Bernice tried to say something but, as her face blurred and ran into the Doctor's, it was his voice that said, 'Are we having fun yet?'

The last thing Ace saw as a separate individual were the Doctor's impossibly blue eyes growing larger and larger, as if to swallow her. Then darkness wrapped its comforting arms around her, and she was borne away by a torrent of faces, words, feelings, betrayals, loves, lovers, pains and pleasures. Like a child in the world's largest sweetshop, she was overwhelmed by the magnitude of choices. Everything was possible. Everything was there, if she could only find it...

Bishop's ship was homely for one: cramped for nine.

Nine people. That was all they had left from an original team of twenty*eight. Miles Engado, Cheryl Russell, Piper O'Rourke, Christine LaFayette, a systems a.n.a.lyst named Sulio N'Farr, Filo Julee, Tiw Heimdall, Shmuel Zehavi, a scheduler called Brandon Courdry. Survivors, all.

Piper sat with Miles in the pilot's cabin, whilst their friends laughed and cried and slapped each other on the back, or simply lay still in the small cargo bay, too exhausted, both emotionally and physically, to move.

On Miles's lap lay the softly pulsing medicine wheel. Had it been the power of the wheel that held the forces from the Mushroom Farm at bay, or had it been blind luck? Whatever, Earth would be pleased to have a sample of the precious high*ma.s.s elements, if that was indeed what the wheel was now composed of. And if there was anything of the old order left on Earth.

Unable to even think any more through sheer exhaustion, Piper glanced at the real*time simularity which overlaid the blank forward bulkhead, displaying a receding Lucifer. Belial and Moloch were too small to see. She was glad that the view was a simularity rather than a real porthole or viewscreen: it meant that she couldn't see her reflection. She felt every one of her eighty*odd years: she was sure she must look them as well.

'I wish I knew what was going on back there,' she said.

Miles put his hand over hers. 'Just be glad we got out.'

'You'll never know how glad.'

She leant forward to kiss him. Unnoticed, Lucifer's red glare shifted through orange, yellow, green, blue and violet, before the planet, its moons, and every trace of human and alien habitation, vanished from the universe.

In their place, a black void took shape, a warning to all not to disturb the Angels at their worship, a sh.e.l.l to shut out the demons.

The smell of boiled cabbage and disinfectant trickled down stained walls, lurked behind cheerful posters of cartoon bunnies with toothbrushes, collected in unvacuumed corners, and pooled in the worn holes, the cigarette burns and the high*heel imprints in the threadbare linoleum. Acedoctorbernice's footsteps echoed through the ward like the tapping of a blind man's cane. Faces turned to watch from the sanctuary of their beds: scarred, scared, bandaged and burned.

The curtains around the last bed in the line rippled ponderously as Acedoctorbernice approached. Behind it, lungs laboured to suck in air. A machine beeped with the same maddening regularity as a fly beating against a window.

Acedoctorbernice didn't want to draw back the curtain, but somehow it drew back anyway. Her father lay there, projecting from the starched sheets like a pressed flower in an envelope. She barely recognized him, his half*forgotten features made more unfamiliar by illness and pain. His dull brown eyes stared vacantly at the punchboard ceiling and the flickering fluorescent light. The fingers of his right hand had dug into the sheets as if trying to find a last handhold on life.

'Hi. Remember me?'

Jan stepped out of the bright sunlight which spilled from the window on the other side of the bed.

Acedoctorbernice's mouth was suddenly dry, and the buzzing of the fluorescent light seemed to suddenly intrude far too much upon reality.

'Yeah, I remember.'

He was wearing an old army greatcoat slung over a baggy T-shirt and a tight pair of psychedelic knee*length shorts. His hair was matted on top and plaited down the back. Someone with patience and no imagination had tied little ribbons into it. Acedoctorbernice had forgotten about the dirt ingrained into his face, and the slackness of his smile.

'Memory plays funny tricks, you know? Like, did we love each other once? Did we fly to the moon together? Did I put flowers in your hair?'

'Yeah we... we did that.'

Acedoctorbernice was edgy, and guilty about the edginess. This was Jan Jan for G.o.d's sake! Her lover! The man she had been willing to leave the Doctor for, and who the Doctor had cold*bloodedly led to his death for what he fondly supposed to be the greater good. for G.o.d's sake! Her lover! The man she had been willing to leave the Doctor for, and who the Doctor had cold*bloodedly led to his death for what he fondly supposed to be the greater good.

'Then why the sad face?'

'It was a lot of years ago.'

On the bed between them, her father went on grasping one moment after another, the rasp of his breath and the beep of his heart filling the silence between their words.

'Love is forever. Or did you forget?'

'Then maybe I didn't love you.' She wanted to slap her hand over her mouth, but the truth had escaped and hung between them, vibrating gently like a struck bell.

Jan's face seemed to sag. 'You said you did.'

'I was wrong.' There was strength in the truth: she felt it, drew power from it.

'But we shared time, s.p.a.ce, our bodies '

'I was young young.'

His shoulders were rounded, his lower lip swollen and childish. She felt pity for him, mixed with something dangerously close to contempt. Why hadn't she seen how pretentious he had been?

'We shared so much.'

'Yeah, like you shared me with Maire? Like you would have shared me with any other woman who took your fancy?'

'You were the special one, Ace.'

'Lying b.a.s.t.a.r.d! I was only special because I fell for your crude charm.'

'You must have felt something for me.'

Acedoctorbernice glanced down at where her father held on precariously to his life, and was unsurprised to see that he was wearing a brown corduroy jacket and a pullover covered in tiny question marks. She brushed his fine brown hair out of his eyes, and marvelled at the tiny wrinkles that surrounded them.

'You, you, you. It was always about you, wasn't it, Jan? I don't love you. I never loved you. I only went with you because he he disapproved.' disapproved.'

Acedoctorbernice turned on her heel and left, only looking back when the dirty linoleum became softer and rose up beneath her feet, but all he could see was the tiny blue flowers which carpeted the slopes of Mount Cadon, their long stamens waving gently in the breeze as they searched the air for unwary lizards, flicking back in momentary alarm as Doctorberniceace climbed past them, returning to their search within moments as their small vegetable memories forgot that anything had disturbed them. Down at the base of the mountain, where its slope blended gradually with the arid plains of southern Gallifrey, the Prydonian Academy erupted in ebony splendour. High above, higher even than the violet clouds and the hovering flocks of air diamonds, the peak of the mountain was abruptly cut off by the pearly orange sheen of the transduction barrier.

The Hermit was sitting, as always, in the shade of a bush.

The small, intense boy who sat beside him looked up casually at Doctorberniceace's approach.

'You're early,' the Hermit said with a sunny smile.

'I... I skipped temporal protocol.'

'As you can see, I am busy. Come back later.'

'I was hoping you would tell me '

'Tell you what?' the boy beside him cut in. 'About the vampire swarms and the legions of the Sphinx? He's told me all that!'

'Do I know you?' Doctorberniceace asked carefully in third*level High Gallifreyan, using the intonation specifically reserved for dismissive politeness.

'Not with this face,' the boy said, in a voice like oiled silk. 'Not yet.'

Doctorberniceace turned impulsively to the Hermit, his cheeks flushing with childish anger. 'I thought I was the only one you told stories to!' he yelled. 'I thought I was the special one!'

'You're all special to me,' the Hermit replied. 'All of you young renegades who come and sit at my feet and listen to me talk.'

Doctorberniceace stamped petulantly. 'I don't understand.'

'One day. One day, when you will have forgotten we ever talked here, high above the constraining walls of the Citadel, when you have met the others who have shared my stories, then you will understand.'

'But I'm better than the rest. I deserve the stories. They don't.'

The Hermit's face hardened. 'Your path will always be difficult,' he said, 'for as long as you think that the universe knows who you are. Laugh at yourself, and practise humility.'

The boy at the Hermit's side looked away and scowled.

Doctorberniceace met the Hermit's calm, ironic gaze, and somewhere deep inside him, a door seemed to open. He turned and walked away down the hillside. Memories of future events filled his mind: one by one he examined them, and was shamed by his arrogance. Hot tears filled his eyes, refracting the landscape and making it appear fragmented and harsh. He wiped a hand angrily across his eyes; the blurriness vanished, but, through the canopy of the archaeology jetter she could see that the landscape remained essentially the same. Berniceacedoctor looked around. Outside beyond the equipment dump containing her excavating gear the terrain of the Vartaq Veil Dyson sphere rolled endlessly on, rising gradually in the far distance, the details lost in the atmospheric haze and the dim light of an old, weak sun.

Far to her right, one of the many fault lines between the different fragments of the sphere ran in a zig*zag for thousands of kilometres. Berniceacedoctor followed it with her eyes as it curved along, and up, and across, and back down again, until it joined up with itself a snake eating its own tail.

She slid back the jetter's canopy, stepped out into the rich sunlight and walked towards the edge of the fault line, wary of loose soil where air leakage had eroded the ground away from the skin of the world. Although the Dyson sphere's gravity was enough to maintain a breathable atmospheric envelope, much of that atmosphere had leaked away through the cracks between the plates and ended up as puddles of ice on the cold exterior surface. The little that was left was breathable just but weak and cold.

One of the Vart was standing nearby, spindly legs supporting its patterned carapace as it stared silently into the abyss. It hissed, but whether in greeting, whim or warning her translator could not tell.

Berniceacedoctor felt a tiny bud of anguish unfold in her stomach. The ship which had been sent to take her to the new dig on the Draconian*discovered planet of Heaven was leaving in a few hours. This was her last chance. She had been seeking this particular creature since her team had discovered an intact but deserted s.p.a.cefleet Dalekbuster, stripped of all insignia and identification, sitting on a hill some thirty thousand kilometres from their base camp. She hadn't been surprised. She'd been following the trail of her father's lost ship for years: moving from dig to dig, planet to planet, looking for the subtle traces of his pa.s.sage. And now, just hours before she was due to leave, she had managed to locate a Vart who had seen the ship land.

'Vart?'

The Vart rotated its carapace to watch her as she walked up to it.

'I am told that you have memories of seeing others, like me, many... er, many...' G.o.d, how do you say 'years' to an alien whose world is wrapped completely around its sun? 'A long time ago.'

The Vart shifted its head so that it was facing forward, elevated its front sets of legs and began to edge slowly into the crack between the vast plates of rock.

'Please,' she cried. 'Please! It's taken me months to find you.'

The Vart halted, and looked back at her, grinding its mandibles slowly.

'I'm looking for my father,' she blurted. 'He he went away, when I was small. I've been trying to find him ever since.'

'Ssss... ssss... sssssksss...' the Vart said.

Berniceacedoctor fiddled frantically with the controls of her translator, trying to get a fix on the particular dialect.

'Ssss... sskt... ktch.... tkcha...'

Almost got it. She adjusted the contextual a.n.a.lyser.

'Tchk-k ko away now, Benny, but I want you to know that I love you, and I'll be thinking of you when I'm gone.'

Berniceacedoctor stood facing the alien, open*mouthed, unable to believe what she was hearing. She couldn't feel the ground beneath her feet, or the breeze on her cheek. The world around her seemed to go fuzzy around the edges.

'And look after sssstchsss sssstchsss... Mummy for me until I come home.'

'Mummy died,' Berniceacedoctor sobbed. 'She died, Daddy. You left me, and you never came home, and she died!'

All self*control was sliding away now, and Berniceacedoctor was a child again, watching from a blast*window as Mummy staggered away through the blazing wreckage of the street, looking for her daughter's toy.

'They said you were a coward!' she screamed at the Vart in the s.p.a.cefleet uniform with the row of Conspicuous Bravery ribbons pinned down the arm. 'They told me your ship broke formation and ran.'

'It wasn't your fault,' her father said gently. 'Even if you hadn't been scared of the fire, even if you had tried to tell Mummy that you didn't want the doll, she wouldn't have heard you. The blast from the Dalek ship's plasma cannon had stunned her. She didn't know what she was doing.'

Berniceacedoctor sank to her knees, sobbing hysterically.

'But they said you were a coward,' she said again, holding the words like a mantra.

'No,' he said, 'they never did. You You did, but you weren't talking about me.' did, but you weren't talking about me.'

The Vart turned and scrabbled into the crack that led from warmth and light into the darkness. Bernice watched it go, and felt a small area of darkness in her mind that she had always taken for granted dry up and blow away...

Ace awoke to find the Doctor standing over her and staring off into the distance. She stretched and, as she did so, fleeting memories touched her brain: images of a mountain, a hospital bed, a doll's head, coasting on a wave of flame, landing at her feet. Looking down at herself, she was relieved to find that everything was intact, where it should be, and recognizably hers.

She stood and looked around. The Mushroom Farm was as placid as the first time she had seen it, and Bernice was lying beneath one of the metal parasols.

'Okay?' Ace asked.

Bernice smiled quizzically. 'I feel... fine. No, better than fine, perfect.'

Ace ran a hand through her hair, and took a deep breath. 'Me too,' she said.

Bernice held out a hand. Ace looked at it for a moment, then tentatively touched it. Nothing happened. More confidently, she pulled Bernice to her feet.

Their eyes met. Ace recalled memories that she knew were not hers, and she knew from Bernice's expression that she was finding the same. And somewhere deep down within both of them, a tiny core of alienness sat and smiled at them.

'Doctor?' Ace said.

He turned to look at them, and Ace thought that he looked older, and more tired, than she had ever seen him.

'Doctor, what happened?'

'We succeeded,' he said eventually. 'Together, the strength of the emotions that we dredged up from our respective pasts brought the morphic field machinery back under control.'

'What about Bannen and Mark?' Bernice asked.

The Doctor sighed. 'IMC had already destroyed the feedback control mechanism by putting the torch to the interior of Moloch, but we couldn't have succeeded without it. I suspect that if you go back there, you will find that the forest has regrown.'