Part 26 (1/2)

'Well, yes. Exactly. We could just head back now...'

'Never,' snapped Angela.'Our party is not complete yet. We need one other. We can't return to Hyspero with our tails between our legs. I won't allow that. We go back at full strength, with vengeance in our hearts, or not at all.'

'Vengeance,' muttered Iris sarcastically. She had never been given to such things. Her style had more to do with getting out of things unscathed. Looking out for number one was her bottom line and she found it easier not to keep too many principles. You only lose them in the end, she thought. She was about to deliver Angela a lecture in this vein when the dense wall of foliage parted suddenly and the Doctor re-emerged with a triumphant look about him. A slightly less enchanted-looking Sam was in tow and behind them came the worst spider that Iris had ever seen. It was purple and black, with a vile head twisting in the feeble sunlight. It was almost half the size of her bus. She held in a squawk of dismay at the sight of the thing.

'What's happening?' asked the frustrated Angela, and Iris quickly filled her in. 'We didn't say befriend the b.l.o.o.d.y thing, Doctor,' she cursed.

Then she had a savage silver dagger in one hand. 'We said get that gateway open.'

He hurried over. 'Angela, Angela, Angela! The spider has agreed to accompany us.' He gave a low bow in the creature's direction. 'Would you like to do the honours?' he asked.

As the spider stretched out its legs and hauled its oily bulk across the road to the stone arch, Sam could only think of minor celebrities opening supermarkets and cutting taut ribbons on the doorstep. The spider lowered itself before the arch and the others drew back. Gila and the d.u.c.h.ess went rather reluctantly, staring up at the coa.r.s.ely haired thorax of the guardian. The spider set to work, tracing various indented nines with the sensitive undersides of its legs.

'It's really going to open for us,' breathed Iris. She wheeled around and hauled herself out of the chair, back into the driver's cab. 'Everyone, get in!'

'Diplomacy!' the Doctor congratulated himself.'What am I?'

'A genius,' Sam told him.

The stone archway was suffused with sapphire light. It was molten, cracking apart the sandstone chunk by chunk, opening hairline cracks and jamming them further apart so that the stone seemed to dissolve into dust, melting like sugar in tea. The ice-bright light burned into their eyes as they stared out from the bus. Burned into their retinas - even Major Angela's - was the afterimage of the spider, suspended and frozen in ma.s.sive silhouette.

Then the terrible glare died. The way was clear.

The spider dropped on to all eights and appeared to regain its thin, reedy breath. It turned to give an oddly human, beckoning gesture for them all to follow it through the archway.

Iris clamped her hat down on her head and gunned the engine.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Going Down

They were inside the confined chrome-plated s.p.a.ce of a lift. The walls threw back alarming distorted versions of themselves, the spider and the bus as the doors shunted closed behind them. They could see their faces stretched in surprise, repeated and repeated in the oily metal. The lift was only just big enough.

Then there came the clunking and thras.h.i.+ng of ancient machinery as, above and beneath the metal box, vast linked chains shouldered their weight and braced themselves to operate. The slick floor beneath the tyres of the bus and the spider's sensitively haired legs shuddered and lurched and everyone aboard felt the unmistakable sagging, dragging sensation of the elevator beginning its descent. The spider clutched itself to the sides of Iris's vehicle, its stomach being by for the least resistant of them all.

'I never expected this,' Sam said, as the bus lights flickered and dimmed, as if startled.

'It's like being in a department store; said the Doctor delightedly.

'I'm only glad there was room enough,' Iris sighed, 'for a whole bus and a giant spider.'

'It's mad, though,' said Sam, staring out of the panes of dirty gla.s.s at the spider, squas.h.i.+ng its ample body and spindly legs against the exterior hull of the bus. Those dark eyes stared back at her and she tried not to think of them as malevolent. The spider's head quivered and its tiny mouth worked and Sam turned away as a gush of livid vomit spurted and slid down the windows.

She turned to Gila, who was chuckling at the spider's discomfort.'So this whole planet is on different levels and connected by lift shafts?'

'Among other things,' the alligator man told her. 'We're lucky. Other places you have to run and jump between levels.'

'This place gets worse.'

They watched in silence, tense and bracing themselves, as the lights continued to wobble and strobe, and the interior of Iris's s.h.i.+p and its freight of oddments shook. 'You should nail everything down,' the Doctor told her.'Or get your dimensional stabilisers looked at.'

She tutted.

Major Angela, blind and unimpressed by the strange new environment, seemed to be fretting still about leaving behind her bears. She wasn't the type of girl, she told herself, to get all sentimental, but nevertheless she clutched her golden furs to her and stroked them.

The d.u.c.h.ess gleamed and whirred and seemed stoically fascinated by the new turn of events.'How deep are we going?' she asked, matter-of-factly.

”That cyborg,' Sam hissed at the Doctor, 'has a habit of making everything sound as if it doesn't matter.'

The d.u.c.h.ess overheard this.'It doesn't; she said, startling Sam.'I cannot be damaged, you see. Nothing can impinge upon me and so, in a very real sense, nothing matters to me. This exoskeleton protects the only mortal, fleshly part of me. If I sound uninvolved to you, to your mortal ears, that is the reason why. I live through everything at a certain remove.'

'You're lucky,' the Bearded Lady said.

'I would give a great deal,' said the d.u.c.h.ess solemnly, 'to feel endangered. To wear flesh on the outside once more.You do not know how precious that is.'

The Doctor sighed. 'I don't think I've ever met a semi-cybernetic individual who was entirely happy.'

Iris said, 'Did you ever meet my friend Kroton? He was a Cyberman whose kill-kill-kill-enslave-destroy function had never quite kicked in.

Now hewas a poor, tortured soul. Lovely boy, though.'

There was a resounding crash of old chains and the bus suddenly jolted them off their feet. They steadied themselves.

'I think we've made it,' Gila whispered.

Then they jumped as one of the spider's legs rapped gently at the window nearest Angela. Its voice came sibilantly, filling the interior of the bus. 'This is our stop,' said the spider.

Now we could see why we needed these heavy old golden furs. I was already very attached to mine.When this whole escapade was over with I was going to make sure that this furry little number was finding its way into my wardrobe on the top deck of the bus, along with my other costumes, trophies, treasures and diaries. Oh, that's if we ever get off Hyspero.

The heavy Art Deco doors groaned open arthritically. we watched the spider twist and unfurl its elegant self out of confinement.

It led the way out on to the new level.

Gone were the trees, the musty heat of the woodlands of Kestheven.

Everything had changed. How would I sum up the next leg of our journey? How would I account for those next few days?

Ice, ice, ice. Ice floes, ice fields, bergs and glaciers, s.h.i.+fting perilous tectonic slabs of pearly grey, violet, indigo, purest aquamarine with odd briny life-forms frozen and perplexed within sculpted blocks of ice.

Verdant green ice, even, for the oldest ice, the ice that had remained unthawed, unflawed for millennia. In the ice fields you could start to see how old Hyspero really was. Its history was frozen before your eyes.

Maybe it was a whole week we spent trekking out to our next rendezvous. I never realised till then, till our sojourn in the frozen wastes of Inner Hyspero, that winter came in so many colours.