Once upon a time a prophet’s brothers would sell him to a band of traveling nomads. But what people do to prophets nowadays is truly frightening.
My real fear—rather than of being burned at the stake like Joan of Arc or shot in the head like Martin Luther King, Jr.—was of people taking notice of this power I acquired late in life and making me President. Certainly Americans these days—those old enough to remember, anyway—are nostalgic for the likes of Reagan and Clinton, happy warriors stomping merrily through the halls of the White House, delighted with who they were and where they found themselves. Deep in their bellies, most Americans long to make someone President who actually wants the job. They do not, however, care enough for their leaders’ sensibilities to elect a complete incompetent, and that is the only kind of person who would be glad to hold the position these days. The hangdog image of that office’s unhappy occupant at the time of Wesley’s death finally alerted me to the fact that my latest relentless dream about the golden crow laying to waste the basket of bread was true. It was tied so closely to the course of historical events that I did not recognize the reality even when it slapped me across the face.
*
Having fallen asleep at my workstation, I woke to find myself having somehow made my way to bed. It was a little past five in the morning, and I was interested in nothing else but finishing the following morning’s sermon and perhaps doing a little shopping when I was done. I did not remember any dreams, but that did not mean there had been none. My joints were achy and my body was stiff in all its vulnerable places. Maybe I could get through the day—or at least, God willing, through my sermon—without suffering an attack of the Holy Rolls.
Up in the corner of my computer screen an icon I never had seen before began to flash, and I could not double-click it off. My glasses had fallen off my face and broken sometime during the rumble the previous afternoon, and I could not make out the shape of the offending flasher in the corner. I squinted. It was the little face of an attractive middle-aged woman framed by short-clipped blonde hair and wearing a morose expression. It was a few moments before I realized it was President Capper’s face beaming into my workspace along the Netservice emergency break-in system. Evidently the President had given—or was still delivering—an address to her public on a matter of some importance. Reluctantly, I left my sermon to tap my fingernail on the President’s touchscreen icon and chose REPLAY from among the choices on the little roll-up menu that appeared.
My writing on this sermon had begun to crank along, finally, and I did not appreciate the interruption. I was expounding on the story of Joseph. There would be no mention in this sermon of the rubbish that leaked from my unconscious. No soaking wet clowns in checkered pants flying through the sky. No visions of the Norse conquest of North America. No Jeremiads spewing forth in pre-Biblical Hebrew. No devastated Breadbasket on an incinerated prairie. I was just writing a hopeful parable for my little Sunday morning flock about how sometimes dreams come true.
On my monitor there appeared the Seal of the President of the United States, an eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon and arrows in the other. In big type with jagged serifs a headline read:
Holocaust in Kansas
––––—
President Jennifer Capper
Addresses the Nation
Holocaust? A politically loaded word, I thought. What ever could have happened to prompt such a … But before I had a chance to wonder about the conclusion of my clause, the President came onscreen.
“My fellow Americans,” she said, “and my fellow citizens of the world,” she went on.
Uh-oh. I had a bad feeling about this. American Presidents had gotten out of the Kennedyesque habit of flaunting their position as titular emperor of the non-American regions of the planet back around the time they had started naming their former National Security Advisors to run the United Nations Secretariat.
“As I broadcast this via all the available satellite and groundlink communications networks, it is a little bit past two in the morning Washington time. The National Security Council in the past few minutes has been able to confirm much of what has been reported and speculated upon concerning the critical events of yesterday afternoon in the American Midwest. We have determined that indeed a high-yield nuclear device ignited yesterday at ground level within ten miles of the city of Abilene, Kansas, at five twenty-one in the afternoon Central Standard Time. Seismic calculations indicate a force well in excess of a forty-megaton concussion. The initial shock wave spread as far as Topeka to the east, Wichita to the south, and the Nebraska border to the north. With prevailing easterly winds, in the flat topography of the agricultural plains, some damage continued far to the west, with winds and heat as far as the Colorado state line. The tapering sweep of the initial wave stopped only at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in eastern Colorado, and the glacial permafrost on the peaks of many of those mountains has melted for the first time in several hundred years. Satellite and aerial reconnaissance, which has been exhaustive and thorough during the past six hours, has found significant reduction in signs of life—human, animal, and vegetable—in a two-hundred-mile radius centered on Kansas. A secondary concussion continues to radiate from the explosion site in the form of fallout and grossly unseasonable heat.”
She spoke in a monotone. Never before had I seen her so without passion.
President Capper had never held elective office. She’d been the national chairman of American ETI, “Education and Training Initiative,” an organization raising money and building schools in Third World countries. One Sunday morning she’d appeared on the news beating the bushes for an exchange-student program involving a kind of metahuman Peace Corps. Give the superkids a mission they could get their steely fingers around, and benefit the rest of the world in the process. The idea was that young superpowered Americans would go to various places around the world to share their gifts and special skills to build up the physical and intellectual infrastructure of underdeveloped areas. At the same time, selected students from these participating countries would come to stay with families in the United States and study here. She’d mapped out the whole plan, drawn up schedules, prepared special events and spreadsheets before presenting a word of it to the public. She’d done her homework. The idea had caught the public’s fancy, and so had its messenger.
As President Zachary King’s second four-year term sludged to a halt, the Chief showed the wear of the office far beyond his years; there had been no one of any substance on the horizon to succeed him. Jennifer Capper had gotten caught up in the celebrity grinder before knowing it, so it seemed, and the New Federalists had nominated her in absentia. At the time of that breaking news, no one had had any idea of the candidate’s whereabouts until a foreign correspondent for Galaxy News tripped over her at an education conference at an obscure university in Sri Lanka. She’d been genuinely startled by the reporter’s news of her nomination as a Presidential candidate, but she’d risen to the occasion with a brilliant, self-deprecating acceptance statement delivered, off the cuff, into the reporter’s hovercam from the floor of a hot and crowded auditorium. Ms. Capper ran no campaign, hired no consultants, and publicly repudiated the several hundred independent organizations that had sprung up in communities and on the nets advocating her candidacy. She was obviously a very thoughtful, brilliant, and passionate woman and appeared honored to be nominated for President, but she had not anticipated much chance of ever actually holding the office.
“What would be the first thing you’d do as President?” a reporter had asked Jennifer Capper one October afternoon during lunch in a little dive on Dupont Circle in Washington down the street from her office.
“Demand a recount,” she told him, and the reporter dutifully sent this statement far and wide along the Netservice News.
“Assuming you were elected and there was no getting out of it,” the reporter continued, “how would you deal, for example, with the Southeast Asian trade deficit?”
>
At this, the reporter’s wide audience saw Ms. Capper apologize to her female lunch companion, apparently a colleague, place her napkin on the table in front of her, and steeple her hands to think for a moment. The camera recorded her few moments of thought. Then she turned to the reporter and his lapel microphone and launched into a detailed account of how joint ventures between sister communities in opposite corners of the world could benefit both economies and, by extension, the economy of the world. She went on for twenty minutes, spouting statistics and tossing around brand-new ideas like confetti as the reporter’s eyes grew buggier and buggier. In response to his request for a position paper, she said maybe she would send one along when she got around to writing all this stuff down.
“You mean you just made up all this stuff here?” the journalist asked. “Over your soufflé?”
“Yes. As I say, that’s my job at American ETI. We take what used to be called the Great Unwashed all over the world, all those huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and we turn them into consumers and taxpayers. It’s a pretty good trick, I think. Now if you’ll excuse me, my lunch is getting cold.”
That was how the campaign had gone until, to the surprise of no one on Earth except Jennifer Capper herself, she’d been elected President. She’d reported to her job running American ETI until the morning after Election Day, a morning she fought her way through a crowd of reporters and admirers to the lobby of her office building only to find there a phalanx of Secret Service agents, who tripped her into an enormous black hoverlimo with flags waving from its shoulders. They whisked her away to the Old Executive Office Building across the street from the White House, where a crisp and spiffy young man in a suit whose corners did not bend had handed her a list of fifty-five hundred high-level jobs she would have to fill in the two months before the day of her inauguration.
Her Presidency’s first casualty was the metahuman Peace Corps project, going the way of the dodo and the great auk. There simply was going to be no time for it.
Throughout her career, Jennifer Capper had taken pride in her creative approach to management, but the White House has never provided an environment conducive to reflection. There is just too much to do, and not enough information to be sure of how to do it best. She often would long for the simple up or down decisions the Presidents of her youth—encumbered only by Cold War and hostile Congresses—had had to make, like whether to annihilate a foreign city or two.
*
I tapped a finger on the voice icon at the corner of my screen and said, “Freeze-frame.” I interrupted President Capper in midsentence and called up the news index. It was no surprise that virtually every headline that unrolled from the master index had something to do with the disaster that I’d dreamed and then slept through:
World
KANSAS FALLOUT CLOUD HEADS FOR NORTH PACIFIC
UNITED NATIONS WORLD FOOD SUMMIT WARNS OF FAMINE
BRITISH PRIME MINISTER RESTRICTS AMERICAN GRAIN IMPORTS
RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT PASSES METAHUMAN SANCTIONS
National
RELIEF TEAMS SCOUR KANSAS IN PROTECTIVE GEAR
FOOD HOARDING NATIONWIDE LEAVES MARKETS BARE
KANSAS REFUGEES’ STORIES: ROCKY MOUNTAIN HORROR
METAHUMANS HOUNDED FROM SHOPPING MALL IN INDIANAPOLIS
Local
METRO AIRPORT CANCELS 92% OF CROSS-COUNTRY TRAFFIC
INTERSTATE 95 CLOSED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY ACCESS
GREAT EASTERN SUPERMARKET CHAIN ANNOUNCES MASS SHUTDOWNS
CITY COUNCIL PROPOSES METAHUMAN CURFEW, SANCTIONS
Then as I watched, that last headline under local news got bumped off the list and the top line moved down to make room for
MAGOG STRONGLY SUSPECTED IN KANSAS CATASTROPHE
Magog. I never even liked the sound of that guy’s name.
*
I switched back to the President’s speech, which I’d left suspended in midparagraph. She spoke about the implications of the effective sudden loss of an entire state, about the value of Kansas to the world economy and to the culture. She talked about the loss of the birthplace of one of her heroes and predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower. Impatient, I fast-forwarded to the conclusion.
“Please do not make unwarranted assumptions or act outside the law,” President Capper told the world. “The first impulse of many of us, in an uncertain condition of this sort—”
I wondered when there ever had been a condition of this sort and how she might know people’s typical reactions to it.
“—is to assign blame to the most convenient scapegoat available, from foreign governments to powerful individuals to groups with whose philosophy you may disagree. This is not about philosophy, my fellow citizens. It is about survival and sovereignty.
“We have a lot of scapegoats and even a few suspects. Be assured that every agency of this government is up late tonight, along with the displaced people of the Midwest and the worried people of the world. Through the grace of God and the prudence of our leaders, nuclear weapons have not ignited in anger or war since before most of us were born. That is an admirable record for a technology that is now nearly a century old. We, your duly elected leaders, will find those responsible for this horror, and we will bring them to justice. But until we do, it is the job of all of us to help one another and to begin to rebuild. That is work enough for everyone.
“Thank you, my fellow citizens, and good night.”
*
I wrung my hands, rattled my cheeks, enjoined my word processor back to work, and tried to see if I could salvage any of my sermon for Sunday morning. I could save a phrase or even a paragraph here or there but not much: things like “How nice it is to see so many faces this morning,” and “Why don’t we all pick up our hymnals and sing,” and other innocuousness. Anything substantive no longer appeared to apply. So I would have to start from scratch. I still had a few hours, and on the morning after the greatest man-made disaster in recorded human history I was lucky enough to have a roof over my head, a word processor that worked, and a job to do.
That was a good place to start, I thought. My sermon could open by citing the luck we had left. Then that icon reappeared in the upper-left corner of my monitor, and I could get nothing done with the sullen countenance of President Capper flashing at me like a traffic sign. I checked to see what the commotion was, and now there were half a dozen gray-suited, gray-faced people sitting in a row at a long table. They were lined up in front of the big Presidential seal, so I supposed they were down at the White House in the Press Room. I caught them in the middle of a live broadcast of their presentation. I recognized most of them: the Director of Central Intelligence, the Attorney-General, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the FBI Director.
“—if you encounter this individual, whether you are metahuman or not, please do not attempt to apprehend him,” Secretary-General Wyrmwood was saying. “Withdraw from the scene. If necessary and at all possible, withdraw your family and any other innocent persons from whatever premises in which you find him. Magog is a powerful and dangerous fugitive. This warning applies not only to the suspected felon Magog but to any remaining members of the so-called Justice Battalion who were involved in its vigilante attack on the late criminal known as the Parasite.”
And the camera angle widened to include the President standing aside the table where her chiefs of the law enforcement and intelligence communities sat. On an easel next to her was a poster-sized photograph of Magog, his scarred face nearly the same golden color as his helmet and its trumpet-shaped horns. His look was blank and without concern for anything external.
Once, long ago, Superman had warned us of the danger Magog posed. The Man of Steel had brought his putative successor to trial in the death of a desperate criminal whose demise had left no one missing him. When the jury had voted not in the name of justice but of what they’d felt was the community’s self-interest, Magog had become Superman’s successor in fact, the new hero of Metropolis. The Last Son
of Krypton was nowhere to be found after that.
Now, an arduous decade after his ultimate public triumph, here stood Magog—his allies now probably as dead as the hapless Parasite—having rendered himself, in the space of moments, one of the most accomplished mass killers since the beginning of time.
CHAPTER 4
Hellfire, Damnation, Spin Control
“There were voices, and thunderings, and lightnings and an earthquake,” I said, “and the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.
“The first angel sounded,” I said, “and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood.
“And they were cast upon the earth,” I said, “and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.
“And the second angel sounded,” I said, “and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood.
“And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died,” I said, “and the third part of the ships were destroyed.”
I did not mean to say it, but I said it. It just came out. I forgot where I was. I forgot before whom I stood. Norman McCay was in his pulpit, and all was faulty with the world.
When I’d been a student considering the ministry as a vocation, I’d thought the least attractive aspect of the job was the public speaking. Every once in a while in those days, a survey would come out showing that the thing people most feared—more than drawn-out illness or being fired from their jobs or death—was the prospect of having to address a large group of people. And those who quoted these surveys generally supposed that it would be surprising for their audiences to hear this. Quaint, I thought, that in those days there had been people believing the most fearsome thing ought to be death. But whenever I stepped into a church, whenever I faced a crossroads, whenever I wished for something, whenever I woke up in fear of a dream I could not remember, I was standing before God. Humans, even superhumans, never seemed so fearsome again. I took up my mantle when I realized that.
Kingdom Come Page 5
