“A good-enough way of putting it.” Luthor was a bit mollified. “Our objective is to heighten the tension between humans and metahumans—for the ultimate benefit of humanity in general.”
“So you want us to throw in with a political pressure group,” Savage suggested.
“In a manner of speaking,” was Luthor’s wary answer.
“What manner would that be?” Savage wanted to know. “Of speaking, that is.”
“Look, Savage, I’m not sure we have time for semantics.”
“I don’t get tired of pointing out, Luthor, that I for one have all the time in the world.” Savage smiled, and the Spectre bristled some more.
“Quite right,” Luthor said. “Yes, Vandal, we are essentially a political pressure group whose eventual aim is to direct the inevitable bloodshed and war to which this world is undeniably headed. In the end, humankind will once again rule the Earth.”
“That I understand,” Savage said, satisfied.
But Nigma was not. “Humankind. So would a rough working translation of ‘humankind’ in that context be, ‘you guys’?”
There was no answer for Nigma, so he posed another riddle.
“When is a villain not a villain?”
“When he labors for a greater good,” Luthor said, the last bolt of his cigar’s fumes shooting from his nostrils.
Luthor stubbed out his cigar and went on. “We have another problem. As you all know, since last we met, the gods have stepped down from Olympus. We have to adjust our long-term plan to accommodate the sudden resurfacing of the so-called Justice League. Their advent has contracted our ten-year agenda into a ten-day stratagem.”
“I didn’t think they’d return in a million years,” said Savage.
“But we have now formulated a plan to neutralize them and their influence, turning their arrival to our advantage.”
“Neutralize?” Naga asked. “By that, do you mean eliminate them?”
“Hold them to a stalemate,” Luthor said, “until they are no longer players.”
“How?” Savage pressed.
“I would rather reserve that information,” Luthor said, continually punching buttons on the keyboard and small monitor built into the hidden recess at the head of the conference table. “I’d like our new alliance to gel a little bit first, but you can all thank young Xu’ffasch here for reestablishing some old family ties.”
No one but the tall patrician Ibn al Xu’ffasch knew what Luthor meant by the remark, and that was the way Luthor liked it. The inveterate boss snapped a finger, and the door near him swung open so that Luthor’s valet could stroll in with a fresh cigar and lighter.
“And Superman?” Nigma asked, smiling still.
The ice of Luthor’s breath did not even melt against the flame that the young valet in the red suit held up to him as the boss sputtered and the unlit stogie flew out of his mouth with a spray of spittle.
“Superman will not lay a hand on—will not—he cannot—” and he stopped himself. He realized he was screaming.
“Are you all right, Lex?” Selina wondered. The question gave him a moment to draw himself back into himself.
Lex Luthor collected his composure and said, quietly, “ ‘Superman,’ as they still insist on calling him, will not touch us.” Luthor drew the flame through a fresh cigar. Then he took a long puff that he expelled through his nostrils. “He certainly won’t touch me.”
“And have we heard this before?” Nigma smiled still.
The fumes seemed to be irritating Luthor’s nasal passage, but just for a moment. “I have the most marvelous anti-Superman option ever devised.” He looked up at the tall red-suited valet who now stood by his side at parade rest. “Haven’t I, boy?”
“You do indeed, sir,” the valet said.
That valet looked somehow familiar, Nigma thought. The stance nearly six and a half feet high, the yeasty handsome face, the wide grin, the narrow laugh-lined eyes; this was not the sort of mien you normally found on those anonymous functionaries who stand at the side of greater men. Then Edward Nigma solved the riddle before it finished forming in his own mind. He knew who this tall young valet was, and his smile dropped to a gaping stare.
If anyone noticed the change in Nigma’s demeanor, no one let on. Like the man in the red suit, Nigma was the waiter here, the pet dog, the person whose face they would all forget as they left the room. Pity.
“I’m sure you enjoy a good cigar, don’t you, Savage?” Luthor asked the aristocratic Cro-Magnon to his right.
“I do.”
“Excellent. These are Churchills by Paul Garmirian. Who else would like to try one of these little masterpieces? Son, go get my humidor, would you? Here, Selina”—Luthor handed her his cigar and offered to light it for her when the valet went for the humidor—“accessorize away.”
And as the tall man in red vanished into the next room to fetch the little cedar box for the master, Nigma found his voice again to whisper only: “Shazam.”
Luthor glared at him, and both were relieved that nothing happened.
CHAPTER 13
New Oa
“To the Fortress?” he asked her.
“No, I don’t want to go back there. Besides, they wouldn’t know where to find us,” she said.
“Is it private enough here?”
“They’re our friends.”
“Is it safe?”
“The gyroscopes are good enough for Green Lantern.”
Superman and Wonder Woman had spent the past week adding eighty-four souls to the informal roster of the Justice League and making a note of only nineteen among those with whom they’d met who needed further persuasion.
“I just really need a break,” she said.
There would be no break.
*
The satellite New Oa was named for Oa, the lost world at the geographic center of the Milky Way where the Guardians of the Universe had made their home and headquarters for eight billion years. If the glow of the original Oa’s nameless star had been much brighter, it would still be visible to astronomers on Earth, who looked back over forty million years of time to see it. We knew that Oa and the Guardians themselves were lost, their star gone nova and planet vaporous. We knew this because the interstellar paramilitary force the Guardians once founded and directed, the Green Lantern Corps, now drifted on of its own weight like the movements of the stars themselves. A handful of individual Green Lanterns had thought to bring some order to the force over the years and tried to take command. Because of the nature of the far-flung Corps, however, no one could find an effective way to keep track of all three-thousand-odd holders of the power battery, each of whom had a sector of the Galaxy in which to keep order. Like many Green Lanterns, Alan Scott had spent most of his career unaware of the true source of his Lantern-energy, ascribing it to magic until an extraterrestrial colleague came across him and explained it all. Scott never either aspired to command or thought it was necessary. When they retired or before they died, Green Lanterns generally managed through some means to pass on the accoutrements of their power to someone worthy—or at least potentially worthy.
Astronomers on Earth did not have to look as far to see New Oa, the name that Alan Scott, the longest-surviving Green Lantern of Earth, had given to the city-sized green-glowing satellite he’d built to patrol the skies. It completed an orbit of the Earth tracing the ninetieth longitude line in precisely one sidereal day: twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes, four and one-tenth seconds. People with good eyesight could see it unaided, a dim green star crossing the faces of the countries of the Earth. The day Alan Scott had begun construction on it—the assembly taking only six days—the hushed word in aerospace circles was that it was some sort of reconnaissance craft of an alien civilization. With word of this suspicion quickly becoming worldwide news, Magog had taken it upon himself to check the place out.
Magog had encased himself in the protection of his confederate, Alloy, the malleable metal-fleshed android, then propelled bot
h of them up to find the enormous satellite nearly built. Green Lantern, tired and weighed down with work yet to come, had been in no mood for little leaguers or their games. With the pair close enough to see, Green Lantern had stood on an emerald wing of the most extended platform and waved Alloy and Magog away.
But they had kept coming.
Green Lantern had resumed work on an engineering problem, chalking up calculations on a big ray-energy blackboard hanging in front of him in space. Slowly Magog and Alloy sidled up beside him and circled once, as if trying to figure out his actions. They looked over the satellite, as if by looking at it they could see whether it was something to which they could reasonably object. Then, with Alloy’s protection, Magog drifted over toward Green Lantern, struggling with a three-headed monster of a math problem, and tapped him hard on the shoulder.
Absently, Green Lantern loosed a curved shoot of energy from his power-charged suit of green armor. It widened to form a man-sized funnel. In the time between Magog’s first tap on Lantern’s shoulder and his attempt at a second one, the funnel enveloped both Magog and his android friend, sealing them with a dense cushion forming inside, and sucking them back Earthward just fast enough for the G-force to knock Magog unconscious.
At the nearest point on Earth’s surface—a small island off the southern coast of Alaska—a great green trumpet like that of a cornucopia touched down within sight of Sanaz Tunari’s bait-and-tackle shop. Sanaz snatched up a little disposable camera from his counter and ran down the icy path to the phenomenon. The funnel had burst open on the beach, depositing Magog and Alloy ungracefully on a blanket of fresh snow. Shaking his head awake, Magog got his footing with the help of the android’s shoulder, and said, “Well, I don’t think that’ll be a problem for us, do you?”
Alloy shook his head, and neither bothered Green Lantern again. Sanaz’ pictures had made it into every sleazy tabloid on the Pacific Rim, and with that found money he built a new house behind the bait shop. And up in space, tracing the path around the globe of the ninetieth meridian, Green Lantern sat watching out for alien invasions until the day Superman and Wonder Woman asked to use New Oa as the Justice League’s new headquarters.
*
Donna Troy and Roy Harper had once been Wonder Girl and Speedy. A generation ago—a few dozen self-important costumed villains ago, a couple of failed marriages, and a few more destructive relationships ago, triumphs and crises and a character change in the world ago—Donna and Roy’s history had begun. Once upon a time they’d been a pair of extraordinarily talented and lucky innocent kids who liked to dress up and planned to make the world better together. And with the games of childhood evolving into the complications of adulthood and the preoccupations of middle age, these two had leaned on one another for support when they needed, for the sake of their own sanity, to be selfish and immature for a little while. They were good friends. They had a kind of shorthand language together.
“They were staring out the window on the observation deck,” Donna told Roy. “I thought I heard her say she needs a break.”
“About time,” Roy said. “They haven’t let up since the Statue.”
“Who else is aboard?” Donna asked him.
“Just Lantern and the sleep shift. Everyone else is out. Somewhere.”
“Should we cover them? Cut them a break?”
“Can we?” he wanted to know.
“We can try.”
*
There is no such thing, I had learned from my late friend Wesley, as elephant privacy. Wesley was always a compendium of generally useless but always interesting information. I once had tried to put his observations on elephant privacy to use in a sermon, but there was no avoiding the essential frivolity of the analogy in order to make my way around it to the point—whatever that might be. But here is the basic idea:
Elephants are extremely intelligent animals. They are also undeniably huge. When two elephants are moved to develop a personal relationship, there is no place they can go to find privacy: no tree wide enough, no rock big enough, no corner isolated enough. So elephant friendships have evolved into a function of the herd at large. What substitutes for elephant intimacy generally involves the entire circle of family and friends in mass rituals of bellowing and pounding down the bush out of boundless joy over the value of such fellowship to the community.
Stomping and trumpeting. Stomping and trumpeting.
That, according to my friend Wesley, is what elephants do.
*
“What do we do about this topographical data?” Roy Harper asked Green Lantern.
“What you usually do. Get it to Superman,” Alan Scott told his navigator-in-training.
Years ago, the least favorite way Roy’s mentor had spent his time was marking it in the Justice League satellite. Green Arrow—Ollie Queen, who’d raised Roy Harper and trained him in archery and derring-do—had groaned whenever it was his turn to warm the helm of the old Justice League satellite. Now, grown into the hi-tech archer Red Arrow, Roy found something very elemental about space flight, something that fed his soul. He was suited to it as a baseball is suited to the air. Green Lantern rode the rhythms of space as well as any man alive, and Roy could have no better teacher.
The latest topographical profile of a random sector of the Earth below showed a number of anomalies. There was land where there should have been none; water where there’d been none the day before. The survey was over only three or four hundred square miles of sparsely inhabited ground—but still.
“Where is the survey?” Red Arrow asked Green Lantern.
“Rain forest,” the old ring-wielder said, and adjusted a stabilizer. “Southern Amazon basin.”
“I’ll get Donna,” Roy said.
“What can she do?” Lantern asked him.
“I guess,” Roy supposed, “she might know what to do.”
“Some reason you can’t ask Superman if he’d check it out?”
Roy hesitated. “No reason,” he said.
Lantern moved so he was between Roy and the control console and spun a dial about twenty degrees to the left. Roy grabbed a handhold on the wall and steadied himself as the ship lurched. Green Lantern looked around innocently at the younger man.
“What was that?” Red Arrow wanted to know.
“What was what?” the old man snapped back. “You green under the gills, or is that just a reflection from the walls? Look, son, we’ve got Magog on the loose, and this could just be him. You telling Supes about this anomaly or what?”
“Sure.” Roy excused himself and stepped out into a long emerald tube that led from the navigation deck to the complex of passenger pods.
And the orientation of the satellite itself shifted so that the Earth below jumped from a little crescent of ocean at the translucent green walkway below Roy—to fill his frame of vision. In a moment he felt sick.
Red Arrow tried to rush down the corridor to a water closet, as crazy old Alan Scott dubbed the suction waste disposal units with which he peppered the satellite. Roy could not make it before he ran into Donna Troy coming around a corner.
She looked at him questioningly for a moment as he careened past her into the small chamber off the corridor tube, then poked her head into Green Lantern’s navigation bridge.
“Alan?” she asked the big man. “Is there something wrong?”
“Wrong?” Lantern asked. “What could be wrong?”
There was a lurch of the craft. Lantern’s hands were off the controls, and Donna could see the image of Earth rattling in the window, then shifting back.
“That,” she said.
“Turbulence,” Alan Scott deadpanned.
“We’re in space, Alan.”
“Then we know it isn’t air turbulence, I guess.”
“Well, what is it?”
The big man shrugged.
“Where’s it coming from?” as the rattling of the satellite became markedly pronounced, like the slow and steady rocking of an oceangoing vessel. “Can�
�t you figure out where it’s coming from? You’ve got a power battery, for Heaven’s sake.”
“All right, all right!” Green Lantern huffed as Red Arrow stumbled back into the room. “Hey, Roy, is that why they used to call you ‘Speedy’?”
“Amusing.” The former Speedy wiped his lower lip.
“All right, kids,” Lantern said, “there’s a yaw on Inspiration Point.”
“Inspiration Point?” the former Wonder Girl asked.
“The observation deck,” Roy answered. “The old man’s having second-childhood fantasies. Calls this navigation bridge the Playroom.”
“Fourth, fifth, maybe eighth childhood,” Lantern said as he reached behind himself to spin a pair of switches like the dials on an Etch-a-Sketch. “Lost count.”
The craft took a sudden dip.
The colossal satellite tumbled end over end in space, and it was all Donna and Roy could do to keep their stomachs intact.
“They make pills for that now, kids,” Green Lantern said as he continued playfully to violate the stability of the craft. Both of these “kids” were well into their forties. The older man was immensely amused that the pair still did not realize it was he who was making the giant craft lurch. They must have thought he was crazy as Captain Queeg pretending not to notice it. “Hey, go check out Inspiration Point for pressure leaks if you think it’s important.”
And Roy and Donna giggled and held their stomachs like kids going up and down in a moon bounce as they crashed and shoved their way along the corridors and convection chambers of New Oa.
*
“He has been scrupulously secretive about his personal life since he was a very young man,” the Spectre said to me, “yet you knew that these two were not life companions. You knew right away that there had been someone else. How?”
“I told you. I’m a minister. Men and women. Life and love. Relationships. It’s my stock in trade.”
“I do not understand it,” the Spectre admitted. “Any of it. It has been so long since I was incarnate, and I have so filled the time with deeds and experiences. That was why I asked to impose upon your wisdom for this mission.”
Kingdom Come Page 17
