Alea Iacta Est

Canopied by the shady vaulted ceiling of what served as an out-of-the-way antechamber, but was actually one hollow plant-cell among millions inside a gigantic alien fungus, two figures sat cross-legged and side-by-side on the floor. It was Joe and Gala, each with head bowed beneath the round brim of his or her black hat as together they pored over a great leather-bound book that lay open in the dust before them. They could almost have passed for a pair of children on a rainy Saturday afternoon, but that their lives thus far had led them through experiences that went some distance beyond truth-or-dare.

Gala was smiling as she let not only her eyes but also her fingertips play over the columns of arcane script and brightly-coloured abstract illuminations emblazoned across the hand-rendered pages. Gently she would stroke a drawing here, or a line there, and then the tender sentiments written on her features were aglow. At times her dark eyes would briefly close as she breathed in the ancient parchment’s scent.

Joe understood why. The Prophecy of the Flame meant many things to both of them, but to Gala it was also like any book that happened to have been read at the happiest time of a life. To pick it up again years later, after everything had changed, was to renew acquaintance with an old friend and touch again upon the sunlight and voices and ways of feeling that belonged to those days now past. The mingled fondness and wistfulness of it was known to Joe, although he himself had never studied the Prophecy. His one time-travelling encounter with that tome occurred soon after its blank sheaves were bound, when ink had not yet stained their identical pristine surfaces.

Looking at Gala again, it occurred to Joe this was the first time he had seen her smile ever since they shared what they had shared. There was some comfort in the thought. For years he had lived with all that was attendant on the anticipation of that deed, and had yearned in vain that he might find some way for it to allow for happiness. Now that it was done, as his memories and body reminded him far more vividly than he could have wished, Gala’s smiles carried with them for Joe a faint stirring of hope that he might not always feel the way he felt tonight.

Gala’s touch was lingering on one especial block of text.

“Paragraph seven,” she explained succinctly. “It was very important.”

There was more than nostalgia about the pronouncement. Joe knew Gala well enough by now to hear the sadness and remorse that were there too; or to put it more accurately, he had always been able to intuit the emotions hidden even in her tersest words. So he merely waited.

“It’s the real reason I came to be so wrong about the rest,” Gala continued sure enough, providing the elucidation for which Joe had not needed to ask her. “Because about this first part we tackled, impossibly complicated as it seemed, we were so right.”

She sighed.

“I’d already restored the golden age to Nottingham,” Gala went on. “The First Dark Advent was over, the plague was cured, the world was free. It was then that The Chancellor made first contact with me via the Time-Shifting Devices which in his own period he’d recently invented, and together we set down in earnest to interpreting what the next phase of our destiny was to be. Success in everything that followed, unprecedented achievements in metaphysics and quantum theory…Joe, anyone would have started to feel they could do no wrong. Is it any wonder I began letting myself be influenced by what I so wanted to be true? The conclusions I jumped to about my role in future events, and what part you were to play, and about…”

“And about me,” Joe finished for her quietly.

Few were more aware than Gala that he was correct on his failure to live up to the expectations she had invested in him long before they ever met. That very thought had lately been precursor to the bitter abandonment she had chosen in his hard loveless embrace. She was however no longer victim to the same excesses of subjectivity that ruled her then, and Gala had lived long enough to suspect that any such faith attached blindly to an imagined paragon was surely fated for disappointment. In addition it occurred to her that the pain she knew now as she contemplated her companion’s three frank words might indicate she had not been wholly mistaken as to the better qualities she once imagined she saw in him.

“There is still much I do not understand, Gala,” Joe went on, turning to the manuscript.

The change of subject was welcome, and moreover both agreed it was needed for more reasons than tact alone. Gala’s pointing forefinger moved to the top left-hand corner of the twin page, and she resumed:

“Then this is where we need to begin.”

Gala completed her account, and gave Joe a minute or two to come to terms with the enormity of these revelations.

“On Christmas Eve,” he began at last, “you told me that the truth was so astounding I would not believe it without some manner of proof. I suspect you may have been right.”

“And I don’t know about that, Joe,” was Gala’s response. “You did trust me. From what I saw, you may have been the only one of The Four Heroes who did. Let me ask you something,” she went on. “How did you know I wasn’t just a good liar? Or to put it another way, a talented actress? Quickly improvising whenever you thought we’d made some emotional connection, so no matter what you believed about me at any given time, I’d be right there working along with it. Exercising my cunning and my wiles. Sure, a few arguments thrown in for the sake of verisimilitude, but always steering you in the directions that would draw you closer to me and pull The Four Heroes apart. Draxu showed you enough. Surely, then at least, you felt you’d been wrong to trust me?”

“You already know the answer to that,” Joe replied, but there was no strength in his quiet voice, merely dull resignation. “I never stopped trusting you. On that one occasion it was merely easier for me to pretend I felt otherwise.”

Again, Gala could not but feel a renewed tenderness as she looked at him. She reached out and touched his hand.

“The tower room, at sunset,” Joe went on. “I knew then you had not lied to me.”

“When I cried in front of you,” said Gala. She refrained from adding it was the first of two such times. Meanwhile a ghost of a smile was touching her lips, as she continued: “Which is Four Heroes thinking for you through and through. With sentimentalism like that it’s beyond me how you saved the world so many times. Someone cries, and you take it as assurance of good intentions.”

Joe was starting to smile back. “And on that same day I told you,” said he, “that you had much to learn from us.”

Gala herself was remembering a battle high in the skies above Nottingham, first sortie in the war between The Four Heroes and the Next Four, or more specifically an instance from its verbal preliminaries of which Joe already knew.

“And there were times I ended up behaving exactly like the hardened villainess I had to pretend to be,” she declared. “Such as lying to the girl that you were the traitor. Of course, setting the pair of you against each other was an important part of what I believed the Next Four’s cause to be at the time…”

Her voice trailed into silence. She met his eyes with hers.

“But you learned from Draxu the way I felt about you,” Gala then acknowledged. “So you know that causes and wars weren’t the only reason I did it.”

The only response within Joe’s power was take the hand that still rested on his, and hold it. Gala had brought him to undiscovered country in so many different ways. She did not fit anywhere in the ideological framework Joe had adhered to when he was young, and indeed, on this night he felt as if Gala’s influence had somehow changed everything he once knew. But belief was still Joe’s to call his own. It was belief that lent firmness to his grip on Gala’s hand, and belief that told him despite all the truths she spoke he was nevertheless correct to hold on to her thus.

A new topic, or rather the inevitable continuation of the present one, had joined them. They knew it was there, hanging in the stifling spore-sifted space above. There sat The Prophecy of the Flame, waiting outspread on the floor. It was theirs at last, and thus far it had led them to much of the knowledge they had sought and helped towards some kind of new emergent understanding of each other too. Greater responsibilities however remained. There was a secret yet to learn, and Gala and Joe knew alike they could not afford to neglect it, no matter how this particular unknown filled both with nameless apprehension.

“Show me,” Joe asked of Gala. His voice was strangely hushed. “Show me the part you misread.”

Joe looked on Gala as she turned over the pages. Still she and he bore something of a resemblance to children on a wet weekend, but now for Joe it was the kind of afternoon when the rain was unmistakably worsening, and all the elements in their fury were starting to blow.

Gale-force winds on Pre-Nottingham Earth would tear unobstructed over realms of flat fenland before screaming down on the tall cavernous house where Joe’s child-self had dwelled. At such times it was necessary to switch the lights on indoors, as the thunderclouds threatened to make day as black as night, though there was no guarantee the power supply would hold against the ravages without. The bulbs themselves seemed to know this, for there was a strained quality to their glow which did not exude the same flowing confidence as that of a still cloudless night. You could not put your faith in the lights. At any point they might blink off and not come on again, abandoning the house to darkness.

Joe remembered his parents’ faces on those afternoons, discoloured and looking not as they should in the preternatural dusk and the daytime electric yellow. It lent them both an unhealthy creeping cast, but as the long-ago visages rose up again before Joe now he wondered whether poor illumination was all that had made them appear so weary, so regretful, so resigned?

Had they known? Were Joe’s parents aware at that time of the fate that awaited them? Had they been planning for it, even then?

Surely Joe was reading this memory through the lens of the later tragedy. Surely he had been far too young for such insight or presentiment. Yet he was certain the fear he had felt on sight of his mother’s and father’s features thus rendered ghastly and somehow intractably distant had reached a part of him mere turbulent weather could not. What was wrong, what he was powerless to change, what he might even be responsible for, had not to do with the storm raging then but the one which was on its way. That fear, forgotten for a lifetime or so it seemed, had returned to Joe and possessed him.

Gala laid the book open.

Sometimes it is the smaller struggles, and perhaps especially the ones we lose, that determine the fates of galaxies and worlds. As Gala’s eyes fell upon the page so well remembered she saw that nothing about its text had changed. It was her life which had evolved and expanded and mutated beyond the meaning forever inscribed there. When first she read it, as a girl-scholar and triumphant liberator of Nottingham, she had absorbed that meaning in terms of all it seemed to signify for what Joe and her destiny had been to her then. Now on her adult rereading, the terrible truth of it was abundantly clear. But it was a truth Gala could not have known before experience taught her there was more in the universe than the dreams and aspirations of the young.

Joe’s old sense of self as first of The Four Heroes had trembled before the certain knowledge that Neetra, with whom he had hitherto imagined he would share the whole of the great adventure, was lost to him. Not because of Gala’s deliberate efforts to sow dissension between them, though Gala was very much involved in it. Somewhere far deeper Joe had already been forced to confront his own helplessness and inability to go on loving Neetra as he had done, and at that same lodestone of his being he resonated with the stirrings towards Gala that would not be denied. To he and she alike then, it seemed there was no prophecy capable of anticipating for them in plain language where the paths of their lives might intersect. The pilots on such journeys were the the body and the soul, and questions of route needs must be left to them.

Now Joe and Gala looked slowly to each other in the earliest natal seconds of coldest horror and dread. The deed was already done. At long last its two authors knew as much. There could be no recrossing the Rubicon now.

The die was cast.

Harbin on his prior voyage to present-day Earth had amazed The Four Heroes’ time-travelling kin by speaking aloud for the only occasion in memory or lore. His words, addressed to Gala, were these:

“I wanted to see your face.”

Now for Joe and Gala the import of this rare utterance was an enigma no more.

Harbin had referred to the face of his mother.