“Congratulations,” Superman said, and smiled a rueful smile. “Given the nature of my own struggle, I had hoped that Orion, the Dog of War, could lend some wisdom. I was mistaken. I can learn nothing from you.”
I got nothing from Orion so much as the idea that I was communing here with a modern-age Moses, though without the street smarts. When Moses upended the despotic intentions of the Pharaoh who’d raised him, he found himself traversing a desert with a nation of slaves. Though it should have taken only a few weeks to shepherd these people to their Promised Land—even on foot—he’d walked them around in circles until the generation of slaves was replaced by a generation of free men and women. Smart. Orion was an intelligent man and full of fine intentions, but he was not a smart leader.
“You have conditions here,” Superman observed, “that are much like those I would have expected on Earth if I had followed the easier course of my life.”
“Eh?” This was something of which Orion had not thought before.
“I was equipped to rule,” the Kryptonian said, “as surely as you were.”
“You were,” Orion agreed. “I often wondered why you never took the strands of power from those less worthy than you.”
“I could find none less worthy than I was,” Superman said quietly.
Both of them stood looking across Apokolips for some moments. Within their far-reaching sight they could see all manner of illicit and depraved goings-on. There, on a platform of public space between two factory structures, not ten minutes’ walk from Orion’s palace, a man stood distributing harmful comestibles to young people in return for small economic markers. In a public square a crowd placed wagers on the outcome of a tearing fight to the death between two animals that, on Earth, might have been house pets. There were temptations for the taking, people for sale, confidences up for grabs. And over all this ruled one whom these people considered a living god.
In the days when God talked to the people of the Earth, when His Light peered visibly over our shoulders, people sinned. One day on Earth, we had come to sin so little that evidently God changed the rules, giving us all a measure of home rule and making it just that little bit more difficult for us to be good.
Here, however, the new god of these people—so long under the crushing thumb of Orion’s evil but nearly omnipotent father, Darkseid—had given them their free will perhaps a generation too soon. Maybe in the future when the children of this casually corrupt nation take control of their lives—even as Orion had taken the wheels of empire from that despot—they will begin to find a role model suitable for a free people to emulate. Freed slaves worship at the feet of those they perceive as gods; left alone, they would not emulate one such as Orion.
“Most of these souls I once thought to save are irredeemable,” the emperor told the super hero.
“Then what do you plan to do now?” The hot breeze from the open portico rustled in Superman’s cape.
“Often have I considered uprooting the more aberrant lowlies,” Orion said, “exiling them to some distant world.” He paused, pulled back his head as if annoyed with my silent monitor of his sensibilities. “It seems unconscionable, though, to inflict such grievous wounds on another planet. I am sure you agree.”
“Far be it from me to argue with the Lord of Apokolips,” Superman said, quite nearly amused at the legendary prince’s dilemma. Certainly he found Orion far more flummoxed and stiff even than Aquaman, but the mitigating sympathy born of long years of friendship did not apply here. “You seem, finally, your father’s son, Orion.”
“So it was prophesied. I am sorry I do not have more to contribute, Kal-El. Our story has forever been a generational one. Many men eventually become their fathers.”
“I wouldn’t know,” he said, and looked down at his feet for a moment. “I was pleased to learn that you finally had usurped your father’s throne. I looked forward to seeing what you had accomplished. Frankly, Orion, of all the old allies I have encountered, you disappoint me the most. You have absolute power here. You can change your world.”
“Or destroy it,” Orion said. “You would be surprised, I fear, at how easily one can lead to the other.”
“I am looking for answers to my own world’s ills, Orion. I have miscreants enough to deal with.”
“What you need, Superman, is a deportation center.” Orion looked up, suddenly aware that there was a way that he could help this Man of Vaunted Steel. “Bring your rebellious and uncontrollable elements to my realm. Certainly they would be no more challenging to me than my own subjects. They may even infuse a needed dose of initiative and inspiration to this wanton race.”
“Orion, I have no desire to uproot even the most troublesome of beings from their homeworld. Deportation is not a punishment I feel comfortable imposing.”
“Perhaps you should be more eager to play the judge, Kal-El.”
“An Earthly political theorist wrote that a ruler makes a choice of whether to rule from love or from fear.”
“My father made that choice for me.”
“I find here, Orion, a nightmare of what my own Earth could become—or could have become. Is there no one here who can help me to turn a world from rabid self-destruction born of fear to … to…”
“To some alternative?” Orion wanted to know.
I withdrew from Orion’s sensibilities—with significant relief—as he told Superman that, yes, there were two people here who believed there was an alternative to fear and insisted on imposing it. A dogged pair.
*
Barda and Scott Free had spent a lot of time on Earth in their youth, on an altruistic mission of cross-pollination; maybe a good example could be set in the process of mixing up the local technology with some of their own. It did not work out that way. His talent made Scott Free, effectively, the greatest escape artist of any world. As Mr. Miracle and Big Barda, the Frees made a lot of noise and a fine living with their stage act, and did some impressive superheroics along the way. Scott and Barda learned far more from Earth than Earth learned from them. They put on a few good light shows, participated in one of an endless succession of reformations of the Justice League, fell in love, settled in New Hampshire, and had a daughter—Avia. By the time Orion got around to summoning them home to be lieutenants in his revolution, neither of them any longer had a taste for battle.
With Orion safely machined into the palace and into the reflexes of the underclass, Barda and Scott had stripped away the fears and superstitions of the next generation of Apokolips denizens—and continued to do so.
“We’re bringing them culture,” Barda said to Superman. Surrounded by students, she was sitting with a mound of clay between her spread legs on the floor in the middle of a classroom. She molded, and the clay grew to a widening obelisk. When she ran out of mass she bored into the top of the mound, gradually hollowing it into the shape of a rather lopsided vase. The eyes of her two dozen or so students, young children to apparently middle-aged adults, were variously wide with wonder to narrowed with cynicism.
“Culture,” Superman repeated, watching the vase take form.
Barda was a big woman, the more so for the loose smock she wore and the clots of clay hanging from both her and the smock. “Free their bodies by freeing their minds,” Barda told Superman, boring into the mouth of her creation.
“Well, from the sound of him,” Superman said, “I’m sure Orion applauds your efforts.”
“Orion is a superannuated schoolroom bully with delusions of purpose,” came a voice from behind Superman, and every face in the room but Barda’s suddenly twisted into a mask of abject terror. Then the voice laughed as Scott Free, Barda’s diminutive husband and co-instructor, strutted into the room.
“There you are,” Superman said. “I was afraid I’d miss you.” Gradually people began to realize that no lightning bolt fried the room. No flood washed through the valley. No masked horsemen swept down from the hills to sack and pillage and burn. Then the timid souls born under the weight of a tyr
ant’s imperative looked up and began to suppose that, even in the presence of their presumptuous teacher, they would probably live through the day.
“Here I am.” Scott clapped Superman over the back of the steely shoulder like the adrenaline junkie he was. “You’ve been out of circulation, I hear. ’Smatter, no more challenges? You can always move in here, you know.”
Superman smiled, about to answer with something mildly clever, but lost the chance.
“So how many sculptors-in-the-making’ve we got here, Barda?”
“Don’t know yet, Scott.”
“You know what you do when you make art, gang?” Scott asked, and he answered himself, “You do the same thing you do when you make philosophy, or song … or rebellion. You do something Orion himself can’t do. You create something that was never there before. Get it?”
Scott Free was not good at waiting for answers to his own questions.
“Of course you do,” he said. “And you’re beginning to get it that a slaughterhouse is not a home and a ruler is not a leader. Nice work, Barda.”
“Thank you, Scott. Anyone else ready to try?”
Nobody volunteered. Nobody ever did.
“You. You. You. You,” Big Barda pointed out a sociological cross-section of their seminar. They understood and obeyed orders; she and Scott meant to fix that. “Grab an armload of clay and start molding.” She got up from her floor, clapped the clay off her hands and arms, went to where Superman and her husband talked, and gave the big man an enormous hug.
“Better reception than I got from Orion,” he said.
“Orion?” Scott repeated loud enough for the class to hear. “That fatted boorish bore who wouldn’t recognize a new idea if it cornered him in a Boom Tube and bit his head off? That Orion?”
The class cowered, but worked on, intent on their clay sculpture.
“That Orion.” Superman smiled. “A little confused just now. Like me.”
“Orion is a pretty well-meaning guy,” Scott said, hollering only the first word of the phrase, then adding in an even louder voice: “for a flat-willed, concave-minded intellectual microbe who hasn’t got the intelligence to get in the shower when civilization’s burning down, Orion is.”
Barda clapped and whooped, the students shuddered and grimaced, and, despite his mission and the mood of his aging soul, Superman laughed. But when he told this pair the saga of the lost prairie and the lost generation of metahumans, even they regained sobriety. He told them of the tricky business of containing that which was born never to be contained.
“We’ve been having the time of our lives here,” Barda said. “I mean, look at us. We’re home again, but no one here knows quite what to make of us.”
“We owe Earth a lot,” Scott said. “We plan to owe her lots more, if what we’re doing here bears any fruit at all.”
“So where does that leave us?” Superman wanted to know. “Are you two in?”
Barda began, “You’ll need a facility with a solid security force. Scott and I can put together the best—” but the rest of what she meant to say got cut off by a…
BOOOM!
A wave of air swept over the little campus and through the room. Eight students leapt for cover. A pillar of smoke arose from nowhere and vanished; in its place, there appeared a long tunnel snaking off into the infinite like mirrors reflecting in mirrors. And out of the tunnel stepped Avia.
“There you are, Superman,” the girl said. “I came to retrieve you from Orion’s lair but you were gone.”
“Nice to see you again, too, dear,” Barda said to the daughter who had gotten a tattoo and done about four hundred other things over the past few years against her parents’ expressed wishes.
“No time for that now, Mother,” Avia answered, more nervous than hostile. “Hurry. I cannot keep this Boom Tube open much longer.”
The Boom Tube was a link between dimensions, a wormhole through the stuff of Creation. I found it encouraging—a nice reflection on Him whose cause I’d made my own throughout my career—to find that the Spectre and I needed no such device to find our way home.
“You were counting on us to work alongside Avia?” Scott shoved Superman, who, to no one’s surprise, did not budge.
“The League is large,” Superman said. “Besides, I was told that your history has always been a generational one. You’re family. You are doomed to be together. Coming?”
They were.
CHAPTER 18
A Mountain Moves
I wondered about the chronic sinners, those who called themselves the Mankind Liberation Front, just wondered about them. From the Aurora I saw the face of my guide, the Spectre, grimacing and throwing aside the curtain, and we were in the dark lair again, with the sun streaming in the big picture windows high above Metropolis, the sun itself unable to shed light here.
Again, the evil company sat around the long conference table with Lex Luthor at its head. Nigma, the smiling pet dog who once had called himself the Riddler, was still here at Miss Kyle’s protective side. The tall valet also smiled, wider now, standing against the wall behind Luthor, his arms crossed over his chest like a genie eager to grant his master’s next behest. The young one, Ibn al Xu’ffasch, slim and crisp and moving with the fluid grace of European aristocracy, sat at Luthor’s left hand.
“Congratulations to our friend Xu’ffasch,” Luthor said, “for negotiating the one union that may yet make the world safe for mankind.”
Luthor looked around the table. Kobra, Savage, King, Naga, and the others stared expectantly at Luthor. Behind him, the tall genie still smiled.
“Friends,” Luthor said, “I present our newest ally in the war against the gods”—Luthor snapped, and the genie flung open the door—“the Batman.”
Through the door, smiling as if for all the world they belonged here, walked Bruce Wayne in his titanium bone-hangers, Oliver Queen the Green Arrow, Dinah Lance the Black Canary, and Theodore Kord the Blue Beetle. If I had been conscious in a conventional sense, I think even I would have fainted. As it was, my perceptions went blank for a moment. I could not see into these people’s intentions or their pasts or their souls anymore. They were a puzzle to me.
Handshakes all around. Smiles and winks. Batman whispered something embarrassing—I have no idea and did not think to listen—to Selina Kyle. The room settled.
“They’ve begun to build a Gulag, you know,” Wayne told Luthor.
“I know,” Luthor said, “that I don’t want to spend my remaining days there. I can hardly believe you’re here.”
As they all took their seats, Bruce Wayne smiled that smile that I’d hardly seen leave his face in all the time I’d observed him—a smile unlike any expression one would expect to find on the Batman.
To his found ally, Luthor said, “This must be killing you, Wayne. If I had known a common enemy could bring us together, I would have invented one years ago.”
“Given the circumstances, what choice do I have but to throw in with Lex Luthor?”
“Alone, neither you nor I can expect victory,” the ancient enemy of the Man of Steel said, “but together we can curtail the Justice League once and for all.”
“Strange times,” the Batman said, squeezing the villain’s hand. And he looked at his friends—at wary Oliver, at inscrutable half-smiling Dinah, at contemplative Ted—and said again, “Strange times.”
CHAPTER 19
Gulag
Scott Free never had met Captain Comet before their collaboration on the Gulag. They got along so poorly that later on, after Comet had become the first casualty of the war that finally did happen, Scott felt enormously guilty every chance he got.
“You better move, Comet,” Scott said, “or that structural beam’s going to Rube Goldberg you out of there.”
“What are you talking about?” Comet the engineer, the Merlin, the genius, asked him, not really wanting to know.
“You’re in a trap,” Scott Free replied. He spoke into a microphone from the hovercraft
observation platform in the sky above the city-sized building that rose from the desert floor.
“Uh-huh,” Comet said, sitting high on a gigantic cherry-picker, tapping away at his keyboard, barking orders into a datamike, trying to say as little as possible in answer to Scott so his construction programs did not get confused.
Scott Free, the escape artist, designed the Gulag as a maze within a labyrinth within a web, an escape-proof prison the size of a city. It took Captain Comet—Adam Blake, the ageless son of midwestern farmers born back in the days when more people lived on farms than in cities—to figure out a way to fit it all together. They were a team, doomed to collaborate whether they wanted to or not, like Superman and Batman.
*
In years to come, history might call Adam Blake the first modern man, just as, in other times, similar titles had gone to Socrates or Copernicus or Franklin. Blake was probably the first man whose worldview included an intuitive understanding of the Einsteinian model of the Universe. That is, he understood relativity better than Einstein himself; to the physicist it was a way of looking at the Universe, while to Adam it was an everyday fact. Of course light bent a little as it flew by a star; so did everything else. Of course your physical dimensions changed and your mass approached infinite as you approached the speed of the energy you used; or else how could you tell the difference between energy and yourself?
“Of course everything is relative,” young Adam Blake had told the kindly but personally disengaged physics professor with the thick German accent who’d taken an interest in the boy’s case.
“I thought I said that,” the professor had wondered.
“Did you really?” the child asked. “And you thought it was your idea?”
At the University of Southern California, in the dark years before the Second World War, Adam, five, aging very slowly, had not yet grown the last of his baby teeth. Until he was fully ten years old, he would still have a soft palate and speak with the damp lisp of a toddler. Some of the things he said as a boy, however, had no business coming from the mouth of so young a child, let alone in a toddler’s voice.
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