Doctor Who_ The Scarlet Empress Part 11

'But I don't want to know everything! Just the bits I need! I need maps and charts. I need to learn the lie of the land.'

"That knowledge will come in due course.You will, however, learn the lie of this land only. That is all you will learn.'

'That could take months!' The Doctor waved his arms, dismayed. 'Look, I'm a great skimmer. I can get through anything you care to give me at a rate of knots. I skim so fast sometimes I don't even know what I'm reading. Can't you just -'

'I can educate you, as I educate all Fortaliceans. This is how we work.'

'How long does it last?'

'Twenty years.'

'Impossible! Show me your maps.'

'You are a very impatient person.'

'And you,' the Doctor bridled, 'are an impossible man.' He glared at the librarian, who, at last, blinked. 'I see it now,' said the Doctor slowly. 'My impetuosity appals you. YouVe forced yourself to think like every other Fortalicean.You are beholden to a system of understanding the absolute order of things. The ranking of all empirical knowledge.' The Doctor came out of his little trance with a smile, hoping the librarian would be impressed by his surmise.'But you don't really believe that possible, do you?'

'I believe that the knowledge a.s.sembled here is all there is.'

'I can see in your face that you don't.'

'I must,' said the librarian furiously.

'There will always be gaps. There have to be gaps in what is known.

How else can you find out anything new?'

'We don't care for the new here.'

'Ah yes. Another village of torch-bearing monster-baiting killers, all superst.i.tious, all unruly mob-mentality, all misrule and xenophobia.

Splendid.'

'We prosper.'

'I don't doubt it. Just tell me what I need to know.'

The librarian considered.'You are free to... look where you like.'

'I believe the word you want is browse. I am free to browse, to skim, to sample, pluck, rummage, unpick, deconstruct, misread and in general randomly choose what I want from your splendid - if rather limiting -one thousand and one volumes. Is that it?'

'On your own head be it.'

"Thank you,' said the Doctor, and marched off into the main body of the library.

There was no one indoors reading or learning today. No one was being forced to digest, page by page, text after text, the supposed complete knowledge of Fortalice. Really, the whole thing was preposterous. Even given such a systematic, doctrinaire workload, not every Fortalicean would learn the same material. They didn't stand a chance. The Doctor reflected that he himself absorbed only part of what he read, and remembered less. Frayed ends stuck out everywhere, to be picked up and ravelled out on a second, later reading, while the previous a.s.sertions and reflections laded away or attached themselves to other parts of his thinking. No two Fortaliceans could possibly have the same knowledge. Not of this world, or a single body of knowledge. They couldn't read a single sentence in the same way. No one could.

By the time he came to the ranks of bookcases on which the thousand and one volumes were carefully laid, he had the whole enterprise put down - in his own mind, at least - as a patent absurdity.

As was the series of headings under which volumes one to a thousand and one were categorised. He read the white placards aloud: 'The Self, Temporality, the Referential Gap, Ambiguity, Undecidability, Rhetoric, and Objects (Ordered).'

He wondered where he ought to begin. He was tempted to have a nose around the Referential Gap, thinking that perhaps the Fortaliceans were more aware of the problems and lacunae to do with language and knowledge than they were letting on.

But all I want, he thought, is a nice plain map to tell me how to get to Kestheven.

He plucked outAmbiguity , Volume Two and its first sentence ran, 'Should the Forest of Kestheven exist?' It continued: Should the Forest of Kestheven exist it should consist of the following unknowable and unaccountable objects and beings, all of which are outlawed and decried in this realm. It is an entirely fict.i.tious region of deciduous woodlands, and any resemblance to any living and true Fortalicean s.p.a.ce is entirely coincidental. Located some one hundred fathomless miles from the exact centre of this town. This text exists to establish and verify, the plain impossibility, the ludicrous unknowability of Kestheven, by illuminating and ordering every one of its properties and purported essences.

The Doctor hurried over to a stark wooden bench to read.

Sam had chosen four apples from a basket in the market. 'Not those four,' said the sombre-looking woman under an immense sun hat.

"Those four are reserved.'

'They're the same as all the others!' Sam protested, and the woman shook her head.

'You are free to choose from the remaining fruit.' She s.n.a.t.c.hed the four apples away.

Actually, the rest were all bruised and withered-looking. Sam had taken the pick of the bunch. Sighing, she rummaged in the basket.'Who reserves apples?'

'Everyone does,' she was told.

When Sam met up with Gila later, he had bought six plump, scarlet fish.

He carried them wrapped in damp brown paper. Each had a label attached. "They've all got names,' he said, laughing.

'Are all the towns here as weird as this?' Sam asked him.

'Oh, yes,' he said.

As the day advanced the atmosphere thickened and curdled. The air was almost too humid and green to breathe as the storm gathered force and small collectives prepared for the impending fracas in the town's various drinking holes. The Doctor's party went their different ways, attracting stares and mutters. Blithely they got on with their business, but all the while the locals were taking note of them, labelling them as visitors, and letting them go safely, knowing full well that when violence broke out - as it certainly would this afternoon - that the visitors would be taken care of.

Iris had found herself a corner table in a dark, smoky tavern, where a horde of ill-dressed men were getting drunk. Unconcerned, she put her feet up and ordered a thin, noxious, local brew which came to her in a bra.s.s pot, set down unceremoniously by the barmaid, who gave the old woman a scathing look. Iris rolled herself a number of lumpy and tatty cigarettes and coolly surveyed the clientele. She thought about doing so with her camcorder, but thought better of it. Everyone was wearing a s.h.a.ggy fur and an old hat at a rakish angle. Some even wore eyepatches. It had been months since Iris had found herself in such insalubrious company and she got goose-flesh at the thought.

The barmaid was in a sheer blue dress and she came tottering over to Iris to refill her jug of foul wine. She told her.'You have lousy timing, you know.'

'I know,' Iris sighed.

'Visitors here get a hard time any day of the year. Don't you know what today is?' Iris must have looked blank. 'It's the annual brawl. The big fracas. The solst.i.tial fisticuffs in the streets. When everyone with a grudge or a secret niggle against their neighbour comes out to let off steam by laying into whoever they can get their hands on. It's murder out there today.'

'I've never been here before,' said Iris worriedly.

'An old woman like you shouldn't be alone today.'

'I can look after myself.'

'Not when this lot have drunk themselves stupid. Every year it's a bloodbath.'

Iris tutted. She wished she'd come armed.

'It's traditional,' said the woman.

'And they don't even use football as a pretext?'

'I don't follow you.' The barmaid looked impatient, and busily fluffed up her tangle of red hair.'Are you alone here?'

'My friends are all shopping...'

'You'd do well to round them up before it breaks out. And before the Executioner realises you're here.'

Iris drained her wine. 'Executioner? This place doesn't get any more alluring, does it?'

'You've come on the worst possible day.'

'Story of my life,' shrugged his as she opened up the battered carpet bag she'd brought with her, and brazenly stole the bra.s.s wine jug.TU be off, then.'

'For a price,' said the woman,'I could show you a place to hide.'

Faces were watching them now. A low grumble set up around Iris as she wedged herself between backs, heading for the door. 'No thanks, I've got my own -' his stopped. The air around her had become cloying and dark.

She came over all clammy. She was going to be ill again, she realised, used to similar attacks. This was worse than usual and, as she looked back at the barmaid, she felt her knees give out. IVe been drugged, she decided and very carefully said,'I have a double-decker bus all of my own.' Then she pitched head first on to the filthy wooden floor.

All the men in the bar cheered and clapped. The barmaid smirked and briskly wiped down Iris's abandoned table, and then leaned over the old woman's p.r.o.ne bulk to retrieve the wine vessel from her bag.

'You'll get a good price for a visitor,' someone called out to her.

'I'll ask for the body back after the festival,' the woman laughed.'How about we get her stuffed and mounted and hung over the bar?'

More shouts and roars of approval.

The barmaid sent a boy out to tell the Executioner of her prize.

The Doctor was reading about the golden bears that allegedly shaved their priceless fur and lived in thrall to a woman who possessed great necromantic wisdom. The bears of Kestheven supposedly lived in peace in their woodlands, in an apparently grotesque re-enactment of a civilised urban society. All of the above, the Doctor read, was untrue. It was an unsubstantiated fabrication, imposed upon the Fortaliceans by evil dissenting visitors, who also didn't - in any real sense - exist.

It was frustrating work. Whenever he read a paragraph that actually described something concrete, the following one would neatly undermine and dismantle every particle of its truth value. The bears of Kestheven were trimmed into non-being as tidily as they seemingly did away with their own golden fur. The sorceress who ruled them was a fiction also, he learned. At this rate these books would end up convincing him - yes, even him, he thought, glumly - that absolutely nothing existed.

'Are you learning anything to your advantage?'

He looked up to see the librarian standing patiently before him. He grinned, seeing that unmistakable twinkle of curiosity in the man's eyes.

'Lots,' said the Doctor.'I'm only reading the good bits. Not the boring bits about epistemology and truth value.'

The librarian looked shocked. "There needs to be a hierarchy of truths.

Your education will be incomplete.'

'Good!' the Doctor laughed. 'I despise hierarchies. And especially hierarchies of truths. I like to make my own mind up, and that's what I intend to do with the Forest of Kestheven. As far as I'm concerned, everything is as true as anything else, until I see it with my own eyes.

And even then there's still room for doubt.' He stood up.'See? I'll believe anything. I'm entirely, entirely credulous.'

'A fool.'

'Perhaps. But I want to meet these golden bears and their necromantic queen.'

'You can't. They don't exist.'

'I think they do.You can't always believe what you read in books, you know.'

'You can believe in everything you read here. We describe these hypothetical creatures only to deny their possibility.'

'Yes, and I'm going to meet them.' He closed Volume Two ofAmbiguity with a resounding bang.'See if I don't. What's your name?'

'Gharib.'

'Shall I bring back a lock of golden hair to prove them to you?'

Gharib tutted and started to move away. Perhaps, he thought, the Doctor was dangerous.

'On Earth,' the Doctor said, 'a world whose existence I am sure you have a volume to refute, there once lived the last man to have read every book then in circulation. He was called Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his keeping up with everything never did him much good. Not as far as I could see. He kept filling asleep, dreaming and forgetting his poems. He was the last of that type. The last genuine universal expert. Everyone else, I am afraid, is a pretender to that state.' He straightened his green jacket.'I'm going now.'

'You've finished already?'

'I know everything I need to know.'

When the Doctor started to walk back to the main doors the librarian became fl.u.s.tered and - as expected - called him back.

'I will show you the maps. They're up in the tower.'

The Doctor turned to him.'I knew you'd succ.u.mb to my charm.'

Gharib's shoulders were slumped. 'They would punish me for showing you. Maps are hated here. We aren't meant to look at them.'

'You aren't meant to broaden your horizons, I suppose?'

'Not just that.' Gharib led him to an alcove, where stone steps led upward in a narrowing spiral. 'A complete, finished map of the world would be absolute knowledge to be undermined and categorically refuted. But maps are never complete, nor fully accurate. They cannot be. A map is an admission of knowledge's defeat. Something always slips the cartographer's notice. A map is always provisional. A map is a celebration of the provisional, if you like.' Gharib looked feverishly excited as he recounted this heresy. 'It is a record of the widening, boundless world, of the fusion of the known and the yet-to-beknown.

That is why we are meant to hate maps here.'

'Personally,' said the Doctor, following him happily up the tower's smooth steps,'I rather like them.'

By mid-afternoon Gila and Sam had finished loading the bus with the provisions they would need for a couple of weeks. The produce - especially the strange-looking vegetables - was poor and sickly looking.