Doctor Who_ Slow Empire Part 6

'Why, the only coin worth pa.s.sing between travellers who might chance to meet,' said Miribilis. 'Something to while away the hours of the night and light the Soul. A story, and a good one, too. A story of your people. From each of you.'

'Marvellous!' said the Doctor. 'Believe you me, you'll not find us wanting in that department. Tales to astonish, stagger and amaze by their breadth and erudition shall occur.'

He looked pointedly at Anji.

'Um...' Anji racked her brain for a story of suitable astonishment and so forth For a moment she considered recounting the Exciting Adventure of Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt something she had sat through repeatedly with her boyfriend Dave, when he had still been alive but some part of her realised that this would not quite be playing fair.

In the end, she settled for a brief account of the G.o.ddess Devi, in the form of Durga, who had been called into life to do battle with the buffalo-demon Mahisha who by subjecting himself to terrible austerities had become so strong that he could overpower the G.o.ds themselves. A slight case of nerves had her losing the thread a bit, and ending up with Devi, in her Kali form, killing her husband Shiva and jumping up and down on him, but n.o.body seemed to notice overmuch and in the end she even got a small round of applause.

'If there's a bad story about a naked, ten-armed, sabre-wielding woman riding on a tiger,' said Professor Miribilis, 'I've yet to hear it.'

Taking Anji's example to some extent, Fitz related the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The tale wasn't particularly well told in itself, but when Fitz spoke of how the best and n.o.blest of intentions can be undermined by human frailties it seemed, to Anji, to be genuinely moving.

From what she could recall, Fitz's family roots were more Germanic than otherwise, which she supposed would have technically made something like Parsifal and his Ring more appropriate than something from King Arthur.14 She didn't know enough about Wagner to tell. The trick here, though, seemed to be to pick a tale that spoke to something in the heart, and gave the listener some insight into it. She didn't know enough about Wagner to tell. The trick here, though, seemed to be to pick a tale that spoke to something in the heart, and gave the listener some insight into it.

In that light, Anji wondered whether her choice of the story of Devi spoke of some unconscious delusion of grandeur, seeing herself as the most powerful of all G.o.ddesses, or that some part of her could just get bang behind the idea of laying into all and sundry with a big sword and drinking their blood.

'I'm not very good at this sort of thing, sorry,' Fitz said when he had finished.

Professor Miribilis gave him a rea.s.suring smile. 'Pay no mind to that, sir. You did very well. Now, who's next?'

In a way that she could not quite put her finger on, Anji thought, it was the good opinion of Miribilis that had in some way become of vital importance. Again, it wasn't an aggressive feeling as such; more like the fear of some impending desolation if the person you've spent three weeks plucking up the courage to ask out for a date refuses you.

Even Jamon de la Rocas seemed to be affected by it. 'I believe that I might be prevailed upon to hazard some small attempt,' he said, with a slight but utterly uncharacteristic air of uncertainty.

'By all means!' Miribilis clapped his hands together. 'I am sure it shall without a doubt prove a treat for us all!'

Jamon peered at the other, as though searching his face for anything other than pure and happy encouragement.

'This is, indeed, an old story,' he said at length. 'I was told it long ago. So long ago, in fact, I must confess, that I have recollection of neither precisely where nor when I heard it...'

My tale, poor though it is [said Jamon de la Rocas], concerns a stranger who once came to us from the worlds beyond even the farthest borders of the Empire, a region in which who knows what necromancies and magicks may lie? He saved the world of my fathers or the world of somebody's fathers at the very least from a great plague, or an invasion of giant arachnid larvae from the cold, bare depths of s.p.a.ce I'm not, I must confess, sure which and then moved on. This particular tale, however, speaks of his life while beyond the Imperial borders though how such things might actually be known is a matter quite beyond my guessing. Perhaps he mentioned it at the time.

His mother, so it seems, was a Great Queen of those lands, who one night in her bejewelled bed was visited by a dream of a man who would be called the Healer of Worlds, who came down from the heavens into her womb in the form of a turquoise marsupial. The greatest sages of her land held this and certain other signs to be those of a miraculous conception this Great Queen being unmarried at the time, of which I gather a certain deal might ordinarily be made. The sages further held that this progeny, should it live, would be the monarch of all lands but only if he kept himself apart and inviolate from the suffering and misery of the world of men.

Alas, seven days after giving birth to her child, the Great Queen died. It was then that this suckling babe, apparently, first showed his truly otherworldly nature. His soul and body transfigured themselves, took him from the world of men into the Unseen Lands that lie past the sleep of dreams and past the dreamless sleep of death. It is said that the power of his infant yearning to be reunited with the soul of his mother transfigured him so, the better to go looking for her, though he never did find her. Or so they say, of course. Personally, I feel it might be worthwhile to discover just who succeeded to the throne with the infant heir conveniently vanished away... But I digress.

Instead of his mother he found The Court of the Invisible King, whose name was Ras. Now, Ras had in mind that his son should become his Regent in the worlds of men, to rule over all his dominion in his name. Mindful of the prophesy that his son must not become aware of the suffering of worlds if he were to rule them, Ras decreed that the infant should be brought up entirely in the Unseen Lands, where all possible pleasures are there for the asking and the words 'grief' and 'death' are forbidden.

As the boy grew, however, something in him yearned to return to the worlds of men. Night and day he asked his father to be allowed to visit them, until in the end Ras was driven to relent. He arranged things so that he took his son to a city on the best of worlds, and saw to it that the streets had been swept clean, the frontages and domiciles regaled with flowers and that the city was emptied of all unpleasant things. All the same, the boy caught sight of an invalid hobbling on his crutches, an old man soiling himself in his forgetfulness and a corpse being taken to the cemetery on its funeral bier and it shocked him to learn that, in the lands of men, men grew sick, and old, and died.

To distract the boy, who was now a youth, the Invisible King arranged a marriage for him, of a kind, to a most beautiful lady from the Unseen Lands. And in their way of doing things there I have no idea what that way might be, save that it is not, I suspect, the same manner of relation as between the males and females of the race of Men she bore him a daughter. It amused the youth to play father in this manner again, as I say, they have a different manner about such things in the Unseen Lands but his desire to return to the worlds of men grew ever stronger in his breast.

Owing to his especially miraculous nature, the youth was able to wander freely through such areas of the palace as his father kept hidden. On one night, while wandering through these secret places, he came upon a group of dancing girls and servants, sick and exhausted after their exertions of the day, and realised just what it was that the eternal ease and pleasures of the Unseen Lands were founded upon. At the sight of them, he straightaway decided to leave his position, family and offspring to return to the real world of men and learn the truth of it.

He cut his hair, changed his very appearance by certain magickal contrivances, and changed his name to the Healer of Worlds which, so it is said, proved his miraculous nature, since such a t.i.tle had been carefully withheld from him by Ras.

In his apprenticeship, the Healer of Worlds became a wandering ascetic, bent upon discovering the true nature of the world. For a hundred years he tried the way of physical hardship, but to no avail. For a hundred years he tried the way of meditation (proof of his divine nature again, I suppose, though in the old stories 'a hundred years' can mean as little as a few waxes of a moon), but again to no avail. At last he realised that, to be a man, one has to hold such things as different sides of the same coin. One must move through the world of men, while keeping peace and honour and all good things in both your head and heart. The Healer of Worlds began to travel again, and to teach what little he might know to those who did not.

In these new travels, it is said that he was hindered by the demon Dominas, who tried to lead him into temptation. Dominas sent his beautiful daughter Kalkalei to seduce the Healer of Worlds, but he resisted her buxom and decidedly forthright charms. Dominas threatened the Healer of Worlds with a host of monstrous devils, from men turned monstrous by way of evil pacts with the Machine G.o.ds, to creatures built whole from primeval filth, to beings made of pure black light whose very touch was choking death. The Healer of Worlds, however, remained unperturbed. He defeated these devils easily, and went on his way.

In final desperation, Dominas hurled the ultimate demonic weapon at the Healer of Worlds a fiery disc which had the power of cutting through mountains to the core of any world of men and some say had the power to destroy the Unseen Lands themselves, which are merely a reflection of the dreams of men. The Healer of Worlds merely smiled at this I fancy that, by this time, to Dominas, it was an utterly infuriating smile and the Great Disc turned into a canopy of flowers that floated around the Healer of Worlds' head.

At the last after a thousand years the Healer of Worlds attained true Enlightenment. He saw the roots of suffering, and saw by what means that suffering might be ended. Now he was left with a choice. He could enter that still and undisturbed state of supreme consciousness and leave the world or he could renounce deliverance for his own sake and try to show the way to men.

Dominas urged him to make the first choice for obvious reasons, I suspect but after much thought on the matter the Healer of Worlds could not but help choose the second. He took such measures as were necessary to return once again to the world, and to continue his teachings and travels.

And for all I know, he's travelling still.

'There's more, I seem to recall,' said Jamon. 'Something about how this stranger was an aspect of some future, unknowable being who will not only save the world of Men but the universe entire and that all of these incarnations are but aspects of the first Thought of the Mother G.o.ddess Bidi, from which the stars themselves first sprang. I do hope, however, that I've managed to convey the gist of it.'

'Indeed you have!' exclaimed Professor Miribilis. 'Indeed you have. One might almost think the teller had really lived it enough of the teller has certainly come from it, never fear.'

Miribilis turned to the Doctor. 'And you, my good sir, sitting there with that strange little smile on your face. Do you have a tale to tell me?'

The Doctor frowned momentarily, opened his mouth to speak and it was at that point that a scream came from one of the covered wagons off to one side.

The Doctor sat bolt upright. 'That sounded like Anji!'

He glanced about himself frantically. Fitz and Jamon de la Rocas, of course, were still there, but there was a decided absence where one Anji Kapoor should have been.

'What's happening to her?' The Doctor clambered to his feet.

'Ah-uh!' Professor Miribilis waved a warning finger. Here and now, for some reason that would never become quite clear, that seemed to have the power to freeze the Doctor in his tracks.

'A story,' said Miribilis, quietly and unthreateningly, but definitively. 'A story first.'

'I'm afraid,' said the Doctor, firmly, 'that it'll have to wait. In some respects at least, my life is very much a closed book. And missing several pages to boot. Come on, Fitz, let's go and see what Anji's got herself into.'

The black-cowled figures paused to catch their bearings. The cerberi accompanying them strained at their leashes, their multiple and vaguely reptilian heads thrashing from side to side, their jaws slavering.

They had their quarry in their uncanny senses.

They had the scent.

As Jamon de la Rocas had told his own tale, which seemed, from what she could make out, a weird kind of corrupted version of the story of Siddharata, Anji had quietly slipped away. If she knew a thing about him, he was set to go on for the rest of the night, and after their argument in the TARDIS she really didn't feel like sitting still to anything he might have to say.

The worst thing about the animosity she felt, it seemed to her, was that, even with his generally patronising demeanour towards her, even after he had slapped her, she could not quite pin down any reason for the sheer strength strength of that animosity. Dislike was one thing, but what she was feeling was more appropriate to her having come upon him gleefully using a knife on some helpless victim, say, and then making to turn the blade on her. of that animosity. Dislike was one thing, but what she was feeling was more appropriate to her having come upon him gleefully using a knife on some helpless victim, say, and then making to turn the blade on her.

As she left the warmth of the campfire, the cold night air hit her like the blade of a guillotine coming down, and she realised how cold the night had become. One of the problems with travelling in the TARDIS, no matter what state of repair it might ultimately be in, is that you can leave a place of sweltering heat to find yourself in bitter cold, and you always seem to have put on the wrong clothes for it. Her breath plumed thickly before her, far more so than on the chilliest day in London. She wrapped her arms around herself and stomped up and down for a while, trying to keep warm.

In this clearing, tree cover failed to obscure the sky, and this far from the fire it was possible to make out the stars. They just looked like stars. There was probably some hideously complicated way of calculating their positions against what those positions should have been and seeing what the Doctor had called 'sprained s.p.a.ce-time', but to the nonastronomical observer they were nothing more than randomly scattered pinpoints of light.

A shiver went through Anji that was unconnected with the cold. It seemed like a symptom rather than a reaction; one of those feelings that you simply get and then have to work out precisely why why. She felt lonely no, in a deep sense she felt alone alone, in a way that she had never felt before, not even on her recent adventures. Whether she found herself on an Earth made strange by some alien presence, or in some period of the past, or on some alien planet, these things were at least conceivable: she had the terms to think about them.

This far out, in human terms, even the most basic of human a.s.sumptions did not apply. Something inside her had the feeling that, if she did something so simple as drop an object, it would not only not necessarily fall to the ground, but might do something outside of the only other options of staying still and of travelling in any direction whatsoever. Even spontaneously transforming itself into a small fish or whatever was out, because, even though it would be utterly nonsensical, at least something like that could be imagined.

The thing that made it worse, she thought, was that the effects here in the s.p.a.ces of what de la Rocas had called the Empire, were subtle. Nothing was obviously obviously strange or alien, but there were little elements of strange or alien, but there were little elements of wrongness wrongness, like a perfectly ordinary scene of a family eating round the TV, except that the meals on the trays contain a side order of live centipedes.

It showed in the Doctor, who hadn't changed his form or anything impossible like that, but it showed in the way that he'd act uncharacteristically: little blips of personality surfacing and collapsing as if he were being taken over by the spirits of other men. A chopping and changing of tenses and diction, seemingly at random. She'd have put it down to the way in which his memories were starting to resurface, but she could see the same thing happening with Fitz.

Was she she acting like that, seen from the outside? Anji wondered. She didn't think so, but then again that all depended on just who was doing the thinking. Maybe that was the reason why her emotions were so disproportionate over Jamon. acting like that, seen from the outside? Anji wondered. She didn't think so, but then again that all depended on just who was doing the thinking. Maybe that was the reason why her emotions were so disproportionate over Jamon.

The cold started biting her less. Anji knew enough to know that this was one of the first stages of hypothermia, and that she needed to warm up soon. She didn't feel like going back to the fire just yet, so she decided to get under cover in one of the wagons.

There was a clatter of metallic items as she hauled herself up over the tailboard, possibly the kind of tin cups and pans that might be found hanging in an imaginary gypsy caravan. In the dim light this far from the campfire, Anji could make out several crates and a pile of sacking. Her hand found what, from the feel of it and the oil sloshing around inside, was probably a lamp. That was no use to her, of course, if she couldn't find any matches. Anji groped her way forward, her fingers brushing at a length of rough hessian sackcloth which fell away to reveal a rearing, hulking form.

'Graghaagh!' it roared, waving a quite impressive number of slimy tentacles, flippers and extensible, snapping sets of jaws on stalks. 'Is graghaagh graghaagh!'

That was the point at which Anji screamed. The lamp she was holding clattered to the flatbed and she lurched back, tripping over the tailgate to fall several feet and land heavily, stunning herself.

She must have remained unconscious for several minutes. The next thing she knew, the Doctor was beside her, helping her to her feet. 'Are you all right?'

'I... Think so,' Anji said. 'There was a... thing. It was like...'

Off to one side she noticed that Fitz and Jamon de la Rocas had, like the Doctor, come to her aid. She also saw that they were staring at something directly behind her in shock. The fall from the wagon had disorientated her; it was a moment before she realised that they were staring at the wagon itself, and turned to see what it was.

In the opening of the wagon's canopy, clutching the now lit lamp in a tentacle, was a slimy, obloidular creature, regarding them severally and quite angrily by way of four eyes on the end of directionally independent stalks. The alien horror of it was slightly diminished by the fact that it wore a floppy nightcap with a ta.s.sel.

'Is what time this monkey-hominid b.u.g.g.e.rs go sneaking round like big sneaky thing, and no doubt try to place scrofulous and grabby paws on person's valuables?' it said. 'Is trying to get head thing, what is specially specially made for purpose, down for sleepy log-sawing kip, yes?' made for purpose, down for sleepy log-sawing kip, yes?'

The Doctor, Anji realised, was looking at this apparition with a sense of shock every bit as great as the others, but also with a degree of puzzled concern, as though trying to recall something so obvious where your hand might be at any particular time, say, a.s.suming it is still attached to the body that the loss of it was genuinely disturbing.

'I seem to know you...' he was saying. 'Don't I know you?'

He shook his head as if to clear it, and then beamed delightedly as some piece of mental jigsaw puzzle (or possibly monkey-hominid puzzle) fell into place.

'Of course!' he exclaimed. 'How could I forget something like that? Of course I know who you are. You're a Collector.'

In my accounts previous, I have mentioned as to how my experience, at the time of which I speak, was in some small measure greater than the common... but that for all of it, in the final counting, it was experience solely of the Empire and the certain limits attendant to it. I have touched upon the point, briefly, as to how, quite unknowing, I contrived to drive Mistress Anji Kapoor into such a rage that she poured forth such vile insinuations that it was all my manly strength could do, at the time, not to meet those outpourings with immediate defenestration. Though the unfortunate incident to which I refer may, in some small part, prove crucial to my tale, I propose for the moment to leave it on the long finger.

More to the point was my experience with those creatures of the Wider Universe who might cogitate and conduct their social intercourse as finely as, or more so than, Men, while looking not one iota like them. Said experience might well be encapsulated as 'none whatsoever' for the simple reason that, on every world of the Empire, Man was pre-eminent, and such creatures as ever might have been in compet.i.tion with him had long since been rendered slaves or driven extinct.

All of which is to say that, having no means of forming an impression to the contrary, my first thoughts on seeing the creature appear from the circus wagon and hearing it speak were something of a paradox two completely dissimilar thoughts, each as strong as the other, and both of them utterly wrong. My first was that this was one of Prof. Miribilis's performing beasts, trained to ape the acts of men and parrot their speech in an amusing manner. The second was that this was some new variety of those hideous monsters whom I had first seen emerging from the Doctor's 'magical' conveyance, and that any moment now it would be about rending all who were gathered there to shreds.

These conflicting thoughts, I must confess, dumbfounded me for the instant, so it was fortunate that neither was the case or, more particularly, certainly, that the latter was not the case.

'The Collectors,' explained the Doctor, 'are a race of aliens who roam the galaxy in five-milewide supercruisers built from planetary debris, which park over planets and release swarms of short-range fighters which lay those planets to waste...'

'Is lie!' cried the creature in a voice that, while seemingly composed of several speaking all at once, still by some means contrived to sound indignantly squeaky. We had repaired to the campfire by this instance, bringing the creature along with us, and were all of us sipping a warming beverage made from the milk of the drawing animals. Professor Miribilis and his troupe no doubt being quite aware of the relatively harmless nature of this creature from the first instance had politely become immured in their own quiet conversations, of making ready for bed and so forth, to allow our making of said creature's acquaintanceship.

'Is foulest lie!' the creature exclaimed again. 'Is never we do that thing!'

'You don't?' the Doctor said. 'I'm sure I've seen it happen.'

'I think you might have got that from a movie, Doctor,' said Anji, by which I gather that she meant a form of entertainment on her world consisting of a variety of Magic Lantern show. 'Like that time you were convinced that Pokemon really existed, and were part of an evil mind-control plot by the industrial-military complex to subvert the infant pattern-recognition reflex with junk data.'

'Well, you have to admit,' said the Doctor, 'I was right about that.'

'Yes, but not in the way that you meant. And the least said about Roswell the better.'

'How did you know about that?' Fitz asked her, surprised. At the least, I a.s.sumed surprise on his part since the conversation had entered areas that were, to me, the purest gibberish. 'We hadn't even met you when that happened.'

'I was hazarding a guess,' said Anji, darkly. 'I can just imagine him catching half an episode of The X Files and running off in search of the mothership. It's just a mercy he was never exposed to The Clangers, I suppose.'15 'I'm sitting right here, you know,' said the Doctor in slightly hurt tones. 'I might not be entirely up on the specifics, but I'm certain the Collectors are known for ravening across entire planets and destroying everything in their path.'

'Is not destroy monkey-hominid worlds,' the creature said virtuously. 'Is just take things n.o.body want.'

'Oh, yes?' said the Doctor. 'What sort of things?'

'Nice things. Shiny things. Things what is not nailed down to floor. Is then wait for bit and come back for things nailed down to floor.' The creature did not say this with either pride or shame: it was simply saying what it and its purloinative kind did, with an air that how one might take or leave it was all the same so far as it was concerned. Well, having myself, on occasion, found myself on the receiving end of those who feel that even the most justifiable and petty larcenies must be punished to the full letter of the law, I for one could not find it in my heart to condemn such a notion.16 'I can't help noticing,' the Doctor mused, 'that hordes of Collectors merrily running around and plundering the planet are conspicuous by their absence. What are you doing here, all on your own?'

'Was a scout,' the Collector said. 'Was looking for places to come with lots of nice things. Is show you...'

At this juncture I must take a moment to describe the Collector more fully. In general form, it appeared to be a glutinous sac of some thick, leathery material from which slime constantly exuded. From this sac would burst, when needed, limbs, sensory organs and manipulatory appendages no two ever alike, nor ever, from what I could observe, repeated in their usage. I believe that such implementia were fabricated by some strange internal means and on a temporary basis. In any event, as the Collector told its tale, it produced such appendages with which to gesture as a man might in a shadow-puppetry display though in a detail of which a man would never be capable.

First it produced, on the end of a slim length of tentacle, a silvery object that looked remarkably like one of the dirigibles that traverse the vertiginous gulfs between the stilt cities of Pons Iridi.

'Is going along like big whoosh-type thing,' the Collector says, waving this object around. 'Whoosh, is going. Whoosh! Whoosh!'

Eventually, after several more 'whooshes' it appeared to tire of this and produced a globular affair on a kind of bony pole and which appeared to be covered with patchily burned moss. The nature of Transference means that, while those of the Empire were aware that its worlds consisted of planets, globes as a means of visualising them were not particularly common. I was aware, however, that this was in all probability intended to be a representation of the world on which we currently were, Thakrash.

'Is found planet thing,' said the Collector, knocking the dirigible and planet together a number of times, 'but is really boring. Is just tree things and people going round cutting them down. Is hardly any nice things at all. Is b.u.g.g.e.r this for game of making way for ma.s.sive first-stage geostationary strike, say I, when is happen really strange-type thing...'

The diminutive planet was whipped away, deflating, like an inflated bladder stuck with a pin, and, as it did so, an orifice opened in the Collector's slimy skin and something unfolded and hardened that I must ask you to stretch the imagination to believe, for all that I have limned something of the Collector's physiognomy. It was a perfect model, such as might be presented by the architect of a great court to show his ruler what might be expected from the use of any number of slaves. A rocky promontory rising from a patch of forest, and set on top of it, in perfect detail, the central Pylon and sundry peripheral mechanisms such as one would find in a Station of Transference.

'Big glittery-shinytype thing,' said the Collector. 'Is look very nice, so went down for proper look.' It nosed its miniature dirigible around the spire of the Pylon, rather like a Golglobulan feeder-minnow nibbling at a gob of meat between the teeth of a punnet-shark. 'But is not nice-type thing at all! Is big horrible nasty thing! Is send out energies, make big disruptions in hyperwobble drive and...'

Enthusiastically, the Collector began to smash the dirigible into the model. I can only surmise that such products of its body had no capacity for pain, or that in a moment of descriptive pa.s.sion it had forgotten that both model and dirigible were in actual fact a part of itself. At length, with both quite definitively demolished, it reabsorbed them with the slightly sheepish air of one recovering from having momentarily lost one's self-possession.

'Is apology,' it said. 'Is get carried away with big shouty thing, sometimes.

'Think nothing of it,' said the Doctor. 'Happens to the best of us, especially in the face I do beg your pardon of such a sad story. So what happened then?'

'Is happened big long time of monkey-hominids running round and burning things and hitting funny marky-face monkey-hominids with sticks,' said the Collector. 'Hid out in leafy woods till stopped. Collectors living much more years than monkey-hominids, yes, so is wandering round in leafy woods and falling into holes and getting very lonely after a bit. Is lonely for big pile of lovely stuff like mangle-handles, shaky snowdomes and jars of pickled marmosets back in home world and just knows all other nasty Collectors have taken things away for very own, with lots of shouty joy and glee. So, decide to go and say h.e.l.lo to monkey-hominid villages but they all go "Agh! Agh! Horrible slimy monster!" and throw things at. So is glomping along all dejected when meet Mr Professor and people...' A limb extended, on the end of which was a perfectly moulded arrow such as might be painted on a sign board, pointing to where Professor Miribilis was about the business of examining the snake lady for mange. 'Tell my sad-type story,' the Collector continued, 'and he take me in. Is have been with ever since, showing perfectly ordinary Collector-like manipulatory stuff to much delight of monkey-hominid audience. Is OK.'

'A happy ending, of sorts, at least,' said the Doctor. He glanced around himself at the general, peaceable presomnolentive activity of the troupe. 'All things considered, I'd suggest that...'

Quite what it was that the Doctor was going to suggest, I never in point of fact discovered for at that moment we all of us were abruptly and quite rudely interrupted.