lakes must be here, somewhere. I followed their scent, needing water. This hide of mine was cracked with heat and I required those few hours apart to submerge myself in dark, dank water.

I returned, replenished, glistening, to find the others sitting by the roadside, waiting for me.

'We thought you'd abandoned us,' said the Doctor, raising an eyebrow.

'He wouldn't, though,' Sam said, unexpectedly.

I found myself being sarcastic, as I often do. 'You think I'm still after Iris's riches.'

'No,' Sam told me.'I think you're loyal to your old friends, if not to us. I think you're less greedy and ruthless than you like to appear.'

She was just trying to be nice to me. To get me back into their company.

They know they need my help. We had the most pleasant evening of the week, then. Sam picked vegetables while I caught rabbits in the dusty gra.s.s nearby and we roasted them on a spit.

I dreamed that night of my home and my parents. It was the first time in many years I had ever thought back. The late-night conversation had been of origins. Sam had described a father and a mother who didn't understand who she really was. Iris talked vaguely of growing up in a matriarchy, among women much older than herself, her Aunts, she called them. They lived in a great house among the mountains of her world. Her mother had vanished when Iris was quite small, into the dawn with a man who was a great deal older, an offworlder. Iris spoke of her Aunts' deaths, one after another, and how she set forth alone for the great city, celebrated across her world. She was going to demand to learn their way of life, to become part of their world. They had great learning - a marvellous civilisation. It was her most perilous journey, she said - her first. And, at the end of it, she discovered a race of charlatans, quivering old men who knew all the secrets of the cosmos, it seemed, but preferred to spend their time in eternal, futile politicking, and the thankless task of scrutinising, cataloguing, all of known creation. And, even though their president was a woman, their ranks closed in front of a woman like Iris. And here Iris's tale stopped, for now, at least.

The Doctor looked sour, and I realised that the two of them must share a homework!. He was silent on the subject of his upbringing. Except for this: he asked Iris,'And They have never bothered you since?'

She shrugged disarmingty. 'I'm surprised you've never asked before, Doctor. But, no. I doubt that They even know I exist. I found my TARDIS, wounded, abandoned, in the wilderness. They didn't even miss it.'

The Doctor looked gloomy.'You should be grateful they never let you in.You've enjoyed amazing freedom.'

She pulled a face.'I suppose so.'

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