Part 19 (1/2)

'He can't help what he is. His gender is alien, but intransigent. The cosmos is guided by male and female impulses - quite separate...'

”That's c.r.a.p!' Sam shouted.”The Doctor isn't your average man, at all. I don't think he even has a gender. How can you - whoever you are - pontificate on what he's like? He's private. He's untouchable.'

'He's a man.'

'I love him,' Sam found herself saying. With a shock, she realised she was telling the creatures the truth. The voice stayed quiet and she let herself absorb what she had just blurted. Love. Still. With it came no shame or surprise. Obviously, she thought, I've moved on a bit from the fixation stage, past the embarra.s.sment-at-covert-glances stage. No longer was she frightened by his proximity. She had come through a change. She loved him, but that was all right. She loved him enough to step back and let him go wherever he needed to. She didn't want him in the way she had wanted him once.'I love him,' she repeated.

'He spurned your desire.'

'It wasn't like that.'

'You were curious about his own desires.'

'Of course I was.'

'But you have never seen or heard him articulate anything of the sort.'

'Sometimes... odd glimpses. The way he looks at certain people. Women and men. But he never acts on anything. There's something about him that makes you think he's beyond s.e.x.'

The voice of the creatures chuckled inside her head, reverberating like a seash.e.l.l. 'Is anyone beyond gender and s.e.x, Samantha Jones?'

Then suddenly, she and Gila were set free and left to float gently, unharmed, to the choppy surface.

Into daylight. They were free of the tunnel.

They had come a long way.

Sam wondered about asking him what he had seen down there. She thought better of it, but eventually Gila spoke up of his own account. 'It was the slaver. The slaver came back to me. He came back and told me I was returning to the sludge, the primeval sludge and that I deserved to.

He told me I wouldn't be human for very much longer. He said I was an animal.'

Sam didn't know what to say to that.

This Doctor had never been very good at remembering stories. In the same way that he couldn't tell a joke, when it came to telling stories, he found that he could never work out what had to come next. Never could he figure out how the plot worked. Maybe, he thought, that was why he wandered so haplessly into events in his real, everyday life. Previous selves of his hadn't thought of themselves as quite so guileless. Unlike them, he wasn't apt to go back to the start of things, to ravel back the plot lines to lay clues for himself, and to plant surprises. To him, that would seem like cheating. No longer did he think of himself as the s.h.i.+fty, anonymous auteur, manipulating chance and circ.u.mstance to suit himself.

Tonight, forced to talk for his life before the parliament of exotic and razor-billed birds, he felt his well of stories dry up. He found he had no idea what might entertain them.

He remembered Romana dragging him off to the opera in Milan and then to see the marvellous soprano hermaphrodites of Alpha Centauri.

He had never seen them before. Romana was rapt, of course, following the score from their gilded box. The Doctor had been bored, unable to keep up and follow, itching to be off and wanting something else to happen.

Tonight he would have to depend on Iris's help. Luckily she was an old gasbag. But she made him go first.

How the birds shuffled and stirred and what a racket of approval, disappointment and uneasiness they set up. He found that they hung on his every word, their pinhead eyes watching his every move, and he started to warm to his theme.

First he told them fables, which he recalled he was very fond of. Once he started, he remembered more and more. He saw again how story could lead to story. He told them the one about the greedy and eccentric merchant who wore a dressing gown and slippers everywhere and was laughed at in the street for looking so bizarre and it made him unhappy.

One day he was caught up in a vast wind, and clung to a palm tree to anchor himself. At last he came to the land of the Turks, where everyone wore slippers and dressing gowns all day long, as a matter of course. At first he felt he fitted in, but eventually he grew bored with being ordinary.

The wren spoke up.'And what is the meaning of this tale?'

'Meaning?' frowned the Doctor. 'Sorry, I don't get you.'

'There must be meaning!' shrilled the wren. 'Stories must have a meaning. How else are we to be edified?'

'I'm not sure I hold with being edified,' said the Doctor sadly. 'Listen. I'll try another.'

Then he told them about the elephant who stole pumpkins from the patch that was a family's sole source of sustenance. This was an African tale. A boy hollowed out one pumpkin, crawled inside and hid. When the elephant king swallowed that choicest pumpkin whole, the boy waited until he was right inside the creature's belly, then he broke out of the orange skin and crawled upwards, to stab the elephant's greedy pink heart.

'Good,' cried one of the more extravagant birds, a kind of macaw. 'You are telling us that vengeance is good and best when it is merciless. That the oppressors will be tamed with violence.'

'Am I?' the Doctor wasn't sure that he was happy with this.

So he tried the one about the childless woman who adopted a bird to be her baby.

There were flurries of agitation in the rafters about this. Maybe I should have told another, he thought, but ploughed on.

The woman and her bird-child were mocked by her husband and his new wife, who was able to bear real children. Then the new wife ate the bird-child, roasting him on a spit, in order to distress the woman.

The parliament rose in uproar.

'It's all right!' The Doctor waved his hands.'It ends happily!' And he told how the bird-child, eaten by the husband and new wife, came back to life and clawed both their insides to pieces until they died.

This mollified the birds somewhat.

'All this is rather bloodthirsty, Doctor,' Iris told him. 'I would never have thought it of you.'

He shrugged and let her take over.

Iris began, ”The Doctor has been bamboozling you all with tales of revenge and being eaten. He tells his tales this way in order to avoid talking about himself and his own life. Now I am going to tell you all about me and my life and the journeys I have been on, and the things I have seen...'

The Doctor looked pained.

'Get on with it, then,' warned the wren.

'I was born in the cradle of mountain tops,' said Iris.'Where the snow was fierce and daily, keeping us trapped in the house that was rooted into the rock by hundreds of storeys, rooted like a tooth in the jaws of the mountain.'

'Birds do not have teeth,' someone pointed out.

'And I was tended by my Aunties, some dozen of them in all, the most beloved of whom was my Baba, who had a shawl that could carry her anywhere in the world, because it was woven from the discarded feathers of every single bird known to our people.'

The room was silent.