“I was with the 101ers and the others who got off-world in ’77.”
“Right.”
“Your mom wanted to stay behind and watch over you.”
“The Titanium Girl from my world, she met a bad end,” I say.
It seems like an awful admission.
“I know,” she replies. “You gotta understand, Joe. They chose two worlds that were so statistically alike, otherwise their little trick would never work. The Editors, you know?”
“Yeah. I know about the Editors.”
“You do?”
She seems surprised. Hell, I’d say shocked.
“Yeah. I’ve got him in here?” I smile, feeling safe among friends, and tap my head.
Titania’s expression’s one of alarm. She stands straight from the bar.
“Who?”
“Lennon. John Lennon.”
If she could harden any further, Titania might break into chunks. Her face closes shop and nascent energy forms around one fist, wisps of burning air curling away from it. The others in the cantina get the vibe pretty quick – quicker’n me, anyway. And they form in a half-circle: Solaris, Olga, Ja Rule, and my old mate the Monolith.
“Steady, boys,” Titania says. “We’ve got a mass murderer in our midst.”
Zephyr 10.5 “A Binary Affair”
I LIFT MY hands in the wild hope of steadying these runaway horses.
“Come on. Hey,” I say weakly. “Steady on yourself, OK? What’s the problem?”
“This is the person who killed our world, Joseph.”
“No, Jane,” I say, awkward as it is to use her real name.
I’m hoping it might be the slap in the face she needs to snap out of her desire to open my father a new asshole and break me in half to do it.
“This isn’t the Doomsday Man. This is the Preacher. The Preacher Man.”
“That’s what they call him here too. Preacher. Seems like he’s bad news on any world,” she replies.
“What about you? On my world, you died. I told you my mother was dead too, but in the last few days there’s been doubt cast on that. Hell, I pity the poor fucker trying to follow this if they’re not me, because fuck, even my head’s spinning,” I tell her. “You’re dead on my world: a dead, dead . . . dead fucking drug addict. Here? Well look. You’re someone else entirely.”
I whirl and gesture at Nocturne, skulking at the back of the room.
“On my world, she’s as weak as tissue paper. Freaks at the first sign of a storm. Stiletto? Ditto. I’ve never seen her take down a posse of bank robbers alone, let alone tear a whole riot squad new ones. Red Monolith?”
“You got a story about me too, dude?” the muffled voice calls – so familiar, and yet estranged.
“Yeah, pal. Fuck.”
I start to weep and cut it out almost immediately. No time for blubbering, I can practically hear the voice in my ear, though my old man’s gone curiously silent yet again. Playing possum.
“Monolith,” I say, “I watched you die, man. Killed. A hero’s death, or that’s what the papers said. At the time it just seemed . . . such a waste.”
“Nice of you to care,” he says, flippant almost.
I sigh and turn back to Titania and see she’s relaxed a little.
“Do you see?”
“I hear what you’re saying,” she says.
“He did take out Fortress for us, Jane,” Olga says from the back of the room.
“So he’s, what, inside your skull?” Titania asks.
“I forgot. He’s kinda your ex-husband, isn’t he?”
“Husband’s not really the word. I’ve wised up a whole heap since 1977, Joe.”
I eye her, the counter, the circle of other masks slowly letting their postures slide.
“I could still do with that drink.”
Titania stares at me a moment. The seconds seem iced. All it would take is one move and we could be starting Armageddon. Instead she nods, takes the bottle and cracks the lid spinning with one thumb.
“OK.”
*
AS TITANIA EXPLAINS it, however much Simon Magus is right that the chances of ourselves recurring infinite times across the multiverse are slim, there’s paradoxically at the same time absolutely, definitely a number of close-match parallels; and it’s these that the shadowy, interdimensional Editors cling between, travelling by eldritch, arcane means you and I just couldn’t even guess at. Their vehicles are thoughts; their dreams, it seems, our reality.
“They collapsed that sonofabitch into the one level playing field,” Titania says with her boots up on a battered day bed, the better part of a fifth of bourbon in a bottle loose between her strong hands.
Olga lounges at the other end, sozzled, but pleasantly so, the women’s feet intertwined in casual overtones I’m in no way drunk enough not to notice. In fact, my inability to succumb to the drink seems to have given them a license to go for broke. Always the chauffeur and never the bridesmaid, I think I might’ve once remarked.
“We had an hour’s notice. That was all. One of the boys picked it up in a moment of cosmic consciousness,” she goes on. “We were doing a lot of LSD and tantric sex, Tibetan chanting, trying to climb up the evolutionary ladders inside our own brains. Had no idea how much further the Doomsday Man and his furry crew had taken it in our other parallel. Contact with the hive mind, well, whatever they were, these subspace flunkies, giving them a conduit right into our multiverse, and all they wanted to do was play havoc.”
“It was a means to power for him though, right?”
“It was stage one,” Titania nods and takes a swig.
I watch the liquid draining into her lips for far too long for it to be proper, but a big part of me feels like those fat sweaty nerdy guys must when the Suicide Girls strut their shit at Comic Con. It’s a teenage fantasy uncurling on a divan just inches away.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen stage two. Not from what we were able to monitor,” Titania says and hands over the bottle to Olga, who drains the rest in about two seconds straight.
“You said you were with others. These 101ers, yes?”
“We’d left the Island by then. Krakatoa. We were in a pitched war – secret, yes, but pitched – against your dad already. There were new ways of thinking, emerging from all our experiments. We recognized what we’d fallen into with the Preacher Man was a sort of . . . Hitlerian eugenics, a master race breeding program along classic lines. It was . . . disgusting. Disgraceful.”
She shakes her head. Olga takes her hand from the other end of the sofa and they sigh.
“Yet you did it,” I say.
“I was young. Your father was hung. What can I say? Besides. It gave me a son.”
The hand-holding between the two women intensifies. This isn’t a fresh issue and the grief rolls off Titania in waves strong enough to drown any nearby empaths. I sigh and take a swig from a glass I discover is empty.
“Everyone who didn’t clear out of there, they were – what’s the term these days – overwritten? Reality isn’t conscious. It’s a binary affair. Alive or dead, one, not two, it couldn’t stand to replicate, Joe. It just copied people over like old VHS tapes,” Titania tells me, earnestness written in every fiber of her being.
“It means the me who carried over was from the other world, a world like this, where The Twelve were already tyrants. All memory of that was gone, of course, though I wonder, from what you tell me and all I’ve found out from others over the years . . . We’ve had people watching, you know, as the years rolled by, and even as our numbers thinned – we commandeered a Thalassian intra-space cruiser at one stage, got our hands on all that sweet ideational tech – and so I was able to keep half an eye on you, your mom, myself. That poor girl.
“Titanium Girl. I think part of her knew, you know?” Titania sighs again.
Olga slips panther-like from the end of the couch, boots off, and pads away to the room they share above the cantina.
“I think that’s what
maybe drove her so crazy. Or something microscopic, some difference between her life and mine that meant where I coped – some would even say I’ve thrived in the chaos since ’77 – instead she snapped. Seeing your kid killed, though, that’s got to hurt. That little boy dying, well, I know how it feels because he was my boy too, Joe.”
The tears well up now and there comes the flow. She’s a big lady. Statuesque. Strong. Beautiful. When she cries, her whole body sobs and her lungs get a real workout. A fey smile crosses my face just a second before the words sink in and I open my mouth and I’m damned if I know what’s meant to come out.
“How. . . ?”
“Jesus, Joe. I’m so sorry.”
She dabs at her eyes like she’s blotting mascara, but it’s been years since she wore any.
*
“WHEN WE WERE leaving, it killed me,” Titania says. “We thought it was safer. There were only so many we could get through the Morris-Thorne wormhole. Your mom, Catchfire, she was in New York at the time with the kids –”
“She said you guys ran away from the Island together.”
“We did. Why do you think I wasn’t too pleased to hear you’d brought him along?”
She shakes her impressive tresses and pats her face down and sits again.
“Georgie was looking after you and Patrick while I was in London with Strummer and the others. We were already working to counteract what your dad was doing on Krakatoa.”
“Who’s this Strummer guy?”
“A Brit super. He was king of the punk movement, but thanks to the Editors I guess you wouldn’t know anything about that. Oh, Joe – his name was Joe too, you know – to think of all the music you’ve missed out on.”
“Punk? Nasty name. Doesn’t sound like I’ve missed all that much.”
Now Titania pulls a motherly face of disapproval and I have to suck my cheeks in to keep from a frustrated sort of visual angst I know my face is more than capable of displaying. Not a pretty sight.
“Joseph. . . .”
“You . . . left him?”
“Where we were going, it wasn’t safe.”
Titania takes a moment, a deep breath of air to restore her poise. Renewed waves of heightened charisma wash over me, just tingling at the edge of what you might call a perfume.
“Strummer was messing around with Papa Africa and MC Massive, the whole white boy, Rasta-fusion thing they had going there. In the middle of all this was this cat called Mister Maker. He had the portable wormhole generator. Without it, we would’ve all been screwed. Hell, without it, we never would’ve known about the Doomsday Man’s shenanigans at all.
“We left because we expected to be coming back,” Titania explains. “We thought if we just jumped the splice, we could nip back on the other side and take the battle to him. He wanted to undercut his buddies in The Twelve. They’d all seen too far into Pandora’s Box with the secrets he’d helped show them. The ruse with the subspace creepy-crawlies was just Lennon trying to hit the reset switch. To roll it all back to Year One. He was trying to retcon his own fucking continuity, if you’ll pardon my language.”
“I’ve heard worse.”
Jane smirks and goes calm again and then her stare goes deeper and I feel her eyes boring into my forehead.
“He’s in there?”
“Yeah. He is.”
“He’s hearing all this?”
“Yeah. I suppose he is, unless he’s, you know, sleeping or something.”
“Is he talking to you now?”
“No,” I say to her. “He goes quiet, a lot. I think he’s . . . respecting boundaries.”
“Did he tell you about the shadow war?”
“This is your lot, versus him?”
She nods and I shake my head.
“No. He said he never had the chance to make the jump with the 101ers. He abandoned his body instead. Went into me.”
“Lying again, John?”
Clearly her comment isn’t directed at me. Feels strange, though, when she’s talking right to my face.
“What do you say, pops?”
Zephyr 10.6 “My Benighted Portrait”
I GUESS IF everyone else is going to start talking to me like I’m not there, I may as well get in on the act. For whatever reason though, Lennon’s not answering.
I can’t shake the fact he surrendered control back to me without even being asked. As bizarre as my very latest newfound situation goes, it hasn’t felt as weird as it probably should. I’ve taken that as some kind of signal from the universe about the path I’m on. You’d think a long record of bad choices made trying to judge the whims of the cosmos would rid me of such monumentally ill-thought behavior, but I’m living proof in natural selection leaving a backdoor open sometimes.
It is getting late and Titania gently snoozes on the sofa. I get up, knock over a couple of glasses, and move to the open wall. It’s peaceful in the rebel settlement now the rain has stopped, the stars twinkling through the combat netting with less industrial smog to cloud the way. The smell of the rain is like a promise of cleanliness I can’t imagine for myself. I can’t help wishing something would come and scour my thoughts and leave something in their place even resembling common sense. There’s just no getting this story straight, it seems.
I think about Julian’s corpse, torn to pieces by the robot’s attack. Catchfire’s crisped remains on an FBI autopsy slab. Red Monolith’s headless corpse on the bridge, gushing blood frozen to slush.
I shake my head and turn to see the man himself staring at me from the other side of the lane.
“Are you serious about what you said before?”
Monolith has the helmet under his arm, jaw-length surfer-boy hair scraping at his cleft chin, gentle stubble, a single piercing in one ear he was worried people thought might mean he was only into guys.
“Afraid so. But that wasn’t you, so no matter.”
“I thought that too, you know, at the time. I haven’t stopped thinkin’ about it since though, you know? It’s hard to think there’s a copy of you, dead, and here you are, me, walkin’ ‘round alive. Bizarre.”
“Yeah well, philosophy never was your strong point.”
Monolith takes this on the chin like I knew he would.
“Maybe so. Were we close?”
“Like brothers, my friend.”
He stares at me a moment, appraising my benighted portrait before he slips the helmet into place. Without another word he turns down the lane and starts off.
“Hey, Red,” I call to him and he stops and swivels at the waist, nearly seven feet of him crammed into that crash test dummy of a costume.
“Yeah?”
“Leave the yellow panels, OK?”
The faceplate stares my way a few seconds more and then there’s a curt nod of his head and he moves on.
*
BACK IN THE cantina, Titania eyes me from the foot of the stairs, only the structurally necessary parts of her costume still in place.
“Are you coming?”
“That would be too much to hope, wouldn’t it?”
She somehow manages a simple farm girl smile. White teeth. Bones almost luminous through her skin.
“Someone has to show you how glad we are you stumbled our way, Joe, and you’re all grown up now.”
I nod and join her, taking her hand and nervous about the prospect despite my inflated sense of prowess. Her behemoth girlfriend is another matter, but in the open space above the tavern bar there’s nothing but strewn clothing and a single mattress, an old wooden orange crate, a paraffin lamp, and Olga sitting up all sexy and disheveled and shit, and I give a gentle groan as she smiles, impious and imposing as her lover leads me in.
It’s like being sandwiched between two erotic forces of nature, deliciously Stygian, like a mythological mind-fuck come to life. They move over and across me, smooth panels of naked skin, succulent curves, tawny and fluid in the roseate lamp light. They remove everything but my mask and when I try to take the lead, Olga gr
ins, gives me that roguish wink of hers, and presses a super-strong hand into my chest that pins me to the bed hard enough to make the floorboards squeak.
“Easy, tiger.”
She is first on top and Titania circles languidly, touching and stroking and kissing and adding moisture where needed until I am groaning with my toes straining and my head back and at the brink of surrender when these delightful ladies switch places and I find the world goes dark as my face is engulfed within the cavern of Olga’s flesh.
You like that, huh? You should try it from where I am.
I cum twice. If the roles were reversed, you’d accuse two men of exploitation, molestation, taking advantage as they set aside my sighed protests and have their way with me. Instead, it’s just incredibly hot as Olga does as she pleases, my mouth full of Jane’s cunt, dismissing complaints that I can’t cum again as Olga licks her oversized finger and slides it into my ass. We ride the waves of pleasure like three gay bikers on the one machine.
Dawn is still plenty of time away when I move gently onto my side and let go a deep breath I feel like I’ve been holding since the day I was born and Jane gently chuckles and I feel fingers, I don’t know whose, trace over the back of my ribs, simultaneously a kiss on my ass and I grin as well, borderline in wanting to dip back into the magic I know is like lightning and unlikely to strike again in my lifetime.
Titania slides onto my arm and Olga nestles up behind her, wrinkling her gently freckled nose and sinking her teeth into her lover’s nape.
“Tired?” Titania asks.
“Yes.”
“Sleep, then. In the morning we can talk. Make plans. Strategy.”
“Boring shit,” Olga says.
“Yeah,” Titania says. “Might save your life some day. You never know. Maybe even your world.”
And so we ease off to sleep, peaceful as stork-delivered newborns enthroned within our nest of teeth.
Zephyr 10.7 “Traceback”
TITANIA IMPLIED THE heroes fleeing our world from the Editors’ splice found they weren’t able to come back. They were cut adrift somehow, all ties to their prime parallel severed when it technically ceased to exist. They were left to scour the infinity of the multiverse for a version of their world as close to their own as possible, a veritable search for a needle in a thousand million haystacks. I guess I shouldn’t blame her for not coming home for her little boy and me.
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