by Larry Niven
“We’re in a big jam, the chili is really hitting the fan, and it is my opinion that you’re the solution. We’re prepared to offer you full asylum and will expunge your past crimes from the record.”
“Crimes, huh? I was fighting crime!”
“Believe me, as a soldier myself, I understand. Collateral damage is inevitable in war. The greater good, son, that’s what matters.”
“Exactly! That’s what I kept saying at the trial. I’m a superhero. There should be different rules.”
“Well, Kowalski, the rules have just changed.”
Bernie wiped the yam juice off his hands, sat up straighter. “They have, huh?”
“It seems you are no longer the world’s only superhuman. But you can still be the world’s only superhero. Madame Devastator has already destroyed most of New Jersey.”
“Madame Devastator? Cool name.”
“We’ve thrown everything at her, but it’s done no good. We need you to take her out. You are cleared to use any means necessary. We’re in a real bind here. What do you say, Kowalski?”
“General, I’ve been waiting a long time for this.”
“I’ll brief you at the Pentagon. We have an aircraft carrier not too far away.”
“It’ll be quicker if I take you.”
Bernie scooped up the general and flew east.
* * *
Madame Devastator’s real name was Hannah Bormann. She was a twenty-two-year-old art student from Connecticut, at least until about a week ago when she went berserk in Jersey.
At the Pentagon, Bernie watched videos of her obliterating Hoboken. She could fire bolts of lightning out of her fingertips and create storms with a hand gesture. She also sported a killer costume, something Bernie had always wanted. But his superhero career had ended before he could design one. Madame Devastator wore black high-heeled boots with laces up to her knees, a leather bodysuit with lightning bolts running down the sides, and a scarlet cape. At the moment, Bernie was in yellow Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a pink tank top.
When the briefing was over, General Duncan said, “Do you need any assistance from us?”
“Can you guys rustle me up a uniform? I feel kinda dorky here.”
A half-hour later he was wearing Henry Winkler’s leather jacket from Happy Days, John Wayne’s cowboy hat from True Grit, Harrison Ford’s pants from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and James Dean’s boots from Rebel Without a Cause. Some wise guy had made a run to the Smithsonian and thought the clothes had some mojo that might help. They started calling Bernie “Mr. Americana.” His previous superhero name was Bernard Kowalski.
* * *
When Bernie reached New York City, where Madame Devastator was currently wreaking havoc, he perched himself on top of the Freedom Tower. He didn’t need his telescopic vision to find her. A boulder the size of a minivan blasted into the air over Central Park. Bernie rocketed uptown, and just before it crashed on top of The Dakota apartment building he obliterated the boulder with a mighty uppercut. A mist of pebbles showered down.
Bernie bolted into the park, flying just above the treetops.
He was nearing the lake when a street lamp rose into the air and swatted him as if he were a pesky fly. He crashed into the water.
As he sank, Bernie thought how he had only ever fought purse snatchers and jaywalkers.
He sprang out of the water, grabbed his hat—which was floating nearby—and placed it back on his head.
Madame Devastator stood beside the Bethesda Fountain, sparks dancing on her fingertips. “I should have figured they’d send for you,” she said. “You’ve always struck me as a brownnoser.”
“Is that why you’re doing this? To get to me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. I’m doing this because I can. It’s fun. Besides, what the hell else can you do with fingertips that shoot lightning?”
“You got me there,” Bernie said, and blasted her with his ultra-breath. She hurtled backwards, knocking down trees and statues. She didn’t come to a stop until she crashed into the side of an M10 bus.
All the vehicles on Central Park West were abandoned. General Duncan had pulled the military out of the area and evacuated as many civilians as he could, though there were plenty of them watching from their apartment windows, snapping photos and taking video.
A woman stuck her head out of a fourth-story window and shouted, “Get her, Mr. Americana!” Bernie’s face burned with pride, though he wondered how she knew his nickname.
Bernie spotted a garbage truck up the block. He’d always wanted to chuck one.
As he lifted it over his head, he noticed with glee the camera flashes coming from the surrounding buildings. He paused, flexed his muscles, then heaved the truck at Madame Devastator, just as she was getting to her feet. Bernie was disappointed when the truck crash-landed right-side up a few yards from her. It tottered and he helped it along with a blast of his ultra-breath. A moment after the truck fell onto the super villain, windows were thrown open and there was a thunderclap of applauds and hooting. Some people were giving Bernie the thumbs-up. They held out their cellphones. Bernie smiled and waved as if he had just won the Miss America Pageant.
He was thinking about the ticker-tape parade they were going to give him, when Madame Devastator zapped him with the lightning from her fingertips.
His body seized. His muscles felt as if they had been turned to stone. Then came the burning. Bernie screamed.
Suddenly the sky darkened and the wind howled. He floated into the air and began spinning in the darkness. Thunder crashed around him. He was caught inside a tornado.
He tried to get his equilibrium, but he couldn’t stop the spinning. He was blind and disoriented. His arms were pinned at his side.
He couldn’t die like this before the world. It would be all over the Internet in seconds. In his panic, he pursed his lips and blew as hard as he could, hoping to jolt himself out of the twister. There was an explosion. He heard glass shattering and stone crumbling. He blew again. Another explosion. Screams. Car alarms blared. Still he was trapped in the funnel. He blew straight down and kept blowing until he rose above the bad weather. He stopped blowing when he saw the sun and the bright blue sky. Then he was falling, his muscles still cramped from the lightning strikes. The roof of the American Museum of Natural History rushed up to the meet him and he crashed through it. He landed on a stegosaurus skeleton, which was now a pile of rubble.
After a moment, his power returned to him and he shot through the hole in the roof. Madame Devastator was waiting for him in front of the museum. She looked tired, drained. The lightning flickered on her fingertips like a dying light bulb.
“You don’t have to fight me,” she said, gasping for breath. “We’re the same. In fact, we’re the only two of our kind. They”—she swept out her arms—“are our real enemies. You saw how they treated you when you tried to help them the first time.”
“I’m a superhero,” Bernie said. “This is what superheroes do.”
One moment Bernie was hovering in the air, the next he was behind Madame Devastator. He held her in a headlock. She barely resisted.
“This ends now,” he said.
“If you’re going to kill me, you could at least use an original line.”
A small crowd watched from the park across the street. Someone yelled, “Finish her!” Another screamed, “We love you, Mr. Americana!”
Bernie tightened his grip on Madame Devastator. Camera flashes, like bolts of lightning, ripped through the air. In minutes he’d be the champion of the world, his face on every TV screen, newspaper, and magazine. He was probably already trending like crazy on the Internet. Before he twisted his arch-nemesis’s neck, he whispered in her ear.
Then Madame Devastator went limp in his arms.
For a moment the city was silent. Bernie heard only his ragged breathing. Then there came an eruption of cheers and shouts. People began to appear from all over. They chanted his name and it echoed across the city. Bernie’s
eyes moistened. He wished his parents were still alive to see this.
As the crowd inched toward him, Mr. Americana, née Bernard Kowalski, flew off with Madame Devastator’s body in his arms.
* * *
The yams were all gone, so he flew to Tokyo and got sushi. He didn’t even have to pay. Heroes don’t have to pay. It’s one of the many perks.
Back on the island, he sat on the beach reading an English-language newspaper he grabbed along with his lunch. The front page showed him holding Madame Devastator. “Mr. Americana Saves the Day!” the headline blared.
A few pages in he found an editorial questioning whether Mr. Americana (the Pentagon had leaked the nickname to the media shortly after Bernie left for New York) was needed now that Madame Devastator was dead. He knew that would come. In time they’d return to seeing him as a ticking time bomb. Weapons of mass destruction are only tolerated in times of war.
“Did you get any sashimi rolls?”
Bernie turned and watched Hannah exiting the tropical forest. Her blond hair was pulled into a ponytail and her freckles stood out with sunburn. Without her costume, she looked like a typical college student.
“Yeah,” he said, and handed her the bag of take-out.
He never intended to kill Madame Devastator. Superheroes don’t kill. But it wasn’t until that day in New York that he realized how badly a hero needs a villain.
She sat next to Bernie. “Doesn’t this get boring?” she asked. “Just sitting here.”
“You get used to it. Have you decided where you’re going to make your reemergence?”
“I was thinking Paris in the spring.”
“Perfect. That will be well after my ticker-tape parade. I’ll give you a two-hour head-start.”
“That should be enough time to destroy the Eiffel Tower.”
“No, don’t do that. I’ve always wanted to chuck the Eiffel Tower like a javelin. I saw it once in a comic.”
“OK. That might be cool. I’ll take out the Arc de Triomphe with a tornado then. Meet me in front of the Louvre. We’ll give them a good show. But this time, why don’t I pretend to snap your neck?”
“Sure. Why not?”
A superhero, Bernie lamented, has no place in the real world. Not unless he creates one.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 11
Copyright © 2014 by James Aquilone. All rights reserved.
Happily Ever After
by C. L. Moore
Cinderella and the Prince were married with a great ceremony. No one had approved from the first, and now more often than not there was a gleam of I-told-you-so behind the King’s spectacles, and the Queen’s three chins quivered with bitter satisfaction as her predictions were realized one by one. For Cinderella and the Prince were not happy. No one had really expected them to be. You cannot pluck a kitchen girl from the cinders and set a crown on her head and let it go at that; small feet are not the only prerequisite of a princess.
To tell the truth, the step-sisters had played a large part in what happened. Cinderella never realized it, but if Darmar and Igraine, with their hauteur and their high-nosed, high-bred faces, had not led her out of the cinders and disdainfully acknowledged her as sister, the Prince might have never done what he did. But after he had made that rash proclamation about the slipper he had to carry it out, particularly with the herald bawling the news to the very doorstep at the time. And then, of course, she was quite charming.
For a while, to do her justice, he was not sorry. Nothing could have been more bewitching than the Princess Cinderella in her billowing skirts, with the gold crown on her head. She had some secret difficulty in keeping it there, and used to practice before the mirror at night, but she never learned to manage the thing with true dignity. Once, when she bent to pick up a dropped handkerchief, it fell off and rolled across the floor. Now, a princess born would never have stooped for the handkerchief in the first place. Poor Cinderella blushed to her ears, and the ladies-in-waiting tittered among themselves.
There were other things. She had a healthy appetite, and the delicacies of the royal table were far insufficient to her needs. She ate and ate until the court stared, and yet she was never satisfied. Her pretty fingers hesitated among the forks, and her full-throated laughter rang almost strident above the polite titters of the court. Once she had laughed so hard that her stays split, to the immense embarrassment of everyone concerned. And sometimes, sitting still in the audience hall, the chill of its shadows penetrated to her warm bourgeois blood, and her mind turned longingly to the cinders and the lentils boiling on the crane above the fire.
She who had never had an idle moment before suddenly found herself plunged into a vast ennui—nothing to do but preen before the mirror and walk the garden paths, her crown tilted at a precarious angle, while hawk-eyes on every side waited for her least mistake as a signal for lifted brows.
One afternoon Cinderella disappeared. For hours they searched. It was the Prince himself who found her at last. Far off in a corner of the castle was an old tower room where odds and ends of things were kept—seven-league boots somewhat run down at the heels, a cloak of darkness with threadbare seams, magic mirrors with cracked faces, and miscellaneous charms that somehow didn’t seem to work very well any more. Under the window stood a spinning wheel that had once spun gold out of straw. The treadle had cracked years ago, it creaked when it moved, and here in the dusty attic it had stood for years. Cinderella had found it, and here she sat in the dusty sunlight under the window, spinning and spinning gold. The shadows were full of it, and all about her slippers shining masses gleamed in the muted sunlight. The famous small foot trundled happily away at the protesting treadle, the curly head bent over the wheel and shining gold ran out between her fingers as she worked. The crown tilted over her eyes at its most rakish angle.
“Cinderella!” The Prince’s voice was harsh.
She started guiltily, and the crown fell from her curls and rolled across the dusty floor. “Cinderella—spinning in the attic! Look at that crown!”
Blushing, she retrieved the crown and balanced it on her head.
“Oh, I’m sorry—” she cried. “I—I didn’t mean—”
“There is nothing for you to say, Cinderella. For all I know I may find you scrubbing floors tomorrow. Have you no sense of values? You are a princess, don’t you understand? A princess! There’s dust on your nose!—Now don’t cry! Princesses never cry. Here—stop—Cinderella!”
“Yes,” meekly.
“Stay here till I can find someone to dust you off. If you should be seen like this—now don’t cry!”
The Prince went out hastily.
Cinderella sat under the window in silence, with magic heaped about her feet. Slowly all the gold slid out between her fingers until they were empty. Her eyes began to brim. She hid her face behind her hands and wept. The attic was still but for the Princess sitting and weeping with her gold crown on her head; and the tears flashed out between her fingers.
Presently behind her hands a light began to shine. Startled, she lifted her wet face. The attic was radiant, and in the midst of the light her Fairy Godmother stood.
“Cinderella, child, why do you weep?”
It was the same question she had asked in the kitchen at home, long ago.
“Because they scold me,” sobbed the Princess. “Because I’m miserable! Oh, Godmother, Godmother, take me home!”
The Fairy smiled, and the radiance brightened until Cinderella’s eyes were blinded with light. She put up her hands to shut it out. There was a deep silence.
After a while, when the quiet had become unendurable, she uncovered her eyes. It was dark—warmly dark. She sat before the kitchen fire again, snug in the cinders.
“Why—why—” Cinderella dug her fists into her eyes, and then, somehow, was yawning, stretching like a kitten. No crown trembled precariously on her ruffled curls. She yawned again, luxuriantly, sniffing the boiling lentils that swung above the fire. She laughed a happy lit
tle gurgle deep in her throat, and settled down among the warm cinders.
Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 2
Upright, Unlocked
by Tom Gerencer
1. ROBOT
Picture an iguana. No, not that one. It’s way too big. And the color is wrong. And not there. About six feet to the left. On second thought, never mind the iguana. This looks more like Arizona. But it’s not. It’s Nevada, and you’ve messed it up again.
On a rock nearby sits a skink. Baking. The sky’s a hard, bright blue lens, and everything under it is like Food Network outtakes.
Close by, a patch of cooked dirt like every other suddenly shifts. Then, just when you think it must be the heat and the light playing tricks on your eyes, it does it again.
Now it tips up and slides and a hand reaches up from below, scarred, scuffed, dirt-encrusted, trembling. If we were making a horror movie we’d find some jarring music and play it.
But it’s not that kind of hand.
It looks like it’s made of white plastic.
It gropes, claws at the dirt, and then pulls. The ground shimmies again, sifts aside, and a head rises. Excitingly curved, like a design student spent most of his or her senior year getting it right.
Like this, it crawls from the Earth. Sand hourglasses off it and out of its joints. A light in its eye slit flickers on. Ridiculous. Why would light need to come out of an eye? Defeats the whole purpose. Probably the design student again. It stands.
Presently, it looks down at the skink, servos grinding.
“Who do I talk to about this?” it says.
Its voice is ancient. It’s a robot. It’s been buried in the exact center of the Earth for four and a half billion years. Give or take. The magma would have melted it, you say. Well, look who’s so smart. It was made to last four and a half billion years. You think a little magma’s going to hurt it? Nothing can hurt it. Except for itself. Which is the problem.
It was put here by a race of impressive machines that created the Earth, and all the life on it. They designed our primordial soup way back when like a program, like gajillions of lines of organic code that developed into everything we know, including pancakes and touch-lamps. They did not do this from the goodness of their hearts. For one, they didn’t have hearts. They were machines. Are machines. Because they still exist. And they’re capitalist. And they take the long view.