Doctor Who BBCN05 - Only Human

by Doctor Who

  ‘Like you’d know.’

  129

  ‘Who says I don’t?’ said the Doctor brightly. ‘Ask Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.’

  Rose decided to let that one pass. ‘So, marrying to save a tribe of cavemen from some monsters, that’s a good reason, then?’

  ‘You might save the world,’ said the Doctor. ‘Best reason of all.’

  ‘I’m not sure I wanna join the Family,’ said Rose. ‘They look all right, but they hate the Neanderthals. They attack them, just for something to do.’

  ‘That’s humans. Anyone outside the tribe’s some sort of evil animal,’

  said the Doctor.

  ‘Knew it’d all be our fault,’ said Rose.

  ‘Generally is,’ said the Doctor.

  Rose blinked and ran a hand through her hair. ‘So we’re not just thick, we’re evil? Why d’you hang around us so much, then?’

  The Doctor looked into her eyes, serious. ‘You can be brilliant, terrible, generous, cruel. But you’re never boring.’

  A tribesman dressed in a garland of flowers, evidently some kind of officiating priest, ran up to them, slapped Rose with another oily fish and shouted, ‘Let the ceremony begin!’

  ‘See,’ said the Doctor.

  Quilley led Jacob and Lene through the woods, wheezing from the exertion. They were about a mile away now and he let himself slip down onto a fallen tree trunk. His ribs creaked. He put a hand to his forehead and mopped away the sweat. Lene crashed down next to him.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘Not all of us had the health patches,’ Quilley growled up at him.

  ‘We have,’ said Jacob hesitantly. ‘So Lene and I, we could keep on running.’

  Quilley put his head in his hands. ‘First, Lene is sick. And second, I just saved your lives, so you owe me.’ Jacob opened his mouth to speak, but Quilley held up a hand to prevent him. ‘If you ask why I shall probably kill you myself.’

  130

  Jacob held Lene, whose face was covered in dirt and tears. ‘I don’t know why I’m running at all,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m going to terminate. . . die anyway. I’m so. . . ’ She couldn’t find the word.

  ‘Afraid,’ Quilley finished for her.

  ‘Is this what it was like to Refuse?’ she asked.

  Quilley nodded. ‘More or less.’

  Lene choked. ‘Then we were right. You must have been insane.’

  Tillun strode from the cave entrance to a round of applause from the tribe. Nan and Gual walked slowly behind him. A garland of flowers had been placed on his head and he looked suitably proud and kingly.

  The procession came to a halt before the Doctor and Rose. The priest-figure stepped forward, rattled a few bones, and sang, ‘Turn to the stone of Brelalla!’

  Rose obeyed. At exactly the right moment, the setting sun touched the tip of the stone, casting a long evening shadow that reached out almost to where they stood.

  ‘Now pass the Great Fish of Matrimony,’ intoned the priest.

  Rose gratefully handed the fish to Tillun, who proceeded to rip off its head.

  ‘Now kiss!’ sang the priest.

  Rose took a deep breath and turned to Tillun. He leaned over and gave her the snog of her life. Over her shoulder she heard the Doctor sighing.

  ‘What a terrible ordeal for you,’ he muttered, with more than a hint of something that was either envy or fatherly protectiveness, she couldn’t tell which.

  Rose broke the kiss, gathered herself and muttered back, ‘Always the bridesmaid.’

  The priest waggled more bones. ‘You are now one flesh. The Great Fish of Matrimony names you Rose Glathigacymcilliach!’

  The Doctor stepped forward urgently. ‘Right, is that it?’

  Rose took her cue. She turned to Nan. ‘Nan, I’m one of the Family. Listen to the Doctor. You’ve gotta hide, get down into the caves!

  Move!’

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  ‘My granddaughter has spoken!’ cried Nan. ‘Flee, my people! Flee!’

  Rose felt a combination of relief and astonishment as the tribe turned as one and started running for the caves. Only Tillun stood still, holding her hand. ‘How mad is that?’ she whispered.

  ‘You’re one of them now, Rose Glathigacymcilliach,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘Think I just might keep my maiden name,’ said Rose.

  The Doctor patted Tillun on the back and pointed him in the direction of the cave. ‘You hurry along too, sonny boy.’

  ‘My wife, the young queen, is coming with me,’ Tillun said protectively.

  The Doctor shook his head. ‘You’ll have to wait for the honeymoon.’

  To Rose he said, ‘We’ve gotta go and warn the Neanderthals.’

  Rose frowned. ‘Bigamy is not on today’s agenda.’

  ‘Why warn Them?’ asked Tillun. ‘Perhaps the new tribe will attack Them first. That will give us more time to hide ourselves.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve invented divorce?’ said Rose.

  The Doctor whistled for his horse, which had been munching happily on a patch of long grass. It cantered up. Tillun stood in front of the Doctor. ‘Rose comes with us. She isn’t one of the Tylers any longer!’

  ‘Sorry, haven’t got time to argue,’ said the Doctor, lifting Rose up onto the horse.

  Tillun was astonished. He launched himself at the Doctor, hands reaching for his neck.

  The Doctor parried the attack with ease, tripping Tillun onto the hard ground and then leaning over to whisper in his ear, ‘It’s a nasty feeling, being used. Sorry. But don’t worry. There’s plenty more, er, fish in the sea.’

  With that, he leaped onto the horse and effortlessly turned it in the right direction. ‘Let’s head to the forest. Know the way?’

  ‘I had a bag over my head,’ said Rose. ‘No idea.’

  ‘We’ll find ’em,’ said the Doctor, prodding the horse gently with his foot.

  It tore off, giving Rose a jolt so hard she was forced to wrap her arms around the Doctor’s middle. She gave a last glance at Tillun, 132

  who was picking himself up, a look of hurt and confusion on his face.

  ‘You enjoyed that,’ Rose told the Doctor accusingly.

  The Doctor said nothing, and Rose wished she could see the expression on his face.

  ‘So, how are we gonna stop these Hy-Bractors?’ she asked.

  ‘Working it out,’ said the Doctor brightly.

  The Doctor and Rose left the horse at the edge of the forest. The smell of woodsmoke from the Neanderthals’ fire took the Doctor unerringly along one of the trampled-down paths that led to the encampment.

  Rose’s bare flesh was constantly scratched by the brambles and nettles that grew everywhere but she barely paid the discomfort any attention. She was desperate to get to the Neanderthals and save them, to repay a little of the kindness they had shown to her.

  ‘It was a Hy-Bractor that nearly attacked us before, then?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ said the Doctor, forcing his way through an especially rough patch of vegetation. ‘Chantal let one of them out the back for a roam, to get it trained up. That’s our only advantage. They’re like children, their brains haven’t properly formed yet. There’s so much for them to take in.’

  ‘But what are they?’ Rose persisted. ‘And why’s Chantal doing this?

  What made her wake up one morning and say, “I know, I’ll go back in time and breed some rampaging zombies to kill everyone in the Stone Age”?’

  The Doctor’s reply never came. Instead, seeing something up ahead, framed by the fading twilight, he exhaled a long sigh of relief. ‘Yes!

  Made it in time. The Hy-Bractors must still be down in Osterberg.

  Fantastic!’

  Rose pushed past him. And there was the Neanderthal camp, much as it had been when she last saw it. But the raid by the humans seemed to have left only four of them alive. They were sitting cross-legged, staring into the fire. Rose was relieved to see Sakka and her c
hild among them.

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  ‘Doctor, there were about fifty of them,’ she said, overcome by the horror of it all. ‘And my new family slaughtered them.’

  The Doctor looked across at her sadly. ‘That’s the way it is here,’

  he said uncomfortably. ‘Neanderthals are better fighters than humans

  – at least in the forest. If we warn them they might stand a better chance, but that’s all we can do.’

  She couldn’t take that. ‘I get it. Different morality, get used to it.

  But I don’t want to. It’s sick, inhuman.’

  ‘No,’ said the Doctor. ‘Inhuman, Rose – that’s you. Because you care, because you believe in something better. You’ve seen the future.

  Humanity is gonna achieve so much, Rose, out in the stars – in spite of itself.’ He smiled. ‘Look, we’ve swapped sides.’

  ‘And what about them?’ Rose indicated the small, sad group in the clearing. ‘They die, and it’s history, and no one cares. Just a little bit of genocide along the way to building a mighty space empire? And that’s just “the way it is here”?’

  The Doctor took her hand. ‘If I’m right, the Hy-Bractors could breed, spread out, eventually kill everyone on this planet. We can stop that genocide. We must.’

  Rose tried to push her feelings to the back of her mind and ran out into the clearing. ‘Sakka!’ she called. ‘Sakka, there are creatures coming and they’re worse than anything you’ve seen before. You’ve gotta get ready and go!’

  Sakka looked up at her dully. The other Neanderthals kept their heads down. She found it hard to imagine the grief they must be going through.

  ‘Rose,’ said the Doctor from behind her, very quietly.

  ‘You could give me a hand!’ she called back.

  Then she turned to see him standing next to something that looked like a weird kind of sculpture, set to one side of the clearing. It was difficult to make it out distinctly in the fading light, but it was of roughly pyramidal shape. It didn’t look like anything the Neanderthals could have made. She stepped closer.

  It was a huge pyramid of bones.

  Heavy Neanderthal skulls,

  ribcages, legs, arms, pelvic bones, arranged neatly, almost artistically.

  134

  ‘Humans didn’t do this,’ said the Doctor quietly. ‘The flesh has been eaten away, every last morsel picked off. The Hy-Bractors have been here. These are their leftovers. They’re tidy eaters.’

  A wave of pure terror washed over Rose. She looked back at Sakka and the other survivors. ‘How did they escape?’

  ‘They were left here as bait,’ said a familiar chatty voice. ‘Which worked, I’m happy to say.’

  The Doctor and Rose whirled round.

  Chantal had entered the

  clearing from the other side, the four Hy-Bractors ranged obediently around her.

  Rose couldn’t restrain herself. She made to launch herself at Chantal, but the Doctor held her back. ‘It’s pointless.’

  Chantal walked forward. ‘I need you, Doctor, but Rose – she’s just another human. Wasteful, aggressive, untidy. . . ’

  The Doctor bit his lip. ‘Harm one hair of her head and I’ll destroy you.’

  Chantal smiled. ‘Exactly the reaction I expected. I’m not going to underestimate you again, Doctor. The drugs obviously don’t work, so I’m going to ask you to come quietly or I shall let the Hy-Bractors do what comes naturally and tear her limb from limb. She’ll make a nice, smooth dessert course after all this hairy lot. I’m worried the Hy-Bractors will start coughing up furballs. . . ’

  The Doctor fixed Chantal with a penetrating stare. ‘I warn you.

  Stop this now or I will stop it.’

  There was no reaction. Her glassy stare met his unflinchingly, casually.

  ‘That will only work on a person with what you’d call a conscience,’

  Chantal continued. ‘And I patched mine out years ago. Let’s go, shall we?’

  As the Hy-Bractors lurched into life, coming towards them, the Doctor shouted, ‘Run!’

  Rose obeyed, but she hadn’t gone more than a few paces before she was knocked to the ground. At first she thought something had struck her, but as she writhed in the muddy grass she saw Chantal holding one of the stinger sound weapons. The noise was so loud it 135

  drilled into her skull. In the moment before she blacked out she saw the Doctor falling to his knees. They were both the prisoners of this murderous madwoman.

  136

  ThefirstthingtheDoctorsawwhenheawokewastheTARDISstanding in all its reassuringly blue, four-square glory. The second thing he saw were the loops of coiled wire strapping him to the chair back in the examination room.

  Chantal stepped in front of the TARDIS. ‘Pretty easy job for the Hy-Bractors, finding that. Might I suggest you disguise it?’

  ‘It is disguised,’ said the Doctor, rather wounded. He nodded to his bonds. ‘Oh, look, I’m tied up. Shouldn’t have shown you that idea.’

  Chantal stroked his forehead gently. ‘Come on, Doctor, if you’re so clever you must have figured me out by now.’

  ‘You’re not like the others here. Much more intelligent.’

  ‘My mother was a pharma-tech,’ said Chantal. ‘On my seventeenth birthday she implanted an experimental patch designed to increase intelligence exponentially.’

  ‘Makes a change from driving lessons,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘My intelligence raced ahead. I learned everything there was to know. I designed new patches and worked on hundreds of different bio-projects. I patched out my empathy with other humans – it kept 137

  getting in the way.’ She paused. ‘Then I designed the Hy-Bractor. An upgrade of the human race.’

  ‘You call that an upgrade?’ scoffed the Doctor. ‘Why didn’t you call them Human version 2.0?’

  ‘The ones you’ve seen are just the first,’ said Chantal. ‘When fully grown, they will be infinitely more adaptable, intelligent and creative than humans, and will lack the basic design flaws.’

  ‘Flaws like what?’ asked the Doctor.

  Chantal stared into space. ‘We’d mapped out the body and the brain to take away all the wrong-feeling. We were an utterly serene and peaceful people. But I knew it couldn’t last. I examined the historical record – sooner or later, for whatever reason, the basic human was going to reassert itself. There would be war, horror and misery. My compassionate values couldn’t let that happen.’

  ‘I’m just gonna ignore that last sentence,’ said the Doctor.

  ‘There is a self-destructive drive in humankind,’ Chantal went on.

  ‘ Homo sapiens adapted as hunters in a cold environment. But in just a few centuries’ time, the climate will change again. Humans will thrive in the warm. They will very quickly abandon the life of the hunter, for which they are adapted, and become farmers.’

  ‘This is turning into Horizon,’ said a familiar voice away to the Doctor’s left.

  His neck was restrained so he couldn’t turn to see her, but he called out casually, ‘Hiya, Rose.’

  ‘Wotcher,’ came Rose’s reply.

  ‘Complex urban societies will form,’ continued Chantal. ‘Every human generation building on the achievements of the last – fast-paced cultural evolution. There will be social stratification, class and caste distinctions, violence and inequality. Because the violent, competitive hunting brain of the human will remain. Humans can adapt their environment, but they cannot adapt themselves.’

  ‘Thought your lot had,’ said Rose.

  ‘They only suppressed it,’ said the Doctor. ‘Handed themselves over to the drugs.’ He addressed Chantal. ‘What you wanted to do was make the change permanent. Build a better species.’

  138

  Chantal nodded primly. She still spoke calmly and evenly, in her piping secretary’s voice. ‘Yes. Ruthless in its dispatch of inferior human competitors. And cooperative, diverse, with stronger values.’

  ‘Values?�
� spluttered Rose’s voice. ‘Like slaughtering a village full of Neanderthals without one glance back?’

  ‘Excuse me, Rose, whose species is going to do that anyway?’ said Chantal, giggling. ‘I don’t need a lecture on that from a human.’

  ‘And I don’t need a lecture from you but I’m getting one,’ replied Rose.

  ‘You must have loved it when you heard the time project was gonna happen,’ the Doctor told Chantal.

  ‘I installed myself as director,’ said Chantal. ‘It was very easy. I found out who else was being interviewed for the post and I killed them.’

  ‘What is this, the psychopath’s guide to career building?’ said Rose.

  ‘Plus I had an excellently prepared CV,’ continued Chantal. ‘The humans of my time are easy prey. They don’t run, even when you’re pulling them to bits. And all you have to do is give their friends and associates combo 199/87 and they forget they even existed and go happily on their way.’

  The Doctor believed he could see it now. ‘So the idea was to come back here and breed your Hy-Bractors?’

  Chantal nodded. ‘I disabled the time engine, cutting off contact with the other end. Then I diverted the power to the area behind the Grey Door, where the Hy-Bractors were cultivated. It took forty-eight days to fully gestate four of them, and there will be many more.’

  ‘So,’ said the Doctor, ‘you’ll let them swarm over the planet, breed, kill all their competitors, Neanderthal and human alike – tape over centuries of history with your own barmy Utopia.’

  ‘To create the world humans always wanted but could never achieve,’ said Chantal, her voice still even and expressionless. ‘No wish unfulfilled, no love to turn away, no life wasted. But with their bestial, unadapted hunting minds they could never have it, never tri-umph against themselves.’ Her voice rose. ‘The Hy-Bractors will not have that problem! They are adapted perfectly for Earth!’

  139

  There was a silence. ‘Well, whoopee for the Hy-Bractors,’ said the Doctor eventually.

  ‘OK, how are we gonna stop her?’ Rose called over.