Magog did not know much about building things. He put together the shell of a house without any crossbeams and tried to set it down on a flat strip of soft earth without any foundation. First the lower strips of outer wall began to give way under the pressure of the upper beams. Then the building’s center of gravity began to shift with its weight on the unstable ground beneath. Angrily, Magog brought up his rod and blew the shell apart like the big bad wolf. If he’d known for sure that Superman was watching him, he might have tried harder to fix it.
“What are you doing here, Magog?”
“Well, as I live and breathe”—Magog turned around to the left so his working eye could hit his antagonist first—“if it isn’t the Abominable Plowman. Still grow the best icicles south of the Equator, Supes?”
“If you can’t make it work, then destroy it, eh, Magog?” the Kryptonian asked, evaluating his opponent’s building skills.
Behind Superman, every flying being who’d been in the New Oa satellite at the time of Ray’s call—he’d gotten them the news of his discovery from a pay phone in a suburb of Denver—touched down on the desert floor.
Green Lantern, Red Tornado, Aleea Strange, Hourman, and others kicked up the worthless dust that a few months ago had been the most productive farmland on Earth. Superman had told them all to stay at the satellite while he dealt with Magog, but only Wonder Woman had even considered staying behind, though ultimately she did not.
“I never left,” Magog said, ignoring the others, “unlike your eminent self.”
“I didn’t come here for a verbal joust, kid. I saw the satellite footage of your last big mission, and believe me, it will be your last.”
“Hey, you’re not the same, Supes. No summons? No jury trial this time? No due process? Not even a bill of bloody attainder?”
“Consider it an act of martial law, Magog. You brought six powerhouses out here to gang up on one deluded little Parasite. Not only did you blow apart your own ill-served allies, but in the first minute after the clash you killed one million people. Who knows how many have died since?”
“Oh get out of town,” Magog said, and laughed. “Oh, I’m sorry. You already did that.”
“You’ll be confined for an indeterminate period, during which time you will undertake a much-needed educational schedule.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re less interested that you pay for your crime than in assuring that it never takes—”
“Crime?” Magog thundered. “My crime? You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
Superman stood silently, containing.
“This was all your fault,” Magog said. “Don’t you see it?”
It was Green Lantern who took a step forward from behind Superman first. “Kal, you don’t need to—” and it was Diana who yanked the big man back by the armor of his wrist and shushed him.
“My fault?” Superman whispered to Magog, astonished.
“Sure,” Magog said. “Just ask any of your buddies over there to explain it to you.”
Now Superman put up a hand to wave back his colleagues. “Maybe you should explain it to me, Magog.”
“See, you were supposed to be the mentor figure,” Magog said, “but instead you were the shadow wizard. Don’t you get it?”
Superman just stared at him, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. “Haven’t you read the literature? They wrote about you. About me. Even about them, your golden horde.”
Superman steamed. Surely with whatever powers he had, Magog could see the fumes coming from the Kryptonian’s ears, from his nostrils, the heat waves trickling up from his scalp. But this was Superman. He did not lose his temper. Instead, he actually sat down on a big rock. The rock was hot, throwing off radioactivity as Superman’s own torrents of fury shadowed it.
“When I was a kid, you know,” Magog went on, talking faster, nearly manic now, “you were everybody’s mentor figure. You were the elder. The great gray god. Everyone you inspired—including me—had to be the hero of his own story, right?”
Magog waited for a nod, for a raised eyebrow, for some confirmation of concurrence or at least understanding. Getting none, he continued, faster now.
“But you didn’t want to give up the throne. Didn’t want to pass the torch to your natural successor. Couldn’t bear to recede from the light. So you had to be overcome. I had to overcome you, and it was your manipulation that made me do it. You know that, right? You must know it, or you wouldn’t have skipped out on everyone when I finally beat you. When you finally made believe I won. Right?”
Magog stopped even looking up for reassurance now. He just explained away, faster and faster, staring at the ground; at the horizon; at his rod; at anything but Superman’s corybantic eyes.
“You bought into the will of the people. The American thing. The American Way, you always called it, right? Well, anyhow, I knew by the time I was an adult that was just a selling point. I thought I understood the day-to-day marketing of superheroism too. It was easy to figure out. I thought when I got the powers myself, using them would be just as easy. That’s where you tricked me.”
“I tricked you?”
“You admit it, see?”
Superman took a deep breath and silently counted to a billion. “You tricked me into killing the Joker so you didn’t have to. The Joker wiped out ninety-two men at the Daily Planet that day—”
“—and one woman.”
“Whatever. Over ninety guys, and you didn’t know how to deal with him. I knew how to deal with him. I was the one who finally blew his innards into the next county when the police were transferring him. And what do you do? You get me arrested for murder.
“For murder. For killing the Joker. That was the joke. The killing joke. You called me a criminal. In public. And then you testified against me. You didn’t care about any of the hundreds of people the Joker had killed. Humans are like pets to you.”
Superman wheeled to his feet, his eyes glowing red and then white with anger, for just a moment, and then he cooled. He stood there, staring at Magog in fury and wonder.
For his part, Magog was so lost in his take on history that he seemed not even to notice the Man of Steel now on his feet.
“They let me off, of course. The people of the city did. That was who they were. They wanted the guy who’d be tough. Who’d protect them. Who wouldn’t be afraid to kill. But even when I won the judgment, you deprived me of my triumph. You turned tail. You rose into the air and headed south and never came back. That’s when I realized who you were. You were the Destiny that blew Odysseus’ ship all over the Mediterranean. The Wicked Witch of the West. You would be secretly controlling my life until the day I defeated you. And until I could defeat you, overcome you, transcend you—until I gained the boon that the hero gets when he vanquishes the dragon—until that day I could only work to prove myself over and over again, make myself stronger and stronger, until this day—” Finally Magog slowed down the manic pace of his speech to some arguably rational rate and looked up at Superman, who stood just steps away from him. “This day, today, when I’ve got you where I want you.”
Reflexively, many of the men and women among the dozens of costumed folks still trickling down from the satellite to the desert floor took a step forward. Their leader needed defending. But Diana put up her arms in front of them like the schoolyard monitor, and, so help me, they all stood their ground.
“Your heritage is fear, Superman,” Magog accused, “the fear of a child huddled under his covers that the boogie man will get him before Superman arrives. Fear that a rumble will come down on your house and nuke you and your whole state. Fear that the real Man of Tomorrow is me. That’s your heritage, Superman, Man of Steel, Last Son of Krypton, Defender of the Defenseless, Keeper of the Faith, King of the Universe, and this out here—”
He gestured grandly at the busted shell of a house, at the evaporated lake bed beyond, at the barren desert that once was Kansas.
“—this is my heritag
e,” and Magog fell silent.
Said Superman, dripping sarcasm: “You must be proud.”
“Proud?” Magog whispered. Then, “Proud?” he screamed as loudly as stepped-up lungs could scream, and because he could scream no louder he spun the hollow golden spear in his hand in Superman’s direction and loosed its chilling cry at Superman’s midsection, and the desert floor went thunderous and white.
His cape burned away under the power of Magog, but when the light settled and the echoing flew too far away to hear, there still stood a Man of Unbending Steel.
It was the moment Magog had awaited from the time a god or a demon gave him power. It was the power Magog had focused through the rod he’d clutched like a talisman through all these empty years. It just rolled over Superman like light over his face, as Magog always knew it would. Superman took not so much as a step toward Magog, nor did he toss him a glance of those radiant eyes.
Still, Magog went down.
He went down to both knees, and his golden-antlered helmet tumbled off to reveal the tendrils of the biomechanical suit wrapping up from his spine to hold the seams of his body together. His patchwork body was strong and firm as ever, but his hair was gone. His scalp peeking up among the strands was the only indication of the battering of radiation that Magog had withstood during these past months.
“Proud?” Magog said. Truly there was little left in either the body or soul of the human he once seemed to have been, but Magog himself remembered the notion of contrition from the shadows of those ancient days of his life. “You think I’m proud to be the Man of Tomorrow? The world took a jag off the straight and narrow, and you claimed too much dignity to follow. So they chose the man who would kill over the man who wouldn’t, and now they’re dead. Yeah, a million of them in the first minute and who knows how many more in the days after. Dead, at the hands of their own anointed.”
Wonder Woman took a step forward, and Green Lantern followed. Then so did the others. They came as close as their own powers would allow them to come to the still-steaming hot figure of Superman, who forbore to put a hand on Magog’s heaving shoulders because no one knew how much heat the Man of Gold could take.
“Proud of being the Man of Tomorrow? It’s your fault, you self-important bastard,” Magog said.
Magog looked up, and around him the figures of the great and the powerful gathered. But he saw only the countless figures that danced in his mind. “A million ghosts,” he said. “Punish me. Lock me away. Kill me. Just make the ghosts go away.”
Diana knew that Superman needed to feel a comrade’s hand as surely as Magog needed an undeserved comforting one. She put a hand on that enormous shoulder, touched the scalding blue shirt that felt like a gossamer pulled tight over a slab of hot-tempered steel. They would leave this tarnished Man of Gold here for the moment, here in the desert of his own making. No harm from him would come to anyone; there was nowhere else for him to go.
Superman looked down at Magog, at the crumbled wreckage of the torrent of demon energy that ten years ago had ended his career, and he said, “We are at war.”
CHAPTER 17
Apokolips
“War is something you know about,” I heard Superman say. “I need to learn.”
“Where are we?” I asked my Spectral companion.
“Somewhere new,” he said cryptically.
Cryptic was one of his less endearing moods.
We were listening to a labored conversation between Superman and someone with a deep rumbling voice. That voice answered Superman’s request, “I am not a teacher.”
I saw a vast rocky world. There was no Aurora, no azure hue to the sky, no sun; there were no clouds. We approached the surface of the land, and the rocks grew to mountains, and the pebbles grew to buildings and linked to form a great city of pipes and bridges and tunnels among the structures. The buildings or their adjuncts and connectors covered every visible iota of surface. Steam belched from smokestacks, and heat erupted in patterns that seemed at first random, but then grew rhythmic.
The prepossessing blankness—the sunlessness—of the sky loomed only larger as we dropped toward ground that seemed to get larger and more distant as it grew discernible. After what felt like a hundred years of approach and the coming-together of a vast planetwide latticework, we touched down finally on what seemed to be the city floor. The orange star burned cold across the black and sooty sky. I looked down at what ought to have been the ground, but suffered a sudden attack of vertigo. I was not on the ground, but on a wide elevated course of foot and vehicular traffic. Dark hooded creatures and smoke-belching craft rumbled by on all sides. The city descended farther below us—for miles, it seemed—to vanish finally in a cloud of surface gas that obscured the depth of the buildings.
“This time it is really not Earth,” I told the Spectre.
“No,” the Spectre said. “Not Earth. Another world in another vibratory phase of Creation. The people of this place call it Apokolips.”
“It’s real?”
“Quite real, but not the fairy tale of a final judgment that many of your colleagues have told to countless children. It is a world like your own. Its history is all that makes it different.”
Moments after I had looked down and felt like falling, after my dour spirit had told me that there but for fortune went my own tortured Earth, a flash of color punctuated this drab sky. He touched down within our sight. He stood now, that great red cape hanging flat in the breezeless dawn, on the peak of a building maybe a quarter-mile from our vantage point.
The dark voice, coarse as fresh ground ice, was behind me now. It continued, “These days I have only my own realm on whom to make war.”
The figure on the rooftop vanished from his perch and lifted into the sky, to reappear at the side of the Spectre. Certainly Superman did not know that he was there—or that I was, for that matter. I was still uncomfortable with the notion of people walking through me, so I stepped back to look at the source of the rumbling voice. It was an enormously thickset fellow in a regal tunic that looked like it would better fit another man. The hooded company of passersby parted for his every step. He moved, as unmindful of his subjects as of the Spectre whom he walked through, to grasp Superman by the forearm.
“Kal-El,” the ruler said.
“Orion,” the Kryptonian answered. “The place looks … the same, actually.”
“That it does.”
The big man in armor, Orion, was the ruler of this land, but he seemed somehow ill suited to the role, uncomfortable. He walked the roads and platforms of the realm as a common man, but the commoners sliced him a path through their commerce as though his very being were a knife slicing away their lives. Superman was uncomfortable as well. Me too. What kind of a place was this?
“He is the son of the one known as Darkseid,” the Spectre told me, uncharacteristically unsolicited.
“They are helpless,” Orion said.
“They have you now,” Superman offered.
Orion looked around at his subjects. They cowered in frank fear as they noticed him standing in this public spot. They went about their business, looked away or smiled expectantly. Expectantly. Perhaps what they expected was a lightning bolt in the small of the back.
“They elected me, you know,” Orion said.
“Excuse me?”
“They did. It was quite fair.”
“Orion,” Superman said, “I find myself a little disoriented here. Do you suppose we could talk in some more private place?”
Orion looked around at his faceless minions, evidently wondering why it made a difference, then shrugged in acquiescence. They both took to the air, Orion with the help of a jet mechanism built into his sleeves and boots and Superman under his own power. The Spectre propelled us effortlessly in their wake. I closed my eyes and had no sense of movement.
I am sure that what disoriented Superman—that most interplanetary of Earthmen—was the tendency of Orion’s subjects to accord him the deference a dog accords it
s abusive master. Yet he stood among them, walked among them, conducted business and conversation among them as though he were one of them. It perplexed me.
Now we stood in a big room of a dark palace, open to the world like an elaborate balcony. Beyond and below was the endless expanse of Apokolips. I could not imagine who would want to live in such a place, let alone rule it. I wanted to reach into Orion’s mind, but he seemed so powerful and forbidding.
“Can I do this?” I asked the Spectre.
“You are immune,” my companion said. “Any notion of physical restraint or pain, any corporeal sensation at all, is but a remnant of your Earthbound consciousness. A conditioned reflex. Reach out and understand Orion, if you like.”
So I dove in. I reached out a hand, passed it inside the ruler’s head as the Spectre had done to me when first we’d met, and suddenly I was sucked in. It was like diving feet-first with my arms extended upward into a churning whirlpool. The sensation was not pleasant, but I stayed until my consciousness began to decode the signals swirling about me. He was not happy, this Orion, and he was not certain why.
“They really did elect me,” he said to Superman as they stood looking out upon the vastness of this tiny fraction of Orion’s realm. “We had no heritage of free choice, so I even retained the oversight of some of the election experts of your Earth.”
“Really? Anyone I know?”
“You know all of them, I think. A former American President, a former Russian President, the South African Archbishop, a few others.”
“Impressive. It should have worked.”
“I suppose it did. It did not seem to matter, though. When I overthrew my father and declared the ruling councils null, no one had any idea how to govern his own actions, let alone a planet. They looked to me for leadership. I won by what you and yours might call an obscene plurality.”
Kingdom Come Page 21
