Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [99]
The Doctor stood, looking down at him, his face still. ‘Doctor. . . ’ said Chris, but they both ignored him.
Joel said, ‘You can’t leave me here. It’s as good as a death sentence. I can’t survive here.’ He looked up at the Doctor, blindly. ‘Can’t you at least leave me my things? My PowerBook and my watch and things?’
‘Of course not,’ said the Doctor. ‘I can’t let you get up to any more mischief with history.’
‘I will,’ promised Joel fervently. ‘You’re messing up history just by leaving me here. What if I accidentally screw up the timelines?’
‘You won’t,’ said the Doctor. His voice was low and emotionless. ‘I’m leaving you in the care of Kadoguchiroshi. He’ll make sure you survive. You’ll be fed and clothed. You’ll work very hard and you’ll meditate and study. After a few years of boiled rice and the Lotus Sutra, I think you’ll have learnt your lesson.’
‘I thought I was supposed to have learnt my lesson already,’ said Joel dully.
‘You know I could never have killed you. You’re just doing this to get back at me.’
‘Listen to me, Joel Andrew Mintz,’ said the Doctor sternly. ‘You knowingly and willingly travelled through time with the intention of altering history.
You told yourself that you would only change history in “good” ways. But you found yourself caught up in the violence of a period and place you knew almost nothing about. In your ignorance and desperation, who knows what harm you might have done?’
‘But I wasn’t going to change history!’ protested Joel. ‘I was only going to make a few things better, just do a little bit of good – just like you!’
202
‘This isn’t a hobby! You can’t just go handing computers over to feudal lords at the first hint of danger!’ The Doctor scowled at him. ‘And the worst of it is that you, of all people, ought to have known better.’
Joel listened to the whole speech, growing paler and paler. Finally he just bowed his head, pressing one hand to his face as though he wished he could disappear.
‘Listen,’ he murmured, desperately. ‘Listen, do you want to know about your future? Because I’ve met you. Your next self. He said he was the eighth one.
I’ll tell you all about it if you’ll take me with you.’ He looked up, pleadingly.
The Doctor shook his head and smiled.
‘But don’t you –’
‘Don’t imagine you can bargain with me, Joel Mintz. Poetic justice would see you as dead as the Caxtarid by this stage. Consider this a very light sentence.’
‘You’re right,’ whispered the young man. His shoulders were trembling.
‘You’re right. This is what I deserve. No one has the right to meddle with history, not even for the better. You ought to just leave me here. Trapped.
Trapped forever, with no way out.’
Chris looked at the Doctor. The Doctor sighed, looked at his pocket watch, checked the weather, scratched behind his ear, and said, ‘Oh, Fugue and Toc-cata. Get your things together, we’re leaving in an hour.’
Talker was hard at work in the monastery garden, chattering away with two of the villagers. Penelope watched as the bird’s slender fingers tenderly plucked a damaged plant from the soil and set it upright. Talker was back to being Gardener now.
Psychokinetic sat nearby, his feet tucked up under his scrawny body. A gaggle of children from the village were playing around him, patting him and combing his feathers with their fingers. He pecked at a bowl of rice from time to time. Gardener said he would soon recover, given copious quantities of food, sunlight and calm.
He looked up at Penelope as she walked up. ‘I know I keep saying this to everybody,’ he said, ‘but I’m sorry. I was panicking in there, and I –’
‘You are entirely forgiven,’ she insisted. The Doctor had made translators from the circuitry of the Caxtarid’s drones; she wore one pinned to her jacket.
‘I cannot imagine how you bore your imprisonment as well as you did.’
‘So much happened because of me,’ said the bird. ‘So much.’
‘The events of the last few days are the result of the Caxtarids’ cruelty and the daimyos’ greed,’ said Penelope, with certainty. ‘I think we should be thank-ful that their vices did not