Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  *

  Then there came the others: Tokyo Rose, the Japanese martial artist. Mr. Terrific and the Joker’s Daughter from my experience on the Outerborough Bridge in Metropolis. In Tokyo, Power Woman took down the Kabuki Kommando in mid-bladeswing, and Red Arrow blinded the Jade Fox just as Superman arrived.

  Stars and Stripes, youngsters who took their models from the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy of a couple of generations back, got caught smuggling Stealth and the new Catwoman into a neutral, left-leaning country in Central Africa in an attempt to destabilize the government there. Wonder Woman flew headlong with her arms outstretched upward across the windshield of Stars and Stripes’ camouflaged and converted DC-3. When they swerved in surprise, creating a moment of zero-gravity inside the plane, the craft’s engines cut out. To the horror of all four people aboard, the craft was out of control. To their subsequent consternation, it did not crash, but rather turned in the sky and headed west. They knew where they were going and who was in charge—carrying the plane through the air under its bulging belly—long before they arrived in Kansas.

  Then to the Gulag came the Braintrust, whom I had seen at the Statue, and with them came the still-recalcitrant Americommando with his Minutemen, and two of those three hang-gliders who had tried to ambush them. The three turned out to be metal alloy androids named “Red,” “White,” and “Blue,” and there was no telling who controlled them—but for whatever it was worth, Red was still at large.

  Then Pinwheel with his spinning blades, Black Mongul with his dozens of followers from the hills north of the Great Wall, and Cathedral with his elaborate costume weaponry.

  Then Demon Damsel and the Insect Queen. Then Shade and the Manotaur waving his horns.

  Stealth. Blue Devil. Buddha. The Icicle.

  Thunder. Fantom of the Fair. Black Manta. Lightning.

  Bizarre names. Grotesque colors and costumes. Outlandish powers. They were as different from each other as a peach is from a prickly pear. If they had one thing in common—and this too is a subjective judgment—it was that none of them had an accurate sense of self. None of them was capable of significant analytical thinking. Not a single one had a discernible unit of intellectual or emotional values.

  Those who had these qualities but who still would not join with Superman and his new Justice League, it seemed, found their way to Batman’s group—-or to Luthor’s Mankind Liberation Front.

  Captain Comet and Scott Free, the wardens, along with Superman and Wonder Woman, the icon and the teacher, put together elaborate reeducation programs. Scott saw little need for them, but he too felt that it was important to articulate values even to the amoral and valueless. Students have to want to learn, Scott cautioned Wonder Woman over and again, and she shrugged. The Amazon solution to an opponent’s recalcitrance, she told Scott repeatedly, was force—and they had plenty of that. Superman holograms were all over the city, spouting aphorisms and extended verbal treatises wherever the rogue metahumans turned. In the middle of an ill-founded escape attempt, there would loom the unsettling figure of Superman talking about the value of humility in the context of the historical development of empirical knowledge, or some such thing. Comet began to think that just the repeated shock of Superman’s holographic presence inside the Gulag did more to quash compound-breaks than all of Scott’s elaborate traps and illusions.

  *

  And one day, from out of the desert wandered Magog, helmet in hand. He knocked politely on a pillar of the enormous Gulag structure. No one heard him knock, but he stood there quietly and decorously until a monitor alarmed Captain Comet to his presence.

  Comet knew immediately that Magog was there, but, so help him, he hesitated to go down to greet the felon. “Where’s he been?” Comet barked into his Justice League communication link.

  “Colorado,” said the Living Doll, from the New Oa satellite. She scanned through a file and found the reference. “A previously abandoned federal prison in Golden, Colorado.”

  “Well, he’s not there now,” Comet said. “He’s here. He escaped. Isn’t Superman monitoring him?”

  “I’m sure he is.”

  “Was,” Comet said.

  “Is,” the Living Doll repeated.

  And from the doorway of Captain Comet’s command center Superman’s voice said, “I saw him leave. I knew he was coming here. Let him in.”

  Eventually Comet walked up behind Magog in the shadow of the Gulag. Magog turned and smiled lightly, putting his helmet and energy spear on the ground as the older man approached.

  “We’ve not met,” Comet said. “I’m Adam Blake,” and he extended a hand.

  “I’m Magog,” the caller said. He extended his own hand to take Comet’s, the first time someone had shaken his hand in years, he thought. “I need a place to think. I need a place out of the sun. I understand that this is the village of the damned. I understand that this is a place where I might be welcome.”

  “Yes,” Comet said. “Come in. We’ll find you a room.”

  *

  There was a right and a wrong in the Universe, and that distinction was not very difficult to make.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Quintessence

  I told my congregation my favorite story about Heaven and Hell about once a year—giving them just enough of a break between tellings that I could be reasonably sure they’d forgotten the story from the last time. It goes like this:

  A man dies and he meets Saint Peter at some gate or other. Peter takes him on a tour. They walk through fluffy fields of clouds and down a long corridor. Along the corridor are two banks of windows: one on the right and one on the left. What’s all this, the man wants to know. You’re walking the thin line between Heaven and Hell, Peter says. Through the windows to your left is Heaven, and through the windows to your right is Hell.

  So the man looks as he walks along. Through the windows to his right, on the Hell side, is an endless banquet table. There are all sorts of luscious foods distributed all along the table and people seated for miles and miles, all in on the feast. The only problem is, their arms are all frozen stiff and straight. Anyone can pick anything up, but there is no way to get your hand to your mouth. Hellish, the man thinks.

  Then he looks at the Heaven side. And there too is an endless banquet table with a marvelous and varied repast. And there too everyone’s arms are fused straight, and no one can bend an elbow to feed him- or herself. These places are identical. Identical setup. Identical food. Identical hardships. Why is one Heaven and the other Hell, the man asks Saint Peter.

  And Peter answers: In Heaven, the people have learned to feed each other.

  *

  The Gulag was that kind of Hell.

  Everywhere this place was magnificent. Pillars graced the façades of buildings as in ancient Greece. A soft pink light suffused the air the way it did in Jerusalem. Boulevards were as wide and as airy as they were in Salt Lake City. Beautiful sculpture and art, as one might find in the streets of Paris or Rome, punctuated the scenery wherever the eye could rest. It was only the people here who were a reminder that this was a prison.

  To tell the truth, even the people—crazed or misguided or just plain nasty—were beautiful too. Their skin and clothes were every color under the sun. Everyone was buff, even the older folks. Their bearing was regal. Their confidence level was high. They contended for their viewpoints. If only they could learn to contend intellectually more often, and physically—dangerously—more seldom. Magog, his hair beginning to return, spent virtually all of his time cooped up in a single room. It was a nice room, with books and with commlinks that had only minimal firewalls. They all had nice rooms, and no one had an unwanted roommate. In almost all cases, inmates here were living in better conditions than they’d left, which was not saying much when one considered the average metahuman’s scant affinity for creature comforts. All the Justice League—and its agents Scott Free and Captain Comet—required was that they listen to reason and that the sky have a ceiling through whi
ch they could not pass.

  Listening to reason, after all, included listening to Superman—or rather his omnipresent holograms. Big messages, little messages, the occasional aphorism would materialize and disappear randomly around the city. Everyone, depending on the individual case, had to appear for occasional “classes,” which Superman had prerecorded holographically. “Students” could submit questions by commlink, and Superman or another member of the education committee—Wonder Woman was in charge of that, as it happened—could answer them. Mostly, classes were on ethics and values. Questions from the participants ran like this:

  Who the hell do you guys think you are?

  Who the hell do you guys think we are?

  How many different ways can you spew that Pollyanna crap?

  Who do you think toasted Rā’s al Ghūl, and hey, how many lives do you think guys like you saved anyway?

  and so forth.

  This reeducation thing would take a while, Diana realized whenever she reviewed the previous day’s “classroom” inquiries.

  *

  The confused young man called 666 sat reading a mildly censored bondage magazine in a gazebo on one of the small pedestrian squares that peppered the city—pretty little greenways like those that punctuate Savannah—when the image of Superman bubbled up from nowhere to say, “Please understand that you are not here for punishment, but for education.”

  “Oh, I’m sick of this crap!” the troubled 666 howled, and stomped along the grass leaving exaggerated footprints behind.

  The holographic image followed the trail of his body heat and said, “With the powers we have, we need to inspire ordinary citizens, not terrify them.”

  “Yeah? You ever fight the Slaughter Brigade, sport? Inspire this!” 666 said and walked a little farther onto a wide mall where scores of people could see him being trailed by the heat-seeking hologram.

  “Above all, we must adhere to a moral code that places the preservation of life first among our concerns,” Superman’s voice said.

  “Man of Tomorrow! Hmmph!” the fellow said as colorful passersby on all sides stopped to watch his frustration and disgust. “Man of the Twentieth Century is more like it. Where’s that projector, dammit?” and he found it. A hovering multilens sat high above 666, camouflaged against the pale violet surface of the dome that kept him and his neighbors from the outside world. There had to be a very slight electrical arc between the projection and the projector, he reasoned.

  “I’m sick and tired of the old man’s medieval thinking”—666 dumped whatever there was of his composure all over the mall, swept his artificial robot arm through the hologram to watch its light scatter, and unloaded a static charge through his main nervous circuit—“and tired of his moral code that’s as empty as this hologram!”

  The static charge shattered the image of Superman into so many points of color, spraying and fading like shoots of a Fourth of July sparkler around the square. A bolt fired upward to shatter the multilens high overhead. The image that Captain Comet beamed in from the Operations Center half a mile from this mall sent a feedback signal. It knocked 666 to the ground, and a few onlookers laughed, but he got up and brushed himself off before he heard:

  “I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” Captain Comet said, hovering in the air above. Behind him, flying in from the Operations Center, was Big Barda, Scott’s wife, whom Comet had asked—partly to deflect his personality conflicts with her husband—to be his deputy operations chief.

  “Are you a hologram, or can I kick your ass?” 666 asked his warden.

  “Neither of the above,” Comet said as he came down slowly to try to help the young man to his feet.

  666 refused, of course, and got up by himself.

  “Leave alone the boy,” Von Bach demanded, striding through the gathering crowd and across the mall like Caesar himself.

  “Trying to build an empire here too, Von Bach?” Barda asked him.

  “This is my fight.” The young man waved off the Yugoslavian.

  “This isn’t a fight,” Comet said. “It’s a clarification.”

  “Fine,” 666 said. “It’s my clarification. Lay off, Von Bach.”

  “I’ll where I please go and when I please go,” the pretender to a Balkan throne told his fellow inmates as well as his keepers in that pronounced street German accent, “and no else will this schweinehund tell me.”

  “The specific reason you are here, Von Bach, is that you killed opponents who already had surrendered. Not only are you a corrupting influence on these potentially good people, but you take your signals on how to speak and act from old World War Two movies.”

  “Vas?”

  “The colloquialism you’re probably looking for, Von Bach, is schwein,” Captain Comet said, and with just that one word every multilingual person within earshot knew that his accent was impeccable High German. “Schweinehund is a term properly found only in old war movies with scripts written by people from Los Angeles and New York.”

  Von Bach steamed. Even Captain Comet’s pronunciation of Von Bach’s name was more precise than the man’s own.

  Through clenched teeth Von Bach said, “Ich bin der rechtmäBige Herrscher im Königreich des Balkans.”—“I am the rightful ruler of the Balkan Kingdom.” Then in English: “I am to your rule and regulation not subject.”

  Comet walked up to Von Bach. Both appeared to have forgotten 666. In a gesture Comet meant to be charitable—to avoid having the others hear his warning—but which Von Bach took to be an expression of dominance, Comet whispered, in perfect German: “This is not a prison. It is a detention center. If, in order to make other residents’ stays shorter, I have to embarrass you in front of them, I will do so. Please make it easier, if not on yourself, then on them,” and Comet turned, about to fly away—

  —as the livid Von Bach snaked an arm around Comet’s throat—

  —Barda yanked a pellet launcher from her belt and said, “Adam—”

  —and without looking, Comet loosed a telekinetic blast behind him that tore Von Bach off the ground, threw him into the walkway, scraped him along the ground, and slammed him into the concrete base of a delicately pillared structure that looked like a Greco-Roman town hall, where six married metahuman couples made their temporary homes. Barda looked over this scene for just a moment, shrugged, and flew off after Captain Comet.

  “Keine Drobungen, Raumfahrer!” Von Bach said as the Kabuki Kommando dragged him to his feet: “I’ll not be intimidated by some spaceman!” And he muttered, “Ich werde diesen Kerl töten!”—“I’ll kill that guy!”—as the big Asian led him stumbling away.

  *

  There were another two prisoners I recognized from earlier: the Blue and White hang-gliders from among the trio who’d tried to break up the Americommando’s attempt at xenocide at the Statue. Curious, I reached into what ought to have been White’s mind, but there was nothing there. This automaton was following not its own initiative but an elaborate program. I looked closely at this creature, if creature it was, and saw that its single eye was a convex reflector. In it was a fisheye view of everything to which it pointed its “face.”

  “Its companion has a similar function,” the Spectre said, floating up beside me.

  “Similar to what?”

  He gestured for me to look at both White and Blue. Rather than eyes—where White had the curious reflector—Blue had vertical slits, arranged on its forehead in a similar convex pattern. Looking closer, I saw that the slits were sound equipment, a battery of microphones. I looked back at White, who stood as still as a cameraman, looking deeply at the reflection in the android’s “eye.” Then I got a sudden attack of something that felt like vertigo: I was falling into the image on White’s reflector.

  The Spectre drew me outward, through the scene that White reflected. Then we were out farther—but not outside the Gulag. We flew outward amid the continuum itself—the image we witnessed contracting inward as we receded.

  The fisheye view of the wide
mall at the heart of the Gulag’s city became again the fisheye view of the lens. It contracted smaller, and it became a globe, a crystal ball hanging in the air. Further, and the crystal hovered over the extended hand of the third of White and Blue’s company: the Red android. Red was somewhere far away, watching. And standing beside the android Red, looking deeply at the images and listening to the sounds from within the Gulag, was Lex Luthor, his arm slung over the shoulder of his tall young valet who had so startled the Riddler back at the Mankind Liberation Front meeting.

  Luthor was the controller of the three androids Red, White, and Blue, and two of them were inside the Gulag sending him the sounds and sights from there as instantaneously as Scott Free and Captain Comet themselves got them. Luthor was the black widow at the center of this web. And the valet?

  “Who is he?” I asked the Spectre. “I tried exploring his mind, but it’s scattered.”

  “You know him too.”

  I was afraid of that. “Captain Marvel?” I asked.

  Spectre pulled us back farther and the scene of the three—Luthor, the android, and the Captain—became yet another of the scenes we watched, as if we were theatergoers, taking place behind the astral curtain of the Aurora. I had no sensation of movement through all of this, only witness: cacophonous, furious witness. We hung in a space that was beyond space and watched whatever scene transpired at this time as the Spectre held back the Aurora that formed a multidimensional borderline among defined spaces on the world it enveloped.

  “What is Captain Marvel’s role?”

  “He is another of Luthor’s ciphers,” my companion replied, “another once-powerful soul meticulously enslaved to the will of an evil man. What Luthor may cause him to do, or what he may choose on his own to do, are mysteries to me as they are to you, as they are…”

  Suddenly I found that we were not alone. There were others here, and they were aware of our presence. There were five of them.

  “… even to the old wizard who first called down the thunder to him.”