The Empire Of Glass Part 11

As the Doctor scrambled up the ladder and onto the platform, Galileo set to work placing the telescope upon its stand and aiming it towards the moon's cratered surface. By the time the old man was standing beside him, he was gazing through the eyepiece.

"Well?" the Doctor queried. "What do you see?"

Galileo didn't reply for a moment. The skull-like contours of the moon's surface filled his eyes, its shadows lengthening as he watched. As always, he felt humbled and elated seeing something that n.o.body else had ever seen. The resolution of the Doctor's lenses was incredible: far better than anything his gla.s.smaker at Padua could fashion. Even the gla.s.smakers of Venice - the very Empire of gla.s.s - would be hard-pressed to surpa.s.s them for clarity. He could make out features that he had never seen before - radial lines splaying out from the circular features and smaller pock marks all over the surface. There was so much to catalogue, so much to think about!

The Doctor tapped him on the shoulder. "This is no time for dilly-dallying, young man. Kindly tell me what you can see."

"Quiet!" Galileo muttered. "I'm concentrating." He shifted the telescope slightly, tracing across the harsh yet serene surface until he found a feature that he recognized: a tall, jagged range of mountains that put him in mind of the teeth of one of the lecturers at the University of Padua. Through the Doctor's lenses they seemed almost close enough to walk to. From the mountains he scanned downwards until a large elliptical area jumped into view.

"There," he said. "That's what I was looking at when I saw the moving object."

The Doctor pushed him out of the way. "Let me see," he said. After a few moments, and a little nudge of the telescope tube, his tense shoulders relaxed. "Yes... " he murmured, "yes, it all becomes clear now."

The Doctor stood to one side and let Galileo take another look. He had centred the telescope's field of view on a plain area of ground.

Galileo had never bothered with it before - it was the features that interested him, not the stretches of ground between them. He had been wrong. Through the Doctor's lenses he could see large geometric shapes scattered across the surface: squares and rectangles, cones and cylinders, spheres and trapezoids. From the way their shadows were cast it seemed as though they stood proud of the surface, as if they were on legs. "Are they houses?"

he whispered. "Houses for moon-men?"

"No," the Doctor said darkly, "they are ships that sail through s.p.a.ce as a galleon sails through the oceans."

"But they are all different in design."

"I suspect that they belong to a number of different races."

Galileo would have pursued the point further, but suddenly a smaller object detached itself from a diamond-shaped edifice and rose away from the surface of the moon. It was circular in shape, like a flattened egg. "Doctor, there's something moving."

The Doctor pushed Galileo out of the way and took a look himself.

"Excellent," he said. "As I suspected, it is some form of shuttle craft. Now if we can only keep it in sight, we should be able to determine where it comes to Earth."

"And where it comes to Earth," Galileo said, "there we may find your companion Vicki."

"I took you for a guard of the house," Chigi confided to Steven. He took a long drink from the tankard in front of him. "Or a demon."

"A demon?" Steven glanced around the bar with the picturesque name of the Tavern of the Love of Friends, or of the Gypsies, wondering if anybody was close enough to overhear their conversation. As far as he knew, both he and Chigi had got out of the strange house without anybody noticing, but if there was one thing he had learned from the past twenty-four hours it was not to take anything in Venice at face value. The city was full of masks, obvious and subtle, and anything could be hiding behind them.

Anything at all.

But the tavern was just a tavern - hot and noisy - and the patrons were just patrons.

"Have you not seen them?" Chigi gazed curiously at Steven, and the pilot was struck by how soft his grey eyes were in contrast to his rugged, scarred face and close-cropped hair. Another mask?

"They fly above us, walk amongst us and swim beneath us. Venice is full of them."

"A riddle?" Steven asked.

"The truth. Oh, I am quite capable of turning the odd fanciful phrase - indeed I was once noted for it - but this time I am speaking G.o.d's honest truth. Or at least, I would be if I believed in G.o.d. But no matter - these demons are real enough. Some are as thin as sticks, with great horns growing from their heads, while others are sh.e.l.led like crabs but have great wings which carry them aloft. I have seen them."

Steven shivered. At first he had thought that Chigi was lying - that or hallucinating - but the latter description sounded uncomfortably close to the Doctor's description of the creature that had abducted Vicki. From the sound of it, Chigi had come across it as well, which raised the obvious question: what was Chigi's part in all this?

"So what were you you doing in the house?" doing in the house?"

Chigi smiled slightly. "I suspect the same as you, my friend.

Investigating." He raised a hand and ran a finger along the scar that ran down one side of his face. "A pastime that has been my downfall before, and no doubt will be again. 'I see the better way and approve it: I follow the worse,' as Ovid said."

"Is that how you got that scar?" Steven asked.

Chigi nodded. "A fight - a sordid affair in Holland, some five years ago now. My skull was split open. A sawbones had to piece it back together. I owe him my life - for whatever that is worth." Chigi reached into his jerkin. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a small, round metal object. "The sawbones claims that he found this inside my skull," he added. "I've never been sure whether to believe him or not."

Steven reached out for the object. Chigi shrugged, and handed it over.

"It's very light," Steven said, hefting it in his hand. "What is it - a musket ball or something?" Running his thumb over it, Steven thought he could detect striations in the sphere, indentations marking the outline of some hidden compartment perhaps, or symbols carved into the metal.

"If so, I know not how it came to be in my head, for I have never been shot." Chigi laughed, and picked the ball from Steven's hand, managing as he did so to run his finger across Steven's palm. "Or at least, I don't remember ever having been -"

He stopped abruptly, his gaze fixed on something across the tavern. Steven glanced across. A man stood in the doorway. His clothes marked him as a foreigner, and he was carrying a bag. His forehead was high and balding, and his face was fine-featured. He was staring back at Chigi as if he had seen a ghost.

"G.o.d's hounds!" Chigi murmured. "It can't be."

The newcomer walked slowly across to their table. His eyes never left Chigi. He dropped the bag by Steven's feet.

"You bear an uncanny resemblance to a man who has been dead for fifteen years, sir," he said. "My name is Shakespeare. William Shakespeare. Might I make so bold as to enquire... ?"

Chigi made no move to answer. Instead he just shook his head again, nonplussed. "I'm Steven Taylor," Steven said finally, rising from his seat and extending a hand. "And this is -"

"Marlowe," Chigi said simply. "My name is Christopher Marlowe."

Steven watched, dumbfounded, as Chigi reached out, pulled Shakespeare to him and hugged him like a long-lost brother.

CHAPTER TEN.

"It appears to be heading towards Venice again," Galileo said, the bra.s.s of the telescope's eyepiece cold against his skin. He looked away from the spinning disc and refocused his eyes on the Venetian skyline: darker roofs and spires against the darkness of the sky. There was the beginning of a dull headache behind his forehead, and creaking pains in the small of his back. He'd spent too long bending over, looking through the telescope, straining too hard to make out details, and he was going to pay the price later.

No amount of philosophy, no amount of science, could hold old age at bay.

When he turned back, the Doctor was at the telescope. "Hmm, you're right, my boy," he said, "it does seem that the object in question is getting larger, and not diverging significantly from its flight path. Venice would appear to be its final destination." He straightened up and frowned for a moment. "I wonder," he muttered, "whether it is actually within sight yet." He gazed upwards, along the line of the telescope, his eyes flicking back and forth as he scanned the heavens. Galileo joined him, and together the two men stood in silence, staring upward.

It was Galileo who saw it first - a tiny point of light moving on a steady course. For a moment he thought it was a falling star, but it was travelling too slowly for that. "Look, Doctor," he said, pointing.

"There it is!"

"My eyes are perfectly sharp and I can't make out a thing," the Doctor snapped. "Are you sure that your own eyes aren't deceiving you?"

Galileo glanced sideways at the Doctor and smiled slightly. The old man didn't like to be upstaged. Too bad: neither did Galileo. "Yes,"

he said, "I'm sure. Obviously your own gaze is too rheumy with age to make it out."

"Nonsense." The Doctor huffed and spluttered to himself. "I can see it now. Yes, I can see it dearly." He pointed to where it had been. Galileo pointed to where it was now, and the Doctor quickly shifted his arm downwards.

"It appears to be coming down in the lagoon somewhere," Galileo said.

The Doctor reached into his pocket and brought out a compa.s.s.

Galileo watched as he fussed around, taking a reading. "We need a second reading," he said finally. "All we can tell from this is that its destination lies somewhere along this bearing. If we could only move half a mile or so and check again then we could determine at what point the two bearings cross, but by the time we get downstairs and across the city it will have landed."

"Give the compa.s.s to me," Galileo said. The Doctor frowned and made as if to argue, so Galileo s.n.a.t.c.hed it from his hand and, without stopping to think through what he was doing, ran towards the edge of the roof platform and jumped into s.p.a.ce. A sudden dizzying vision of the canyon between the houses flashed past; and then his feet were stumbling heavily upon the roof platform of the widow Carpaccio, who lived opposite. A short scramble up the eaves and down the other side left Galileo perched on a length of gutter. He launched himself across the gap to the next house, and laughed as he landed, feeling like a youth again. He had forgotten how exhilarating it was to jump, to run and not to care about dignity, decorum and pride.

For the next few minutes he forgot what he was doing and why: all he felt was fingers scrabbling at tiles, feet thumping against wood and the coldness of the air whipping past as he sprang from roof to roof. He lost count of the number of times he had jumped, the number of houses that he had crossed. Once or twice he had to go sideways to avoid particularly tall or short buildings, or to detour round churches or empty squares, but he did his best to keep going in the same general direction. Sometimes he could see upturned pink faces gawping from alleys as he crossed, like a thief in the night, and he wondered what the people actually saw. Was it a mysterious shape flying across the sky, or just a portly, middle-aged scholar acting the fool? A few times he heard the rattle of trapdoors or windows behind him as occupiers checked for nocturnal invasions. Once a cat squalled and shot out from beneath his feet, almost pitching him into an alley.

Every so often he glanced up to check the moving star. It was descending slowly but surely towards the horizon, and when it was a mere hand's breadth away from the rooftops he stopped and pulled the compa.s.s from his pocket. His body shook as he tried to draw enough air into his lungs to a.s.suage the burning void within him, and he could hardly focus on the compa.s.s, but it only took him a few moments to make a reading. As the star vanished behind the rooftops, Galileo felt a wave of elation sweep over him.

He could draw a line on a map from where he was to where he had seen the star vanish, and the Doctor could do the same from Galileo's house. Where the lines crossed, that was where they had to go.

Fatigue washed across him then, and his legs almost gave way beneath him. Carefully he picked his way across the roof, looking for a way down that didn't lead through someone's bedroom. His breath rasped in his throat, and he suddenly realized that his back was locked in a solid ma.s.s of pain. He was getting too old for this.

They were sitting in loungers out on a balcony, high up on the main central tower of the island of Laputa. Vicki was sipping at a drink that tasted of strawberries and had started off chilled but was now comfortably hot in her hands; Braxiatel was leaning back with his eyes closed, humming to himself. Below, Vicki could just hear the cries of birds and animals in the vibrant jungle.

"That jungle isn't natural, is it?" she asked sleepily.

"That depends on what you mean by natural," Braxiatel said. "If you mean "is it artificial?" then the answer is no. If, however, you mean "is it native to this area of the Earth?" then the answer is also no."

Vicki frowned. "Sorry?"

"I had it transplanted from South America. The vegetation around Venice consists primarily of small shrubs and scrubby olive trees. I felt that the envoys deserved something more picturesque." He shook his head. "No, that's not true. I felt that I I deserved something a little more picturesque. That's why I have my living accommodation in Venice - it's much more attractive than here." deserved something a little more picturesque. That's why I have my living accommodation in Venice - it's much more attractive than here."

Vicki nodded. "It's very pretty."

"Thank you."

After taking a sip of her drink, Vicki said, "Can I ask you another question?"

"Of course."

"What are the envoys doing here? What are you doing here? And what are we we doing here?" doing here?"

Braxiatel opened his eyes and glanced towards her. "That's three questions," he said. "Let me answer them by turning them back on you: what do you think think is going on?" is going on?"

Vicki considered for a moment. "I think there's some sort of conference going on in Venice," she said finally, "and I think you're organizing it. I think you wanted the Doctor to go to it, and I think that Albrellian is supposed to be attending the conference but doesn't want to."

"More or less spot on," Braxiatel said, sliding upright in his lounger.

"It's called the Armageddon Convention, and I've spent the past twenty years trying to set it up."

"The Armageddon Convention?" Vicki said, frowning. "That sounds rather... warlike. You don't strike me as the sort of man who would go around arranging armageddons."

"It's a peace conference." Braxiatel placed his hands behind his head and shifted slightly in his lounger. "It struck me some time ago that wherever I went in the universe, there were races who had spent millennia trying to kill each other for reasons that they had probably all forgotten. I thought that if I could get representatives from all of the major races in a room together then -".

"- then you could stop them fighting!" Vicki slapped her hands together. "That's wonderful."

Braxiatel looked downcast. "I'm afraid that's not quite the case. I'm hoping for something much more pragmatic than that. I knew that if I told them it was a peace conference the only races who would turn up were the ones that were losing. There's no incentive for the winners to negotiate."

"So what are are you doing then?" you doing then?"

"Limiting the damage." He stood up suddenly and walked over to the edge of the balcony. "The one thing that most races could agree on was that some weapons were just too terrible to consider using - the doomsday devices, we tend to call them. Temporal disruptors, for instance, can rip apart the structure of the universe and set off a chain reaction that might unravel reality, while cobalt bombs are so unpredictable that n.o.body can tell what the resulting damage might be. The only races prepared to use doomsday devices are the losers - the races who will be completely wiped out otherwise and just don't care care about long term effects." about long term effects."

"So this is ... what, an arms limitation conference?"

"That's right. The envoys all have the power to agree that their respective races will stop using certain weapons. The losers give up their doomsday devices in exchange for the winners giving up some of the dirtier weapons that don't discriminate between military and civilian targets. My hope is that by the time they've finished, there won't be very much left for them to fight with with." He sighed as he gazed down at the jungle. "I sent out robot messengers twenty years ago with the invitations. The Daleks and the Cybermen refused even to respond, of course, and destroyed the messengers out of spite, but a lot of the other, second-rank races were interested. That was all I got for a while - interest.

n.o.body could agree on a location or a chairman that they trusted."

"Until you chose the Earth for the location and the Doctor for the chairman," Vicki prompted.

"Exactly," Braxiatel nodded. "The Earth is a developing world with a bright future ahead of it. Within a thousand years or so it will become a dominant force in this part of the galaxy, partly because of its unique strategic position but mostly because of the unique ability of its inhabitants."

"I didn't know that we had any unique abilities," Vicki said.

"You don't," Braxiatel replied, "that's your unique ability. Other races specialize in trade, or warmongering, or shapeshifting. You humans are generalists, and for that reason you can do everything reasonably well, rather than one thing very well and everything else badly. I thought that holding the conference on Earth would remind the various envoys that they were all young and powerless once." He turned to face Vicki. "It's also conveniently placed for everyone, of course, and at this point in its history it's on the verge of ma.s.s-producing cheap but effective weapons using a powder that was originally developed for fireworks - a reminder to all the envoys that even the most innocent of research programmes can be perverted to a military end."

"And the s.p.a.ceships of all the envoys are parked on the moon?"

He nodded. "Less conspicuous that way. We shuttle them down here in s.p.a.ceworthy skiffs. And, of course, all of the envoys' ships are heavily armed. Most of them brought examples of the weapons that they'll be discussing. It's safer to have them all out of temptation's way. The ships are all empty - the envoys and their crews have all been quartered down on Earth in whatever locations are most comfortable and, by and large, uninhabited. The Ice Warriors have a base near the North Pole, the Krargs are in the Sahara, the Vilp are deep underground and so on. The Greld have been here longest. They agreed on the location almost straight away, twenty years ago, and I had them quartered out in what you would probably know as North America. They've used the time to teach themselves standard Galactispeak, but they can't quite come to grips with the fact that verbs and personal p.r.o.nouns don't come at the end of sentences. That, incidentally, is why Albrellian is a little... flighty. He's been waiting so long for this convention to start that he's on edge all the time. I think they call it "stir crazy". We've had more problems with the Greld delegation going out formation flying than with anyone else."

Vicki felt herself blushing slightly, and looked away. "Is that why he said... that he loved me?"

Braxiatel was equally embarra.s.sed, judging by his tone of voice.

"The Greld are a very... sensuous... race. They take their physical pleasures very seriously, and they're enlightened enough not to restrict themselves to members of their own race." Vicki glanced over to find Braxiatel furiously polishing his bifocals. "There are no female Greld in the delegation, and I've been trying to discourage Albrellian from... from accosting... women of this era, because the women would see it as a visitation from their devil. He's tried it on with several of the other envoys, but they all turned him down. I think having an attractive human female nearby who is intelligent enough not to be scared by him is... er..."

"A turn on."

"Indeed." He looked away. "Not that I'm trying to denigrate your own unique physical attributes, of course. Don't take Albrellian seriously - apart from the way he mangles grammar, he's harmless."

"Thanks for rea.s.suring me," Vicki said. "Can I ask where the Doctor fits into all this?"

"The Doctor was the only person that the major races could agree on as the chairman of the conference."

"You mean they all respect him as a fair and wise person?"

"No, they all hate him equally." Braxiatel smiled. "Actually, that's not quite fair. The Doctor has a growing reputation, but it was what he did with the miniscopes that impressed everyone."