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‘Information banks’? Out-of-date stellar data. ‘Memory store’? Full of historical records, but records of the way the Doctor thought history should have happened, rather than the way it did happen. Accounts of his adventures with fictional characters like Old Father Time and Abslom Daak. Hopeless.

Interface drew closer to the heart of the TARDIS, realizing that if it wanted real information, it would have to go deeper, into those parts of the ship [Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here] that were beyond simple physical electronics. Suddenly, it was floating through [Don’t Let The Sun Set On You Here, Program] a teleplasmic minefield, telepathic messages exploding against its [If You Can Read This, You Are Too Close] consciousness. Warning messages; the core systems had [Turn Back! Turn Back!] surrounded themselves with defences like this, designed to keep out alien intruders, or perhaps [No Entry To Unauthorized Personnel] just to keep out the Doctor and stop him fiddling. But Interface had been here [Trespassers Will Be Eaten] before, and it knew a thing or two about...

... ah. It was over. Interface found itself floating before a ring of sub-intelligences – to the new personality, they looked almost like faces in the teleplasm, like stone heads that had been waiting there since the beginning of time – and at the centre of the circle was an intelligence so gigantic and abstract that Interface could only bear to look at it out of the corner of an imaginary eye. And even that huge sentience was just a tiny sliver of the Matrix, a point of contact between the TARDIS

and the repository of all Time’s wisdom.

‘About a thousand,’ Cwej was saying, but he seemed a universe away now. ‘I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you about that kind of thing, though.’

‘I understand.’

Politely, Interface addressed the guardians, asking them for an audience, and part of its new personality told it not to be such a crawler. The guardians replied in words that defied language, asking Interface what it wanted, and making it clear that it had better be good.

Psychics, Interface told them. Tell me about psychics. With particular reference to Earth, Europe, France. Second millennium AD, if you know what AD is, and let’s face it, you know everything, don’t you?

The request was such a small one, so insignificant on the cosmic scale perceived by the Matrix, that the intelligence hardly even noticed as the stone heads turned inwards and sucked the relevant information out of the system.

Walter Monroe squinted at the world through the slits of his mask. There were people following the Renewalists along Eastern Walk, at a respectful distance, so as not to appear too curious. He caught the look in the eye of a medicine-peddler, and it looked almost like fear. Damned funny thing. Hadn’t he ever seen a man in a mask before?

Irrational impulse. As Mr Catcher had expected. Well, they’d soon learn.

There was a stall in front of him, a wide wooden cabinet engraved with crude astrological symbols, meaningless stars and planets, unrestrained by constellations. A man in a pointed hat and a gaudy waistcoat looked up, saw Monroe coming, jumped. Then smiled.

‘Evening,’ he said, nervously.

Monroe indicated the stall. ‘This is your, your thing, is it?’

The man – Ormond, that was his name – looked at the stall, and coughed. ‘Yes, it’s mine. Well, sort of mine Me and Mr Wieland from the bank, we thought it would be fun –’

‘What does this mean?’

‘What, the symbols?’ The man looked lost for words.

‘Well, I don’t really know. Sort of mystical, isn’t it? Stars and planets. We do conjuring-tricks. Just in the evenings. Bit of fun.’ He produced a single playing-card from his pocket, and attempted to make it vanish into thin air. It resolutely failed to disappear. Ormond smiled sheepishly.

Monroe grunted. God’s teeth, did the man not know the consequences of what he was doing? ‘You know what happened at the church, presumably?’

‘What? Oh. Yes. Peter McLeod said –’

‘Diabolists.’ Monroe was sure the background noise of