Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [31]
Back in his dressing room, changing into a non-ripped suit (purple velvet), Fitz sighed. It wasn’t just that he’d been recaptured and locked up. For the first time ever, he’d been wanted desperately by a horde of screaming women, and he wasn’t allowed to capitalise on it. They wanted him so bad. Lying on the ground, he’d been grabbed and stroked and touched and, oooh, don’t start thinking about it all now because he’d be close to tears. One of the audience
– a stunning redhead of twenty-ish, who, you never know, may not have been an android – had thrust her address and contact number in his pocket. A gold robot, acting on orders from Antarctica, had removed it and scrunched it up.
Fitz, Antarctica had said as he was carried away from all the hot babes, was her pet. No one else could have him. And she wanted a Fitz Fortune concert every single day and no more naughty attempts to escape. Fitz didn’t think he’d be able to oblige concert-wise, even to save his neck – now the adrenalin had gone, he wanted to sleep for a week.
But he had been so good. In many ways, he didn’t blame her. They’d recorded the concert, and left him with a Walkman-like device (despite having travelled all round the universe he still felt dead clever when he recognised future-Earth gadgets) so he could listen to how fab he was and psych himself up for next time.
He’d been good before, back in the old days, and he’d known it – not in any bigheaded way, but he wasn’t one for false modesty, either. In the wannabe rock-star league, he’d been one without the opportunities rather than without the talent. After a few years gadding about the universe, though, with not all that much time for practice, he’d expected to be a bit rusty, not bloody-hell-better-than-ever.
And then he realised.
It wasn’t him.
One of the things that Fitz had been trying to shut from his mind was his recent discovery that he – well, that he wasn’t Fitz. It was a bit complicated, and his understanding of it was hindered by the way his mind automatically stuck its fingers in its ears and yelled LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU every time the subject threatened to come up.
What had happened was: Fitz had been replaced with a copy; the real Fitz whisked off elsewhere. Over the years, memories of the copy were imprinted 58
EarthWorld
on to a lump of biomass, until only a Chinese-whispers version of the Fitz-copy remained. The Fitz-copy had then been taken to the TARDIS, and the TARDIS
had ‘remembered’ it into the Fitz it’d known in the first place. Neither the new Fitz nor the Doctor had realised he’d only been a copy to start with. And the real Fitz – the biological, born-on-Earth, went-on-the-run-with-the-Doctor Fitz
– well, he grew old waiting for the Doctor to rescue him; he lived for thousands of tormented years, and then he was killed.
Fitz was dead. Long live the Fitz-copy.
Real Fitz had been good at the guitar; Real Fitz could sing. The TARDIS had known that, and remembered him thus. Not as a guy who hadn’t played for a while and needed a bit of practice, but as somebody who was bang-up-to-date, right-that-second damn good.
He wasn’t real. This wasn’t him. No, it was him, but he wasn’t Fitz. He wasn’t really anybody. Not an actual person at all.
Fitz – the Fitz-thing – threw off the headphones and curled up in the corner of the dressing room, hugging its knees. It suspected that the real Fitz would have cried. But it wasn’t the real Fitz, so that wasn’t allowed.
Chapter Four
A Man is the Sum of His [False] Memories While still cursing her heels, Anji tried to count her blessings, and thanked goodness that she’d chosen casual slacks yesterday – was it only yesterday?
No, surely not – she’d have to get out her Psion and work it out. Anyway, whenever it was, she was glad she’d not gone for a suit. It might have given her a psychological advantage in the earlier cross-examination, but a restrictive skirt would have made things twice as bad as they already were – her