'Why, you could be cousins !'

Ressadriand had now transformed from overexcited teenager to terrified kid. He was even backing away now. Tarra, however, had swiftly regained her composure, Fitz noted, and was whispering in Kellen's ear.

Kellen stepped towards Fitz. 'You seem to be well informed about Faction Paradox.' Fitz hoped his own reaction couldn't be seen behind his mask. 'Remarkably wellinformed for an Earthling.' Kellen spat the last word out with contemptuous dismissal.

Ressadriand hushed him with a hissing sound through his teeth and a feeble wave of his hands. He scurried over to the door of the room and shut it firmly, as though someone outside the tired digs might overhear their secrets.

Kellen took Fitz by the wrist, and drew him over to the Visualiser. 'We should continue our search.'

'No!' protested Ressadriand, hurrying back to join them. Kellen scooped up a bone mask with one hand and dropped it into place on his face, never relinquishing his grasp on Fitz's wrist.

Tarra was already wearing her mask, and offered another to Ressadriand. He took it from her as though it might be electrified.

Fitz decided not to wrench his hand free. If he failed to break Kellen's grip, he'd be conceding a weakness. Better to try to remain aloof, in control, as though graciously permitting the blond lad to steer him towards the Visualiser as he played his bullyboy game with the frightened Ressadriand. Even so, Fitz couldn't stifle a little 'eek!' when he felt the palm of his trapped hand being scraped against one of the sharp canine teeth that protruded from Kellen's mask. Nor could he then prevent his arm muscles from tensing involuntarily when Kellen jerked his hand towards the Visualiser. Fitz could feel blood dripping from his palm, and hear it spotting the metal surface of the small basin below the Visualiser's display screen.

He glared at the blond man. The teeth on Kellen's halfmask were wet with Fitz's blood.

"The human vascular system is relatively weak, of course,' Kellen said softly. 'And the blood runs thin. But it should be sufficient ... ah, yes.'

The Visualiser screen had flared into brilliant life, casting weird shadows behind them. In the sudden light, Fitz saw that Tarra's face was alive with new interest.

Ressadriand blustered beside her. 'Earthlings have such short lives. You ... you'll be hardpressed to find any kind of future for him.'

'Let's see how long our monkey lives,' grinned Kellen, indicating the status display on the screen. 'A hundred years ... two centuries ... five centuries ...'

Ressadriand stared. 'A thousand years.'

Fitz gulped, tried to regain his composure. 'What are we looking for, then? A nice picture of my skeleton in the rotting remains of an oak casket?'

The Visualiser display swirled, clouded over, and finally snapped into sharp focus.

Kellen released his grip on Fitz's wrist. Fitz snatched it back, wincing as the pain seemed to increase. He extracted a grubby hankie from his coat pocket and pressed it to his palm. When he looked back to Kellen, he could see a mixture of amazement and fear in his eyes. The youngster hadn't expected the game to get so real, so suddenly.

Fitz eyed the display. The reading indicated that the view was some two thousand years in the future. His future.

The swirling grey haze of the vortex was disgorging a tumbling figure.

Kellen plucked his mask off and looked in growing horror at the figure. His face told Fitz that this was a game for him no longer. 'What is dial?

'The future,' crooned Tarra.

The black silhouette became an ancient humanoid, battered, torn. Despite its huge age, it was alive. Around its wizened torso, the figure was tightly clutching its one remaining arm.

Chapter Eight.

Question time

Castellan Vozarti stared out of the viewing window and tried to focus on the roof of the Panopticon in the distance. The Jasdisary Building rotated slowly, and would complete one entire corkscrew turn in exactly fiftyeight minutes. He couldn't remember now what was special about the number fifty eight, but the Architect had probably included it in his treatise.

The Architect had been a Devotee of Apeiron, of course. They'd managed to keep that quiet, afterwards quite enough superstition on Gallifrey as it was, these days.

A muffled cry from behind him momentarily broke his concentration. That wasn't good: Vozarti needed to concentrate on where he was looking. If he didn't focus on the Panopticon roof carefully enough, he would accidentally catch sight of his own reflection in the window, and be surprised all over again at how young he looked. The evening's reflected sunlight wasn't as bad as the harsh illumination of day his red hair looked darker and his clear blue eyes more hooded, brooding perhaps. Even so, he'd have traded back this youngerlooking incarnation for his old one, gout and deaf ear and bald head too. There was something familiar about it, and he suspected he got more respect from the Chancellery Guard then. An illadvised attempt to grow a thin, gingery beard had only reinforced this. It had also made him look younger than his son, instead of four hundred years older. But what were his options? Retirement because of ill health, driven out of office to allow that guttersnipe Trantres to slip into his stillwarm boots, or a forced regeneration?

The roof caught the orange light of the sun. Vozarti wondered how long it would be before the Edifice encroached on the planet, and started to cast its shadow permanently over the Capitol, over the Panopticon itself. Not before the Reaffirmation Ceremony, he hoped. That would be too dreadfully symbolic literally casting a shadow over the celebrations.

The Jasdisary Building, all ninety storeys, slowly turned on its antigravs.Vozarti quietly cursed the Architect again. The whole idea was a stupid nuisance, he had decided. And he'd decided long before his previous incarnation's legs had given up on him. The problem was that you could never work out which was the best exit from the Jasdisary, because it had no external windows for aesthetic reasons, the Architect had said on the lower thirty storeys.

So you could end up travelling around the entire base of the building to get to the Panopticon even if you chose the same exit at the same time of day, because the rotation of the Jasdisary was erratic for artistic reasons, no doubt.

There was a long groan from the interrogation suite behind him. Vozarti tried to filter it out.

That had been no problem when he'd been deaf in one ear, of course.

The Panopticon itself was just as impractical as the Jasdisary, like most of the architecture of the Capitol. The unnecessarily enormous Panopticon had six needlessly gigantic statues in it, one over each of the wildly oversized doors in the massively outofscale walls. The walls arched up to a ceiling that curved like the inner surface of a small artificial moon. It was a masterpiece of physical and temporal engineering, obviously. But it was typical of a Time Lord joint project: each of the six colleges had ended up trying to outdo the others, so that each side had to become bigger and bigger. The Cardinals of each college had stared each other down, like their huge statues, unwilling or unable to drop their gaze and lose face before their peers and rivals.

Eventually, the Scendeles ran out of money, bankrupted their college, and almost everyone else saw sense. Seeing sense was easier once one of the Cardinals had blinked, of course. But they hadn't stopped before they'd already built a structure that now took the best part of a morning to traverse on foot, and which had its own weather system. (The Patrexes, meanwhile, went on to even greater financial disaster after constructing a son et lumiere portico for their Academy Lodge, which cost more to run in one month than they spent on building it in the first place.) The Panopticon roof had rotated almost completely out of view at last. This had happened twice since the interrogation began. If Vozarti intervened at the right point, about another fortyseven minutes, he calculated, he could complete the interrogation in time to sneak through the admin offices and machine rooms in the base of the Jasdisary while it was neatly aligned with the Panopticon's nearest entrance. That would save him a long trek around the building to the President's office. Even with fast transport, there was once a President who couldn't keep his appointments, and ended up with his final meeting of the day running hours behind. A Time Lord President who couldn't keep time.

The Penansulix Structure was in view now. Beyond it, faintly discernible, hovered the Edifice, a nightmare looming over Gallifrey's horizon.

Another shout from the interrogation suite. This one startled Vozarti, jolted him from his reverie. After one last despairing look at his tooyoung reflection, he turned to stare at the prisoner through the oneway mirrorwall.

The prisoner was shouting with anger. Unusual, after this long. That would turn to shouts of pain soon enough. And yet, as he watched, the prisoner was just becoming more indignant.

Despite the way he was strung between the posts, he was arguing with the Chancellery Guard. Sometimes, his pale eyes would stare towards Vozarti, as though he knew he was being watched, and his words would be addressed to his unseen tormentor.

'You were caught attempting to break into a highsecurity area,' Chancellery Guard Captain Ditrec was telling the prisoner as though this was a major revelation. 'Without authorisation, without requesting permission, and at a time of maximum alert. You're a known subversive and -'

'Yes, yes,' snapped the prisoner. 'So if you've read all my press cuttings, why can't you tell me my name, eh? You have no record of my biodata in the Matrix, or you wouldn't be going through this whole charade. So cut to the chase, why don't you?' He gave a further groan of dismay as Ditrec ratcheted up the power on the equipment. Sparks flew.

Vozarti watched the guard take off his jacket and hang it over a chair. He wondered whether Ditrec would be careful not to get the prisoner's blood on his shirt. At least the red material of the jacket hadn't shown that.

Ditrec sat on the chair, and stared at the prisoner closely. 'Why were you attempting to break into the secured TARDIS cradles if you were not attempting sabotage or theft?'

'How many more times do I have to tell you?' sighed the prisoner. 'I was lost and confused. I can barely remember who I am.' He tossed his head back in an unsuccessful attempt to flick the sweatcaked hair off his forehead. Now he was staring directly at Vozarti, impossibly, through the mirrorwall. He knew he was there. 'Won't you come in and do your own dirty work?'

Ditrec twisted round in his chair to look at where Vozarti was standing. 'Special request, sir?'

Castellan Vozarti sighed despairingly. The guard had no technique. The Castellan waved one hand over the control at waist height, and the oneway mirrorwall dissolved into its constituent particles. He stepped into the room, and brushed Ditrec aside as the guard leapt to attention. 'Idiot.'

'Castellan Vozarti,' Ditrec yelled at him. 'Permission to employ the mind probe, sir!'

'No,' said Vozarti calmly. 'Not the mind probe. And there's no need to shriek at me like that I'm not deaf, you know.' I'm not deaf, you know.'

'No, sir, sorry, sir!' bellowed Ditrec.

The prisoner was smiling broadly. Vozarti wondered if he was on the edge of a grimace. He reached out to touch the pain control, pondering whether to flick it higher.

'Castellan Vozarti,' said the prisoner quickly. 'I think the President should know that I have access to a Type 102 TARDIS.'

Vozarti felt himself go cold. He remembered a series of restricted Council meetings, a number of agreements entered into by the assembled highest of the High Council during the recent crisis, unminuted commitments made to the President by each and every one of them.

He knew at once who the prisoner was.

Vozarti wrenched the pain control around until it hit the end stop.

The hum of power died away as the machine switched off. Despite the prisoner's brave facade, Vozarti noticed, his body visibly relaxed. 'You can leave us now, Ditrec. End of shift for today.'

'Are you sure, sir?' cried the guard from just behind him.

Vozarti winced. 'Yes, that'll be all, Guard Captain. Dismissed.'

Ditrec put his red jacket back on, saluted noisily to Vozarti, and stepped out of the interrogation suite.

Vozarti motioned with his hand and the missing wall reassembled itself, an opaque and soundproof barrier now. Another gesture released the prisoner from his bonds.

Vozarti reached to his own belt and took out his staser. 'A Type 102 TARDIS?' he said quietly. Tell me more, Doctor.'

The Doctor had slumped down on his haunches, and was rubbing life back into his wrists and forearms. 'Do you know what happened to my coat? I'd only just got it.'

'Doctor?'

'I will speak only with the President. You must have realised that.'

Vozarti said, 'I have the authority of the High Council in these matters.'

The Doctor stared up at him defiantly. 'I've waited quite some time for a member of the High Council to deign to visit me here,' he snapped. 'I can wait just as long again until the President arrives. Or you could take me to her that might be more courteous. Romana and I are old friends.'

Vozarti let the unwarranted familiarity slide by, remembering how President Romana had described the Doctor in that secret briefing. 'I understand you are acquainted.' Vozarti gestured one more time, and the wall behind him dissolved again. He took a slow, pensive stroll over to the observation window. Thirtynine more minutes, he thought to himself. 'Very well, Doctor.'

The Doctor was standing beside him. He had recovered his frock coat, and was shrugging it back on. 'You sound reluctant, Castellan. Is it such an impropriety in the power structure for you to do this? After all, it means the Time Lords will learn more about the future of time travel.'

Vozarti tucked the staser back in its holster. 'No, Doctor,' he said, staring out at the last visible edge of the Panopticon dome. 'It's just such a very long walk.'

Chapter Nine.

Message in a bottle

Vice President Timon turned the bottle over for the hundredth time, feeling it tingle on the skin of his long, thin fingers, through his palms and then out across the back of his hands.

Colours swirled over it, illuminated by the stark white light above his desk, an oilslick sheen that fluctuated constantly over the bottle's surface as the contours shifted through time. It was beautiful, if unpredictable. Timon preferred things to be predictable.

On the other side of his desk, through the eddying colours of the bottle, Timon could see three Chancellors Fremest, Branastigert and Djarshar. Djarshar was still talking. Like all Time Lords from the Patrexian College, he was never short of a word, could speak without interruption or pause for breath, and always seemed to know what he was going to say. At least that was appropriate for a Chancellor of Time Future, thought Timon. Yet as Djarshar droned on, he noticed that even Chancellor Fremest's eyes were glazing over at the torrent of words.

'I have another appointment, Chancellor Future,' said Timon, smoothly interjecting his words and emphasising matters with the formal address.

Djarshar's conversation stuttered to a halt. 'I don't think this matter can wait ...' That was when he saw who was coming into the room. 'Oh, well, I see.'

Timon smiled inwardly. No words now, Chancellor Future? Doubtless they would come in time. But he simply said, 'We will talk at the full Council later, Chancellor.' He nodded to Fremest too. 'Chancellor Past.'

Fremest, the Chancellor of Time Past, turned to go. Djarshar did not take this hint to leave.

He was still staring at the newcomer who had arrived with Castellan Vozarti. 'Well, well, Doctor ...'

'Well enough, Djarshar,' said the Doctor, tugging at his green lapels in a futile attempt to straighten his crumpled frock coat. The strain of recent interrogation showed in the marks on his lace. 'You've done well for yourself, I see. I imagine you're just leaving, though, so goodbye.' He strode up to the desk and stood boldly in front of the Vice President. 'You've done well, too, haven't you, Timon? I remember you as a junior time technician, don't I? All bookish study and no practical work in the field. No panache, a bit like that rudimentary Klein bottle you're holding. You're a functionary, Timon. And I said I wanted to speak with Romana. Where is she?'

Timon set the bottle down on the desk, between two neat piles of reports. It bobbed about a little before it decided which parts of itself existed at the same point in time as the desk. 'I am the Vice President, Doctor,' said Timon slowly, deliberately. He allowed himself a lazy look at the Castellan standing at the prisoner's shoulder. 'You would do well to remember your own position.'

He was surprised when the Doctor threw back his head and guffawed.

'Been there, done that, got the Tshirt,' the Doctor laughed. 'I was President of Gallifrey myself, you know. On several occasions.'

'A president doesn't deserve the title until at least a century of service. Maybe even not until his first Reaffirmation,' huffed Fremest. 'Yours was the shortest term of office ever.'

'Not shorter than Greyjan,' interjected Timon. He regretted it immediately. Branastigert, the Chancellor of Parallel Time, was clearing his throat.

'Officially,' Branastigert began, precisely enunciating his words as usual, 'the term of office concludes ...'

Timon was half afraid that Branastigert was about to list a complete history of Time Lord presidents, so he held up his hand for silence.

He did not need to, for the Doctor had interrupted already. 'Pedantic poppycock! You don't need centuries in office: you need centuries of practical experience. I really don't know what all the fuss was about when I was President. And I certainly didn't feel the need for a cohort of Lords Temporal and a secondincommand flunky to do my dirty work.'

'How typical of your college,' snapped Chancellor Djarshar. 'The Prydonians! Renegades, fugitives, lunatics and ingrates. You think Gallifrey owes you everything. And you, Doctor, are the most insolent of all of them.'

'Your President is a Prydonian, is she not?' said the Doctor. That shut Djarshar up at once.

The Doctor placed his palms flat on Timon's desk and stared into him. 'Speaking of the President, I told Castellan Vozarti that I wanted to talk to her.'

'The President,' intoned Chancellor Parallel. 'Really, Doctor, your tone suggests she is nothing more than a function. She is the Lady President, she is the War Queen, she is our Head of States. She is Mistress of the Nine Gallifreys.'

The Doctor smiled. 'I hope she wears a big badge. To get all those titles on it, I mean.'

'I am her Vice President,' said Timon coolly. "The Lady President is unavailable. Preparing for her own Reaffirmation Ceremony. Busy with affairs of state.'