Mutant Legacy

by Karen Haber

  “This isn’t miracle-working,” I told the vid reporters when they called. “Any reasonably talented telekinete could have accomplished what that man did. He’s simply using mutant powers.”

  “But, Dr. Akimura,” said Tim Walters of Vidnews Too, “what about the disruption of the manganese structure? How do you explain that?”

  “Easily,” I said. “Any telekinete who knew what he or she was doing could handle that task. We’re dealing with a heroic deed here. But not a miracle.”

  “But if what you say is true, then why don’t other mutants come forward to aid their communities?”

  I scented smoke here: the first tinder catching in a backlash of resentment against selfish mutants hoarding their skills. “No,” I said quickly. “I want to emphasize that not every mutant can do these things. Our skills vary. But this man is not some avatar. He’s just a very skilled mutant employing his talents for the good of others.”

  A week later, Rick really outdid himself.

  My brother went down to Mexico City to help battle a cholera epidemic. The vid report I saw was not of first quality—apparently the tape had come from some amateur vid jock’s hand-held rig. Although the color and sound wavered from time to time the action was clear enough.

  My brother was standing in the midst of what looked like an International Red Cross hospital tent as a tall, blond-haired doctor glared at him.

  “How did you get in here? Who are you?” the doctor said. “Get away from that patient.”

  “Is this a terminal case, Doctor?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I think I can use microkinesis to save her,” Rick said. “At least I’m game to try.”

  A short, gray-haired woman in a Better World jumpsuit moved into view. She had the no-nonsense air I’ve always associated with nuns and medical professionals, and she ignored the sputtering doctor as easily as Rick did. “We’ve got to deal with the dehydration,” she said to my brother.

  “What about the bugs?” Rick asked.

  “The antitoxins will get them. It’s the fluid loss that’s killing these people. Probe her bloodstream. Look for white platelet clumps. Wherever you find them, reinforce the cell walls nearby to increase fluid retention. And scan for ruptures. When you find them, try to repair the cell walls so we can stabilize the osmotic pressure. Got it?”

  “I think so.” Rick frowned, leaned down over the woman who lay, unconscious, on the cot, and closed his eyes. “Okay, here we go.” Sweat began to pour down his face.

  “Now wait just one frigging moment here,” said the Red Cross doctor. He reached out to grab Rick’s hand—and froze in midgesture. Rick had trapped him in a telekinetic field. The doctor’s eyes roved back and forth in obviously mounting frenzy but otherwise he was completely immobilized.

  Yet Rick seemed oblivious to him, eyes tightly shut, all his will focused on the dying woman.

  She stirred once, moaned softly, strained for breath, then her labored breathing eased.

  Rick opened his eyes. “There,” he said. The tension went out of him; he stood up, breathing heavily, and swung his arms back and forth.

  The Red Cross doctor gasped and took a staggering step or two. “What the hell was that?” He rubbed his fingers and arms, concentrating on the tricep muscles. “Jesus, I ache all over.”

  “That’s because you fought me,” Rick said. “You shouldn’t have strained so hard. You probably gave yourself a pretty bad charley horse.”

  The doctor glared at him. “What have you done to this woman?” The color drained out of his face as he examined her. “My God,” he said. “My God, I don’t believe it.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Her fever’s broken. She seems to be in a light sleep instead of a near-coma. All other bodily functions seem to have returned to normal. Fluid balance is fine.” He gazed up at Rick in wonder. “Did you cure her just like that? Can you really do that? I mean, I’ve heard of mutants having unusual talents, but—”

  “Let’s just say that I’m more unusual than most,” Rick said. “Yeah, I guess it worked. Is there anybody else around here I can help?”

  The doctor rubbed his jaw. He seemed to be turning things over in his mind, and then turning them over again. After a long moment he said, “I don’t know. It’s irregular as hell just letting you waltz right in here and go to work on people. But on the other hand, we’ve got terminal cases I can’t help. You might as well take a whack at ’em.” He grabbed Rick’s shoulder. “Come on. This way. Hurry.”

  Rick moved from cot to cot and the camera followed him. The work was draining, and under his desert tan his skin grew pallid and waxy, but he refused to rest. In his wake, patients breathed with renewed vigor, sat up, and a few of the strongest even attempted to walk.

  All afternoon he worked on the most critical cases and a quick, clumsy montage showed that within hours Rick had cured most of the patients within the tent city.

  “What’s next, Doctor?” Rick said. A tremor ran through his body but he seemed not to notice.

  “Don’t you want to rest?”

  “Please, Rick, listen to him,” said the short, gray-haired Better World staffer. “You nearly passed out after curing that last patient.”

  Slowly, stubbornly, my brother shook her off. “No, I’ve got to keep moving. There’s too much work to do.”

  “Here.” The Red Cross doctor began to press a hypo against Rick’s arm. Rick jumped away from him as if he had just tried to bite him.

  “What the hell’s in that thing?”

  “A vitamin-B booster.”

  “You take it. I don’t need anything. I’m fine.”

  “Can’t hurt,” the doctor said. “Especially if you want to keep on going.”

  “I told you, I’m fine.” Rick’s left eye twitched in an odd tic. “Where to next?”

  “Well,” the doctor said, “if you’re absolutely set on running yourself into the ground, there’s an auxiliary tent hospital set up in the Galeria Plaza. I’m sure they could use help there. And if you’ve got any energy left after that, try the city hospital near Reforma at the corner of Sevilla and Ocampo. That place has got to be a nightmare.”

  “I’ll bet.” Rick took several steps, staggered, stopped. “Y’know, on second thought, maybe I will have the hypo after all.” He held out his arm and the doctor pressed a small syringe against it. If he felt the sting of the injection he didn’t show it. “Thanks.”

  His stride lengthened as the serum took effect and he moved quickly out of range as the film faded, blurred, and ended.

  I was deeply alarmed by this particular vid and not only because it showed my brother mucking about in international health crises when he didn’t have any sort of medical training to begin with. That was bad enough, but I was even more concerned when I saw Rick nearly faint from exhaustion. Oh, yes, he had made a lightning-quick recovery, but I knew that something had gone wrong, and that frightened me more than anything—and hardened my determination to head off Rick’s juggernaut. What if he, himself, couldn’t control it any longer? Who could?

  His intervention in the cholera epidemic made headlines, of course. He was both anointed and vilified by the usual chorus. Loudest among his critics was the ever-vigilant, ever-hysterical Roman Catholic Church, which ceaselessly warned him to stay away from its precious flock. But the AMA was right behind them, cautioning against public sanction of untrained miracle workers.

  Theirs were voices in the darkness and they went largely ignored. A letter of commendation arrived from the Secretary General of the United Nations. Rick was even invited to dinner at the White House. And, of course, after a while, he seemed to take all the kind words a bit too seriously. At least, that’s how I saw it. So once again I added my voice to the refrain.

  “Of course he helped the medical teams,” I said to the reporters. “But I can’t believe that one man alone was responsible for chasing cholera out of Mexico City. He merely has a ver
y efficient P.R. staff. They’re exaggerating. He’s a glory hunter, pure and simple.”

  Then came the plane crash. Or, let me rephrase that, then came the near-miss.

  It was a night of uneasy dreams for me. If, in fact, they were dreams at all.

  I was standing with my brother outside the main building of Better World. Rick held me in an affectionate embrace.

  “Little brother, I wish you were here with me,” he said. “I need your help so badly. Why do you insist on rejecting me? You’re a part of me. Why do you stay away?” He hugged me tightly against his rough wool shirt and his eyes were suspiciously bright, as though he were fighting back tears.

  I returned the embrace happily until his grip changed and I began to have trouble breathing. “Rick,” I said. “You’re hurting me. Let go.”

  He didn’t seem to hear. With punishing fingers he held my arms and his eyes were wide and unfocused and horrified.

  “Oh, oh God,” he said. “They’re going to hit. All those people, the little children. No, no, I can’t, I—” He grabbed his head with his hands as though rocked by some terrible pain.

  “Rick, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  He ignored me, lurched backward, and vanished.

  For a moment I was dumbfounded. Then, somehow I saw it also. Two planes were taxiing down a runway toward each other in the twilight. Red lights blinked secret messages from the wings and tail, freezing drizzle fell gray from the sky in the winter dusk. Ice-slicked runways reflected the lights, making ghost patterns of shadows as I watched the slow-motion ballet performed by the elephantine flying machines. In silence they met, metal on metal, and in silence came to pieces. In silence the lights flashed, the bodies fell, the people screamed and screamed and screamed.

  No—no, wait. It wasn’t that way, not at all. No one was screaming, no one was dying. The planes floated toward each other and passed smoothly, silent metal birds on separate and safe trajectories. There was no crash. No death. None at all.

  Then I saw it yet again, faster this time, and even more terrible. The planes raced toward each other, engines screaming. They hit, they hit, they hit. Oh God, the blood, the sounds, the horror of it. I covered my face. Please, don’t make me see it anymore, please, I can’t bear it.

  As if a film were being rewound, the images reversed, planes re-formed, disengaged, pulled back and away from each other. They moved forward, then pulled back. Forward, then back. My vision looped around and around, finally catching and holding on the image of a young woman’s face frozen in midscream.

  Julian?

  The vision shattered into splinters of color and light. My twinsense twinged, a maddening subcutaneous itch I could never reach, never scratch. I saw a figure, head down, shoulders slumped, standing in the midst of a gray and endless void. I knew before I had even seen his features clearly. It was Rick, and I sent him a query in private mindspeech mode.

  Are you all right?

  No answer. Couldn’t he hear me?

  Rick? Answer me. What happened?

  Still no response. I was really worried now.

  RICK!

  I hear you, for God’s sake. I hear you. Yes. I’m all right. Brother, let’s walk.

  Before I could assent I was in a dark, chaotic place, tumbling end over end, stomach rebelling. Then I was standing, shivering, on a high cliff, the wind was blowing fiercely, and my brother stood beside me. He seemed reinvigorated, almost exhilarated by the icy wind.

  “Where the hell are we?” I said between chattering teeth.

  “Mesa Chivato, near the old Zuni-Jemez trail,” he said. “Sorry for the quick trip but I had to get us out of there, away from the confusion. And besides, I like it here.”

  I stared down at the tormented landscape far below us. Rick would like it here, I thought. And why not? It suited his nature. He could range throughout the roughest, wildest spots in New Mexico. Or anyplace else he desired.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I dunno. Guess I didn’t get to the airport in time. But it was so close—” His voice, already hoarse, broke and for a moment he said nothing.

  “You mean the accident had already occurred?”

  “Was happening,” he said. “As I arrived. I was too late. So like an idiot I tried to t-jump back five minutes to see if I could divert one of the planes off the runway.”

  “You tried to jump in time?” I gazed at him in amazement. “But I didn’t think that was possible.”

  “Oh, it’s possible, all right,” Rick said. “But it’s hard, even for me. And the displacement of energy really screws up the sequence of events. Not to mention my head.”

  I laughed. “If you think you were confused, you wouldn’t believe what I saw.” Quickly I told him about the conflicting visions that had so astounded me.

  Rick whistled. “You, too? I don’t know, Julian. Maybe that twin link leaves you open to leaks.” He nodded. “It wouldn’t surprise me. Nothing would, anymore.”

  “Hey, at least you managed to prevent the crash.”

  “Took everything I had. I got into the cockpit of the 987 and grabbed the pilot in major coercive mode. Made him pull to the right as fast as he could. Jesus, it was hard. I thought I was going to have a stroke or something. And as it was, I couldn’t quite hold it long enough. I could feel it slipping, getting away from me: felt kind of like I’d pushed an elastic band a little bit and then let go. That’s when the plane hit that shack.”

  I saw tears in his golden eyes.

  “But you did save most of the passengers,” I said. “Gods, Rick, you practically worked a miracle. There were only twenty casualties. If you hadn’t tried to intervene, seven hundred people might have died instead of twenty.”

  Rick shrugged and wiped his eyes. “Yeah. But try telling that to the families of the casualties.”

  I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Rick, don’t do this to yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay. Spare me the therapy, Doctor.” He shook off my consoling grip. “Y’know, when I first had that vision of those two planes hitting, I couldn’t tell when it would happen, or if it was happening in real time, right then as I watched. All I knew was I had to get there. For all the good it did.”

  “Stop it, Rick. You’re only human.”

  My brother smiled at me oddly. “Glad you’re so certain, kiddo.” Then he faded, faded, until all that was left of him was a smile against the tormented clouds in the New Mexican sky. Even after I awoke I could still see his smile against the clouds.

  That morning, I heard about the near-miss at the Albuquerque airport as I dressed for work. Twenty-seven people had died. But a major disaster had been averted.

  The phone began ringing immediately and for once I let the answermech take it.

  “This is Channel Two. We would like a reaction from a mutant spokesman to the rescue at the Albuquerque airport. Officials at the Mutant Council gave us this number.”

  “Chris Rossfeld, Independent Vid, and I’m calling about the miracle in Albuquerque.”

  “Dr. Akimura, this is Clayton Pierce. Will you comment?”

  “The miracle man of New Mexico—”

  “Do you still think he’s a fraud?”

  “We need a reaction shot—”

  The dream was still too fresh in my mind and my doubts were overwhelming. Had Rick just barely managed to save those two planes? Was he in any way responsible for the deaths that had occurred? And what had I seen? Was my unconscious mind somehow tied into Rick in such a way that I received visions from him? For the rest of that day I didn’t return any calls.

  Rick’s media exposure increased threefold. He was peripatetic: curing people, extending his hand in friendship, pouring out good vibes to everybody within the sound of his voice. And his miracles just got bigger and better. If they cost him more in energy, in concentration, in all the tiny special areas that he relied upon to work his magic deeds, he carefully shielded his weakness from the view of others. On video, at least, he was stro
ng and splendid, a demigod for all seasons.

  The mountain rescue he performed in the Canadian Rockies made for extraordinary video and he followed that up with a midair levitation and t-jump of survivors from a shuttle crash. Then there was his nifty trick at the Houston Spill, the recovery of the neutronium shipment lost between the Gulf of Aqaba and Dakar, and his plugging of the hole in the seawall of Pacifica II, thirteen miles off the big island of Hawaii, saving the sea colony. As if that weren’t enough, he even extinguished the fire storm on the French/ Saudi orbital platform. By then he was famous. And not merely for his heroics.

  Word of Rick’s wondrous sharings had spread throughout the nonmutant community and people were intrigued—and attracted—and most eager to experience the healing qualities of Rick’s special magic. Apparently, a few members of Better World had talked to the vidnews, describing their experiences as transformational, empowering, and even more enjoyable than sex.

  Needless to say, Better World was besieged. Half the people in the Western Hemisphere seemed to want to have a transformational, better-than-sexual experience as soon as possible. And each one of them sent money.

  I watched these developments with a certain sour uneasiness. Was I jealous? After all, I wasn’t the brother for whom people clamored. I didn’t draw crowds, didn’t trail vid cameras behind me for a block, didn’t require a security force to protect me from the people who loved me. But no, no, I don’t think I was jealous, exactly. More likely, I felt disappointed with Rick for falling under the spell of it all and allowing a documentary crew to accompany him wherever he went.

  Everyone seemed to embrace my brother’s philosophy of support, caring, and comfort. The Public Vid Service rushed through a four-part documentary series on Better World narrated by one of the youngest, most sincere, most popular actors in the business.