Kingdom Come

by Elliot S Maggin

  “She’s fine. She follows you in the news,” Xu’ffasch said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “They have a pretty good commlink in Calcutta now, thanks to my new fleet of satellite transponders.”

  “She’s alive?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’re the Batman.”

  “I’m not God. Where? Calcutta, you say? What’s she doing there?”

  “She’s Mother Talia. She’s the mother superior of Saint Teresa’s clinic.”

  “I didn’t even know she was Catholic.”

  “Well, she wasn’t. We’re Muslim, I guess, if we’re anything, but you know…”

  The master of this place stalked past beds full of ailing victims and “volunteers” who were here in lieu of long prison terms. He was never very good at bringing conversations to an end, even with a newly discovered son.

  He was halfway out of the room when he called back, “How do I get in touch with her?”

  “Here,” Xu’ffasch said. He jotted an address on the late Lady Marvel’s chart and rose to hand it to his father.

  Standing by the door of the ward was Lex Luthor, drawing corrections and extrapolation marks on a recently minted computer data chart. He was allowed to do this because all of the bedpans were empty. Like most of the rest of the members of his erstwhile cartel—Catwoman, Vandal Savage, Lord Naga, the Riddler, and the others—Luthor wore an electronic restraining collar that confined him to this wing of the house. It would be an interesting game to anticipate and quash his escape attempts when he made them, but so far he had not. No one made any attempt to force him to tend patients, Heaven forbid. Luthor was never adept at bedside manner. He was, however, making some significant progress working out a cure for Crohn’s disease here.

  “Shazam,” Bruce Wayne gibed through a side of his mouth as he stomped past Luthor.

  “Shutup,” was the criminal mastermind’s clever reply.

  *

  The granite sign at the main roadway leading to the cemetery read HOMESTEAD MEMORIAL PARK, and a stone beyond the sign was engraved with:

  For those claimed by the Great Bomb

  And for all those who lost their lives to our mistakes:

  We wish we had known you better.

  Along the road leading into the park a little historical marker told that this property had once been the site of the farm of Jonathan and Martha Kent. There was no mention of all the other people who had ever passed this way or events that had taken place in the area. No one was sure after the Kansas disaster exactly where, for example, the little spaceship from Krypton had touched down all those years ago. The rest of the story would be clear enough in the accounts yet to be written. With all the cataclysms and revelations of the past months, it seemed history was beginning again.

  Kal-El returned alone to the land. Not to the Antarctic, but to his boyhood home. He determined above all not to let Kansas go the way of the other lost planet of his past. Of course he was all over the world all the time now. If anything—as for many active men—his retirement promised paradoxically to be more hectic than his career.

  I should talk.

  The Spectre turned out to be something of a friend. He put me through a kind of rejuvenation process before summarily depositing me back into my life. There is no rigid sense of time in a spirit’s existence, but there is a kind of moral fatigue that serves a similar purpose. I spent a period suspended in a kind of bubble of light, growing energy of spirit before I finally picked up the loose ends of the life I’d left behind when I went off to judge the world. I was rejuvenated—no younger than I was before, unfortunately, but stronger, gamer—when I walked the spirit planes with the Spectre for the last time. It was on that farm in Kansas that I witnessed a most affecting tableau.

  Clark had an enormous plowshare, bigger by far than the largest farmhouse. Maybe he’d fused it together from the metal of melted swords. Maybe not. It had grooves along its face, and as he pulled it along like Pegasus in a yoke, with each stroke it prepared maybe twenty rows for planting. He wore work clothes, like those of a farmer: jeans and a white tank top. The only thing that distinguished him from a farmer was simply that he did not break a sweat. And of course there was also the flying. Here was what remained of the Kent farm, all loamed and turned over for sowing. And there in the near distance was the memorial park with rows upon rows of headstone markers.

  Before the flying woman in the red tunic was even in my sight or the Spectre’s, the big man undid his yoke, floated to the ground, and, staring out across the cemetery, said in a terribly loud voice: “The top-soil was down to just an inch or two in some places. Bedrock was poking through the loam here and there. But not anymore.”

  It would be a few moments before she flew close enough to respond to him. Wafting through the sky she managed to look better in her flowing, shapeless outfit than most people look when they go to their high school proms.

  “The Breadbasket was getting thin, eh?” Diana commented as she touched down to join him at the edge of the plowed field and look across the acres of neat white marble monuments.

  “When the Native Americans first arrived here—what? about eight or ten thousand years ago?—the rich dark soil reached six, eight, twelve feet down at its thinnest point before you hit even a hint of silt or sand. When the Europeans took the land for farming, it was probably in better shape than when the Indians found it. It’s only in the past two hundred years that we’ve sucked up the minerals out of the Heartland and turned it all into oatmeal and white bread.”

  Then he was quiet for a few minutes, just looking across the reclaimed land, at the headstones. Diana took his hand and held it lightly.

  “Kal?” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “They haunt you only when you forget what they had to teach you. Let them rest in peace.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “We’ve got a world to rebuild.”

  “We do. I’m starting here.”

  And they were quiet again for a while until she reached into a pocket of her clothing and took out a small wooden box.

  “For you, Kal,” she said. “A little something to help you see more clearly.”

  He opened the box and found a pair of glasses inside.

  Clark Kent had worn glasses. He put them on, and kissed her. Then he smiled. More than by the long-gone smile, I was startled by how different he looked with the glasses. I wondered whether he would grow the beard he wore in his seclusion again.

  “Take care, Clark,” she said.

  “Are you rested, Norman McCay?” the Spectre asked me as she took off.

  “I feel like I could pull that plow,” I told him.

  “Time to go home,” the Spectre said. Then it occurred to him that I thought by “home” he meant my eternal reward. I thought of the ghost of Boston Brand, the circus acrobat. I thought of Ellen.

  “I’m ready for whatever’s next,” I said. I never seriously thought I would get out of this alive.

  Reading my thought, the Spectre said, “Not yet, Norman McCay. Your own mission is not yet complete.”

  “Spectre,” I said, and reached up to stay the magic of his hand, “all the sins have been exposed. Tell me. In the end, whom do you punish? Who is responsible?”

  “No one need suffer any further for the tragedies we have witnessed, Norman McCay,” my companion answered me. “Do not mock me.”

  “I don’t mean to. I just wonder. When you first appeared before me, you said you needed a human soul to be your anchor. And yet you yourself were once a mortal man. Tell me, what would his perspective have been?”

  “Ever the minister,” and somehow I felt he was mocking me in the gentlest of ways. Then he took down the hood and revealed his face for the first time. It was a good face, ruddy and angular, with just a patch of white hair in front among a thicket of red. “Be well, Norman McCay. You have watched the titans walk the Earth and you have k
ept stride. Perhaps you are more like them than you realize. You exist to give hope.”

  Then the church, my church on Jefferson Avenue, materialized all around me.

  My body was heavy again. Suddenly I was bound to the Earth again. It was all right; I could handle it. I was even relieved. According to the calendar, to which I’d paid little attention all this time, I would soon be yet another year older. And considering that among us survivors human life expectancy was about to take a dramatic jump, due to richer soil in the Heartland and a sudden abundance of minerals in the food we ate, I was but a lad.

  “Wait!” I told the Spectre before he faded completely from my sight. “Will I see you again?”

  “I expect you will see quite a bit of me.”

  *

  “… and the Lord God sent His angel to show His servants…” I recited now from my head and my heart. No longer did some compulsion press the ancient words out my mouth. The congregation that sat before me finally befitted the fine church where we met. People crowded. They hunted for seats. They had to touch one another to pray here. I liked that.

  The first member of my newly minted Confirmation class walked into church holding her mother’s hand on a Sunday not long after I left the Spectre’s world. She was a pretty little girl named Diana, as it happened. Somehow during the following weeks more and more families with young children appeared and filled up the new Sunday School class. For their benefit I had to enlist some young fathers to help me rake out one of the storerooms off the sanctuary balcony. After a while I began to assume that many of these young families knew each other, had a history together, and that it was word of mouth that gradually brought them to our little church on Jefferson Avenue. Asking around, however, I found that they generally came here through chance: the recommendation of an uncle or aunt, an old article someone saw somewhere about the sounds that once had come from our pipe organ, or their walking down the street and seeing what a beautiful building we were in. A lot of people were beginning to walk down the street again: normal people mostly, without costumes, without the power to fly or to tie their shoes just by thinking about it.

  Still, the average age of the congregation, as my friend Wesley used to quip, was now just a bit younger than dead. It did not matter. We were building a little community here in the heart of the once and future City of Dreams. My adopted city again was becoming a city whose people walked its boulevards and browsed its shopping centers with pride and a bearing as though each of them was the lord or lady of this manor, and where each of them was in fact. Once, not long ago, Metropolis was a palace. That is how it would be again. As for myself, I had a new best friend.

  Jim Corrigan started showing up occasional Sunday mornings. He was a striking man, tall and beefy, and with a patch of white at the fore of his full head of red hair. I suppose I was the only one in the congregation who realized that he was mostly illusion. Then again, there was a case to make that a creature in such close touch with his higher self was more “real” than either my congregation or myself.

  Then there was another who wandered into the sanctuary one Sunday morning. He was nearly as tall as Jim, and even beefier. He wore a flannel shirt and slacks, and glasses that a friend had given him. He found a seat toward the back. In my sermon that morning I was talking about perfectibility.

  “Our forebears found comfort in the notion that anything on which God placed his hand was thus the model of absolute perfection. They had no evidence to suggest such a thing of course, but they wanted it to be true, so they said it was. The Earth was at the center of a symmetrical Universe, and anything that went wrong was the result of some evil force or of the shortcomings of frail humans. Well, evidence has shown us—and the recent history of our own lives has brought it home for us—that the Universe, this Creation of God, is an imperfect place, and we are not even at its center.”

  I talked about what our lives would be like if everything around us were a clockwork of order. I said that God had created an imperfect Universe so that we could have adversity to overcome and so that we could be his partners in the most Godly work of creation.

  “Know what this is?” I pulled a visual aid—an orange, actually—from the shelf under my pulpit. It was such a pleasure to have children again in the sanctuary. The youngest sat with her parents and her big brother in the fourth pew near the aisle. “What’s this, Sarah?”

  “An orange,” Sarah said.

  “And who made the orange, Jeremy?”

  “God did,” Jeremy said with some authority.

  “He did. But that’s only part of the answer. Where did we find the first orange?”

  That stumped both of them for a moment, then thoughtful thirteen-year-old Jeremy said, “On the first orange tree. Wait, weren’t there plants before there were people?”

  “By most accounts,” I said, “but not oranges.” Then I pulled another, bigger piece of fruit out from behind my pulpit. “Anybody know what this is?”

  After a moment, Jim tentatively raised his hand. This was a good sign. He was learning again the human capacity for taking initiative. Perhaps there was nearly as much hope for the angels as there was for the rest of us.

  “Yes, Mr. Corrigan, do you know?”

  “Is that a citron, Pastor?”

  “It is. It’s a large yellow citrus fruit. The first citrus fruit, in fact, packed tight with vitamin C and cellulose and very good for you, but it tastes more bitter than a night in the Antarctic. The citron grows in the Middle East and North Africa and predates humans on this planet by quite some time. But this orange—which grows pretty much everywhere with a long-enough growing season—was an invention of man.”

  Murmurs. If Wesley had been here, he might have leapt to his feet and started quoting Scripture against his will. Thank heaven I did not have that urge anymore.

  “God made citrons, and man took the citron and grafted and cross-pollinated and nurtured and grew until we had oranges and lemons and grapefruits and limes and tangerines and all sorts of derivative stuff that’s been with us so long, we can’t remember a time without it. Do you think the orange is better than the citron, Sarah?”

  “I don’t know.” The little girl shrugged.

  “What do you think, Mr.—” I strained my aging eyes toward the back of the big room. “Mr. Kent?”

  “I think,” the bespectacled man in the flannel shirt at the back said, “I think we improved on the citron for our own purposes, yes.”

  “I think so, too. Which is not to say that the citron—which may have grown in the Garden of Eden for all we know—was a bad idea. But you and I will take our vitamin C more reliably when it tastes a little less bitter going down.”

  I looked around. I loved this room. I loved the people in it. For the first time since I lost my Ellen, I loved my life again.

  “We have cities to rebuild, my brothers and sisters. We have a world that’s waiting for us to mold it to our use. He gave us this lovely blue planet as surely as He gave us the citron. And He gave us the tools to see the imperfections and to make them better. Not perfect, but—for our own purposes, as our good Mr. Kent puts it so well—improved. So let us remember that when we make our choices—when we clone a grapefruit or repair a table or comb our hair or sit up late with a troubled friend—that here on Earth God’s work must truly be our own.”

  And so the crisis passed. There was no grand celebration, though someday our children’s children might set aside a day to mark the moment. Today, there is too much pain to forget, too much rebuilding to master. But there is faith here. So, though visions no longer haunt me, I must preach the lessons they taught me:

  A dream is not always a prophecy.

  The future, like history and intention and so much else, is open to interpretation.

  And hope is brightest when it dawns from fear.

  I closed, as I used to close when I’d been a young minister at my first pulpit, with the blessing of Aaron the High Priest: “The Lord bless thee, and keep thee. T
he Lord make His face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee. The Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. Amen. Grace be with you.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Ontogeny

  Finally I got Jim Corrigan to go with me to Planet Krypton, the theme restaurant near Governor’s Plaza. I had not been there since before all this, and I insisted that he could not fully experience it unless he was at least ostensibly in human form. It turned out to be a good day to go. Maybe Jim knew it would be.

  “Look here,” I said, waving the menu in his face. “A Spectre Platter. That’s new. I’m sure of it.”

  “I wonder if that will help my career,” he said. It was a joke—dry as dust but a joke nonetheless. This was another good sign. Apparently he’d had a rather impressive public career during my youth, even as an active and occasionally visible member of the old Justice Society for a while.

  “Look at it this way, it’s flattering to be remembered somehow,” I told him.

  The Spectre Platter was not really a meal at all, but a flavored rice cake with lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Cellulose and empty calories, mostly. We both declined. We had a great time at Planet Krypton: took in the costumed waitpersons, made believe they flubbed our orders, pretended they were the real characters they were playing, and tripped them up with questions about ancient history, and so forth. This is not the way I generally find my fun—it was more like something I would have done with Wesley, actually—but my judgment as a minister told me that it was a fine prescription for someone as chronically starved for amusement as my friend Jim.

  Then Superman and Wonder Woman walked in.

  No one noticed, of course. Clark looked like a big middle-aged truck driver. Diana looked like she must have been his daughter. She turned more heads than the waitress in the Power Woman outfit, and of course this annoyed her. She would never outgrow that.