“What don’t you understand? Relationships?”
“Among humans. They are so complicated. I am sure that I never experienced one of the magnitude that these two have, yet you imply that this pales against the experiences of their youth.”
“Its magnitude is no less, perhaps,” I said. “Youthful loves are different, is all. There is less of the intellectual sharing than these two have, but more of the emotional and physical sharing.”
“When first I introduced you to Kal-El and Diana,” the Spectre observed, “you said that women scare men. I do not remember this from life.”
“Perhaps I was saying,” I observed, trying not to smile, “that such a woman as this would scare me. Superman seems not to be scared. Certainly, though, he was scared of Lois. Did you know her?”
“I did. I even met her once, shortly before she left mortal life.”
“What was she like?”
“Like this one,” the Spectre said, indicating Wonder Woman. “Unafraid. Unpredictable. Not like the mortal women I remember.”
“Would you say that Lois might have been a woman suited only for life with a very strong and sure man?”
“I do not know.”
“This woman Diana,” I said to the Spectre, “is very much unlike the public persona of the Wonder Woman I remember.”
“How is that?”
“The Wonder Woman of my youth was an icon. She appeared from nowhere to solve problems. Her tools were persuasion and intimidation, as much as her sword or her magic lasso. This woman is not so monolithic. She is complex. Certainly she is intimidating, but she’s thoughtful and intellectually honest. And she is unpredictable. The things she does, things she says, genuinely surprise Kal-El sometimes. He is exasperated and delighted by that, I am sure. I just don’t think a young man—even a young Superman—could be wise or brave enough to enter her intimate world. This is a relationship of maturity.”
The Spectre looked impassive. He always looked impassive, but I went on anyway.
“These are people who come together only after doing a lot of living,” I explained. “Only after being vulnerable and disappointed a lot. After loving and being loved a lot. Both of them. A woman this formidable needs a man who’s weathered, sanded down around the edges—or she needs to be with no one at all. And a man this weathered needs someone capable of making him forget the ghosts of his own sad stories—or he needs to be with no one at all.”
The Spectre looked at them some more, with clinical interest.
“Then again,” I said, “I may be wrong.”
“You may be wrong? You have been correct consistently. I have learned much from your insight,” the ghost said.
“Thank you.”
“But you are telling me that in the realm of human relationships there are no definable rules. Is that possible, Norman, in the context of God’s Creation?”
“I’m not saying anything of the sort. Certainly there are rules. We are just not smart enough to know what they are.”
*
Looking for the source of the strange instability of the New Oa satellite, and fighting the gyrations in space caused by Green Lantern, Roy and Donna reached the door of the observation deck. Donna was about to press the panel to slide it open when Roy stayed her hand.
“Shouldn’t we knock?” he asked her.
“If they’re in there, they already know we’re here.” The satellite spun a bit again. It lurched. On the ground a tremor like that might measure close to six on the Richter scale.
“Okay, then let’s open the door.”
They did…
… and found the observation deck dead as a ghost town. The globe of the Earth hung big and blue, 22,300 miles out the window. Then the floor shifted, and when the satellite stopped moving, the planet was only a crescent along the emerald pane and the constellation Orion hung where the Earth had been.
Donna leaned back against a wall and put a hand over her mouth. She was the spacesick one now.
It was a long shaky walk back to the navigation deck to find Green Lantern and tell him that Superman and Wonder Woman were nowhere to be found. Probably, Roy and Donna thought, the two of them went off somewhere for a deserved respite. That was not the case.
“All right, give the kids a break, Alan,” was what the two former Titans heard when they stepped, queasy and uncertain, back onto the navigation deck. It was Wonder Woman’s voice. As she said it, Lantern smiled, and the rocking and rolling of the satellite suddenly came stable.
Superman stood next to Green Lantern studying the topographical printout, and peered with telescopic vision out the bay window at the Amazon River on the planet out there. The Kryptonian looked down at the unrolled printout in his hands, then up at the Earth; down again, up again, comparing.
“Just natural annual river runoff,” Superman said. “No environmental dislocation as far as I can tell. The Amazon is pretty wild this time of year. The Earth will shift beneath your feet on a moment’s notice.”
Wonder Woman smiled at that and motioned for their two younger friends to come on in.
“No Magog?” Donna asked.
“No, haven’t found him yet,” Superman said as he put down the printout and clapped Alan Scott on the shoulder. “I hear you’ve caused these two a rough night.”
“You were doing that on purpose, Alan?” Red Arrow asked. “Making the whole satellite bump and grind like that? I thought—”
“You thought a spacecraft I built with my own hands would pitch like a rowboat just because we’ve got a crew who’ve been known to play a little rough once in a while?”
“No,” Donna said, “but we just thought—”
“Never mind what you thought,” the Green Lantern barked. “You two’ll learn to be competent space engineers before this thing is over, or you won’t keep down another meal.”
“Are competent space engineers required to work for days without letup and contend with their commander’s penchant for riding the bridge like the Bizarro Captain Ahab?” Roy wanted to know.
“Occasionally,” Alan Scott said, and as he reached for the stabilizer panel again, Wonder Woman grabbed at the nearest handhold. “We’ve got more work to do. What’s everybody say to some java?”
“I’ll get it,” Superman said. “I can brew it up in about a tenth of a second.”
The Man of Steel, unbound by inertia or the wages of fatigue, would have no trouble negotiating the gyrating corridor to the galley and back. Donna, Roy, and Diana laughed like kids at a carnival, clutching the green wall bars and hanging on to the magnetized floors of this emerald space palace. And Alan Scott, custodian of the power battery of the Guardians of the Universe, spun his stabilizer dials around and around, and the satellite pitched and yawed and spun and spun and spun, stomping and trumpeting: the Elephants’ Dance.
CHAPTER 14
Atlantis
Those who dwelled in the kingdom of the oceans were never as preoccupied as their surface-dwelling cousins with filling slots. Perhaps the casual attitude down here was based in metaphor: Water is more visible in filling a vacuum than air is, if not as eager as air is. The office of the President of the United States had never been unoccupied for more than a few hours at a time in its two and a half centuries. Asian, European, and African nations were, over the dynasties, inclined to put children on their parents’ unoccupied thrones and wrap those tiny fingers around the scepters of power, if only to keep authority away from eager and plentiful usurpers. Napoleon Bonaparte once declared his yet-unborn son King of Rome. When Rā’s al Ghūl’s spent and ancient body finally had crumbled seven years before, the forces of the shadow empire upended cities and rattled sedate civilizations in a frenzy to recover the Demon’s callow designated successor and explain to him the responsibilities that the rest of his unnaturally long life would involve.
By contrast, when Atlantis’ last ruler had expired, its civilization patiently waited. The new King completed his education and played out the extended d
rama of his youth before finally assuming the burden of the people’s crown. In Atlantis—even as a violent young culture sitting high on a volcanic rock in the sunshine millennia ago—a King did not have subjects so much as a nation had its King.
Now he was wise and grizzled beyond his early middle age. He’d grown up believing he was only Arthur Curry, dreamy son of a lighthouse keeper. He thought every kid could swim to Cape Horn and back in an afternoon and talk to the fishes on the way. Now he sat on the ancient Abalone Throne, and here he would stay for the foreseeable centuries.
“She remembers Aquaman,” Arthur told his Queen, “though I can barely recall the young fellow myself.”
“There was talk of a royal alliance in those days,” Delphia said.
“Really? Between whom?”
“Atlantis and the isle of the Amazons.”
“Through me?” The King had never heard of such a thing before and found the suggestion startling.
“Your exploits among the superhumans were fodder for popular entertainment throughout your youth, Arthur. Every rotation new odds were cast in the grottoes concerning whether and when you would marry her.”
“But we never even—”
“Never?” she asked.
“She’s an Amazon, for Neptune’s sake, Delphia.”
“Oh yes. I forgot about the surface men’s elaborate legends surrounding such women’s proclivities. They are a defensive mechanism, you know.”
“Pardon?”
“The prejudices and peccadilloes of a youth mostly spent on land.” The clear-skinned Queen smiled at him. “You still have traces of it, don’t you, my King?”
“I certainly do not,” he said.
The Queen smiled and expelled a trail of water bubbles as the Princess floated—struggling to appear to walk—into the throne room with her imposing consort behind her. The surface dwellers would not recognize the Queen’s trail of bubbles as an expression of mirth, and she could continue to poke at her husband’s spiny hide even in their presence.
Wonder Woman wore a pressure helmet and speaker; Superman did not require the undiluted oxygen and could communicate as the Atlanteans did through deciphering throat exhalations, much in the manner of speech.
Diana went down to one knee, floating upward from the sea floor as she lowered her head, and said, “Offering Your Majesty thanks for his gracious grant of an audience.”
“Diana, you look wonderful,” the King said. “The tides of time have been kind to you, Princess. Please speak freely. You know Delphia.”
“Of course,” she said. “This is a beautiful kingdom, an architecture worthy of Paradise Island.”
Superman started to extend his right hand to his former colleague and thought better of it. He simply said, “Hello, Arthur.”
“Good to see you, Kal.” The King turned back to Diana: “You have not aged a day since we met.”
“Thank you,” she said, observing the elaborate protocols necessary to ease the social encounter into a discussion of substance. “Would that the outside world had fared so well, but times above have grown hard and harsh.”
“The surface world is in a crisis, surely you know,” Superman jumped in to explain.
“Ah yes.” The crowned head nodded. “I see that the ocean trenches in which your cities dump your garbage are beginning to overflow. Is that the crisis you mean?”
“No, Arthur,” Superman said. “Certainly you’re aware of the—”
“The extinction of entire races of sea life upon whom surface industries have made themselves dependent? Is it that crisis?”
“Arthur, I’m sure you’ve—”
“Or perhaps you refer to the crisis of identity of the surface race. To their assumption that they are the rulers of the Universe, the assumption that obtains in their tiny little minds until they realize what a small part of a tiny speck in a vast cosmos among an enormous expanse of Creation they really occupy. And then when they realize that they don’t even really hold sway over their own minute fraction of a speck, they have—what did we used to call it?—an identity crisis. That crisis?”
Unlike Superman, Wonder Woman realized that a King’s suggestion to speak freely comes, like any other free lunch, with hidden costs. This is true even when—or perhaps especially when—the King is an old friend whose youthful exuberances peck at his memory. Or perhaps Superman was simply unused to paying such costs. Diana stood quietly—as protocol determined she ought to do—until she could stand the wait no longer. Then she interrupted.
“Your M-m-majesty.” She stammered a little.
The King cut himself off, smiled at her, and said, despite his Queen’s obvious amusement, “Please. Call me Arthur.”
“Arthur.” She tripped over the name as though it were uncomfortable for her to say. It was not uncomfortable, of course, but rather the name by which she had addressed him for years. Unlike her companion, however, the Amazon Princess knew that there were appearances one had to perpetuate. “Arthur, please excuse our presumption.”
“Nothing new,” he said. “I’ve been excusing it for years.”
“A new generation of metahumans has made the surface world harsh. The environment is becoming unlivable from a sociological standpoint as well as a physical one.”
“And this is a surprise to you?”
“Arthur,” she said, “surely you remember the virtue of many of the surface dwellers among whom you lived for so long.”
“What exactly do you feel you need from us, Diana?”
“Your political skill, Arthur, and your diplomatic—” Superman began, but she put a hand on his arm and interrupted again.
“We need something quite substantial. We need the seas to provide a buffer between the rebellious metahumans and the land-dwelling society. We need your permission to build an underwater penal colony for the rebels.”
“Excuse me?” This time Superman interrupted, surprised.
“Don’t insult me by acting disingenuous, Kal-El,” tossed off the King. “You’re Superman, for Neptune’s sake. Don’t pretend the Princess is making a request of which you were unaware.”
“I really didn’t know that—”
“He didn’t.” The Princess bowed her head with some contrition. “He has not yet agreed that such a facility is necessary. I just thought that it was unlikely that Your Majesty would want to leave his kingdom to undertake a dangerous and unlikely enterprise, but that you certainly would see the necessity of detaining and reeducating miscreants.”
“I do see the necessity, Diana,” Arthur said, “but our kingdom has grown too used to being burdened with the surface world’s refuse. Request denied.”
Superman realized that a few years ago he would have been better at this sort of thing—dealing on a personal level with a chief of state. In ten years of self-imposed exile, however, his interpersonal skills had eroded somewhat and his sense of protocol had virtually vanished. He determined at least to make the request he’d come here to make.
“Arthur, if only you could see the trouble we’re in up there,” Superman said to his curiously imperious old friend. “Stand at our side as you did in your youth. You have no idea how valuable just your presence would be. Please join us.”
Neither the Amazon Princess nor the Atlantean Queen had any idea what effect the frank plea of this one extraordinarily powerful man might have on this other extraordinarily powerful man. For a moment even King Arthur paused. Then he said, “Oh, Clark.”
Superman tilted his head.
“You are still Clark, aren’t you?”
“No, Arthur. I’m afraid not. Clark died some time ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the King said. “I liked him.”
“I did, too,” Superman said, “but now he’s gone.”
“I miss the camaraderie of those days, too, though I was never comfortable being your ‘Aquaman.’ I’ve left that name and role to Garth, my protégé.”
“He’s joined us, you know,” Superman said. “Pe
rhaps if he were to come and explain to you—”
“No, Cl— No, Kal. That would not work, either. Garth knows better.”
“I’m sure he does,” Wonder Woman added.
Finally Arthur softened to Superman, though his point of view did not. Perhaps it was the memory of the role the Man of Steel played as the ordinary but stolid newspaperman that woke the heart of the King. I wondered what Clark Kent had been like, wished I could have met him. I was sure I would have liked him, too.
“My subjects need me,” the King told the Princess. “You have hundreds of champions to defend a few paltry land masses. I protect the other seventy percent of the world. You could have no idea of the responsibilities I bear to my people here. Certainly you, Princess, are aware of the moral weight of a royal crown.”
“I no longer have my royal station, Arthur.”
“No?” The Atlantean was genuinely surprised. So was Superman, I knew, but he did not dare allow Arthur to see that. “What happened?”
“Recently my Amazon sisters who chose me as their ambassador to the outside world determined that my mission was a failure.”
“How so?”
“They were right. I failed to make the outside world a better place than it was when I left Paradise Island. Still, I insisted for one reason or another that I needed to continue. So they relieved me of my royalty and my heritage. I am no longer welcome on Paradise Island.”
“I am sorry,” the man who once had been Aquaman said. He paused and took a long gillful of the water around him. “I only wish that could have some bearing on my decision. But it cannot.”
The meeting had been over minutes before. It was only now that they were willing to recognize it.
*
“How long were you planning on keeping that from me?” he wanted to know. He would like to have known this the moment she’d suggested building a prison installation, and from the moment she’d mentioned the loss of her crown. Here in the open air, rising through the clear sky, was his first opportunity to bring it up.
“Which time?”
Kingdom Come Page 18
