Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [172]
The smell of salt probably came from the ocean, if indeed there was an ocean anywhere around them. It made Juliette think of blood anyway.
‘What was wrong with the Doctor’s heart?’ she’d asked Sabbath, when they’d left the grand palace of the ape-world and headed back to the Jonah. Six months ago, now. Six months of watching the trained apes hunt down the wild apes, of listening to Sabbath while he taught his animals to perform the surgery and, later, while he recovered in the dim black-walled rooms below decks.
‘Nothing,’ Sabbath had told her. ‘The heart was in perfect working order. It was only serving its purpose. Rooting him to his borne territory, the same thing it’d do for anyone. The problem was, his territory no longer existed. That was the cause of the poison.’
‘History seems to have been playing on your mind recently,’ Sabbath said, suddenly. It took Juliette a moment or two to follow his drift.
‘I worry,’ she told him.
‘I see. You believe you’ve still got business to attend to here.’
It wasn’t even disguised as a question. Juliette raised her head to him, a sign that she was ready to acknowledge her past even if she wasn’t quite prepared to confront it. ‘Can you blame me?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Sabbath. ‘Do you worry what he’ll think of you, now you’re gone?’
‘Of course.’
She didn’t explain what she was really thinking. She didn’t have to. When Sabbath had shown her how far the ship could travel, how far he’d expanded the borders of his ‘territory’, she’d known full well that such a journey would make her more than a simple human being. She’d be able to step outside her own time of residence, to look at the whole of her lifetime from the outside, to see the consequences of every action she’d ever taken. Soon the Jonah would go further, into the deeper realms, into parts of time even the tantrists could barely imagine. One could barely see such things and still consider oneself to be a person, as such. One could hardly go that far and not dwell on thoughts of history.
She often lay in the bunks in the depths of the Jonah, alone or otherwise, thinking of all the things she’d said in the presence of her colleagues at Henrietta Street. She wondered, sometimes, if she’d concealed too much and given too little of herself away. She tried to see herself as they might see her, from the inside of time. As an innocent? As the guilty party? Would they look back on the things that had happened in her room, the secrets and the experiments, as the actions of a stupid little girl or of a female Iscariot?
‘It’s probably a good thing you’ve started thinking that way,’ mused Sabbath. ‘I think we can safely say that history’s our profession now. Our employment, if you like.’
‘We have our duty,’ Juliette responded, and she was a little surprised to discover that she actually meant it. It sounded so much like the kind of thing that Sabbath would say… but then again, she’d set foot on this ship of her own free will, so she really shouldn’t have been surprised that she’d become a part of it.
Sabbath nodded, and it took Juliette a while to realise that he was nodding at something. She turned back, towards the prow, and the blaze of light that was fast approaching the front of the ship. Not just the streaks of brilliant colour, as the world flashed past below them or around them or inside them. A point of intensity, towards which the ship was being navigated by its unseen crew.
‘It’s happening?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ said Sabbath.
Yes. They were moving fast enough, they’d been travelling for long enough, they’d seen enough of the Earth pass them by. Standing there on the deck, Juliette felt