Doctor Who_ Left-Handed Hummingbird - Kate Orman [83]
Benny sat cross‐legged on the floor, a little distance from him. ‘Can’t you concentrate?’ she said gently.
‘I can’t stop concentrating.’ He was glowing with fever. ‘Tell me about Cristián.’
‘They’re letting him go home.’
The Doctor nodded slowly. ‘Best thing for him. He’s been through rather too much. And he won’t be able to remember it clearly.’
Ace was leaning on the wall, arms folded. ‘That’s your doing?’
‘Our minds were slammed together,’ said the Doctor. ‘Everything melted together.’ He put a hand to his forehead. ‘Far too much for Cristián to cope with. Perhaps it’s for the best that he doesn’t remember.’
‘There are some things that man was not meant to know,’ said Benny.
‘Don’t joke,’ said Ace. ‘You don’t ever want to be inside his head.’
The Doctor didn’t appear to be listening to them. ‘We still need Cristián’s help. He’s one of the few clues we have, the few links with the Blue.’
Benny said, ‘New York. We know when he was there. All we have to do is find him in a city of fifteen million.’
Ace scuffed the floor with her shoe. ‘Haven’t we put him through enough yet?’ The Doctor looked up at her sharply, and she concentrated on tracing a complex pattern on the floor with her toe. ‘Why don’t you just track down Huitzilin yourself?’
‘Not yet. I don’t want to get any closer.’ He plucked the bowstring, and it gave off a deep, disconsolate note. ‘Supposed to scare off evil spirits,’ he said.
Ace said, ‘You said something had changed. When we were in Tenochtitlan.’ It seemed like centuries ago.
‘Huitzilin couldn’t have gone on as a ghost. The amount of power required to maintain that state would have increased exponentially. Like Xanxia,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The crisis point was the dedication of the Great Temple.’ The Doctor stood up, nocking another of the long arrows. ‘Huitzilin was desperate; he thought that if he could exceed a critical amount of energy, he’d stabilize. He was wrong. He should simply have dissipated, like a handful of smoke. But someone dipped into the stream of time and made a tiny change.’
‘Someone who?’ said Ace. ‘Huitzilin himself?’
‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘Huitzilin was the effect, not the cause.’
‘If they’ve manipulated the time lines,’ said Benny, ‘why don’t we just manipulate them right back again?’
The Doctor blew out a long, slow breath. ‘Do you know why so few species develop time travel?’
‘Why?’
‘They keep wiping themselves out of existence. They always insist on tinkering with their history. Perhaps thousands of worlds are developing temporal technology every day, and simply erasing themselves. A tidy self‐regulating mechanism.’
‘We might create something worse,’ said Benny. ‘Like – like the Silurians’ world.’
Ace said, ‘But we’re stopping him making changes to the time line. We’ve done it twice.’
The Doctor sighted along the arrow at the target. ‘He’s not going to let us spoil his fun like this,’ he said. ‘He’s already found someone who wants to bring about the end of the world.’
‘The cold war is still on, isn’t it?’ said Benny, alarmed. ‘He’s not going to push any red buttons, is he?’
‘He wouldn’t wipe out his food stock. He wants something vicious, something that will emotionally entangle people. A handful of gruesome murders will be adequate. These days an atrocity can travel around the world by satellite in a day.’
‘But he didn’t get to kill John Lennon,’ said Ace.
‘Oh grief,’ said Benny. ‘Helter Skelter.’
‘Bozhe moi,’ said Ace, pressing her palm against her forehead. ‘Charles Manson. Fix one leak and another one opens up.’
‘The Beatles,’ said Benny. ‘Manson said he knew the end of the world was coming from listening to the Beatles. And he murdered all those people to start it happening.’
‘Huitzilin just wants to make sure we don’t miss the point.’ The Doctor pulled back the string.
‘Enough of this,’ said Ace. ‘Let’s trash the bastard.’
‘But if we destroy Huitzilin,’ said Benny, ‘what happens to –’
‘KYA!’ shouted Ace.
The Doctor, startled, let the arrow fly. It struck the target dead centre.
* * *
New York City, December