‘No,’ I say, ‘I have Kara and Karen and Power Girl and Andromeda and Dr Quinzel and the nameless one and Lois and Atlee and maybe one or two others, but I’m sure none of us is called Holy Mary.’ I look at wrong Helena more carefully and see something strange. It looks as if she is more than one person. If so that would explain everything: right Helena is hiding inside wrong Helena, so I just have to get her out and everyone will be happy. At least, Power Girl will be happy, and I guess that right Helena will be, and maybe even wrong Helena. So I let go of wrong Helena, who steps away from me and says,
‘Oh, thank you Lord. Power Girl – Power Girl, what are you doing?’ I take her shoulders in my hands and say,
‘I am taking you and right Helena apart.’ I start to pull. She looks at me as if I have told her she is incurable and says,
‘No, please, Power Girl, I’ll do anything. Take me if you want to, just please, please don’t . . .’ then she starts to scream and then she stops screaming.
I look at my hands, but instead of right Helena and wrong Helena I see two things leaking red stuff. That is not what I expected. I try putting them back together, and now they look like wrong Helena, but they don’t move or talk. I seem to have broken her. This makes me sad because, though she is not right Helena, I want to make people happy, not to break them. Looking at her breasts, which were beautiful, I wish this had not happened. Then I realise that I can make it not happen. If I stop thinking that wrong Helena is broken and think that she and right Helena are here, then that will be true, because what I want to be true is. So I look down at wrong Helena and say ‘You are not broken. Both of you are here,’ and there they both are. Wrong Helena is shaking all over. She holds out her hands and looks at them as if she doesn’t expect them to be there, which is silly, because where else would they be? Then she says,
‘Power Girl, you, you, you, you tore me, you tore me apart. Why?’ I say,
‘I wanted to find right Helena, but I broke you, and that made me sad. So I decided to make you unbroken again. So here you are. With right Helena. But I still like your breasts.’ She looks at me with an expression on her face that I do not know. I expect it is love. It must be, because she throws herself at me as if she wants to touch more than lips, but though I intend to make her part of me, I want to talk to right Helena first, so I hold her back. She struggles. I think she must be excited by the sight of my beautiful breasts, but she will have to wait, so I say, ‘Be patient, wrong Helena. Soon you will be part of me.’ She screams and struggles even harder, then she stops struggling and starts to cry. She says,
‘Why can’t you leave me alone? I was happy until you arrived. I knew what I was doing, I was good at it and I enjoyed doing it.’ I feel sorry for her. I say,
‘You will be happy with me.’ I reach out to her. ‘Come, wrong Helena, let me make you happy.’ She looks up at me and says,
‘Is that really true, Power Girl? Can you make me happy again?’ I smile at her, so she can see how happy I am, and say,
‘Everyone is happy when they are with me.’ She talks for a moment to Holy Mary and then gives me her hands. I pull her in, put my arms around her and touch mouths with her. She makes a noise like the hospital dog the time I trod on its tail, then I put her hand on my breast and we are one.
As wrong Helena takes her place within me I turn to right Helena. She looks at me and says,
‘Amiga, I’m so happy to see you again,’ and Power Girl says ‘yes!’ this is her friend Helena after all. I am so glad. Right Helena says, ‘And to be alive again. It was so miserable: I was not even dead, just not alive.’ She looks sad. ‘But,’ she says, ‘Now you have brought me back…’
‘You will never be unhappy again,’ I say. ‘You will be with me and Power Girl and Kara and Karen and even wrong Helena and you will be happy forever.’ She breathes out deeply and extends her hands to me and says,
‘It seems such a shame to go when I have been back so short a time. But I’m sure, amiga, that you know best, so do what you want with me.’ I look at her lovely face and body and her beautiful, beautiful breasts, and want to show her some of the things Lois showed me. But there is something I must do first. I must see if she can open a door into truth like the others did. So instead of taking her in my arms I say,
‘Tell me the truth.’ She says,
‘Anything, amiga. What do you want to know?’ I do not know the answer to that, and neither do any of the others, but something makes me say,
‘Who am I?’ and as soon as I say it, I know that it is the thing I most need to know. She says,
‘You are Kara, and came from far away. You are Power Girl, the unrelenting foe of evil. You are my amiga, and have been my friend and colleague in the fight to make the world a better place. You are strange and no one knows your destiny. And I love you.’ She extends her hands again and this time I take them and we do the things Lois showed me, and more, and I am filled with happiness such as I have never known before. And afterwards, as right Helena fades away and I say ‘goodbye’ to her, I think of what she said: that I came here from another place to make people happy. I know that it must be true. It makes many doors fall open and I nearly see the truth. But not all of it. Not yet.
As I put on the white and red costume again, I wonder what to do next. I think I might fly some more, but then I hear a voice. At first I think it is someone inside that I have not met before, but then I realise that it comes from some things left behind by wrong Helena. The voice says,
‘Huntress? Come in Huntress? Where are you? This is Oracle.’ And I know where to go. As I step into the room, she is sitting in front of a wall of computers and saying, ‘Huntress? Please respond. Where are you, Helena?’ I say,
‘She is with me.’ She jumps and turns round. When she sees me she seems unhappy, but she says,
‘Kara: I didn’t expect to see you here. But where’s Helena?’ I say,
‘I told you, she is with me.’ She starts to look confused so, not wanting even her to be unhappy, I explain. I say, ‘She is part of me now. I can let you talk to her if you like.’ She looks at me with her mouth half open just like someone so full of Thorazine they don’t know what’s happening to them. I decide that means she does want to talk to wrong Helena, so I let wrong Helena speak. She says,
‘Barbara, it’s me, Helena. I am here now, along with Kara and Power Girl and the nameless one. When they asked me to join with them I didn’t want to, but now I know it’s the best thing I ever did. Please join us soon, Barbara.’ I say,
‘So you see, wrong Helena is happy now. Everyone is happy with me. Even you will be, once you have done what I want.’ She does not seem to have heard me. She says,
‘Oh my God, it’s true. That was Helena. What have you done to her?’ I say,
‘I have made her happy.’ She looks at me and her face turns red, while her heart beats harder and faster. She takes a long bar of some kind, like a metal broom-handle, from beneath her chair and holds it in front of her, then she says,
‘You murdering monster! You may have taken Helena, but you won’t get me!’ She waves the broom-handle at me. I think she is trying to scare me. I reach out and take the broom-handle and the woman who calls herself Barbara screams. I fold it into a knot and drop it on the floor, then I move closer to Barbara, who is looking at her hands like someone who has sniffed too much white power. I say,
‘I am not a monster. And I do not kill. People who upset me may hurt themselves but I just make people happy.’ Barbara looks up at me and says,
‘So Helena upset you, did she?’ She seems angry. I do not understand why. So I say,
‘At first she was frightened, like you are now, or at least Dr Quinzel says you are, and I was confused because she was wrong Helena and I wanted right Helena. Looking for right Helena I broke her and her bits leaked.’ Barbara interrupts and says,
‘You see, you did kill her. I knew it. Well you won’t get away with it, bitch!’ She picks up a pointy thing and there is
a bang. There is smoke and something bounces off my skin. As the smoke clears, I see Barbara looking at me with wide eyes and the look on her face of someone who has been told they’re confined to their room for a week. I take the pointy thing from her and snap it in two, like a waist. Then, as Barbara seems to be in something called a state of shock, that Dr Quinzel tells me is a bad thing to be in, I say,
‘I did not kill her, Barbara. I broke her, but I decided that was bad, so I made her whole again. And then she chose to join me and be happy. You can join me and be happy once you’ve done what I want you to. What can I do to make you happy?’ I look at her and see that she is sitting in a chair with wheels. I say, ‘Your legs are broken. I can fix them if you like. Would that make you happy?’
Barbara looks at me. She seems unhappy, which I don’t understand, because surely the thought of being fixed ought to make anyone happy. But she says,
‘You think you can talk me round with nonsense like that? You must think I’m really stupid. Well, I don’t know how you got Helena, but I’m not falling for your tricks.’ She is definitely not happy. I decide that the only thing I can do is to fix her, to show that I want her to be happy. So I look at her legs. They are nice legs, which makes it a shame that they are broken, for nice legs should be a joy to all, like my breasts, only not so much. I say to myself that her legs are not broken, then I say,
‘It is not a trick. I have fixed your legs. Now you can walk and be happy.’ She says,
‘So I can walk can I?’ I say,
‘Yes.’ She says,
‘The best doctors in the country say I’ll never recover, but you say I can walk just because you looked at me?’ I say,
‘Doctors only have medicine; I am the source of all happiness. And Dr Quinzel says you should never trust doctors. After all, she says, she’s one.’ Barbara looks at me for a moment and says,
‘Either this is a trick, in which case I don’t understand what you think you’ll gain from it, or you’re totally insane. Whichever, there’s one way to prove you’re lying.’ She pushes down on the arms of her chair and stands up. She gasps and breathes very fast and very deep. She looks at me. Her mouth and eyes are wide open and she says, ‘Kara, I…’ then she falls forward. I catch her and hold her and touch mouths with her. I want to join with her right now, but she must do something for me, so I hold her while she cries. I do not understand why she is crying, because she ought to be happy, not sad, but Lois tells me that sometimes people cry when they are very happy, which I suppose explains it.
When she has cried for a while and my breasts are quite wet, I say,
‘Are you happy?’ Barbara looks up at me and says,
‘Oh, I could never be happier. And I can never thank you enough for this gift.’ Then she reaches up, as if she wants to touch mouths again. I let her touch mouths, but when she starts to touch me in other places as if she wants us to do some of the special things for being happy together, I hold her hands and say,
‘We can make happiness together in a little while, Barbara, and become one. But there is something you must do for me.’ She looks sad, but only a little, and says,
‘Anything I can do for you, my darling, I will do.’ I say,
‘Give me knowledge.’ She looks as if she does not understand, which is silly, for what I want is very simple after all. She says,
‘Of course, my darling, but, er, knowledge of what?’ I look at her, surprised. Isn’t it obvious? Obviously not, for she continues to look at me the way Dr Quinzel did after she had given me what she called an experimental pill, and I woke up three days later covered in blood. Which she did say was someone else’s, so that was all right. But this time there is, I think, no blood involved, so I don’t understand what is troubling Barbara. Obviously she is not so clever as I had thought. So I explain. I say,
‘Knowledge of everything, of course.’ She looks surprised, which I don’t understand, because surely if I knew what I wanted to know I wouldn’t want to know it, but she says,
‘Right, okay. Well, I guess if that’s what you want, then the best thing you can do is search the Internet.’ I think about this and point at the computers. I say,
‘You mean I should search them?’ She says,
‘Well yes, I suppose so, but – Kara, no! What are you doing?’ I look at her. I am confused. I say,
‘I am searching it. Isn’t that what you said I should do?’ She says,
‘But you’ve taken it apart. You can’t do that.’ I look at her, breathing heavily and unhappy, then I look at the things in my hands. I say,
‘But how else am I to search it? And I am already learning things. I see from the pattern of atoms in this melted sand that naked mole rats live in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia. I wonder what a Kenya is?’ Barbara is still breathing deeply and her eyes are wide again. She says,
‘Are you saying that you can actually read the electronics?’ I say,
‘Of course. Is that not how everyone does it?’ She opens and closes her mouth a few times, then says,
‘This is too much.’ She puts her arms around me and says, ‘My darling, I can’t wait any longer; you are so amazing that I can’t bear to be without you. Can you promise you’ll never leave me?’ I smile at her and say,
‘I promise, Barbara, once we have loved you will always be with me.’ We touch mouths. Then I acquaint her with my breasts and hold her and love her and am one with her.
I start searching through the Internet again. I do not know what I am searching for, but as I piece through Barbara’s computers and read what they have to say I learn all kinds of things, like what a transistor is, or how bone china is made, and even some very silly things that people have said about us. Power Girl gets angry when she sees some of the pictures and says we should hunt down the people who made them and kill them like dogs, but I say that won’t help me find who I am and carry on searching. And then I find it. I know that this is what I am looking for. It is the thing that makes me not know how I came to be in the hospital, and makes there be so many of me that I can never tell if there actually is a me. But that will change. I will know who I am and what I am here for, and finally be able to use my breasts properly. I only need to find this thing and destroy it.
We discuss what we should do. Barbara says we should send something called a virus across the Internet and make it destroy the thing. But Dr Quinzel says that is silly, because how would giving the thing a cold help? Barbara tries to explain, but I don’t understand what she is saying and neither does anyone else and then Dr Quinzel says ‘Shut up, Babs, or I’ll wake Mr J’ which I don’t understand either, but which makes Barbara stop talking about ‘stateful packet inspection’, which is a relief. I like Dr Quinzel. The two Helenas say we should ask the Internet where the thing is, then go there and kill it. Atlee says ‘Couldn’t we just politely ask it to go away?’ but everyone else ignores her and agrees with the Helenas. So we look at the Internet and soon we find the thing. And some more pictures of us that the thing drew that make Power Girl even angrier.
Now I know how to make things the way I want them to be, I do not need to fly. I decide that Barbara’s room is not the right place to confront the thing, so I am at the right place, which is high, with rocks and snow on the ground. I can see people a long way below me, so I think it must be a mountain. It is a good place for what I have to do, so I make the thing be here with me, and it is. It stands before me wearing clothes rather like Power Girl’s, only they aren’t made to show off beautiful breasts. Even if the person wearing them has beautiful breasts. Which the thing doesn’t. And the clothes are a different colour. Power Girl’s are white like the snow I am standing on, but the thing’s have red bits and blue bits and are really a terrible mess. Even though the thing is like me, in a bad way. I can see that its heart is racing and its body is filling with strange chemicals, so I think it must be suffering from the thing Dr Quinzel called ‘shock’. I suppose I should expect that, really. It says,
‘P…Pow
er Girl, what are you doing here? You should be…’ I raise my hand and it stops talking. I say,
‘I should be what? Drugged into a stupor in Arkham? Being Mr Kent’s brood mare? But I am not. I am here, and I have brought you here so you can answer to me. And I am not Power Girl. You will call me Kara.’ It says,
‘But, but, I, I am Kara. That’s my name.’ I look at it. It does not realise that its days are over. I say,
‘Kara is not your name; it is the name you tried to steal from me. You are nothing, with no name of your own.’ The thing shakes its head and says,
‘Fine, if you insist, I’ll call you Kara. But really, you’re not meant to be here, you should be somewhere safe. Thank heavens I found you before you could do any…’ It stops talking as I give it a hard stare, which is all it deserves, then, after a few seconds it says, ‘So you have…’ then stops again. I stare at it for a bit longer, because staring is easy to do and can be fun too if you are a good starer. I am a very good starer. Everyone at the hospital used to say my stare was the most frightening thing they had seen, so it would be a shame not to use it when I want to make a bad thing realise how just bad it is. I stare at the thing for a bit, so it knows how bad a thing it is, and then, when I think it has learned its lesson, I say,
Lost Girl of Krypton Page 3
