Masterclass

The land lay level, gold gradually mellowing to amber, and here and there the foamy jets of irrigation-hoses seemed as still as scattered brush-strokes on an oil-painting rendered in sun. Against a sky whose blue bore the first deepening tints of afternoon was suggested Nottingham’s distant outline, each slender rectangle blocked-in with the same hue of haze. Through the flat fields the road ran, and parked haphazardly along its grass verges were a black space-racer and a red, the occupants of each sitting atop their hoods.

Appearances to the contrary, this was Joe’s masterclass. The two girls striving after soft-rock nonchalance in their tunics and knee-boots were so far the only Special Program Mini-Flashes to forsake Headquarters in favour of his faction. Joe had reason to believe that made them his most important pupils, and never more so than now.

“Let us consider what a moment might mean,” he commenced from the prow of the crimson rod. “Here we hold at rest on a road The Four Heroes brought into being in a single such instant, and which later that day we traversed as another ran its fleeting course. Yet the road remains. Such still stretches as these await us any hour, welcoming us to stop awhile, and remember.”

Joe paused.

“Your observations, ladies.”

Shyly Flashshadow put up her hand, and on being invited to speak, contributed something brief and indistinct. Joe however was getting better at making out her murmurs, and in the vernacular of her approximate age-group back home on Earth, she’d nailed it.

“Indeed, Flashshadow,” he commended her. “This is not the road I refer to. That one was created by The Four Heroes long ago, light-years hence, on my home planet.”

“And this strip is like hotter off the griddle than yesterday’s burgers,” Mini-Flash Splitsville put in. “One half-order of Four Heroes powers courtesy of heart-throb and his hippest chick, with some real gone Toothfire and Back Garden short-order cooks to super-size that fries and shake.”

“Yes,” said Joe, and thinking about it awarded Flashshadow an extra mark for her admirable concision.

“Now comes the most difficult element of our lesson,” he went on. “The cause does not require you to participate in delusions or lies. These atoms, this engirdling ecosystem, even the very dust upon the surface of the road, did not exist on the day of which I speak. What I ask of you however is to understand the relationship between that moment of Nottingham’s creation on Earth and our being here, at this specific time and these specific co-ordinates within your own galaxy. Grasp that the one is so because the other was, and then you will know something of the cause.”

Joe gave over a little while for the gushing geysers stationed across the landscape to continue their all but imperceptible dance.

“From what need sprang the iteration of Nottingham here apparent?” was the rhetorical question on which he resumed. “Was it not to prepare your generation for the trials in which you are destined to play a pivotal part? Though as yet we know not what the nature of your role will be, it is my belief that if you are to prevail, the cause must be no ideological abstraction but rather the very foundation on which your lives are lived. Let us say a Mini-Flash this very hour finds meaning in,” he suggested with a smile, “the recent exemplary output of our hardworking publications department…”

“Sludge-Man’s laying down some crazy jazz,” said Mini-Flash Splitsville approvingly.

“He is,” Joe agreed, though he was aware some of his appreciation for the same had to do with the circumstances under which he usually read it. “And years from now, when that Mini-Flash is grown and the coming conflict upon us, at some crucial juncture he or she may revert to that which was imparted today. Then shall they look back on what they were then, as I myself picture even now the boy I was when I gazed on this road’s historical genesis. The cause is built on moments. We do not languish in one everlasting. But it is through the cause that even on those roads that lead us to the opposite end of the universe, we might retrieve every step of the journey and know it for our own.”

The small scholars were looking thoughtful. Flashshadow was never easy to see but instinct told Joe she was following this, while Mini-Flash Splitsville though younger was trying her best.

“Practical component, ladies,” he announced. “Please telepathically demonstrate your understanding, sharing only as much as you are comfortable to. Mini-Flash Splitsville, when you are ready.”

So saying Joe engaged his psychic abilities. Presently the deserted highway began to come alive with blurry tail-light trails and the slick gleaming glimmer of paint-jobs and chrome. Joe heard whitewalled tyres screech, and what may have been either throbbing engines of the heavy strums of a double-bass. Perhaps even the sizzling fried foodstuffs to which Mini-Flash Splitsville had alluded were not remote, hot fat palpable in the slipstream, heaped in a nest of greaseproof paper and ready to hand on the passenger seat.

“An excellent first attempt,” Joe told her. “Do I detect the influence of last week’s Film Club?”

“You better believe it, Daddy-O,” Mini-Flash Splitsville said happily.

Flashshadow now. Something about an especially treasured snowglobe would have been Joe’s guess. Once again he applied his powers.

This kind of communion with Flashshadow was no easier than the verbal or visual, but what eventually swam into focus was an out-of-the-way module or nook inside a habitation-dome. Joe could tell from the start that this was far back. There was the limpid light of a holoscreen, and on the periphery no more than a suspicion of a glass concave enclosure with either night or space outside, and what may have been translucent top-heavy pot-plants of some low-gravity genus. Joe was seeing through the eyes of a truly tiny Flashshadow sitting quiet and alone on the floor, her legs curled up under her just as she curled them still.

What was she watching? Joe felt like the last person qualified to jump to conclusions on the way things looked when you were Flashshadow, but even despite this and the vale of years, he felt the excitement which flickered in that ephemeral breast. A location-filmed landscape of very grainy black, glaring puddles reflecting the sky. Had the director shot it on a rough-ridged mountain? No – a volcano. Joe knew because the frenzied plot had by now moved inside. They were at the volcano’s heart, surrounded by special-effects smoke, where a rock-rimmed circle high overhead shed a single shaft of Heaven’s light. This must be the climax. What were those dark shapes hulking in the shadows, and what was their terrible noise? Why had Joe’s infant student and friend been parked in front of a programme so frightening? Surely an horrific conclusion was portended by those dreadful groans and lows?

Only it wasn’t. Because it was song. In their bestial ruckus these unseen monsters of the underworld were trying to sing. And the minute Joe recognised that, it was beautiful.

His heart, not Flashshadow’s, missed a beat.

It had to be. The volcano and the singing beasts were among the few fragments apparently concrete enough to have recurred, across one or two of the otherwise infamously vague and idiosyncratic Mini-Flash letters which Croldon Thragg had neatly compiled in a data-file for him to pore over.

Joe was seeing it.

His first mad impulse was to glance around the module interior for a copy of the Radio Times. Joe knew full well though that even if a galactic equivalent had lain conveniently open on that day’s page, there would have been no access to it from here. Memories didn’t come with original air-dates and a range of bonus features. This was about the child Flashshadow and what the experience had meant to her.

Joe supposed that when she was very young Flashshadow had barely existed at all. The galaxy still did not completely comprehend what its so-called second gender was, and for Flashshadow to have been so conspicuously different even from typical examples of her strange new sex, at the time of their startling and unprecedented proliferation…no wonder she had related to those monsters onscreen. There would have been no shortage of adults around her who’d made her feel she was one herself. Sad, thought Joe, that no matter where in the universe you went, you always found some who couldn’t see who the real monsters were.

Flashshadow’s lyre suddenly made so much sense to Joe. The gentle beasts inside the volcano had shown her how, that there was a way to make real the music within and communicate it to those others who watched her from across a distance she’d feared she would never transcend. It had all begun then. Our hero returned to reality in a position to affirm he’d correctly anticipated just one point. Flashshadow really had understood the lesson.

Her present-day self beside Mini-Flash Splitsville was demurely awaiting her grade, but Joe needed a minute.

“I am honoured, Flashshadow,” he said to her in a hushed voice. “And this I promise you – we shall acquire it for rerun. My best men even now are charged with the task,” and he barely faltered over this accolade because in actual fact, that was what they were. “No matter what it takes, and though but one extant print of it should hunker in the farthest and most forgotten studio storage-shack on Acheldama’s outer elliptic. Your old friends will be surprised by the being of beauty you have since become, but they will sing anew their song of joy to see you again.”

Flashshadow’s smile, which for once in a way Joe was certain he saw, was how he knew this session had been a success. He dismissed the attendees and they made to drive off, because speaking of Dean, they were meeting him later. As Mini-Flash Splitsville revved up the black hot-rod she added to Joe: “Never had a blast like this flying The Flash Club’s so-square-they’re-cubed close-combat aerial drills, Dad. Finish-line for this drag’s got to be you and my down girl Neet flipping the sisters to our Four Heroes B-side.”

With a roar of motors and a cloud of dust the girls set forth for Nottingham. Before he made to do the same Joe stood awhile, thinking.

The words of encouragement were all the more welcome for coming from someone who’d personally experienced official Special Program studies. Joe suspected however it would take more than Mini-Flash Splitsville preferring his version to convince The Flash Club all her other peers would. That establishment had grounds on which to defend its own methods. It could already boast of one successful trial run. Joe had been several things in his time, but never a schoolteacher, and he would have been the first to admit his entire syllabus was based on nothing beyond what felt right to him. The problem was that this galaxy was past the point where it was only about education. There wasn’t as yet a documented procedure for determining the fate of the universe, and qualifications relevant to that would be most sought-after among the generation our hero had taken it upon himself to train.

NEXT: 'THE SPECIAL PROGRAM'