Her understated quiet is infectious and I sense the accustomed sorrow that clings to these campaigners like cobwebs.
“Fuck,” I mutter quietly. “How do we take this guy out then?”
“Take him out?” Olga chuckles. “Beautiful, we just want to get out of here alive. Defeating Fortress is more than we could possibly hope for.”
“We’re taking a major risk just coming to bail you out,” Solaris says.
“Why did you, then?”
“Just following orders,” Solaris says and dishes out another one of those sunny grins of hers.
“Whose orders?”
“The boss,” Stiletto says.
“Supreme leader of our Europe Command,” Olga says. “Titania.”
“Titania?” I pause a second. “Do you mean Titanium Girl?”
“They haven’t called her that for years,” Olga laughs. “She went by Titanium Woman for a while, but that was just too hard. Jane’s not into titles anyway, really. That’s why you can call me Olga, cutie. I used to be Iron Maiden.”
“Jesus,” I say, probably my astonishment a misguided compliment to Olga as if I had heard of her before, which I haven’t.
I’m thinking about Jane Fonda, my mother’s one-time friend dead these so many years, and her baby boy, the same age as me, murdered by the Crimson Cowl, Julian Lennon now dead, that other Lennon sibling with whom I must’ve been raised side-by-side until the daydream of the Island collapsed around them.
“This is turning a bit too much like This Is Your Life to me,” I say. “Can we kick the bad guy’s ass now? I need something I can understand.”
“Sure, honey,” Olga says. “After you.”
So I eye up Fortress as he finishes hosing down Red Monolith with the laser-beam milk bath and I crack my fists together and start trying to think of a way out of this mess.
Zephyr 10.3 “Mask”
WE HIT THE big guy like the cavalry we hope to be, spelling the exhausted trio running interference on my behalf. Olga disorients Fortress with her sonic attack and Stiletto comes in with a gust of super-speed, the anatomical precision of her strikes something cruelly beautiful. We’re mindful that any damage inflicted is just going into the bank for this guy to unleash on us later, so this situation really needs some thinking outside the box.
My father’s voice comes crackling inside my head like from a broken radio.
Don’t believe these fellas can’t be taken down, son.
“You heard what they said, pops,” I reply.
Meta-class psionics still have their weaknesses, Joey-lad. I know.
“You think you could take him?”
Well . . . I might.
I watch as it’s Olga’s turn to get picked up and thrown – directly into Red Monolith. Stiletto keeps circling, nipping in like a troublesome dog on a jam-smeared postman, but her war of attrition looks set to backfire.
“Solaris!” Stiletto yells.
“What?” the flying woman replies. “I can’t attack him. It’s just a free recharge!”
“Then give it up, you clowns,” Fortress bellows, darting after Stiletto, who melts away like she’s Teflon-coated.
I concentrate my thoughts inward.
“You want a chance in the driver’s seat, dad?”
If you trust me, lad.
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I say. “But desperate times and all that.”
Alright then Joey. Ease back. Take a breath. Let me see.
“How?”
Just let me in, lad.
“OK.”
And it’s as easy as that.
*
SUDDENLY IT’S ME who is the back-seat driver to my own life, the adventures of Zephyr rendered as a slightly dodgy superhero film with surprisingly good special effects. My hands lift, turning over as if Lennon is marveling at his freedom. Yes, you’re right I’d be silly not to have a sinking feeling at this point, but I’m relieved when my father strides forward and yells to get Fortress’s attention.
The big guy turns, dropping Olga to the ground and wiping sweat from his face.
“You again.”
“Not quite.”
My voice filtered through my father’s vocal patterns isn’t a pretty mix, especially as he seems determined to try and fake my accent, which goes on top of his about as well as a T-bone steak on chocolate cake.
And you’re a sick puppy if you think that sounds tasty.
Fortress’s eyes start to whiten. The light gearing up in Gumbel’s skull leaks from his mouth – hell, maybe even his ears as well. But there’s a light in my skull too, to call it that, and I feel myself (us) lift from the ground as that great outpouring floods the scene, transfixing Fortress’s mind like a stone in the middle of a rampaging river. Except Fortress isn’t stone, merely clay. And in seconds it erodes beneath the powerful flood, whittling down next to near nothingness.
I sense this on the psychic level at which my father’s mind powers operate. In real space, all we see is Fortress crash to his knees with his mouth open, eyes blank, all power gone, his life erased from his head as neatly as one of those new-fangled whiteboards taking the educational world by storm.
Fortress falls onto his side on the damp ground. There’s barely a sound as the other freedom fighters from this strange mirror world watch in awe and I am almost proud for myself as I descend unwittingly to the ground and hook one thumb in my belt.
“Min Gud,” Olga says, getting up and wiping ground earth stains from her tight dungarees. “That was some show, little man.”
There’s a silent thunk and I slot back into control, sensing my father passing the reins back to me. I quietly genuflect.
Thanks.
Premier League?
Maybe. Sure.
The others gather slowly about the brain-dead supervillain and then they jostle around me like I just won the World Series.
“How in the hell did you do that?” Solaris asks.
“It’s sort of a long story.”
Nocturne lands with a swish of her cloak.
“We have to get back to Haven. I don’t think I could mask a mental signature like that in a million years.”
The caramel-colored woman lifts the peaked hood of her cloak and stares at me with sea green eyes, curious, and more than a little afraid.
Zephyr 10.4 “Silent Running”
IT TURNS OUT Haven is a person, not a place. A middle-aged woman with a significant psionic power that a sprawling refugee outpost of about two hundred relies on to keep them on silent running 24-7. It’s a tough gig and it shows in the preternatural bruising around her eyes, the sallow demeanor and corpse hair.
All the same, she, like the dozens of others milling about me on our arrival, seems to just want to touch and acknowledge the legend: the parahuman who took out one of The Twelve single-handedly. Me, a hero by default, it seems.
The outpost nestles in the ruins of a tiny mountain-side village. Once, rich Americans would’ve given their eye teeth to go trekking thereabouts. It’s like one of dozens we have passed over on the mad flight from Julian Lennon’s place. But the land has reverted to agrarianism in the aftermath of whatever world-destabilizing events the rule of The Twelve has triggered. We are nowhere near any of the cities, but they tell me the few that remain are wild places, vast asylums where mob rule masquerades under the presence of military law.
“The Twelve rule the whole world, or at least the parts that matter,” Olga says as she shoves away well-wishers.
With the other returned freedom fighters as my entourage, we push up a muddy alleyway between ramshackle stucco houses, old signs for Orangina and Caltex oils faded in the rigging, great big tarpaulins and camouflage nets stretched between the roofs. As a light rain falls, we duck in through a broken wall and into the town’s taverna.
Titania stands at the bar waiting for us.
I expected her to be older. The Titanium Girl of my world descended into a farce of drugs and sexploitation following the dea
th of her little boy. For a few years she was the darling of the New York club scene and then came the Kirlians to foist just another level of trauma on the once beautiful woman. She didn’t do porno, but that’s probably just because she died before she could. I practically memorized her infamous spread in Playboy one-handed in my early teens, no idea at all she and my mother were best friends and fellow fugitives – single moms united by the supposed abuses of the man lurking inside my head.
The woman in front of me should be about seventy. If she looks forty, maybe forty-five, I’d be surprised. Her long, honey-gold tresses are piled atop her head, a mask on her face almost like butterfly wings pushing the hair from her broad forehead. Titanium Girl’s costume was three parts go-go dancer and one part gymnast. As Titania, she wears boots to mid-thigh over skin-tight ski pants, thighs like old-fashioned telephone poles, a dark brown cloak of leathery hue and a similar bodice, metal rings on her bare upper arms, feminine shoulders broad enough to make most men blush. I have a hard-on and I’ve barely stepped inside the room.
“Joseph,” she says and smiles weakly. “It’s been a long time.”
I clear my throat and think I might need to think for a moment, but that moment’s long gone.
“I didn’t know we’d met before.”
“Not in this world. No.”
I think about offering a handshake. She is like the royalty of dudes who dress up in tights, as far as I am concerned, if not our temple goddess. Instead, she wraps her arms around me and practically lifts me from the ground.
“It’s still good to see you,” she says.
“How do you know me?” I ask once I’ve recovered.
I try to nudge my pecker to the right. Black leather pants camouflage my arousal.
“I mean, I know who you are, but I’m not from this parallel.”
“Nor am I,” she says. “I came here with the others and got . . . separated. Well, fuck. Truth is, I chose to stay. We couldn’t get our way home and this world needed . . . needs heroes. Still does. As you’ve shown us, I hear.”
She smiles, wide-lipped, and carefully unpins her mask. A few thick locks of treacle hair spill down either side, an incredibly handsome woman in the sense back when handsome didn’t mean anything manlike and gay was a word to describe happy strangers. The strength oozes out of her, both physical and I also mean her aura of command. It’s no wonder this rag-tag army follows her. With Titania in the room, it’s hard to believe anyone else knows what they’re doing. I’m only faintly aware this is just another aspect of her powers.
“I’m . . . really confused,” I say. “Can I sit down?”
“I’ll do you one better,” she says. “We haven’t got any Stoli, but I could do you vodka and . . . well, just vodka.”
“Vodka it is.”
“It’s been a while since Coca Cola made any deliveries, you dig?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s your mother?”
“My . . . ma?”
My face crumples and I follow it, face to the floor and then in my hand. I mutter a few poorly-phrased lines into my palm and then suck a deep breath, sitting up again, but my face tells the whole story.
“Fuck,” Titania says. “How? Who?”
“The . . . I guess you’d say The Twelve, too.”
“But they were eradicated on your world,” she says and stares at me a moment, mind still ticking over like a cooling automotive. “Or maybe I should say they eradicated themselves?”
“You’re one of the ones who . . . ?”
I shake my head again, sitting on a tattered armchair, aware the others are hushed like spectators at the theatre and we’re some five-dollar speaking word tour by performers normally in much bigger productions.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m still confused.”
“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 s
lim, 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.”
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