Echoes of the Future

The reason remained a mystery, but whatever force it was that had been responsible, it did not discriminate. No form of life was spared, be it mammalian, reptilian, arboreal, gaseous, energy or mineral. Even the robots and androids succumbed, their artificial intelligences clogging with computer-viruses until they collapsed alongside their creators. The only machines that did not falter thus were the ones still busily slaughtering each other at the nucleus of a nightmare they heeded not.

First, continents were quarantined. Then whole planets. Then it was solar-systems. But before long, there was no hiding from the reality that everywhere and everything was stricken. Interstellar travel and communication broke down. Trans-galactic treaties and pacts became meaningless, their member-states hopelessly incapable of reaching each other. Races that had enjoyed all the benefits of cross-cosmic trade and cultural exchange were now confined to the dull earth of their respective homeworlds, eking out an existence of ever-increasing deprivation. Fear descended over the isolated globes darkly dotting the silent sector, their city lights dimming one by one. To most sentient inhabitants it was starting to seem there was only one way this could end.

Joe would have been hard-pressed to muster a more persuasive object-lesson on how war makes everyone its victims. Of course, rational explanations had since been duly posited. Nothing after all was more likely than that two types of experimental weaponry, mingling with something in the ice-worlds’ crusts, might have led to a new and undocumented chemical reaction whose resultant invisible fallout was then flung quadrant-wide from the struggle as if by a vigorous centrifuge. This, the broadest and therefore most plausible theory, our hero gathered was now the popular consensus. Flashtease however was able to talk him through several alternative opinions, from one which cited twenty volumes of technical manuals as evidence that sub-molecular vibrations within Vernderernder and Veranda servo-linkages harmonized harmfully on coming into contact, to others at the opposite end of this scientific spectrum which waxed downright spiritual. This could only happen, asserted the pundits of these, when brother took up arms against brother. It was a matter of balance. The First and Final War was the way the universe addressed transgressions and abominations that stood out so starkly against order which should properly be.

Hearing this, Joe thought of Dylan and felt a chill. The Four Heroes’ cause and the mystical powers of Nottingham had been part of his life far too long for him to dismiss that kind of thinking as mere superstition. Nor had it escaped Joe that however much his adopted space-sector might present a futuristic facade, its belief in ancient destinies was nevertheless real and demonstrable. This region of the stars so remote from Planet Earth had predicted key events for The Four Heroes eons before any native-penned prognostication was thought of. What if the galaxy was correct again? What if the culmination of Joe’s feud with his one-time friend was already spelled out in the tragedy of the First and Final War?

Our hero considered a page of painted manuscript from The Prophecy of the Flame depicting Harbin’s triumph over the ruins of Nottingham, and he considered a spectral manifestation of the same event conjured for him by Empress Ungus, and he considered the words she had spoken to himself and Dylan at that time. Taking all this together, Joe could not but conclude that everything he thus far knew pointed that way. It would have been enough to have had to acknowledge such a truth even if it had arrived on its own. Sadly for our hero though, there was more to come.

On that note Joe wrested his thoughts out of future dread and back to a past no less appalling. He and Flashtease were standing amid holographic tableaux of various shelters and bunkers, a grim museum dedicated to the galaxy’s long plague year. The design of each refuge depended on what manner of species had constructed it, but by all accounts none had made for especially effective guard against the wasting. Our hero however knew of desperation, and the wild chances and impossible hopes people in that state were wont to cling to.

“Most of what we learned about the First and Final War had to do with how ordinary citizens coped with the crisis,” Flashtease continued. “How they tried to help each other, even though there was nothing they could do to change what was going on. How hard they worked to keep essential services running on fewer and fewer staff. Just the courage and compassion that were seen. Really, more than any of the actual fighting between the Vernderernders and Verandas, that’s how we remember that time today.”

“I would venture, Flashtease, that that is the only way to remember such a time,” said Joe.

Something was calling our hero’s eye to one of the ramshackle bolt-holes represented in solid light before him. He walked over, and crouched to survey the likeness of a wall behind which families had huddled in dark days millennia ago, listening to faint fearful broadcasts on rising death-tolls and wanly wondering how long it would be before they too were included among them. Apparently these unfortunates had also whiled away the interminable hours by scratching written passages and rough illustrations onto the face of the wall. Joe looked closely and confirmed his suspicions, whereat his head began to spin again.

It was the Prophecy. Even couched in this galaxy’s preferred parlance, there was no mistaking it. Here, a lengthy proclamation that the Host of War was come, and only the sector-wide transmissions blackout kept this from the realms of common knowledge. Elsewhere, a drawing of a planet of doom descending on ordered orbs, together with scrawled admonitions not to believe farcical reports of a Veranda-Vernderernder skirmish, but to consult instead the rendering above for the true bringer of present plight. Everywhere Joe looked was the garbled misrepresented authority of that which he himself knew best as a leather-bound book titled The Prophecy of the Flame.

Flashtease saw what was on his friend’s mind. “You see, Joe, most people back then thought this was the coming conflict,” he explained. “We know better now, of course. But in the First and Final War, even those who’d never believed in the Prophecy started to think there might be something to it after all. Because I guess it must have felt a lot like all our worst and oldest fears were coming true.”

Joe had been a victim of the same misapprehension once. Just now however he lacked the words to tell Flashtease so, or indeed make him any kind of reply. It was all our hero could do to stare at a patch of shelter board which held him powerless and mute. There etched upon it was a figure without a face, just two glaring eyes and a ragged cloak wrapped about the shoulders. Crudely adapted from a statue on Eshcaton which seers before even the First and Final War had hewn through their art, it was Harbin The Foretold One, Joe’s son. And beneath his portentous shape a scribbled script screamed words that recurred throughout every known text treating of him:

The time is at hand.

Joe was starting to understand the attraction he had felt to the Flash Club chronicles here housed. Those easy-to-access pyramidal packages had offered him a past which nothing now could damage or change or destroy. Perhaps it had reminded him of his own boyhood, the years starting out in his home city and the first adventures of The Four Heroes. All had not been universally cheerful and carefree then, as Joe was well aware, but this place to which Flashtease had brought him possessed power enough to make it seem so. For when Joe turned from the past to face the other direction, he beheld only consequence and responsibility. Here in this sketch of his scion was proof that a clutch of miserable sufferers, separated by incalculable distances of time and space from that one angry shameful act when he and Gala surrendered to their darkest desires, had nevertheless felt justified in laying blame squarely upon it for the death and disease surrounding them. That was the future as it appeared to Joe right now. Everything was too vast. Everything was too heavy in the implications it bore. Everything you did impacted on yourself and others in ways it never could have done when you were young. Who would not have wanted to remain forever in that which had already been? Who would not have chosen thus, were the past and the future ever made available as options in such a way?

Our hero looked to his small freckled Virgil in profoundest need of a happy ending. “How was the First and Final War resolved, Flashtease?” he asked, in a voice that was quiet and hollow.

Flashtease said he would show him. The smile on his face was a blessing to Joe, for it suggested they were finally near a part of the story the Mini-Flash could take pleasure in telling. No less welcome to our hero was the summary deactivation of the holo-bunker programme, as his companion selected a new pyramid and switched it on.

NEXT: 'INTELLIGENTSOR'