'I want a go at "What if?",' said Iris suddenly, and rounded on the Doctor.

'I want to know what if, I mean, what happens if it was in fact you who defeated the Dalek invasion of Earth? What if you opened the Cyber Tombs on Telos? What if you were the one who was there when the Great Fire of London broke out? What if that was all you, and not me?

What does that do to my timeline? Does that cancel me out?'

'But I did! It should!' cried the Doctor. 'All of those things were me.' He frowned.'I think.' Then he waved his arms.'Anyway, do shut up, Iris. This whole thing is enough like being stuck in some ghastly Zen parable without your making it even worse.'

Iris smiled sweetly at the perplexed Mock Turtle. "The poor Doctor is simply overcome with existential angst.'

The Turtle shook his head.'He's all tangled up in himself, this one,' he said sadly.'Perhaps he should have all his hair cut off.'

'No!' the Doctor snapped. 'Look, what if we built a large fire out of driftwood or something, and made the fish sneeze us out?'

'Never works,' said the Turtle.'He never sneezes.'

The Doctor sat down heavily.'Are we even moving?'

'Oh, yes.'

'How can you tell?'

'I'm in constant contact with the fish. My low-level telepathic capabilities are chattering away to him, reminding him we are here.'

'Remind him not to digest us,' Iris shuddered.

Tell him we want to be let out,' the Doctor demanded. 'Go on, tell him!'

They were locked into a cabin with washing lines stretched taut across it.

Laundry hung dripping and spilling puddles of water on the dirty floor.

The air was rank and steamy, and was almost unbearably muggy to breathe. It seemed, however, to cheer Gila, who inhaled more easily in the swampy atmosphere.

They sat and waited. They checked Major Angela's wound, and it didn't seem too bad, so long as she got it looked at properly in the next few hours.

They sat quietly to wait. The crew left them alone. They sat without saying much to each other.

Eventually the Bearded Lady tried to pick a fight. She was bored and pained and crotchety.'Anyway, we're better with the Doctor and Iris out of the picture. They were a hindrance. That Iris was the worst. Meddling old fool. Where did you pick up that old fossil?'

Gila hissed and managed to shut her up, and then a.s.suage Sam.'We'd have been dead long ago if it hadn't been for those two.' Sam let the argument go by. She was thinking about the Doctor. Thinking about first wandering into his Ship. About their first months travelling together, how breathless and hair-raising it had all been. Their time of separation. Their reunion. How it was different now, but still as good, if not better, that she was grown up. And now him gone. She couldn't imagine being without him.

Gila was pacing the grimy confines of their cell.

'What I want to know,' he said to Angela at last,'is how you came to have the first Empress in your possession anyway.'

She raised her eyebrows and looked smugly inscrutable at this.

From somewhere they could hear engines powering up, as if in preparation to put some speed on. Obviously theKristeva was about to go dashing back to Hyspero, full steam ahead, for a private audience with the reigning monarch, the Captain's mother.

Gila beat the walls in frustration. If only he could somehow get to radio ahead, he could have his own brigands and ne'er-do-wells waiting at the docks. He could engineer a rescue of sorts. He set to work unpicking the impressive array of antiquated locks that held them prisoner. It looked like a hopeless task.

The idea of being once more outside of time had hit the Doctor where it did him most damage. He had set about waxing philosophical. Iris ground her teeth.

He was giving an account of himself. 'My job is rather like a doctor in a hospital, or a novelist's... in that I try to keep people alive.' The Mock Turtle nodded, encouraging him.'Everything we get ourselves involved in is a plot. A messy one, of course, not like a plot in a book. Most books are tidy. They belong to types and kinds and genres, and we know the rules for those genres. Cowboys or romance or horror. There is a clear line they have to follow. But watch out if you get caught in one of those plots! That kind of plot wants to kill off all your characters. Or flatten them into mere... functions.'

'Yeah, yeah,' muttered his.

'My job,' he said,'is to keep us all out of the trap of genre-death. The interesting parts of any story, or any life, to me, are the parts where life just goes on. It's just to the sides of the big adventure. The bits that overstep the boundaries of convention.' He seemed pleased with that.

'Your life!' laughed Iris. 'Your life is all genre! Who else do you know who meets up - on a daily basis - with vampires, soldiers, murderers and robots who want to take over the world?'

'Ah,' he tapped his nose. 'But my sense of genre and the right way of doing things is utterly skewed. I've never played these stories straight.

My adventures - if we are to call them that, and I suppose it is the correct word - are a kind of bricolage. A large and teeming compendium of all sorts of alternatives.' With a flourish he produced theAja'ib from deep inside his coat pocket. Its cracked leather binding glowed in the vague and unreliable light. 'Wouldn't you hate to have a straightforward life?' he asked. 'Wouldn't you hate to be plotted out neatly? What would you think of a generic life?'

'I wouldn't mind,' said his stiffly. Tt mightn't be as hectic.'

'If we had a bottle of something,' said the Doctor, 'we might have a toast.

To the picaresque life.'

'Doctor,' said the Turtle.'What is that remarkable book you have there?'

The Doctor drummed a contented tattoo on the hard binding. 'Just another picaresque novel. I picked it up in a bazaar in Hyspero when we arrived. Back whenever that was.'

'Weeks ago,' muttered Iris.

'It isn't by any chance theAja'ib , is it?'

The Doctor smiled. "That's exactly what it is.'

'Ah,' said the Turtle.

'What's your problem?' snapped his. The Turtle had got on her nerves.

Here she was, alone with the Doctor while he was in a relatively good mood for once, and they had this creature for a gooseberry.

'I think you may have in your hands the single most effective weapon against the Scarlet Empress, or at least a bargaining tool. She wants that book, Doctor. She'll do anything to have it.'

And then, abruptly, utterly without warning, the fish stopped swimming.

They were flung to the fleshly ground as it decided to beach itself on dry land. As its colossal mouth opened its innards were flooded with fresh daylight, which took some moments to reach into their hidden, pulsing chamber.

They lay on the moist stomach lining. The Doctor pocketed the Aja'ib once more.'Did you tell the fish to let us go?' he asked the turtle. The light was oddly blue. A slight, ruffling breeze was showing them the way to clamber back out. It would be a tight squeeze.

The Turtle shrugged.

'Come on, his,' said the Doctor. 'I'll squash out first. Mind his teeth when you get to them. I think this is our stop.'

Grimly she followed the pair of them, through the rumbling, quivering gullet of the fish.

Gila couldn't free them from their cell. Sam couldn't help thinking that the Doctor would have got them out in a flash. His sudden demise had done a power of good for her retrospective appreciation of his abilities.

Angela suddenly said.'Do you really want to know how I started all of this?' Gila slid down the wall and sat, glaring at her. 'Do you want to know how I got you all into this?'

Sam nodded. She wondered if the Bearded Lady had lost her marbles, being wounded and all. But as she started to talk, Major Angela's voice was full of clarity and she was lucid enough, even if her tale was bizarre.

As Angela talked, theKristeva was doing something very odd indeed.

They could barely feel the impact of it in their cell, deep within. The ship was lifting right out of the ocean. The engines thundered, turbines whined and the ship blazed with power as it sailed straight up into the night. Bits dropped off, but no one noticed, because the crew were in celebratory mood. They knew that their success that day would put Julia back into favour with her mother, the Empress. It was an opulently dressed crew that celebrated on deck with their Captain that night, one a.s.sured of a warm greeting when they returned, quite soon, to the Scarlet Palace. They caroused and drank as the great ship swept up, over the clouds, and headed back towards home.

The fish had gone.

Once they were spat on to the sands of this paradisal island, the fish slid backwards into the sea, and left them to it. They were stranded. But they were pleased - whatever the Turtle said - to see the back of the monstrous fish.

They turned their attention back to the island, with no idea about what they ought to do now.

'She'll get her own way now, the Empress,' fretted Iris. 'We've lost. And this is it. And I'll just die, alone, here, on an empty island.' She was seething.

The Doctor tried to calm her down, by building around her a little camp.

In any other circ.u.mstances, Iris might have thought this a rather good set-up. The Doctor catering to her every whim. A tropical island and so on. Not for the first time in her extraordinarily long life, Iris reflected that it wasn't always marvellous when you got what you'dalways wanted.

The Doctor constructed for her a bower of rubbery leaves. She watched him work. Next thing she knew it was night-time, and the unfamiliar stars were quite stunning. The Doctor was mixing up potent c.o.c.ktails, somehow, in coconut sh.e.l.ls. They foamed over light medicine.

The three of them sipped quietly, locked in private thoughts.

Then the Mock Turtle said, 'Perhaps I should tell you what this is all about.'

'Hmm?' asked the Doctor.

'I shall tell you how, in the first place, the Bearded Lady came to steal the Eldest Empress, Ca.s.sandra.'

And so he started to tell them just as, at exactly the same time, only hundreds of airborne leagues away, Major Angela was telling her own side of the tale.

Chapter Twenty-Seven.

The Bearded Lady's Tale

She had always been obsessed with how everything began and why.

Years before, Angela had been a real Major, with her own ship and crew. Sallying forth, boldly going, making first contacts, and generally stirring up the usual raft of interstellar ructions. Other crews would have to follow along behind her, bearing gifts and amba.s.sadors and peace treaties. She plunged and plundered ever deeper into unknown s.p.a.ce.

This career ended with a sh.o.r.e leave on the planet of Hyspero, where her ninety-nine-strong crew were all mysteriously killed by a changeling creature who also blew up her ship. Major Angela was trapped. She had led all her fellows into disaster. But then she found a new purpose, having heard from an offworld trader that Hyspero was a place with an alibi. Its famed Scarlet Empress knew all the answers - the answers to the questions about how it all began and why.

Angela disguised herself as a freelance troubleshooter and got together with Gila, the Alligator Man, whom she met in one of the capital city's less salubrious drinking holes. Soon she got herself involved in adventures, during which she met the Mock Turtle, and eventually the d.u.c.h.ess, in that episode with the vizier and his ship stocked with hearts and other vital organs. Before she knew it, the Bearded Lady was a famous citizen and heroine of Hyspero.

The four of them together took commissions from the Empress herself.

They even met her, in the gold and crimson stateroom, where one wasn't allowed to speak above a whisper, for fear of shattering the monarch's precious gla.s.s or her sensitive eardrums. They said she herself was composed of organs of molten gla.s.s.

The four of them together - adventuresome genetic freaks as they were, complementing each other's strengths - escorted alien envoys and dignitaries, looted their ships for goods and information while their backs were turned, neatly a.s.sa.s.sinated rivals to the Empress and even once set alight a Dalek scout ship, which had touched down, on a recce, in the desert, far from home.

The Scarlet Empress had been pleased with her four pet warriors. Her instructions often came via the Scarlet Guard and fairly frequently. It was very rare that they were admitted to her tender, near-silent presence.

The Mock Turtle had nightmares for years about seeing her again.

Their final mission came when the Empress decided she wanted her own daughter and her motley crew aboard the Kristeva killed. The four were summoned secretly to the palace and calmly informed of this. It was quite a big job. They fought between themselves over whether they should take it on. Gila was all in favour, the d.u.c.h.ess indifferent, and the other two were plainly scandalised by the Empress's plan. This commission of the Empress was the beginning of the tensions that pulled their successful team apart.

While they quarrelled over the ethics of this, they were treated to the hospitality of the Scarlet Empress, each a.s.signed an apartment in the palace's turrets.

The Bearded Lady did not want to waste this opportunity.

'What did you do?' asked Sam.

A pause.

Gila said impatiently, Tell her, Angela.'

Angela looked shifty and discomfited, and coughed in the steamy, fetid atmosphere of the cabin before going on with her tale.

In the throne room: three doors. She felt around the perimeter of the room and located them. How desperate, how raging with curiosity she must have been, to stumble blindly into the monarch's most secretive chambers. And how brave.

Angela wanted to open every door and find out what was in them. She wanted the dirtiest of the Empress's secrets. She wanted the most exalted of secrets, too.

And she found - without even being able to see them - the three rooms behind the doors. The circular, drum-like room where the Empress went when she wanted to look over her tame, mechanised dummies. They were still in their opulent dresses, primed and ready to dance for their mistress. She found the room that smelled of cured leather, and she knew it was filled with the dried and hanged skins of her dead guards.

She could imagine their exquisite pain, and their pinks and blues, as they draped the walls like mere garments.