Chapter Nine

Galileo and the Doctor trudged up the stairs to Galileo's door, trailing water behind them as they went. Galileo was still carrying the buckled remains of the Doctor's spyglass, while the Doctor had his amazing boat beneath his arm, folded into a bundle of fabric.

"When I was twenty-nine," Galileo muttered, "I went for a ride in the country with some friends. We ended up at Costozza which, if you've never been there, is well worth avoiding. Its only saving grace is the wine they make. Strong? It's enough to strip the varnish off a violin." He glanced across at the Doctor, who was plodding on, weary and bedraggled, but there was no sign that the Doctor was listening.

"We stayed with a well-known member of the legal profession who had a villa there. It was the height of summer: the ground was baked harder than a biscuit and the air shimmered wherever you looked. Even the grass had turned brown. We drank enough wine to float a warship, and I passed out near to a crack in the ground." He shook his head at the memory of his youthful foolishness. "Not that I realized at the time, but there was a breeze coming out of that crack that had been cooled by an underwater spring. When I woke up, I'd contracted a chill. They had to carry me back to Padua in a litter. Soon after that I found I couldn't move my arm without it feeling like there was ground glass in the joint."

Raising his hand, he looked at the swollen knuckles, turning the hand over and back as they climbed.

"'Arthritis', said Girolamo Fabricio. He was my doctor. One of my doctors, anyway. I could have told him I had arthritis. In fact, I did tell him. What I wanted to know was what I should do about it but, like all doctors, he knew all the answers except for the ones I wanted." Galileo suddenly realized that they were standing in front of his door. He fumbled at the lock for a few moments, and they staggered into his rooms. "If that one moment of stupidity cost me years of ill health," he continued. "I wonder what today will do."

Without replying, the Doctor fell instantly into a chair. Galileo flung himself onto a couch, the Doctor's spyglass falling from his hand and bouncing on the floor. Reaching down blindly with his hand for it he found instead a bottle of wine standing where it had been left after the dinner party the night before. He pulled the cork out with his teeth and took a long swallow. Air and time had roughened the wine, but it was as sweet on his tongue as the most expensive liqueur.

The Doctor sighed. "Not the most productive day I have ever had," he murmured. "I only hope that Steven has got closer to finding Vicki than we have. Poor child: she must be terrified." He hit the table with his clenched fist. "If only we hadn't had to destroy my telescope to drive that creature off! It might take days to get another one fabricated by the Venetian artisans, and that could be too late! Far too late! We need to know where those ships are heading for when they leave the moon, and to do that we need that telescope!"

"Telescope?" Galileo held the bottle out towards the Doctor. "Tele-scope, from the Greek, a device for seeing far distances. Hmm, I like that. It has a ring to it."

"Indeed," the Doctor murmured, "perhaps it will catch on."

Galileo took another swig of wine and put the bottle down beside him. It clinked against something metallic. He rolled over to look, and saw the Doctor's spyglass -telescope - where he had dropped it. He picked it up and looked it over. The tube was bent and buckled, and in two places there were tears in the metal. It sloshed as he shook it, but it began to dawn on him through his tiredness that the lenses looked as if they had survived unbroken. "Perhaps all is not lost," he said thoughtfully. "The lenses of my - telescope - were broken, but the tube survived unscathed. The tube of your telescope is useless, but the lenses are perfectly all right."

The Doctor frowned slightly, and turned to gaze at Galileo. "Do you mean that we could construct a working telescope from the remnants of the two we have?"

"The lenses may be too large or too small," Galileo mused, "but with judicious amounts of stuffing we should be able to make them fit."

"Then you had better not make yourself too comfortable," the Doctor said, standing from the chair. "We have work to do!"

"You what?" Vicki exclaimed.

"Love you I," Albrellian stammered. His wings furled and unfurled against the hard red shell of his body, and his eyestalks were retracted so far that they were just glints in the darkness.

Vicki wasn't sure whether to laugh or cry. "But... but you hardly know me," she said finally. "I mean, we only talked twice. You can't suddenly decide you love me on the basis of two short conversations.

"Why not?" Albrellian's eyes poked slightly out from their hideaways.

"Because there could be all sorts of things you don't like about me but haven't had a chance to find out yet. I mean, I might hate arthropods, for all you know. Or I might have a fearsome temper. Or -"

Albrellian held out a clawed hand to stop her. "Kind and friendly are you," he said, "and so few friendly faces here on Laputa are there. Drawn to you found myself when first rowing towards Venice saw you I. Since then following you have been I."

"You've been following me?" Vicki felt a surge of anger within her.

"Nothing sinister!" Albrellian protested. "Face to see and voice to hear your wanted I. Stop thinking about you cannot I."

Vicki folded her arms across her chest. This would have been disturbing if it hadn't been so funny. "Albrellian, this is going to have to stop. I want you to take me back to Venice now."

"A species thing it is?" he muttered, his shell dipping towards the floor.

"It is not a species thing. Some of my best friends were aliens, before I left Earth for Astra."

Albrellian's eyestalks suddenly extended upwards. "Someone else there is? That human male - Steven. Him it is?"

"No, no it's not him."

"Then is it who?"

Vicki sighed deeply. "Albrellian, this isn't funny. Stop it at once."

Albrellian moved forward and reached out a claw. Vicki"s first thought was to step backwards, but if Albrellian was doing something innocent then he might take offence. On the other hand -

Before he could touch her, the door to his room slid open. A man was standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the corridor. "Envoy Albrellian!" he snapped. "I presume that you have some explanation for your actions?"

Albrellian whirled around to face the newcomer. "Braxiatel, I -"

"He was just being friendly," Vicki said, surprising herself. "He hasn't hurt me."

Braxiatel stepped into the room and glanced at her. He was tall, with finely chiselled features and straight brown hair that fell in a slight curl over his eyes, and he wore a pair of half-moon spectacles that struck Vicki as curiously anachronistic in the midst of this futuristic island city, and yet which wouldn"t have attracted a second glance in Venice itself. He looked back at Albrellian. "Envoy, you were made perfectly aware of the rules concerning the natives when you arrived. Fraternization is completely forbidden. They must not know that we are here. The only thing that is keeping this girl sane now is the fact that she doesn't understand what is going on."

"Now wait a second -" Vicki began, but Braxiatel was still talking.

"The minute she does realize, she'll go mad. This has to stop now. We'll give her an amnesia pill and return her to Venice before anybody realizes she's gone. In the meantime, you have a convention to attend. The Doctor has arrived."

"The Doctor?" Vicki and Albrellian chorused.

Braxiatel looked from one to the other. "You know of the Doctor?" he said to Vicki eventually.

"I travel with him," she said. "And you know him?"

"We are... acquainted," Braxiatel said, frowning slightly. "I invited him to come here to Laputa, in fact. He was here last night."

"No he wasn't. The Doctor was with me last night."

Braxiatel shook his head. "Impossible. I was told that he was brought here. My people said that he was so tired he fell asleep when they picked him up, and slept all the way through to this morning."

Albrellian clicked a claw to attract their attention. "Story can confirm Vicki's I," he said. "In Venice in the early hours of this morning indeed was the Doctor. Saw him I. Talked to him I."

"Oh no." Braxiatel rubbed a hand across his forehead. "The stupid... They've only gone and picked up the real Cardinal Bellarmine. It goes to show you should never employ Jamarians."

Something occurred to Vicki. "You said you invited the Doctor here," she said. "Was it a real invitation - a piece of card, about this big?" She held her fingers a few inches apart.

"Yes. Yes, it was."

"But it didn't say anything apart from "Invitation". We only got here because the TARDIS brought us."

"The card itself contained full flight details, compatible with the navigational equipment of any vessel up to and including a TARDIS," Braxiatel explained, "but it was really only a formality. When I gave the Doctor the card, I did explain what it was for."

"But he forgot!" Vicki exclaimed. "He suddenly appeared in the TARDIS holding the card, and he couldn't remember where he got it from."

"They wiped his memory." Braxiatel shook his head in exasperation."They didn't bother telling me, of course. No, that would have been too simple. They just let me witter on about how important it was that he come here, and then they wiped his memory of everything that had happened since they took him out of time."

"Since who took him out of time?" Vicki asked.

"Our own people," Braxiatel said simply.

There was an ugly feeling in Heaven. Cardinal Bellarmine could feel the tension in the chamber of angels. It must have felt like that before Lucifer and his minions rose up against the Lord and were exiled from His sight.

An angel leaped to its feet and waved a gloved fist at Bellarmine. It looked like a man wearing green armour, and its head was almost completely encased in a metal helmet, but what little could be seen of its lower mouth looked rough and scaly. One of the other angels had referred to it earlier as Ssarl during a heated exchange of threats. It and its larger, rougher, companion were aggressive and forceful angels, and were apparently reviled by most of the other angels present. The same applied to the gargoyle-faced angels in shiny black costumes, but there was particularly bad blood between them and the blobs of jelly that always referred to themselves in the plural. Bellarmine had also identified various other factions and alliances around the steeply rising walls of the chamber. Truly he was present at the time that St John the Divine had written of. The words rose up unbidden in his mind: "And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels."

"You have a question, Ssarl?" Bellarmine said mildly.

"If this Convention is to have any validity at all," the armoured angel hissed, "then it must address the issue of chemical and biological warfare. We all know," and it gazed meaningfully around the assembled ranks of its brethren, "that the Rutans have used plague bombs during their endless war with the Sontarans. The Daleks too have used disease to massacre entire populations. What remedy do you..." and it paused rhetorically, "suggest? Can mere talking prevent the use of such devastating weapons?"

Bellarmine waited before answering. He'd been standing there for hours, listening to the angels discuss matters of theology that were so far beyond him as to prove almost impossible to grasp, and in that time he had come to realize what his task was. He was a peacemaker. The discussion, as far as he could tell, centred around war in Heaven, and what weapons would be allowed. It was his task to calm the angels down when violence threatened to erupt in the chamber, and to move the discussion on when it was deadlocked. For some reason, they deferred to him. They seemed to respect his words, although he couldn't see why. They listened. Every so often they would pose him a question - as Ssarl had just done - and he would do his best to answer. Perhaps they were just testing him. Surely they must already know the answers to their questions better than he did.All he could do was try.

Plague, Ssarl had said. Was it right to use plague as a weapon? His mind raced across the various books of the Bible, trying to recall whether the Lord had ever pronounced on the matter. Yes! Yes, he had! In the Revelation of St John the Divine it clearly said, "And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways and pour out the wrath of God upon the Earth. And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image." That meant that plague was a suitable weapon for angels. There was no question about it.

"Plague is a suitable weapon," he said. "So it is written."

Ssarl looked as if he was about to argue, but sat down rather heavily in his chair. An angel across the chamber from Ssarl stood up straight away. It had the head of a fish, and was wearing a glass bubble filled with water. "And poison?" it asked. "What about weapons that poison the seas? The Chelonians have used these against my people. Are these acceptable?"

Bellarmine sighed with relief. That one was easy. The verse from Revelations went on: "And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea."

"Yes," he said, "poison too is allowed."

The fish angel sat down again. A thick-set angel whose skin was covered in spikes stood in its place. "Sun-blasters," it yelled. "Surely blowing up someone else's sun can't be allowed."

Chapter sixteen, verse eight: "And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire." "Yes," he replied, looking the angel in the eye, "yes, it is right and proper."

Instead of sitting down again, the angel began to argue. Five other angels sprang to their feet and began to debate the point with it. Bellarmine closed his eyes for a moment to gather his strength. He had a feeling he was going to be there for some time to come.

Eternity, perhaps.

The moon was almost full, and its pearly light illuminated the spires, domes, minarets and rooftops of Venice, making them all seem like paintings on a backcloth, close enough to touch.

Galileo stood, hands on hips, gazing out across the sea of architecture. The errant breeze caught a distant snatch of song and brought it to his ears. He turned, letting his glance rove across the entire city from Cannaregio to La Giudecca, from Dorsudo to Castello. He smiled as he realized something at once obvious and paradoxical: from where he stood he could see all of Venice, and yet there wasn't a single canal visible. How odd. How very odd.

"If you've quite finished sightseeing," the Doctor said from the room below, "then perhaps you could help me with this telescope."

Galileo bent down and reached a hand through the trapdoor. The Doctor held the telescope up above his head and Galileo took its weight, pulling it through the hatch. He quickly checked it over. The Doctor had done an excellent job of work: his lenses were slightly smaller than Galileo's tube, and so he had packed the surrounding gaps with lead foil from Galileo's wine bottles and then melted wax over them to seal any gaps. The resulting conglomerate telescope wasn't pretty, but it would work.

As the Doctor scrambled up the ladder and onto the platform, Galileo set to work placing the telescope upon its stand and aiming it towards the moon's cratered surface. By the time the old man was standing beside him, he was gazing through the eyepiece. "Well?" the Doctor queried. "What do you see?"

Galileo didn't reply for a moment. The skull-like contours of the moon's surface filled his eyes, its shadows lengthening as he watched. As always, he felt humbled and elated seeing something that nobody else had ever seen. The resolution of the Doctor's lenses was incredible: far better than anything his glassmaker at Padua could fashion. Even the glassmakers of Venice - the very Empire of glass - would be hard-pressed to surpass them for clarity. He could make out features that he had never seen before - radial lines splaying out from the circular features and smaller pock marks all over the surface. There was so much to catalogue, so much to think about!

The Doctor tapped him on the shoulder. "This is no time for dilly-dallying, young man. Kindly tell me what you can see."

"Quiet!" Galileo muttered. "I'm concentrating." He shifted the telescope slightly, tracing across the harsh yet serene surface until he found a feature that he recognized: a tall, jagged range of mountains that put him in mind of the teeth of one of the lecturers at the University of Padua. Through the Doctor's lenses they seemed almost close enough to walk to. From the mountains he scanned downwards until a large elliptical area jumped into view. "There," he said. "That's what I was looking at when I saw the moving object."

The Doctor pushed him out of the way. "Let me see," he said. After a few moments, and a little nudge of the telescope tube, his tense shoulders relaxed. "Yes... " he murmured, "yes, it all becomes clear now."

The Doctor stood to one side and let Galileo take another look. He had centred the telescope's field of view on a plain area of ground. Galileo had never bothered with it before - it was the features that interested him, not the stretches of ground between them. He had been wrong. Through the Doctor's lenses he could see large geometric shapes scattered across the surface: squares and rectangles, cones and cylinders, spheres and trapezoids. From the way their shadows were cast it seemed as though they stood proud of the surface, as if they were on legs. "Are they houses?" he whispered. "Houses for moon-men?"

"No," the Doctor said darkly, "they are ships that sail through space as a galleon sails through the oceans."

"But they are all different in design."

"I suspect that they belong to a number of different races."

Galileo would have pursued the point further, but suddenly a smaller object detached itself from a diamond-shaped edifice and rose away from the surface of the moon. It was circular in shape, like a flattened egg. "Doctor, there's something moving."

The Doctor pushed Galileo out of the way and took a look himself. "Excellent," he said. "As I suspected, it is some form of shuttle craft. Now if we can only keep it in sight, we should be able to determine where it comes to Earth."

"And where it comes to Earth," Galileo said, "there we may find your companion Vicki."

"I took you for a guard of the house," Chigi confided to Steven. He took a long drink from the tankard in front of him. "Or a demon."

"A demon?" Steven glanced around the bar with the picturesque name of the Tavern of the Love of Friends, or of the Gypsies, wondering if anybody was close enough to overhear their conversation. As far as he knew, both he and Chigi had got out of the strange house without anybody noticing, but if there was one thing he had learned from the past twenty-four hours it was not to take anything in Venice at face value. The city was full of masks, obvious and subtle, and anything could be hiding behind them. Anything at all.

But the tavern was just a tavern - hot and noisy - and the patrons were just patrons.

"Have you not seen them?" Chigi gazed curiously at Steven, and the pilot was struck by how soft his grey eyes were in contrast to his rugged, scarred face and close-cropped hair. Another mask? "They fly above us, walk amongst us and swim beneath us. Venice is full of them."

"A riddle?" Steven asked.

"The truth. Oh, I am quite capable of turning the odd fanciful phrase - indeed I was once noted for it - but this time I am speaking God's honest truth. Or at least, I would be if I believed in God. But no matter - these demons are real enough. Some are as thin as sticks, with great horns growing from their heads, while others are shelled like crabs but have great wings which carry them aloft. I have seen them."

Steven shivered. At first he had thought that Chigi was lying - that or hallucinating - but the latter description sounded uncomfortably close to the Doctor's description of the creature that had abducted Vicki. From the sound of it, Chigi had come across it as well, which raised the obvious question: what was Chigi's part in all this?

"So what were you doing in the house?"

Chigi smiled slightly. "I suspect the same as you, my friend. Investigating." He raised a hand and ran a finger along the scar that ran down one side of his face. "A pastime that has been my downfall before, and no doubt will be again. 'I see the better way and approve it: I follow the worse,' as Ovid said."

"Is that how you got that scar?" Steven asked.

Chigi nodded. "A fight - a sordid affair in Holland, some five years ago now. My skull was split open. A sawbones had to piece it back together. I owe him my life - for whatever that is worth." Chigi reached into his jerkin. When he pulled his hand out, he was holding a small, round metal object. "The sawbones claims that he found this inside my skull," he added. "I've never been sure whether to believe him or not."

Steven reached out for the object. Chigi shrugged, and handed it over.

"It's very light," Steven said, hefting it in his hand. "What is it - a musket ball or something?" Running his thumb over it, Steven thought he could detect striations in the sphere, indentations marking the outline of some hidden compartment perhaps, or symbols carved into the metal.

"If so, I know not how it came to be in my head, for I have never been shot." Chigi laughed, and picked the ball from Steven's hand, managing as he did so to run his finger across Steven's palm. "Or at least, I don't remember ever having been -"

He stopped abruptly, his gaze fixed on something across the tavern. Steven glanced across. A man stood in the doorway. His clothes marked him as a foreigner, and he was carrying a bag. His forehead was high and balding, and his face was fine-featured. He was staring back at Chigi as if he had seen a ghost.

"God's hounds!" Chigi murmured. "It can't be."

The newcomer walked slowly across to their table. His eyes never left Chigi. He dropped the bag by Steven's feet.

"You bear an uncanny resemblance to a man who has been dead for fifteen years, sir," he said. "My name is Shakespeare. William Shakespeare. Might I make so bold as to enquire... ?"

Chigi made no move to answer. Instead he just shook his head again, nonplussed. "I'm Steven Taylor," Steven said finally, rising from his seat and extending a hand. "And this is -"

"Marlowe," Chigi said simply. "My name is Christopher Marlowe."

Steven watched, dumbfounded, as Chigi reached out, pulled Shakespeare to him and hugged him like a long-lost brother.