'But... look at this bit... You didn't foil the Dalek invasion of Earth in the twenty-second century. I did! It was me and Susan and Ian and Barbara!

And the Cyber tombs on Telos... You weren't there, Iris. I was. You weren't to be seen!'

'That's your story,' she smiled. 'In my version, it was me. With my glamorous young a.s.sistant Jeremy. With every one of our peremptory arrivals, we fork off into, another version - surely you know that?

'So your version has more validity than mine?' he asked bitterly.

'Not necessarily.We can coexist, can't we? We have parallel lives, pasts and futures. I'm stopping this bus for lunch.' They lurched to a halt. 'Mind you, I've got written evidence of my version. What do you have?'

He turned and stumped back up to the top deck, furious. She cackled and made them lunch in the restocked galley. But it took days before the Doctor would speak to her again.

In tunnels still dense with fronds and vines and thickly whorled flowers, both Sam and Gila expected at any moment to be met by Our Lady. The fact that they were allowed to go traipsing on like this, shuffling forward through the treacherous undergrowth, meant either that they had escaped or that this was a trap. The usual choice. But Our Lady did not appear.

Curious that the plants down here grew without light. The flowers were anaemic and cold to touch; the furled petals of the lilies were like old, damp paper.

All they could do was press on, and hope they would emerge into daylight soon. They had no idea what direction they were heading in, until they came to a chamber that illuminated itself fitfully at their approach. They discovered that its walls were painted with maps and charts. Precisely what the Doctor had been looking for above ground.

The paint here on the walls was chipped and scabrous, and the charts were incomplete. Figures of animals and trees swarmed to fill in the cartographer's blank s.p.a.ces; they were represented with the touching, weightily symbolic care of religious iconography. The charts, Gila observed, resembled those imprinted on the tattooed hides of the Empress's Scarlet Guard.

In the centre of the ceiling they found Fortalice, presented as the centre - the sensible, knowable median of the world of Hyspero. Lines of routes, frontiers and contours ran out to craze and furcate all the walls of the room. Fortalice was like the point in the ice at which a stone is dropped; the rest is cracked, with hairlines jagging out from that single point.

Starting from Fortalice, they studied the myriad lines running south. The Forest of Kestheven crept down the southern wall of the chapel -Sam couldn't help finding the whole frescoed room creepily religious. The forest, with individually painted trees, lovingly emblematic trees of no type she had ever seen before, was faded a muddy, olive green. It looked like a s.h.a.ggy beard of mould on that wall.

"That's where we're going,' Gila said and tried to untangle the routes.

Overland, through the valleys.

Sam started. 'We're already on the route, look.' She had found a drawing of the tunnel, and even of this chapel. It looked like a bubble in a tube of mercury. She peered, and Gila peered, and they found that the drawing of this room even included the maps on the wall. Maps of maps. And, standing staring at the maps on the walls, were two tiny, thumbnail figures, holding a light. "That makes me dizzy,' Sam said. Infinite regression, the Doctor had called it once, using a number of mirrors and a small plastic Dalek to explain a point in temporal physics. She looked away.

'This tunnel appears to connect with an underground river,' whispered Gila.'If we travel down that... we end up here.'

He pointed at the overpopulous heart of the forest.

'Good,' she said, suppressing a shudder.

Then they traced the overland route, the longer route through the valleys.'I hope,' she said,'the Doctor manages to find the way.'

Gila grunted.'I think they already have.'

He pointed to a painted cleft in the rock, where the going seemed particularly hard. And there - she could hardly credit it - was a naive but unmistakable painting of a double-decker bus, livid scarlet, and beside it, two figures, staring out for the way to turn.

'It's a map for all time,' breathed Gila. 'Representing events as well as places.'

"They're on their way, then,' said Sam. She looked at the green and grey daub that was meant to be the Doctor. His shock of brown hair. Iris came off worse: a smear of yellow and blue, fat with her arms akimbo.

'I wish we could roll this up and take it with us,' Sam said.

'I have an excellent memory.'

'You would.'

'Usually I need only look at a map once. But this is different. It changes in response to events and the endless changeableness of the topography of Hyspero. I have heard tales of this room. On all of Hyspero, only the stars and this room are still. Everything, everything else alters.'

'Let's get on,' she said.'Find this river.'

She hated the idea of standing still in a place that was constant. And she was wary of Gila's fascination with the charts.

'I could find my birthplace... I could find out what happened to them...'

'No, Gila. We have to go.'

His eyes tracked back across the walls to find the wicked city of Hyspero. At its northern point, in a gaudy, domed palace, he located the Scarlet Empress. He hissed and pointed it out to Sam.

'We have to come all the way back here, eventually.'

"That's some distance we have to cover.' She felt quite small, gazing at the spread ma.s.s of the ancient planet and almost wished they were embroiled in one of those missions that involved only a few corridors and a control room or two. The hugeness of Hyspero, its measureless deserts and seas began to alarm her. In a smallish, underground cavern Sam felt the first twinges of a misplaced agoraphobia.

Goodness, well, you talk about mind specialists, about spiritual takeover plans, about mind probes, brain probes, hypnotism, soul stealing, and I've seen them all. I've been possessed by the best of them. Or rather, the best of that parasitic breed and brood have tried to dabble with my mind and, at one time or another, have attempted to take me over.

Strapped to tables, electrodes snaking all over the shop, sensitive suckers stuck on my temples, leeching out the memories, the sensations, and the essences. Like a dying man again and again I've seen my life flashing before my eyes. I make a very enc.u.mbered existentialist. I try hard, but my past is always catching up with me.

At one time it seemed to me that no one I met could be very happy with their lot, since all of them were wanting to possess the spirits (to use an unwieldy term) of everyone else. All this possession going on -there was quite a rash of it. Well, you know me. I was never very possessive. You can't be, can you?

What I feel about Iris now is most peculiar. I'm sure she thinks I'm in a huff, and maybe I am. She should know my moods by now. When I don't feel like talking I take myself off. It's what I always do. On the whole I'm a sociable creature, but... sometimes you have to retreat a little.

She is encroaching on me. Not just my s.p.a.ce, though that is bad enough. This trip, with the two of us on the bus, we have to negotiate, quite explicitly and carefully, our s.p.a.ce and privacy. It isn't like my ship. I can't go wandering off. It rather reminds me of that sleigh trip I made on the ice fields of Myrrh... oh, I don't know how long ago, in a very cramped s.p.a.ce for two whole months with those little fellows who looked like poodles.

Iris does prattle on. I thought I was bad enough, these days, when I can't seem to stop myself gabbling about plans, strategies... all these spontaneous effusions of mine. I can't remember a time when I was more chatty, but Iris takes the biscuit. Last night I had a twenty-minute lecture on how her TARDIS maintains a constant supply of fresh water.

I'd already figured out that she must have connected her tanks to some pocket dimension, but she went on and on about how the tank in the galley takes water from a private, immense reservoir that she's sampled (read 'stolen') from Canada. Iris said she sometimes wants to squeeze herself up through her own kitchen taps, through the rusted pipes, into that pure, watery immensity. All I could think about was the virtual pressure on the pipes, the ma.s.sive, insistent ma.s.s on the back of the bus. I don't think she quite understands the implications of her dabbling with transdimensional, um... things. The interstices are, to her, a matter of household convenience and even fun.

The thing is, the more she talks about things that she's got up to, the places she's been, the people she's met - in whatever dimension (we'll call them that for convenience) - the more I end up thinking these things over in the precious hours I manage to get to myself, I dwell over Iris's stories. Not just the ones that seem oddly similar to my own. She also works at reminding me of the times that we have spent together, all over the place, on the occasions that our hazardous paths have intersected.

These memories do disturb me because, once she has cheerfully triggered them, they are quite definitely there. These things, it seems, really did happen to me. Now I can see them in Technicolor, Cinemascope, with wraparound sound.Yet I would never have recalled them without her gentle conversational sifting and prodding. It makes me wonder how many pockets of memory I habitually repress or ferret away.

(There's an unnerving a.n.a.logy to be made, I suppose, between my own unfathomable past and the chilly Canadian lake banked and br.i.m.m.i.n.g behind Iris's transdimensional waterworks - if that isn't too infelicitous a phrase.) See how insidiously her blithe garrulousness works on me?

One day recently - and I've lost track of time, so don't ask me - we stopped the bus and walked in the woods which have sprung up all around us, spectacularly untamed and lush.'Remember,' she began, and I shuddered, knowing that she was off again on some ghastly reminiscence. That day she was in a purple turban and scarf, with dark gla.s.ses, and her lips were scarlet and prim.'Remember that terrible fight you got into when we visited Gertrude Stein at 27 Rue de Fleurus and Pica.s.so was there and he'd brought Jean Cocteau and you -'

'Iris,' I snapped, 'if this is something you're just making up, I don't want to hear it.'

'Oh, you must remember it. Gertrude's girlfriend, Alice B. Toklas, had been cooking all night and day and she'd laid on a lovely spread.

Gertrude tried to flatter all her painter guests by sitting them around the table, each directly opposite a painting of their own that she had bought.

It was a beautiful room, full of fresh Matisses and Pica.s.sos, all hugger-mugger and lit by rather decadent candelabra. And you picked a fight with Gertrude because of her recent book, in which she claimed to be individually responsible for creating Dada, surrealism, and cubism...'

I frowned.'When was this?'

'About 1935. AfterThe Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was published.'

'In my time, I mean.'

'Oh. Let me think. You had that nice girl with you, Jo. You were in a blue velvet smoking jacket and your hair had turned a shocking white. You cut quite a dash in Paris that autumn. Set tongues wagging on the Left Bank. You claimed to have just come from Spiridon, which was overrun by half-frozen Daleks...'

'Oh yes,' I said and then, suddenly, I could see it all. The thirties had rather suited Jo. She loved meeting the painters and writers of the period and I was glad to show her a place where she wasn't in continuous peril. She expected to despise Pica.s.so, but found herself maddeningly charmed by him.

'You were there,' I said to Iris.'You took Stein's side against me. You said that she had every right to rewrite cultural history and put herself at the centre, if that's what she wanted to do.'

'Exactly,' said Iris smugly.

'And we took the train together. Jo wanted to see Berlin. To catch the Cabaret.'

Iris nodded grimly. 'And we saw them all before they were famous.

Christopher Isherwood when he was living on the Nollendorfstra.s.se, with that terrible floozy who sang and kept trying to get him into bed. And poor Chris was only there in the city for the boys.'

'I've forgotten half the people I've met...' I said.

'How can you forget Isherwood? Auden shuffling about in his dressing gown and slippers? Stein with all her paintings and dogs?'

I shrugged helplessly. 'You tend to forget the quieter moments. I remember the more hair-raising sc.r.a.pes.'

'Sc.r.a.pes.' She shook her head at me. 'You should act your age more.'

'I remember meeting Greta Garbo in California,' I said.

'I don't: 'No, you weren't there, were you?' I smiled. 'It was a picnic in a dusty valley. Isherwood was there, too, with Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. Garbo went up a tree for me. She shinned right up to pick me some figs. She was a funny thing, much more approachable and chatty than she was supposed to be.'

Iris looked piqued by this.'You met Garbo? She climbed up a tree for you?'

'You're so easily impressed, Iris,' I laughed. 'Such a name-dropper.

People are just people.'

'Yes,but... Garbo!'

'I told her I'd met the real Queen Christina in a previous life. I said she had caught something of Christina's true essence when she played her in that ridiculous, camp film.'

'You show-off.What did Garbo say? Did she think you were bananas?'

'She threw back her head and laughed at me. That sweet chuckle of hers. But she believed every word of it.'

Iris tutted and glowered at me.

That night we drove deeper into the Forest of Kestheven.

We were keeping our eyes peeled for the golden bears.

When they came to the river it was about twenty feet across. It was powerful, though, coursing thickly through the carved walls of the tunnel.

The noise was deafening as Sam and Gila stood on the wet bank and watched thick dark ropes of water churn swiftly past. "There could be anything in there,' Sam said.

Gila could hardly restrain his pleasure at the sight.

He leapt in without a word, and didn't emerge for some time. Sam sat down to wait.

When he returned he clambered exhausted on to the bank.'It's thick with life,' he said, eyes gleaming. 'Nothing very familiar. It goes very deep, too - a dark seam right into the earth.'

'Marvellous.'

'And it seems the only way to go. We have to travel down the river.'

'I can't swim that, Gila.' The water would exhaust her in minutes, she thought. She hated to admit it to him, but Sam had learned to respect her limitations. It didn't do to just throw herself in at the deep end every time.

'We need a boat,' said Gila. 'A raft of some kind.'

So they set to work on the dead albino plants around the bank. The wood was white and brittle and snapped free quite easily. Sam foraged and brought back load after load, wearing herself out as she lugged back trunks much taller than herself. Gila worked busily, contentedly, constructing their raft. He was very skilled and chuntered on about his childhood and learning the ways of the swamps. By raft had been the only way to explore his earliest, benighted landscape. He soaked vines and tied the trunks, pulling them tight and leaving them to dry, sometimes hastening the process with a belch of lightly roasting flame.

'Build us a fire, would you?' said Sam. "This is going to take all night.'

'Night?' Gila asked.'You mean you have some idea of what time it is?'

This brought her up short.'No, I haven't.'

They kept going till the craft was finished and it sat there, looking flimsy and unimpressive on the black sh.o.r.e.

"This is what I'm trusting my life to?'

'I'm afraid so.' Gila shrugged. 'We'll be all right.'

Then they slept beside it, to replenish their strength before the off. Sam woke, hours later, to see Gila stripping two thinnish poles of their bark and leaves. He explained they would have one each, to guide the craft, punting themselves off the low, dripping ceiling of the tunnel. Sam hauled herself to her feet and thought miserably of driving the bus, and how she had loved that endless, easy road opening up before her.

Chapter Seventeen.

Telling Tales