Oh, What Feeling is This? Chapter One

Every little touch of the boy Flashthunder brushed starfire on Neetra’s lips. He wasn’t like Joe, or indeed anything bound to the Earthly physics of her native Terran sector. Flashthunder’s essence was that of his own galaxy, where planets without number glittered in Technicolor skies, where luminous colonies dotted plunging nebular gulfs of midnight hue, and where the electronic engine-noise of roaming spacecraft scattered the tingling infinity with Wurlitzer-organ song. Within the kisses of this celestial Mini-Flash were fleeting constellations that blossomed ablaze and rushed to supernova. Neetra pressed close, wanting ever more, swallowing gulps of his breath alongside hers before clamping her mouth back down and surrendering anew, while her fingers lost themselves in the sparkling silk of Flashthunder’s hair and she crushed her cheeks and face against his to draw in long draughts through her tiny nostrils, surfeiting on the delicate pollen from his skin. Two parts of her had become expanses of heat and weight lying heavy against him – the quivering thigh flung upon his lap, and the breastbone above her pounding heart where deep in the yielding topography of her torso Flashthunder’s upper arm and shoulder were thrust. Neetra was a binary system whose twin pulsating solar presences were fast approaching solstice, stirring sultry summer in the orbital reaches without and between.

Nor was the heat rising from two young bodies the only increase in temperature Flashthunder’s small sleeping-quarters had to contend with. They, the ship and the rest of the crew were barrelling as one through a nightmare space-scape of seething crimson clouds whose torrid agitations had already lent the very bulkheads an insubstantial shimmer. Deeper and deeper into this furious zone forged the valiant vessel, a mirage-trail of searing steel in its wake, past desert-cyclones of supercharged vapour and scarlet mountain-ranges alive with storm-bursts at the gaseous core.

Another male and female couple took their destined position in worn-out chairs before a hearth that flickered and crackled in sole defiance of the black Martian night. For Professor Iskira Neetkins, Neetra’s mother, what was sounding within were as yet soft piano-notes merely recalling and suggesting the magisterial orchestration reigning over her daughter. Time, age and sadness had muted the yearning refrains of youth. But as Iskira’s eyes beheld Dr. Mendelssohn’s thin huddled form, each touch on those ivory keys rang harmonious and true. Their enemy was closing in, and the lonely red desert outside would inevitably betray this old abandoned mill where Iskira and Mendelssohn hid. It was more than probable they were sharing their final hours. At thoughts such as these the gentle tinkling variations began to strike into resonant chords, steadily tracing out motifs Iskira remembered. Somewhere deep in their interwoven complexity stirred the overarching theme that Neetra was living, and which long ago her mother had lived, with the man sitting opposite her in the restless firelight.

As for Flashthunder, that same score was playing euphorically, intoxicatingly, almost unbearably. Carried on the coursing currents of supernal force that were part of his physiological make-up, its rhythms and cadences thrilled enticement across every quarter of him. Neetra was writing a symphony on Flashthunder’s very self. He already knew, far better than any adult among his people did, that the energy-based constitutions of Flashkind were highly vulnerable to this strange new gender’s influence. Mere mention of feminine peers triggered in boys of Flashthunder’s generation flustering memories of when alien prettiness and ticklish perfume and tantalizing unknowable mysteries had so unsettled the delicate balance of powers inside as to leave the male Mini-Flash breathless. But though all that was so, this girl Neetra was a universe more. At last Flashthunder had the answer as to why he had only begun to manifest his incipient paranormal powers after meeting her. His body understood it now, even while his whirling thoughts registered nothing but Neetra’s kisses, and her heavenly presence as it was communicated via all five rapturous senses at once, and her being here with him at this time and place which was the reason his every molecule was singing to the cosmos.

Dr. Mendelssohn, though still too weak to raise his head fully upright, met Iskira’s gaze with his own.

The recent breakdown had laid everything bare. Gone were the carefully-designed filters he had spent so long and worked so hard positioning between himself and his pain. Now in unobstructed span once more gaped Mendelssohn’s long darkest hour, so starkly that he could see all the way back to its beginning. And that last was surely a factor in why the fireplace’s ever-shifting half-light was blurring the boundary between past and present, and out of the sliver-skinned purple-haired Martian wife and mother across from him was calling back the image of the girl she had been.

This did not, however, bring only suffering to Dr. Mendelssohn. There was indeed a flood of accompanying recollections and sensations he had known when they were of the happiest, and though they could not be relived now without the ache of knowing what those arcadian joys had come to, they in turn shaded back into the agony itself and tinged its otherwise crushing cruelty with a wistful tenderness. The young Iskira was the taste of coffee amid dazzling sunlight on early mornings when Dr. Mendelssohn was to see her later in his class. She was a chemical tang mixing on the laboratory’s spicy air as their intensive work together yielded astonishing discoveries by the day, and two minds corresponding on the same brilliant level moved ever closer to the conclusion they sought. She was scented springtime dusks among the quadrangle gardens. She was the heady excitement of breaking the rules, a secret engagement with his student no less, and the pleasures he had never dreamed could follow such a compromise of professional ethics. The young Iskira was everything a university in pre-Nottingham Earth was, and forces besides The Four Heroes’ powers had so changed the world since then that Mendelssohn doubted he would ever find his way back to that university now.

She had been beautiful, that undergraduate in the plaid skirts and handwoven sweaters, just as her daughters were beautiful now. Though she had concealed her Martian features behind a disguise that led Dr. Mendelssohn and the rest of the campus to think her human, she had nevertheless stood out for other reasons. That rarest combination of genius and beauty…Mendelssohn hoped any lecturer could be forgiven for falling in love. Ultimately though, it was not the way she looked that had stolen the heart of the young man he was then. At the very dawn of his career, his credentials as a scientist proven but his experience in the world as yet lacking, he had seen in Iskira the first triumph of his system. Here was a junior scholar to whom his theories spoke, who held his knowledge in awe, and who thirsted to learn everything he could teach her. Among faceless ranks arrayed before him in research labs without number, had Mendelssohn found just one he was proud to call his student.

Not that he had been too much the scientist then to fool himself it was only about intellectual accord. Iskira’s physical beauty had been part of it too, which Mendelssohn felt all the more sharply for their never having been intimate. Of course, he knew now why that had been impossible. She had had a staggering secret to keep. It was quite right of her to ask him to respect her wishes, and she would have insisted on the same with any partner…

But everything was still too edged with jagged razor-blades for that kind of thinking. All at once the old suspicions and jealousies were rushing back on Dr. Mendelssohn, and they had years of lost time to make up for. Maybe Neetkins did know, mocked familiar demon-voices gleefully launching into a brand-new chant. Maybe she showed Neetkins right away. She lied to you when she was seeing him behind your back. Maybe she’s still lying to you about that side of it. There they both were at the halls of residence, Iskira’s silver body so young and firm, and there was that boy Neetkins laughing about you…

As Dr. Mendelssohn shuddered in his beaten-down chair, gnawed at by a deathly cold that the fire was unable to touch, Iskira spoke.

“Irwin,” she began quietly, her large purple eyes cast down. “All that I’ve done…all that I’m responsible for. How can I possibly make amends?”

END OF CHAPTER ONE