Part 17 (1/2)

'But... look at this bit... You didn't foil the Dalek invasion of Earth in the twenty-second century. I did! It was me and Susan and Ian and Barbara!

And the Cyber tombs on Telos... You weren't there, Iris. I was. You weren't to be seen!'

'That's your story,' she smiled. 'In my version, it was me. With my glamorous young a.s.sistant Jeremy. With every one of our peremptory arrivals, we fork off into, another version - surely you know that?

'So your version has more validity than mine?' he asked bitterly.

'Not necessarily.We can coexist, can't we? We have parallel lives, pasts and futures. I'm stopping this bus for lunch.' They lurched to a halt. 'Mind you, I've got written evidence of my version. What do you have?'

He turned and stumped back up to the top deck, furious. She cackled and made them lunch in the restocked galley. But it took days before the Doctor would speak to her again.

In tunnels still dense with fronds and vines and thickly whorled flowers, both Sam and Gila expected at any moment to be met by Our Lady. The fact that they were allowed to go traipsing on like this, shuffling forward through the treacherous undergrowth, meant either that they had escaped or that this was a trap. The usual choice. But Our Lady did not appear.

Curious that the plants down here grew without light. The flowers were anaemic and cold to touch; the furled petals of the lilies were like old, damp paper.

All they could do was press on, and hope they would emerge into daylight soon. They had no idea what direction they were heading in, until they came to a chamber that illuminated itself fitfully at their approach. They discovered that its walls were painted with maps and charts. Precisely what the Doctor had been looking for above ground.

The paint here on the walls was chipped and scabrous, and the charts were incomplete. Figures of animals and trees swarmed to fill in the cartographer's blank s.p.a.ces; they were represented with the touching, weightily symbolic care of religious iconography. The charts, Gila observed, resembled those imprinted on the tattooed hides of the Empress's Scarlet Guard.

In the centre of the ceiling they found Fortalice, presented as the centre - the sensible, knowable median of the world of Hyspero. Lines of routes, frontiers and contours ran out to craze and furcate all the walls of the room. Fortalice was like the point in the ice at which a stone is dropped; the rest is cracked, with hairlines jagging out from that single point.

Starting from Fortalice, they studied the myriad lines running south. The Forest of Kestheven crept down the southern wall of the chapel -Sam couldn't help finding the whole frescoed room creepily religious. The forest, with individually painted trees, lovingly emblematic trees of no type she had ever seen before, was faded a muddy, olive green. It looked like a s.h.a.ggy beard of mould on that wall.

”That's where we're going,' Gila said and tried to untangle the routes.

Overland, through the valleys.

Sam started. 'We're already on the route, look.' She had found a drawing of the tunnel, and even of this chapel. It looked like a bubble in a tube of mercury. She peered, and Gila peered, and they found that the drawing of this room even included the maps on the wall. Maps of maps. And, standing staring at the maps on the walls, were two tiny, thumbnail figures, holding a light. ”That makes me dizzy,' Sam said. Infinite regression, the Doctor had called it once, using a number of mirrors and a small plastic Dalek to explain a point in temporal physics. She looked away.

'This tunnel appears to connect with an underground river,' whispered Gila.'If we travel down that... we end up here.'

He pointed at the overpopulous heart of the forest.

'Good,' she said, suppressing a shudder.

Then they traced the overland route, the longer route through the valleys.'I hope,' she said,'the Doctor manages to find the way.'

Gila grunted.'I think they already have.'

He pointed to a painted cleft in the rock, where the going seemed particularly hard. And there - she could hardly credit it - was a naive but unmistakable painting of a double-decker bus, livid scarlet, and beside it, two figures, staring out for the way to turn.

'It's a map for all time,' breathed Gila. 'Representing events as well as places.'

”They're on their way, then,' said Sam. She looked at the green and grey daub that was meant to be the Doctor. His shock of brown hair. Iris came off worse: a smear of yellow and blue, fat with her arms akimbo.

'I wish we could roll this up and take it with us,' Sam said.

'I have an excellent memory.'

'You would.'

'Usually I need only look at a map once. But this is different. It changes in response to events and the endless changeableness of the topography of Hyspero. I have heard tales of this room. On all of Hyspero, only the stars and this room are still. Everything, everything else alters.'

'Let's get on,' she said.'Find this river.'

She hated the idea of standing still in a place that was constant. And she was wary of Gila's fascination with the charts.

'I could find my birthplace... I could find out what happened to them...'

'No, Gila. We have to go.'

His eyes tracked back across the walls to find the wicked city of Hyspero. At its northern point, in a gaudy, domed palace, he located the Scarlet Empress. He hissed and pointed it out to Sam.

'We have to come all the way back here, eventually.'

”That's some distance we have to cover.' She felt quite small, gazing at the spread ma.s.s of the ancient planet and almost wished they were embroiled in one of those missions that involved only a few corridors and a control room or two. The hugeness of Hyspero, its measureless deserts and seas began to alarm her. In a smallish, underground cavern Sam felt the first twinges of a misplaced agoraphobia.

Goodness, well, you talk about mind specialists, about spiritual takeover plans, about mind probes, brain probes, hypnotism, soul stealing, and I've seen them all. I've been possessed by the best of them. Or rather, the best of that parasitic breed and brood have tried to dabble with my mind and, at one time or another, have attempted to take me over.

Strapped to tables, electrodes snaking all over the shop, sensitive suckers stuck on my temples, leeching out the memories, the sensations, and the essences. Like a dying man again and again I've seen my life flas.h.i.+ng before my eyes. I make a very enc.u.mbered existentialist. I try hard, but my past is always catching up with me.

At one time it seemed to me that no one I met could be very happy with their lot, since all of them were wanting to possess the spirits (to use an unwieldy term) of everyone else. All this possession going on -there was quite a rash of it. Well, you know me. I was never very possessive. You can't be, can you?

What I feel about Iris now is most peculiar. I'm sure she thinks I'm in a huff, and maybe I am. She should know my moods by now. When I don't feel like talking I take myself off. It's what I always do. On the whole I'm a sociable creature, but... sometimes you have to retreat a little.

She is encroaching on me. Not just my s.p.a.ce, though that is bad enough. This trip, with the two of us on the bus, we have to negotiate, quite explicitly and carefully, our s.p.a.ce and privacy. It isn't like my s.h.i.+p. I can't go wandering off. It rather reminds me of that sleigh trip I made on the ice fields of Myrrh... oh, I don't know how long ago, in a very cramped s.p.a.ce for two whole months with those little fellows who looked like poodles.

Iris does prattle on. I thought I was bad enough, these days, when I can't seem to stop myself gabbling about plans, strategies... all these spontaneous effusions of mine. I can't remember a time when I was more chatty, but Iris takes the biscuit. Last night I had a twenty-minute lecture on how her TARDIS maintains a constant supply of fresh water.

I'd already figured out that she must have connected her tanks to some pocket dimension, but she went on and on about how the tank in the galley takes water from a private, immense reservoir that she's sampled (read 'stolen') from Canada. Iris said she sometimes wants to squeeze herself up through her own kitchen taps, through the rusted pipes, into that pure, watery immensity. All I could think about was the virtual pressure on the pipes, the ma.s.sive, insistent ma.s.s on the back of the bus. I don't think she quite understands the implications of her dabbling with transdimensional, um... things. The interstices are, to her, a matter of household convenience and even fun.

The thing is, the more she talks about things that she's got up to, the places she's been, the people she's met - in whatever dimension (we'll call them that for convenience) - the more I end up thinking these things over in the precious hours I manage to get to myself, I dwell over Iris's stories. Not just the ones that seem oddly similar to my own. She also works at reminding me of the times that we have spent together, all over the place, on the occasions that our hazardous paths have intersected.

These memories do disturb me because, once she has cheerfully triggered them, they are quite definitely there. These things, it seems, really did happen to me. Now I can see them in Technicolor, Cinemascope, with wraparound sound.Yet I would never have recalled them without her gentle conversational sifting and prodding. It makes me wonder how many pockets of memory I habitually repress or ferret away.

(There's an unnerving a.n.a.logy to be made, I suppose, between my own unfathomable past and the chilly Canadian lake banked and br.i.m.m.i.n.g behind Iris's transdimensional waterworks - if that isn't too infelicitous a phrase.) See how insidiously her blithe garrulousness works on me?

One day recently - and I've lost track of time, so don't ask me - we stopped the bus and walked in the woods which have sprung up all around us, spectacularly untamed and lush.'Remember,' she began, and I shuddered, knowing that she was off again on some ghastly reminiscence. That day she was in a purple turban and scarf, with dark gla.s.ses, and her lips were scarlet and prim.'Remember that terrible fight you got into when we visited Gertrude Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus and Pica.s.so was there and he'd brought Jean Cocteau and you -'

'Iris,' I snapped, 'if this is something you're just making up, I don't want to hear it.'

'Oh, you must remember it. Gertrude's girlfriend, Alice B. Toklas, had been cooking all night and day and she'd laid on a lovely spread.

Gertrude tried to flatter all her painter guests by sitting them around the table, each directly opposite a painting of their own that she had bought.