Doctor Who_ Earthworld - Jacqueline Rayner [41]
The Doctor grinned his thanks and slapped Hanstrum companionably on the back.
Hanstrum seemed to be thinking of something else.
The door banged open. ‘Hello, Fitz Fortune!’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘That’s no way to talk to your fans, Fitz Fortune. And you don’t want to upset your fans, do you?’
‘I don’t care,’ said Fitz. Then he remembered the man being ripped apart by the lion, and the look on the triplets’ faces as he’d died, and said, ‘No, I don’t want to upset my fans. Sorry.’
He sat up. The trip in the room with him was wearing a green FITZ FORTUNE
IS FAB! T-shirt, and so he was pretty damn sure it was Antarctica. ‘Listen, I’m A Man is the Sum of His [False] Memories 75
not who you think I am. Really.’
She giggled. ‘Don’t be silly!’
‘I’m not. I. . . I wasn’t really a star back on Earth, you know. I wasn’t as big as Elvis. I wasn’t even as big as Elvis’s smallest toenail. I played once or twice a week in a small club in Soho, and never even pressed a disc. That was it.’
Antarctica giggled some more. ‘You are funny, Fitz Fortune. I know that can’t be true. Because if it was, I’d have to let Africa have you, and that wouldn’t be very good, would it? After all, you are my favouritest singer of all time ever.’ She gazed off into the middle distance. ‘Africa puts knives under people’s toenails. She likes that.’
Torture. Honesty or torture. Self-discovery or torture. Which to choose?
The Fitz thing, now Fitz again, became once more Fitz Fortune. ‘Ha-ha! Just kidding ya, baby! Tell you what, I’ll dedicate my next record to you, OK?’
Antarctica beamed. ‘Did you hear the alarm earlier, Fitz Fortune?’
Fitz hadn’t. In serious introspective mode he probably wouldn’t have heard a bomb go off under his nose.
‘We think it might be your friends’ fault.’
Fitz’s heart jumped.
‘So we’ve sorted things so they won’t get you.’
His heart sank again.
‘’Cos you’re going to stay with me for ever and ever!’
Fitz’s heart reached his boots.
‘And I’m going to leave Princess Leia to keep you company until we’re ready.’
‘Who? Ready for what?’ cried Fitz, his heart jumping up slightly at the idea of a princess who wasn’t one of the triplets sharing his room. But it sank down even lower than he thought possible when Antarctica dropped her crocodile in his lap, and locked the door on them.
And there was that ticking sound again! It was coming from the crocodile.
Was it a crocodile-bomb? Were they trying to blow him up? He pushed the animal on to the floor hurriedly. It just sat there, gazing up at him in what was really quite a cute way for a reptile, and. . . ticking. Fitz thought about crocodiles, and about the loose grip on the realities of history that most people on this planet seemed to possess, and then shook his head in recognition.
He picked up the little crocodile and gave it a rueful, if somewhat wary, hug.
‘They’re quite mad, aren’t they?’ he said to it.
Chapter Five
Powerplay
Hanstrum didn’t seem to be particularly interested in what the Doctor had to say, but the Doctor didn’t let that discourage him.
‘I find androids fascinating, don’t you? Androids. Hmm. From the Greek androeides, manlike. Man seems determined to set himself up as a creator of life, and as he can’t do it in any real sense he contents himself with these strange approximations and pretends that’s enough. I knew a man – should I call him a friend? Yes, I think I should – I had a friend, many years ago, called Alan Turing.
A very, very clever man. He predicted that computers would one day be able to think like humans, and he came up with a test that would prove it. He said, if you had a computer and a human hidden from view and asked them a series of identical random questions, there would one day be a computer who could not be told apart from the human by its answers alone. The trouble is, that’s not a finite test.