Gathering

“Had you been there,” Joe began, “when first The Four Heroes looked out upon Nottingham, then perhaps you would understand.”

An assortment of eyes gazed back at him in the candlelit dark. Joe paused to drink from his glass, and continued.

“The woodland blazed with autumn as we climbed ever higher, and each of us sensed change in the preternatural sunset that had endured for hours that day. Evening was at last upon us. Above the treetops the sky’s blue dome steadily deepened in shade, but to us this was not the advent of what you might call darkness. Rather, it was a glorious dawning of the universe that lay beyond our sphere, the earliest indication that this momentous deed accomplished mere hours ago would resonate through glittering realms more distant than we had dreamed. Indeed, the stars sparkled so brightly that night that I may perchance have glimpsed the one we circle now, though never did I imagine I would carry the lesson then learned to touch so many lives within its faraway orbit.

“But can mere words describe what it was, to finally gain the top of the ridge and there behold our road, stretching to the horizon where destiny awaited us? I must tell you most emphatically of all that somehow, for The Four Heroes, none of it was new. It may be that Nottingham’s retroactive history had exercised its influence even on our hearts, such that the very dust on the highway seemed old and familiar to us. In every logical, measurable sense it was the first time those city-lights brightened our corporeal world, and yet each of us recalled their beacon of hope holding steady through the hard and empty years.”

Joe’s voice dropped a little.

“You must not picture one of your own architectural masterpieces, some faultless fusion of technological finesse and angular geometrics,” he advised his listeners. “Imagine instead vertical brush-strokes of luminosity itself, etched along the vast expanse between celestial arch and mountaintops. The melding of a million windows and streetlamps and neon-signs, softly tinting the night. And we knew that there, deep within the heart of that ephemeral land, lay the home we had sought so long…”

The memory was rising up before Joe in the candle-flames, and he had to pause for several moments. Talking about this was almost too much, while he was light-years from the city he spoke of and in terms of time and experience felt a comparable distance from the day. What was more, revisiting his first sight of Nottingham would surely lead him to consider in turn his last. Then he would truly be unable to go on, when the recollection of that sunset and those final parting breaths summoned the face of she who was absent in the flickering golden glow.

So he looked instead at the faces assembled in a semicircle in front of him. Nearly all were young, and some but not all belonged to humanoid bodies. The Mini-Flashes among them appeared no different to human boys and girls wearing short-skirted tunics, and Joe knew that once tonight was over they would return to their headquarters for another day of that strange combination of sports and superheroics that made up Flash Club basic training. Nevertheless, Joe was equally aware that when the next of his meetings came around, they and their friends from different walks of life would duly be back to listen to him again.

Our hero could not help admitting that here in this galaxy he had found something of what he used to wish for back in the early days. As a self-styled prophet during that gloomy epoch known as Pre-Nottingham Earth, no-one could have accused him of attracting a legion of followers. He had reached the three who mattered, and that of course had been the point, but most others including Joe’s own best friend had not believed. There was however clearly some truth in old sayings that material evidence made all the difference. Every intelligent life-form indigenous to the quadrant had not so long ago witnessed firsthand The Four Heroes’ cause as it turned back tyrannical Empress Ungus and wrested a new age of peace from what would have been the darkest hour. To a younger generation which Joe recognized had already been quite spiritual, with their beliefs in holy planets and prophecies and a myriad different theories on what the sudden emergence of a second gender in their midst might portend, this had proved a turning-point. Now the semicircle grew a little larger on each occasion, and Joe for the first time in years was starting to feel like a prophet again.

“Do not think I tell you these things to indulge nostalgically in glories gone, my friends,” he resumed. “Since the hour of Nottingham’s genesis, I surveyed our city by every conceivable shade of night and day. I have glimpsed five different phases of its future and past, and six times seen all that we created laid waste by war. When The Four Heroes stood together on that highway at dusk, united in the fulfillment of our cause, we knew the battles were but beginning and our happiness would not be eternally thus. There will you find the meaning to my memoir, the reason we must never forget that that hour once was. Treasuring such events, and striving to uphold all they stood for, is why we go on.”

The silence that fell, for all its reverential qualities, tingled nevertheless with anticipation. In due and timely counterpoint something new began to rise amid the hush. It was time. This had become an important part of the ritual too.

With a single gesture Joe extinguished the candles his powers had lit. From their ring of old couches his attendees were starting to stand. Joe clapped on the shoulder the fair-haired freckled Mini-Flash boy sitting beside him, and together they did the same. No resident of that galaxy here tonight knew half as much about their theme as Flashtease did.

They moved as one from the deserted lounge to the balcony outside. Parked on the edge of a towering space-rock, the view thus commanded was for the moment of a vast dark gulf, in which a scattering of similar asteroid installations dotted the distance at every horizontal plane. Joe and his entourage watched and waited.

Then, slowly, the first radiant bands of a pearlescent aurora began to wash across the awesome lowering depths. A new lunar cycle was waxing into phase, and the islands were awakening. Pinprick lights from a thousand dwelling-spheres and starship-ports and leisure-domes twinkled in fast-growing proliferation atop each meteoric mass, and then all at once the transport-tubes interlinking these planetoids wheeled and spiralled their brilliant hues through the cosmos. To the observers it was as if an intricate multicoloured network of fibre-optic cable had suddenly woven isolated chunks into an astral village, and soon the whole of that winding maze would be alive with sentient beings whizzing back and forth along the archipelago’s span, as vigorous daily existence resumed in the age of peace and plenty.

There was something about the situation that struck Joe all at once. He had spoken to his companions of touching their lives, but it seemed more than one person who had done the same to him was fated to be on his mind this night.

“From the city of long ago, to the city of today,” he told the youngsters. “Remember those words, and you will preserve the memory of one who was important to me.”

A civilian girl, gazing enraptured on the vista, breathed to Joe in something like awe: “You did this. All this…you gave it back to us.”

“Then you did not understand my story, Petunia,” Joe told her kindly. “The happiness your galaxy now knows was brought about through the combined powers of The Four Heroes. No sole effort on my part could have achieved this. That is why it is imperative we stand together again, as we did on the day of Nottingham’s creation. Only when the bitter enmity that has befallen us is banished at last, only when The Four Heroes are divided no more, will our cause be restored to all that it should be.”