'Is the manager gone?'

The Doctor thought this was an odd way to begin the conversation. Was Octave perhaps afraid he'd need protection? He did look pitifully nervous.

'Yes he is,' said the Doctor. 'I'm afraid I avoided him. I badly wanted to speak to you.'

'And I to you,' said Octave, with sudden resolve. 'But this room's too small. Come with me.'

The hall was dark except for a flickering fixture at the far end. Octave led the Doctor past the other dressing rooms to the stairs, scurrying ahead, slightly stooped. As they passed the lamp his slicked-down hair gleamed wetly at the edges, still damp from where he had washed off his greasepaint.

On the stage, a solitary electric bulb glowed in an iron cage on a rod, spreading a weak circle of light against the theatre's empty darkness. The ghost light, thought the Doctor, wondering how he knew the phrase. He'd noticed earlier the up-tothe-minute electrical stage lighting, though the theatre lobby, like the backstage hallways, was still illuminated with gas. He looked into the black void of the rows of seats.

'You're curious,' said Octave. In the faint light, without his makeup, he looked washed out.

'No,' said the Doctor. 'Oh unless that was a description of me.'

'About my act,' said Octave after a beat.

The Doctor shook his head. 'There's no mystery about your act.'

'I like to think there is.'

'I'm sure you do. Not a secret you want advertised. Tell me: how many of you are there altogether?'

At the edge of the light, in quiet unison, the doors of Octave's cabinets swung open. The Doctor watched as five identical men stepped out. He nodded. At a noise behind him, he glanced into the auditorium. Two more Octaves were coming up from the blackness on to the stage. Silently, the figures surrounded the Doctor. He turned in a circle, examining them. They wore different suits but otherwise were indistinguishable one from another.

'Eight,' said the Doctor. 'Thus the name. Bit obvious, don't you think?'

'No one's guessed,' said the first Octave. 'Till now.'

'I didn't guess,' said the Doctor. 'I knew.'

'Really?' said another of the Octaves, very quietly. 'What did you know?'

'Perhaps you're a gynaecologist,' said a third drily. 'Someone familiar with multiple births.'

'Though not quite this multiple,' added a fourth.

'You're not octuplets,' said the Doctor calmly. 'You're the same person splintered into eight parts.'

The Octaves hadn't been exactly animated before, but now they became completely still, their eyes fixed unblinkingly on the man at their centre. The Doctor was unruffled by this stark attention. He reached out, took the first Octave's hand, and gently pressed the little puncture wound with the edge of his thumbnail. A tiny spot of blood appeared. The Doctor looked around. As one, the other Octaves turned their palms towards him, each with its own glistening droplet.

'You're one man,' the Doctor said as the first Octave took back his hand, 'but shattered, like one reflection multiplied in the fragments of a broken mirror. Who did this to you? And why?'

'Who are you?' said the first Octave. 'And why have you sought me out?'

'I'm the Doctor. Time is wounded here. You can feel it, can't you?' The Doctor was turning in a circle again, facing each of the Octaves for a moment. 'You're part of the wound.'

The Octaves moved back a step. The Doctor looked from one pair of identical eyes to another to another, saw the trace of sweat beneath the moustaches on each upper lip. It was like facing multiple beings that shared a hive mind, only not quite. That was natural. This was a human mind, never meant to exist in more than one body, let alone eight. What kind of perceptual strain must it be?

'How do you manage?' he said. 'What do you do?'

'I sleep,' said the first Octave simply. 'They sleep.'

'Except during the act,' said the Doctor. The Octaves nodded. 'It's a risk, that act.'

'There's so little I can do,' the first Octave whispered, anguished. 'So little,' murmured the others.

'My mind...'

'My mind...'

Their voices broke. The Doctor flushed angrily. 'This is abominable! Who did this to you?'

Weirdly, they looked at one another. The Doctor watched in fascination. Elements of the mind communicating. So there was some slight psychic as well as physical fracturing. His heart sank. That made reintegration more difficult, perhaps impossible...

'I did it to myself,' the first Octave said. 'I thought it would be...' He trailed off.

'What?'

The Octaves shook their heads, not meeting his eyes. Tears appeared on their faces.

'Let me help you.' The Doctor stepped towards the first Octave. They all flinched back. 'Please.'

'You can't.'

'Let me try.'

'Too late,' said an Octave behind him. The Doctor turned. 'I'm different now.'

'Than what?'

'Than myself,' said another Octave.

'I am,' said a third, 'a "we".'

'Too late,' they all repeated, eyes down.

'No,' the Doctor protested, though he suspected they were right. 'You can't know that.'

'You can't help,' said the first Octave. 'What could you do?'

'I have a machine '

'No!'

'No more machines!'

'He has a machine, but it can't help.'

'Who does?' The Doctor turned on the Octave who had spoken last. He looked away. So did the others. 'And why can't he help you? Or won't he?' Silence. 'Where is this machine?'

The Octaves' heads snapped up. Sixteen eyes stared at him suspiciously.

'Why do you want to know?' said an Octave to the Doctor's left.

'Perhaps if I saw exactly how this '

'You don't know?' said another. 'If you don't know how it happened, how can you help?'

'There are many ways of '

'It's the machine, isn't it?' said the first Octave. 'Not me. Not... us.'

'You '

' just '

' want '

' to '

' find '

' the '

' time '

' machine.'

'I don't care about the machine!' said the Doctor in exasperation. 'I already have '

One of the Octaves hit him. It wasn't much of a blow, but it knocked the Doctor off-balance, and as he staggered another Octave looped an arm around his throat, jerking him upright. Two others seized his arms and they began to drag him towards the wings. As the remaining five closed in, the Doctor managed to kick one of them in the stomach. They all stumbled and groaned and he wrenched free, but before he could get three steps they were on him again, grabbing his limbs, his hair, his clothes, twining their arms around him, moving as one.

'Don't be a fool, Octave!' the Doctor yelled, struggling against the clutching hands. 'Let me help you! Let me mmph!'

A handkerchief was jammed into his mouth and they barrelled him into the wings and fell with him to the floor. The Doctor twisted and fought as they spread his arms and legs, but against so many he might as well not have bothered one Octave gripped his head, another two pinned his arms, two each leg and Hang on. He turned his head as much as he could, searching the curtained shadows. That was only seven. Where was He spotted the last Octave over by the backstage wall, hauling on a rope. The Octaves holding him had drawn away as far as possible, the two at his left leg keeping hold only of his foot and ankle. They were all looking up.

The Doctor followed their gaze. It took him a moment, peering into the high darkness, to discern a lumpen shape moving slowly upward. He knew what it was, had known as soon as he saw the Octave at the rope: one of the heavy sacks of sand that served as a counterweight to lift the painted backdrops of the stage sets. As Octave didn't use backdrops in his act, this one was free to be utilised for other purposes. The Doctor wondered exactly how much it weighed. At least thirty pounds. He imagined that when it crashed down on to his chest it would, in addition to crushing his remaining heart, drive the edges of his smashed ribs right out through his back and into the floor.

In this, as in so many other predictions of his long life, he was correct.

Chapter Seven.

Anji started awake, confused. She had been dreaming that she was in a large house, in a storm, and that somewhere an unsecured door, caught by the wind, was banging and banging and banging that there were steps on the stair and voices in the hall and then just one voice, and she was sitting up in bed, blinking, listening to Fitz say, 'Anj! Anj, wake up!'

There was a policeman in the sitting room, admitted by the landlady, knocked awake and still in her wrapper. The hearth was cold and the sky was grey and the Doctor was dying, his chest caved in in an accident, hours away in this slow century, unconscious in some primitive hospital ward. 'If he's not dead now, they'll kill him before we get there,' she said to Fitz on the train. Fitz was white-faced and his collar stuck out absurdly to one side. They were pulling into the Lime Street station before she registered this sufficiently to reach out and reattach it.

A long, high-windowed hall with a black-andwhite tiled floor. Another policeman. She let Fitz do the listening. She wasn't expected to understand English anyway, which was just as well because the words went past her. Theatre. After hours. No idea what. Flyweight. The policeman showed a card. It had their London address on it, half-obscured in damp blood. The bright morning sun hitting the card seemed to her obscene. Their rushing footsteps were too loud, like a rattle of stones. At the end of the hall, tall white double doors. Then more white: the walls, the curtains, the screens, the sheets, the nurses' aprons, the faces of the patients. And a young doctor in a dark suit: 'He shouldn't even be alive.'

'I'll say,' thought Fitz. He stared at the Doctor's face, paler than the pillowcase it lay against, even the lips without colour. Beneath a grey blanket, his chest was swathed in bandages. Jesus, Fitz thought, was he even breathing? The room smelled rawly of disinfectant with an under-odour of staleness and bedpans. Fitz put his hand on the iron railing at the foot of the bed. The young doctor was saying something. 'I'm sorry?'

'Mr... Kreiner, is it?' Fitz nodded. 'You are the nephew?'

'Right. This is my uncle John. Smith. Mum's brother.'

'Are you aware that...' The doctor hesitated. 'It was difficult to tell, with so much damage to the body cavity, but your uncle appears to be possessed of a number of physical anomalies.'

'Does he?' said Fitz nervously.

Fortunately the Doctor chose that moment to open his eyes and scream.

It wasn't much of a scream, having almost no breath behind it, and quickly lapsed into a sort of moaning gurgle. The Doctor's head thrashed-back and forth. Blood came out of his mouth. Fitz and Anji found themselves jostled aside by a sudden knot of busy nurses. A needle glinted in the doctor's hand.

'No drugs!' cried Anji. 'He's allergic!' Then, wondering if the word were even in use yet, 'I mean, he can't '

'It's only morphine.' The doctor lifted the Doctor's wrist. 'He reacted satisfactorily before Oh!' The Doctor had wrenched the hypodermic from his hand and flung it across the room. It shattered in a sudden silence as the hospital staff froze, staring at him. Wildly, his eyes raked across their faces and locked on Fitz.

'Why...?' he whispered in anguish. Blood bubbled over his lip. 'Why am I alive?'

Two days later Anji asked Fitz whether the Doctor could could die. die.

They were in the TARDIS kitchen, where they spent most of their time when they weren't staring at the Doctor, white-faced and unmoving, plugged into the machines he'd attached himself to before dropping into a coma. She had made tea in a mechanical, unthinking way, but neither of them had poured out and the pot had grown cold.

'I don't know,' said Fitz. Maybe not, he thought, if two days ago were any example. At the hospital, the Doctor had suddenly recovered his composure. He had spoken calmly and with great sincerity to the young doctor, staring intently into his eyes, and soon the discharge papers were signed and they were on their way to the station, the Doctor in a clumsy wicker-andwood wheeled litter-chair, encased in blankets and bandages, his pallor ghastly in the sunlight, his eyes glazed with pain. In the first-class compartment, they had stretched him on his back with his knees up and his head elevated on Fitz's bundled coat, and he had immediately fallen unconscious.

'Biodata,' said Fitz.

'What?' Anji had lapsed into a little trance of her own, staring at the teapot. Now she frowned. 'Biodata?'

'Yeah,' said Fitz. 'It's hard to explain. I don't know if it's his, erm, species, or if it's just him, but on the cellular level his DNA, because he's a time traveller well, it's more than that we're time travellers, you and me, and I don't think there's anything like this about us, but he sort of exists on a trans-temporal level, you know, and that translates to a trans-spatial level as well I mean, a few years ago in San Francisco, his biodata, well, it kind of stretched '

'I have no idea what you're talking about.'

'No.' Fitz deflated. 'Neither do I, really.'

To the Angel-Maker, it seemed as if there were a crack in the world. A very thin one, to be sure. Hardly wider than a thread. But dangerous, nonetheless, like a hairline crack in a jug that slowly, imperceptibly weakened the vessel, until suddenly one day, all unwarning, it fell to pieces. So might the world fall to pieces if nothing were done.