There was a pause, and some muttering in the background. The Doctor was obviously getting Mali to speak. Eventually, another woman's voice said, 'I believe he is telling the truth, Lady President. Despite my reservations about his Faction nature. Are there any signs from the Emonitor, ma'am?'

'That's enough, Mali!' snapped Romana. Fitz could see she was irritated.

The Doctor must have noticed it too, because he said, 'This Emonitor. I've heard it mentioned a few times now. What is it?"

Fitz watched Romana think about this for several long seconds. 'Tragdorvigan is scanning the higher dimensions.'

Another pause. Eventually, the Doctor said, 'Yes, and ...?'

Romana gave a little sigh. 'Oh, all right, Doctor. Our psivestigator Tragdorvigan is conducting regular scans for any evidence of the first assault by the Enemy. Whoever and wherever they are, we want to know about it.'

'Hushhush, I take it?' said the Doctor's voice. Fitz could hear some amusement in it.

'Otherwise the Time Lords would have given it a more pompous name, and made a song and dance about it.'

'As you can imagine,' said Romana, 'it's not the sort of thing we like to make public. Is it, Mali?' she added in an acid tone.

'No, ma'am,' Mali's voice said contritely from the communicator.

'Very well.' Romana licked her top lip, which Fitz found distracttngly sensuous. 'Now, what else can you tell me, Doctor?'

'Well, Nivet here is making a firstclass job of steering Compassion. We should all be with you shortly.'

'What of Vozarti and the others?'

A short pause, and then: 'I'm afraid we seem to be the only survivors. The creatures that inhabit the Edifice have killed pretty indiscriminately.'

'Creatures?'

'Twisted remnants of the life forms left aboard this ... place before it changed. And now that the Edifice is surging between dimensions, the time fluctuations are more unstable and the number and size of the creatures is increasing. So we're returning to Gallifrey now.'

Romana set her mouth in a grim line. 'Very well. Though there are some things you should know, Doctor.' She briefly summarised the situation, including Fitz's role in identifying Greyjan's true nature. The Doctor sounded absolutely delighted to hear Fitz was present, and they spent a minute or two exchanging inconsequential pleasantries until Romana interrupted with an irritated coughing noise.

'Well, I believe I am paying for this call.'

'Believe me, Doctor,' Romana grumbled. 'I'm feeling the cost. Now, can you find a way to reach us here?'

There was a longish pause while the Doctor evidently consulted with his fellow travellers.

'We'll be with you shortly,' he announced. 'Or at least, Nivet and Compassion will. I need to find out precisely what Greyjan is really up to.'

Fitz leaned forward and talked into Romana's open palm. 'I can guess how you're going to do that. The usual bullinachinashop routine.'

Romana withdrew her hand daintily, and waved him away with a small gesture of her other fingers. He stood up with ill grace and walked over to sit at the table instead.

'Something like that,' he could hear the Doctor saying. 'I do believe that Combat Elite Mali will be arresting me and presenting me in person to the new President.'

'Is your plan wise, Doctor?' asked Romana, the doubt evident in her voice.

'Are they ever?' said Fitz to himself.

'Trust me,' he replied. 'I'm the Doctor.'

He was saying something else, but Fitz was distracted by the sound of a TARDIS arriving.

He half expected to see a shape materialising in the corner of Romana's exquisitely furnished quarters, which would annoy her by crushing her expensive carpet. But the familiar noise didn't get much louder, and he was startled when a delicate white cube slowly appeared out of thin air on the onyx table.

He picked it up, and the lid seemed to flip up and then snap firmly shut again. He tried prising it open with a dirty thumbnail, but couldn't even find a seam to work into.

'I think you'll find,' said Romana, 'that the hypercube is addressed to me.' She had reattached her earring, and now plucked the delicate cube from Fitz's fingers.

She placed the hypercube on her palm, and it immediately unfolded for her. She dosed her eyes, and raised her chin. Fitz thought, not for the first time, how pretty she looked with her pale skin set off by her vermilion lips and sharply defined line of straightcut black hair.

After a minute, she opened her eyes again. The cube seemed to dissolve on her palm, and she dusted the cindery remains between her palms with a brisk action. She was allowed to make a mess on the carpet, Fitz noted.

'I have no idea who Kellen is, but he seems very concerned about Mother Tarra and Father Kreiner.'

'Kellen,' pondered Fitz. Was it for real, or another trick?

'Still,' said Romana brightly, arranging herself back on the chaise longue. 'No use worrying about that until Nivet arrives. I do hope the Doctor knows what he's doing with Greyjan. It would be so embarrassing if things didn't work out.'

'Why's that?' asked Fitz, knowing he'd regret it.

'Well, he doesn't seem to have much time for other Time Lord Presidents. I at least had the good sense to let him think I was retiring gracefully. How will he react when the Doctor marches in and confronts him?'

Fitz wondered why she was smiling.

Chapter Thirtythree.

Who to blame

Vice President Timon watched his new President with a mixture of awe and apprehension. It was bound to be an awkward time, he told himself, as a new Head of State and Master of the Three Gallifreys settled into his role. What could he expect after only a few hours?

Well, he told himself, perhaps he'd expect the new President to stay awake during his first High Council meeting. He had settled not so much into his role as into his grand Presidential chair, plumping up the cushions and slumping into it casually before dozing off. The Councillors of Time Past, Present, Parallel and Future had seemed much less comfortable, particularly when they were pledging their private allegiances to the Lord President at the beginning of the Council session and could hardly hear themselves for his snoring. At least the absent Castellan Vozarti was spared this indignity, and he would doubtless have suffered it less gladly than the others.

The Chancellors were even more dismayed when Lord President Greyjan had awoken with a particularly loud snort, taking them in with one sweeping, baleful glance, and dismissed them on the spot, spluttering, from his chambers. At this point, he'd also eyed up Timon eyed up being the operative phrase, since the left one seemed to have a life of its own and rolled around the room as the right eye focused on the Vice President.

Then Greyjan had shaken his substantial jowls and barked at Timon, 'You'd better stay, Timon old man. I'm a bit rusty with the old Matrix, and you may have to help me plug into the damn thing properly. But first of all, let me have forty winks, would you? Come back in half an hour.'

Thus it was that, some hours later, Timon was watching his new President sifting through the Matrix. 'Just to get up to speed after all these years, old boy.'

The Lord President looked ghastly, decided Timon, almost corpselike. Which would be appropriate for someone allegedly long dead. And yet behind the languid mannerism and the blustering speech, Timon detected a firm resolve and an edge of steel in his good eye when it looked at him. Into him, even.

Certainly, Lord Greyjan was starting to take him into his confidence in a way that he did not do with the other High Councillors, in a way that even the Lady Romana never had (and she was the high priestess of consensus politics the seventh way, she had once called it). He had provided clarification and support to Lord Greyjan on a number of questions prompted by the President's investigation of the Matrix.

It reinforced all Timon's personal hopes. He had been unable to confess his own growing faith in the superstitions of Gallifrey. His High Council colleagues would have denounced them as treasonable, and so Timon had hidden his true feelings by excessively condemning anyone who gave the slightest hint that they believed in magic, chance or the supernatural.

Overcompensation, perhaps. And perhaps, too, he was trying to convince himself that there was really nothing to the legends. But at heart, in the very core of his beliefs, Timon knew that he looked to Sabjatric and Rungar, the Pythian Heresy, the legend of Cuwirti and Klade as much as most of the population.

And he had conducted his own personal research into the story of the shortestlived Gallifreyan President. It was his obsession with Greyjan the Sane. So for Greyjan to reemerge at this time of crisis was like a revelation to Timon. His own time, it seemed, had arrived.

'What's this, then?' growled Lord Greyjan, interrupting Timon's reverie. There's evidence here of some kind of axiomatic encapsulation within fourdimensional parameters.' The President threw a mental image on to a nearby display screen, with the air of discarding a chicken bone. And, like a faithful dog, Timon pounced on it.

'That, Lord Greyjan, appears to be the bottle universe we ... er ... obtained.'

'Don't pussyfoot around, Timon,' rumbled Greyjan. 'If we stole it, tell me who we robbed, and where it was.'

Timon coughed apologetically. 'We stole it from Foreman's World.'

'And from whom?'

'Well,' pondered Greyjan. 'I suppose Foreman's World was actually the owner, too. Sentient biosphere, you see, er ...'

'Yes, all right. And this fourdimensional Klein bottle contained an entire universe?'

Timon nodded eagerly. 'Yes. Well, a modest one at any rate. We thought that, all things considered ...'

'... it was a bolt hole for times of crisis?' Greyjan chuckled deep in his throat. 'Somewhere to it was a bolt hole for times of crisis?' Greyjan chuckled deep in his throat. 'Somewhere to hide if this unknown Enemy became too overwhelming?'

Timon smiled modestly. 'Well, along with the possibility of moving to the other Gallifrey.'

Greyjan sighed. 'In my day, we considered creating as many as eight or nine other Gallifreys.'

'We have only one,' said Timon. "The bottle universe was just a further precaution.'

'Quite a prize. I hope you keep it somewhere safer than the unfortunate Foreman.'

'Absolutely, sir,' agreed Timon, desperate to please. 'Where safer than the local spacetime vortex, over which we have such complete control and -'

He broke off. For the first time, Lord Greyjan had sat bolt upright in his grand chair and was gripping its arms so tightly that his pale knuckles went even whiter. For a terrible moment, Timon thought the President was suffering some kind of embolism as colour flooded his cadaverous cheeks and his lazy eye rolled in his head. Eventually he spat out one word: 'Safe?' He went a bit more purple and bellowed 'Safe!' once more.

So it was almost a relief when two figures burst unexpectedly into the room and stood before the President.

'Combat Elite Mali,' announced the one holding the worryingly large knife. 'I've brought you this renegade, Lord President.'

'Ah,' said Timon to Greyjan, indicating Mali's prisoner. 'Perhaps I should introduce you to the Doctor.'

It was obvious the moment the Doctor clapped eyes on him that Lord President Greyjan was insane. At first, he had been prepared to allow Greyjan the benefit of the doubt. But the more he listened to the bioform creature masquerading as the former President, the more clear it became: Lord Greyjan the shortestlived President of Gallifrey, newest President of Gallifrey, Greyjan the Sane from a previous age was quite mad.

Even Timon seemed embarrassed by Greyjan's eccentric behaviour. The Vice President had almost welcomed the intrusion when Mali had bustled into the room with her prisoner.

Greyjan had initially seemed not to notice, and was rambling on about fourdimensional leakage, strange radiations from Paradox, and dread creatures.

At one stage Greyjan's mumblings resolved themselves, and he spoke clearly: 'Conceptual creatures that thrive on the energies of the spacetime continuum. A force is coming that none can withstand! None shall survive!' His voice dropped to a harsh whisper. 'None would choose to live through this.'

The Doctor could see Timon's unease reaching such a level that the Vice President was ready to usher the newcomers out of the room, away from the spectacle of his President's apparent descent into lunacy. So the Doctor interrupted in a loud and commanding voice, directed straight at Greyjan: "These creatures, Lord President. Did you see them before?'

Greyjan snapped around his good eye, and his jowls quivered fearfully. 'Yes!' He seemed to have a focus now: he was concentrating on the sight of the Doctor.

So the Doctor shook off Timon's restraining hand, waved away his protective duckings, and moved to stand right in front of the Presidential chair. He stared Greyjan right in the face.

'Was that why you took your own life all those years ago, Greyjan?'

The President seemed strangely composed now. The flush was leaving his cheeks. 'I used to lecture at the Academy, Doctor, in lighter times,' Greyjan said, 'on the origins of life.' He cleared his throat and looked around the room as if at a large imaginary audience.

'I believe that all life throughout the universe descended from a single ancestor cell,' he began. "The evidence is clear: every known organism shares a common physical and chemical system and genetic instructions are implemented using a universal code of chirality, whether life be siliconbased, or organic. Are we to believe this complexity of nature arose in isolation again and again? No, such properties were present in that very first cell that survived the hostility of its spawning ground, and we, its descendants, inherited and adapted them.'

'He's treating us like children,' Mali whispered, as the lecture went on.

'Don't disturb him,' the Doctor murmured. 'Perhaps the answer came to him talking to kindergarten classes.' Then an idea gripped him. 'Or perhaps he's simply reciting the words just as he rehearsed them. This Greyjan has been remembered back into existence, and these words along with him.'

Mali frowned. 'Well, I don't believe any of this. It's insane, there's nothing to substantiate - '

True or false, it's irrelevant,' muttered the Doctor. 'Greyjan is clearly convinced, and the Faction clearly need him to do something ... his theories on the Enemy drove him to suicide, they were his key motivation. The Faction may be using those fears to motivate him now, to their own ends.' He paused. "The way they manipulate everyone.'

'No talking at the back!' Greyjan wagged a stern finger at his class. 'Now, this last common ancestor should not be confused with the first living thing, of course. Who knows what exotic biochemical systems those firstborn organisms employed, dragged to the prebiotic precipice and thrown over the edge? Who knows how different, how utterly alien, their genetic codes could be?' He suddenly looked uneasy. "These organisms died out of course, aeons before they could develop sentience. Only their barest traces exist to tell us they even survived the endless firestorms of the fledgling universe.'

Greyjan's voice slowed to a halt, and he was left standing silently like a waxwork. 'Come on,' the Doctor muttered. 'We're just getting to the good bit.'

Greyjan abruptly leaned forward and started up again, his tone growing increasingly hysterical. 'Now, leave those precious cells lost unknowing in space and consider what we have done to our universe with our knowledge of time travel. Consider the pollution of our TARDIS trails through the wastes of the vortex. Consider the fierce energies of temporal paradox we have created, over and over, searing through the fabric of spacetime. Blithely we go on, bending time to our will, siphoning the power of singularity and squirting it back out to irradiate the universe!' He paused, panting for breath. 'And those ancient, forsaken cells feel those energies. And find that they can grow ...'

Mali looked up at the Doctor, unease prickling down her back. He was nodding. 'They grow into life so utterly alien, so impossible to fathom!'

Greyjan nodded. 'So perfectly inimical to our own, that to label them with a race name would seem wholly inappropriate, don't you think?' He smiled sadly. "They're just the Enemy.'

'You foresaw them coming?' Mali asked.

'My studies of Paradox Theory, of the order in chaos, led me to suspect what was to come,'

Greyjan agreed, smiling at the irony of his predicament. 'I wanted no part of it.'

'Even assuming any of this can be true,' the Doctor said, 'why Gallifrey's Enemy?' He turned to Timon. 'What did you do, eh?'

'They dropped the universe in a bottle,' Greyjan chuckled dryly. 'They broke it.'

'No!' interrupted Timon. 'We secured it in the spacetime vortex.'

'Imbeciles!' barked Greyjan. 'It's a fourdimensional Klein bottle. It contains a discrete area of threedimensional space only if it remains in three dimensions. You put it in a fourdimensional space, where it has only one surface. It was no longer sealed once you subjected it to the higherdimensional forces of the vortex.'