Superheroes

by Margaret Ronald

  SUPERHEROES

  RICH HORTON

  Copyright © 2013 by Rich Horton.

  Cover design by Michael King.

  Ebook design by Neil Clarke.

  ISBN: 978-1-60701-396-9 (ebook) ISBN: 978-1-60701-380-8 (trade paperback)

  PRIME BOOKS

  www.prime-books.com Publisher’s Note: No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  For more information, contact Prime Books at prime@prime-books.com.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION — Rich Horton SUNLIGHT SOCIETY — Margaret Ronald SECRET IDENTITY — Kelly Link THE ILLUSTRATED BIOGRAPHY OF LORD GRIMM — Daryl Gregory TONIGHT WE FLY — Ian McDonald WILD CARD — Leah Bobet HEROIC MEASURES — Matthew Johnson THE BIGGEST — James Patrick Kelly DR. DEATH VS. THE VAMPIRE — Aaron Schutz SUPERHERO GIRL — Jei D. Marcade SUPER. FAMILY. — Ian Donald Keeling THE STRANGE DESSERTS OF PROFESSOR NATALIE DOOM — Kat Beyer DOWNFALL — Joseph Mallozzi DIRAE — Peter S. Beagle GRANDMA — Carol Emshwiller THE LOS ANGELES WOMEN’S AUXILIARY SUPERHERO LEAGUE — Elana Fortin WONJJANG AND THE MADMAN OF PYONGYANG — Gord Sellar ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  SUPERHERO FICTION

  RICH HORTON THE “SUPERHERO” GENRE BEGAN, OF COURSE, IN THE COMICS, IN THE LATE ’30S, AND FOR A LONG TIME IT WAS SOMEWHAT TARRED BY THAT ORIGIN. JUST AS COMICS WERE CONSIDERED DOWNMARKET WORK, “JUST KIDS STUFF,” AND SO ON, ANY STORY ABOUT SUPERHEROES HAD TO FIGHT THE PERCEPTION THAT IT WASN’T SERIOUS. BUT THE IMAGE OF COMICS WAS EVENTUALLY REHABILITATED, AND ALONG WITH THAT THE NOTION OF PROSE FICTION ABOUT SUPERHEROES GAINED RESPECTABILITY AS WELL.

  Trends and fads come and go. A little while ago I suddenly noticed a boomlet of short stories about superheroes, many of them in the pages of a single online magazine, Strange Horizons. (Three of the best of those are collected here, and I could have chosen as many as four more!) I have no idea why that suddenly happened—perhaps a reaction to Michael Chabon’s magnificent Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay? Even without that spate of stories, the superhero trope is a continuing element in science fiction and fantasy. Of course we should also note the recent popularity of superhero movies, including various movie series based on classic comic books, as well as a such more original fare working with or against the tropes originated there, such as Pixar’s wonderful The Incredibles.

  Superheroes intrigue at the first level because of the idea of individuals wielding such great power. The idea that that was all there was to such stories was part of the reason for their early disparagement. But of course good stories depend on conflict, and super powers might seem to demand super antagonists—and indeed, one of the key elements of superhero tradition is the super villain. Stories of this sort—stories which revel in the powers of the superhero and perhaps also those of his antagonist, and especially those which use those powers to propel action-filled plots, can still be of interest.

  But ultimately, it seems, fiction is more interesting when dealing with human scale problems. And much superhero fiction shows that with great power often comes … fairly mundane personal problems. The best such fiction uses the super powers to better illuminate the perhaps less “super,” but still moving, problems at the heart of the stories.

  Of course, superheroes can have families as well. And the way in which one family member’s special nature (be it a super power or any other “difference”) affects the rest of the family has driven great fiction for a long time. Some of the best stories in this books are centrally concerned with family.

  The science fictional approach to super powers looks, rather, at the consequences of them. What could be a plausible origin for super powers? What are the costs? And what would be the real effects on society? Sometimes these are the most intellectually engaging stories.

  All I am saying, I suppose, is that the superhero trope, like any other, is fruitful material for the imagination of good writers, and that it can be twisted in any number of ways to create good stories. As the stories in this book amply demonstrate.

  The past decade or so has been, as noted, a fruitful time for prose fiction on the subject. I have mentioned that three stories here are from Strange Horizons, and that I could have chosen at least four more: “Women are Ugly” by Eliot Fintushel; “Merrythoughts” by Bill Kte’pi; “They Fight Crime” by Leah Bobet; and “Captain Mighty and the Case of Ennui” by Paul Melko. I should also mention one outstanding original anthology on the subject: Lou Anders’ Masked (from which I have chose two fine stories, but the book has many more). Other notable recent stories include Claude Lalumiere’s “Hochelaga and Son,” Michael Canfield’s “Super-Villains,” and S. L. Gilbow’s “Alarms.” And that brief list only scratches the surface.

  I should mention in particular the remarkable online series of stories called Shadow Unit. This is sort of a web-based TV series in format, about a special division of the FBI: the Anomalous Crimes Task Force. It was originated by Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull, and those two along with various combinations of Amanda Downum, Will Shetterly, Sarah Monette, Chelsea Polk, and Leah Bobet have produced episodes. The stories center on crimes committed by people who have gained terrifying special powers in response to horrible trauma. As such, they feature, usually, sort of “super-villains” (though these villains aren’t typically out to conquer the world). I’ve chosen one example story for this volume, Leah Bobet’s “Wild Card,” in part because it’s a particularly good standalone selection, but also but it explicitly plays with the superhero mythology in connection with the themes of the whole Shadow Unit series. But I’d urge readers to seek out the entire absorbing series.

  So—on to the stories included. I hope they entertain and also provoke thought. I hope they engender fond memories of the fun we have had reading superhero comics and watching superhero movies, and also scratch the special itches prose science fiction and fantasy can scratch, by examining how “super” powers illuminate human life in general.

  SUNLIGHT SOCIETY

  MARGARET RONALD

  When the Fourth Street biolab went up, I didn’t think of Casey right away. I was working in the far side of the complex, which meant I was one of about four hundred people who got to see the entire dome rise up off its foundations, rotate counterclockwise ninety degrees, and shoot up into the sky. My immediate reaction followed the same pattern as everyone else: first What the hell, then, just before a needle of light vaporized the biolab, Are those people up there?

  I could hazard a guess at the second question; I’d gotten that far into the shadow organizations, even then. I knew enough to guess at the identities of some of the blurry shapes darting through the smoke, shapes that official press releases would call confabulation and that the conspiracists would call aliens or Muslims or Freemason-built androids. The shadow orgs had been sloppy that time; usually they didn’t like to be seen at their work, but there’d been so little warning that they’d had no choice but to break out the big guns. Literally, in this case.

  But that wasn’t what came to mind as I stared up into the sky, the glare of that solar blast fading bit by bit from my retinas, my nethead links relating the intensity of that blast, the projected knock-on effects on the rest of the Niobe web, the first stirrings among the dataminers. Instead, I just thought Casey would love this. I kept coming bac
k to that thought over the next few weeks, even after word got out about the low-rent terrorists who’d gotten so close to taking over the biolab that vaporizing the whole place was the only alternative. Even after the arrests started.

  I still think it’s true.

  Today marks the first time I’ve been allowed into the Albuquerque facility. My credentials have been checked and re-checked so many times that they could probably tell you the weight and density of my last three bowel movements. Even so, they’ve been cutting corners on security, just so they can get me in here.

  I fully expect that within twenty years, someone will have figured out a way to install nethead technology in anyone regardless of individual brain structure. But until they do, I’m pretty much guaranteed work wherever I go. And there’s even fewer of us netheads with the proper security clearances to get into the Madison facility, let alone Albuquerque. I’m a valuable commodity.

  The facility isn’t much to look at: any decent biolab would have more apparent security. My nethead links are telling me otherwise, though; streams and warnings buzz against my skull so hard I can almost feel my teeth rattle. It unnerves me in a way that Madison didn’t, and Madison’s where they keep the host site for the Niobe satellite web. Enough solar power to—well, to blow up a biolab, for instance—focused onto the energy collectors for five dozen countries, and it’s still less well protected than this place.

  It’s cool and dark inside the guard shack, and the back of my neck prickles after the blazing heat outside. The guard’s got a laser sight wired into his left eye; the silver tracery of it fades into his pale complexion much more smoothly than the similar patterns on my own skin. He gestures to the marks while the machines verify my ID. “Looks nice.”

  “Thanks.” It’s striking, or so the nethead PR department says. They claim that’s why they want my image for their publicity stills, not just to provide the illusion of diversity. Some days I think they even believe it.

  “Been here before?” The guard knows I haven’t—a glance at the screens could tell him as much and more—but sometimes courtesy trumps efficiency.

  I shake my head. “I’ve been to Madison.”

  “Madison, pfft.” He grins. “That’s nothing to what we got—” He stops and turns red, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. I used to have that reaction, way back when I was sharing what I knew with Casey, when I tried to tell her that the comics we’d read were—well, not true, not close to true, but had some basis in reality.

  “Got what?” I ask, as the computers spit out my ID and agree that yes, my fingers and retinas appear to be my own.

  “Well, you know. Them.” He opens up the doors, and the flickering readouts in my periphery flare and scramble into new configurations. “The heroes.”

  The official story of Casey and me is that we were kids together, grew apart, came back together, screwed around, and then split up for good once I realized how crazy she was. Both times it was the heroes that brought us together, the first time through the comics that had come out in the wake of Maxentius sightings and the rumors about the Sixth Seal group. We read them all, regardless of quality, lying on our backs in the vacant lot behind her house, ink on our fingers and intent discussions of whether Mistress Fivepoint could beat Jack o’the Green or if they’d just team up against Memetek. The second time it was because in my first months as a full nethead I learned so much about the shadow organizations, the reality behind all those rumors, and I could only think of one person I wanted to share that with—Casey, who could rattle off the Liberty League’s oath or Red Knight’s transformation mantra as easily as the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Both times it was her head, or what was wrong with it, that split us up.

  It’s a useful official version. But one thing you learn when you start getting involved in the shadow orgs is that the official version means very little. After all, none of them show up in any official version, except in the records of what didn’t happen, the plots that failed, the disasters averted.

  Or, sometimes, in the lists of people who’ve disappeared.

  The transport behind those metal doors takes me maybe eight floors down, with that bone-twitching stutter you only get from passing through negation fields. I don’t notice it; I’m too busy dealing with the sudden silence in my head. I can handle it—mental stability is one of the most important factors that they test for in determining nethead fitness—but that doesn’t mean I enjoy it. Particularly because the one link that does remain is the one that got implanted when I started working for the shadow orgs. For insurance, they told me. The Niobe GPS link.

  I remember the Fourth Street biolab, and the back of my neck goes abruptly hot again.

  When the doors open again, though, all thoughts of the world outside vanish. The visual input’s bad enough: between the scream of light on my right from what might be a laboratory and the dizzying drop twenty feet ahead of me, I can barely register mundane details like the polished-glass sheen of the floor, the central spindle of memory staves, the man waiting for me just to the side.

  But all that’s nothing compared to the chatter of computers on every side, the information in patterns I’ve never seen before. It’s like being picked up from one set of rapids and dropped into another, and it takes all of my concentration not to drown.

  The biggest difference is that there’s not much trace of nethead work. It’s tradition to leave our marks on the usernodes, stegans encoded into the streams of data like graffiti in a canal, but here there’s only two: Klaatu Barada Nikto! from the designer of the Niobe web, and Welcome to Olympus (plus a handy map) from a woman who’s now on permanent detail with the Secret Service. If this were a normal job, I’d be tempted to add my own mark to the tabulae, but right now I don’t trust what I’d leave.

  A permanent link unscrolls with the boxy look of official work. IN RESIDENCE: Kazemusha/Lady Nettle/Oculus/Matthew Glendower/Maxentius … The list goes on, code names and real names (not that it matters which is which, this far in) and designations I’ve only seen in the most hidden records. Names to conjure with.

  And finally I recognize the man who’s been standing just to the side of the entrance. They’ve sent the shining face of the org to meet me.

  He’s just like Casey and I always imagined, resplendent in ivory and gold, and while he doesn’t have the red cape the comics gave him, I get the sense he’d like one. Barrel chest, brilliant smile, voice with enough bonhomie for a tri-state area. “Bit overwhelming, eh?” Maxentius says.

  “A bit,” I agree weakly.

  “It does that to me too, sometimes.” No, it doesn’t, I think, but he’s not talking about the information overload. He gestures to the vista behind him: dozens of circular floors leading off a central shaft, lifts and elevators between for those who can’t just fly. “This sight—when I tire of it, then I’ll know the skein of my days has run out. Good to meet you, Seth.” He clasps my hand and shakes it vigorously.

  “Good to meet you.” I’ve read papers on how much force that hand can exert, how many diamonds it can crush into powder.

  “And you’re here to see Glendower. Splendid.” He turns and strides forward across the gleaming floor. I follow, and if it looks like I’m not gawking, that’s because I’m only doing so in my head. Of the levels I can see, some are sterile white and glassed in; some hold weapons and implements I can only guess at; a few look inhabited, homes for those who can’t or won’t stay outside in the world they claim to protect. A blur on the next floor up, across from us, resolves into a sparring match between two figures I’ve only heard rumors of, and even then I have to slow the visual down by a factor of ten to get a glimpse.

  At the far end of the walkway, Maxentius glances over his shoulder. “Come along, lad! Mustn’t keep him waiting!”

  Of all the members of the shadow organizations, Maxentius has read too much of his own press. He really does talk like a comic book; ‘lad’ is nothing to worry about.

  Still, it
bothers me, and not just because I can remember one too many cops calling my father ‘boy’ on one too many late-night drives.

  There are some things I know for sure about Casey: she loved superhero comics; she didn’t keep in touch with her family after graduating; she wrote pamphlets for the Oakland Anti-Gnosis society; she couldn’t keep a job for more than six months at a time; she could make fantastic biscuits out of damn near any ingredients she had at hand. When her parents moved away the first time, when we were in school, it was because the first round of mandatory testing had come through. I was on the track to being a fully-functional nethead; Casey had tested positive for a number of dysfunctions, including predisposition to schizophrenia.

  There are things I wonder about—whether the chemical imbalances in her brain were caused by her father’s exposure to some of the nastier weapons of the Second Chinese War, whether she knew what a risk I was taking associating with her, whether we should have gone ahead and slept together after all.

  There are things I’ve been told about her in the wake of Fourth Street, about her mental state and the company she kept. These are things I will never believe about her.

  Maxentius leads me around one side of the silo shaft, through what looks like a trophy room (it’s not, according to the nethead stegans). He’s rapidly figured out that I’m not listening to him, but that doesn’t stop him; in fact, I think he’s taken it as license to ramble on.

  I catch a glimpse of someone I think is Pale Rider down one hallway. If it is him, that means this particular shadow organization has gone global. Most of them have; a few nationalists cling to their identity in places like Turkmenistan and France, and somehow I’d always assumed the U.S. shadow orgs would be the same way.

  Of course, they have the Niobe web. That automatically makes them global; I’ve got the reminder in my skull if I ever forget that.

  We walk past cases holding remnants of past work, plots unraveled, events that were hushed up and now only remain as a footnote to history. Still talking, Maxentius gestures vaguely at what looks like a giant pair of shears. “ … didn’t tell us that the phase shift had affected only half of her, and the other half was stuck in another dimension entirely!” He chuckles, and I remember to smile. “Down this way. Glendower, are you there?”