The Ritual of Demand, Chapter One

So there were Flashpower and Flashfair, 4-H-N guessed, crashing through the undergrowth of a barren outback planet astride local steeds not dissimilar to bipedal dinosaurs. Flashpower was somewhat the elder, leggy and restless in a tunic of brown, apparently determined to keep the lead. Flashfair meanwhile wore white, and seemed to have been named for his complexion and hair. Both Mini-Flashes, it went without saying, bore on their breasts the chunky old lightning-bolt logo.

They reached their destination and cantered to a halt. The creatures snorted, stamping the dead scrub. Flashpower slid awkwardly down, flicking 4-H-N a glimpse of his orange ones.

Flashfair took one look at the side on which he’d alighted, then swung himself from the saddle so that he landed on the other. Which was to say, so that the back of his beast would interpose itself between his dismount and Flashpower’s line of sight. What was more, Flashfair did it as though he were making a point of it.

4-H-N couldn’t help being curious.

Because that felt to her like what she’d have done.

Especially since Flashpower was breathing hard, and she wasn’t completely sure anymore that was due to the exertions of the race.

He hurried after the younger boy, pushing brushwood and the tricky tunic-snagging finger-ends of boughs clumsily out of his way.

“You’ve just got them in a twist because you came in at second place!” ventured Flashpower, with a laugh that sounded forced.

“You talk about that topic altogether too much,” was Flashfair’s succinct reply.

Being small, he was making shorter work of negotiating the foliage than Flashpower with his adolescent frame was equal to. The camera-angles limited themselves to the latter’s perspective as he struggled, affording mere snapshot snippets of the figure ahead, which moved smoothly and neatly with well-ordered skirts swinging only where they should.

It was good filmmaking, 4-H-N had to admit. You shared in something of what Flashpower felt, growing hotter and hotter on this hot pitiless world.

But it was all a bit odd too.

And there hadn’t been anything about the Ritual of Demand yet.

“Flashbee, can you pause it?” she requested. “I’m confused.”

Flashbee hit pause on the pyramidal recording-device. Holographic rays fanned back inside it, restoring 4-H-N to a private study-room at the Flash Club Headquarters video-library.

“It’s really accomplished stuff, Flashbee, and if I was on Earth right now I’d be comparing Fifth Film Director Grindo to Nicolas Roeg,” she assured him. “But…”

“I told you,” Flashbee put in patiently. “Flashpower and Flashfair deals with the incident which led to the last time The Flash Club observed the Ritual of Demand. It’s not specifically about the Ritual. We’ll get to it.”

“You couldn’t just tell me what the Ritual of Demand was?” grumbled 4-H-N. “That’s all I need to know, Flashbee.”

“For your assignment,” that one added.

“Yes,” returned 4-H-N, looking straight at him. “My assignment.”

“Right,” Flashbee said back. “Then like I also told you, 4-H-N, trust me. Showing you the film all the way through is the best possible way I know to help you with your assignment.”

4-H-N sighed.

“I do trust you, Flashbee,” she confided.

A part of her wanted to smile, in spite of everything. They’d been discovering so many new ways to wage the battle of wits of late. It wasn’t confined to the flight-simulator anymore.

Their scene shifted to later in the day. Heat was rising from sand and rock to a sky of deepening amber, but these thermals and updrafts seemed only to fret Flashpower as he sat on his own. Behind him the silver shell of what had then been a Flash Club border outpost bulked incongruous and technological amid planetwide never-never.

Thoughtfully 4-H-N studied the breathing afflicted boy.

She didn’t feel sorry for him. Call her heartless, but it was too soon after her last date for that. Nevertheless, you couldn’t help finding it all at least a little bit interesting. Before the proliferation, then, had boys just had to…make do? That hardly sounded to 4-H-N the right way to put it. Flashbee was watching alongside her, but she guessed just this once she’d stumbled on a subject he wasn’t qualified to lecture her about. His generation had only ever known a galaxy abounding with girls. Yet the adults Mini-Flashes grew into led long lives, and maybe the likes of Storm-Sky recalled those bygone ways of feeling she herself was unable to relate to.

A man was approaching through the distant heat-haze.

He was gaunt, walking slowly with shoulders high, his outline black. 4-H-N couldn’t tell at first which parts of that were armour, and which a kind of cybernetic unliving body.

“Space-Screamer,” she whispered.

“He wasn’t only Blaster-Track Commander’s,” Flashbee corroborated grimly. “The Flash Club had their share of throwdowns too.”

By now Flashpower had seen him. The frightened boy scrambled from the crag on which he’d perched, slipping 4-H-N another quick reminder orange was his colour of choice, then proceeded to flee face-first into a breastplate from which he rebounded with a clang. Audio-Wave, Space-Screamer’s robotic communications officer, loomed faceless and unspeaking. An iron hand thrust to snag Flashpower by the skirt, whereat Audio-Wave hefted him effortlessly with one arm. Wow, thought 4-H-N, it was turning into a lot of reminders. Never more so than when Audio-Wave threw.

At long last Flashpower thumped breathless to the baking soil. He was however afforded precious little time to lie there, before the very face of the planet began to break up beneath him.

“Waah!”

Helplessly the boy rolled amid loose earth and stone, as a colossal corkscrew-bit span out into the dying light of day. Drilldome’s leering head and hulking shoulders were next.

A third robot had already emerged as from nowhere. Flashpower near-frantically found his feet, and mustered up the most one such as he was capable of as to energy-emission.

There’d have been more danger of scratching the newcomer had he put in for a polish.

“Why, you miserable Mini-Flash!” that one thundered. “You dare smite at Steelstreak?”

Unlocking wrist-guns the robot became more outspoken still. 4-H-N couldn’t see this being anything other than Flashpower’s final flight, but even as he sailed leagues through the sky on the shockwaves of Steelstreak’s barrage, his limp form was still flicked and chivvied cruelly by a flitting golden blur which seemed to delight in steering him to some precision landing-point. Cyclotor, 4-H-N apprehended. She’d not had the pleasure of encountering this quartet while they were still functioning, but knew from their reputation that where there’d been three, there’d usually been the fourth.

Flashpower hit a flat-topped upland, from which the border outpost would have appeared to him a far-off silver dot, had he been upright and able to see it. The malevolent robots were landing to surround him, but they as per their programming made way in turn for the master, now alighting on his belt-jets.

“Forgive them,” Space-Screamer said. “They’re a little overzealous. One of these days I’ll get around to tightening whichever bolt it is that…”

And he finished on a vague gesture, indicating that actually he wouldn’t and didn’t care.

Lone and fearful Flashpower picked himself up, trembling in his tattered tunic. Out of wide eyes he gazed on the despot.

“That’s the way,” remarked Space-Screamer with approval. “Just look, without having to be told. Plomonoog knows, I can’t always be bothered to say something chilling when I do this…”

His eyes were mere circles of no shade nature wrought.

Stronger minds than Flashpower’s had blue-screened at that blue.

The resultant jump-cut dropped 4-H-N and Flashbee into a world of nothingness. Flashpower stood blinking amidst it, and all else was empty infinity but for one other figure. It was Flashfair, suspended a little above the observer by some swirling force which held him fast by the wrists and feet.

“What are you doing here?” Flashpower asked.

He spoke extremely shortly, as though remembering the morning’s rebuff. 4-H-N gathered it had not been the first.

Flashfair didn’t answer. Beneath his tumbled gold-silver locks he was murmuring in strife.

Slowly Flashpower began to walk towards him. Perhaps, considered 4-H-N, at that time he was still telling himself it was to try and free Flashfair.

Yet Flashpower’s stare even then was fixed just where it had been before.

He halted in front of the smaller boy. Time, like space, seemed to have forsaken this realm.

Fifth Film Director Grindo probably hadn’t been thinking of Roger’s arm, but it was very much on 4-H-N’s mind. Flashbee had told her the real Flashpower’s scribbled confession had come to light after the events here narrated were over, and the Grindoes had worked from it in the interests of giving a balanced view. What she was watching, in other words, wasn’t fictionalized.

Flashpower’s hand twitched in the direction of the hanging white tunic-hem, only for him to restore it as speedily to his own agitated skirt-folds.

He was the picture of plight.

That was when 4-H-N began at last to pity Flashpower, while the loathing and disgust she felt for Space-Screamer swelled in proportion. She appreciated the latter wasn’t supposed to be the good guy, but Fifth Film Director Grindo couldn’t have known his work would make 4-H-N think of what Gala had done to Flashtease, or what Gala’s son had gone on to do to 4-H-N’s friend Jenny at Limb. These people, whose route to whatever it was they wanted cut directly though the one right which everyone was entitled to claim. The right to own your body. Lastly 4-H-N thought of Harbin’s other parent, and the Drenthis feeling ticked over inside her.

Fitfully Flashpower glanced about. What he will have looked on met 4-H-N’s definition of no-one around to see.

He drew the deepest of breaths.

Then he did it, quick, as might a schoolboy who had taken as long to nerve himself.

And from the way it made him close his eyes in bliss, 4-H-N deduced that that at any rate had been a first for him.

TO BE CONTINUED