Finally Wonder Woman answered: “Magog is a wanted felon. He will be dealt with.”
Somebody said, maybe louder than he meant to say, “Yeah, that’s happened before,” and certainly Superman heard it. If Wonder Woman caught it, she did not let on.
“We doubt that he will surface of his own accord,” she continued. “Given the consequences of his actions in Kansas, that seems unlikely. If he does, we will certainly do what needs to be done.”
Then the company of journalists and diplomats and onlookers erupted in a rude confusion of questions and implied doubts. Who would call Magog to account? Who would be responsible for the destruction? Would there be a solution to the impending famine? Was there anyone not afraid of Magog? What about the growing social problem?
Wonder Woman took the flurry of questions, Superman’s reticence, and her other colleagues’ silence as a fine opportunity to say, “Thank you. That will be all.”
“That’s enough,” a woman from Netservice News said, turning to her hovercam and its remote operator.
And it was.
*
Upstairs, in a secluded private study of the Secretariat Building, several senior delegates of an ad hoc committee representing nations on six continents sat while an assistant paged Secretary-General Leonard Wyrmwood.
CHAPTER 11
The Rave
“No jolly smiling faces—why am I not surprised?” Wyrmwood asked. It was a rhetorical question.
Since the reconstitution of the United Nations decades before, the Secretary-General always had been, by tacit understanding, an American. Wyrmwood was the longest tenured of these so far, having served during the administrations of two American Presidents. Eight years before, President King had appointed him the United States’ ambassador-level chief delegate. The rest of the world immediately had taken this as a signal that he would succeed the old Secretary-General, close to retiring from a long and distinguished career. Before coming to the Secretariat, Wyrmwood’s predecessor had been Director-General of the World Health Organization, a professor of International Relations at Metropolis University, chief of the American delegations at different times to both the old and New United Nations, the United States’ Secretary of State, best friend and antiquing buddy of a First Lady, childhood refugee from both Hitlerian fascism and Stalinist communism, and an accomplished great-grandmother. Leonard Wyrmwood, by contrast, had been the junior senator from Montana and spent four years on the Senate Agriculture Committee. He was a self-made nursing home mogul who had a growing family far more photogenic than he. Wyrmwood had no idea what he was doing here and, as it happened, a profound and immediate understanding of the worldwide implications of the demise of Kansas. He was also, for better or worse, a canny natural politician.
“There’s a fear in this room,” I told the Spectre.
We were in the expansive conference room of Secretary-General Wyrmwood, in the Secretariat Building in the complex that composed the New United Nations fortress. The meeting room had leather chairs facing the mahogany table that Wyrmwood had inherited from his predecessor. There was even a view of the river if you got up on a chair close to the vertical-slit windows on the outside wall and managed to look at a downward angle through the six-foot-thick concrete and quadruple-reinforced glass that separated you from it. The previous Secretary-General had decorated one of the walls between the window slits with a full-sized copy of the famous portrait of Wonder Woman by Andy Warhol. Wyrmwood filled the space with a display of testimonial plaques from his career in the Senate and some pictures of Montana.
A dozen or more delegates sat around the room. Some faced the Secretary-General somberly. Others fiddled with their glasses or their clothes. A few stroked their foreheads or their hair or pulled at their ears nervously. No one said very much. They waited for him.
“So Superman’s back,” Wyrmwood allowed with a smile as he clapped a fist repeatedly on the mahogany to the silent rhythm in his head. “Who here is delighted?”
One white-bearded man from Senegal began to ask, “What do we do when he—”
“Applies for nation status?” Wyrmwood finished the delegate’s question. He threw his hands up in the air and laughed. And as far as I know, he never answered.
“Not just fear,” my spectral companion said to me, “but a validation of fear.”
“You mean they’ve been afraid all along.”
“Would you not be, in their position? Humans have long suspected that they are no longer the captains of human destiny.”
“And that is now confirmed,” I noted.
The Spectre nodded, and as though he were reading my thoughts—I supposed he was, actually—he perceived that I felt we had no more to learn from these scared, tired people in their bomb shelter on the riverbank.
*
The room shimmered away, and now the night sky blanketed another city. From the neo-Gothic architecture and the profusion of ornate ledges and gargoyles, I recognized it as Gotham. High above the city, our forms still as big as the largest buildings below, I heard voices. I did not listen to the words, only their timbre, as we drifted downward to a place far below the ground. The voices were happy, a touch wanton, a little of the whisper in their tone if not in their volume. They were voices that did not want to be heard. I knew somehow that it was from the Batman, the presumptive keeper of this place, that the owners of these voices meant to keep their presence secret. I would know, before I saw the Batman again—and I would see him again—whether the voices had succeeded in their secrecy.
Beneath Gotham was a thick layer of solid bedrock. In the bedrock was a second city, a latticework of bubbly caverns already old when the last march of glaciers had laid down the surface above. A collection of bubbles of gas from when the Earth was young had jammed up together and gotten caught in the formation of the bedrock. Millennia later those gases leached out or combined with other elements and left behind, under the suburbs of Gotham, the endlessly rambling cave that became the home first of the flying mammals who inspired the Batman’s standard, and then of the Batman himself.
Another mass of gaseous bubbles had collected and congealed and found a sinecure for some hundreds of thousands of years under the land that became Gotham’s Midtown. Eventually the gas had leached out of here as well and left behind a cavern and a narrow passageway to it. It was in a corner of this cavern that the Spectre and I found our noncorporeal selves.
It was a party, of sorts.
It was loud here. There were hundreds of them, maybe a thousand, in one room after another. The place was lousy with bizarrely costumed, multicolored, oddly shaped superhuman types, all showing off their particular talents or enjoying the showing-off of others. A slim young woman with gossamer wings growing from her shoulder blades pranced from ridgeline to stalactite along the distant ceiling, snatching up little bats and swallowing them down. A bartender with a glowing fringe of hair along the back of his head and a T-shirt that said EARTH PRIME SUCKS—whatever that meant—leaned across the bar to a patron in what looked to be a French military coat circa the Napoleonic era. Napoleon flicked a thumb out from his fist like a wick off a flint and lit the cigarette with his thumbtip. A face-masked fellow with long orange Day-Glo hair slid his drink down the bar, complaining that it was watered. The bartender wiggled his fingers until a triangular chemical analysis meter appeared in the glass to show that hydroxide levels were below the redline level. The masked man approached the bartender, waved both hands over the glass angrily, and turned away to vanish into the thumping crowd as the drink, glass, and chemical meter vanished. I was grateful that, in my spirit state, my sense of smell did not register the trace elements of the air.
“Oh, jeez, I’m gonna blow,” the muffled voice of a man said. It was a fellow wearing what appeared to be a radiation suit. I heard the phrase “Human Bomb” in my head when I looked at him. “Hold me down! Hold me down!” he said as he leaned toward a young masked man in a leather jacket. He extended a forefinger the way a
nasty uncle used to do just before he imposed the vaporous waste of Thanksgiving dinner on the dining room air. Gamely, the kid yanked on the extended finger…
… and a burst of flame and smoke exploded in his face.
These people did not even like each other much.
Good Lord, I thought, this was a den of iniquity where no minister of the Word belonged. A watering hellhole for the scum of the Earth. The gathering sink of the übermenschen of the pit.
I heard a cackle and finally saw somebody whom I recognized: a skinny, yellow old man with a little sprig of green hair on his head and red furry boas flung over his shoulders. It was the Creeper, that wild-eyed misanthropic wacko from the supervillain-spattered tabloid pages of my youth. Evidently he found the entire scene amusing. It seemed the misanthrope had finally found a home.
“These kids,” I told the Spectre, “they’re a bunch of little monsters. Beasts. They—” I was about to say that they ought to be wiped off the face of the Earth, and then I remembered my designated job here and worried that he might take me literally.
I hesitated long enough for him to answer: “They will be tamed.”
Music blasted from all corners. There was nothing soft or evocative of a ballad, but I appreciated that the tastes of the creatures of this place were a bit retrograde. People accosted each other for personal perks and favors as though it were the Nineteen-Seventies. They danced and moved and wailed as though certainly the world could end at any moment. There was an abandon here I had not seen since working in that street mission in the waning days of the Cold War. Then a cool breeze sliced through this killing heat.
A succession of whispered messages began to replace the cacophonous din. The quiet emanated from a corner and grew through the collective sensibility of these rooms like a rolling wave. These were strange sensations I had, standing with the Spectre in this ghostly form. I could hear and see but could not smell or touch. I could not taste even the tongue in my mouth, but I could sense the swells and contractions of emotion around me as if they were liquids mingling in a great shifting sea. And then as the wave of whispers reached us, I felt a lift of awe and surprise. One by one these revelers witnessed him, each after the other: Superman was walking through the room.
By the time he stood at the bar, only the speaker system made a sound. “Would you turn down the music, please?” he asked the plump man in bow tie and mask behind the bar.
“Excuse me?”
“The music. Please.” Superman pointedly indicated the tuner on a shelf high above the man.
As the bartender slowly raised his eyes toward where Superman pointed, he snapped out of his daze, said, “No, I’ll do it,” and leapt the fifteen or twenty feet up to flick a switch, and then landed lightly behind the bar again, smiling sheepishly. Those were old recordings and hard to find.
“I appreciate that,” Superman said, and added, “but the refreshments don’t help.”
A searing beam of heat sliced from those eyes across the shelves of alcohol and other chemical elixirs behind the bar. Bottles burst. Powders fused. Liquids spilled and boiled away. The old Creeper, grinning nearby, inhaled a big breath from a cloud of something or other that rose from the ruin. The Kryptonian gave him a look through cooling eyes, and the old man lowered his head and exhaled slowly through his mouth.
“Party’s over,” Superman said softly, and it was. “I’ve come here with an invitation for you,” he continued, “to join the—”
“Oooo! I’m a-scared!” a raspy voice said from behind a chair.
“Shaddup,” someone else said, more in the sense of a plea than an order.
“Ain’t it past yer bedtime, Gramps?” the first voice said, and its source stood and stepped forward from behind a gathering of large bags of muscle.
“What’s the S stand for? Senile?” the loudmouth wanted to know.
“We’re try’na hear somethin’ here.” One of the muscle bags shoved the young man, who shoved back.
“Dincha see the NO SOLICITING sign up the top of the ramp, old man?” The loud fellow was barely if at all out of his teens, unshirted and with a lion-tattooed chest, his head shaved except for a tuft sculpted into letters to read KILLER #1.
“We were having a party here before you dragged that big hokey cape in. Y’know capes’re over. History,” said the self-proclaimed killer, “like you.”
“Will you shut up?”
Exasperated, a muscle bag turned and smashed the offender’s face in. The loud young man spent the remainder of the evening draped over the bar.
“Thank you.” Superman continued as though uninterrupted. “I am here to extend an invitation to join the Justice League. Willingly. I am, as you know, a founding member of that dormant organization. Its history is vivid and honorable. We are, all of us here, colorful people. Vividness and honor are two qualities that I admire and would suppose all of you do as well.” He allowed a slight smile, and many here returned it.
He looked around. Silence. Attentiveness.
“There are nine hundred and seventeen people in this establishment tonight within the sound of my voice. I can identify all of you—nearly all by name and all of you by appearance. Eight hundred and ninety-six of you are in a state of consciousness, capable of listening to and understanding what I say. I suggest you convey this message to your unconscious or otherwise indisposed friends. You may consider this, then, a formal invitation.
“The world—as you may have noticed and as your generally wanton behavior proves—is in bad shape. We have a great deal to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. So be advised: We have rules.
“Heroes behave in a certain way. This isn’t it. Those of you who choose of your own volition to join us will be as responsible as you are powerful. You will be as effective as you are capable of being. We are people who do not stand by the blood of a neighbor. We are people who never let a friend go into battle alone.
“The League has no formal roster anymore, no dues, no little membership card. To respond positively to this invitation you need only behave in the prescribed manner. You need only use your initiative and talents for the preservation and quality of life. You need only do what you are able to do, to make a dying world live again. You may join my company or the company of those with whom we work. You may urge others to join and to combat the excesses of our time. You may work to undermine destruction, injury, and death and those who bring these things about. If you want to let us know in a formal sense of your positive response, then find me or other members, and tell us so.
“Those of you who do not join us or who respond negatively will be dealt with.
“Our job is thankless, but we do what needs to be done. Right now, we are humanity’s only hope.
“Be heroes.”
And he left.
*
It took them a while to catch their breath.
“Do you think it was really him?” someone said.
“What do you mean, do I think?” someone answered. “Look at all these people. Don’t you think if it wasn’t really him, somebody in this crowd would’ve noticed?”
“Yeah. Somebody would’ve.” A pause. “So you think it was really him. Right?”
“Are you in?” someone else asked.
“I feel like I was just asked to be the thirteenth disciple,” was the answer. “What do you think?”
“See how he looked?” from someone else.
“Good skin,” in answer, “for an old man.”
“Sure he has good skin. Look who we’re talking about.”
“So where’d the lines come from? The little wrinkles.”
“From inside.”
“Oh. Right.”
It went like that. Soon the rooms were abuzz again, though with talk now. They saw the light peer down over their shoulders and they were, most of them, good again.
*
There was a young woman I had seen before. She was quite beautiful, and once I saw her, so help me, I could not stop staring a
t her. She was the one with the violet chrome star tiara and bright green eyes. Nightstar was her name, I remembered. Then, for staring at her, it seemed, I suddenly knew things about her I could not have known. Nightstar was her real name, her given name. Nightstar Grayson. I saw the name as if I was reading it. She was, like many of the people here, of partly extraterrestrial stock, but her father was an Earthman. Then I realized he was the one called Red Robin, who’d joined Superman and Wonder Woman’s company in the course of the incident at the Statue. Suddenly she had a history and a life, and I knew it. I looked around to see whether I could do this generally or whether it applied only to beautiful exotic young women.
I looked at a terribly unattractive young man with tattoos of the Sign of the Beast—the three 6s of Saint John’s Revelation—over his body. He had a big black 6 making a loop around each pierced and exposed nipple, and a third over his face with its loop ending on his philtrum. He wore a spiked collar and something that might have been a black leather jacket were it to come around and cover his adorned chest, which it did not, and a little bat-gargoyle epaulet. He had no hair. A single small horn pointed from his skull. His left arm was a cyborg attachment of jointed steel. Though he affected the body language of a rumbler, I wondered how he proposed to keep all of his display hardware in place in a fight. I stared for a moment at him nonetheless, and learned something of him.
He called himself 666, aptly enough, and I realized that I had seen him before. It was on the street during the rumble when I had found the little girl and then her mother and brother in the destroyed bus. He’d laughed that day, I remembered. Now I knew he rarely experienced mirth and certainly had not then. He was an unwanted son born to a then-sixteen-year-old cheerleader and a father whose identity neither the mother nor the son had known. But I now was aware that the father previously had been a nuclear plant employee who’d found himself trapped in a containment chamber during a meltdown simulation exercise, and he’d vaporized without a trace. His consciousness and invisible and incorporeal parts had begun over the following months to reassemble themselves spontaneously in the cooling tower of the plant. Only when his consciousness returned to this nonbody did the poor being go mad. He had evolved into a kind of chaotic incubus and happened one day upon the unfortunate cheerleader in her sleep. The girl never could get anyone to believe she had no idea how she’d come by this child, and even the child never had accorded her much credence about anything after that. This 666 had grown up with the capacity to shield his body and its accoutrements in a thin, virtually impenetrable shield—which accounted, in answer to my curiosity, for why the bizarre costuming never got rattled in a fight. The boy was most troubled, and I did not care to spend any more time in his history or his mind.
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