Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “Both times. You made me look like a fool in front of the King. He didn’t even believe it was news to me.”

  “I probably should have brought it up before.”

  “Probably? Diana, you’re suggesting a fundamental tactical and philosophical shift about which I have grave concerns.”

  “We’ve got rogue metahumans scattered in prisons and makeshift facilities all over the world. Most of them, though, are running around loose with your unspecified threats still ringing in their ears. More captives than converts.”

  “And you suggest that we arrogate to ourselves the position of judge, jury, and Grand Inquisitor.” They flew fairly slowly. Only now were they reaching the edge of the atmosphere, where even these two could no longer hear one another speak until they reached the satellite.

  “Kal, I’m tired,” Diana said as her musculature flexed and pulsed around itself in that impossible way it has to do in order for a person to fly. “You don’t know about being tired, and it’s a stretch for me, but the pace of this thing is horrendous. So sometimes I just want to get things done and I leave things out. I’m just used up sometimes. I’m sorry, all right?”

  For years, this man had lived with a human wife whom he’d loved and regarded as his partner and equal. He’d grown up in the home of two normal parents, fine people with no powers or abilities beyond those of mortal men. Now he was pressing this Amazon prodigy to the walls of her own strength. He should have known better, he knew. “I’m sorry,” he said. “All right?”

  And for a while it was all right.

  *

  “And there was a rainbow round about the throne,” came the echo in my memory of old Saint John through the voice of Wesley Dodds, “in sight like unto an emerald.”

  Everything aboard New Oa was as green as Atlantis, and glowed as well. Against the backdrop of space, it made for a surrounding that seemed far more verdant and vital even than the teeming sea floor. The big satellite spun above the Indian Ocean and moved due north.

  “We’ve done pretty well at attracting large numbers of our colleagues and successors,” Superman began. He stood at a seat around a large round green table. He paused and continued, “but we struck out on two big ones. Most of you know by now that Bruce Wayne—the Batman—and the former Aquaman, King Arthur Curry, have declined to join us.”

  There were creased foreheads and murmurings around the table. Evidently everyone here did not already know this. For many, both the Dark Knight and the King of the Seven Seas were nearly the role models that Superman himself had been. Garth, the new Aquaman, whom Arthur once had considered his son, was especially disappointed but not surprised.

  “He told me to play out the extended drama of my youth,” Garth said.

  “Guess what, Garth?” whispered his old friend Red Arrow.

  “What?”

  “You’re graying around the gills, pallie. It may be too late for that drama.”

  “We’ve all got that problem”—Superman smiled for the first time today—“except maybe Diana.”

  The Man of Steel chaired the meeting quite informally. More than two dozen powerful and accomplished women and men sat at this table or stood in the room, but rather than trying to impose parliamentary procedure to keep order, Superman simply approached it as though he were having a conversation with his friends. If someone interrupted him, he supposed that person had something important to say. As it happened, no one—not even among this collection of colorful types—interrupted him lightly.

  Around the table in the Earthrise room of the New Oa satellite sat the members of the Justice League who had made themselves the most active in the past weeks. Among the older ones were the “Seven Angels” who’d stormed the Statue the day of the New United Nations news conference, as well as Captain Comet, Tornado, Donna Troy, and others. The younger ones—Avia, Starman VIII, Bulletgirl, Tyra, and the others—wondered how they’d ever made it here.

  Superman looked across the room at Garth again and mused: “It would be like Arthur to call the cratering of Kansas a ‘learning experience’ for the people who died there.”

  Garth took it as a rebuke but he need not have. Diana saw him trying to blend into the curved green wall, grinned at him, leaned in, and shoved his shoulder with her own. Certainly the friendly shove would have knocked me to the ground, and it nearly did that to the new Aquaman, but he smiled back.

  “Any other new business?” Superman asked.

  Nothing.

  “All right,” he said. “Back to work. Diana and I are off to eastern Europe today to do some recruiting. Anyone without a specific assignment is welcome to come along. We’re adjourned.”

  As Superman left the room with Wonder Woman behind him, Captain Comet got up from his chair and smiled at the quizzical Avia. She whispered to the older man, “He’s so casual, and somehow unattainable at the same time.”

  Captain Comet nodded.

  “He has no idea what he’s accomplished here already,” Avia put forth, and the Captain shrugged.

  Avia talked and the Captain gestured toward the door. Both of them knew that Superman could well be listening.

  CHAPTER 15

  Citizen Wayne

  “If I hadn’t been so rich, I might’ve been a great man,” the character in the old movie said.

  As he always did, Bruce Wayne doubled over on his seat and rolled to the left. He used his titanium framing as a rocking pontoon on the couch, and he laughed. Slowly, in what spare time he afforded himself, he was restoring parts of the old manor house with his own hands. The living room with his beloved grandfather clock where his mom once had read to him from Dr. Seuss and from Hans and Margaret Rey, where his dad used to smoke his pipe until dawn, sometimes over a mystery novel, was nearly done. It was done enough to be watertight, done enough for a couch and a monitor. Wayne had not laughed so hard and so long from the age of eight to age fifty. Then the line about being a great man had begun to strike him funny.

  He laughed so loudly that he missed the next line. It had been so long since he had not laughed that Bruce Wayne forgot what the line was.

  In the years after Superman dropped from the world’s stage, especially once knowledge of the Batman’s identity had entered the collective consciousness, with some of his surviving enemies trashing the most visible trappings of his enormous wealth, something strange had happened to Bruce Wayne. Gradually, without reason or explanation, he’d become happy. There was no denying it, and it had puzzled him at first.

  *

  There were two things in this life with which Bruce Wayne had to come to terms: First, his parents were not coming back; and second, no matter how much and how painfully he taught himself to be better at sharing his soul and his life, there would never be a woman able to handle him properly. Even setting aside his incalculable wealth, Bruce Wayne was undeniably a high-maintenance guy.

  His parents had been taken from him when he was eight. Dr. Thomas and Martha Wayne had died at the hands of a petty thief. It’d happened when social taboos against killing a child obtained even among the dregs of the community, probably the last time such a gunman would leave behind even an innocent-eyed witness to robbery and murder.

  If the gunman had simply asked for the necklace, if he had not resolved even before he met them to kill his victims, then Thomas and Martha probably would have found a way to break the natural laws of engagement and solve the problem. Martha might have looked at the robber—a boy himself, really—with that tilted head and that piercing temperament and the can-do attitude that had brought her through four years of Army intelligence work. He would have relented—just enough—when she asked him what the problem was, or what drove him to thievery, or how she might make it all better with a few phone calls and a chance for honest work. Even if he was not interested in honest work, she had that way of convincing folks that they wanted what she thought they ought to want.

  And when the young man did not lower the gun, Thomas would have evened the sides by of
fering to buy the pistol from him. What is that thing, he would have asked, a little Raven? What’d you pay for that on the street, about forty-five bucks? Will you take a hundred for it? Give it here before you hurt yourself and I have to take you to the emergency room. Come on, come on, he would have said as he threw open his jacket and casually revealed the location of the secret cash pouch in his belt and peeled off a pair of hundred-dollar bills for the guy and offered to buy him a bite with the family, too. We just saw The Mark of Zorro, he would have told the former gunman as Dr. Wayne tucked the little pistol into the lining of his tailored jacket. They re-released it, you know. Don’t hardly make movies like that anymore, he would have said … introducing his little son—This is my boy, Brucie—to the man who might have changed the child’s life, and they would have shaken hands.

  Never happened. It took Bruce Wayne most of a lifetime to get over the fact that it never happened. In the course of that most-of-a-lifetime he chased after the ghost of the man who had murdered Thomas and Martha Wayne in the street and made even more miserable the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who thought they might get a leg up by stepping on the backs of others. In the course of that most-of-a-lifetime he spent several fortunes on computer hardware and paramilitary vehicles and travel and research and relief funds and cavern renovation and a big spotlight with a special lens that cast a signal on the sky and what-all. And in the course of spending all that money, the family fortune under his stewardship only grew to monstrous proportions. Bruce Wayne—with the collusion of Alfred Pennyworth, whom Martha and Thomas had given a home after the death of his father, their servant—had taken charge of his own life at the age of eight. No one but Pennyworth ever caught on to the little mogul’s innate genius, a secret both of them guarded gleefully. Technological and industrial breakthroughs that the Batman had made in the course of his ongoing war on the denizens of the Gotham underbelly formed the basis of the reinvention of Wayne Industries.

  Bruce Wayne believed in the supernatural, and he believed that the energy that drives the Universe is an intelligent force. Like his Puritan forebears, he took his success as an indication that he was doing what he was properly meant to do. Then one day he realized that his hoary old city, his family heirloom Gotham, was finally the palace of his dreams. Even in these restive times, every citizen who walked these avenues and enjoyed these pavilions was responsible to every other, and no child was in danger on these streets. It was still a garrison state where his great mechanical bats patrolled the skies, but he was close enough finally to know that his efforts were working, and Bruce Wayne was happy.

  He was happy.

  There were no parents, and they would have made great old folks too if they had ever had the chance, but they did not. There was no one with whom to share all this, not even Talia, who would have made a great partner if she and Bruce had ever had the chance, but they did not. Hell, any of a hundred strong women would have made a great partner, but Talia would have made the best one. Bruce Wayne was doomed, he’d decided long before, to share his life only with his male friends: with Alfred, who was dead, and Dick, who was estranged, and Clark, who was on his own mad crusade these days. So now there were Ted and Ollie. Sure, there was Dinah, who belonged with someone else, so she may as well have been a man for all he cared. But Bruce Wayne was doing his job.

  He had many luxuries, but the greatest of them was knowing where he belonged in the world, and knowing that was where he was. He thought about Talia often: Talia, the daughter of perhaps the greatest of his enemies—Rā’s al Ghūl; beautiful, exotic, brave Talia; a memory of love swallowed up by circumstance.

  This afternoon, in the few hours a week he gave himself for leisure—and he did give himself a few hours a week for leisure now—he punched up a disk of Citizen Kane. It was a comedy. At least it was for Bruce Wayne. He laughed raucously all the way through it and could not for the life of him remember how somebody could be that rich and still be that miserable. And he thanked God and went back to work.

  CHAPTER 16

  Magog

  “You know I’ve never been comfortable with forcing others to follow my lead, Diana.” They were in the twilight room of the emerald satellite. Earthrise filled the lower right-hand corner of the dome window, and soon the big blue marble with its shifting white patterns would fill their line of vision. “Now we’re about to imprison those who won’t.”

  “That seems to be the prescription, Kal.”

  Superman was not in the habit of pacing, of forcing his mind to percolate an idea, but in the face of this woman’s prodding, even his mind could not work fast enough to bubble up an alternative. So he paced.

  “What’s the problem, Kal?”

  “You want us—me, really—to be judge, jury, and jailer. I am simply not comfortable with—”

  “Since when did you require comfort?”

  “You’re talking like a fascist, Diana.”

  “Well, I can admit to being a monarchist, but that’s not something I’ve ever imposed on anyone, and I don’t advocate doing it now.” She allowed a deep breath and turned away from the looming globe of the Earth to face him. “In a war you don’t stop to consider secondary principles. And that’s what this is. A war.”

  “So we’re forced to crack heads among our own kind.”

  “Will you stop that ‘our own kind’ garbage, Kal? We’re all stakeholders in that planet out there. No more, no less. It’s our role to be protectors of humanity. And these people we’re talking about are barely human. Get some perspective, will you?”

  “Is that you, Diana?”

  “Is that you, Kal?”

  “You seem so angry.”

  “Not angry. Passionate.”

  “Oh. That.”

  Somehow there was suddenly no space between them, and the satellite and the planet and the sun beyond faded from their perception. And someone coughed.

  “’Scuse us?” Red Arrow said.

  “What?” Superman wanted to know.

  “It’s Magog, Superman. We found him.”

  *

  I thought for a while that I was a dupe of the prophets of old, that my burden of tongues and visions was a curse foretold and required by our holier ancestors, who’d walked through life having conversations with their Creator the way we might talk back and forth with a friend. Magog was the real dupe.

  Somewhere toward the end of the book of The Revelation of Saint John the Divine, the book from whose account of an apocalyptic future I found myself quoting against my will in languages in which I have never been fluent, the mad old visionary mentions something called Magog. It is refreshing, as I tell this story, to have to look up the exact line; refreshing not to have it blossom unbidden like the weed of my cerebellum. Saint John gave to us a narrative prophecy of what would happen when the Beast—man and God’s implacable ancient enemy—takes over the world. John wrote:

  And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, And shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea. And they went up on the breadth of the earth, and compassed the camp of the saints about, and the beloved city: and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them. And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

  So what was this Magog? Our Magog? Was he a player in this ancient dance between God and Satan? Between Man and Beast? Whom did he fancy himself to be in this fossil of a morality play?

  I was feeling strong. I was growing into the eternal agelessness of this spirit state in which I had already “lived,” it seemed, for so long. I touched the soul of Superman himself and of uncounted others whom the casual observer would surely judge far greater than I am. When the Spectre and I found Magog—moments before Superman and his company did, in fact, on the b
arren floor of what once was Kansas, trying to reassemble the broken pottery of his crime brick by shattered brick and bone by ashen bone—I felt through the ether and the souls around me as I learned to do, and sought out the story of this most tortured of God’s creatures.

  *

  Magog had been, for a short time, a particular target of the investigative journalist Lois Lane. His path to acceptance among the general public in Metropolis had eased with Ms. Lane’s demise. By the time of my arrival with Ellen in Metropolis, Lois Lane was already very renowned and accomplished, with half a dozen Pulitzers and even more Peabodys, a perennial presence on the best-seller lists, once winning a Grammy for a video edition of a book on the Mount Pisgah conspiracy—the attempted coordinated terrorist attack on several heavily populated areas of the Middle East that her investigation had helped to avert. For some time the tabloids and the personality magazines routinely had referred to Lois Lane as “Superman’s Girl Friend,” always in capital letters as though an official title. An obvious match: the hero of the planet with the woman seeming to exemplify initiative and courage and all those qualities that we like to think are the best in the human community. Ms. Lane and Superman had been friends, certainly, but Superman had a lot of friends in those days. The loose talk of “Superman’s Girl Friend” stopped abruptly with Lois Lane’s marriage to Clark Kent, a reporter on his way to becoming the last editor-in-chief of their newspaper, the Daily Planet. From then on—in public as well as in private—every utterance from this most liberated of women seemed to be punctuated with “Clark says,” or “Clark thinks,” or “Clark always insists,” or simply “my Clark.” So she had not been “Superman’s Girl Friend,” despite her adoring public’s wishes. The title that never evaporated from Lois Lane was “America’s Sweetheart.” That one stuck.

  Many of the people who’d admired Lois Lane found it ironic that Magog finally had avenged her death. A world that had begun to collect superpowered champions of principle and justice like barnacles had accumulated villains and menaces of comparable potency: a sociological trend of the late Twentieth Century that—as we should have realized then—would presage the conflagration to come as the line between hero and villain fuzzed and finally faded away. Probably the most bizarre of these criminals was a homicidal madman who called himself “the Joker.”