Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [101]
Only when the Doctor had assembled his party in the map room did he address everyone en masse, Who standing beside him and nodding in short bursts as the Doctor explained what was about to happen… and, perhaps more importantly, as he explained the true nature of the apes for the first time. Lisa-Beth was the most accomplished tantrist amongst them – though not necessarily the most accomplished witch – and she seems to have understood the Doctor’s briefing better than the rest.
Throughout what follows, it’s important to remember that the Doctor perceived time as, at least in part, a psychological phenomenon. Time, in the Doctor’s view, was inseparable from the observer’s perception of time. In this he was far ahead of all eighteenth-century thinking, and very much in line with more modern speculative physics. The Doctor’s explanation, as recorded by Lisa-Beth, was this.
The Doctor informed us that all time (and, so he claimed, all of space) could be perceived as an aspect of human thought, although I could see this meant nothing to Katya and her kind. Yet the Doctor stated that human thought has limits. In his philosophy, the mind of man is not capable of understanding any mystery or solving any puzzle. To him the mind of man is an animal thing, which I can well believe having seen so many men lose theirs over the thought of sexual conquest. A man, or woman, can no more understand time as a whole than an ape can be taught the rules of chess. The Doctor maintained, and still maintains, that we are all of us animal in nature and are not the creatures of infinite comprehension which men like Newton would have had us believe… I do not know whether he applies this rule to elementals also.
He further speculated that there was a point of understanding no human mind could pass. At the limits of our consciousness, he informed us, there comes a point at which time and mind become indistinguishable. He implied an area of grey where it is no longer clear whether the events we might witness are made of flesh or simply aspects of our own thinking. This is the point which we call the horizon. Though as even Mother Dutt knew, no human being ever comes close to the horizon. No man or woman yet born has understanding to reach the point where understanding fails…
…but it is from the horizon that the apes come. They are, believes the Doctor, aspects of ourselves. They are our own ignorance given flesh, born of the place where thought and being are twined. Should we reach the horizon, we will find our own ignorance staring back at us in the shape of these bloody, murderous animals. If we search too deeply, we will find the beasts ready to tear us apart for our curiosity. With every new thought and discovery we move closer to that horizon of understanding, yet our comprehension is such that it is still a greater distance from us than we can imagine.
It must have taken some time to explain this complex notion to everyone assembled. But the story seems incomplete. If this were indeed the true nature of the apes, then why had they never been seen before the 1780s? And why had the Doctor, a self-proclaimed expert in matters of time, never encountered them before?
He had an explanation, of course.
No man or woman, he said, should ever have a chance of nearing the horizon or meeting the apes. The horizon should by all the laws of Nature be safe and stable, beyond the reach of us all, but he had through his studies with Sabbath become convinced that this was no longer the case.
The Doctor was loath to speak of the past, but we understood from Mr. K.’s veiled and not so veiled comments that the world [i.e. universe] had undergone a degree of change. Once the Doctor’s tribe of elementals had protected the element of time. It had been their place to maintain a certain aplomb [in this sense meaning ‘stability’ or ‘balance] .Yet now they had gone, and in their absence there was great suffering to be had. So accustomed had the world [universe] become to the elementals’ presence that when they were removed the world found itself to be weak, like a