“I bow to your superior wisdom,” came the answer.
Superman rose as if riding an invisible flying carpet to the rock platform where Bruce Wayne sat. A tight white T-shirt hugged a cable-hard chest under the exoskeletal frame that held together his insulted back and shoulders and limbs.
“After all, you’re the world’s ranking authority on hiding—” Wayne swung his chair around to face his old colleague and smiled sardonically. “Aren’t you, Clark?” Bruce’s renown as a fighter grew from an uncanny ability to press on an opponent’s weakest point.
“Don’t call me Clark,” Superman could not keep himself from saying. “What happened to stately Wayne Manor?”
“Bane and Two-Face happened to it. My identity got exposed. Doesn’t matter.” Bruce Wayne turned back to his monitors and console. “I’ve got everything I need down here. Besides, it’s not as if anyone intrudes on me. That hardly ever happens. Clark.”
“I saw your granddaughter tonight, Bruce.”
“My what?”
“She’s quite beautiful. A young lady.”
“Dick’s girl?”
“She has a name. She’s—”
“Nightstar. Yes, I know. I saw her once. Stared shamelessly through the skylight at the preschool. Felt like a pervert. That doesn’t matter, either.”
“You’re not in touch?”
“I never adopted Dick. He’s only fourteen years younger than I am. He never asked for anything.”
“He has to ask?”
“Who do you think you are? You walk around with your own damn gravitational pull until you check out on everyone who ever cared about you. And now you come back here to dispute my parenting skills?”
“Just wondering.”
“No, he didn’t have to ask. In fact, when Starfire was dying—and I didn’t even know her well—there wasn’t a specialist on circulatory problems or a theorist on alien anatomy in the world who didn’t find a helicopter sitting on his favorite golf course and a pilot with a satchel full of hundred-dollar bills to coax him into a consulting trip to Mass General. We could’ve used your help back then too.”
“Does Dick know you were behind that?”
“He didn’t ask.”
Superman paused. Bruce took a breath and returned to his monitors and keyboard. There was a purse-snatching on Broad Street. At Bruce’s command a robot Bat-Monitor lowered a hook from the sky in front of the fleeing perpetrator. The snatcher gently draped the purse strap over the hook and lay down on the street, shaking, his hands over his head.
“Yeah, I’d heard your nights became free once Genosyde blew up Arkham Asylum.”
“Not to mention Belle Rêve Prison and Blackgate. Not an action I’d condone. I wonder, though, if I’d prosecute as rabidly as some others might. Clark.”
Now it was Superman who stood on silence.
“I mean”—the Batman turned again to his sometime ally—“tell me the thought of it doesn’t give even your superhide a little tingle.”
“I don’t have that dark a side.”
“Tell that to your tailor,” and Wayne pointed a thumb at the new S emblem on Superman’s chest, red on a field of black. “A new look for you?”
“It’s for Kansas.”
“Oh my.” Wayne laughed. “Is there anything you can’t justify?”
“I can’t justify our being a couple of grotesquely sad old men who should’ve become friends a long time ago instead of having this same sniping conversation every time we run into each other.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Bruce,” Superman said, “the League needs you.”
“I’m busy.”
“Too busy to help save the world?”
“The crisis at hand isn’t new. Where have you been? Oh, I’m sorry. Perhaps I should ask Magog?”
Superman seemed taken aback—even hurt—by the venom and the spin of his colleague’s big chair. For a moment the Man of Steel stood silent, crossing his arms, trying to find an opening, and in that moment Bruce Wayne’s objection grew into a rant.
“Frictions have built to a head for years, Clark. The metahuman population boomed while you were gone. Ordinary folks decided you and I were too gentle and old-fashioned to face the challenges of the Twenty-First Century. They wanted their heroes strong and ruthless. Be careful what you wish for. Now it’s the metahumans who have the keys to Earth’s kingdom. Wresting control is a delicate matter. It requires finesse. It requires meticulous planning against more hidden enemies. It can be done. But it needs to be done without Superman and the Justice League booming into town, punching now and asking questions later.”
There was a moment for a breath and Superman filled it. “Dick doesn’t see it that way,” he said.
“You got him to reclaim the Robin mantle. Is that supposed to sway me? Try harder. Did Dick and I ever see eye-to-eye? I have my own controls in place, thank you. They may be more methodical than yours but they get results. My affairs and my city are more important than your sudden interest in empire-building.”
“Your city is a police state,” Superman snapped. “No, excuse me. I mean a vigilante state. Does the Mayor have to clear his choice for police commissioner with you now, too?”
“Generally does, though I’ve never asked him to.” Wayne turned back to his battery of monitors, where one showed two gangs of teenagers congregating on opposite sides of a downtown church. He pressed a button that brought the scene on the main large screen and he spoke into a microphone: “Units eighteen and forty-four. Maneuver sixteen.” Then he flipped off the microphone and said, “In fact, no one’s been elected Mayor without my explicit endorsement in twenty years.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
“You used to brag about Metropolis, Clark. You used to tell me how hard you had to work to find anyone there doing anything remotely illicit. You thought you lived in some kind of Earthly paradise.” He flipped on the microphone and said, “Variation E,” and flipped it off again. “Whose city is a paradise now?”
On the screen, a pair of flying twelve-foot Bat-Monitors touched down back-to-back between the two collections of kids. The gangs scattered by the time the robots took three steps.
“Lovely,” Superman said. He was facetious.
“I know.” Bruce Wayne smiled. He was not.
“Your whole act has always been based on fear, Bruce.”
“Did you come here to debate philosophy?”
“You’ve turned a whole city into a superstitious and cowardly lot. Haven’t you ever read Machiavelli?”
“My favorite philosopher. Next to you, of course.” Now Wayne was being facetious. Partly.
“You can rule through fear and superstition or through love and trust, Bruce. You’ve chosen fear. You’ve proved you’re the aristocrat you always claimed not to be.”
“They’ll fear me more than they’ll trust you. Even I don’t trust you. After all, you left. I stayed. Love’s a two-way street; fear’s straight down the line.”
Superman knew there were others among the Batman’s allies. He even knew there were others here in the cave, but who they were was none of his business. They were none of his business unless the Batman again became his ally.
“We’re warriors, Bruce. We have an obligation to wage combat when combat is appropriate.”
“We have an obligation, Clark, to create the conditions wherein combat becomes unnecessary.”
A pause. Both tried to grasp the precise little philosophical difference keeping them apart.
“Then you’re sure you won’t join us?” the Kryptonian asked.
“For a man who can hear clouds scrape together,” Wayne observed, “you don’t listen very well.”
Finally, Superman unfolded his arms.
“The only thing I wonder about your totalitarian solutions,” Wayne concluded, “is whether I’d be the first to be ‘reformed’ by your new world order. Goodbye, Clark.”
*
Like shadows coming out o
f the shadows, three figures emerged to Bruce Wayne’s side in the seconds after Superman vanished.
“Were you here for all that?” Bruce asked.
“Ollie just came back in,” the woman said, “but Ted and I monitored it from the time he came down the stairs.”
“I recognize Oliver Queen, the Green Arrow,” I said to the Spectre. “Who are these other two?”
“Dinah Lance, once called the Black Canary”—the Spectre was unusually responsive and forthcoming—“and Ted Kord, once known as the Blue Beetle. Urban warriors.”
“He knew we were here,” Oliver Queen grumbled. “I could feel his X rays. Hell, I’m probably sterile now.”
“Let it go, love,” Dinah Lance said, taking him by the hand.
“Actually, Ollie,” Ted Kord said, “given the low level of roentgens involved, I’d calculate nothing intrinsically harmful about—”
“Stop making the world safe for science, Beetle,” Oliver snapped. “Let an old man be paranoid. Of course, if they’re after you, it ain’t paranoia, is it, Bats?”
“If the League are allowed into our arena, the world is doomed. Superman has no idea what he’s really up against, but we have our own team to call into play.”
“You sound as if you have a plan,” Dinah said.
Ollie, her husband, smiled. “How soon they forget.”
“Does the Batman ever not have a plan?” Kord added.
“We have contacts across the world,” Bruce Wayne said, punching a flurry of keys and looking over the images they brought up on a battery of screens. “It’s time we drew that web tight.”
They went on like that, joking and talking and saying not much of anything. I could gather very little of their intentions or their thoughts, and I asked the Spectre why.
“They are strong-willed,” the Spectre said, “especially here in this context.”
“In the Batcave, you mean?”
“They are at home, and their will is, to us, a solid thing. If they view their concerns as theirs alone, then you can no more read them than you can, in your corporeal state, walk through a wall.”
The physics of the Spectre’s existence, it seemed to me, were more confusing than quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, I watched the Batman and his allies, and I learned very little. There were more than these four, it seemed. They secretly had been recruiting among the superhumans for months, and with some success.
For what purpose? They had no intention of allowing me to know.
PART II
… To Make
Our World …
CHAPTER 12
Mr. Mind
Her best friend had been missing for weeks, and she was worried. The guy who was supposed to take her bungee jumping at Mount Saint Helens last night had stood her up. But this morning all was right with the world. Today Avia flew with Superman.
I had been a widower too long. This long-legged flying creature with the golden body tattoo yanked at my aging cleric’s soul. I knew it was my soul and not my flesh; the Spectre’s imposed condition had relieved me for the moment of human physical urges. Those remaining were the passions that rose from my character rather than from my hibernating chemistry.
There was something hormonal, something aggressive in the very makeup of the metahuman—as opposed to the traditional human—that Avia seemed to recognize as a spirit akin to her own. While she had been born here and lived here, she was not of this Earth. Neither of her parents, Scott and Barda Free, was even remotely related to an Earth person. While like many other alien races they were clearly human, or at least humanoid, there was not yet any evidence that they could reproduce with human partners. DNA of many alien races, however, proved surprisingly adaptable to the protocols of the building blocks of Earthly human life—of which Avia’s friend Nightstar was an obvious case in point.
“Do you think there’s some aspect of the metahuman gene that makes individuals more belligerent or aggressive?” Avia flew up beside Superman somewhere in the sky over the outskirts of South Coast City.
“Pardon?” he asked.
“Do you think there’s something inherently different about the metagene?” she asked. “I mean as opposed to conventional human DNA?”
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Let me think.”
It had been a month since Superman had walked alone into the party cavern under the outskirts of Gotham and first asked the children, grandchildren, and successors of many of his old colleagues and foes to join his cause. It was the same cause he had always championed: Be a hero and save the world. At the time, though, it felt so promising and new. Certainly Superman was fresh and tireless every day, even if he was a little morose sometimes. And Avia herself could not be more thrilled to get up in the morning and pursue this quest with the great man. To some of the others, though, it seemed to be getting old.
They traveled in a company of nine Justice Leaguers, moments from flying into a high-risk situation. With Superman and Avia were Wonder Woman, Whiz, who was one of the new generation of Marvels, Golden Guardian, Green Lantern, Hawkman, Red Robin, and Flash.
Cathedral—he of the involved jagged costume reminiscent of Gothic architecture—Phoebus, the new Red Tornado, and Tyra, who was the human “daughter” of the supercomputer Brainiac, rumbled in a residential district of South Coast. This conversation in the sky would not cause what happened next to miss a beat.
“I think it’s a kind of stand-and-fight survival response you’re noticing,” Superman said as the angle of his approach dropped toward the position of a power dive. “Not aggression per se.”
“Really?” Avia followed suit and headed precipitously toward the ground. So did everyone else. “Then how would you explain the metahuman tendency to respond violently to stimuli that normal humans would treat logically instead?”
“Dominance,” Superman said, pointing his fisted hands downward and diving among the glistening towers of South Coast City. “Not on our part, but on that of conventional humans,” he called back as he left Avia and everyone else far above.
On the roof of a four-story apartment building, Cathedral heard a loud male voice come from somewhere unexpected: above. Was somebody calling down to him from a higher building? Cathedral had his hands fisted together and was about to bring them down on the roof to rattle the stance of the oncoming Tyra and—nominally—shatter this multiple-family home into a zillion pieces. Superman went after Tyra first.
The girl had a fingertip fireball launcher. She was shooting little licks of flame in a wide pattern in Cathedral’s general direction, smiling, enjoying this. Superman always thought of her as such a contemplative, intellectual girl; a good girl. Then he remembered that throughout history there were good people, thoughtful people, who—in keeping with the force of their times—owned slaves, or followed unjust orders, or advocated the rule of racists and tyrants because they were in power, or waged war. Like them Tyra was a product of her time and her generation’s rage, and only by comparison was she a “good girl.”
“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?” Superman demanded as he clapped down hard on the roof, blowing cold air over the fireball launcher until condensation froze it unworkable, dripping icicles.
“I don’t know,” she stammered. “Hi, Superman, I—”
“Don’t you know better than to be rumbling where people live? What’s gotten into you? All of you?”
Behind him, Red Tornado and Phoebus flew out from behind nearby buildings, forgetting their fight to gape in wonder at the celebrity they seemed to have attracted. Then Wonder Woman, Avia, and the others landed, and clicks and whirring gathered from all directions. Local news hovercams rose in the sky around them. The chattering of reporters’ narration punctuated the air. Clicks came from nearby buildings. People who moments ago had run for cover now poked cameras out windows, looking for a visual souvenir. Cathedral was gone, but nobody seemed to notice.
“Catch!” came that raucous voice from down on the street—
&nb
sp; —and an old rattletrap 2014 Chevy came tumbling fore-over-aft up through the air, fell just short of the roof, and smashed into the side of the building.
“Son of a sire!” Wonder Woman spat. She dove off the roof headlong at Cathedral’s throat, slamming him back-first into the piling of an old center-city oil pump that gathered rust on the wide traffic island dividing the street. She slid him hard against the fossil ruin down to the ground.
Wonder Woman was sick and tired of the effort they all were putting into this project over these weeks, growing into months. She was sick of the upstarts a fraction her age who thought they could make a name for themselves by poking their betters in the eye. She was tired of all the energy she had to put out just getting her leader to budge a little. “This is the way we do things,” he insisted, “this isn’t the way we do things,” and “that is the way things are done.” Ends justify only ends, and means don’t get justified by anything, he was always telling her. He had to be true to underlying principles; it was like a religion to him. She needed only to get each job done, one at a time. “Consider the implications of our tactics,” he would tell her. “Consider the implications if we fail,” would be her retort—angrier and more snappish every time she snapped it out. Perhaps there was some vindication for Diana in the fact that, over these past weeks, as their efforts had become more tedious and martial in nature, Superman had begun to refer to her openly as his second-in-command—always smiling that thin smile while saying it. But the others took the title seriously, and she became his first officer in fact. Then again, sometimes it seemed that all this exalted position afforded her was the need to be the one to argue with him. Today she could not be bothered. The Amazon’s fist smashed into the delinquent’s face.
“Think that’s funny, boy?” she demanded of the bizarrely costumed Cathedral and hit him again.
“Unghh,” he said.
“You like throwing heavy machinery at your betters, do you?”
“Unghh,” he said again.
“Diana!” Superman looked at the sudden damage his first officer rained down on the mildly deluded boy. But he also saw the old woman with the camera, rushing over the ground at the mess of the façade of her home.
Kingdom Come Page 15
