Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [29]
But having done so, how could they return to the little prison of their world here? Natural enough for them to want to create androids in their own image
– a common form of narcissism. And I’m sure the people round here had got complacent in their security procedures – after all, who’d expect young girls to want to live in a park instead of a palace? After so many years locked up, they 54
EarthWorld
must have thought they were institutionalised. Didn’t expect them to escape.
Didn’t expect them to start killing people.’
Asia sneered at him. ‘You’re so stupid. That’s exactly what they did expect.
Why do you think they kept us locked up all these years? They knew we’d keep killing people. After we’d killed our own mother.’
‘My turn my turn my turn!’
After the man’s death throes had finally ceased, and the battery-operated lion had gone back to whatever electric jungle it had come from, the trips had started to row. Antarctica seemed to think it was her turn for a treat now. Africa was obviously quite happy to gaze at the corpse for a bit longer. She’d probably go down and start prodding it in a minute. Asia was regarding them both in a scornful, yet strangely indulgent way. The Big Sister. Fitz thought she was probably the most stable of the three. But then that was rather like saying that the Pacific was probably the least wet of all the oceans.
In the end, in the manner of foot-stampers everywhere, Antarctica got her own way. She was to have her treat. What would it be? Fitz wondered. A re-creation of the St Valentine’s Day massacre (romantic yet blood-soaked)? The English Civil War (possibly a problem: Fitz’d place the trips as Roundhead by inclination, but they’d undoubtedly prefer the Cavalier costumes)?
Fitz tried to put on a mask of eager anticipation while Antarctica decided.
He didn’t really succeed. The look of shock when he heard what she had to say was perfectly genuine, though.
‘I want a Fitz Fortune concert!’
‘Pardon?’ said Fitz.
Antarctica ignored him. ‘I do I do I do! I want a Fitz Fortune concert by Fitz Fortune now!’
‘Do I get any say in the. . . ’ (glare from Antarctica), ‘no, obviously not.’
‘Fitz Fortune is my favourite singer ever and I love him and I want a concert now.’
Fitz marvelled at his successful self-publicity. How come he’d never got this sort of attention from teenage girls back home? Of course, they had actually heard him sing. And they weren’t, on the whole, homicidal lunatics.
‘Ladies, ladies, I’d love to oblige, really I would, but I’m afraid, I don’t have my guitar with me – and Fitz Fortune sans guitar is just not Fitz Fortune at all. . . ’
Antarctica glared at him. Asia turned to stare. Even Africa tore her eyes away from the gladiator’s bloody remains. And Fitz realised that saying ‘ha-ha, Killing Queens
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they’re homicidal lunatics’ in his thoughts was one thing, but for goodness’ sake he’d just seen them have a man ripped apart and just because they looked like the babes in the wood didn’t mean they were any less likely to kill him than any of the other homicidal lunatics he’d met (and there’d been a few). ‘Um, do you possibly have a backing tape?’ he asked.
Africa had wanted to hold the concert in the Roman arena, because then if Fitz wasn’t very good they could set the lion on him and at least have fun that way.
Fitz had tried a half-hearted ‘my friends will be looking for me’ defence, but it didn’t seem to worry them.
Antarctica had ridiculed her sister’s suggestion that her beloved Fitz Fortune might be a bit poor, because he was ‘the greatest pop star in the whole world’.
Fitz, however, did not find this comforting.
Asia had remarked that the twentieth century was probably the best setting for a twentieth-century act, and Antarctica had jumped up and down going
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’, so off to the Twentieth-Century London Zone they went. They rode in a horse-drawn chariot to the border, but Fitz barely noticed. He didn’t even twitch when Antarctica’s crocodile