Doctor Who_ The Gallifrey Chronicles - Lance Parkin [54]
Emma had a good voice. They hadn’t had a chance to talk before the gig –
Fitz had cut his arrival a bit fine. She was young, sort of all right, but nothing on Trix. She was singing folk songs, but with a bit more energy to them than normal. He’d been told her stuff went down well here. The song he’d written probably could count as folk, if you fiddled the figures a little.
His turn came racing round. He took his place where Emma had been standing, the applause for her merging into his welcome.
Fitz lifted his guitar.
‘Good evening,’ he said, confident. ‘My name is. . . ’ He hesitated, unsure what he should call himself. He’d played a couple of places in the Sixties, called himself Fitz Fortune. It had a good ring to it, but. . . ‘My name is Fitz Kreiner. I’m going to sing three songs, if that’s all right.’
All twenty people nodded enthusiastically. There weren’t many of them, but they were all keen.
Fitz smiled. He knew already that they’d like this one. ‘I call this one
“Contains Spoilers”, and I warn you that it does, indeed, contain spoilers.’
He made a show of tuning his guitar, although it was already as tuned as it was possible for a guitar to be. Then he began his song1.
The crowd were soon tapping their feet and cheered him at the end.
‘OK,’ said Fitz, ‘this is a Beatles song. You won’t remember but, trust me, the Fab Four brought the house down at Live Aid with it. This is called “Celebrate 1The lyrics to Fitz’ song are on page 231
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the Love”. One, two, three. . . ’
Rachel found Marnal in the garage unlocking the door of the TARDIS.
‘Is it OK if I come with you?’ she asked.
Marnal looked curiously at her, then stepped aside to let her in. He followed, the doors whirring smoothly shut behind them.
‘Were all the buildings bigger on the inside on Gallifrey?’ she asked.
Marnal gave a cold laugh. ‘A few were.’
‘Such as?’
‘The Towers of Canonicity and Likelihood.’ He looked down at her. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘If you told me how it was done, would I understand that?’
Marnal had reached the console. As he started working the controls, checking the progress of the recalibration, he was clearly considering her question.
‘Yes, I think so,’ he conceded after a moment or so. ‘Imagine a sequence.
Start with a point, then a line, then a square, then imagine a cube, then imagine a TARDIS.’
Happy with what the instruments were telling him, Marnal continued on his way, heading for a door in the back wall.
‘I think I get it,’ Rachel said. ‘When you go into a TARDIS, you don’t go forwards or backwards, you don’t go up or down, you don’t go from left to right. You go in a completely different direction, one you can’t travel on Earth.’
Marnal turned, smiling. ‘Yes, that’s certainly one way to put it.’
He opened the door. On the other side a long, wide corridor raced off far into the distance. The walls, floor and ceiling were all spotless and white.
Rachel could see other corridors branching off it. Every so often, there were doors – white ones, naturally. The walls had a circular pattern embossed on them. It was all brightly lit, although there were no apparent sources for the light.
‘I’ve just been talking to the Doctor. He says he remembers something.’
‘What?’
‘He said something about the back wall of the TARDIS.’
‘It doesn’t have a back wall.’
‘It must have.’
‘A fully functional TARDIS is practically infinite.’
‘Is infinity ever really a practical size?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Marnal admitted. ‘Even a Time Lord setting out in his youth and walking every day of his life with a minimum of rest could only get so far.’
‘I thought you were immortal?’
‘The Doctor and I can live for a very long time, replacing our bodies every thousand years or so as they wear out – sooner, of course, if we meet with 116
an accident. We have a limited number of bodies. We can regenerate twelve times, after the