Immortal Hate, Chapter One

It was the time-interval when a space-conurbation’s artificial sky stained everything beneath with its luridness.

After the moisture-purge, the last of the atmospheric condensation roiled overhead in vast formations of mustard and sulphur. By now it was too late in the diurnal round to think of regaining simulated day. Elongated polygons of light were already spilling from shopfronts and windows, etching their pattern on streets darkening and damp. At the far end of one, a small nightclub stood.

4-H-N stumbled into sight of it.

The strains just that minute striking up from within were enough to assure her she hadn’t ventured here in vain. Not that she could recall ever hearing that particular number before, which would have to make it the sixth, last in the modest repertoire and seldom brought out to delight the galactic public. Maybe Petunia saved it for days when she’d been on telly, although it was getting a little cold underfoot for jokes. At any rate, 4-H-N would have known the keening of those clapped-out backing-singer androids in her dreams, since that was one of the places she’d heard them.

Dear Mr. DJ, play it again…

Dear Mr. DJ, play it again…

Softly 4-H-N advanced along the empty lane. She saw they’d patched up the club since Sue blew a tunnel from its subterranean theatre to open skies.

Hopefully Petunia remembered that day too.

There wasn’t much else to lend 4-H-N a bargaining posture just now.

On cue, both literally and figuratively, the known voice uprose from within:

Dear Mr. DJ,

Play it, play it again;

I want my baby to remember when

We danced to the jukebox while the lights were low,

’Til the lunar cycle ended and we had to go…

Oh, 4-H-N could picture her. She didn’t need to peer in through that lit window. This act was more than familiar from the vocals alone.

There Petunia would be, hugging away at her too-tight sweater and pleading with the daytime drinkers through quivery glossy lips. Petunia and her standing invitation to look but not touch. The bouncing bobbing advertisement for Joe’s interpretation of the cause. Which spoke volumes on the first of The Four Heroes and his way of going about things.

4-H-N knew that early choking in her throat, that anticipatory hardening of every sinew, and she forced herself to fight it back.

She couldn’t afford the Drenthis feeling.

She was shivering in her knickers on a conurbation street-corner with night drawing on, and all she needed from Petunia was a phone call.

Breathing out slowly 4-H-N made herself repeat that.

Just a phone call.

Dear Mr. DJ,

He’s gone, gone away;

I want him to hear the songs of yesterday;

Oh, make him remember how he loved me then,

Oh please, Mr. DJ, play it again…

Only the worst of it was, it wasn’t just an act. 4-H-N would have marched straight in if she’d had nothing more than a silly show-off girl to deal with.

It was that Petunia felt everything she was singing.

And she was singing for him.

That murderer. Father to The Foretold One. He who’d sparked in 4-H-N the feeling hitherto glanced at.

Now to walk contritely into that club, and beg help of a girl who loved the one who’d done that to her…

4-H-N’s eyes were teeming.

She wouldn’t.

Not him.

Not Joe.

A thousand stars in the sky were shining up above;

I’ll never forget the night that we met,

As we stood there pledging our love…

Besides, just imagine how Petunia would be about it. The thought was enough to make 4-H-N clench her teeth. There’d be more than a few superior flicks of the violet tresses, not to mention a homespun sermon on the wages of delinquency. And all the while Petunia would be secretly smirking and sneering, taking her revenge for the night on the ledge. Even though it was Manual all over again, because 4-H-N had sent Sue to this spot the minute she’d heard about the threat. And no, she added to herself with a sob, that didn’t make it alright that she, 4-H-N, had yanked at great handfuls of that same flippy hair or ripped and torn at Petunia’s petticoats in a frenzy. It wasn’t that 4-H-N didn’t know how it felt, when that particular sanctity was violated…

But that only brought her all the way back around to her beginnings.

Because her so-called family and friends had seen it happen on Drenthis, and not one of them had given a thought to her. Oh, they’d all had their take on what it might mean in Prophecy terms, but what about the thing Joe had actually done? For 4-H-N that was no abstraction. She was the one who’d been shamed and exposed in front of everybody. And apparently it didn’t matter what it was like for a girl to go through that, when there were bigger concerns.

It still seemed to 4-H-N it had mattered just as much as any of the rest of it.

And now here she was, shamed and exposed again, while her one potential source of charity posed and flaunted and enabled the behaviour to which 4-H-N had fallen prey.

Encouraged it. Incited it.

Even wore Joe’s symbol in the same place…

4-H-N was shaking from more than just the chilliness and damp. What held her to the spot was something in which Petunia played a part, but ultimately wasn’t about her.

I’ve been so lonely,

Lonely, lonely and blue;

So, Mr. DJ, it’s all up to you,

Play all the goldies from the old top ten;

Oh please, Mr. DJ, play it again…

If 4-H-N had stepped into the nightclub at that moment, there would still have been time for the fate of the galaxy to take a different course to the one it did.

Instead, those seconds, those slow passing beats of Petunia’s song, she employed as she was.

Alone on the street by the lit-up window.

Lost and trembling without, but hewn from adamantine rock within.

Hating Joe.

END OF CHAPTER ONE