'What could you see?'

Kristeva closed his torn eyelids carefully, exhausted by his limited projection on to the planet of their enemies. The planet of their victims. 'I sensed the virus taking hold of him. I could commune for only a short time.'

From the corner, he could hear a long hiss of satisfaction. 'No matter. The body of Faction will join us soon. We shall perform the rituals together, and we will be stronger. Stronger than the Time Lords. Do you know the creature called Compassion, Uncle?'

Kristeva nodded, but did not open his eyes. 'I knew her before she was first remembered, when she was still known as Tobin.'

'She shall be ours again, Uncle. And this thing of bone, too, this Edifice. And then ...'

Kristeva heard Mother Mathara give another great sigh of anticipation. 'It will be quite a reunion, Uncle.'

Second Interlude Know your enemy He's made it inside the closed library undetected; his body has been reengineered so often he barely recognises it himself, so he is not surprised the security systems fail to do so.

All remains quiet in the hushed vaults of the library. The carpet is thick and soft to absorb every footfall, every movement that might disturb the reverent atmosphere. He moves along it silent as a cat, sticking to the shadows of the towering shelves and statues.

He knows his story begins with shadows his hero, the Doctor, lost his shadow in the days before the Event. The Event is the moment the war began, buried beneath billions of years of history toppling in on itself. And yet, somewhere in the library, he senses that strand of history still protruding from the rubble, like a hand reaching out from chaos for something sure to hold.

He finds something similar now himself: a data terminal, a means of access. He pauses for a moment, glancing about him to check this part of the library is deserted, then walks to the terminal. He pushes the clumsy user interface and eyeboard to one side, staring instead directly into the shining crystal lens. He feels laser light snap on behind the connection screen, probing his retina. Then he's inside, and with shadows still looming over him he finds even without trying that he is summoning data retrieval on Faction Paradox.

The Faction stole shadows. The Faction stole time. What started as a group of disenchanted spiritualists on Gallifrey who celebrated the power of the individual's biodata over the socalled laws of time became a cult dedicated to chaos and destruction of all kinds. The Faction's ambition grew with their numbers and with their strength. They forced themselves to see patterns in the universe that the earliest Time Lords had glimpsed and shied away from for their sanity's sake. Yet he is unsure as the data floods over him if they held their beliefs so sacred that they would sacrifice all in their name. Or whether their beliefs altered as the patterns wore into their minds, changing them, and reality, for ever.

Grandfather Paradox, the most revered and sacred figure in the Faction's religion, backed himself out of creation to prove the naivete of the riddle be stood for, that is what is whispered. The Grandfather showed that a man can go back in time and kill his own ancestor, that a man can do anything be likes if he's powerful enough. If he keeps watching the patterns.

Though the patterns swimming by his own eye are simple and harmless, he feels a moment's guilty kinship with the Grandfather. He is shocked by the clarity of knowledge here in the system, knows his presence here risks summoning forces from the future to destroy it in reprisal for his escape.

He will be missed. How long can he have?

He is sifting through chapters and footnotes, casual references and indepth studies. Then he finds data so old and pure he nearly laughs out loud in surprise. It is only a few lines of information, a tiny taste of what must be a newly discovered book a relic so ancient and delicate its knowledge remains bound indelibly in parchment and skin, awaiting a more comprehensive reinterpretation by technology.

The Faction heartland endures an endless eleven days in conceptual space. Exploiting a calendrical anomaly, a legal loophole in the laws of sidereal time, a Shadow Parliament presides over the universe like the unkindness of ravens beyond its walls, clattering and swooping over the feeding grounds. The Speaker's seat remains empty until the Grandfather will claim it, until ...

The ancient book's open pages seem to slam shut on him as the fragment ends. He is dazed for a moment, and his link into the datacore shuts down. He cannot revive it. The crystal lens is opaque and blank now, like the bottom of a bottle. No pattern disturbs its surface.

He must seek the book itself. He hurries from the shadows into the dull light of the main concourse, trying to stay calm, to feel his way to the text he needs. He fears he will be missed.

Chapter Twelve.

Great minds

It had been a mistake to tag along, led by his loins instead of by logic. And now there was no way back. All Fitz could do was watch the delectable Tarra expertly manipulating a mass of connections in a tornoff access panel as she broke into the Capitol's main computer.

She hadn't called it that, of course. She'd given it some complex jargon name, like 'Amplified Panasonic Network', but she might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense it made to him. All he knew was that it all seemed a bit odd for a girl like Tarra, who (he had learned from Ressadriand) was the daughter of some highranking local statesman.

What would this High Councillor do about the light of his life hacking into the computer?

Smacked wrists and no allowance for a week, he imagined.

'Why have you brought me here?' Fitz asked. She didn't look up from her work. Perhaps if he provoked her she'd respond. "That guy Eton fancies you. Why didn't you buy him a ticket instead of me?'

Tarra gave a short laugh. "That wet fish? Eton is the Castellan's son. He might make a lot of noise about the need for an alternative order, but it's all just a game to him.' She favoured Fitz with a bold look. 'This would be too real for him. Are you excited, Fitz?'

Fitz gulped. OK, OK, he told himself, you're a resistance fighter burrowing into the German HQ. There's a gun in your pocket, a radio in your hand, and a cyanide pill under your tongue.

Allons, enfants! Courage, man brave! 'Er ...' His shoulders sagged. 'Well, it's all a bit real for me too, actually.'

Tarra turned back to her work. 'You were frightened by that image on the Visualiser. Don't be. You have it in you to be a great and brave man.'

'You know who that was? Who ... who I'll be?'

Tarra changed the subject. 'Eton could have helped us here, of course. He used to work for his father, when he was a student. So his biodata still provides access to the APCN.

Fortunately ...'

She opened her palm to reveal a clump of curly brown and grey hairs. The handful she'd pulled out of the back of Eton's head when she snogged him at the seance!

As Fitz considered this, Tarra crouched over and seemed to heave. Fitz squeezed forward to help her, worried that she was about to be sick. Instead, she hawked up a disgustingly glutinous sniff, and spat into her palm. Fitz pondered whether he might be sick himself at this point. Red blood mixed with the hairs.

'Ugh,' observed Fitz helpfully. 'Yuk. Oh ... er ... urn ... are you OK, Tarra?'

She was entirely unmoved by the repulsive sight. 'Eton's biodata,' she repeated, 'do pay attention.'

Oh God, thought Fitz. She'd bitten Eton's lip, too. Drawn blood. But that was Tarra slapped her palmful of grobbedup biodata on to a device she'd attached to the computer. The computer obligingly hummed and whirred into new life. "There we are,' she said with a satisfied sight. 'We have access to the Matrix.'

'You can tell me what the Matrix is, of course.'

She filled the dark chamber with her bright smile. 'It's a distillation of the minds of the great and good who have died, and all those who have ever held office. All the past Councillors, Lords Temporal and Presidents are here. The High Council defer to them on all things. The collected wisdom of the ages, ossified in this archaic system.'

'They program it before they die?'

'No Fitz. They become it when they die. They join it, and thus they keep their dead hands on the tiller of the ship of state.'

Fitz thought back to his communist friends on Earth, like JinMing. He could see Tarra fitting right in, quoting The Thoughts of Chairman Mao and waving her little red book with the best of them. 'So, this computer is keeping their brains in a jar.'

Tarra laughed at this. 'Not that most of them were worth keeping. Except for Rassilon the Great, I suppose, and Torkal the Great. And Greyjan the Sane, of course.

Fitz laughed too. 'So Greyjan wasn't so great, eh?'

Tarra's smile snapped off like a popped bulb. 'Don't mock, Fitz. This is too important.'

Fitz acted braver than he felt. 'Come on, this is all for Kellen's big joke, isn't it? That's what you made out before we left.'

'Kellen's another rich boy acting bad. But he's right about one thing: he can capitalise on the Edifice's presence, and play this prank on the High Council. That'll make more of a spectacle than their stupid Reaffirmation Ceremony. With what we get from this breakin here, Kellen can present the High Council with a fakedup recreation of Greyjan.'

'And Greyjan would be ...?'

Tarra's beatific smile had returned. 'Why, the great Sage of Paradox, of course.'

'Of course.'

'Paradoxically back from his own grave.' She sounded distant now, as though she was losing herself in some other world. Fitz imagined her being sucked down into the computer systems as her voice faded. 'Imagine Greyjan, returning to confront those rationalist sceptics on the High Council, and preaching doom and disaster.'

Hilarious, thought Fitz. And I thought the previous party was insane. 'So we grab some dead guy's details from this Matrix,' he said carefully. 'Sounds like a fancy kind of grave robbing.'

'Mmmm,' said Tarra dreamily. Fitz wondered if she'd heard him at all.

'So, what can you see?' asked Fitz. It was like watching his mate Ronnie dropping a tab, and listening to him struggle to find words to describe the neverbeforeexperienced sounds and colours.

'Ohhh,' said Tarra throatily. "That's unusual. Most unexpected.'

'Do tell,' said Fitz tartly.

'Most of the biodata is from the dead, you see. Or the occasional sample from the current High Council. But here's a very rare example an exPresident who left office and who is still alive. I didn't expect to find him.'

Fitz was unimpressed. 'Was he a Great as well, then?'

'Remains to be seen,' said Tarra quietly. 'I should have remembered, I suppose, that I might stumble across the Doctor.'

This certainly got Fitz's attention. 'Did you say ... the Doctor?'

'Mmm,' said Tarra, smiling, her eyes closed as the data swam past her eyes. 'He was the four hundred and seventh and the four hundred and ninth President of Gallifrey.'

For a moment, Fitz just nodded, impressed with this feat of the Doctor's. Then the penny dropped. And he was listening so carefully now he could hear it from a mile away.

Gallifrey.

They were on the Doctor's home planet, Gallifrey. The people who would do anything to seize him, the Doctor and Compassion.

Bloody hell. Could he be any further up the creek?

'You really don't like me, do you, Doctor?' Mali was curious, rather than offended.

'Please don't interrupt. If I'm to get into the Matrix without overwriting all my previous biodata, I need to concentrate here.

Mali continued to stare at the back of his neck. 'What have you got against me?'

The Doctor looked away from the Panatropic Bypass Relay. She felt his gaze rake her from head to toe. 'I hardly know you, so I really can't judge.'

'You're not exploiting your "elite Gallifreyan research team". Not even a token involvement.

I have several degrees in temporal engineering. And I know how to make tea.' She waggled her empty cup at him.

The Doctor resumed his work, changing the access controls with a delicate adjustment of his sonic screwdriver and a small piece of wellchewed bubble gum. 'I just don't approve of the company that you keep.'

Mali considered the two Chancellery Guards, who were lounging on the far side of the Matrix Room with a determinedly bored air. "They're mostly harmless. Tragdorvigandorvigan and Klenchron are good men, Doctor.'

'It wasn't them I was thinking of ... Aha! We're in.'

'If I judged people by appearances the way you obviously do, I'd assume you were an indolent postgrad student who flunked discontinuity physics three times before scraping a pass.'

The Doctor narrowed his eyes at her. 'All right, so you've got access to the Academy records.

That doesn't mean I'm going to let your colleague there stick his head in here.' He fussed around with the controls he had devised, and started strapping them to his own head.

Mali bristled. 'You really should use our expertise, Doctor.'

The Doctor paused, one hand poised in midair, a connector wire a centimetre from his forehead. "This is a complex fractal interface with a nonreal pseudoenvironment, not the Number TwentyTwo bus to Putney Common. I'll need to have a little dig around in the Matrix for any remains of my earlier visits there. I think I might recognise them a little more easily than you. You don't need a doublestarred degree in temporal physics for that.'

'You're looking for untainted biodata to work with?' Mali hunkered down close to the Doctor. She could see he was screwing up his eyes tightly. 'Are you OK?'

'It's just ...' He gritted his teeth, as though trying to block the world out. He looked as if a wave of pain was surging through his every fibre. 'I need to do this before the virus takes full control.'

Mali waited until the wave seemed to break and crash, until the Doctor's tense shoulders slumped in relief. She patted him on the arm, and then started to attach the wires to his forehead and temples. 'All right, let's get you in there, Doctor.'

She admonished herself silently. Don't get too friendly. You're here to do a job. Get him through it, get the information, get out. Even so, she couldn't help feeling a little sorry for the renegade as he struggled with the virus. And he had made an interesting job of bypassing the usual Matrix replication protocols.

The Doctor's body suddenly became rigid. At first Mali thought he was fighting the virus again, but then she recognised the initial spasm as the Matrix absorbed the conscious mind of the person connecting in to it. Within a few seconds, he had slumped awkwardly to one side.

Mali supported his limp torso to prevent it falling. She clutched his wrist, her fingers probing for a pulse.

The Doctor was so inert that Mali was startled when his clear, confident voice said, 'Well, this is jolly interesting. They haven't tidied up much since I was last here.'

He was able to speak to her, yet she knew he must be deeply immersed in the Matrix. His handiwork on the access controls was certainly remarkable, she conceded.

She beckoned for one of the guards to come across and listen, which he did with evident reluctance.

'How can he do this, Klenchron?' she asked. 'He's surfacing part of his conscious mind while still within the APC Net.'

'You're supposed to be the expert,' grumbled Klenchron.

Mali shook her head in admiration. 'It's extraordinary.'

'Thank you very much,' said the Doctor. 'Perhaps we will make a good team after all, Mali.

You really have got a good postgraduate degree in parallax theory, haven't you? And lots of useful subsidiary subjects in your first and second degrees. And you like gardening. That's nice. And you've been on active service. Oh, dear, yes, you've been in the military for some time, haven't you?'

His lips were set in a grim line. His eyelids were closed, but beneath them the eyes were swivelling in their sockets as though he was looking wildly around.

'How do you know all this?' said Mali. 'Madam President did not say that she had briefed you ...'