Once Upon a Future

by Robert Reginald (ed)

  To move quickly was vital, in order to catch any knowledgeable enemy intent upon entering the Communications Cavern to provide warning of the Bonded Brotherhood on the way. To move quickly was dangerous, though, because light-concentration goggles provided only minimum visibility under the best of circumstances, and dangers were more easily missed when concentrating more on a pursuit than on a potential ambush.

  While Wolf faced forward, Tyrone kept twisted toward the rear, lest their momentum carry them past a concealed enemy who might mount a surprise attack from some dead-end offshoot.

  “Ungh!” Wolf came to a dead stop and withstood Tyrone’s forward-momentum thud against him. The dull clash of metal against metal indicated to Tyrone swordplay, muffled by it being on the other side of his soldier/lover.

  Tyrone mind’s-eye flashed Wolf soon as dead as the soldier/lovers over whom Wolf and Tyrone had crawled and walked, squeezed by, waded and cut through. Wolf gone to Heavenly Banallah, no longer alive and vital within the mortal realm, filled Tyrone with such raw anguish that he would have wailed had not his mind already diverted to calculations as to how he could best join the fray kept from him by his lover’s placement ahead of him within the narrowness of the parenthesizing rock.

  Tyrone didn’t doubt Wolf’s swordsmanship. That said…the fighting abilities of those already dead in the Tunnel had, likewise, been of superior quality.

  “Fucking shit!” Wolf’s accompanying grunt was low and long; Tyrone hoped it wasn’t verbalization of a fatal wound.

  Tyrone turned fully toward his partner’s back and squatted, in seeming smell of Wolf’s uniformed hard ass. Tyrone thrust his sword, right hand, and right arm between his soldier/lover’s powerful legs, and fucked them all upward into the space on the other side. Sword-point hit something that resisted only briefly before giving way.

  There were resulting human, although seemingly inhuman, sounds, audible even within the Tunnel’s poor acoustics.

  There was sudden dead weight skewered on Tyrone’s sword and riding it to horizontal.

  “Wolf?!” Tyrone’s main concern remained the welfare of his soldier/lover, even as he pulled his sword from its temporary blood-and-guts sheathe. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, but we now have to move out, and fast.” He managed a successful climb-over of their now-dead Tyrone-killed attacker.

  There was no way to know if the newly dead assailant was the same believed to have been en route to the Communications Cavern to sound the alarm.

  Quickly, they continued down the Tunnel and around the bend to…spill-out into the Communications Cavern, so suddenly and unexpectedly (one second, having been claustrophobically confined by the Tunnel walls; the next second, having been within the expansiveness that stretched in three horizontal directions and vertically to High Peephole’s summer sunshine), that they were temporarily disoriented. Several of the enemy, equally surprised, turned toward the two blood-smeared, sweaty, and panting materializations.

  The soldier/lovers were the first to recover their senses; three of the enemy died before anyone but Wolf and Tyrone knew what was happening. Two more enemies were slain before the reality dawned on everyone as clearly as sunlight through High Peephole.

  Four swords, and the quartet of men who drew them, came at the Bonded-Brotherhood soldier/lovers who, back-too-back, prepared to kill or be killed. Two more enemies rushed in.

  There was a sharp sting to Tyrone’s right shoulder and a resulting gush of sword-drilled blood. Still, he fought on. Death was acceptable; defeat was not.

  One enemy raised both arms to put his sword into wide-swing mode; each of his two follow-up wide swathes almost lopped Tyrone’s head off. When the same man fell backwards, pulled in that direction by two swords simultaneously withdrawn from his back, Tyrone could thank fellow Bonded-Brotherhood soldier/lovers, Marten and Slate, for having come to his rescue.

  Belatedly, Tyrone’s attention was diverted to the ladder accessing High Peephole. One enemy was halfway to the sunshine-highlighted Communications Console.

  “Nooooo!” Tyrone refused to believe failure was eminent; although, as if to verify just that, the enemy soldier on the ladder turned in Tyrone’s direction, and, as if having picked Tyrone specifically from the bloody milieu, raised his right hand, its back aimed in Tyrone’s direction, all but his middle finger folded to his palm. Then he continued his scurry up the ladder.

  No way could any of the Bonded Brotherhood reach the top before news could be signaled to Castle Generals that the enemy was loose within the Castle Dunsmire’s bedrock foundation.

  * * * *

  The ceremony was Delta-Tai—in that, against all odds, the assault on Castle Dunsmire had been successful, and the Cankintic War had been won.

  Though some would, and did, cite the reason for winning as the Miracle of Failed Communications—due to yet another (albeit timely for the Bonded Brotherhood) occurrence of the region’s more and more frequent magnetic anomalies—the victory was mainly attributed to Karma and the Blessedness of the Bonded Brotherhood; after all, the latter had a long history of successes against seemingly insurmountable odds, even without miracles, as had been the case at Elixir Rey, Dynamo Maul, and Grindon Falls.

  Tyrone spotted Marten and Slate who, in Communications Cavern, had joined Tyrone and Wolf to save the day. He walked over to them, put one hand to each of Slate’s broad shoulders, and leaned in to deliver a Dilinus-kiss which Slate returned in kind.

  Wolf nodded a Dilinus-greeting to Marten who responded with a nod of the same.

  Thereby, a Clan Anima Bonded-Brotherhood 2+2 Dilinus sequence was mutually agreed upon, and was initiated, whereby the two pairs would eventually be but one officially bound foursome.

  * * * *

  A time-consuming Epsilon was the much-anticipated finale ceremony of any 2+2 Dilinus sequence, but it had to be postponed because of recruitment, via lottery, for a new, highly dangerous, important, albeit classified-as-of-yet campaign, that saw Wolf and Tyrone draw green pebbles-to-go, but Marten and Slate draw gray pebbles to-stay.

  Not long afterwards, Wolf and Marten sat on the former’s tree-house balcony that overlooked the undulating treetops of Forest Wen that appeared ocean-like in the breeze. Tyrone and Slate were in the kitchen, preparing Morinbolun Elixir.

  “Shall I tell you who else’s pebbles, besides Tyrone and mine, are green?” Wolf asked. Then, he answered his own question with, “Tig and Baz, from barbarian Clan Grandlint, who let that fact drop to me while I was negotiating with them for the return of the Grandlint-Clan stolen munitions from the arsenals of Windwood Plain. What logical reasoning, I ask you, can be behind the selection of those two, albeit now admittedly again our allies, while left behind are grade-one Bond-Brotherhood superior soldier/lovers, like you and Slate? Who within the hierarchy thinks me and mine safer with Tig and Baz at our backs, rather than with fellow heroes of Castle Dunsmire and the Cankintic War, like you and Slate? Tyrone and I think it may be some kind of test.”

  “A test?” Marten wasn’t following.

  “Like during our final Bonded-Brotherhood initiation, during which we were sworn to maintain our chastity for forty days, only to be presented by our superiors, after only twenty days, with a toy-boy, to have it tacitly implied that we were being rewarded for progress well-done and should feel free to do with him as we damned well pleased. Yet, those who did were eliminated.”

  “I’m still not sure I get the connection.”

  “What if we’re meant to question the kind of randomness that provides such piss-poor selections as Tig and Baz? What major campaign, as this upcoming one is reputed to be, was ever adequately won by less than the very best? Each substandard soldier increases the odds for failure.”

  “Which leaves us where?”

  “With Slate and you deserving green. With Tig and Baz deserving gray. With Slate and you having a chance to make it right, and pass the test.

  “By exchanging our gray pebbles for their green
, you mean?”

  * * * *

  Tig and Baz’s eagerness to cohabit with Marten and Slate was the direct result of the former pair’s assumed good fortune in having somehow managed to snare such prime specimens whose bodies were of a kind that none of the local population would likely be able to match, even with additional years of hard workouts in the gymnasium…with handsomeness the gods only granted the very few. Slobbered over by the whole Cornit Inn’s clientele, Marten and Slate had initially seemed destined to succumb to the come-ons of Batch and Cal, but Tig and Baz had triumphed in the end.

  That Marten and Slate were heroes, Clan Anima Bonded Brotherhood to boot, was, for Tig and Baz, proverbial icing on the cake, especially since Tig and Baz had missed out, only days before, on bedding Clan Anima Bonded-Brotherhood negotiator and hero, Wolf, who had turned out far less eager to join in than these two.

  What with the Treaty of Borguha so recently signed, and the inclusion of Clan Grandlint, along with Clan Anima, scheduled for participation in the upcoming mysterious military campaign, Tig and Baz figured they might yet have a second chance at fellow green-stoner Wolf, as well as Wolf’s fellow green-stoner, hero, and soldier/lover, Tyrone. Until then….

  The seemingly happy-to-be-there Marten and Slate, naked and back-to-back on the bed, succeeded in continuing to get Tig and Baz more at ease, sexually sated, and, most of all, vulnerable to the follow-up machinations to exchange green pebbles for gray. The successful sleight of hand was, in the end, likewise, assisted by the bog fern, helibuius rendesus, from the far recesses of Province Kylile, which, when drunk, soon had Tig and Baz out cold.

  * * * *

  “Wolf and Tyrone aren’t here.” Marten stated the obvious. “What time is it?”

  “Time we should start if we hope to make coordinates before we’re listed as AWOL,” Slate said. He’d calculated the time by checking the placement of the sun on the horizon, not by checking his wristwatch which, like all things mechanical, had, for not the first time, malfunctioned. As usual, religio-groups blamed the latest magnetic anomaly on Karma. Sun-Starers insisted it was because of increased solar activity, including massive flares, but who could believe those stupid enough to go blind doing what they did, when it had long been proved that sun-gazing was disastrous to eyesight? Whatever the cause and result, it would likely pass, as it had after Miracle of Failed Communications at Castle Dunsmire and Cankintic War.

  “Maybe Wolf and Tyrone were delayed and intend to meet us at the gathering spot,” Marten suggested. He wished confirmation was as simple as sliding his phone from his pocket for dial-up; communications, though, were no more operational than timepieces or transportation vehicles.

  They donned their duffle bags and headed off.

  In a very short while, they reached the dividing line between forest and desert.

  Shortly thereafter, they detected evidence of those who had walked the same pathway not all that long before them. That they saw no people persuaded them to pick up their pace, in case they were running late due to something as much gone wrong with their internal clocks as with the timepieces on their wrists.

  They were disconcerted when the footprints narrowed into single-file, and, as if made by lemmings, led directly to the lip of a cliff.

  They were startled, when, edging closer to the drop-off to see if there were, indeed, multitudes of fellow green-pebble lottery winners splattered on the rocks below, a door materialized, mid-air, at the terminus of the pathway and cliff-drop. While Marten and Slate were well aware that the powers-that-be were always out to develop stealth techniques, they knew the opened door, revealing a man, and the room beyond (neither visible when checking left or right, up or down), was simply too high-tech for reality.

  “Your invitation please,” their greeter requested. He had corn-silk hair that attractively banged his forehead, almost into his startlingly pale eyes.

  Marten and Slate produced green pebbles, expecting the man to question, accusatorily, how they, having officially drawn gray pebbles, were now suddenly in possession of green. All that he said, though, was, “You almost missed the deadline.”

  As if already confronted by more than his share of green-pebble holders reluctant to manage the leap of faith that required stepping off the high cliff and through the magically appeared, seemingly in-thin-air, door, the man, having palmed the green pebbles as entrance fees, physically reached out and grabbed the bulged bicep of Marten’s left arm. His resulting tug brought Marten on through the materialized opening; Slate’s battle-hewn reflexes immediately pulled him along in his bond-mate’s wake.

  At which point, Marten and Slate were possessed by an inexplicable something that propelled them, full speed ahead, across the floor, up a ramp, and into a room seemingly filled with chairs, two of which seemed impossibly designed with Marten and Slate’s specific body dimensions in mind.

  Immediately, Marten and Slate began checking the room for Wolf and Tyrone, distracted from it by their sudden physical encapsulations by chair-manacles that grabbed their legs, by chair-bracelets that encircled their wrists, and by chair-metal girdles that webbed their torsos.

  Then, there was a blinding white light.

  Marten and Slate wrongly assumed the light lasted but a fraction of a second, with several seconds more needed for everything to return into focus. By which time, manacles, bracelets, and girdles were released, and everyone was told, over a loudspeaker, “Please exit, by bond-mated two-by-two, to the right and down the ramp.” As if anyone had any real choice, since whatever the compelling force that had brought them into the seats in the first place, now removed them and headed them toward the far door.

  Having been last to arrive, Marten and Slate were the last of the line. Again, they searched for Wolf and Tyrone.

  “Holy shit!” Marten would have exclaimed, upon seeing what he saw, if only he’d been able; his vocal chords were still no more in his control than the rest of his gone-robot body.

  Finally, out the door, Marten’s next exclamations would have been in response to the fantastically changed landscape. No more red sky, green water, blue ground, violet vegetation. This sky was blue, as was the water (the latter in the far background). The ground was brown. The vegetation was green.

  “Your sun has gone supernova,” a sympathetic loudspeaker voice said. “Your planet and your solar system are destroyed. Your dire situation, having been detected and monitored by humanitarian Alenixitixian team 911, sees as many of you saved as possible via random-lot selection for transport here by ARK (Alenixitixian Rescue Kraft 2119-642). Though your new planet may seem different, it has been carefully chosen because of its compatibility for colonization by your species. Therefore, with Alenixitixian philanthropic blessing, go forth and be fruitful.”

  “What the hell?” Slate’s voice and surprisingly weak-kneed legs were suddenly returned to his control.

  However, there was no longer any evidence of ramp, door, or room.

  “And, where in the hell are Wolf and Tyrone, who should have found us, by now, or vice versa?” Slate wondered aloud.

  Marten pointed toward the approaching Tig and Baz.

  “Good God, how?” was Slate’s exclaimed surprise; as it would have been Marten’s earlier, if he’d only been able when he’d first spotted the supposedly eliminated duo.

  “Well, doesn’t it look as if the four of us may well have inadvertently bitten off more than we can chew?” Tig greeted.

  “Your green pebbles-gone-gray, did you somehow steal green from others?” Marten intuitively accused.

  “Is that the pot calling these kettles black?” Tig asked. “Or, did you ride in here on your own horse? At least Baz and I were original ticket holders until our green pebbles suddenly, mysteriously, unnaturally, metamorphosed into gray; you or your partner were nowhere to be found. Should Baz and I, now, bear grudges against you two “alchemists” to whom circumstantial evidence now points as having been temporarily responsible for our elimination from rescue? Or, shou
ld we put all such things aside in order best to cope with the situation at hand?”

  * * * *

  Their mantra was Mu-Nu, part of the Erasure Ritual that negated bad feelings, obliterated vengeance inclinations, soothed bruised egos, expunged wrong deeds, and eliminated harm done or thought done. Such verbalization recognized the reality of more to think about than unwanted baggage inadvertently brought into this new world from the old.

  “We ask forgiveness for all we may have done to offend you and yours,” Marten and Slate said in unison.

  “All is forgiven,” Tig and Baz responded. “In turn, we ask forgiveness for all we have done to soldier/lovers Wolf and Tyrone, in having exchanged gray stones with their green, leaving them behind to die while we live here.”

  Having learned, during the negotiations for the return of Grandlint-Clan stolen munitions from the arsenals of Windwood Plain, that Wolf, and his soldier/lover were in possession of green pebbles, Tig and Baz, having been deprived of their green by Marten and Slate, had launched their successful campaign to exchange their suddenly gray pebbles for the green of Wolf and Tyrone.

  If Marten and Slate missed Wolf and Tyrone, there was no bringing anyone, or anything back, from disintegration by supernova. Besides, hadn’t Tig and Baz just played “the game” better than Wolf and Tyrone, who, fully-initiated heroes of the Clan Anima Bonded Brotherhood, should have been far cleverer? Should Tig and Baz be penalized for having exchanged stones for stones when neither had known, beforehand, as in the case of Marten and Slate, that green meant salvation and gray meant death? They’d merely, as had Marten and Slate, been bravely eager to join in whatever the ensuing battle.

  Some of the adopted planet’s indigenous fowl, grown agitated by the sudden loud and guttural 2+2 Dilinus-sequence sex sounds of the two Bonded-Brotherhood pairs, took wing, exited adjoining trees, and, immediately, turned, en masse, to fly south. It was yet another good omen at the beginning of what would, hereafter, be known as Year One A.K. (After the Ark).