Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  Superman realized that a grand gesture was in order here. He wondered, would this be grand enough?

  “For a long time I went under another name,” he told his colleagues and the General Assembly and the world peeking in via Netservice News. “I was a man named Clark. Clark Kent.”

  Many of those here recognized the name. By the “end” of his life, Clark Kent had accumulated a worldwide reputation as a fine newsman.

  “As Clark I was a rather ordinary man,” Superman said, “with a job and responsibilities, living in Metropolis with my wife, Lois…”

  Ears perked up even more now. The death ten years ago of Lois Lane the journalist had promoted her to legendary status. Now everyone learned that she’d been the wife of Superman himself. Stories and headlines tomorrow, the day after the United Nations nuked the superhumans, would cover this historic revelation here on the General Assembly floor.

  Superman could change the course of mighty rivers, and the old newsman in his soul could wrest the public imagination to spin in a new direction. It was, as I had told him, Clark’s gift to Kal-El.

  “Less than an hour ago,” Superman said, “I asked someone to choose between humans and superhumans. But in his wisdom, Captain Marvel knew that was a false division.”

  Superman stepped over to Jade, who leaned against her father. She had found and now held in her hands an icon of a simpler time, when it had been easier to determine right from wrong. She handed Superman the white-and-gold cape he’d torn off Captain Marvel’s back and left to flutter to the floor of the battlefield.

  “He chose neither of the options I saw, but made the only choice that ever truly matters. In the hope that your world and our world could be one world again, he chose life. That is his legacy.”

  Superman walked up an aisle to the main door of the General Assembly hall, the one that led down the stairway that heads of state take when they come here. He ran a fingernail through the melted steel jamb that held the door shut and threw it open.

  Wonder Woman took his arm and tilted her head toward the door. Chastened, he stepped back through it and fused the steel and the hardwood that composed it back into the form they’d had before. She was teaching him that there was magic in cleaning up the mess you leave behind you.

  Everyone followed them out to the main courtyard of the New United Nations fortress. There, Superman rose along an unused flagpole and lashed the cape of the late Captain Marvel by its decorative golden cords to the top.

  Green Lantern walked over to Leonard Wyrmwood and, removing his mask with his left hand, extended his right. “Mr. Secretary-General,” Lantern said, “my name is Alan Scott. Pleased to meet you.”

  Jade took the hand of an officious-looking young man among the crowd. “Jade Scott,” she said. “I’m a Green Lantern.”

  “Jean-Paul Kasavubu from the Congo River,” the young man said in an accent that spoke rather of Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall. “I’m a consul-general and a tribal chief.”

  The Flash, slipping in and out among the dimensions that surrounded the UN courtyard, extended the multiple-image of his hand to the figure of a man who was tall even though he stooped over a cane.

  “Anthony Wainwright,” the tall man said, extending his own hand, “Earl of Harlech and representative of His Majesty King William to the United Nations.”

  The Flash buzzed something that Lord Wainwright could not possibly understand, but encased the old man’s hand in a cushion of red handshake that made his limb relax up and down the arm.

  “This is my friend, Mr. West, Your Lordship,” Wonder Woman leaned over and said. “Wallace West.”

  Red Robin asked Nightstar to help him in the direction of someone to whom he wanted to speak. He wiped back his hood and extended a hand to the tall white-haired man in the titanium suit of armor. “Richard Grayson, sir,” he said. “I understand you’re a friend of my daughter’s.” Robin’s daughter, Nightstar, had long since taken to calling the Batman “Gramps.”

  Bruce Wayne took his onetime protégé’s hand and pulled him in to his chest and hugged him tightly. Then both men did something neither had done in a long time, certainly not in one another’s presence. They cried.

  *

  “Do you want her private line?” Wyrmwood asked. “It’s classified, of course, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind in your case.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to breach national security on my account,” Superman said, smiling. “Besides, I have ways of getting in touch. Tell the President I’ll set something up with her scheduling office this afternoon.”

  “Can I get a picture of you, sir?” the young man with the digital camera asked. “Maybe with the Batman?”

  “Sure,” Superman answered, and motioned toward Bruce Wayne.

  “Come on, Princess,” Wayne said to the Amazon, “you need to be in this one, too.”

  “Just a second, son.” Superman stopped the photographer, his journalistic sense awakening from dormancy. “Over here.”

  You want us to pose for pictures? the Amazon’s face demanded silently. Superman nodded back at her—just as silently but in a manner that spoke volumes. She would drop her objections and argue later. Bruce Wayne turned away when Superman motioned to him. Unaccounted numbers of their friends were gone and now this presumptuous man wanted to pose for the cameras. Though the eyes of the world were on them, no one saw Superman whisper into Wayne’s ear: “I know this seems frivolous, but it isn’t about us or our fallen friends. The healing starts here. We owe this to the ages.”

  In the coming weeks and years Superman would begin to grow an awareness he never possessed before of the things of the world and their power: a rhyme, a monument, the relic of a treasured memory; the things that give a human life its demonstrable value. This is where he would start. From the wreckage of the old United Nations complex someone had harvested a shattered granite slab, reassembled it, and planted it here on a pedestal in the New United Nations courtyard. Superman walked his friends Bruce and Diana over to it. In front of this legend did the photographer take their picture:

  They shall beat their swords into plowshares,

  And their spears into pruning hooks;

  Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,

  Neither shall they learn war anymore.

  The photograph served as the following week’s cover for Time magazine. It was the fastest-selling issue of that venerable publication, and in all the magazine’s history a most treasured keepsake in millions of homes.

  CHAPTER 35

  Novus Ordo Seclorum

  The meeting went relatively well. Superman did not try to out-talk President Capper, and she did not try to overpower the super hero. Both were growing into unaccustomed roles—she, long a gifted administrator of large systems, as the spokesperson of a grander vision; he, a renowned role model, as the manager of a vast complex of independent forces and sources of power. They had a lot to learn from one another.

  In the study off the Oval Office, they went over the day’s order of business. Bruce Wayne would rebuild Wayne Manor and outfit its nonliving spaces as a series of convalescent wards. She offered to recommend a Medicaid subsidy but the big man laughed.

  “It’s Bruce’s house, Madame President,” Superman insisted, “and when everyone is better, he gets to live there. He doesn’t want any subsidies.”

  “Well, Congress gave me a hefty subsidy to rebuild my house,” she said.

  “Tell me that, Madame President, when the White House is as lavish a place to live as Wayne Manor. Besides, I don’t think Bruce wants Congress dictating the decor in the Batcave.”

  “Perhaps we can provide the facility with a security system.”

  Superman shook his head.

  “Maybe not, Superman,” she said, “but we need to funnel funds into these projects in order to be a good example to the other industrial states.”

  “All right, so how about a feed and grain airlift from Antarctica, Madame President? That’ll cost you plenty
and set a really good example.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Well,” he explained, “Antarctica’s been under ice for fifteen million years. President Capper, I have discovered that under that glacier is probably the most mineral-rich soil on Earth. I’ve been farming thirty-six hundred acres of wheat and alfalfa there for the past ten years and distributing it anonymously in the drought areas of Sudan and Ethiopia. Interesting thing is that practically nobody in Central Africa who has eaten that grain or fed it to their livestock has died of natural causes in all that time.”

  “We’ve been studying that.”

  “You have?”

  “There’s a National Science Foundation commission trying to figure out why the life expectancy has gone up in Central Africa by seven years over the past ten years. It’s perplexed us.”

  “Well, there’s your answer. Now call back your commission and put the money into reclaiming the glacier and distributing the harvest.”

  They talked about the reeducation program on Paradise Island, and Diana’s return there.

  “What about the rule that says no men on Paradise Island?” she wanted to know.

  “What’s the matter, Madame President,” he said, “don’t you believe in magic?” Even through lines like that, which made Jennifer Capper grin, he wore a glum face.

  They agreed that Alan Scott would serve as the permanent Justice League spokesperson in the United Nations.

  “He’s been a recluse for as long as you,” she noted. “Is his presentation up to the job?”

  “He’s relatively housebroken,” Superman answered.

  He said he thought Raymond Terrill, the Ray, and Alan Scott’s daughter, Jade, could restore the quality of Kansas’ farmland over a short period of time.

  “Do they need funding?” she asked.

  “Given Jade’s effect on men and Ray’s arrested development,” he suggested, “maybe you could buy them a pair of blinders.”

  He told her about the property his foundation owned in Kansas, the old Kent family farm. He wanted to turn it into a shrine and cemetery.

  “They’ll want to bury you there, you know,” she told him.

  “They’ll have a long wait.”

  And the President looked at Superman and said, “How are you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It wasn’t a trick question.”

  “We’re fine,” he said, and did not smile.

  “We?”

  “Me,” he said, and wondered whether the President wanted to be nosy or make friends.

  “It would be good to see you smile, Superman,” she told him. “It’s how most of us remember you.”

  He paused for a moment, thought about it, nearly smiled, and said, “Sorry. Soon.” Then he said, “Maybe.”

  *

  On Paradise Island her sisters subjected Wonder Woman to a community inquiry on her extraterritorial activities—essentially a trial. They asked her why she’d prodded Superman into building a Gulag; why she’d opposed the Batman, her friend, to the point of violent combat; what she thought the martial women’s role in the new world ought to be—questions like that. Her answers did not always conform to Amazonian orthodoxy, but they always challenged the intellect and the assumptions of her questioners. At the end of it, Diana’s sisters not only returned her previous station, but gave her a crown.

  Her answer to the question of the Amazons’ role in all of this had to do with her belief that Amazon philosophy had grown stagnant with Paradise Island’s isolation from the world. As this very inquiry vividly demonstrated, she said, her sisters needed to become truly an Amazon nation. There was a surfeit of training and philosophy in her people’s lives, and a scarcity of actual living.

  “For example,” Diana told her sister Cressida, whose otherwise impassive face in the course of exhaustive questioning betrayed a growing uncertainty about what answers she wanted to hear, “who among you has actually met a living soul who does not live on this Island?”

  A few hands went up among the four- or fivescore assembled sisters. Then even they went down when everyone realized what their former princess meant by “living.” Not a single one of the long-lived residents of this Island had had contact with a single outsider in more than seventy years.

  “This needs to be fixed,” Diana said, “and the way to fix it is by becoming teachers. By turning Paradise Island into a great center of philosophical thought. My sisters, it is time that we all dare to put down our spears and our bows and our physical culture and—through articulating it to others—relearn the ancient principles on which this culture is founded. It is time we applied those principles to the worldwide society of our own times.”

  “And who would these students be?” Diana’s mother, Hippolyta the Queen, asked. It was her first question, and her last.

  “Mother,” Diana said, “it is time to change the rules.”

  In the following weeks all manner and conditions of arcane folk set foot on Paradise Island and proposed to stay. Most of them were men. Most of them, as well, were veterans of the Gulag. Magog would come here and become a kind of dean of students. And also the Manotaur, whose ancestors had so bedeviled Diana’s own.

  Diana regained her title and resumed her station, but declined her old job as ambassador to the “World of Men.” That portfolio went to Cressida.

  “And good riddance,” Diana said.

  *

  The older man noticed himself trading in his black garb for white. In the T-shirt and the titanium shoulder framework he was enormous and imposing. The younger man with the shock of black hair was quite handsome and wore the prepossessing manner of European aristocracy. “I understand,” the older man told the younger, “that you are my son.”

  They were in the part of the once stately manor that Increase Hopkins and his kids had built, the part that had been the Gothamborough Inn. This was the section of the mansion that Dr. Thomas Wayne, Bruce’s father, had converted to a recovery ward during the time when the polio epidemic had filled the hospitals of Gotham with suffering children. Now it accommodated patients and guests again, survivors of a nuclear bomb deployed in anger. Tall, recently glazed windows and long recessed ceiling lamps lit the room as brightly as if it were outside. The white walls still needed some cosmetic patching, and the twelve-foot Bat-Knight frames that perched at periodic distances along the wall gave the place the look more of a theme park than of a hospital room. Wayne knew that the best environmental filtration system available anywhere was the one with which he outfitted his flotilla of urban patrollers. He had an oversupply of these robots after shutting down Luthor’s production facility, and here was the best use for them.

  Everywhere was the red bat: on a ceiling mural, on the converted robots, silk-screened on Wayne’s white T-shirt. Once, long ago, Bruce Wayne had sat over a drafting table with protractors, triangles, and an overworked pencil sharpener and spent the better part of a week designing the stylized sign of the bat that had punctuated his career. Once he’d developed the design of which he was proud, he wondered whether he would have been an artist if he had not been born to wealth and married to tragedy. He rarely sat down at the drafting table now. Here in Gotham the Renaissance was not over; certainly not here in what this aging Batman laughingly referred to as Wayne Manor and Supervillain Convalescent Home.

  Ibn al Xu’ffasch, heir to and hegemon of the late Rā’s al Ghūl’s empire, looked up from turning the sheet over the face of Lady Marvel, who had thus come to the end of her radiation-induced coma. For all the aversion training his grandfather had imposed on him in his long exile, the young man had what amounted to a genetic reflex against the concept of death. There would be more deaths in this place during the coming months, all of them more drawn-out and most of them more painful. Perhaps this was therefore not the best place for him to spend these days, but when Diana invited him to Paradise Island to teach with her, he was adamant about coming here instead.

  “How long have you known of our r
elationship?” Xu’ffasch asked Bruce Wayne, who sat down on the bed with a hand on the boy’s shoulder.

  “Since not long after you called me to come to that first meeting at Luthor’s. I had just assumed you were Rā’s’ son, but I had never heard of you before he died.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “There didn’t seem to be time until now. Welcome to the ancestral home.”

  Xu’ffasch looked around at the relative paucity of these surroundings compared to what he was used to. “I grew up in Andorra.”

  “Yes, I know. In the family of Prince Hugo. Did you know of your pedigree?”

  “Not a clue. I thought I was some adopted waif someone left on the doorstep. My ‘brother’ Pietro—Hugo’s real son—got an education that centered on manners and business management while I had to study science and history and ancient languages. I was jealous. I didn’t know what it was about. Not until the day a skyful of paratroopers came to claim me and hand me a kingdom.”

  “You’d be just thirty-two now, right? Your family members have always looked younger than their years.”

  “It’s part of the birthright,” Xu’ffasch said, referring to the Lazarus Pit, the steaming chamber of chemicals that had sliced decades at a time off Rā’s al Ghūl’s age and extended his life to several centuries.

  “And your mother?”

  Bruce Wayne had no idea, until he investigated Xu’ffasch, that he himself could possibly have fathered Talia’s child. Rā’s had only his daughter and was preoccupied with the idea of the Batman being his successor. For his part, Wayne knew it would never happen.

  Rā’s al Ghūl’s empire was a country without borders. The organization’s economic interests centered on mineral cartels and shadow governments that occasionally overthrew legitimate ones and drove ethnic groups to war over natural resources when they thought they were fighting over principles. Nonetheless, Talia was brilliant, brave, and exotic, and she’d stirred Bruce Wayne’s heart and soul as no other woman ever had. The last time he’d seen her was during one of his flirtations with her father’s ambitions. For his damned principles he’d tricked and betrayed Rā’s, much as he used and betrayed Luthor. Talia had taken it personally and disappeared from his life forever.