Zephyr Box Set 1

by Warren Hately

  “Your honesty is compelling,” I say drily.

  Magus smiles. It’s a wan thing, like the rest of him. I get the sense he’s only really warming up, but as long as he’s spilling his guts for free, at least on this topic I am willing to let him run.

  “How did you hear of Elvis?” he asks.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Do you know how many possible actual worlds there are, Zephyr?”

  “Ugh, infinity?”

  Again with the tight smile.

  “Close. About five hundred trillion. That’s in the long measure. So a trillion is –”

  “I get it. The French system.”

  “Yeah. And in all of that, how many versions of yourself do you think there are?” Magus asks.

  “I think what you want to tell me is there aren’t as many as we’d think,” I reply, my desire to undercut his egotistical crap almost winning over my need to hear the actual answer to my question one of these days.

  “That’s right.”

  Simon looks at Annie and is set to say something, but then physically restrains himself.

  “The probability of two people coming together to make a human being is one thing. The odds could be worked out on a high school calculator. Hey, maybe even by you, Zeph.”

  He sniggers. Twat.

  “But the probability out of a few million sperm and successful ova production in the womb, all it takes is an erratic heartbeat or a missed cab or a spot of bad weather and you can kiss yourself goodbye,” Magus says. “Of course, a child might be born. One of your imagined siblings. But it won’t be you. When you think about the powers there are in the cosmos – at least in the higher plasticity parallels – don’t you think we’d be flooded with versions of ourselves flitting about in the multiverse, fucking up time and continuity?”

  “Plastic parallels?”

  “The multiverse is tiered, Zephyr.”

  He points up.

  “There are parallels that would make even your head spin. And then of course there’s the lower plasticity realms where even I would be powerless, and some of us, well, we wouldn’t even be able to live. Their physics is far too classical and rigid. Magic is unheard of, and supermen, even simple mutations, are rare.”

  “Sounds depressing. Not sure how this all ties in to Elvis,” I tell him. “Cosmonauts and copraphages, you said?”

  “Cryptonauts and semiophages.”

  Simon says it with another of those smiles I don’t like.

  “The cryptonauts are few. Rare. Think of Jesus, Gandhi, Mohammed, Martin Luther, Bob Marley – people whole cultures organize around. And Elvis is one of those. In some parallels, he is a simple performer. In others, he is a king in truth as well as essence. A god-king. The golden child of a new age.”

  “And semiophages, then?” I ask. “I get the –phage is eating, and semio- is what, like semiotics?”

  “Yes. Meaning-eaters. Consumers in the truest sense of the word. That’s you and me, Zephyr, and sorry, you too Annie.”

  “Hey, just forget I’m here,” she says.

  “We’re like some exotic cosmic mollusks, shitting the very same substance which is the food source for others. Meaning. Ideas. Communication. Verbiage.”

  “I’m not Saussure,” I say with a vaudeville shake of my open palms and a diagonal grin. It’s an oldie, but a goodie.

  “That’s lame, Zephyr. We’re talking about the discourse of the cosmos, which is the very building blocks of what most people call magick. It’s about as divorced from Saussurean semiotics as an HP Pavilion is from Babbage’s difference engine.”

  “How does this Elvis king guy fit into that?”

  “Cryptonauts are more than just cultural semaphores, Zephyr. They’re culture seeds. Or bombs, in some instance. Elvis has influenced the course of the Twentieth Century in every parallel on which he was born, even on those very basic and entirely non-plastic worlds I’ve described. If you’re after him, it sounds to me like you’re after something pretty big. So I’ll ask again: who gave you the name?”

  “John Lennon,” I say.

  “Ah, there you go,” Magus says. “From one cryptonaut to another.”

  Zephyr 7.16 Coda

  IN WASHINGTON, A man in a silver-and-black costume with a motorbike helmet tells me Hawkwind left for New Orleans back in the days after Hurricane Katrina. Hasn’t been seen in Atlantic City since. I thank him as best as my gruff new persona allows, my mustache grown out into what Loren teasingly says makes me look like a younger, smaller, darker Hulk Hogan, with the black bandanna even lower, holes in it for my eyes.

  The guy in the spacesuit calls himself Timelord, though he stresses he has no actual powers and simply works alongside a few other masks who also have no real powers, their common aim to help in the quiet disaster the streets of Washington have become. I stay a whole five minutes, mute witness to the tragedy of lives coming undone in cardboard shelters, shipping containers in abandoned alleyways, homes made from spot-welded shopping carts, tarpaulins, dime store tents, every manner of impromptu structure known to man miraculously overlooked by the city council as each week serves even more human detritus upon the city’s streets. The disconnect and paradox between the black town cars in endless streams on the city’s motorways, as common here as yellow cabs were once in Manhattan, the capital’s expressways on giant concrete stilts for more than practical reasons, I suspect, rivers and estuaries of human misery beneath them as they snake their ways between the megaplexes of government, my cynicism ripe as I think of the wheels within wheels and how they grind on, sheltered from the underclass upon which the revitalized city quite literally has its foundations.

  I phone Loren and tell her where I’m going and she agrees to skip work, albeit reluctantly. There’s some case she says she’s investigating that keeps her on at the club, though I haven’t really bothered to get across the details as I suspect she simply enjoys the attention, the Catholic schoolgirl thing in reverse or at least delayed a good few years longer than I’ve ever experience. All the same, an hour twenty later and I pull up to the corner of Matrix and Cane in Johnson and Lioness steps through the gasping crowd. I admit my heart gives a brief flutter at her leather loveliness, the tawny hair, flawless skin and cherry leather costume straight from God’s palette of the vision of paradise. Although it’s her bike, like so many things Loren has deferred to me, and she slides onto the back and puts her hands on my hips, giving me a gentle, sexy squeeze under the leather overcoat as I throttle the Triumph, painted black now, and cast away from the sidewalk like a Viking ship breaking anchor before the two cops who were chasing her can arrive.

  It’s a long ride to Louisiana, but we get through the rambling southern outskirts of Atlantic City by nightfall and the Virginia countryside is a soothing tonic for two good-hearted outlaws on horseback such as we are. As the evening gathers her cloak around us, we pull off among the reclaimed farmland and cut through a field and let ourselves into one of the many old barns abandoned under the amalgamation regime of the German agri-corps. After bare-backing in the straw, Loren collapses backwards into me and we kiss for longer than I could’ve once deemed necessary and then we share a few nips from a bottle of Jacks for our dinner and sleep comes with surprising ease. By dawn, a creaky light stealing through the rat-holes and ancient cracks in the warped, time-greyed wood, a new resolve is on my stomach and we rise early, determined to cross half the country by day’s end.

  CONTINUED in ZEPHYR III

  ZEPHYR III

  Zephyr 8.1 “Not Dead But Dreaming”

  INTERESTINGLY, THE POLICE presence we’ve had to consider most the way across the country virtually disappears at the Louisiana border. Lioness and I coast down deserted freeways where rusted-out car bodies remain from the disaster of five years previous. Businesses from before the hurricane and horrific floods vie with new roadside stalls that flourish like mushrooms, giving the approach to New Orleans a third world feel. The dark eyes of the mostly black populac
e follow us with vacant intent as we enter the city, life as normal tinged with urban decay and squalor, the smell of rot, a pall of grey across everything, the skies overhead a disastrous semiotic – a commentary on the present state of affairs.

  We tour the collapsed levies and the halted relief effort, huge earthmoving machines like monsters from Greek mythology turned to stone, not dead but dreaming in the muddy fields. By unvoiced consent we return to civilization such as we know it and pass billboards proclaiming the end date for projects yet to even commence, last term’s politicians riddled with bullet holes.

  A metallic guy lands in a crouch by the road ahead of us, dull sunlight glinting off his hard angles as I slew the Triumph to a stop and keep the engine running, nervous without my powers by the obvious challenge such a person could bring. He stands slowly and motions us forward and although I don’t recognize him, he puts his hands on his hips in as unthreatening a pose as someone like him could probably manage.

  “Yo,” he says in a deep local accent. “I’m Steel Falcon. Our people spotted you near the water. Who you be?”

  “This is Lioness,” I say slowly. “I’m the Devil’s Advocate.”

  “Uh-huh,” the other man says. “And whatchoo doin’ here?”

  “Looking for Hawkwind. You’ve seen him?”

  The metal dude gives me his death stare for two or three seconds and then breaks the link.

  “Yeah, man. Follow me. I’ll take you to the Hawk.”

  *

  THE WAREHOUSE HAS young black men and one or two whites guarding it with assault rifles and bulletproof vests marked POLICE. Inside, on concrete wet in places from holes in the broken tin roof, forklifts are parked near giant stacks of hard-taped cardboard boxes. There are some tables nearby and a few men and women of less military guise man laptops and clipboards, inventorying the operation as from somewhere the beep of a truck reversing cuts across their efficient chatter.

  Loren and I ride in feeling about as appropriate as circus clowns bounding from a Morris Minor, though I’m relieved to see another costumed figure, a huge bear of a man in a tattered cloak and quasi-medieval leggings.

  Just as quickly I’m horrified to realize the man is Hawkwind, my one-time mentor.

  The mask is gone. He sees us ride in and I have to assume I’m a stranger to him, only rivulets of black in his grey beard, the changed face ringing through the years since we saw each other last. Unlike some, I was probably not the most beloved of my mentor. It could be said this is a greater indicator of my character in general, but I am deaf to that. He helped lift up a gawky, unstreetwise kid who probably would’ve got himself killed without a few basic combat moves and learning the stupid Viking creed the old man always swore by. And though there’s no recognition in his eyes, curiously revealed to me in full detail after all these years, it’s true a pang of some sort goes through me so that by the time I have wheeled the bike to a halt, I feel the need to distance myself from the gaudily-accoutered woman astride the tail pipe, like the prodigal son coming home for Thanksgiving with the town whore in tow.

  Steel Falcon has flown. He slams down ahead of us and walks briskly to where Hawkwind stands juggling supply cartons as easily as cigarette packs. The old man nods, slides a hand in fingerless gloves back over his frizzy ponytail and walks towards us.

  “I’m the Hawk,” he says in the voice of a graveled New Yorker of old. “No one’s called me Hawkwind for ten years or more, so who are you really?”

  I’m off the bike. Loren’s in the background, hands clasped together as she ponders her place in this melodrama. And I peel off the bandanna and end up displaying a stupid, embarrassed grin, sixteen again despite my girth.

  “It’s me, pops. Joe.”

  “Zephyr,” he says and frowns and puts one hand on his hip. “Zephyr.”

  “Yeah. Well, no. Not at the moment.”

  “What’s with this get-up? Last I saw, you were favoring gold.”

  “Let’s just say I ran into a few problems,” I reply and look around. “Can we talk?”

  “You gonna introduce your girlfriend or are you always this rude?”

  I laugh uneasily and my eyes flick over the familiar brown-colored scale armor straining at the old guy’s chest, arms and belly. He still radiates the strength that once made him famous, but I can’t imagine him gliding anywhere, and his cape has seen better days. It looks like he sleeps in it. It’s stained in a dozen places and ragged towards the floor. Something of his years in Washington rubbed off on him, perhaps.

  “Uh, sure. Hawkwind, this is my partner, Lioness.”

  Loren steps forward and mumbles something about being pleased to meet him and lies about how much I’ve told her. The old man’s gaze is borderline lascivious and for the first time I interrogate my unconscious reluctance to even expose Loren to him. Just as quickly though, the Hawk, as he calls himself now, leads us through a miniature canyon of packing boxes to a card table and a few benches displaying a coffee machine, a bar fridge, a few other things that scream “office” despite the open-air scenario.

  “Take a seat,” he says and walks to the fridge and pops the mouthpiece on a gallon of milk he promptly starts necking.

  Loren pauses uneasily and I surrender myself to a folding chair, knees apart in a show of ease I suspect only renders me more juvenile.

  “Must be a pretty big deal for you to track me down here,” he says.

  Loren coughs.

  “I’ll just be with the bike.” And she withdraws.

  Hawkwind eyes her departure and raises thick eyebrows at me, Lancelot gone to seed after years in the wilderness.

  “Cute girl. What happened to the love of your life?”

  “She left me.”

  “Took her time.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  “So you’ve lost your powers,” he says.

  I stand as an expression of my surprise, but the big man doesn’t flinch and barely moves from the table he’s leaning against.

  “How did you hear that?”

  “You’re only telling me now,” the Hawk says and strains fingers through his beard. “You changed your name, though. Your look. Said you ran into some problems. What else could it be?”

  “Shit. I forgot I could never fool you.”

  “And I ain’t even touched you yet,” he says with a smirk.

  My head drops and then I sit again, tired, almost wishing he would. Hawkwind’s signature trick is kinaesthetic telepathy. Once the rapport’s established he can tell if you’re lying and your emotional state, not to mention kick your ass as he predicts every move as your body contemplates it. Fortunately, the touch wears off after a couple of hours, but during that time it feels like he knows you as well as you know yourself.

  Never occurred to me I’d miss that feeling.

  Gay, huh?

  Zephyr 8.2 “Halfway There”

  “SO WHAT DO you want me for?” Hawkwind asks.

  “I don’t really know what to tell you,” I say.

  “You rode a fuck of a long way for someone without a clue.”

  He raises one of those powerful eyebrows again and I sag, head in my hands at the card table.

  “Sorry. Things have been so fucking chaotic, such a mess, since things fell apart with Elisabeth. I don’t even know how to explain it. And then this bitch zapped my powers and I think I quit the team I was on and cost Loren her powers too.”

  “Who’s Loren?”

  “Lioness.”

  “She’s got no powers either?”

  He sounds incredulous.

  “What the hell are you kids thinking? Remember:

  “Away from his arms, in the open field

  “A man should fare not afoot;

  “For never he knows when the need for a spear

  “Shall arise on the distant road.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I say and lift my head only to shake it, face tingling from my own fierce ministrations. “We might not have powers, but we’re hardly powerle
ss. You taught me that, remember?”

  “And I see you’re carrying a baseball bat,” he says and perhaps grins.

  “And I’m carrying a baseball bat. It’s not a spear, but probably just as well.”

  “Tell me what’s happened,” Hawkwind says finally, voice calm.

  “You really want to know?”

  “Get on with it, or get the fuck out,” he sighs. “I’m busy.”

  I swallow my pride and think about where to start.

  “Apparently the Doomsday Man is my father. No one knows where he’s gone since they released him from prison more than 10 years ago. Hell, no one can even explain to me why they released him. I thought he tried to wire up half the latent psychics in the northern hemisphere to one big telepathic super-computer or something.

  “Anyway,” I say and sigh. “If that wasn’t bad enough, it seems like his old squeeze Spectra, Yoko Ono, is a shape-shifter whose been pretending to be my mother since God knows when. My other mom, the one who gave birth to me, was secretly Catchfire, and she went with Lennon to some freaky island commune where he tried to start a parahuman master race. I don’t know what went wrong, but my mom and Titanium Girl took their kids and fled and my mom was hiding out until I stumbled on the truth and then all hell broke loose and it looks like some guy, this fucking assassin, must’ve been watching our house or something because he killed my mum just as easily as these other people he’s also killed.”

  I wipe my nose, privately astounded to realize tears are now streaming down my cheeks. I shoot a glance at Hawkwind, otherwise unable to look at him while I offload. The old guy simply stands impassive with his hairy arms crossed over his gut and his ankles crossed. The old wing-heel boots are gone, I notice, frayed steel-capped work boots on his feet instead.

  “Who are the other people?”

  “That’s where it gets really weird,” I say, and when I catch his double-take I laugh and nod and hold up a hand to show I’m being heavy with the irony here.