Triptych

Before the eyes of Dr. James Neetkins, Kumiko Rintari, D’Carthage and 4-H-N, absolute dark was dispelled by the soft flickering onset of light resembling that of a sunset. Each face among the foursome reappeared to the other three, daubed warmly by the golden glow which was steadily growing in brightness and magnitude even as it shaped itself into human form. This was no mere silhouette however, for the details of the figure’s features and clothing were picked out as if in a painter’s complex study of evening-sky hues. The highlights were that shining brilliance which would have showed where the sun itself touched the horizon’s edge, whereas the shades were like the ruddy heavenmost edges of cloud-formations furthest from daylight’s last blaze. All these variations in gold and flame disclosed the body and eyes and hair of a boy, standing some distance above the ground at the centre of the circle of four. It perhaps went without saying he was a boy they all recognized.

Dylan, smiling down upon the others, said softly to them:

“I know everything.”

By now the light from him had so risen that James could perceive the mobile life-support tank, inside which another Dylan still slept. This one was as corporeal as James and his companions, bedecked in the golden glow like themselves rather than projecting it in the manner of the Dylan standing above.

“Great Scott,” James breathed. “Laddie, are ye communicating tae us thrae The Four Heroes’ cause?”

“That and more, Doctor…so much more,” was the luminous Dylan’s reply. “The cause is communicating to me in turn. It’s telling me everything we’ve needed to know for so long.”

“Dylan,” whispered Kumiko, her eyes full of tears.

“It’s got to be something new, for your cause to work like that,” 4-H-N observed. “But Neetra told me once this place is different every time you guys come down here, right?”

“Because the situation that leads us here is different each time too,” Dylan agreed gravely. “And this one’s got to be the trickiest yet. This time if we save the Earth, we may be paving the way for Harbin to wreak havoc across half the universe. The Solidity’s only fighting to destroy our world because they can’t see any other way to keep their own home safe from him. But that’s what we’ve got to find. Somewhere in all these secrets that are ours at last, about the Prophecy and the Foretold One, the Next Four and the Dark Advents, the future and the past…that’s where we’ll find the answer to what we have to do.”

“We knew it not, my boy,” D’Carthage declared, in the honest and unpretentious voice he had been using more and more these days, and which was so much more agreeable than the unctuous pronouncements of before. “I can but beg you to believe me on that count. Such news as breaks upon you this hour is a mystery likewise to the poor remnant of the Next Four you hear behold.”

“It’s OK, D’Carthage,” Dylan told him genuinely. “The time when The Four Heroes couldn’t afford to believe that just came to an end. No more mysteries, no more mistrust. There’s nothing now but the truth.”

He looked upon his friends, united in the ring of light.

“Let’s begin,” said he.

Gala, a short stretch ahead, was shouting aloud words which were muffled by the foul fusty alien air but the heightened emotion of which at least carried clearly. When Joe called back a response his voice was thin indeed, though in his case this was not wholly down to the environs.

Long before the pair of humans had even arrived at the Royal Palace of Empress Ungus, they were both sufficiently familiar with The Back Garden and its inhabitants to be anticipating something other than stone walls and fluttering turrets. Neither however was prepared for the nightmare convocation of cyclopean intertangling mushroom trunks, with fleshy flabby caps the size of city parks arrayed in looming plateaux all along the height of the horrendous whole. Stepping into one of the spore-slit entrances that gaped like eager vertical mouths would have been a daunting experience for any visitor, but once inside, as Joe mutely followed Gala ever down the spiralling hollow tubes into heavier and heavier gloom choked with the mingled reeks of botanical fertility and decomposition all at once, it was he more than she who began to feel faint. There had been too much of this. Unknown bodies, sights he had much preferred to remain obscured suddenly uncovered before him, and even his own body acting in accordance, doing things it had never done which made him shudder when he thought back on it…but not with simple revulsion, nor even with simple shame. No, the shame he felt was just as much for the fascination these deeds still exercised over him. When an infrequent pool of limpid blue-green fungal bioluminescence glimmered faintly across Joe’s path, he could glimpse strange plant-organs belonging to this living fortress half-perceptible through the pungent murk. He did not like what these bulges and nodes and orifices reminded him of, but he liked considerably less the immediate and almost urgent manner in which such recollections rushed upon him.

Then, as he caught up with Gala who had drawn to a halt, Joe detected a change. It could not have been of a more welcome kind. Indeed, even before he saw what it was, Joe felt hope and joy rekindling inside him like a pure candle-flame. He knew in that first instant that what lay ahead must needs be the one and only potential source of comfort remaining for him. It was, at long last, something familiar.

Empress Ungus had mentioned to Joe and Gala that the object of their quest, that which had drawn them together in pursuit of the seemingly impossible, was sitting on a bookshelf in her home. There had been no false modesty about the statement. The hollow plant-cell of a room that disclosed itself to the two humans at the end of the tubular passage was unexceptional in every regard, nothing but a small dusty antechamber. It was the bookshelf in question that held Gala and Joe in speechless wonder, or rather, the single volume that rested upon it.

Sizable and stately, its parchment pages bound in ancient leather, there was no doubt that the soft ethereal song gently banishing the fungus-fort’s brooding silence was emanating from it, nor that it was the source of the twinkling specks of softly-tinted light that seemed to slow-dance in the surrounding space. That song and those lights were tiny fragments of the home from which Joe had never felt so far, and they made him almost weak with gladness.

This, taken together, was The Prophecy of the Flame.

Few in number were those who had settled down with the tome and benefited from all it had to teach them. Empress Ungus, Dimension Borg, a pair of Professors Joe had never met, and Neetra and Gala before either had been old or experienced enough to understand the words they read. Now the ranks would be swelled by two more, and a most significant duo they were, a Joe and Gala possessed of all requisite foreknowledge who had battled through every obstacle of time and fate to accomplish their desperate mission. Not that such pride as they felt in this achievement could replace their awe when they contemplated what was next.

They had found the Prophecy. The truth was theirs at last.

Planet Eshcaton's arnosphere had lately come to resemble some kind of giant cosmic commune or rock-festival, as its sector’s every race and allegiance opposed to the Solidity parked starships in orbit and rallied round the four ancient sages in the temple below who led this passive resistance. Under bright beacons and the comradely glow of a million porthole-lights Flashshadow was far easier to make out, and Neetra had been able to see her quite clearly as they said their goodbyes.

Now our heroine was half-sitting on Vern with her feet on the hull beneath them, as he himself recharged his engines. Oxygen-filters were in operation all along this star-cruiser’s massive roof, so that numerous groups made up of countless different life-forms talked or sat or walked about on it underneath black sky and stars. Neetra was remembering how she and Flashshadow had found the latter’s band-mates, Cherry and the six-armed beetle-like bassist and the three backing-singers and the robot drummer, loitering in a deliberate show of nonchalance just as a band should. After a tear-choked and utterly inaudible farewell from her last friend in The Flash Club, and a hug Neetra could barely feel, she had walked back to Vern alone.

Now as she thought on it, tears of her own were dotting the latter. “Oh, your nice clean finish,” Neetra tutted, mopping him with her skirt. “Sorry, Vern.”

“Oh, not at all, I mean there’s been this pair of girls rubbing their dampest sweatiest parts on me for the last three or four hours, a few teardrops aren’t going to make much difference,” responded the Vernderernder.

Quite why words such as these should prompt in Neetra such an unexpected feeling of comfort and belonging was beyond her at first. With a small curious smile she thoughtfully surveyed the back of Vern’s featureless metal head.

“So where to now, you sweaty bag of fat?” he then inquired. “I must say, this is much more fun than getting to take part in the final battle.”

That was when Neetra figured it out. They needed the ones like Vern – which was to say, she and the ones like her did. It was lucky the Verns of the universe were around. Their outlook was a constant reminder why a different one would always be needed, and of what a treasure beyond value it was to be able to see things in that other way.

No-one therefore was more surprised than Vern when Neetra giggled, leaned forward and kissed him on his smooth dome. “The Back Garden, please,” she replied, sitting back, and as Vern’s motors kicked in and swept them both away from the Eshcaton colonies and back to sparkling space Neetra added in contentment: “Whatever you do, Vern, don’t ever change!”

“I swear this galaxy’s never going to understand girls,” Vern muttered. “Be amazed if yours even does.”