The Four Heroes, Chapter Three

The fluxball’s southern hemisphere rolled slowly before Neetra’s upturned eyes, as might that of some moon of light bellying into the atmosphere to orbit a mere hundred or so feet above the Earth’s mantle. Our heroine had pretended to Bret far more confidence than she felt about her chances of ever coming back out of this leviathan’s guts once she was in. But there was no point getting her knickers in a twist. Duly Neetra cast out her astral form, which looked exactly like her and was wearing the same clothes, and thus entered the sphere while her physical body slumped to sleep on the pavement.

First impressions were akin to those of a traveller returning to a familiar land which during the interim has lost a cataclysmic war. The younger and smaller predecessor of this late chrono-telepathic cocoon had thrown spectral manifestations of Steam’s memories across the Nottingham sky in living luminescence, while the liminal space immediately within its threshold was a whirling kaleidoscope of emotion. Not so here. Neetra grimly recognized there were going to be no convenient cinematic thought-projections to guide her on this second visit. Everything was blacker, deeper, than the drinks. She stretched out a hand into one of the sluggish streams of psionic residue that barely moved about her hovering frame, and it was like molasses. Just as thick, just as cloying, and just as uncommunicative on the subject of Steam’s whereabouts.

Neetra moved her fingers experimentally through the tepid syrup, to no avail. Possibly even this congealed sugar symbolism had nothing to do with Steam, and was merely her psyche imprinting itself on inert surroundings. Her clone 4-H-N for example loved treacle pudding and custard. That was the way minds worked in places like this.

Several times Neetra tried calling the name of her friend Jiang Jiang, before resigning herself to solitude. Evidently the tiny surviving fragment of that long-gone girl which dwelled in the entity known as Steam had already departed. That meant two of the three components that once made Steam up were far beyond our heroine’s reach. It was the third however, that which had been neither Jiang Jiang nor Automaton Zero, that Neetra had come here to seek, and all appearances to the contrary she had a feeling he would still be hanging on. The question was whether she also had strength enough to make it to him. Before her a psychic well-shaft dropped away into seemingly endless darkness, and she would have to swim its turgid fathoms of dead telepathy alone.

“Fine,” Neetra grumbled, “I mean it’s not like someone’s stuck a cutlass in me already today or anything like that.”

Nevertheless she set off, diving down into depths through which she had to grope and push her way, the semi-permeable substance of this unwieldy terrain testing her clairaudient stamina and eating up her spiritual reserves in comparable fashion to the effects of a week-long cheerleader class on her physical state. For what felt like an age nothing emerged through the treacly black, not so much as a glimmer of he for whom she quested. The one perceptible change was that it was becoming colder. In fact, it was by now exceedingly cold. Neetra however could have hoped for a better sign she was on the right track. Our heroine knew only too well it might equally be a sign of something more ominous.

“Thanks for the sweater, Shadow,” she murmured. True, the garment in question had seen better days, but Neetra was nonetheless grateful to be wearing it here.

Ahead was a dot that was different to the surrounding void. Neetra slowly blinked her eyes, trying to focus. This lifeless landscape had been taking its toll so long that she needed a minute to remind herself there had ever been anything other than nothing. She drew to an upright halt and stood before the object, absent-mindedly smoothing her skirt with her hands.

It was a wooden bus-shelter. To Neetra’s senses, every bit as solid and real as one out there in the corporeal world would have been. She ran her fingertips over the rough grainy surface of the pine slats that were its outer walls, and tiptoeing inside smelled creosote and pink bubble-gum.

What was a bus-shelter doing here? Neetra sat down on the narrow bench that ran round its square interior and struggled to apply the kind of thinking that was required. It must signify something. Was a bus coming? No, not according to what Neetra’s psychic instincts were telling her. Despite its outward shape, she wouldn’t get anywhere by waiting in this bus-shelter. It seemed to her as if transportation was being taken care of by some other means.

Neetra was most reluctant to leave. This little island in the emptiness, where the ceiling and walls of something familiar encircled her, was a comfort indeed. Nor was it any help to remember that this bus-shelter might be the last glimpse of home she ever saw. But it was also the first tangible indication there was anything left of Steam still capable of thinking and feeling, no matter how incomprehensible its manifestation might be. In that knowledge was motivation enough for Neetra to reluctantly abandon her oasis, and will herself back on into the inky cold.

Presently another bus-shelter emerged. Unless of course it was the same one and Neetra was going round in circles, for it was identical to the last. A short glide from this bus-shelter and a third appeared before our heroine, or the original a third time. The chill by now was that of a merciless winter’s night, piercing Neetra’s clothing as it if wasn’t there so that she shivered in her skin beneath, and try as she might she just couldn’t understand what the bus-shelters were supposed to be telling her.

It was no use. She was lost. She was never going to find Steam, or make it out of here.

Grasping her sweater in both hands Neetra drew the tattered fabric around her as tightly as she could. She needed it for more than warmth now. Think Flashshadow. Think the gentle glow of her kindly eyes, her tenderness and her patience and her understanding. All that had to still exist, even though a place like this did too.

Why was it so cold? What was with all these bus-shelters?

They must be coming from Steam. Neetra’s idea of a bus-shelter was the chrome and glass kind you saw in the centre of town on shopping trips at the weekend with the girls. You didn’t get many of these old wooden ones nowadays. They’d been more common on Pre-Nottingham Earth…

Neetra’s heart began to beat.

Steam, on Pre-Nottingham Earth, when it was cold and dark. A snow-swept night before Christmas, for example.

Whispering to herself, her voice rising softly through the bleakness and the nothing, our heroine declared: “They were the last thing he saw through the car window, before he fell asleep. They’ll have been why he was able to go to sleep. Because once they start showing up, you know it’s not far. You know it won’t be long now…”

Her spirits suddenly soaring Neetra thrust herself yet deeper, now without the least fear of this no-man’s-land, knowing at last what she must do. Follow the bus-shelters. The bus-shelters meant you were nearly home.

And sure enough, soon enough, there he was. Outstretched and prone against the black, awash on the surly tides, a lean body of cogwheel-jointed riveted steel topped by a handsome head with jet-black hair and a stubby chin. The mechanical man who’d saved Neetra’s life and given her a childhood flashback on that day at the Floating City when they met so long ago.

All in a flurry she floundered fast to where Steam lay, and seizing his metal hands kicked off with all the might left in her, hauling him along, striving ferociously against the ocean-trench pressure here at the bottom of the world that threatened to suck the pair of them forever down. Like swimmers they ascended through the murk, Steam joining Neetra in her efforts as his consciousness and strength began to return. And light! Such a thing had been unknown to our heroine ever since she entered the fluxball, but now welcome rays were starting to filter down from above as if the surface of this dark sea were drawing near.

They came to rest under the sheltering canopy, facing each other with hands still intertwined, while the illumination steadily grew. Although Steam’s joy as he gazed again on his love was more than could ever be expressed in words, he somehow managed to breathlessly articulate to Neetra: “Thought it was too late! Reckoned I was gone into this lot for good. Never would have guessed even you had what it took to get all the way from out there and bring us back!”

But the serenity and purity now streaming upon their heads was something different, something that surpassed any light known in the world to which Steam referred. This light was like music, like a song. Neetra’s smile was not without sadness as she explained gently:

“It is too late, Steam.” Then she added: “For that.”

They looked around them, and saw. What had been shafts of radiant pearlescence were taking on form, not to any solid state which might have required them to shed the ephemeral quality that was fundamental to their being, but rather maintaining it even as their intricate alignments disclosed avenues and pavements, majestic domes and spires, citadels and minarets and cathedrals whose towers touched the sky. Certainly this otherworldly city was populous, though the figures moving throughout it were not quite describable as human, as that term did not do full justice to what they truly were. And then Steam knew that returning him to the mortal realm was not the reason Neetra was here.

She herself looked on in wonder at somewhere in which she had always believed, but of which she never dreamed she would be granted a glimpse before her time. Within that same sense of awe was acceptance that although she was free to behold, she could go no further than where she was now. Not today, at least. Though of course it was a different matter for Steam. He, restoring his gaze to Neetra and smiling that same old smile, declared:

“I knew it. All me life. Knew my angel was coming back to take me the rest of the way.”

Our heroine’s eyes were warm. “This sort of thing, Steam, you and I,” said she. “It doesn’t have to end. It’s eternal, if anything is. But sometimes things do have to change. You know who’s waiting for you. They’ve been waiting longer than they were meant to.”

Neetra paused.

“And you know there’s only one thing left you’ve got to do.”

It was no question. Steam looked down at his hands, holding onto hers yet, and knew.

He let go.

As Neetra watched spellbound, that land of spires and pinnacles seemed to come alive and stretch itself out to welcome Steam in. Its residents who had maybe appeared humanlike before were more distinct than ever, such that the foremost three among them were conspicuously a mother and a father and an elder brother too. And when Steam turned back just once, to look at Neetra for the last time, he wasn’t a mechanical man anymore. He was a little boy with blue and white pyjamas on. Then the beings and the light gathered him up into their embrace, and a moment later all was gone.

What Neetra felt most like doing was sinking to her knees and crying until there was not a tear left in her. But she also knew that if she was going to leave this place at all, it had to be now.

Striking out for the boundary of the fluxball our heroine drove her weary psyche on with all the telepathic potency that remained, fighting the undertow as she had never had to before, the tarry gulf seemingly determined to retain at least one of the souls it had coveted. It helped a little that she was retracing her prior journey, but her last reserves were all but depleted, and she still had so far to go. Although Neetra was gradually becoming aware of her material form in the distance ahead, she feared she would drown amid these fathoms while in sight of land…until, heaving a sigh of blessed relief, she sensed the strong arms wrapped about her body. They were too strong to be Joe’s, but that was for the best right now. Complicated and troubling emotions didn’t make for reliable handholds at such times – they had a tendency to give without warning, plunging you back into the darkness below. This was one of the situations when what you needed above all was a friend. So Neetra grasped gladly for the psychic self of her fellow hero Bret Stevens, letting those large powerful hands seize hers securely and haul her up the shallows, out of the sphere’s fearsome suction and through its periphery at last, where safe and sound back inside herself again Neetra lay and rested as Bret held her close.

That one had understood from the start what Neetra meant when she spoke of rescuing Steam. “Everything go OK seeing him off?” he asked her once she was ready to talk again.

Neetra nodded. “It was the one line from the Prophecy I still didn’t understand,” said she. “‘An army of angels will rise’. Well, I’ve just set right a mistake the angels made years ago. They owe us a favour for that. And an army of them, rising at just the right moment to help us out in our final battle against Harbin…”

Neetra smiled a small secret smile.

“That sure sounds to me like a fighting chance,” she concluded. “Thanks, Steam. The Prophecy was right about you.”

Bret rose and lifted Neetra to her feet one-handed, just like he’d always done when she was tiny. “Got enough left in you to round things off?” he grinned.

The answer was in the affirmative. Together the two members of The Four Heroes tipped back their heads and closed their eyes, mustering their powers, and began.

END OF CHAPTER THREE