Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (20 page)

Valkyrie was behind him. Taller than me and glowing, with wings on her helm and a braided horsetail of straw-blond hair. She wore a polished iron breastplate and carried a four-foot sword strapped to her back. The muscles in her bare legs stood out like metal cables. Devil-mask started shooting and Blue Titan was at him before you could feel the air move, held him up by the neck and squeezed until he passed out. A foot from me Valkyrie trussed cat-mask up with rope and dumped him on the floor, dazed and submissive. I reached out to touch her boot and she kicked my hand.

Blue Titan dropped devil-mask like an empty sleeping bag and walked over, bent down to look at me. “That’s yours?” he said and pointed to where my pack had spit out the gun, snub-nosed and silly on the floor. I nodded and held up my cowl. The beak was torn and I’d bled on it. His breath didn’t smell like anything, and I realized that he didn’t have to eat.

He picked up the pistol, dumped the bullets into his palm, and crumpled the gun like newspaper. Then he held his fist at my ear and squeezed. The little explosions in his hand banged my head against the floor again, my ear went zero. He dropped the hot slugs on my chest and glided back out to the street.

Valkyrie nodded her chin at me. Her eyes were white as sheet ice. “People like you,” she said, “get people like her,” she pointed at the girl lying by me, “dead.” She turned and dragged the two bodies behind her like sacks.

“We shouldn’t have to live with gods,” I said with my broken mouth. I was a dying seal barking on a rock. The girl next to me, still with her hands on her head, began to cry.

My ear roared back alive, horrible and loud.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said. She couldn’t understand me.

* * *

Fredericton expat Sacha A. Howells was a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Fellow at the Hambidge Center.

Bluefields Reharmony Nest

Kim Goldberg

Dr. Aurelio announced, “We are about to get started, Opul, if you would care to join us now.” On her lounge chair atop the cliff, Opul sat facing the shimmering orange sea.

Dr. Aurielio called Opul’s name again, but she remained impassive. “Very well,” he said as he gathered the rest of them: Ixcel the Ice Child, Leap, Dark Blade, KwaKwa, Doonah the Maker. They all dragged their chairs into a circle behind Opul. All patients at Bluefields must participate in daily group. It was written into the admissions contract, there were no exceptions. A patient needn’t share, but sitting in the circle for one hour each morning while others spoke was mandatory. “If the moon won’t come to the river, then the river must come to the moon.”

* * *

Even with her bioelectric flux at low ebb, Opul recognized the reference immediately. It was from an ancient Breitenbas legend on Kellar IV about the Moon-Bride who sought to be united with her new husband, the Black River, on the planet’s surface. But the Moon-Bride did not know how to climb down from the sky, so her husband ascended to meet her, creating night with his blackness.

Opul saw little connection between the myth and her current situation. The only thing she knew for certain was that there was no escaping Dr. Aurelio’s group session— not unless she planned to hurl herself off the cliff and into sea. She considered it for a moment, but she doubted she had the energy or the motor control to choreograph so grand an exit. So she continued to lie on her lounger while the rest of the menagerie of dysfunctional superheroes joined Dr. Aurelio and brought the circle to Opul.

“Who has something to share this morning?” Dr. Aurelio asked after the patients had settled themselves. He had strategically seated himself directly across from Opul, she looked away.

“Anyone…? KwaKwa, how is your world today? Still having those headaches?”

KwaKwa could usually be counted on to share. He was not bashful about his emotional processes, and he had a surprising degree of insight. KwaKwa’s monumental physical strength had manifested by age four; already, he’d been able to lift and toss large boulders, which he did to save members of his tribe, the Seetles, from being enslaved or eaten by the other intelligent species of his homeworld, the Ramorgs. However, the arrival of offworld colonists had pushed KwaKwa beyond the limits of his powers. With their mechanical grapple-maws they were more effective hunters than the Ramorgs, and more relentless by far. He became wracked with night terrors and excruciating headaches, necessitating his stay at Bluefields.

“The headaches are better now,” KwaKwa replied. “But I awoke from a dream this morning that I don’t understand. It was quite unsettling.”

“Tell us about it,” Dr. Aurelio urged.

“I was walking through the forest,” KwaKwa began, “when I found a ravine filled with hundreds of dead jimbos caked in—”

“The Mother will be saved!” Leap blurted.

All heads swivelled. “The Mother must be saved because The Mother is sacred!”

“Leap… What have we said about interrupting?” Dr. Aurelio asked.

“If Leap would prefer to share first, that’s fine with me,” KwaKwa offered.

“No, that is not fine,” Dr. Aurelio cut in. “Leap, you’ll just have to—”

“The Mother must be saved! All hail The Mother!”

“Leap! That’s enough!” Dr. Aurelio didn’t use his stern voice often, and never on anyone other than Leap. But poor Leap had impulse-control issues, not to mention attention-divergence issues and mother issues.

“Sorry,” Leap replied.

“You will have a chance to share after KwaKwa has finished,” Dr. Aurelio instructed. “All right?”

“Yes, of course. Sorry. The Mother will be saved! So sorry.”

Leap fidgeted for a few more seconds and then grew still as KwaKwa resumed recounting his dream.

Opul returned her absent gaze and sense-mind to the ocean. She missed the entirety of KwaKwa’s disjointed tale of dead jimbos and hurtling spears, which somehow became forests of snapping tortas that swallowed a shuttle pod of blood-red gemstones as it orbited a woman’s furry neck.

* * *

Dr. Aurelio listened in a distracted way to the dream saga. He was far more intrigued by the subtle interplay he had just witnessed between Opul and Leap. This was not the first time such an exchange had manifested between the two of them. Leap was the most volatile patient here, and also the most dangerous— or at least had been initially. He was the only current resident whose admission had not been voluntary. When a superhero goes rogue and starts committing mayhem, the Interplanetary Corps of Superheroes has little choice but to round him up and ship him off for treatment. And if treatment fails, his powers must be disabled. Permanently.

Dr. Aurelio did not want that outcome for any of his patients, and recently, it had started looking like Leap might escape it. The once-explosive lagomorph had become subdued in recent weeks. Calming him was no longer the chore it had been in the beginning, and the soft chamber was no longer necessary. Dr. Aurelio would have liked to credit Leap’s turnaround to his own therapeutic skills and proven track record as the pioneer of superhero psycho-reharmonization therapy. But he was honest enough to admit that, in this case, the truth lay elsewhere. Specifically, it lay somewhere deep within the badly frayed sense-mind of Opul the Mender.

Opul was by far Dr. Aurelio’s toughest nut to crack. While her outward symptoms appeared to be psychological — despondency, abysmalism, alienation — her fundamental malady was in fact physiological and bioelectric. So deep was her wound that it touched her bioenergetic core and its architecture of neural webs. Opul needed more than group validation and gentle guidance from a trained professional. Much more. And the only one she could get it from was herself. At best, Dr. Aurelio was nothing more than a passive conduit for her powers of autonomous neural repair, if such repair was even possible in so extreme a case.

Normally, patients were barred from using their superpowers while at Bluefields. There was simply too much risk of them injuring themselves or others while in recovery. But in Opul’s case Dr. Aurelio had decided to make an exception. Once he had fully assessed the neurological basis of her condition and her special aptitude, he realized that the only likelihood of her ever regaining the full use of her sense-hairs and her mending power (really more of an energy-streaming ability) was if she actually began to
do
it again, to mend something or someone close at hand. It was indeed a “use it or lose it” situation. Neurons that fire together, wire together.

“The Mother must be saved! The Mother…” Leap erupted again but quickly trailed off once Opul’s gaze fell upon him.

Opul’s effects on Leap told Dr. Aurelio that she was already starting to regain her powers. Although, to see her immobile in her lounge chair, with her long sense-hairs limp against her head and shoulders, one would never guess she was engaged in mending.

Dr. Aurelio had reviewed vid images of Opul at work: in full-out mending mode, she stood erect while sweeping her elongate arms rapidly in front of her and bringing them back to her torso in broad gathering motions; her lustrous mane of sense-hairs lifting from her scalp, defying gravity, each strand twisting and turning every which way. But he had never observed her mend firsthand. It was rumored that she could even mend wounded planets ravaged by war, natural disaster, or cosmic accident, could stream and heal all of a planet’s broken or tangled geoenergy threads. Amazing! How he longed to see her in action.

On Earth, for as long as she’d lasted there, she mended from a concrete highway underpass in a small coastal town in Canada. Yet the primary geowound she was sent to heal was thousands of bounders inland, where a vast swath of forest had been sheared off and the land was now mired in an upwell of black tar that had lain buried for millennia. From all accounts, Opul would have completed her mission, even from that distance. But her sense-hairs and neural webs were severely damaged by the unanticipated levels of radio-frequency radiation on the planet. The concrete underpass provided the only shelter she could readily find from the toxic radiation. So she lived there during her sojourn on Earth. In order to do her mending each day, she’d had to stand at the mouth of the underpass. Anything that shielded her sense-hairs from the withering radiation also shielded them from the planetary energies she was there to reweave.

Now, Opul was beginning to mend Leap’s tangled energy threads. Perhaps not just because he was close at hand; all the patients were. But Leap was the only one who had been born on Earth. And come into his powers on Earth. And ultimately wreaked his great havoc on Earth before being captured by the Corps and sent for reharmonization. It was as though, at some subliminal level, Opul’s bioenergetic core knew that the key to her own autonomous repair would be found in reconnecting with the source of her damage: Earth. Perhaps the key also lay in Opul completing the mission she had been forced to abort. Namely, the healing of Earth. Or, in this case, a proxy for Earth in the form of Leap.

“…I knew they weren’t really gemstones,” KwaKwa sobbed. “The red was dripping off them and landing on my face. I knew they were the slaughtered jimbos from the ravine. And it was my own neck that was being circled until I couldn’t breathe!” KwaKwa broke off his tale and wept.

Ixcel the Ice Child (who was really three hundred years old but looked twelve) slipped her tiny pale hand into KwaKwa’s big mitt and gave it a squeeze.

“I have scary dreams too sometimes,” she said.

“Do you?” KwaKwa stopped bawling long enough to speak.

Ixcel nodded.

“Sure. We all do,” Dark Blade said.

Doonah the Maker patted KwaKwa’s shoulder. “We got yer back, buddy.”

“But what does it mean?” KwaKwa asked Dr. Aurelio.

“What do
you
think it means?” Dr. Aurelio replied.

“I think the blood that landed on my face was really my own tears. And the strangulation by that shuttle pod was my powerlessness against the offworlders. And the ravine of dead jimbos is the loss of our fertility. And…” KwaKwa dissolved into tears again.

“You’ve done significant work today, KwaKwa,” Dr. Aurelio said. “This is a lot of progress.”

Then he turned to Leap and braced himself for an incoherent litany of Mother worship.

* * *

That night, as Dr. Aurelio sat at his desk in the glass conservatory writing up his daily notes, his thoughts turned to the woolenwood forest to the rear of the compound. The patients at Bluefields were free to wander the trails, observe the wildlife, or simply meditate and restore themselves beneath the soft protective shield of the forest canopy.

The cornerstone of his doctoral thesis decades earlier involved cross-mapping the psychological profile of a superhero to the vital impulse of a tree. Each is driven by one need only: to fulfill itself according to its own laws, to represent itself in the world at large. Superheroes do not choose to be superheroes, do not choose to act when called upon to do so. They cannot
not
act. It is as hardwired into their genes as the tree’s impulse to build up its own form. When superheroes are unable to access their powers, unable to represent themselves, to fulfill their mandate, the damage to their psyche is profound and potentially irreversible. It is as mortally damaging as a tree’s inability to represent itself would be for the tree.

Opul visited the woolenwood forest more than any other patient in the current batch. But never at night. Nights were reserved for something else.

Dr. Aurelio glanced up from his desk and, as expected, saw Opul’s dark silhouette standing at the cliff edge, illuminated under the triple moons. The first night he had observed her there, he wondered if he needed to worry that she might jump. Indeed, what he saw floating on the ocean when he raced across the moss after her silhouette disappeared from the clifftop made his heart do several backflips. But after he understood her nightly ritual he determined he had no cause for concern.

* * *

Opul stood at the cliff edge along the east side of the compound. A wooden staircase led down to Lullo Cove. She was waiting for the steam to start rising from the sea. That was the best thing about this place. Thermal vents on the sea bottom opened at night, and the ocean warmed considerably.