Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 11

The Doctor, meanwhile, was looking around at the consoles a little crestfallen.

'I hate to admit it,' he said, 'but for some reason I can't make head nor tail of these. Advanced technology of several alien races I seem to be able to handle with no problem. Primitive mechanisms like an Enigma device or transputronic so-called supercomputers, the same.' He prodded at one of the consoles. It may have been pure imagination, but it seemed in some way to growl at him, like a guard dog warning off a pa.s.ser-by. 'These things seem to have fallen between two stools, as it were, in a way that I can't quite make out.'

'So, no sudden flashes of mysterious and uncharacteristic brilliance in areas you shouldn't really be knowing anything about?' asked Fitz.

'Not at this precise moment, no,' said the Doctor. 'Possibly I should have stayed in the virtual world of the Cyberdyne a little longer before escaping.'

Anji, meanwhile, was remembering her own virtual life in the Cyberdyne, and how she had operated equipment remarkably similar to this for her nonexistent Master.

'I think I could do it,' she said. Then she peered at what had been etched on the plaques by the printing machines. 'Or possibly not. There isn't really any point if I can't make out the language.'

'I fancy I might offer some a.s.sistance,' said Jamon, a little tentatively. It was the first thing he had said since being freed from the Cyberdyne, not counting direly muttered vows as to what he was going to do to the individual who had put him into it. 'I know something of the language, as I believe I have demonstrated before.' He bowed to Anji with a flourish so dashing that one would have to be watching very closely to see anything other than the fact that his high spirits had been fully restored. 'If the lady will allow me, I shall be happier than a Thraptulese helium-puffing giggle-fish to offer any small translatory service at my command.'

Anji found herself smiling despite herself. 'If you really must.'

Fitz considered what special qualities the Cyberdyne had left him with and which ones might be of any help at this point.

'And I could stick my hands in my pockets and wander around whistling a catchy pop song to keep our spirits up,' he said.

'Race you for it?' said the Doctor.

In fact, Fitz kept a sharp eye out for any sign of approaching threat, while Anji and Jamon worked at the consoles and the Doctor made helpful suggestions and comments. At least, since he seemed to be going through one of his manically inconsequential stages, he made what he probably thought thought were helpful suggestions and comments. It was very fortunate for one person at least that the TARDIS was here or at least two people thought so, for it was only the fact that said one person had the sole means of entering the TARDIS that prevented said two from braining him with the nearest handy plank. were helpful suggestions and comments. It was very fortunate for one person at least that the TARDIS was here or at least two people thought so, for it was only the fact that said one person had the sole means of entering the TARDIS that prevented said two from braining him with the nearest handy plank.

The Empire might exist in what the Doctor had called 'sprained time', and three of the people here had direct experience with other and stranger time scales entirely, but there is a peculiar sort of time that occurs when one is wrestling with a recalcitrant informational system whether it be the c.u.mulative effect of several million brainwashed people pressing one b.u.t.ton or another, a computer that stubbornly refuses to talk to the portable laptop sitting right next to it, even though the port configurations have been triple-checked until they squeak. After raging and cursing and making a note to throw the d.a.m.ned thing out of the first available window, one finally gets somewhere... and looks up to realise that the hour or so one has set aside before going to bed is long gone and it's nearly noon the next day.

In much the same way, getting into the Goronian Archives took quite a few hours so far as humans count such things, and Fitz had long since been reduced to a nervous wreck waiting for Amba.s.sador Jarel to burst upon the scene with any number of walking-corpse enforcers of his will in tow. Such an interruption, however, completely failed to come about which left the gnawingly unanswered question of just where the h.e.l.l was was he? It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and almost worse than if he had come bursting in. he? It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop, and almost worse than if he had come bursting in.

On the other hand, Fitz thought, that's just the sort of thing they say in bad old war movies, about how it's the waiting that's the worst part. No, it isn't. The worst part is when some enemy soldier jumps into the trench you're in and sticks a bayonet in you. All things considered, it was better to count your blessings and keep on starting at shadows.

More to relieve his boredom than anything else moments of extreme trepidation by their very nature not being able to last for long at a time he walked over to the thing covered by a dust sheet and examined it. It was a large armchair, on which sat the animatronically controlled dummy of a man. Its face was lined and grandfatherish; Fitz recognised the so-called Uncle Chumly from the h.o.a.rdings in the streets outside. Yet another truncated repet.i.tion, he thought, remembering the artificial Emperor and court on Shakrath.

At length, the combined efforts of Anji and Jamon had produced a stack of printed sheets piling up to the height of the hip of a man.

'We've been concentrating on pulling out a basic current state and general history,' Anji said. 'There's more, a lot more, but if we tried to get it all it would probably fill the entire room. We wouldn't be able to carry them, anyway.'

'Well, I suppose that's enough to be getting on with,' said the Doctor, in a slightly critical way that, once again, had at least two people looking around for something that might be used as a club. 'In any event, it'll have to do.' He glanced about himself. 'I think we've stayed here long enough. Time to be moving on in fact, I really think it's time we took some action.'

'It's about time,' said Fitz, speaking for everybody.

When the TARDIS had dematerialised, when the last traces of its outer plasmic sh.e.l.l that was its connection with this world had dissipated, a door opened quietly and discreetly to one side of the chamber. The Amba.s.sador Jarel emerged, and thoughtfully regarded the empty s.p.a.ce in which the Doctor's conveyance had once stood.

It had taken quite some time and some incredibly abstruse means, he thought or rather, something that was not quite quite the mind of Amba.s.sador Jarel thought but the man calling himself the Doctor had finally taken the bait. Hook, line and sinker. the mind of Amba.s.sador Jarel thought but the man calling himself the Doctor had finally taken the bait. Hook, line and sinker.

There had been some problems, admittedly especially after the Doctor had been allowed to escape from the Court of Shakrath, when he had evaded detection for quite some considerable time but that was of no matter now. The plans of Amba.s.sador Jarel and his colleagues (or those who were not quite quite Amba.s.sador Jarel and his colleagues) were at last coming to fruition. Amba.s.sador Jarel and his colleagues) were at last coming to fruition.

[Revelation]

In my expostulations previous, I have touched upon the means by which the processes of Transference, the foundation of the very Empire itself, contrived to operate. Some of those means I knew, at the least in part, at the time of which I have spoken of them. I have drawn freely, however, from the facts as detailed in the printed sheets obtained by Anji Kapoor, with the small a.s.sistance of my good self, from that foul milling engine of information that existed on the world of Goronos.

Of my own time spent in that mill, I would rather not speak unless it be absolutely necessary and the time for that will shortly come, never fear. Suffice it to say that as much now as then, while I fancy I am man enough to put such things behind me and remain mindfully demonstrative of all good things, the very h.e.l.l of it left its mark upon me. There is a certain loss, a certain emptiness, that I do not think shall ever again be filled.

But enough of such maudlinity and mopery! High were our hearts and spirits, such as was possible, in part from being free of the fetid air of Goronos, but in most part for having hard-won through with much information such as might be pursuant to our further course. Such a course would, so the Doctor said, locate in fine detail such evil influences as were perverting the good order of the Empire, and stop them on their rails once and for all a notion of which I myself was most heartily in agreement.

As his conveyance, the TARDIS, devolved into what I gather was the ghostly state suitable for its traverse between worlds, the Doctor set off into its extraordinary interior, looking to find, so he said, the Collector (which had been left to its own devices for quite some time long enough) and ensure that creature hadn't 'half-inched' anything important. This left Anji, Fitz and my good self to translate the information we had gathered into a form that those mechanisms that controlled the TARDIS could readily understand.

For the most part, this consisted of our taking each printed sheet and holding it, momentarily, before a dark and circular lens which extended telescopically from the console affair that dominated the chamber to which it gave the name. During the course of doing so, I myself was able to catch a glimpse of brief pa.s.sages detailing certain aspects of the Empire itself of which I had previously been unaware. You must understand, of course, that to be from one part of the Empire meant that any understanding one had of other parts was somewhat dated at best but, from what I could make out here, things had changed out of almost all recognition.

The Thraali, for example, whom I had always understood to be the most kind, courteous and civilised of men, now seemed to have demarked an entirely spurious subset of their number (based upon the shape of the occipital lobes, I believe) and were busily in the process of exterminating that subset in manufactories built for that especial purpose.

On the world of Draglos, where the inhabitants in their various tribes waged a perpetual and intricately balanced war with each other, conducted by way of counting coup with ceremonial sticks, the use of explosive landmines and other such engines of destruction had devastated the world entire, and left the few pitiable survivors with hardly a leg between them upon which to stand.

The world of Gingli-Tva (which I remember for a time visiting in my own person, and noting the remarkable beauty of its coral habitations spread across a globe-wide collection of crystal-clear pools) was now barely habitable, owing to industrialisation, the pools that were its notable feature now reduced by way of sulphuric pollution into nothing more than seething vitriol.

And so on, and on, and so quite dreadfully forth. If I had been paying slightly closer attention at the time, I might have wondered how it came to be that this information was, as it were, current that it dealt for the most part with what was happening on those worlds now, rather than what might in actual fact be several hundred years before but I confess that I was too shocked by the supposed states of these worlds to think much further than that.

Now, please don't misinterpret my words to mean that Empire as was, the Empire such as I had known it, was all sweetness, light and a life of luxury and ease for the commonality. I have previously mentioned some of the worlds to which I have travelled, and touched on such matters as might show that truth, justice and certainly liberty were not exactly in an abundant supply but in none of the worlds to which I had travelled had I encountered circ.u.mstances quite so deleterious as this.

Be that as it may. For quite some time, I, Anji and Fitz performed what Anji herself described as the 'feeding' of information into the TARDIS mechanisms. Personally, for myself, I found the use of the term unfortunate. It suggested, obviously, a sense of hunger about those mechanisms, which called up the notion of their being ravenous, and perhaps for things quite else than information.

At length, we were done. As if waiting for that precise cue, the Doctor appeared again, telling us that the Collector was quite happy where it was for the moment, and rubbing his hands in antic.i.p.ation at our labour's use. On large televisual screen he caused pages of text to appear (written in a script that I entirely failed to understand but which seemed to be known to both Anji and Fitz) and by manipulation of certain controls caused that text to flicker and scroll rapidly too rapidly, it seemed to me, for the eyes of a man to follow.

'Well, that all seems simple enough,' he said presently. 'The interesting thing is how the Empire came to be set up in the first place.'

'How so?' Fitz asked. I myself, I must admit, found it hard to see how ancient history might have a bearing on our current circ.u.mstance.

'I'll tell you in a moment.' The Doctor touched a control, and on the televisual screen a collection of radiating lines began to extend themselves from a single point. 'Millions of years ago millions of years from this subjective s.p.a.ce-time point a certain unnamed, long-dead planet began sending out probe ships. Each had a payload consisting of the means necessary for the setting up of a high-powered transmat unit an Engine of Transference. Each was crewed by a single man, kept in stasis, whose job it was to set the mechanism up. They were shooting into the dark, effectively, hoping to find a percentage of habitable planets... It was ninety-nine parts suicide mission to one part one-way trip. The crewmen were selected from those who were marked for execution in any case: the unrepentant or the irredeemably psychotic....

'That sounds like a recipe for disaster,' Anji said, a little worriedly. 'I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust a small motor scooter set up by someone unrepentant and irredeemably psychotic.'

'And nor would those that founded the Empire,' said the Doctor. 'The crewmen were lobotomised and implanted with unbreakable Cyberdynic control structures, which had them setting up the Engines of Transference, sending back a test signal and then simply dropping dead. Upon receiving the test signals, the founders then sent out the biological pattern-signatures of volunteer seedling colonists. Apparently, they didn't bother destroying the original bodies at the start what difference would it make to them if duplicates of them popped up on some other planet in a thousand years? That practice or lack of practice, I suppose was discontinued almost immediately. Can't think why.

'The process took tens of thousands of years a very patient race, those original founders, I imagine. Once set up, the Empire became self-perpetuating, and for almost two million years it ran itself quite happily, on the cosmic scale of things...'

'So what happened then?' Fitz asked. 'What went wrong?'

'I have no idea,' said the Doctor. 'We've talked about how the basic structure of it seems to have been twisted in some manner, and I can see from the Goronos data how each individual world is going through collapse at an alarming rate, but the primary source it still... Now there's a thing.'

The proliferating lines on the televisual screen were now a tangled, pulsing ma.s.s of the sort I had seen, earlier, on the Doctor's own extrapolations. For myself I could make neither head nor tail of it, save for the obvious fact that it was a representation of the various links of Empire. Looking at it, I fancied I could see certain differences from what I had seen before, but to achieve more than that sense was beyond me and, I suspect, any other man.

The Doctor, however, seemed quite excited. He caused the image to dissolve into pages of indecipherable text again, through which he shifted rapidly, again too fast for any sense to be made had I been able to comprehend it at base.

'Interesting...' he said at length.

'What's interesting?' Anji demanded. 'What have you found?'

'The Transfer of data and inert materials,' said the Doctor, 'seems to be relatively consistent. So does the general traffic of people like you, Jamon, though it seems to have fallen off of late.' This, nodding towards me. 'Travellers seem to be being held rather than otherwise, rather than being allowed to carry on their way. The inconsistency is blindingly simple and obvious but by its nature it's too sporadic to show up easily...'

He caused the more complete version of the Imperial network to appear again. 'You see this?' He traced a number of lines on the televisual screen with a finger. As he did so, I experienced a profound shock. It was indeed sporadic, but indeed it was also obvious so obvious that, once pointed out, it was impossible to see how one could not have noticed it before, especially, of course, one of such a noted comprehension as myself.

(Then again, though, to take the other hand, I'd had the woeful disadvantage of being able to see such things only from a singular point of view. It took such marvellous resources and instrumentation such as the Doctor himself commanded to show what was indeed the obvious. So I feel that any obduracy that I might have evidenced beforehand was quite natural, and not entirely unjustified. Which is to say, you can't blame me for not having spotted it as, of course, you yourself must have, long before this point. I go into the matter in such length here, not to belabour a point so perfectly manifest to all, but merely to give an idea of my own state of mind, in that place and of that time, to make of what you will.) Now that I had spotted it, however, I could only look on aghast much as I had in looking upon the crippled Engine of Transference in the Citadel of Souls on Thakrash, come to think on't. It was the sensation of looking upon a thing that, while being perfectly possible, was so contrary to what one a.s.sumed it to be, in the bones, that to see that it could be something else was quite debilitating.

'The anomaly is in the movement of the members of this so-called Amba.s.sadorial Corps,' said the Doctor. 'The G.o.ds only know where they think they're being sent, but they're all being sent to the same place. And those who arrive, wherever they say they're from, are in fact being sent from that same place.'

The Doctor planted a finger firmly on the televisual screen.

'There,' he said. 'That's where they go. That's where they come from. And I rather suspect it's the exact same place that the Empire came from in the first place.'

4.

Go Ghost

Attrition, Anji thought: that was the word. Forget about the days when you just want to get home, curl up and die; forget about the ticking of biological clocks. Attrition, with a capital A, was what it basically was about. You come up to thirty and you really start noticing how the occasional bruise takes too long to heal, a torn nail takes too long to grow back. You catch the intimations of the realisation that Time isn't going to make things better: it's going, by increments, to make things worse.

Five years from now, you're not going to be soaring ever higher from your GCSEs to a university first, to a job and promotion: you're going to be hanging from your fingernails (which don't grow quite as fast as they used to) to what you've got, watching it crumble away from you, knowing that when it goes, to some final extent, the only way is down. In the physical, mental, social and every other sense besides.

It probably wasn't true. Anji had known forty-yearolds who had more party energy than people half their age. People who had kept the spark inside them while their contemporaries had ended up balding (male and female pattern balding) and exhausted by the demands of their b.u.t.ton-down, kid-rearing, boss-sucking and ultimately meaningless lives. She had formulated, looking at them, the vague principle that lives could take two tracks. On the one, you hit middle age around the age of twenty-four, weighed down by the world. On the other, you kept it getting on at forty, fifty, seventy or you were dead of a heart attack by thirty-six. She had always thought of herself as being on the right track, but now she was wondering...

Inside herself, she just felt lower than she could ever remember having felt in her life. The deep feeling, deep inside you, where a little voice is saying come on, you can see how pointless it all is, why not just run a warm bath, slit your wrists in the correct manner and just switch it all off?

It didn't help much that she'd worked out why why she was feeling like this. Anji wasn't stupid; she knew her own head as well as if not better than any armchair psychologist who had ever sat in said armchair and said something really patronising to the point where you wanted to hurl a brick. It wasn't that she was feeling depressed it was that the events of the past subjective days had conspired to oppress her. Knowing that your feelings are being imposed upon you from the outside, though, doesn't help much in dealing with those feelings themselves. she was feeling like this. Anji wasn't stupid; she knew her own head as well as if not better than any armchair psychologist who had ever sat in said armchair and said something really patronising to the point where you wanted to hurl a brick. It wasn't that she was feeling depressed it was that the events of the past subjective days had conspired to oppress her. Knowing that your feelings are being imposed upon you from the outside, though, doesn't help much in dealing with those feelings themselves.

Fitz had been talking about the last few days, she recalled, and saying something about how the same things kept seeming to happen, over and over again. That was a part of it, Anji supposed, but he had missed a fundamental point. Everywhere they had been, things had been stripped away, not least a sense of humanity. From the opulent and patently human-built s.p.a.ces of Shakrath, they had come to the empty forests of Thakrash, then the dead streets of a world where human beings, as such, did not live. Now they were in s.p.a.ces where human beings, as such, could could not live. It was like a demonstration of Entropy in four easy lessons. not live. It was like a demonstration of Entropy in four easy lessons.

They had stepped out of the TARDIS into desolation. A landscape of ash and nothing else. A grey cloud that hurt your lungs when you breathed it, stung your eyes if you tried to see.

In the shifting and actinic light, she could barely make out the forms of the group and it struck her that she was automatically thinking of it as that: the Group. And it had only really struck her now because one of them was missing. When the TARDIS had materialised, on this unnamed planet that was supposedly the centre of things, Fitz had been set to run out of the door in the enthusiastic way that he always seemed to, as though hungry for what new experience any and all new worlds might bring before the Doctor had stopped him.

'Remember what we talked about,' he had said, quietly, though within Anji's hearing. 'That time when we were on our own. This is the time we were talking about. I want you to stay in here for a while. Keep an eye on the Collector if you can one of the better and more entertaining species in the known universe, I've always said, I think, and I wouldn't hear it otherwise, but sometimes their worst nature runs away with them.'

At the time, Anji had racked her brains to try to remember any private conversation Fitz might have had with the Doctor before realising what was, as it were, the basic nature of any conversation they might have had while they were alone. Of course you wouldn't have heard heard it, if they were on their own, in the first place. The thing about it was, though, that if you it, if they were on their own, in the first place. The thing about it was, though, that if you knew knew there was something to know, and you hadn't been told about it, there was no way you could keep your mind from worrying about what it might be like a tongue forever probing at an imperfection in a tooth, while you're wondering whether, if you ever pluck up enough courage to go to the dentist about it, it's going to be merely some calcine acc.u.mulation that can be simply blasted away, or the sort of root-ca.n.a.l job that leaves you unable to eat for three days for fear of disturbing what feels like three tons of amalgam. there was something to know, and you hadn't been told about it, there was no way you could keep your mind from worrying about what it might be like a tongue forever probing at an imperfection in a tooth, while you're wondering whether, if you ever pluck up enough courage to go to the dentist about it, it's going to be merely some calcine acc.u.mulation that can be simply blasted away, or the sort of root-ca.n.a.l job that leaves you unable to eat for three days for fear of disturbing what feels like three tons of amalgam.

In any case, out here in this ash world, she found herself retreating into her head, and all the little insecurities that she would never, ordinarily, pay a mind to seemed to be accelerating round in circles until they were all she could think of. There was something she hadn't been told about, fair enough but here and now it felt like being back in the playground, of being actively, hurtfully excluded from the gangs you wouldn't join even if they asked. But, then, they never asked...

'Are you feeling quite all right?' asked Jamon de la Rocas. 'Only you seem to be a little upset.'

For some reason, Anji found herself flashing back on something her boyfriend, Dave, had said, some while before he had died and just after they had started being with each other seriously.

'When I first saw you,' he had said, 'when I first met you, you were like this beautiful girl and that's what I thought. I'm not saying it very well. You were like this beautiful girl, like Seven of Nine out of Voyager Voyager and that's all I could think, Beautiful Girl. And then somehow this switch went off in my head and I suddenly realised you were a Real Person...' and that's all I could think, Beautiful Girl. And then somehow this switch went off in my head and I suddenly realised you were a Real Person...'

At the time it had been the standard, getting-togetherseriously conversation, however badly expressed, but she had known what he meant having had daily contact with a broad cross-section of stock-a.n.a.lysing male humanity who were physically incapable of seeing her as anything other than a pair of b.r.e.a.s.t.s and b.u.t.tocks hanging off a kind of articulated frame, with a little dash of the ole curry powder to add a bit of extra flavour. Remembering that, she realised that she had been doing the same thing in reverse, to some extent. It wasn't a big thing, but she realised that she had simply not seen Jamon as a Real Person, as if he were a shibboleth, or a character in a novel that didn't quite ring true.

'It's OK,' she said. 'This place has just got me feeling incredibly introspective, that's all.'

'I think this place might do that,' Jamon said, looking around himself. 'Who knows what phantasms and megrims a place such as this might wake in any mind?'

'If you say so,' said Anji.

'Come along,' the Doctor called, slightly ahead of them, the long black coat he had recently affected to wear flapping about him. 'I can feel we're getting closer to the heart of the matter. Don't you want to finally learn the truth of things?'

It was in that instant that all of Anji's confusion became clear. Possibly it was because she had found herself thinking on levels that she wouldn't have otherwise the deep levels where, if you mine them far enough, you find something approaching a real truth.

It was like wandering in the desert: the lack of external stimuli has the mind working against itself, ablating itself to the point where it exposes the core. There was a phrase she remembered, from reading a William S. Burroughs book, back in university, when she had tried for a time to be hip, cool and trendy: Naked Lunch Naked Lunch. A Naked Lunch Naked Lunch moment was when you experienced an instant of utter clarity, looked around the refectory and saw, precisely, what was on the end of every fork. moment was when you experienced an instant of utter clarity, looked around the refectory and saw, precisely, what was on the end of every fork.

'No I don't, frankly,' she said.

'What?' The Doctor paused in his purposeful stride. He turned around and looked at her. 'I mean, I beg your pardon?'

It was the moment of truth something of a moment of truth, at any rate.

'I've just realised,' Anji said. 'I've worked it out. Fitz was talking about how he had a feeling we were running through a maze but his mistake was thinking that some evil monster or other was making us do it. It's been you you doing it, Doctor you've been prodding us around, prodding us out of the TARDIS and making sure we have an appropriately exciting adventure, with rescues and explosions and running through corridors, and all of it means precisely nothing. There's doing it, Doctor you've been prodding us around, prodding us out of the TARDIS and making sure we have an appropriately exciting adventure, with rescues and explosions and running through corridors, and all of it means precisely nothing. There's nothing nothing we've learned that we couldn't have worked out simply by sitting down safe in the TARDIS, looking at the information that we already had and having a quiet think.' we've learned that we couldn't have worked out simply by sitting down safe in the TARDIS, looking at the information that we already had and having a quiet think.'

'I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about...' the Doctor began.

'Yes you do,' said Anji. 'You've been putting us out there in these places simply for the sake of putting us out out there. Playing Mr Enigmatic. Touting us about to show us off and make a bit of noise. Get us noticed. Hanging us out as bait. And the way you've been acting...' there. Playing Mr Enigmatic. Touting us about to show us off and make a bit of noise. Get us noticed. Hanging us out as bait. And the way you've been acting...'

'Well, I admit that for a while I haven't been acting quite like myself...' the Doctor began again.

Anji snorted. 'And don't we just know it! You've been overplaying the multiple-personality card like n.o.body's business. The thing is, it just doesn't ring true. You've been f.a.n.n.ying about from one so-called emerging personality to another, wilfully saying and doing things that are completely out of character and you don't even believe it yourself.'

Anji scowled. 'Do you know what I think? Do you know what I think you've been doing since we came into the Empire? You had a flash of insight a bit like the way I'm feeling at the moment and you knew how you were supposed to act, and you've been trying to. You're just not very good at it, and you've been overacting like h.e.l.l. You've been trying to do it and you just can't. It's all a bit embarra.s.sing, basically.'

She realised that the Doctor was staring at her astonished. While she was certain of what she'd said, with the certainty of anger, some part of her couldn't help pointing out that the things you're certain about when you're angry can often be completely and utterly wrong.

Then the Doctor grinned. He was possibly even a little chagrined.

'It's a little like you say,' he said. 'When we entered the Empire. I received some very strong intimations. You know how it is when there's a hole in something, you can sometimes tell what needs to be put in it by the shape? It was a bit like that, I knew there were certain things I simply had had to do I couldn't quite grasp the reasons behind them, sometimes, but I knew they were there, somewhere in me, like the vast ma.s.s of an iceberg underwater. I think I have some measure of it now, though.' to do I couldn't quite grasp the reasons behind them, sometimes, but I knew they were there, somewhere in me, like the vast ma.s.s of an iceberg underwater. I think I have some measure of it now, though.'

The Doctor halted and planted his feet in the ashy ground, to stand there in what seemed to Anji to be quite a confrontational gesture.

'All right,' he called into the billowing grey clouds. 'I'm here. I'm willing to talk. Now, what is it you wanted to talk about?'