False Messenger, Chapter One

The city was surely a recent addition to a far older landscape. Joe knew a thing or two about how that could happen. Cone-shaped it sat on the flat horizon, its neon and domes and slow-fanning spotlights mere misty wisps under springtime suns. By night it would be an urban spectacle to rank alongside the galaxy’s finest, yet what obscured it periodically from view were ancient riverside treelines and the brilliant green canopies of otherworldly willows passing overhead. In and out of this verdure the destination rolled from side to side as Mini-Flash Splitsville hugged the road.

It wasn’t that Joe hadn’t offered to drive. Old Mini-Flash habits died hard however, especially those relating to leadership, and at any rate Joe really had been a little worn-out. There’d already been daily duties in Nottingham and expeditions into the quadrant to organize when this other issue came up. Sunshine plus an open-topped space-rod cruising a twisty bank by water-meadows and ivy-wreathed plantations were good ingredients for a nap, even if you were the first of The Four Heroes. Alien arbour-spray showered yellow-green to ripples warm with gold. Joe felt he was heading home for half-term or the Easter holidays.

No use shearing away from such thoughts. That had ceased to be a luxury our hero could afford. For no other reason were he and Mini-Flash Splitsville here.

Joe was no stranger to telling himself he was foolish to feel that way. There weren’t rules about what you had to come from if you were going to save the world. Dylan too had lived comfortably in Pre-Nottingham Earth. Neetra strictly speaking was royalty. True, in recent years our hero’s reluctance to engage with the earliest chapters of his life had intensified, and again he was not unmindful of the futility. Nevertheless he still met Gala in dreams, and who could put aside forevermore someone who had been to him what she was?

Maybe it was time Joe hardened his heart to the memory of her. It wasn’t his fault her origins

hadn’t been the same as his. She’d been hypocritical about it too, telling him she accepted this difference the first time it came up, then throwing it in his face later. “Little spoiled rich boy,” if Joe remembered rightly. Which he did. It said much in and of itself that he still had it all word for word.

Including when she’d touched upon those who once negotiated the winding lanes outlying Boston, while he as a child rode sleepy and contented in the back seat.

Joe turned to reassure himself of the small pretty blue-haired girl behind the wheel of the space-car. Here was the real reason he didn’t care to confront.

Which didn’t change the fact he was going to have to.

His eyelids heavy, Joe looked sunward again and saw them there. Over the river, beyond the reeds, and across a shining garden of this planet’s bright grasses. It seemed to Joe as great as the distance which divided his childhood from now. Side by side they stood, watching, afar.

Once within the city limits Joe found himself, figuratively at least, not light-years from a Boston slightly later in his recollections. Behind the flying cars and prowling extraterrestrial creatures was a town of the same reassuring shabbiness as that in which he and Degris had divided their days between drunken karaoke and fighting the forces of evil. How quickly and readily had Joe made the change to living such a life.

Splitsville parked and they disembarked, making their way to a small Earth-foods café beneath an overpass. Joe knew one girl at least was going to be right at home. Sonica, on the other hand, bravely bore the plebeian grease when she trotted in to join them minutes later. From her bosom she whipped a dainty lace-trimmed handkerchief, spread it on the seat-cushion beside Splitsville’s, and very carefully settled her silken Tuesdays upon it.

Joe ordered milkshakes for the two unlikely friends, and as they chatted together his mind began to wander again.

There had been a restaurant most unlike this one, set so high above the squalid streets of Boston that when the lunchtime sun shone through its wall of windows, everything glittered as if the customers were sitting in the sky. Here in the holidays, a child-Joe had fancied this was the place he found equipoise and balance.

The present Joe could hear Scientooth remarking that in the parlance of his homeworld, he must only very recently have fallen off the Christmas Tree.

Fair enough. It couldn’t appear anything but ridiculous now, in the light of Joe’s subsequent experiences, that this small boy should have assessed his life on such terms. Holidays were better than school, but what had truly been bad about the latter? Joe knew nothing then of what it was to go from hardship to respite.

The best part of lunches there was the bread roll baked that day. It had been Joe’s favourite.

Had he gone out of his way to overload the scenario with symbolism, that he might feel all the more guilty in future years? Setting himself above the huddled masses, for whom Pre-Nottingham Earth was one long struggle to secure any kind of daily bread. It couldn’t be more shaming now if his child-self had tried.

Tucked between his knees under the restaurant chair was doubtless whatever toy he’d purchased with his holiday money. An afternoon acquainting himself with this newcomer to the large collection was as strenuous a stretch as lay in store, while the world in general suffered and starved. This planet’s mild climate seemed to have fixed Joe on either Easter or summer half-term, so that would mean taking the toy out into the garden for the cats to have a look at too. Probably he’d also rented a video-tape from the garage on his way home, for widespread poverty and the depletion of fuel-resources had made this their main line. On every visit Joe’s child-self was touched by how glad the proprietor seemed to be for his handful of tarnished coins, and went away with the glow of knowing he’d helped alleviate the planet’s sad condition.

He had to stop blaming himself. How many people took their place in history before they’d hit double figures?

He couldn’t be accused of doing nothing. No-one had done more.

Eventually.

Up in his attic he’d have watched and enjoyed the cartoon movie of his choice, window wide on all that drowsy warm. Then afterwards perhaps he’d have perused a few favourite comics to pleasantly pass the time, before evening meal at the long dining-table below.

With his parents.

He could never cease to blame himself.

What was between then and The Four Heroes’ cause would always be.

The café door jingled open, and both girls were looking up. Joe turned in the direction of their gaze.

It wasn’t a completely new sensation to behold himself in front of him. Joe had been cloned before, but he who stood in the doorway wasn’t anything so straightforward. His faded denim, Stetson hat and trenchcoat our hero remembered, but he doubted now whether he had truly perused the mirror during those months soon after Nottingham’s creation when this Joe had been him. For the long brown hair, brown eyes and other features were his, yet not his. Those minute departures and deviations, which might have been imperceptible to any other human, told the tale Joe was here to make sense of. Our hero rose to his feet at once.

“It was with untold gladness and relief we received your communication, informing us you were safe and well,” he said to himself.

For Mini-Flash Splitsville nonchalance was a way of life, but there was more than that in the infinitesimal inclination of her silver-blue head which she aimed at the cowboy. Joe had never thought he’d see the day Splitsville suffered from second-date nerves, for want of a better phrase. Sonica however took care of the formalities, bouncing from her seat and tottering straight past the original Joe all top-heavy purpose.

“You saved my life,” she breathed to the other, and curtsied.

Joe guessed, correctly, that this was the first révérence Sonica had ever bestowed on a male. Her kidnap and rescue had evidently challenged certain assumptions on second gender status and the privileges it entailed. Which meant Joe’s subconscious had unconsciously been going about his own conscious work, not that our hero even knew where to begin with that.

“I guess you’ve got all sorts of questions,” said the cowboy.

Joe owned that this was so, and his other self having prepared an explanatory demonstration the group elected to make as one for their space-cars. Doing so, Sonica caught Mini-Flash Splitsville’s tunic-sleeve and tugged her into her confidence.

“Does your friend know he really looks like him?” she whispered.

END OF CHAPTER ONE