the equaliser and left his team considerably better off. With
the rain thundering down and everyone hurrying for the
pavilion's shelter, the teams would play again with more
or less equal strength now that Argentino was out of the
shooting at least. He would be whacking, given the chance,
when fresh targets were set up in the morning.
Gathering under the deck's roof, the teams and spectators
had temporarily forgotten the game as they watched the
great, brilliant blue sun seem to rock across the bloody
horizon, back and forth, forcing some of the watchers towards
the bathroom facilities, unable to hold the contents of their
stomachs down.
Amy had been told by the Doctor about the first signs
of the 'Ghost Worlds' beginning their orbit through the
multiverse, but she had felt he was talking about a dream or
a story. The reality was more spectacular and more terrifying
than anything she had expected.
The rain stopped as suddenly as it had started and a
delicious scent of wet grass and wild flowers filled the air. The
black cloud passed and the remaining clouds were purple,
breaking occasionally to let shafts of blue sunlight spear their
way to the ground. Pitchmen hurried to put a force field over
the whole grounds and turn up the heat within to begin
drying the pitch. This had to be done gradually to ensure
that there would be a proper spring to the turf when they
played again.
Then everything within the pavilion started to shake. Amy
wondered if this was an earthquake, and the Doctor laughed.
He had that wild look he got in his eye when something big
was about to happen. Something dangerous.
"This is it! This is it!' He was exultant. 'You'll probably
never know anything like this ever again. Make the most of
it, Amy Pond! Here we go!'
Through the windows she saw the purple clouds pass
and the sun shiver and shake in the sky, beginning to spin
like a monstrous Catherine wheel; the Doctor assured her it
was only an illusion. Many of the watchers threw themselves
to the floor, a few muttering prayers to whatever deity they
had just rediscovered. Lightning began to run across the
ground outside, crackling and shouting. Off in the distance
they saw the village dairy explode and go up in smoke as if
under attack. Then the lightning ran back exactly the way it
had come and poured up a massive tree on the far side of
the pitch, not harming it but causing its branches to glow
and flicker as it formed a beautiful golden halo and slowly
faded.
'I doubt there was anyone in the dairy at this time of the
evening.' The Doctor's tone was intended to be reassuring.
Amy was not altogether reassured.
'Is there any chance of getting off and back to the ship?'
she asked.
'None at all,' he told her. 'The Ghost Worlds are moving.
Sideways through time and space. Enjoy it, Amy. The shift
won't be this spectacular every time, not once the orbit is
established.'
'You told me people were lost in these orbital changes. Did
you mean killed?' Her voice rose and fell with the wind. She
watched as the trees began to dance, their branches bending
down to the ground and then sweeping gracefully up, coming
together before they spread out again, as if synchronised. A
huge oak suddenly split and cracked all the way down the
middle, falling apart in two perfect pieces. 'I think that is
what you meant,' said Amy quietly.
There being no difference in their luck whether they stayed
in the pavilion or went to the pub, a group of them agreed to
make a dash for it. As soon as the rain stopped they set off
along a relatively level road into the village.
The landlord of the Blue Barsoomian was pleased to see
them. 'It's going to get chilly if what I've heard is true,' he
said. 'I came here as a settler twenty-five years ago. Bloody
agent told me Miggea was "shifted out" - whatever that
meant!' He winced as the ground trembled again.
Rubbing his hands together, for all the world like a TV
game-show host, the Doctor looked around. 'OK,' he said,
'what does everyone say to a good old-fashioned singsong?'
Bingo came to stand beside Amy and put a comforting
arm around her shoulders. 'I know the words to "My World
Fell Apart When I Fell In Love With You".' he offered. He
thought for a moment, then cleared his throat. 'Perhaps not,'
he said.
In the end Amy remembered a song Mr Thompson in
the village had sung. When he'd heard her accent, he'd even
bought her a CD of Harry Lauder and a bunch of other early
twentieth-century music hall performers singing their best-
known numbers:
'I belong tae Glasgae, good auld Glasgae toon,
Oh, there's somethin' the matter wi' Glasgae,
She keeps goin' roond an' roond!
Ah'm only a common old workin' man
As anyone here can see,
But when ah git lit oop on a Saturday -
Glasgae belangs tae me!'
The Doctor took down the big menu board on the bar and
turned it round, using a bit of chalk to write the words out
in Universal, which most of them knew. Of course hardly
anyone had the faintest idea what the song was about, but
they were glad to learn it, since that was better than trying
to puzzle out the Ghost Worlds, where they were going, and
what would happen.
Eventually the sun set -
And set again -
And again -
And again -
'I'm getting fed up with this,' said Amy sternly and stepped
towards the nearest window as if she intended to admonish
Miggea for its erratic behaviour. 'Oh, gosh!' she exclaimed.
'Oh, everybody! Come and look at the stars!'
In the soft darkness of the skies over Miggea the now-
familiar constellations had never been more beautiful.
Everything was magnified and somehow sharper. The
distant suns appeared to have been scattered like precious
stones and metals over black velvet. Shimmering rubies,
sapphires, emeralds; gold, silver, milk jade and onyx swirled
in a magnificent pavane. You could hear the music swelling.
No one attempted a rational explanation for this miracle;
they simply stood in awe and watched. The constellations
marched this way and that as if in celebration of Creation.
They were closer, larger, brighter. The Doctor, who had seen
so much of the multiverse, shook his head in amazement. 'I
think we're still moving. The stars aren't. They only seem to be changing their positions. We're going from one level of the
multiverse to another. That's what we're seeing. And we're
keeping our atmosphere, our positions around Miggea. It's
happening!'
Amy understood. 'So - do you mean we're moving through
all the alternatives in the multiverse?'
'I don't think Miggea's orbit takes her through every
alternative, only a relative few really - maybe thousands? A
/> few million at most. Time determines the nature of space,
you see.'
They heard more deep rumblings, saw deep green
flashes.
'We're actually orbiting the black hole. We've no business
existing, yet we do exist. I don't know how time relates
to space here. Not really. Especially where gravity's an
important part of the equation. But this isn't an aberration.
I think all aspects of the multiverse have systems like this at
their centre. It's part of that grand design, that logic we find
so hard to grasp. Wheels within wheels. A quality of gravity
that's barely begun to be examined. Gravity within gravity?
Like electricity, we know it happens but we don't know how
or why. We can learn how to use it because that's what we're
good at. Yet - I'm not sure —' He shook his head.
'What, Doctor?' Urquart Banning-Cannon lifted his pewter
shant to his lips. 'What aren't you sure about?'
'I think we're going to have to play these matches through,
for a start. And then we might learn a bit more. I think we're
heading for the centre - no, I don't mean the centre, do I? I
mean a centre. There's more than one. I should have realised
that. Yet each centre represents the other, just as each aspect
of the multiverse represents the other. And each affects the
other! It's beautiful! What a machine! I doubt if you could
easily make a model of this. But maybe you could. Self-
similarity. The part represents the whole. There's really
no such thing as size, not in the way we've been taught to
understand it.
'That's why these rituals are so important, see? Why we
have to play the game or do the dance or say the prayers or
whatever it is, yeah? I think we should try to keep things
as ordinary as possible. So the clocks don't represent cosmic
time. It doesn't matter. We stick to our rules. Our regulations.
Our rituals. And that way we might just restore it all. Of
course, there are the games to play. They're important. No,
really, they are. Play the game. Win the prize. Do what we
have to do. And the rest will follow logically. I don't mean by
our logic but by the logic of the multiverse. What a privilege,
eh? We can't let the multiverse down, can we?'
'It's the strain, poor beggar,' said the landlord of the Blue
Barsoomian.
Outside, the stars continued their dance and the thunder
boomed, the lightning flashed. The great ritual dance of the
multiverse, driven by some unreasoning intelligence that was
both Law and Chaos, Matter and Antimatter continued...
'I think we need to get to the Second Aether,' said the
Doctor. 'Miggea will take us there. And then well know
what to do.'
'But will you have the means of doing it, Doctor?' Mr
Banning-Cannon smiled as he raised his shant to his lips.
'I know. That's why I think we have to play on through. At
least it'll help us pass the time,'
They had not predicted the rain which came as a result of
their passage through the scales of the multiverse. Neither
had they anticipated the pain or the sickness. More than once,
as the colours of space melted and merged and the star that
was Miggea blazed scarlet, they doubled up with appalling
cramps, forced to abandon momentarily the game on which
so much depended. 'Pain stopped play,' as the Doctor had
it. Then there were the bloody blue screams which seared
their way through their circulatory systems, as if they were
attempting to warp them into entirely different creatures.
The blue screams affected the Judoon more than the
humans, and they seemed ashamed when even the smallest
moan escaped their brutal snouts. It was sound, it was colour
and it was something else, maybe scent. Nobody could easily
describe it, nor the bubbling mauve 'fizz' associated with
phasing from one scale to another, which took over their
muscles and made them good for something other than their
original purpose, causing exhilaration.
When a good whack was scored, then came pleasure,
glowing through them from feet to face, all gorgeous blues,
the colours of the sun. They could not witness it for what
it was, a rapid scale change in which everything on Flynn
and everywhere else under the Shifter star's influence shifted
upscale (or was it down?) from the star and planets to their
ship, their bodies to their smallest possessions, the atoms of
the air they breathed.
Those few like the Doctor who understood the
mathematical theory knew why this happened to them but
not how to describe it, nor how to stop it, only that resisting
the process generally caused death. Once again the Doctor
was forced to resort to his old admonition to 'go with the
flow', even if that flow caused him to writhe and pulse with
uncontrollable tremors. How they played so well when
remembering and anticipating these horrible sensations
they also could not begin to understand, but play they did,
perhaps because their instincts told them that the ritual and
replication involved in the game could bring resolution and
an ending of the pain.
Once Amy saw a spoon and a cup on a table shake, crack
and appear to tear as something in their constitution failed to
match the scale which made them either too big or too small
to be seen. The Doctor had told her that this could happen to
anything or anyone failing to shift in concert with the indigo
sun.
But then there were the pleasures the Shifter brought when
enjoying food or a shower or some other pleasant physical
sensation which became hugely intensified. Sometimes they
could not exchange so much as a word without experiencing
ecstasy; at other times the same sensations translated into
agony.
Trailing the Visitors by 97 for 12, the Tourists did
everything they could to save the game but they had very
little left and, when the Cairene Dodger was taken 9 for 22,
they were forced to acknowledge defeat. The Visitors would
play the Gentlemen for the Silver Arrow of Artemis.
The final match of the tournament opened on a golden day
when countless planets filled a sky with glorious reflected
light and seemed to be jostling to get a view of the match
between those old rivals.
Captain Bingo decided to put Hari Agincourt in to defend
the wotsit while a Judoon fast archer went up against him.
Both players were on top form, and Hari kept his ownership
of the wotsit firmly against arrow upon arrow, hitting high
sixes and tens, until he looked like a distraught hedgehog,
with shafts sticking from every part of his well-padded
armour. The Judoon did not break down his defence until
just before teatime, when an arrow, whacked for six into the
lower screens, was caught smoothly before Hari saw it out
of the comer of his eye and rammed by the keeper deep into
the 180 quarter causing a huge wave of applause from the
Gentlemen's su
pporters. At teatime, Hari was congratulated
by the Tourists for a fine score which they promised to even
up.
After tea, they put Parker, the half-canine whacker, in
as defender, indicating a more aggressive strategy against
Je'I'me Polucks, which kept the game in their hands but failed
to advance by the time change of wotsits was called. The rain
came on again just before the planet began to grumble and
struggle beneath their feet.
The Gentlemen had a good deal to celebrate, even though
their ears felt as if they were swelling from the inside, and a
rapid thump-thump-thump reminded Amy of a pneumatic
drill going off right next to your head. Fortunately all this
subsided and the sun returned to its usual colour just in time
to offer them an astonishingly beautiful dusk.
That evening, looking around the crowd in the Blue
Barsoomian, the Doctor opined that everyone was beginning
to look the worse for wear, though he was proud of them
all for their resilience and determination. 'I sometimes forget
that it's not just humans who have kept going through all the
various disasters the universe has sent. I'm honestly amazed
at how well all these species perform under duress. Victory
tends to be bad for the character if it's too easily won. Know
what I mean?' He stuck his tongue out suddenly, his face
contorted in disgust. 'This tea is rubbish, isn't it?'
'Made by a Ringai,' Amy said with a nod towards Mrs
Aramone in her pretty false head and retaining glasses. 'And
if there's one thing a Ringai can't do, it's make a decent pot of
Darjeeling. Even when you give them second flush to make
it with.'
The Doctor was laughing. 'Is this the wisdom you intend
to take back to Earth with you some day?'
She shared his amusement. Bingo strolled over, attracted
by the ordinary domesticity he'd spotted. 'Dashed good bit
of playing on Hari's part, eh? You two seem to be enjoying
yourselves.'
'We were talking about the tea,' Amy told him.
'Ranjun, isn't it? Not a patch on Darjeeling. I say, I wish
the weather was a spot more predictable, don't you? Almost
impossible to know who to put in from hour to hour. I was
thinking of a Judoon before lunch tomorrow and then see
how we go. What do you think, Doctor?'
For a while they discussed the merits of the various players
until it became obvious to the Doctor that Bingo really wanted