“They were replaced,” the teacher continued, “by a more advanced race called Cro-Magnon man, also known as Homo sapiens, also known as human beings. In other words, children, they were replaced by all of us.
“It was once theorized that Neanderthals were wiped out by years of conflict with these successors, but new evidence found in our own DNA suggests that these two species may have interbred, eventually evolving into modern humanity. In effect, they became us.”
One of her kids, a twelve-year-old named Artie, flashed a smile at a little girl standing nearby. She was with her parents and she didn’t look at all happy. Her dress was stained with ice cream and Kool-Aid, and she was far more interested in getting some more snacks than in looking at boring old statues and such. When Artie smiled, she responded by sticking out her tongue.
He did the same, only his tongue was black and forked like a snake.
The girl stared goggle-eyed for what seemed like forever before jumping back against her mother and, to that woman’s surprise, burying her head against her leg and whining in fright.
“Artie,” the teacher said quietly, looming over him. He tried his best smile; she wasn’t interested. “Not here.”
“I didn’t mean any harm.”
“You scared her.”
“She started it!”
“She’s a little girl, you’re almost a teenager. I expect you to know better.”
“That is so bogus, Miss Munroe.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Hiding what we are.”
“Yes, in a way. But also necessary. That girl doesn’t know you, Artie, or any of the other students in the class. She didn’t react to who you are, but to what she saw. And it was different and it was scary. It’s very easy, almost natural, for people to react to the surface presentation of things; it’s a survival instinct that some believe is hardwired into our genes. It’s why people have problems with different cultures and different faiths and different skin colors and different ways of behavior. What’s ‘same’ is comfortable. What’s different could be a threat.”
“Are we a threat, because we’re mutants?”
“Am I a threat because I’m black? Or that little girl because she’s Hispanic?”
Artie shrugged. “Of course not.”
“Exactly. As Martin Luther King said, we want to be judged, not by the color of our skins—or, in our case, the makeup of our genes—but by the content of our characters. Artie, mutants are only people with some extra, unique genes. We’re still human.”
While she was talking with Artie, the bulk of the class had moved on to the next diorama, and as Ororo Munroe, known to the other teachers as Storm, strode after them she sighed inside that she’d allowed herself to be distracted. This was a presentation she’d wanted to avoid.
Although the museum had been assiduously upgrading its collections over the years, to stay current with advances in the evolutionary and archaeological sciences, this was one of the exhibits that had been left over from the old days. Against a panoramic background of what was meant to be the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa were a succession of mannequins and visual presentations, tracking the development of mankind from the apelike Homo habilius all the way up the evolutionary line to the present day. Along the way, however, there was a diversion to a second grouping of figures, labeled Homo mutantis? Some were based on informed speculation, while others were clearly purest fantasy. But they were all awful to look at.
A few of the younger students, grouped around Jubilation Lee, exchanged some gently rude banter about ancestry and the obvious resemblance between the display figures before them and some of their classmates. Their way of coping was to hurl wisecracks, but a couple of others just stood and stared, making the obvious connection between past and present, the one perhaps being prologue to the other. Mutant powers tended to catalyze at puberty, and while all of them had been cataloged as carriers of the active gene, not all of them had manifested their powers. They were clearly wondering now if they’d end up looking anything like these nightmares.
“The tribe where I used to live called this part of Africa ‘the forge of Heaven,’ ” Storm told them all, standing right before the diorama but staring past the figures, ignoring them in favor of the vista that lay beyond. In her mind’s eye there was no painted backdrop but a stark, sere landscape that stretched far beyond the visible horizon. It was mostly grassland, when there was rain, not much in the way of anything larger like trees. Those were found in the higher elevations, toward Mount Kilimanjaro. “It’s a harsh and unforgiving country where anthropologists believe that life on Earth was born,” she continued. “Only the strongest, the most intelligent, the most worthy of creatures can survive here. That’s nature’s way. She tries all sorts of possibilities—dinosaurs great and small, mammals much the same—until she finds a species that works. At the same time, we have to accept that some things . . . don’t.”
“Old news,” Artie said flatly, end of story.
“Precisely,” Storm responded cheerily. “What you see here is our snapshot of the world tens of thousands of years ago. What they were has no more relevance to what you are than that Neanderthal does. What matters is who you choose to be. The kind of person, the kind of life you want to live.
“Come on, class,” she finished, shuffling them along, “let’s go rejoin the others.”
Around the corner, down on the main floor, some older students from Professor Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters were checking out a reconstructed skeleton labeled SABER-TOOTHED TIGER. Their comments were mostly about a notorious mutant who’d adopted the same name and was currently the object of a hugely unsuccessful worldwide manhunt.
The teacher responsible for watching them was only partly paying attention. His eyes and the bulk of his focus were on a slim, striking redhead who stood across the hall. She was a head shorter than he was, which made her about five-foot-seven to his six-plus, with legs that went on forever, a figure to die for, and a face to match. Her eyes were the green of a spring forest and had a sparkle that would put the finest emerald to shame.
His own eyes, she had never seen. He kept them hidden behind specially designed glasses whose lenses were made of a ruby quartz so dense the crystal seemed almost opaque. Sometimes he wasn’t even sure there were proper eyes at all within their sockets anymore, although he had perfect twenty-twenty vision. Instead, there were beams of pure force that Xavier had labeled “optic blasts,” powerful enough to knock a tank end over end or punch holes through mountains. Unlike the others with their powers, Scott Summers had no control over his. He couldn’t shut off his beams; they blasted away 24/7, as they’d done since he was a teenager. Even closing his eyes didn’t help. For some perverse reason, his eyelids—or his hands—were able to block the beams; he couldn’t do damage to himself. But the beams themselves were so powerful they’d take advantage of the slightest gap. A twitch of the eye, the slightest relaxation, meant instant disaster. So, to keep from devastating his surroundings, he had to wear these glasses—or a visor that even allowed him to manipulate the strength of the blasts—constantly.
The eyes, so the saying goes, are the window to the soul. He didn’t like to think how that might apply to him.
Aside from that, Scott Summers was a fair package. Good lines to his face, the kind of clean-shaven, handsome features that may have started out slightly pretty but which improved markedly with age. His hair was brown, with a hint of auburn, and when he spoke there was a faint echo of Nebraska in his voice. He was a natural leader, the sort of young man who would seem at home taming a frontier, although he himself would scoff at the description.
He was hopelessly in love with the redhead, Jean Grey, and had been since the moment they’d first met.
She saw him watching and flashed him a smile that made his heart sing and ache all at the same time, and wish they were alone. Then her eyes slipped past him and the students they were minding to a clutch of tourists just down
the gallery, and her lips tightened, her smile quickly becoming a work of fiction and artifice. Scott immediately intuited what was happening. Once more her mental barriers had turned porous and Jean was finding herself caught in a rapidly rising tide of thoughts and emotions. That was how she described it to him, late at night, usually with wine, on the increasingly rare occasions when he could get her to relax. The hardest part about being a telepath, she explained, wasn’t “reading” other peoples’ thoughts, it was keeping them out of your own head. If your control slipped, if the shields failed, it was so easy to be overwhelmed, like standing in a puddle one second and being lost in the middle of a raging ocean the next.
But Jean had another problem. She wasn’t simply a telepath, but a telekine. She could manipulate physical objects with the power of her thoughts and will. And when she was stressed, like now, that second aspect of her abilities as a mutant gave the conflict within her a tangible, material dimension.
Just like now.
The glass wall of the display behind her was trembling, displaying visible ripples like the surface of a pond being stirred by an autumn breeze. As Scott stepped forward, he could see the window warp in its frame, the metal creaking quietly in futile protest. In another moment it was sure to shatter—and Jean hadn’t noticed. The interactive display TV monitors flashed with static.
“Hey,” he said gently, slipping his arm in hers.
“Hey,” she said, visibly relaxing as she reacted to his presence, before her eyes widened, her mouth pursing in tired frustration, as she realized the reason. The glass behind her was still once more, and solid. The voices had silenced in her head. For a while.
Scott didn’t need telepathy of his own to sense what she was thinking, although her face masked that fury superbly. She had an impressive temper and, from God knows where, a wealth of profanity that beat anything he’d ever heard. She was a doctor, and she was proud. She didn’t like being weak or vulnerable.
“You okay?” he asked.
Her eyes were half-closed, which undercut what she told him in answer: “Yeah,” she said, giving him a reassuring squeeze. “I’m fine. It’s just a headache.”
Scott felt a tug on his other sleeve and turned to see one of the students holding up a sketch she’d made of an iguanadon.
“Scott,” she reminded him, “you were talking about the extinction of the dinosaurs. . . .”
He nodded and indicated the tiger display. “I need to talk to Dr. Grey real quick. Can you draw me a picture of that big cat?”
She sniffed, hugely uninterested. “It’s a saber-toothed tiger.”
“Right.”
She took his cue and scampered off to join the other kids. Scott looked back to Jean, who chose to look anywhere but at him.
“It’s not just a headache, is it?” he challenged.
She didn’t want to talk about it, but this time he found he didn’t want to hold back.
“I wasn’t sure how to say this,” he began, and then he paused, concern vying for dominance with his prairie rectitude. He understood her desire for privacy. In the orphanage, growing up, you played every emotion, every thought, tighter to your chest than a winning poker hand. But she was in pain and it wasn’t getting any better and that was more than he could bear.
“Look, Jean,” he began again, “ever since Liberty Island you’ve been—”
“Scott,” she tried to interrupt. He didn’t let her.
“—different.”
“My telepathy’s been off lately,” she confessed. “I can’t seem to focus. I can hear . . . everything.”
He shook his head, ruthlessly exploiting the opening she’d given him, hoping she’d understand, praying it would pay off. “A month ago you had to concentrate just to levitate a book across the room. Now when you have nightmares the entire bedroom shakes. It’s not just your telepathy.”
She left her arm in his, her grip tightening around his fingers, while she splayed her other hand against the glass in front of her, as if to reassure herself that she hadn’t done it any lasting damage. At the same time, as she watched the room behind them both in the window’s reflection, he was reminded of how science teachers used to warn about looking at a solar eclipse. The only safe way to gaze at the sun was through a reflection; do it directly, you’ll go blind. Jean had that same apprehension about people. And it was growing.
“The dreams are getting worse,” she told him. “I keep feeling that something terrible is about to happen.”
She leaned her forehead against the glass and spoke so softly Scott couldn’t tell if the words came from her lips or from her thoughts.
“I don’t want to lose you,” she said.
He wrapped his free hand around her and pulled her close against him.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he told her.
She relaxed against him, but only a little bit, leaning her head into the junction of his neck and shoulder but keeping her eyes open and on the glass, with a stare that seemed to go on forever, as though she was searching for something.
He wondered, and hoped she had grace enough not to pry, if what she was searching for had a face. Handsome and hairy and Canadian, Logan had rolled into their lives like an avalanche and wreaked just about as much havoc. It drove Scott a little crazy to think that, only a few months ago, there’d been no Logan to complicate their lives—and yet, without Logan, he and Jean and Storm wouldn’t have stood a chance when Xavier’s former colleague and friend, who now called himself Magneto, had tried to reshape the face of the world. All as part of a misguided attempt to guarantee the future safety and prosperity of mutantkind.
He believed as an article of absolute faith that Jean loved him. It was the keystone of his world, as he hoped his own love served for hers. But he could also see what happened when Jean and Logan came near each other. That kind of primal attraction was impossible to hide, and trust Logan not to even try.
They hadn’t heard from him since he left the school, to follow some leads Professor Xavier had provided about his mysterious past. And Scott knew there hadn’t been a day since when Jean hadn’t thought of him. The questions he had were, how did she think of him? And what was she going to do about it?
And when that moment came, what would Scott do?
“Are we interrupting again?” Storm said softly as she came around the corner and into view.
Because the two women were best friends, Jean didn’t react to her arrival as any sort of intrusion. She took a moment to gather wits and self-possession, gradually disengaging from Scott—her hand staying closed around his right to the last—using her telepathy to partially cloud the perceptions of the kids so they wouldn’t easily recall how vulnerable she looked.
“So,” Storm continued cheerily, “how was the giant squid?”
“The children liked it,” Jean replied. “Scott was bored.”
“It was boring,” he agreed wholeheartedly. And then, taking refuge in responsibility, “Guys, if we don’t want to get stuck in rush-hour traffic—”
“We should get moving,” Jean finished.
Storm absently acknowledged their decision. She wasn’t quite paying attention, though, as she finished a quick headcount of their charges. She didn’t look happy.
“Wait,” she said in a tone that made clear she wasn’t really surprised, just disappointed. “We’re short.”
Jean concentrated, and Scott know she was casting a mental net across the whole of the museum.
“We should find the professor,” she said.
In the museum’s basement was the food court, with seats galore and offering a surprisingly eclectic collection of items, ranging from burgers to sushi. Off in a corner all their own, polishing off the remains of a modest feast, were Xavier’s three missing students. Two boys and a girl, all in their midteens.
One of the boys was slightly taller than the other, both their bodies built pretty much the same, both of them slightly taller than the girls. The taller boy had pleasant, regular
features, with curly blondish hair that looked like he generally used his fingers in place of a comb, in a vain attempt to establish some kind of order. His companion’s face was sharper, a little more technically handsome, thick brown hair swept straight back from his face. He had a Zippo lighter in hand, and the way he kept snapping it open, igniting a flame, snapping it closed, to the beat of a doo-wop song only he could hear, went with the hair and manner to present him as a reincarnated fifties rebel.
The girl was southern; that was obvious the minute she said a word. She was pretty, on her way to beautiful, with eyes green enough to put Jean Grey’s to shame. Her shoulder-length dark hair had a dramatic streak as purely white as Storm’s that rose from the peak of her forehead, in absolute contrast to the rich auburn that covered the rest of her skull. Unlike the others, she wore gloves at the table, and long sleeves and a high collar, and the coat that was slung back on her shoulders had a hood so that when it was pulled up the only part of her body that showed any skin was her face. She also sat a little apart from the others, as if she was wary of touching or being touched.
“So I’m asking,” said the dark-haired boy with the lighter, John Allardyce, “what would be worse, to be burned to death or frozen?”
The girl made an appropriately dismissive face, this was so not why they had snuck away from the crowd, but John could be worse than a mastiff with some topics. Try as you might, there was no way to get him to back off.
In any event, Bobby Drake wasn’t in the mood. He looked intensely perplexed, facing a problem that taxed his obviously meager mental resources, while Marie fidgeted under John’s stare, and Kitty wondered how big a fight she’d start if she just snatched that damn lighter away. The boy loved that Zippo more than she did her stuffed snugglies! Too totally creepy for words.
“Gosh,” Bobby began, which made John chuckle because only a lamoid straight would use a word like “gosh,” “I dunno, John. Seems like being burned would be awfully painful. . . .”
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