supply. Certainly, he was pretty sure he had been smelling
wonderful roses since he had come aboard. The awful fate of
Pangloss was no longer the main topic of conversation.
Bingo and Hari were not the only bachelors looking
forward to the joys of matrimony. Even W.G. Grace had
trimmed her magnificent chin topiary and was eyeing a tall
and handsome running fielder, David Saint Roberts, who
had paid her the compliment of saying she was probably the
greatest all-rounder since Myfanwy Bannarji, the legendary
Whistling Whacker of Haverford West, an obscure planet
in the Murgatroyd system, since carried off by a powerful
pumper and sold for scrap.
Elsewhere the lads of both teams were all taking advantage
of Gargantua' s many entertainments and were getting along
famously. The rival teams were on excellent terms and the
many other passengers, most of whom were travelling to
attend the Terraphile Renaissance Re-Enactments, were in
various states of happy anticipation. Only one Panglossian
remained awake after a week in space. The others had elected
for a light cryosleep. The Gargantua was a happy ship again.
If space liners could smile, whistle and snap cheerful fingers
then there was no doubt that the massive ship would soon
be doing the hoochie coochie as she slipped magnificently
through the star lanes.
The Doctor, although frequently turning his thoughts
to the various mysteries engaging him, was determined to
enjoy himself while he could. He discovered that he had
an aptitude for nutcracking that would almost certainly
advance his team's chances in the coming games. His archery
skills had been honed and he was presently concentrating on
the subtleties of jousting. The joust was perhaps the hardest
aspect of Tournamenting because it involved the 'iron mule',
an extremely hard seat and a two-stroke 'Wasp' engine which
was inclined to spray hot oil whenever it got overexcited. He
made the most of all these pastimes in the sure knowledge
that, the nearer they came to Miggea, the tougher things
were going to get.
Even Mr and Mrs Banning-Cannon were enjoying the
trip. The tycoon had found a bar where he could hobnob
with fellow captains of industry, and Mrs B-C had found the
ship's milliner, whom she considered something more than
a mere Diana-in-waiting. She felt a little as Prince Lobkowicz
must have felt when he realised he had become Beethoven's
patron. She was undoubtedly a patron to Genius. Mr Toni
Woni had a splendid way with hats. He was a natural. Not
only had he completely recreated and indeed improved her
stolen and recovered chapeau, he had made her several new
hats which, he was forced to admit to himself, were his finest
creations.
This was not surprising. Just as Leonardo needed his Medicis
and Borgias, so had Toni been awaiting his own particular
muse and patron. Together they talked brims, crowns, veils,
buttons, bows and bands and every evening Toni retired
to his studio to work. Never thoroughly appreciated until
now, he flourished. Where he had been admired, now he
was worshipped. And so he bloomed. Felt, lace and feathers
came to fresh life at his touch. The spirit of his household
goddess, Donna Coco Colombino, imbued him with fresh
inspiration every morning as he woke to accept his breakfast
tray. Mrs Banning-Cannon was inexhaustible on the subject
of boaters, fedoras, pork pies and bowlers. Toni had but to name an obscure hatter of history to find she knew all about them,
including Dr Lock St James, inventor of the Piccadilly topee
and Fly-in-Squatt, the infamous Mad Hatter of Fleet Street
who had designed the gruesome de-cap-i-tator.
The great matriarch felt she had at last discovered a true
fellow spirit. And, what was more, she was a very generous
fellow spirit, her coffers apparently unlimited, her mighty
head always ready to accept fresh decor. If she were not a
natural, capable of carrying the most elaborate summer
gainsborough to the simplest formal pillbox, she would have been in danger of becoming something of a butt of the other
women's disdain; but there was no getting away from it, she
was a woman who could wear a hat in a world where that
she appeared at a friendly between the Gentlemen and the
Tourists, her inventive Colonel Jack tricorne became the centre
of attention, at least until the match started, and there was
scarcely a dowager or a debutante who did not yearn to learn
the great lady's way with a mop or a tiara.
Well aware of this, Enola Banning-Cannon was content.
All previous upsets and disappointments were forgotten.
She was setting the tone. She was leading the pack. She was
establishing her milliner not merely as Diana's equal but as
her superior. There was scarcely a woman aboard who was
not a trendsetter in her own circle and acknowledged Mrs
B-C as mistress of mistresses. Mr Toni Woni had it, as his
chief trimmer reminded him almost daily, well and truly
made.
If a ship could radiate peace, love and happiness, then the
Gargantua was pumping the stuff out into the near-vacuum
and covering every passing planet with joy, leaving the
suns and the moons singing 'I'm aitch ay pee pee wy' at full
volume. So immensely H-A-P-P-Y was that enormous liner
that she might have had the whole galaxy yodelling and
tap-dancing by the termination of her cruise, had she been
permitted by Fate. But Fate, who never misses the chance to
slip a bluebottle into the Vaseline, had other plans.
Out near the Sagittarius Schwarzschild Radius, a storm
was brewing, created by forces which had always been
there but were now growing increasingly less stable as they
shifted in and out of their own space-time continua, making
a very dangerous place in which to know perfect bliss. Even
the captain, a Polynuraied and therefore naturally given
to anticipating the darkest and most unlikely dangers,
was whistling as he checked his autopilots and supervised
his incredibly intelligent and well-programmed bots. He
repeated jokes told him at his table the previous evening
(they were rather lost on the bots) and made remarks such
as 'It's going to be a very pretty evening' when his second
officer, Mr TrYr'r an insectoid Bruzh of an equally gloomy
disposition, sat down with him to enjoy their afternoon tea.
Designed, as her architect had put it, to 'calm and relax the
customer at every turn', the Gargantua was pulling out all
the stops as far as helping her passengers forget the shadows
lying in her wake.
It would be an exaggeration to describe that gorgeous
liner as 'doomed' but it is fair to say that, within the next
few thousand par sees, she was going to find herself in some
pretty thick and steaming soup.
It began to dawn on the Doctor that he was und
er the
influence of the Gargantua's reassuring spell when, settling
back into the comfort of his specially programmed armchair
and sipping a cooling drink, he sighed contentedly and said:
'Well, I have to say it looks as if the worst could be behind
us.'
Hearing himself speak, he knew he should have at the
very least crossed his fingers.
Awakened by the alarms from the control room, Captain
Snarri bundled out of bed, hastily climbed into his uniform
and hurried at once to where the bots were processing the
information.
Mr TYrYr was already there, spraying his facetted eyes
with pep fizz.
'Show the captain what's up, lads.'
The bots indicated the screens they had materialised for
him. 'Storms ahead, sir. Moving into all quadrants.'
Captain Snarri coughed and accepted the Vortex Water
his steward, the twin-headed Lio Jir Kahpeth, offered him.
He and Mr Tr'r'r'r were both used to storms and invariably
found the means of taking the ship around them. The first
rule on a G-class M&S was never to disturb the passengers.
Captain Snarri noted some peculiar fluctuations in his
bank of barometers, designed to register the slightest changes
in the weather and anticipate their likely effect on the areas of
space through which they intended to pass. This was unusual.
They were surrounded by the storm. There was no avenue
open to them. They were going to have to go through.
With a deep sigh he had the bots plot the best course.
Except there was no best course. The storm was fierce
and implacable, streaming from the direction they planned
to take. The spattering of galaxies was obscured by what
might have been heaving waves of black smoke. That smoke
was already coiling around the forward hull, clinging to the
complicated filigree, spreading across the observation ports.
In a moment the Doctor arrived, pulling on his jacket.
'Oops,' he said, craning forward. 'I think I've seen this before.'
He drew closer. 'In fact, I know I've seen it before.'
This was the same phenomenon he had spotted from the
bridge of the water tanker when they were much closer to
the Rim than they were now. He had an unhappy feeling that
things were getting worse.
'So what do we do, Doctor?' The captain was used to
moving through some of the worst fluctuations the void could
offer. He took another pull on his Vortex Water. Although he
commanded a luxury liner, he had a great deal of experience
and knew how to remain cool through any circumstances in
which he found himself. The rest of his staff were arriving
now. He indicated the information which was now coming
in rapidly. 'Any point in warning the passengers?'
'I think there is.' The Doctor fingered his chin. 'They need
to know. It could get a bit rough.'
The ship was falling into a well of darkness, flying entirely
by her instruments. All that could be seen of the outside was
the occasional flash of light as the blackness sagged open to
reveal clusters of stars, miniature galaxies pouring ahead of
them so that the Doctor realised for the first time that they
were not being drawn into the gravitational systems but were
being forced through them. Something was pushing them
back away from their destination. Not pulling them down
towards the black hole at the centre of their galaxy, as he had
thought, but drawing them out to the Rim, to the unknown
regions of intergalactic space. How could that be?
Pulling on her big red sweater, Amy entered the now dark
control room. 'I thought everything was all right?'
There came a shuddering blow to the hull. Another.
And another.
It felt as if a giant dampened hammer were repeatedly
striking the ship. The captain cleared his throat and spoke
calmly to the passengers via the internal V.
'Sorry you're being disturbed, folks. Just a spot of
turbulence. We expect to be through it very soon now.'
The ship's alarm systems began to scream as the Gargantua
was tossed up and down, turning from side to side. Amy
grasped the Doctor as the nearest thing she could cling to.
'This is like the last time. Only worse. I thought you said this
ship was unsinkable - or whatever a spaceship is. Not like
the Titanic, I hope. Oh God - what is that stink?'
The smell of candyfloss, cloyingly sweet and chemically
flavoured, came and went and now something pale blue
fading to a paler green was filling up the control room like
foam. Surprisingly she could still breathe, but she could no
longer see the Doctor.
She was in her police uniform, running for the TARDIS.
She was in the high-street beauty parlour wondering how
to tell them she didn't like their cut. She was in the TARDIS,
reading an Agatha Christie. She was getting ready to go to
sleep. She was running across a limestone pavement in the
Yorkshire Dales and there was a pack of woad-painted Iceni
coming after her. When had this happened? She couldn't
remember. Now she was sitting at a desk, writing. Now she
was outside the spaceship, this spaceship, the Gargantua.
The plumber was lecturing her on the proper maintenance
of her hot-water heater and she was a creature of air and
darkness slipping somehow through a gap in the hull which
only she could see or use. She was big. An undine as big as
the universe and able to see galaxy after galaxy after galaxy
all streaming towards an invisible source of gravity. A super-
massive, infinitely tiny presence, smaller and heavier than
any black hole at the centre of any single galaxy. She realised
this presence was the nucleus and everything else was moving
according to its extraordinary density, its immeasurable
gravity. And suddenly she was heavy, too, watching as she
spun clusters of galaxies in her gigantic hands, blew out the
flames and the heat of suns, made chains of white dwarf stars
and played bowls with quasars until she sat under a tree in a
park, perhaps in Africa, as lazy lions licked their chops and
moved their heads to show they were ignoring her.
She was a soldier in Afghanistan, desperately trying to
reach cover as she crawled from her wrecked tank. She was a
little girl, an old lady and suddenly, after millennia, herself,
her own age, and still the huge ship bucked and rocked and
spun like a stick being thrown from hand to hand. And she
realised that 'size' was an illusion, that it did not matter how
big or heavy or fast anything was, it was all relative, for the
multiverse around her only got smaller and smaller in some
directions, bigger and bigger in others and that she had just
as much effect on this quasi-infinite environment as a sentient
being a fraction of her size or someone living in a universe
vastly bigger than this one.
She understood that it had something to do with
self-similarity. Her actions affected every aspect of the
multiverse, were echoed on every plane, every alternative.
Whatever danger threatened them now would threaten them
everywhere. These other universes were no more independent
of the presence to which they were drawn than her Earth was
independent of the sun. It had nothing to do with size. If she
pushed, the whole multiverse responded. If she slept in this
aspect of herself then she probably slept in all other aspects.
And how many were there? Millions? Billions? Probably. But
was this also true of the Doctor who she could see now doing
something with his sonic screwdriver?
The ship divided and became many ships, each one a
fraction bigger than the next. Each one containing an Amy,
but not a Doctor. Where was he? Was he independent of the
multiverse? The only one of his kind?
This made sudden sense.
Something began to come clear in her head as the ship's
captain took hold of her arm.
'Are you all right, Miss?'
He had interrupted her at the very point of understanding.
She rounded on him angrily.
But he had become the tall French guy she met on holiday
and it was impossible for her to tell him off. 'I was trying to
do a sum...'
A sickening groan erupted from the middle of the ship and
it began to bend. Everywhere people were screaming. The
screams became a bleating alarm and suddenly the control
room was full of passengers struggling into the emergency
suits they found in their cabins.
Again the captain was shouting at her. Telling her to go
back to her room. Go back and put on her suit, prepare to
get in the lifeboats, but before she could do that the hull
straightened out, though they were still bound by the black
ropes and rearing waves of the intergalactic tsunami.
The Doctor was also not wearing a suit. Grabbing her arm
he supported her on his shoulder and helped her back to
their cabins. The ship was roaring, squealing, scraping at the
fabric of the cosmos. Every so often the black clouds parted
to reveal streaming galaxies, their light leaving strange trails,
almost like handwriting, across the captive stars, able to
behave only as the tsunami demanded.
'Are we breaking up, Doctor?'
'We're very strong. Should be able to withstand a time
storm.'
'Is that what we're in?'
'Something worse. I'm not sure. But when the time currents