by Ewing, Al
THE SUPERMAN STARED at himself in the mirror.
He ran his fingers slowly over his chin, then the bald dome of his head, touching the scalp gently. No hair would ever grow there again, but over time he’d become used to that. Likewise, his eyes would never be the same shade of piercing blue they had once been, but occasionally he felt their new colour suited him better; near white, and icy cold.
It had been almost two hundred and eighty years since Doc Thunder had received the touch of death.
The first fifty had been the worst – unable to stay awake more than five minutes at a time, barely able to breathe on his own, an unmoving lump of poisoned flesh, rotting in a medical chamber in the palaces of Zor-Ek-Narr. Occasionally, during his brief spells of lucidity, he would see Maya looking in on him – at first with love and sorrow, then with pity, and finally, towards the end, with something approaching indifference, as if he was a houseplant she was taking care of for a neighbour. When he’d finally left – when he was finally able to leave – he’d felt a great weight fall from his shoulders. There was nothing even approaching love between them any more.
Monk had apparently visited him as well, though he hadn’t been awake for that. He wished he had been, just once; Monk had died twenty years into his long sleep. A heart attack, brought on by encroaching age and the strain of his own monstrous physiognomy. The Doctor had felt a great, crushing wave of grief when he’d first heard; he still wished he’d had the chance to say goodbye.
But there was a small, selfish part of him that was glad his friend and lover hadn’t lived to see what he’d become.
On a whim, the Doctor intensified his gaze, watching in the mirror as the flesh of his face seemed to melt away, then the layers of muscle, until he was looking at the smooth whiteness of bone, the grinning skull beneath the skin. It was a nice trick – with a little concentration, he could have seen right through himself. Or, if he focused his eyes a little differently, right through the mirror and into the next room. From his brownstone in New York, he could read the President’s personal mail, if he wanted to, or search for microscopic life in the sands of Mars. There were only two things in the entire solar system that his gaze could not penetrate: the wall of mist shrouding Zor-Ek-Narr from the eyes of mortal men, or the other wall of mist Maya had set up an ocean away, around Britannia. She needed her secrets, he supposed.
Perhaps he should have worried about that – or about the network of operatives she had evidently maintained since the eighteenth century, if not thousands of years earlier – but increasingly, he found it difficult to care.
He had become aware, soon after regaining full consciousness, that his brush with mortality had not weakened his system at all. If anything, it had strengthened it beyond measure. The moment he’d received the touch of death, his superhuman body had gone into overdrive in an effort to save his life, and had remained that way ever since. Wounds healed almost instantly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been sick.
He no longer aged.
Every so often, he performed this little ritual; he stared into the mirror, focused the strange new powers of vision he was acquiring, and peered through himself, through flesh and bone, into his smallest cells, examining the loops of his DNA for some clue as to how long he might live. He did this even though he knew the answer already.
Forever.
Forever and forever. He was immortal now; that which could not kill him had made him stronger, whether he wanted it or not. He’d never grow any older. Never get any less powerful.
Only less human.
He concentrated, and the eyes in the skull glowed a fierce red.
The mirror melted, dripping onto the floor in a pool of red-hot slag, threatening to set light to the floorboards. It pooled around the Doctor’s shoes, setting them alight, and his trousers in turn; soon all of his clothes were ablaze. And he felt nothing.
Not quite true. He felt like screaming.
“Good morning, Doctor. Is that your new party piece?”
The Doctor turned to see Lars enter with the morning coffee. He feigned surprise, although his senses told him exactly where his housemate was at all times. If he thought about it, he knew where everyone in the world was at all times.
Except for Maya, of course.
He quickly blew out the flames – using a tiny fraction of the air super-compressed within his lungs – and turned his attention to Lars, resisting the urge to look inside him. Lars Lomax was another one like himself. Another immortal.
He had suffered a debilitating setback of his own around the same time that the Doctor had received the death touch; he had been stabbed through his invulnerable heart, then decapitated by shaped explosive charges, and his immense head, horned like Satan’s own, stored in a jar at Langley for the CIA to poke at. Like the Doctor, Lars had Thunder Serum flowing through his veins – although this was a mutated variety created from a stolen sample of Thunder’s own blood – and, like the Doctor, his death had been a temporary measure, an inoculation against mortality. He, too, would live forever.
In the jar, he had begun growing a new body from the stump of his neck. It had taken about thirty years; the mass needed to come from somewhere, so as his body had grown, his head had shrunk, until it was of normal human size – a man’s head resting atop a child’s body. The Doctor hadn’t seen that stage, and the thought of it made him feel nauseous. He wondered, sometimes, how Lars had stood it.
They’d tried killing him again – and again, and again – but it had never quite worked, and eventually those scientists who remembered his atrocities died off and were replaced. The new crop remembered only that Lars was charming, funny in a deadpan sort of way, and that he enjoyed debating current affairs from inside his glass prison. He especially enjoyed taking the position of Devil’s Advocate. His little joke; although he looked almost human, his skin was still a bold shade of red, and a pair of satanic horns still grew from his temples. Occasionally, to complete the picture, he would grow a beard. The new scientists thought he was quite the joker.
The Doctor did not think so.
The Doctor had seen inside him.
They were already enemies before immortality took them. Lars Lomax – who’d once called himself the most dangerous man in the world – was a genius on the level of a Richard Feynman, a Galileo Galilei or a Franklin Reed, who’d used his terrifying intellect for evil, even as the Doctor had used his own powers to uphold the forces of good. It seemed like a minor philosophical difference in the face of immortality, but it had been enough to make them eternal foes, just as having immortality thrust on them and their humanity stripped from them at the same time had made them unlikely friends; they understood each other, and there was nobody else in the same hemisphere who did.
There was a word, the Doctor thought, that had seemingly been invented to sum up their relationship, and that word was stalemate.
Roughly ninety years ago, the Doctor had had Lars Lomax released into his care, so he could keep an eye on him; and vice versa, because the Doctor did not entirely trust himself, and he felt a friend and enemy like Lars would ask the difficult questions. Like whether trying to immolate yourself with your eyes and a molten mirror is a new party piece.
Implicit in that question were a dozen other questions, a hundred, a thousand, and all of them about his mental state. The Doctor didn’t feel like answering any of them.
Instead, he reached for the coffee. “Is this the French blend?”
Lars shook his head, a little sadly, as if the Doctor had disappointed him somehow. “Hydroponically grown, from Kew. Much as I enjoy watching Homo Mechanicus recreate Western Europe in their own image, robot coffee isn’t really up to par.” He handed the Doctor one of the mugs. After a pause, he indicated the melted mirror with the other. “I haven’t seen you do that before.” His voice had an edge to it.
The Doctor shrugged his massive shoulders. “To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure how I do it yet – telekinetic acceler
ation of molecules, perhaps. It raises some questions.”
Lars nodded. “A few.”
The Doctor suppressed a sigh. He’d discovered the ability two months ago, and had practised occasionally since then, finding a childlike joy in melting great rocks out in the desert. While nobody else had known about it, the feeling of projecting heat from his eyes had been oddly relaxing; now that Lars had seen it, the whole thing felt grubby, like he’d been caught masturbating.
Lars nodded, sipping his coffee slowly. “I’d be interested to see how well you perform the ability over distances.” Again, a hundred thousand words unspoken in one sentence. All their conversations seemed unspoken nowadays. The Doctor found himself wishing Lars would attack him with a flamethrower or a killer zeppelin or a robotic lion; anything but this endless barrage of unasked questions.
There was an awkward pause, then Lars spoke again, “In the meantime, you’ve got a call waiting. From an old friend.”
The Doctor instinctively moved towards the telephone extension, and Lars shook his head. “It’s in the study.” He grinned. “The crystal ball.”
The Doctor nodded, perking up slightly, and walked to the study. He hated the telephone. The crystal ball was different.
In the past two hundred and eighty years, he’d gone from being the hero of the American people to being a virtual recluse, only coming out to handle the occasional natural disaster, talking to his government as a voice on a phone, an emergency service to be contacted only when necessary. Occasionally he wondered if it was losing his hair that had caused the withdrawal – seeing that stark, angular face reflected in the mirror instead of the warm blond beard. But no, the disquiet ran deeper than appearances; it was in every cell of his body. Before the touch of death, before he’d evolved into what he was now, he’d enjoyed talking to people.
Not now.
Any human friends – and now that qualification, human, slipped regularly into his thoughts, human, because he was not human, not any more – any human friends had long since died, and now there were only two other people in his life who really appreciated what it was to be immortal. Two people in the whole world he could talk to.
One of them was Lars.
The other was Maya Britannia.
AS HE STRODE towards the study, the Doctor found himself musing on the double anniversary.
It was the year of the Quincentennial – five hundred years since America was freed from British rule – and, by coincidence, roughly a hundred years since Magna Britannia had quietly and almost imperceptibly fallen under the rule of Zor-Ek-Narr, and the two most advanced civilisations in the world had become one. The Magna Britannia of 2276 was a bizarre mix of cultures where Leopard Men and their high priests walked the streets, rubbing shoulders with the mechanical men of Europe and Japan – some so lifelike that there was no way of telling them apart from human beings – and the twilight entities of the Night Kingdoms of Russia. These days, London was so exciting and diverse it made New York look like a picket-fenced suburb of old. The Doctor had to admire Maya’s achievement, and it had all been done without a single shot fired, or a single life lost before its time.
As far as he knew, anyway.
A military invasion of Britannia by the Forbidden Kingdom would have doubtless been effective, but it would also have resulted in a global apocalypse; first France and Italy would have had to become involved with a war on their very doorstep, and then, while their attention was distracted, the Night Kingdoms would have doubtless attacked them from the East; Russia had always resented France and Italy slicing Germany up between them without inviting Hitler’s most implacable foes to the party, and they’d have relished the chance to take a piece of it for themselves – if not the whole pie. The Doctor was sure such a war wasn’t in Maya’s plans, whatever they were. He found himself wondering how she’d have gone about stopping it.
Sometimes, he wondered what he’d do in her place, if he were the one guiding the great powers from behind the scenes, shaping history for his own benefit. Probably not bother doing it from behind the scenes – no, use his strength instead, his ever-growing power. Stare down the massed armies until they ran together like wax, bodies shrieking in furnaces of liquid metal. Shake the earth and topple cities with a single punch. Bathe in blood and fire. Rule over the fragile insects, the mayflies, the human species. Until he got bored and snuffed out the Earth like a candle.
During these nightmarish reveries, he found himself wondering just how serious he was, and something very much like terror would creep slowly up from the base of his spine.
Sometimes, he wondered what would happen if that feeling of terror ever left him. If the nightmares didn’t seem so nightmarish any more.
What he might do.
At any rate, Maya had chosen a different route.
Instead of starting a useless war, in the years between the Third Great European War and the Fourth – the Robot War – Maya had simply married into what was left of the Royal line. She was a Princess, after all.
She’d used the cultural and social status this gained her to slowly influence politics, parlaying the role of consort into a position of visible power and legitimacy within the British government. It hadn’t hurt that the strained Franco-Italian alliance had collapsed when France’s territory had been forcibly taken over and transformed into the Mecha-Principalities; she, or rather the late Rousseau-1, had been the one to broker a peace between Britannia and the robot kingdom, which had earned her the plaudits of a grateful nation.
Eventually, her ascension to the throne had seemed like the most natural thing in the world. It had taken over a century to accomplish this slow sleight of hand, but Maya was one of the immortals, and as such she had all the time there was.
The Doctor had no real feelings for Maya any more. Before the death touch, this would have saddened him, but not worried him; now it was a source of dread. He found himself wondering if his ability to feel things, simple emotions like love or hate, was atrophying slowly, shrivelling like some vestigial gland no longer required. During those nights when he lay in his bed and stared up at the ceiling, knowing that if sweat could come it would be icy cold, he always found himself giving thanks to whoever might be up there for the primal terror he was feeling. As long as he could feel that horror of becoming inhuman, it meant he still had some humanity left in him.
Maya – and Lars, come to think of it – didn’t seem to have the same problem. Maya’s love for him had cooled, yes – to someone who’d lived as long as she had, he supposed he’d been nothing more than a one-night stand, if that – and Lars had certainly mellowed with the years, seemingly content to potter around the brownstone, making vague plans for future schemes.
They both seemed more emotionally active, alive in a way he no longer felt. It was possible, he supposed, that they, too, were feeling that terrifying disconnect – but then, Maya had been immortal as long as he’d known her, and a thousand times longer than that, and royalty to boot; Lars, meanwhile, had never seen himself as being any part of the common herd. Maybe the problem was that the Doctor, alone out of the three of them, had always preferred to see himself as an ordinary human being.
And now he was the least human out of all of them.
“Maya?” he said, entering the study. The large spherical crystal in the corner was alive with a blueish light, and in it he could see Maya looking through a sheaf of papers, signing each in turn; she looked up at the sound of his voice, and he smiled.
“I prefer ‘your Majesty,’ Hugo,” she said, unsmiling but without reproach.
He winced at the ‘Hugo.’ He’d always hated that name, and she knew it. “Well, I prefer ‘Doc.’”
“It doesn’t fit you any more.”
He sighed. “Doctor, then.”
“How’s Lars?”
The Doctor shook his head. “Still... Lars. Always some scheme or other. He’s talking about colonising Venus – creating a slave race from his own cell tissue. I think it’s just i
dle talk at the moment, unless he’s worked out a way to terraform the planet somehow, or build dwelling-places that compensate for the temperature and atmosphere... maybe coat them with reflective surfaces to mitigate the sunlight...” He realised he was trying to solve Lars’ terraforming issues himself, and tailed off. Maya shrugged.
“I wouldn’t put it past him. Do you think he wants to be on his own for a millennium or two?”
The Doctor rubbed his temple. “I think he just wants to go to war with us again. He misses it.”
“Do you?”
“No.” The Doctor thought about leaping over buildings, smashing his way into crashing zeppelins on fire over mountain ranges, fighting hand to hand with golden robots and abominable snowmen for the fate of the world. He missed it all terribly.
Once he’d thrown off the worst of the sickness, he’d tried to get back to that, but while he’d been away it had become a different world. People were nervous around him. The President, depending on which of the many new parties he was affiliated with, would routinely invite the Doctor to the Oval Office the day after inauguration; most often, during these meetings, the President would nervously make it clear that, while he or she thanked the Doctor for the sterling work he’d done in the past to safeguard the nation – and while he or she would certainly appreciate any help the Doctor could provide when it came to Acts of God, plagues, meteors, earthquakes or what-have-you – he or she would prefer that the Doctor not take too active a role. “We humans prefer to do things our own way,” one President had said, smiling, not understanding why the Doctor had winced.
The Doctor would invariably shake hands, congratulate the President on his ascension to office, and then return to his brownstone to enjoy another four-to-eight years as a useless hermit. And those were the good meetings.
At the bad meetings, the President would smile a little too wide, shake the Doctor’s hand a little too hard, and talk about all the things America would be able to do with the superman on their side. How nobody would push America around now, as if they’d been pushed around before. After those meetings, the Doctor would again return to his brownstone to be a hermit for four years. Occasionally there would be calls and requests for another audience, but he ignored them, and the bad Presidents weren’t bad enough to try to force the issue, or bad enough for him to take a stand, the way he had against McCarthy. They were just ugly, unpleasant little people.
