The Coming of the Teraphiles

  supply. Certainly, he was pretty sure he had been smelling

  wonderful roses since he had come aboard. The awful fate of

  Pangloss was no longer the main topic of conversation.

  Bingo and Hari were not the only bachelors looking

  forward to the joys of matrimony. Even W.G. Grace had

  trimmed her magnificent chin topiary and was eyeing a tall

  and handsome running fielder, David Saint Roberts, who

  had paid her the compliment of saying she was probably the

  greatest all-rounder since Myfanwy Bannarji, the legendary

  Whistling Whacker of Haverford West, an obscure planet

  in the Murgatroyd system, since carried off by a powerful

  pumper and sold for scrap.

  Elsewhere the lads of both teams were all taking advantage

  of Gargantua' s many entertainments and were getting along

  famously. The rival teams were on excellent terms and the

  many other passengers, most of whom were travelling to

  attend the Terraphile Renaissance Re-Enactments, were in

  various states of happy anticipation. Only one Panglossian

  remained awake after a week in space. The others had elected

  for a light cryosleep. The Gargantua was a happy ship again.

  If space liners could smile, whistle and snap cheerful fingers

  then there was no doubt that the massive ship would soon

  be doing the hoochie coochie as she slipped magnificently

  through the star lanes.

  The Doctor, although frequently turning his thoughts

  to the various mysteries engaging him, was determined to

  enjoy himself while he could. He discovered that he had

  an aptitude for nutcracking that would almost certainly

  advance his team's chances in the coming games. His archery

  skills had been honed and he was presently concentrating on

  the subtleties of jousting. The joust was perhaps the hardest

  aspect of Tournamenting because it involved the 'iron mule',

  an extremely hard seat and a two-stroke 'Wasp' engine which

  was inclined to spray hot oil whenever it got overexcited. He

  made the most of all these pastimes in the sure knowledge

  that, the nearer they came to Miggea, the tougher things

  were going to get.

  Even Mr and Mrs Banning-Cannon were enjoying the

  trip. The tycoon had found a bar where he could hobnob

  with fellow captains of industry, and Mrs B-C had found the

  ship's milliner, whom she considered something more than

  a mere Diana-in-waiting. She felt a little as Prince Lobkowicz

  must have felt when he realised he had become Beethoven's

  patron. She was undoubtedly a patron to Genius. Mr Toni

  Woni had a splendid way with hats. He was a natural. Not

  only had he completely recreated and indeed improved her

  stolen and recovered chapeau, he had made her several new

  hats which, he was forced to admit to himself, were his finest

  creations.

  This was not surprising. Just as Leonardo needed his Medicis

  and Borgias, so had Toni been awaiting his own particular

  muse and patron. Together they talked brims, crowns, veils,

  buttons, bows and bands and every evening Toni retired

  to his studio to work. Never thoroughly appreciated until

  now, he flourished. Where he had been admired, now he

  was worshipped. And so he bloomed. Felt, lace and feathers

  came to fresh life at his touch. The spirit of his household

  goddess, Donna Coco Colombino, imbued him with fresh

  inspiration every morning as he woke to accept his breakfast

  tray. Mrs Banning-Cannon was inexhaustible on the subject

  of boaters, fedoras, pork pies and bowlers. Toni had but to name an obscure hatter of history to find she knew all about them,

  including Dr Lock St James, inventor of the Piccadilly topee

  and Fly-in-Squatt, the infamous Mad Hatter of Fleet Street

  who had designed the gruesome de-cap-i-tator.

  The great matriarch felt she had at last discovered a true

  fellow spirit. And, what was more, she was a very generous

  fellow spirit, her coffers apparently unlimited, her mighty

  head always ready to accept fresh decor. If she were not a

  natural, capable of carrying the most elaborate summer

  gainsborough to the simplest formal pillbox, she would have been in danger of becoming something of a butt of the other

  women's disdain; but there was no getting away from it, she

  was a woman who could wear a hat in a world where that

  art had come dangerously close to being forgotten. When

  she appeared at a friendly between the Gentlemen and the

  Tourists, her inventive Colonel Jack tricorne became the centre

  of attention, at least until the match started, and there was

  scarcely a dowager or a debutante who did not yearn to learn

  the great lady's way with a mop or a tiara.

  Well aware of this, Enola Banning-Cannon was content.

  All previous upsets and disappointments were forgotten.

  She was setting the tone. She was leading the pack. She was

  establishing her milliner not merely as Diana's equal but as

  her superior. There was scarcely a woman aboard who was

  not a trendsetter in her own circle and acknowledged Mrs

  B-C as mistress of mistresses. Mr Toni Woni had it, as his

  chief trimmer reminded him almost daily, well and truly

  made.

  If a ship could radiate peace, love and happiness, then the

  Gargantua was pumping the stuff out into the near-vacuum

  and covering every passing planet with joy, leaving the

  suns and the moons singing 'I'm aitch ay pee pee wy' at full

  volume. So immensely H-A-P-P-Y was that enormous liner

  that she might have had the whole galaxy yodelling and

  tap-dancing by the termination of her cruise, had she been

  permitted by Fate. But Fate, who never misses the chance to

  slip a bluebottle into the Vaseline, had other plans.

  Out near the Sagittarius Schwarzschild Radius, a storm

  was brewing, created by forces which had always been

  there but were now growing increasingly less stable as they

  shifted in and out of their own space-time continua, making

  a very dangerous place in which to know perfect bliss. Even

  the captain, a Polynuraied and therefore naturally given

  to anticipating the darkest and most unlikely dangers,

  was whistling as he checked his autopilots and supervised

  his incredibly intelligent and well-programmed bots. He

  repeated jokes told him at his table the previous evening

  (they were rather lost on the bots) and made remarks such

  as 'It's going to be a very pretty evening' when his second

  officer, Mr TrYr'r an insectoid Bruzh of an equally gloomy

  disposition, sat down with him to enjoy their afternoon tea.

  Designed, as her architect had put it, to 'calm and relax the

  customer at every turn', the Gargantua was pulling out all

  the stops as far as helping her passengers forget the shadows

  lying in her wake.

  It would be an exaggeration to describe that gorgeous

  liner as 'doomed' but it is fair to say that, within the next

  few thousand par sees, she was going to find herself in some

  pretty thick and steaming soup.

  It began to dawn on the Doctor that he was und
er the

  influence of the Gargantua's reassuring spell when, settling

  back into the comfort of his specially programmed armchair

  and sipping a cooling drink, he sighed contentedly and said:

  'Well, I have to say it looks as if the worst could be behind

  us.'

  Hearing himself speak, he knew he should have at the

  very least crossed his fingers.

  Awakened by the alarms from the control room, Captain

  Snarri bundled out of bed, hastily climbed into his uniform

  and hurried at once to where the bots were processing the

  information.

  Mr TYrYr was already there, spraying his facetted eyes

  with pep fizz.

  'Show the captain what's up, lads.'

  The bots indicated the screens they had materialised for

  him. 'Storms ahead, sir. Moving into all quadrants.'

  Captain Snarri coughed and accepted the Vortex Water

  his steward, the twin-headed Lio Jir Kahpeth, offered him.

  He and Mr Tr'r'r'r were both used to storms and invariably

  found the means of taking the ship around them. The first

  rule on a G-class M&S was never to disturb the passengers.

  Captain Snarri noted some peculiar fluctuations in his

  bank of barometers, designed to register the slightest changes

  in the weather and anticipate their likely effect on the areas of

  space through which they intended to pass. This was unusual.

  They were surrounded by the storm. There was no avenue

  open to them. They were going to have to go through.

  With a deep sigh he had the bots plot the best course.

  Except there was no best course. The storm was fierce

  and implacable, streaming from the direction they planned

  to take. The spattering of galaxies was obscured by what

  might have been heaving waves of black smoke. That smoke

  was already coiling around the forward hull, clinging to the

  complicated filigree, spreading across the observation ports.

  In a moment the Doctor arrived, pulling on his jacket.

  'Oops,' he said, craning forward. 'I think I've seen this before.'

  He drew closer. 'In fact, I know I've seen it before.'

  This was the same phenomenon he had spotted from the

  bridge of the water tanker when they were much closer to

  the Rim than they were now. He had an unhappy feeling that

  things were getting worse.

  'So what do we do, Doctor?' The captain was used to

  moving through some of the worst fluctuations the void could

  offer. He took another pull on his Vortex Water. Although he

  commanded a luxury liner, he had a great deal of experience

  and knew how to remain cool through any circumstances in

  which he found himself. The rest of his staff were arriving

  now. He indicated the information which was now coming

  in rapidly. 'Any point in warning the passengers?'

  'I think there is.' The Doctor fingered his chin. 'They need

  to know. It could get a bit rough.'

  The ship was falling into a well of darkness, flying entirely

  by her instruments. All that could be seen of the outside was

  the occasional flash of light as the blackness sagged open to

  reveal clusters of stars, miniature galaxies pouring ahead of

  them so that the Doctor realised for the first time that they

  were not being drawn into the gravitational systems but were

  being forced through them. Something was pushing them

  back away from their destination. Not pulling them down

  towards the black hole at the centre of their galaxy, as he had

  thought, but drawing them out to the Rim, to the unknown

  regions of intergalactic space. How could that be?

  Pulling on her big red sweater, Amy entered the now dark

  control room. 'I thought everything was all right?'

  There came a shuddering blow to the hull. Another.

  And another.

  It felt as if a giant dampened hammer were repeatedly

  striking the ship. The captain cleared his throat and spoke

  calmly to the passengers via the internal V.

  'Sorry you're being disturbed, folks. Just a spot of

  turbulence. We expect to be through it very soon now.'

  The ship's alarm systems began to scream as the Gargantua

  was tossed up and down, turning from side to side. Amy

  grasped the Doctor as the nearest thing she could cling to.

  'This is like the last time. Only worse. I thought you said this

  ship was unsinkable - or whatever a spaceship is. Not like

  the Titanic, I hope. Oh God - what is that stink?'

  The smell of candyfloss, cloyingly sweet and chemically

  flavoured, came and went and now something pale blue

  fading to a paler green was filling up the control room like

  foam. Surprisingly she could still breathe, but she could no

  longer see the Doctor.

  She was in her police uniform, running for the TARDIS.

  She was in the high-street beauty parlour wondering how

  to tell them she didn't like their cut. She was in the TARDIS,

  reading an Agatha Christie. She was getting ready to go to

  sleep. She was running across a limestone pavement in the

  Yorkshire Dales and there was a pack of woad-painted Iceni

  coming after her. When had this happened? She couldn't

  remember. Now she was sitting at a desk, writing. Now she

  was outside the spaceship, this spaceship, the Gargantua.

  The plumber was lecturing her on the proper maintenance

  of her hot-water heater and she was a creature of air and

  darkness slipping somehow through a gap in the hull which

  only she could see or use. She was big. An undine as big as

  the universe and able to see galaxy after galaxy after galaxy

  all streaming towards an invisible source of gravity. A super-

  massive, infinitely tiny presence, smaller and heavier than

  any black hole at the centre of any single galaxy. She realised

  this presence was the nucleus and everything else was moving

  according to its extraordinary density, its immeasurable

  gravity. And suddenly she was heavy, too, watching as she

  spun clusters of galaxies in her gigantic hands, blew out the

  flames and the heat of suns, made chains of white dwarf stars

  and played bowls with quasars until she sat under a tree in a

  park, perhaps in Africa, as lazy lions licked their chops and

  moved their heads to show they were ignoring her.

  She was a soldier in Afghanistan, desperately trying to

  reach cover as she crawled from her wrecked tank. She was a

  little girl, an old lady and suddenly, after millennia, herself,

  her own age, and still the huge ship bucked and rocked and

  spun like a stick being thrown from hand to hand. And she

  realised that 'size' was an illusion, that it did not matter how

  big or heavy or fast anything was, it was all relative, for the

  multiverse around her only got smaller and smaller in some

  directions, bigger and bigger in others and that she had just

  as much effect on this quasi-infinite environment as a sentient

  being a fraction of her size or someone living in a universe

  vastly bigger than this one.

  She understood that it had something to do with

  self-similarity. Her actions affected every aspect of the

/>   multiverse, were echoed on every plane, every alternative.

  Whatever danger threatened them now would threaten them

  everywhere. These other universes were no more independent

  of the presence to which they were drawn than her Earth was

  independent of the sun. It had nothing to do with size. If she

  pushed, the whole multiverse responded. If she slept in this

  aspect of herself then she probably slept in all other aspects.

  And how many were there? Millions? Billions? Probably. But

  was this also true of the Doctor who she could see now doing

  something with his sonic screwdriver?

  The ship divided and became many ships, each one a

  fraction bigger than the next. Each one containing an Amy,

  but not a Doctor. Where was he? Was he independent of the

  multiverse? The only one of his kind?

  This made sudden sense.

  Something began to come clear in her head as the ship's

  captain took hold of her arm.

  'Are you all right, Miss?'

  He had interrupted her at the very point of understanding.

  She rounded on him angrily.

  But he had become the tall French guy she met on holiday

  and it was impossible for her to tell him off. 'I was trying to

  do a sum...'

  A sickening groan erupted from the middle of the ship and

  it began to bend. Everywhere people were screaming. The

  screams became a bleating alarm and suddenly the control

  room was full of passengers struggling into the emergency

  suits they found in their cabins.

  Again the captain was shouting at her. Telling her to go

  back to her room. Go back and put on her suit, prepare to

  get in the lifeboats, but before she could do that the hull

  straightened out, though they were still bound by the black

  ropes and rearing waves of the intergalactic tsunami.

  The Doctor was also not wearing a suit. Grabbing her arm

  he supported her on his shoulder and helped her back to

  their cabins. The ship was roaring, squealing, scraping at the

  fabric of the cosmos. Every so often the black clouds parted

  to reveal streaming galaxies, their light leaving strange trails,

  almost like handwriting, across the captive stars, able to

  behave only as the tsunami demanded.

  'Are we breaking up, Doctor?'

  'We're very strong. Should be able to withstand a time

  storm.'

  'Is that what we're in?'

  'Something worse. I'm not sure. But when the time currents