False Messenger, Chapter Two

They parked at a vacant lot, which the cowboy explained would afford him the space he needed. Joe, and for that matter even Mini-Flash Splitsville, had thus far only heard tell of his mysterious power to telepathically imprint himself upon the surrounding landscape. Already a light drizzle had started up, which Joe knew at once for the psionic illusion it was. Sonica unfolded her tiny pink umbrella.

“You are certain you possess strength enough for this undertaking?” our hero inquired tactfully of his likeness.

That one had draped his coat round Mini-Flash Splitsville to keep her warm and dry. Joe was struck by a memory of sheltering Neetra from snow in just that manner, at a time when they were both so young he could barely conceive of it. Now his semblance, and what he could see of Splitsville’s face, beamed back at him wordless and identically radiant. Our hero took this for a yes, and wished he hadn’t asked.

The geodesic and helical elevations of an alien city were reshaping to vistas Joe reckoned must have been more alien still to his female companions, but as far as he was concerned were a slice of home transplanted onto the opposite end of the universe. Damp tiled rooftops sloped blackly beneath a sky so forlorn and overcast it might have been going on for night. The chimneys however were giving forth teatime smoke, and Joe knew at once Earth’s sun was striving to set somewhere far beyond the mountains of moisture and murk.

He couldn’t have failed to know it.

Our hero caught his breath.

“That’s right,” the cowboy said to him. “It’s the day you created Nottingham. What you’re looking at here are the first few seconds after it didn’t happen.”

Joe stared. Yes, this was how it would have been, for it was a miserable evening they’d interrupted with their glorious blue-skied autumn sunset, and but for that moment, miserable it should have stayed. Doubtless there were such alternate realities. Yet how to describe what it was to stand and watch the steady passage of time, as it widened with every tick the interstitial distance between this tangent and the destiny for which Joe had forsaken it? Still softly fell the rain, and away the smoking vista of Boston roofs stretched for their gloomy vanishing-point. Our hero cast about for the correct metaphor, though he couldn’t help leaning overmuch on Robert Frost.

Nor was he any psychiatrist, but his grasp of the subconscious was sufficient for him to venture to himself: “Then, this is the world you inhabit?”

Solemnly the cowboy nodded. He looked as if what he had to say next was something that needed to be said, but it gave him no pleasure to have to do so in front of the two girls.

“What you did was better,” he affirmed to Joe. “Better for the world. Better for mankind. We’d be looking at an archetypal Four Heroes dystopia if this were an alternate reality.”

Joe supposed it followed that he and another him would think along similar lines.

“Imagine though, a reality defined only by the perception of one subjective individual,” his double went on. “That’s what you have to get into when you deal with a being like me. A reality where the bigger picture impinges only insofar as it directly affects you. In other words, not consistent in the way a parallel timeline is. You’re seeing Pre-Nottingham Earth as seen by a boy who was never anything but safe and comfortable there.”

Bearing in mind the line on which Joe’s train of thought had been running all day, it was no struggle for him to picture such a boy.

“One who learned responsibility,” the gentle other went on, “only at a terrible cost.”

That was the fungus-ship again. Joe had known he would be there, the place where this topic was last dredged up and mercilessly brandished before him. Yet even still, he wanted to assure his alter-ego he may speak freely on such matters, that since his interview with Scientooth he had resigned himself to the necessity of their talking about this.

At last our hero replied, in a quiet voice:

“I can well understand I needed you, my friend, and all that you represent. That rupture, that…loss, ended the safety and comfort of which you speak. In place of these came duty, which even when its motives are of the purest, is nevertheless a burden to be shouldered. Had it not so fallen out…”

Joe’s own face smiled back at him through the twinkling mist.

“Then instead of creating Nottingham,” the cowboy finished, “maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if you’d just gone home and had your tea.”

A younger Joe, more given to melodramatics, would surely have protested that even on a subconscious level he had never been capable of wishing such a thing. Yet what would have been the point of our hero’s attempting to claim the same, when proof of his having done so walked and talked alongside him?

It dawned on Joe that what he surveyed might be less a fork in the road, and more the closing of one enormous circle.

“Pseudangelos,” said Mini-Flash Splitsville, out of nowhere.

Drizzle and teatime tiles were all at once an empty lot in a galactic city again. Around the corner of the boundary wall a girl was poking her face, watching them.

She was Special Program. Joe deduced it at once, not so much because Splitsville had hailed her by name, but rather because he’d been teaching the former and her friends long enough to have started thinking of them as “his three.” He knew the signs, and they were all over this little interloper, even despite the slightly overdone Earth-style school uniform she was wearing. Some sort of disguise probably made sense for a wanted Flash Club fugitive, but Joe didn’t believe the galaxy in general was so well-acquainted with human fancy-dress.

Neetra however had brought back intelligence from the planetoid of Flaban which hinted at a potentially catastrophic alliance between certain of the Special Program runaways and 4-H-N.

Could this be one of them?

Mini-Flash Splitsville set off walking towards her erstwhile classmate, and Joe made no delay in doing the same. He had one of his feelings about this.

“Dig those crazy mixed-up threads,” Splitsville grinned. To Joe it didn’t follow in the least that she should be able to see through the other’s subterfuge as if it wasn’t there, and yet at the same time perceive no physical resemblance between himself and the cowboy. The Special Program were strange however, and never more so than in the way they related to each other.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos said something in reply, though it came out so halting and murmurous that Joe could barely hear. He immediately thought of Flashshadow.

By this time his other self and Sonica had also come over. Their unexpected guest’s hair was dark as chocolate, and her face would in the ordinary way have been naturally pale, as the Special Program were. Just now however Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was all a furious blush, averting her pretty cheeks as if in an attempt to hide it, though heat seemed to pulse even through the thinness of her stockings and blouse. Nor was that all that radiated from her.

“Oh, yummers,” Sonica remarked. “What branch of tappy smell-bomb is that? You must let me know, I’d love to try one.”

Now Joe was reminded in turn of Mini-Flash Juniper, who could be as bashful as this Mini-Flash Pseudangelos seemed. She also flushed that way whenever she exerted herself.

Using her powers.

Joe wasn’t having much luck with metaphors, but the final piece of the puzzle had been staring him in the face.

He’d had every reason to be steeped in memories of Pre-Nottingham Earth all day.

So much so, that the possibility of an outside psychic influence hadn’t occurred to him.

“You!” our hero flung aloud at Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, making everybody jump. “This was your doing! Why have you performed such an act upon my person?”

END OF CHAPTER TWO