The Magnetic Stones, Chapter Four

The film was starting. Mini-Flash Phytolith couldn’t wait in the lobby for Mini-Flash Moon any longer. He hurried to take his seat.

Opening scenes were always breathtaking, a sensory inundation. Scarlet and cyan and gold and green were the battle-vehicles which swept the Mini-Flashes up in their slipstream and whirled them as one to the brawl. Here in the silent near-monochrome world bounded by the magnetic stones, such sound and fury were only known between these auditorium walls. That Drenthis’s desert somewhat resembled the dry dust and crags beyond the school perimeter only conferred plausibility and terror on these staggering scenes. Every beige tunic housed a heart that hammered. It was the preliminary plunge, where wide-eyed watchers wrestled with the thrill and feared it might be more than they could bear.

Presently, there was something else.

It started when their enemy fired the shot heard round the universe. All the Mini-Flashes’ textbooks about Drenthis were insistent on that curious bit of phrasing, so unlike anything a writer from this galaxy might have set down. No words however could do justice to that needle-fine shard of brilliant flame, or even a holographic depiction of it, piercing polyester and silk beneath to crumble glass and steel.

Half the audience gulped to a man, and shifted restively in their cinema-seats. Mini-Flash Screeslopes was in agonies as to whether or not he ought to be enjoying this bit.

The other half sat thoughtful, pondering, thinking back on class. Some of them were ready to venture a guess as to where this story was going.

All however understood, and felt a quiet awe at their own understanding, when desert winds raised a harsh swirling crucible round about 4-H-N’s feet. There she stood, hurt and humiliated, alone though friends and foes debated endlessly over the sands. Drenthis was where 4-H-N was forged. The Mini-Flashes knew it now. There she had taken her first taste of that which might make her one of them.

Anger. Outrage. Indignation. And thence, slowly fermenting, hate.

The female Mini-Flashes in particular felt that. The liberty that Earthling male had taken! Whatever would Miss Jade do to the unlucky boy she caught behaving thus?

Events of galactic significance in which 4-H-N played a part, Titus, Nereynis, rolled by.

Until, from hate, revelation dawned.

The presumptuousness had been the enemy’s. But the power was 4-H-N’s.

Those girls who’d remembered their training breathed out as if they’d drunk deep and long. They knew it. They’d been there ahead of 4-H-N. Oh, what a film!

Sure enough, next they saw their enemy, surrounded by his glittering new city yet wracked. Drenthis visited him in dreams. What he had glimpsed there would not leave him. Possessing even its correlative, its original, brought no respite. He wanted that which he could not have.

He had handed 4-H-N the means to make him suffer.

The female Mini-Flashes would have made him suffer in just that way. It was what they’d been schooled for. Mini-Flash Semiprecious was so moved as to murmur aloud:

“The unconquerable will, and study of revenge, immortal hate, and courage never to submit or yield.”

Those sitting near enough to hear her acknowledged with reverent looks and nods. Most were aware she’d taken that from a textbook too, but even so, you could always count on old Semiprecious to have the very words.

If empathy in the strictest sense was feminine for these reels, the male Mini-Flashes absorbed something of it all the same. So much so that when the film’s wild spectrum plunged to pinks and shiny violet, Petunia could do no more than keep the boys’ hormones bubbling. It was 4-H-N they rooted for. 4-H-N was like them, and Petunia would never be.

Uproariously the audience applauded when ink splattered that despised emblem.

From here on, male and female Mini-Flashes alike began rooting for 4-H-N in a different way. Once again they had pulled ahead of her. The film and their education had taken pains to make sure they should.

4-H-N wasn’t able to see the ink-bottle for the victory it was. In fact, she was horrified at herself.

For 4-H-N was still drawing erroneous distinctions between those who attached themselves to that insignia.

She had yet to understand that all who wore it were the same.

Think, 4-H-N, her fans inwardly implored her. Who so much as asked you if you were OK back on Drenthis? Then did these supposed loved ones even spare a thought when you started hanging round the flight-simulator night by night? There you fell into bad company, which they waved away at once as some sort of undercover mission. Even though that was no explanation for your quickly turning into the worst delinquent of all.

You were crying out for somebody to notice, and it didn’t even occur to them. Because they didn’t care. No-one could, who adhered to that accursed cause.

The Mini-Flashes hoped against hope 4-H-N would figure this out in time.

She didn’t.

Not long after Limb Four, her so-called family and friends let her down when she needed them most. They left her no choice but to run away.

Then before she even had the chance to do that, something worse happened.

Cold dungeon walls under reddish torchlight described to the boding cinemagoers what seemed the lowermost circle of somewhere dark and ancient. 4-H-N stood at dead centre, exactly as she had done on Drenthis, for once again she was alone despite the multitudes around. These ringed her, Alliance Mini-Flashes one and all. Beige-garbed neophytes made up the inner ranks and so were nearest 4-H-N, while assembled behind them were graduates clad in their individual costumes. Every eye pinned her with a silent severe stare.

Auntie Green, whose function apparently resembled Miss Jade’s, held court.

She demanded 4-H-N’s immediate resignation from The Flash Club.

That one had striven to stand in defiance, but now confronted by what she must do, she quailed. Mini-Flashes sitting safe inside the magnetic stones did so too, for 4-H-N’s other audience was legion and expectant, and suddenly she was but a lone tunic before them.

Tinted by the fires, choking back tears, 4-H-N began to undress in front of the tribunal. Auntie Green was waiting calmly for that uniform to be surrendered into her hands.

Even the cinema’s masculine patrons were daunted. True, it wasn’t that that glimmer of torch-flame on contoured skin hadn’t been looked forward to, and most had to squeeze their legs tightly together and gather tunic-skirts close. Still, they’d have taken Miss Jade and her corrector over being in 4-H-N’s boots any day. Female classmates meanwhile were open-mouthed and righteous. The Alliance was no different to the enemy! How true it was that the cause was the same no matter where you went. It had only ever led poor 4-H-N to one fate every time.

Girls, who had never lived without the security of corporal punishment hanging over any boy who so much as fidgeted at them, hated the cause.

For their leader didn’t lie. Falsification and positivism were enemy tools. What was more, he’d seen the future.

His films told nothing but the truth.

Including those truths which hadn’t happened yet, but were going to.

Onto the silver screen swelled a climactic cloudscape of roiling mustard and sulphur. It was the time-interval when a space-conurbation’s artificial sky stained everything beneath with its luridness. Light spilled from the windows of shops and bars, casting elongated polygons on the damp darkening street. The club at the far end was also giving out faint strains of music and singing.

4-H-N could hear this from the corner. Her feet were now bare, and no more modesty was afforded her than one arm thrown over her torso.

She was free from Flash Club Headquarters, forever indeed. Nor was it possible for her to return to the home she’d once known on Grindotron.

The soft song continued. 4-H-N attempted to dash her angry tears away.

She wouldn’t.

She hated him.

She couldn’t, wouldn’t, run to Petunia to beg his help through her.

Only she needed help. She was shivering in her knickers on a conurbation street-corner with night drawing on. There wasn’t anyone else.

But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not him.

Every watching Mini-Flash yearned in their deepest heart for her. It couldn’t end like this. She’d come so far, and made such progress. She’d hated more magnificently than any of her misguided faction. Had this inspirational journey been leading her all along to the one outcome her audience had been taught was unforgivable?

To weakness?

It couldn’t end like this.

But the film was doing so.

The Mini-Flashes knew why, too. Their films always ended at that point in the story where what came next was going to be up to them. They also ended the same way each time, with transparent rays of dusky luminosity sliding slantwise over the final frame. These shadow-shafts contained glinting stars, and although for some seconds the street and 4-H-N were still to be seen, soon enough all that was left was a singularity’s glow. Awed by what they had witnessed the Mini-Flashes sat, some in a hush, while others whispered faithfully along to the valediction:

“Go, and be strong.” So saying he dismissed them.

They with speed their course through thickest constellations held,

Spreading their bane. The blasted stars looked wan,

And planets, planet-struck, real eclipse then suffered.

For who can think submission? War, then.

War open or understood must be resolved.

END OF CHAPTER FOUR