Doctor Who_ The Blue Angel Part 16

Her old woman's body looked so much thinner than I expected under all those layers.

She stood on the welcome mat and I hardly knew where to look.

At least the alcohol had soothed the pain in my leg a little.

And it made me less likely to wonder what the neighbours would say about a naked grandmother leaving my house this time of night.

'Why don't you try it?' she grinned rakishly. 'Cast off your Edwardian finery, Doctor?'

And before I knew it, she was helping me off with my green velvet coat and my waistcoat.

I was folding up my moleskin trousers and pulling off my cravat. We were giggling like school children. Off flew my shoes and my socks. She stood back as I shucked the rest of my things and folded them neatly. I looked up blus.h.i.+ng and she smiled.

At last we were ready.

She opened the front door and let in the freezing night. Up came my goose pimples. She turned to smile at me again, still egging me on.

I was covering up my nakedness with both hands and then decided, oh, hang it and strode out after her.

The cold drew us out of the house and the door slammed behind us with a resounding note of finality.

Here we were, ploughing through the snow.

Suddenly, gloriously free.

'See?' she said. 'Don't you wish you'd done this before?'

We walked into the park.

Strange how warm I started to feel.

She stopped and looked down at my leg.

She was staring at my swollen calf muscle.

It was quite a sight.

The flesh stretched obscenely.

'Something is growing in there,' she said, simply.

'That's what I've been thinking.'

'It needs letting out.'

'How?'

I thought she was mad.

Then I realised how mad I must be, to come out with her like this in the night.

She reached up into the branches of the dark tree next to us.

She snapped off the sharpest, most jagged icicle she could see.

'What are you doing?'

She bent with a grunt, at my feet. She seized my leg.

'Iris...'

And before I knew it, she had plunged the diamondsharp icicle into the flesh.

I watched, curiously detached, as the scarlet blood ran freely straight on to the blue snow.

There was an instant release from the pain.

She murmured, tearing open the swollen muscle, and my flesh inside looked like peach flesh, parting neatly down to the clean pit of the bone.

And there, nestling in the warm meat, was a tiny blue body.

She touched it and it moved slightly.

It started to make a noise.

Iris tugged at the tiny creature inside my leg and, with one deft movement, tugged it free.

There was a slight sucking noise as it came away.

Then it was in her hands.

'He comes from the Enclave,' she said. 'A s.p.a.ce filled with corridors in which he was free. A s.p.a.ce between two worlds. He has to stay free to move between worlds.'

I clasped my leg.

'We'd better get you home. And I can st.i.tch that leg,' she said. 'I'm a dab hand.'

The wound wasn't so bad.

I was just glad it was over.

I wanted to know what she was holding in her hands.

She showed me.

She opened both palms to reveal the tiny thing lying there.

It was a very small baby boy, all of blue.

As he dried in her elderly skin, his wings were shaking loose and fledging out.

I didn't know what to say.

She stepped back and held her hands aloft.

'Off you go,' said Iris quietly.

And the blue boy ruffled his wings experimentally.

As both Iris and I watched, breathless, my child took off and soared up into the black sky.

Twenty Questions

1. Was it completely fitting that Belinda was transformed into a giant squid, thras.h.i.+ng her newly granted tentacles as the captain of her s.h.i.+p stormed into the throne room on Valcea?

2. Or was it an ad hoc, impromptu, arbitrary change of form, perpetrated by a Daedalus embittered by his own metamorphosis, a Daedalus who laughed aloud in glee as Captain Blandish informed the a.s.sembled rabble that they were all about to die?

3. Or was it all to do with Belinda's eventual, heroic status as commanderinchief of the defending armies on the frontier water worlds during the final push that the worlds of the Obverse made on the Enclave, and was she destined to find a new element?

4. And did Blandish's personalised weapon really go off as devastatingly as he had planned, destroying what remained of the throne room at the heart of the City of Gla.s.s?

5. Or did it merely set off a bizarre and unforeseeable chain reaction which splintered and shattered the transdimensional Corridors, causing them to mutate beyond anybody's wildest dreams?

6. And did those fractured conduits open up even further complex channels into known and unknown universes, so that even more s.p.a.ces were jeopardised and even more races were sucked ineluctably into the b.l.o.o.d.y fray?

7. And was it so unforeseeable? Did Daedalus already know that the captain of the Nepotist Nepotist was bound to seek to detonate his secreted device? Did Daedalus set the whole plan in motion, everything dependent on Blandish's incendiary internal organ? was bound to seek to detonate his secreted device? Did Daedalus set the whole plan in motion, everything dependent on Blandish's incendiary internal organ?

8. Did Daedalus rule supreme in the chaos and did he lord it over the ravening hordes?

9. How did he deal with the first new arrivals the first being, naturally, the Daleks who entered the s.p.a.ce of contention, the threshold between thesis and ant.i.thesis bristling, buzzing, swivelling with fury?

10. Did the Steigertrudes and Ghillighast, led by Emba united with Meisha, form an army between them to defend the Enclave and maintain its fragile integrity?

11. At what point did the Doctor arrive?

12. And in which incarnation?

13. Was it really several, as many sources claim, and was it a tale as the legends have it?

14. Did Iris forge an alliance between Cyber factions and insect races and lead an a.s.sault on the homeworld of the first of the unknown races to emerge, hungry, from the Obverse?

15. Did Iris ensure that the earlier, merely eighth, Doctor was safely out of the way, on purpose?

16. Did she know what a can of worms had been opened?

17. Had she already been there and seen the outcome?

18. Did she live, like Merlin, backwards through time?

19. In the end, did she remove her Doctor, because she knew what must eventually become of him, or simply because she couldn't bear to see him there on the battlefield again, again, again and over again?

20. Did she want to prevent her Doctor from seeing what really did happen next?

paul magrs and jeremy hoad norwich, spring 1999