Oh, What Feeling is This? Chapter Four

“I needed you to know, Irwin,” Iskira said. “Before it was too late.”

With those words she rounded off her tale of the decision she had made that night alone in Bill Jordan’s barn, and hung her beautiful head like a penitent pupil.

Dr. Mendelssohn had remained seated in his chair by the fire throughout, not speaking, but listening to all. Now as silence returned to the cavernous workroom he asked her at last:

“Do you tell me this because you hope for forgiveness, Iskira? Or to hear comforting words that my warmongering alone was indeed responsible for all that befell?”

He looked older and more tired than he had ever done.

“Either would be beyond me,” Mendelssohn continued with a heavy sigh. “It is not a time in my life I can survey with the objectivity that would demand. The weaponry experiments, my affliction, your leaving me for Neetkins…you imagine I can separate them, and order them in some logical sequence for you? I cannot, Iskira.”

Then, after a pause, he went on quietly:

“I flung your version of events at Neetra on our first meeting, during my battle with The Four Heroes. That you told me the weapons had sent me mad. That I disbelieved you even then. That my long years of hating you stemmed from it.”

But there, Mendelssohn saw, was too much harshness. The time for gallantry may have been past but there was also such a thing as too much candour, especially considering their lives were measurable in hours. He began again, more gently this time.

“You learned from me to give due attention to all the eventualities that might influence an outcome, Iskira. But I also taught you it is illogical to go on doing so once the reaction is underway. The processes we set in motion must and shall run their course. What happened, happened, with nothing more or less than scientific inevitability. We cannot change it now, nor wish for that which will never be.”

Another thought occurred to him. It was one at which he could not suppress a small wistful smile.

“And you and Neetkins did save the world,” he pointed out. “Perhaps not with an invention, as you had envisaged, but with something else you made together. Meanwhile the work I had in mind for you might well have doomed humanity. Surely in that there is some vindication for the choice you made?”

Iskira looked up at last, but there was only sadness about her.

“Then I am a footnote in my daughter’s heroic epic,” she declared. “The story of my life and James’s does not make for comparable reading. You, Carmilla, Phoenix Prime… how many did I twist to the path of darkness, all the while claiming science was to blame? And then, Dimension Borg. He should have been my punishment alone, Irwin! But he laid on my conscience the suffering of billions of innocents besides.”

She slowly shook her head.

“You and your weapons, James and his ideals…there was never any difference,” Iskira concluded. “Only this much is true. Long ago, when I was but a child on this same planet, destruction came to call. It made me its daughter that day.”

As Mendelssohn watched her, Iskira stood.

“It is over, Irwin,” she went on. “James and I paid, again and again, until at last we were torn apart. For me, all else shall soon be at an end likewise. Until that hour comes, just once…I want what might have been.”

She looked at Dr. Mendelssohn, and her meaning was clear.

“Iskira,” he cried. “You spoke of making amends, but you must see this cannot be the way! How could I, in all good conscience…?”

But the girl was before him again. Indeed, this was the fantasy of the girl that had worked sweet agony in his thoughts back then. Mendelssohn could not have waited those years, hoping all the time a young man’s hopes, without knowing some quickening of his heartbeat now.

She began to walk towards him. All of a sudden it was less in the attempt to deter her, and more in the name of making a kind of apology or plea, that Mendelssohn continued to stammer out: “And Iskira, I’m an old man now…”

Then she stooped to kiss him, and it was all still there. Every desire, every pining pang, everything that had been when those same lips used to touch long ago. Forgotten love-songs of the era that only meant something because of her. She beside him in the dark on nights at the theatre, or the cinema that had been gone for what felt like eternity. There were the old campus laboratories faithfully waiting, stocked with antiquated equipment anyone today would have thought obsolete, but lighting-up and functional still. In that single kiss was the whole world that was, gloriously alive once more after the many long cold years of its absence.

Dr. Mendelssohn had been wrong. There was a way back after all. Iskira, withdrawing her lips a slight distance, made his last protest the simple reply:

“You’ve always been old to me.”

Then she slipped her white lab-coat from her shoulders, reached for her collar, and began to unbutton.

Bendigo, staunch sentry posted outside the mill’s rugged walls, maintained his solitary scan of the sand for advancing Solidity troops. A desert wind was picking up, and the dunes were starting to stir.

On the deck-plates of Flashthunder’s sleeping-quarters, two matching brown tunics lay crumpled. Sweat was shining on skin, soaking into underwear, and by now this had little or nothing to do with any heat-field. The kissing had hit a new pitch. Neetra saw well enough that what had hitherto been unknown to her was on the brink of beginning in earnest, and that her next act would surely be to skim off her white eyelet lace and toss it the way of her Flash Club uniform. This she knew with a strange kind of calmness even despite the rushing of her blood and the shivering convulsions loosed by every breath. She was whispering, over and over in the brief interstices when her lips unlocked from his: “Flashthunder, Flashthunder…oh, Flashthunder…”

And he responded, also in a breathy hush: “Neetra…”

She held her mouth back from his.

“It’s Li,” she reminded him, in a small voice from which the passion was suddenly gone.

“But Neetra’s your real name,” he protested, confused. “I thought you’d want me to call you that. I mean, at a time like this.”

She moved away and sat down on the bed again, putting sweltering air between her form and his.

“Definitely Li,” Neetra repeated with a sigh, still in the same hollow tones. She picked at some elastic that had started to cut into her. “Neetra doesn’t do this.”

Flashthunder was looking completely lost by now, not to mention quite fretful and scared with it. None of which was uncommon, of course, but Neetra remembered he had told her once before that her name-change was a source of distress, and she also knew that for more reasons than that there was an explanation she owed him before they went any further.

“You already know I was in love with someone, back in my own galaxy,” she began. “Well, he left me, for the leader of our enemies. When he went to her he betrayed our team into the bargain, and that was what led to the battle that stranded me in your sector. After that, for just as long as I could, I tried so hard to believe I was wrong, that something different must have happened…until we made it to Dimension Borg. He showed me proof it was all true. And that was the end of my hope.”

From the looks of things Flashthunder still didn’t see how this answered to his bafflement. Neetra took a deep breath.

“I needed Li,” she admitted at last. “Li, the leader of The Flash Club, didn’t have to deal with that mess. She could leave it for Neetra of The Four Heroes to sort out. All Li had to do was be sure not to make the same mistakes, so avoid any similar situations, or any similar people who’d treat her that way again – ”

As her gaze fell on Flashthunder’s quiet, attending, wide brown eyes, she immediately strangled those words. Once already today she had noted to herself he was nothing like Joe. Perhaps she had known all along what that meant, about her and about what she was really doing in this small overheated bedroom, but suddenly she saw what speaking it aloud would spell for poor Flashthunder’s feelings. Desperate to spare him that, and anxious he might already have figured it out, she reached to him at once and laid her hand on his damp cheek.

“You’re not some meaningless rebound fling,” she announced firmly. “I really like you for who you are too. You’re…”

The stuffy hotness seemed to be making it hard for her to find the right words.

“You’re cute,” she declared at length, weakly. “You can’t need me to tell you you’re one lovely boy to look at. And…and you’re…”

Timid and frightened. Fragile and dainty. In constant need of help from others. Unsure whether the path of the hero was the one for him. Not much to write home about in battle. The same age as her. Someone she’d not known her entire life. He made her laugh.

And they were back on the list of ways in which he wasn’t Joe.

She seized Flashthunder and smacked her lips down on his, pulling and inhaling with all her might, then released him and without even stopping to let out her breath, declared loudly:

“You know how a boy and girl get to our age without ever having done this? Talking! That was his problem, you couldn’t get him to shut up! So no more talk, Flashthunder, just you and me. Right here, right now, like we’ve both wanted to from the start. You know the little good girl of The Four Heroes, who we’ll be bidding farewell to in just a moment? Here’s something she used to say...”

She kissed his lips one last time, then murmured throatily to him:

“Let’s do it.”

A second or two passed before the reply came back. And when it did, it consisted merely of: “Um.”

Neetra looked at Flashthunder. She already knew meekness was a way of life for this boy, but couldn’t help noticing he was setting new standards right now.

“Um,” Flashthunder said again. “If that’s how you feel…then why are you crying?”

He was right. There was no getting away from it anymore. She had been crying for at least the last minute. Now the tears were a flood, coursing down her cheeks and trickling in quick freshets from the contours of her chest to dot her bare thighs like rain, while her eyes were teeming so full that Flashthunder was fast becoming nothing more than a blur.

“What’s wrong?” he gasped.

Something in Neetra faintly acknowledged just how new it must all be to him. Clearly he didn’t know about it yet. So she did her best to tell him, even though her attempt to speak unleashed the deluge like never before and the resultant words were expressed as so many wracking sobs:

“It’s not all looking at the stars and feeling wonderful, Flashthunder,” was how she put it. “Sometimes it hurts too…!”

END OF CHAPTER FOUR