Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [73]
What they spoke of next, both men equally guarded, was ‘shop talk’. The general gist seems to have been this. Sabbath had some time ago plotted out the ‘contours’ on his charts of time, and worked out (with the help of his ‘magic words’?) how to navigate his ship through the currents. In fairness, the Doctor’s ability to do this all by himself – and with so little research – is a testament to his abilities, though his exact methods remain vague. It may be important, though, that the House had recently ‘bled’. In the same way that a tantrist could use hormonal techniques to enter states beyond normal time, there’s the implication that the Doctor had turned the House on Henrietta Street into what might be described as an enormous resonator, an idea suggestive of the bio-electrical experiments being performed by Mesmer in the salons of Paris.
Though he was unsure of the details, Sabbath believed that the damage to local time – the crisis which had summoned the babewyns – was in some way a result of tantrists like Lisa-Beth and ‘dabblers’ like Scarlette, though he was only too ready to ascribe a lot of the blame to elemental meddlers like the Doctor. As Sabbath once wrote himself, ‘time is too precious an artefact to be pawned off by prostitutes’. He allowed Scarlette and the Doctor to continue with their work only as long as he could watch them from a discreet distance.
When the Doctor told him that the experiment had only been a partial success, Sabbath at first believed that it was a result of the Doctor’s inexperience, more ‘dabbling’. But as the conversation went on, and the trained apes began to scratch at their parasites in the corner, Sabbath apparently became unsettled. The Doctor described the ape-world, including the black eye-sun, something which didn’t surprise Sabbath in the least. But when the Doctor mentioned that he’d been trying to get to Paris, even Sabbath’s amused, chubby face must have turned grave. And when the Doctor explained that he’d seen Tula Lui in the ruins…
Sabbath began pacing, it’s said, tucking his big hands behind his back and letting his heavy frame roll backwards and forwards along the length of the cabin. He’d believed that the ‘magic word’ technique of fast-transit, as used by Tula Lui, was ‘safe’. He shook his head while the Doctor talked, rumbling ‘no, no,’ on occasion. Then he turned to head for the bridge-room, to consult his chart, and despite the screeching of the crew-apes the Doctor followed.
In front of the great chart, Sabbath indicated the coloured flags across the continent of Europe. The account isn’t detailed enough to identify which flags meant what, but evidently Sabbath had managed to plot out the position of the ‘horizon’, that faraway place which no tantrist was supposed to be able to reach but which had been slowly closing in on the western continent. From the Doctor’s notes, it’s plain to see that the horizon (and therefore the threshold of the world of beasts) did indeed brush the northern edge of London, before curving through the continent, across the northern part of Africa and towards the West Indies. Yet on Sabbath’s chart, it was nowhere near central France. Probably still shaking his head, Sabbath announced that even given the horizon’s