And I rather think I'll have to be there, eventually, to dig you out again.'

She smiled and, by mutual, unspoken consent, they decided to leave it at that. As the coffee started to bubble and hiss the bus's speakers crackled into life and Abba came on.

'Someone come and talk to me!' Sam yelled down the aisle. She turned in surprise as Gila slipped into the chair beside her, and started to tell her about the good old days, when his mutant vigilante squad rode the highways, sailed the seas, and had adventures that she could only ever dream about.

The Doctor strolled down the aisle and sat thoughtfully on a seat at the front. As Gila's story came to an end, the Doctor said, quite out of the blue, though no one had asked him,'Oh, I'm sure he's fine out there in the desert. I don't suppose his Empress would let a fine precious pelt like his go to waste.'

Sam gave him an odd look, wondering who he was justifying himself to.

Sometimes he seemed to have to do this.

Sam is having a go on the camcorder. She corners Gila in the kitchen, where he is searching through the tiny fridge.

Sam tells him,'Your eyes are flicking about all over the place.'

'I'm starving. Looking for something to eat.'

'You look all intent. Tell me what you're thinking.'

'I'm not thinking about anything.'

'n.o.body doesn't think about anything.'

'What?'

'I mean, n.o.body thinks nothing.'

'Well,'he sighs, closing the fridge,'I do.'

'Is that usual, though? I wish I could empty my mind of all thoughts.

Have you asked anyone if they're like you?'

'No.'

'Don't you wonder?'

'No, I don't. Have you asked anyone if they can clear their minds?'

'No. But I'm asking you now.'

'Well, I can. Lucky me.'

That night, once they had a.s.sembled blankets and the rough makings of a camp in a hollow of sand by the roadside, Iris started to regale them with more of what she knew about the Gla.s.s Sultan. Another cool blue fire caught them in its lambent spell, and they fell to listening to the old woman's warm, quite hypnotic tones.

'Do you know how she gets her seers?'

'I've heard the stories,' said Gila. 'Vague rumours. She has a room full of them, doesn't she? She keeps them locked up, all of them prophesying the future?'

'The Scarlet Empress has a mania for knowing the future,' said Iris.

'Which is why she keeps coming after me, I think. She is horrendousty paranoid that one day someone will come and depose her and put an end to her cruel exploits and her languorous, malign rule. So she seeks out these people who have the sight, who have a particular, bright blue cast to their eyes...' Here Iris stared across the fire into the Doctor's eyes. 'And she imprisons them. She pops them in a cauldron of oil, of some sweet, prepared, corrosive oil, and here they stay for forty days, drugged out of their skulls. All their flesh dissolves and drops away, their organs melt into the oil and their poor, astonished heads are left, perched atop a calcified skeleton. When the whole series of rituals enacted around them is over, these heads are snapped off at the first vertebra. The head is placed in a room with the other seer heads she has cultivated over the years, a circular room. And there it is set to work, to flatter and cosset her with consoling tales of the future. And also to bring dire warnings.'

Sam gulped. 'That's disgusting.' She stirred at the remains of her dinner.

The cooling coils and spirals of onion in a vegetable-based sauce.

'The families of these seers are honoured. But they don't know what goes on. All they hear is that their loved ones are living in the lap of luxury, serving the Empress with their rare gifts.'

They sat for a while, thinking about this.

'No one can see the future,' said Gila at last. 'It's with barbaric practices like that that the Empress keeps this world, and her city, enslaved - by pretending that we're all in some dark age, full of mysticism and magic.

Here, they all believe you can do anything with sorcery, with spices and potions and evil intent. It is a determinedly backward world.'

The Doctor said softly, 'Hyspero, the city and the world, are a law unto themselves. You shouldn't be too dismissive of the dark powers that certain people here have harnessed, Gila.'

'Come off it, Doctor,' said Sam.'You're not going to say you believe in magic and sorcery, are you? You of all people.'

'The proof is generally in the pudding, Sam,' he said. 'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It means that once upon a time I thought rationality was everything. That you could understand everything if you pushed at it with enough clear-headed logic and refused to give in to superst.i.tion. I thought it was all claptrap. But these days...' He sighed.'l would describe myself as an ethnomethodologist. It's still science. But it's about setting yourself within the parameters of the society you are visiting. Thinking from their point of view. Looking at their consolatory myths and ideas from within. I'm not so quick to dismiss the arcane, the apparently magical. Look at vampires, Sam. You must have grown up with an idea of vampires existing only in horror stories, in vague, musty legends. But you met them; they're real. They exist within their own terms. They are both as fabulous and ordinary as you are.'

Sam didn't know whether to feel flattered or not.

'Some kind of sorceries appear to work here on Hyspero,' the Doctor continued, lying back. 'And they conform to a system of belief and science about which I know very little. Even to me they seem magical.

When we're tourists like we are, we just have to entertain and respect the bizarre logic of each new experience as we get to it.'

'It's a h.e.l.l of a world,' said Iris. 'IVe had a few peculiar run-ins here.'

'So you think the Scarlet Empress really can tell the future?' Sam asked the Doctor. 'By asking her roomful of mummified heads?'

'Who's to say?' he said airily, infuriatingly.

'If she hears anything from their heads it must be her own delusions,'

said Gila.'It's all inher head. She makes it up.'

'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'But isn't it in the nature of tyrants to impose their wills, their imaginations, their versions of the world on everyone else?

We all do that to lesser or greater degrees.'

Sam started to feel uncomfortable. 'You make me feel like there's no real world at all. Just a big ma.s.s of shared delusions.' He gave her a twinkling smile. 'But that's impossible!' she protested. 'Real things happen, you can get hurt, Gila broke that tattooed man's wrist. A couple of days ago you sprained your ankle!'

'Of course we feel things,' said the Doctor. "The world impinges upon us.

But our imaginations have to collude with that world to make it happen.

It's all rather sticky.' Then he said something that surprised them. 'I feel like I've got my own chamber of disembodied heads, pa.s.sing out counsel, warnings and reminiscences. I've an interior set of seers: the seven previous me's, all stuck on spikes, all gossiping and telling me what to do. Now, are you going to say that's any different from the delusions of the Scarlet Empress? I can't afford not to listen to the intermittent, whispered comments of my other selves. I don't suppose the Queen of Jam can, either.'

Sam thought about this. She was sleepy. Somehow she knew she would end up dreaming tonight about severed heads and how they could be made to speak. The Doctor had unsettled her, talking like this about himself. Typical. He can't tell you anything nice about himself.

Sometimes she dreaded this usually hidden, darker side to his nature.

'Have you ever met your other selves, Doctor?' asked Iris.

He spluttered, and lied, as if she had asked him something rather shameful.'Of course not... That, um, contravenes the First Law of...' The old woman was grinning at him.'Well,' he said.'Once or twice. Only by sheer accident, and then a number of hideous catastrophes that necessitated our being brought into the same timestream as each other.'

Iris said. 'It happened to me. Seven of me were taken to the Death Zone on Gallifrey. Someone had reactivated the Games they used to play there. Each of my selves, present, past and future, was given a relevant companion and playmate, and we were forced to battle our separate, and then collective ways, past Ice Warriors, Ogrons, Sea Devils, Zarbi, Mechanoids and Quarks, to get to the Dark Tower. Good job we only got rubbishy monsters to battle, eh?' The Doctor was staring at her. 'It was that devil Morbius behind it all. The rogue was after Ra.s.silon's gift of immortality.' Iris chuckled at the Doctor's face. 'You're not the only one who gets to have terribly glamorous adventures, you know.'

After this, they started to go off to their sleeping bags. As Sam went off to use the bizarre, effective, but somehow unsatisfying sonic shower on the top deck of the bus, the Doctor muttered something to her, along the lines of Iris being such a show-off and name-dropper. She simply smiled at him but, as she washed and pulled on some exquisite yellow silk pyjamas Iris had produced for her, she felt a jab of sorrow for the Doctor.

He was having his thunder stolen somewhat. Tomorrow he was driving them, however, and maybe that would make him feel more in control.

Sam went back downstairs, and into the night, to sleep under the stars, and dream about bodyless seers, foretelling disaster.

Chapter Eight.

Any Vigilante's Life

As the days go on and establish their easy patterns, the mountains have come into view, savage and green, still days away from us. But we all know that soon we will be climbing. Only I know what to expect when we leave the desert and reach the ranges. Possibly Iris does too, since she claims to have explored these lands. She shows few signs of trepidation.

I think the old woman is full of false bravado. If anyone had gone through the rigours she says she has endured, they would be dead.

The Doctor and Sam have become careless and relaxed of late. We have had curious, concentrated days of travelling the plains. The Doctor points out birds and creatures to us, impressing us with his erudition. Yet you can see his mind is on other things. It seems that nothing escapes his attention. Sometimes I feel I ought to warn them of what is to come, in the mountains and beyond, but I cannot. Something stops me. The Doctor is so infuriatingly confident.

So we have these easy days, of replacing each other in the driving seat of the bus, this tireless vehicle that never seems to need fuel. Ms claims that it is powered by a vital green and pink, everlasting crystal, somewhere underneath the dashboard. It is certainly a remarkable vehicle.

We drive, we eat, we drink and we talk. No end of talking on this trip.

Sam tells us about London, a place so full of lives and preoccupations that it dwarfs even Hyspero. I can't imagine such a place, but the Doctor concurs: he has visited Sam's birthplace on numerous occasions. These recent days the Doctor himself has opened up and found himself talking and explaining about himself. Even to me, at whom he looked so distrustfully at first. The atmosphere about Iris's strange vehicle has worked on us like a charm, cohering us, making us a team. The turning point, I think, came with the capturing and expelling of the tattooed guard of the Scarlet Empress. That proof of her suspicion and enmity bonded us against the Empress, even as we act supposedly on her instructions.

Whenever I think of the Scarlet Empress, I remember the Throne Room, and when we were brought before her, ten years ago. The last time the Four were united. I never wanted to go back there. I think we may have to.

This company is not like the old days. It is not like being in a team like the Four. When we were together then, we didn't talk about ourselves.

How much did we really know about each other? Friendship, companionship never came into it.

Then, our ident.i.ties were secret to the world. We wore our mutant powers as badges, as masks - masks that carry out that paradoxical double function: to conceal our true selves and yet to render us conspicuous. Our essences, it seemed, were always elsewhere, which made the Four strangers to each other, as we were to the rest of the world.

We existed merely to carry out our function, which was to do whatever was demanded by our paymasters of the time. We laid our miraculous services before the highest bidder. And in any fracas, mission, quest or imbroglio, we were never bested.

The other day, when I told Sam about some of our old escapades, she seemed perturbed. 'But did you end up doing things you disagreed with?'

I said that naturally, we did. I said we had to suppress that part of ourselves that entertained moral qualms. If you offer yourself up for sale, then you can't afford to discriminate. At this Sam looked shocked.'So you just did what the person with the most cash asked you?'

I nodded. And, in our small craft, the Coriola.n.u.s , our team flew all over the world of Hyspero, flaunting our wares. And regularly, I said, antic.i.p.ating the girl's next question, we found ourselves fighting for one side of a conflict, and then, the following week, the other.We turned and turned again. Sabotage was our particular forte. In one small war, we ruined one party's weapons, and were then employed to put a stop to the other's. We set about battling our own shadows.

'That's madness,' said Sam.

'It was our life for years,' I told her. 'It's any vigilante's life. You don't stop to take breath or to grow soft on existential angst. And we became very rich.'

The way she looked at me I could tell she thought she had never met anyone more corrupt. The conversation ended there. I was driving at the time, and she went very quiet. She was disgusted with me and, truth be told, if she knew some of the things we were paid to accomplish, I don't suppose she would talk to me again. Now she thinks of me as vicious and amoral and yet... if I was those things, I would never have been strong enough to disband the Four when I did, citing exactly the kind of ethical problems Sam had tried to articulate. It wasn't that I had been without moral sense - I had merely repressed it, brutally, for many years.

So at the height of our wealth and the peak of our performance, I disbanded our team and told the others that we must spread far and wide. And the four of us should never meet again.

Until now, that is. This particular mission. Something is going on. Iris is in the thick of it. And I want in.

That night, when I appeared to disgust Sam with talk of my past, I pulled the bus to a halt and went off for a walk deep into the surrounding countryside. We were in a zone in which plant life was trying to reestablish itself.A primitive, stunted region. These were the foothills before the mountains; you could feel the land beginning to rise. Streams and lakes must be here, somewhere. I followed their scent, needing water. This hide of mine was cracked with heat and I required those few hours apart to submerge myself in dark, dank water.

I returned, replenished, glistening, to find the others sitting by the roadside, waiting for me.

'We thought you'd abandoned us,' said the Doctor, raising an eyebrow.

'He wouldn't, though,' Sam said, unexpectedly.

I found myself being sarcastic, as I often do. 'You think I'm still after Iris's riches.'

'No,' Sam told me.'I think you're loyal to your old friends, if not to us. I think you're less greedy and ruthless than you like to appear.'

She was just trying to be nice to me. To get me back into their company.

They know they need my help. We had the most pleasant evening of the week, then. Sam picked vegetables while I caught rabbits in the dusty gra.s.s nearby and we roasted them on a spit.

I dreamed that night of my home and my parents. It was the first time in many years I had ever thought back. The late-night conversation had been of origins. Sam had described a father and a mother who didn't understand who she really was. Iris talked vaguely of growing up in a matriarchy, among women much older than herself, her Aunts, she called them. They lived in a great house among the mountains of her world. Her mother had vanished when Iris was quite small, into the dawn with a man who was a great deal older, an offworlder. Iris spoke of her Aunts' deaths, one after another, and how she set forth alone for the great city, celebrated across her world. She was going to demand to learn their way of life, to become part of their world. They had great learning - a marvellous civilisation. It was her most perilous journey, she said - her first. And, at the end of it, she discovered a race of charlatans, quivering old men who knew all the secrets of the cosmos, it seemed, but preferred to spend their time in eternal, futile politicking, and the thankless task of scrutinising, cataloguing, all of known creation. And, even though their president was a woman, their ranks closed in front of a woman like Iris. And here Iris's tale stopped, for now, at least.

The Doctor looked sour, and I realised that the two of them must share a homework!. He was silent on the subject of his upbringing. Except for this: he asked Iris,'And They have never bothered you since?'

She shrugged disarmingty. 'I'm surprised you've never asked before, Doctor. But, no. I doubt that They even know I exist. I found my TARDIS, wounded, abandoned, in the wilderness. They didn't even miss it.'

The Doctor looked gloomy.'You should be grateful they never let you in.You've enjoyed amazing freedom.'

She pulled a face.'I suppose so.'