Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  I looked around the room to see where my apparently expanded perceptions would take me. I found a tall bald man named Oliver with arms like steel cables and a dense white goatee that pronged off in two directions. I realized after a moment that this was Oliver Queen, the man from the Statue. Oliver was behind a wall, listening in on others’ conversations. I saw him nonetheless. My new talent was like a superpower, this proximity sense I seemed to have here in this state, and it was intoxicating. No secrets hid from me. These were angelic powers, I realized, not superhuman ones as the children who surrounded me wielded. Angelic powers come with restrictions; superhuman powers do not. I was beginning to understand the problem better.

  I turned my attention back to Nightstar and the conversation she was having with another young woman. Her friend was also quite beautiful, though not like Nightstar. Her name was Avia. She had yellow-green flesh—it was a tattoo—and bright red lipstick and makeup. She wore a green headdress and a brightly colored costume whose bizarre design, I came to understand, served to camouflage the many extraworldly mechanical devices she and her parents built into it.

  She was the daughter of Scott Free, the escape artist, and his wife, a very imposing woman named Barda who had migrated here from some place whose nature I could not at first understand. Then I saw. Avia was descended from people of another dimension, native to twin worlds. In English they called the world of her parents New Genesis, and Avia’s birthright included not only their natural abilities but their technologies as well. This young woman was a person who could only grow in power as her self-awareness gathered within her. Her consciousness, what I could glean from it, seemed almost divine itself. She would be a valuable asset to anyone with whom she aligned.

  “Lord, I’d follow that man to Apokolips,” I heard Avia say.

  “Who? The big guy?” Nightstar wanted to know.

  “Who? Listen to you. You ask me who? Yeah. The big guy. Oh my, oh my.”

  “How do you think he found this place?”

  “How? Well, if he didn’t just kind of know, I suppose somebody invited him, just like us.”

  “Jeez.”

  “Am I crazy,” Avia wanted to know, “or are you all blown away, too?”

  “I’m pretty blown,” Nightstar said. “I mean, I thought my dad was full of crap for being drafted by that guy, but now…”

  “I’m all butterflies inside. I met Superman once when I was a little girl, did I ever tell you?”

  “About four hundred times.”

  “He’s right, you know.”

  “Do I know? Right about what?”

  “The League,” Avia decided. “The right way is the League’s way.”

  And a hardwood shaft came shooting through space to plunge solidly in a decorative slat between Nightstar and Avia. Green feathers—ballast—dangled off its tail, and Oliver Queen, in leather chaps, and with studded belts across his chest and holding a longbow, stepped out from behind the wall.

  “Is it really?” Oliver, the former Green Arrow, said.

  Again the room quieted. This Green Arrow, the archer, the legendary urban warrior, was a man whose shadow passed through endless rumor and swashbuckle. I’d heard he was dead. I’d heard he lived on a South Pacific island with an old high school flame and a Tibetan guru. I’d heard he lost a limb, though he seemed intact. Maybe it was in the tabloids I’d read that he was on his way to Mars to found a colony somewhere in its equatorial regions. Evidently not. He was here.

  “So you’ve heard Big Blue’s pitch,” he barked gamely at the chastened crowd. “Now for the democratic response.”

  *

  Green Arrow walked out into the middle of the floor. Superman had gathered their attention through the force of his presence, but the archer exacted their attention by demanding it. As still as Superman had stood and as softly as he’d spoken, so was the Arrow bombastic and histrionic, a showman who stomped around the room like a tornado looking for an unsuspecting chicken coop upon which to touch down.

  “First of all, let me relieve you of one major preconception,” Oliver thundered. “This place is no secret. Several hundred kids and arrested-development cases a night don’t show up anywhere without everyone concerned knowing all about it. Supes didn’t care until he busted out of the woodwork and decided he needed you all. The Mayor and the police didn’t care because, well, they don’t care about much these days besides sucking up to old Bats. And Bats still doesn’t care—and he sure does know you’re here because guess who sent me?—he doesn’t care because he knows this place keeps you off the streets and out of his way. What Bats does care about is that you don’t go off half-cocked after that red-caped sugar daddy.”

  Oliver looked up toward the ceiling and hollered: “Hear that, Big Blue?” and looked back into the eyes of his audience and said, “You can bet he heard it. Just like Santa.”

  He got a laugh with that one.

  “We have reason to believe that Superman has stumbled upon a path that will lead to disaster for most of you and for most everyone you care about. If what you want for the future is a fascist garrison state where every one of you is part of a rigid hierarchy of jackbooted enforcement, then fly after the man who just left this room. He’s well meaning, but he’s wrong wrong wrong. His future is a future of laws without principles, discipline without reason, and oversight without direction. Do you hear me? Is that what you believe in? Superhuman dictatorship? You might have powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. You might just have talent—like me.”

  That brought another laugh. They all knew that there were few people in this room who could stand up to this mortal bowman in a free-for-all.

  “But in a world ruled by the one who has the strongest arm or the farthest sight, the future belongs only to Superman.”

  He paused on that one a moment, and it sunk in. By the time he finished speaking, the crowd was as animated as he was.

  “We too,” Oliver concluded, “know pretty much who all of you are. Let the word out that you’re with us, and we’ll find you.” And he worked his way around the room shaking hands like a candidate for Congress.

  Avia turned away when Oliver offered her a hand. Nightstar, however, was the daughter of Richard Grayson, the original Robin, who’d grown up in the old Wayne Manor. She always wondered what the Batcave looked like. She snatched up Oliver’s mitt and pumped it as though she had been waiting all her life to meet him.

  *

  I stretched my newfound abilities and, without the Spectre’s help, found Superman in the sky. He flew high above the clouds, idly circling the city for a time, thinking. Then his image changed to a red-and-blue streak flashing toward the ground and vanished. But before that happened, glory of glories, I found his thoughts.

  He was resolving something. Something about another man—an important figure, from the feel of him. Superman was actually organizing his ideas, and I was listening. I could not understand the thoughts themselves, but I felt the march of them. He was lining them up, putting them in place. It was as though he were preparing for a job interview. With his speech before the underground gathering of his errant children and successors, he felt, he was finally able to articulate these ideas. He had a clear sense of his purpose, and he was ready to bring this before—whom? His thoughts were a puzzle, like a passage from the I Ching. He was crossing the water to see the great man. Who in Creation could Superman be thinking of?

  I should have guessed.

  *

  Bruce Wayne had grown pleased with himself. He had no more secrets, plenty of money, and lots of work to do. His decaying spine held on tight to four inoperable slipped discs. Six years ago his doctor had performed an experimental procedure worked out by Wayne himself, to fuse a titanium framework to his shoulders and backbone and keep the spine from pinching and ripping at its nerve cord in a manner that threatened to make him a quadriplegic. Another set of external bones ran along his arms and another along his legs, fused to his joints, keeping Wayne’s
muscles intact. A pump arrangement in the framework itself fed a steady stream of fluid into his cartilage to keep it from slipping.

  For a long time after the series of operations, he could do nothing but lie forward at an angle on a chiropractor-style platform, manipulating the machinery in the Cave as he watched his monitors through a hole for his face in the platform. When he could move again, he spent most of several months building up his shoulder muscles, torn open in the course of the corrective back operation, to the strength they had before. Today those muscles squeezed at the roots of the framework planted in his bones the way the impenetrable dirt of the desert clutched at the roots of an ancient saguaro. When his back and shoulders hurt the most, he knew he was working as hard as he could and it felt good. He sat in a chair on the flat of his giant truncated stalagmite in the enormous cavern beneath the neglected ruin of his manor house, and kept his city clean.

  “It’s my job,” he said to himself maybe a hundred times a day.

  The house that one day would be Wayne Manor had risen from the tough soil of this township in 1779 when Increase Hopkins, Bruce Wayne’s ancestor, had judged his family too big to live in their roadside inn. Increase and his wife, Rebecca, had been the owners and managers of the Gothamborough Inn since the week after their marriage, when a buggy had rolled over to crush Increase’s parents, Elijah and Chastity Hopkins; Increase had been seventeen at the time, Rebecca fifteen. In thirteen years, they had brought ten children into the world and made their family the most prosperous in the township. As each son or daughter had become old enough to walk on his or her own—“totin’ age,” Increase had called it—the child had acquired a specialty. One would pile or carry in firewood. Another would monitor the supply of water from the well. Yet another would set and clear the table in the big boardinghouse dining room, the same one where Bruce Wayne had eaten breakfast every morning of every day while his parents were alive. In time Increase and Rebecca’s children would take on progressively more difficult and complex responsibilities as younger siblings took over their elders’ jobs—all duties that, without the children, Increase and Rebecca would have been doing themselves. By the time Increase had turned thirty years old, his ten offspring—aged two to twelve—were competently managing his family inn; his neighbors had labeled him the laziest man in the township.

  A joke, of course.

  In fact, Increase Hopkins never had found a moment he could not figure out how to fill. With the first baby old enough to walk, Increase no longer had carried silverware from the kitchen to the dining room; Rebecca, nursing their second child, would count out spoons, hand them to the toddler, and in the dining room Increase would arrange them on the table. He’d spent his newly freed-up odd moments designing a dumbwaiter system to accommodate the new formal dining hall being built upstairs. With the oldest able to carry water from the well, Increase had spent his spare time engineering and digging the piping for an indoor plumbing system. With the oldest, ten, keeping books and welcoming and checking in guests himself, Increase had carried twenty-pound property markers for the town surveyor until he learned how to survey land and draft property maps for himself. By the time of America’s Declaration of Independence, the Gothamborough Inn, with its fine dining hall and indoor plumbing, had become the most widely renowned lodging place in the north. The night George Washington slept there, Increase Hopkins was out subdividing the southwest sixty of the four thousand forested acres left to him and his wife after the untimely departure of Elijah and Chastity Hopkins.

  During the summer of 1780 the Hopkins family moved into the large annex that Increase had attached to the inn. The family annex soon grew appreciably larger than the inn, and, by the time Increase turned thirty-five, his children were contracting out the management of the inn and had opened a tavern on the far side of the Gotham-Barrington Road. Rebecca and her husband had been pioneers in the field of municipality management, with Increase surveying and subdividing several dozen small lots on and around the outermost reaches of their property. The outskirts of Gotham now were home to a thriving chicken and dairy industry, at whose heart was the cooperative of families who had leased or bought—against a promise of future productivity—small pieces of the Hopkins family homestead.

  Gotham had not turned into a metropolis overnight, but through the work of Increase and Rebecca Hopkins and the habits they’d impressed upon their children and descendants, Gotham had become, by the end of the Nineteenth Century, a great palace city of the Northeast. By the time Judge Solomon Wayne of Boston settled there, married a Hopkins girl, and gave the family and manor its name, the scions of this industrious homesteader family were this city’s most brightly shining light. And in the dreams of Bruce Wayne, the last scion of that breed, people walked Gotham’s boulevards and browsed its shopping centers with a pride and a bearing as though each were the lord or lady of this manor, and in Bruce Wayne’s Gotham each of them was in fact. In his dreams, this palace had no King or Queen, but every citizen who strode these avenues and enjoyed these pavilions was responsible to every other. No child was in danger on these street corners, and all could trade in confidence that it was his work and his product and his honor that every merchant offered, not his artifice. And out beyond the edge of the city proper, on a windswept granite cliff, the patron family entertained and romanced Presidents and paupers alike, with a characteristically American sense of how things are, how things work, and how things can be. All the good things of the Earth flowed to Gotham because of the city’s greatness.

  But always, in the great city’s soft underbelly lurked the cancer of corruption, the impurity of greed, the ravening demon of its sin-infested heritage. Sometimes the demon contracted on itself. Sometimes, as in the days when Bruce Wayne had first donned the cowl, it had reached its tendrils into every corner of the city’s corpus, requiring a Dark Knight to beat it back. Deep in his soul, in the places where even this bravest of men forbore to look, Bruce Wayne knew that Gotham never was or would be the paradise to whose ideal he dedicated his life.

  All of this I learned when I looked down over the titanium-reinforced shoulders of the good and great man who sat in the chair before me studying his monitors. On a little bronze plaque bolted to the mainframe facing him was a family shield that bore a legend in classical Greek: APHAYNAI MATAION—“SURRENDER IS FUTILE.”

  An UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY legend began to flash on all the operating monitors, several seconds before a warning light and beeper indicated a fast-moving object approaching the property from the air. Only one thing ever moved fast enough to trip off the entry signal even before its approach registered. There was no danger here.

  Upstairs, Superman walked through the wreckage of the once-stately Wayne Manor for the first time. He was familiar enough with this enormous place to know where everything belonged. Here the fourth-floor roof lay on the open-air second-floor formal dining hall. Down that corridor the bed of the maid’s suite still had crumpled, soiled sheets stuffed into chipped Ming-era vases and flapping with the chill wind. In this short passageway off the dining hall was a winding tunnel that used to be the hidden circular stairway leading down to the kitchen cupboard. The knives and other hardware that once hung from magnetized hooks along the kitchen wall now lay scattered, and he found around the living quarters some of the cutlery still in the plush furniture whose stuffing now gathered in corners. In the foyer was the ruin of the old custom-width Harvard grandfather clock that still pressed against the wall. The glass of its cabinet lay shattered, sharp blades and pointy crumbs of glass still arrayed on the floor. The pendulum had not swung for years.

  Superman tapped it, and it caught a rhythm. It was not the rhythm of time; on the leftward swing, it hit a skewed slat of cabinet, and the beat was not regular. Nonetheless, it was not the clock of a dead man. On the third swing Superman moved the hands of the clock to 10:47 as the pendulum continued to rock. A lock came undone, and the entire frame of the clock swung forward to reveal a passageway not found by the van
dals who’d attacked this place. As he had before, in the days when the Earth had sung the names and praises of the Last Son of Krypton and the Dark Knight of Gotham, Superman walked down the hidden stairs to the Batcave.

  *

  “Bruce?” he called when he reached the bottom of the stairs.

  No answer.

  He walked in the direction from which he heard the slow thumping of an athlete’s heart, then stopped. Wrong direction. That was a woman’s heart. The beat was not as strong or quite as regular as Bruce’s, and there was another one nearby. Neither belonged to Bruce. Bruce’s heartsong came from down the cavern, mingled with the creaking of a pivoting chair and the occasional tapping of keys. “Bruce?” he asked again, in the new direction.

  More tapping. Another heartbeat. The telltale whirring of a video camera turning on an automated fixture.

  Halfway across the open area between himself and the dimly lit humongous sliced-off limestone stalagmite, Superman realized he was walking on water. Trophies and mementos lay in puddles: a huge Joker playing card with dog-eared corners. A giant Lincoln penny. A life-sized tyrannosaurus with its fiberglass frame poking out the tips of its claws. This place had gone to seed. “Bruce, you know you can’t hide from me.”