Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [102]
…his suggestion was that in these times, the element of time was no longer stable. It followed that its limitations were not stable either, and that the very absence of an elemental force in the world had altered the nature of the horizon. The horizon had moved, was still moving, the lines of time around it moving also so that soon no man or woman would be able to think an original thought without the apes tearing them to shreds. The apes were the guardians of that threshold, but never before had their realm been breached by mankind. Now it seems their realm is all around us.
A theory that certainly fits everything known about the apes. The apes which had attacked the Countess and the Lord, on the previous night, had brought back memories of the Gordon Rioters… almost as if the beasts had responded to the aristocrats’ anxieties about the mob (the Gordon Riots had themselves been a kind of violent cautionary tale, at least for the English upper classes).
Scarlette had two questions for the Doctor. First she asked why the apes should have appeared here in Europe and now in 1782, when there were so many other aeons to choose from. The Doctor responded by saying he felt it was something to do with the era’s perceptions: humanity as a whole was now beginning to think of time in dimensional/scientific terms, and this ‘mass understanding’ was likely to have caused a great shift in the unstable horizon. He also felt it was significant that only a year earlier, Wessel had more or less invented the concept of time travel in Anno 7603. This was typical witch-thinking on the Doctor’s part. In witchcraft and in ritualism, words (in the form of incantations) are used to summon and bind the elemental forces, in order to change the human world. Similarly, the Doctor described Wessel’s work as a kind of summoning, a collection of words which had inadvertently brought forth the apes and let them loose.
Scarlette’s second question was harder for the Doctor to answer. She asked why these bestial guardians of the horizon should look like apes. Fair enough, they were symbols of man’s ignorance – the animal inside, dragging humanity back into savagery – but why should they resemble apes? Why not dogs, or bears, or tigers, or rats, or any other species?
The Doctor attempted to gloss over this question. If he truly knew the answer, then it’s not surprising he didn’t reveal it. It would be over seventy years before Charles Darwin would release his theories about mankind’s ancestry, seventy years before Scarlette’s generation would appreciate the answer.
So that was the Doctor’s explanation. Every human action, every human thought, every new experiment and theory now had an effect on the horizon and the world/universe it encircled. That was why the party had assembled here, on Sabbath’s ship, to perform a procedure which the Doctor believed could recall his TARDIS without bringing the apes running.
But even so, the ceremony would have its side effects. Of course it would: the Doctor was bringing an object of power, a lodestone of the elementals, into an already unstable world. It would be on this very night that ‘Hellgate’ Barrymore would catch and butcher his prize grey ape. Rumour would have it that people living near the Strand would hear a monstrous screeching from behind their walls, as if ancient animals had been bricked up in the architecture. Sailors off the coast of Britain and mainland Europe would report a record number of sightings of the ‘silver ship’, as if this mysterious metal craft were attempting to be in several different places at once. Before the night was out, the Countess of Jersey – still shaken after witnessing the horrifying, violent death of Lord _____ the previous evening, in an attack she herself barely survived – would face the inner circle of the Service itself, and make a decision which would change the whole