Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen (40 page)

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Authors: Claude Lalumière,Mark Shainblum,Chadwick Ginther,Michael Matheson,Brent Nichols,David Perlmutter,Mary Pletsch,Jennifer Rahn,Corey Redekop,Bevan Thomas

BOOK: Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

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Shurui stands her ground as the Xun Long rushes her. Xinhua’s own qi crashing on the air like a wave ahead of her. And then there is only the commotion of combat, and restraint as she tries not to burn Xinhua.

All she has to do is hold. Until this body burns down to ash. And wait to resurrect. Zetian her anchor.

Always the Xifeng is her anchor.

Everything becomes this moment.

* * *

Somewhere in the darkness between bodies, there is a memory of bright wings. Of open sky. Of mountain ranges with a dawn so bright no mortal eye can behold it.

And there, too, is Chang’e, bound to the moon, ever waiting to descend. She speaks words Shurui cannot hear. Words meant only for her. Each time she is closer to hearing.

And then she is being pulled back down to her body.

* * *

Shurui struggles to keep her qi from overflowing the new self it’s building to house her. Tendons burgeon and snap taut around hollow bones, light as air. The pain sends her floating up off the ground. Until the meat of organ and muscle tissue bubbles up out of her bones, coats them in bloody gristle, and her new weight drags her down to the hardwood floor. Presses her down into the grain.

She bites clean through her new-formed lower lip as fresh skin knits itself over raw nerve endings in fits and starts. Her lungs still too new, too weak, to scream with.

Zetian is there beside her. Cool hands steady on her half-finished back, keeping her from setting this new body on fire before it’s done forming. Zetian sweats from the heat her lover throws off.

When she is done being born, Shurui gulps down air— peels her bloodied nails back from the long furrows they have made in the floorboards. Her breath forms steaming puddles on the wood. Beside her, Zetian sits down and splays her legs to massage cramped thigh muscles.

In the quiet that follows, broken only by the settling and creaking of their ancient apartment, Shurui wishes things were different. Hates herself for thinking it— for Zetian not being enough to tie her to this place. But still, always, wishes she’d never left Liushi Shan. Wishes Chang’e had never shown her that first, beautiful, unattainable Xifeng.

—That she weren’t going to lose Zetian and the rest of the life she has built here. Because she always loses her Xifeng.

When her muscles are strong enough she rolls over on her back, rests one arm on her stomach. Her new chest rises and falls. Sweat plasters her naked skin. Each body identical to the last. She wonders if she’ll ever be allowed to truly die.

Zetian brushes soaked, matted strands of hair from Shurui’s face. Shurui’s mobile rings, and Zetian strokes Shurui’s shoulder and levers herself off the floor to go answer it. Shurui hears her “Hello?” as through water; tracks the slap of Zetian’s bare feet back across the floorboards. Opens her eyes to find Zetian, hanging upside-down in her vision, leaning down above her. “It’s Xinhua.”

Shurui nods slowly. The mobile is heavy in her hand as she takes it. She croaks to clear her throat. “Is everything all right? You don’t usually call this early.” Her voice is a whisper as her new vocal cords acclimate to speech.

Xinhua’s voice is softer still than her own. “I’m sorry. I just really need to talk. I can’t talk to Lin right now. I mean, eventually, but, she’s not—” Xinhua’s voice catches. Her inhale shaky. “I shouldn’t have called.”

“No, it’s all right.” Zetian helps Shurui up to a sitting position. And she leans on Zetian’s proffered shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

Xinhua pauses so long Shurui wonders if she’s hung up. “I can’t… deal with carrying this secret anymore. Can I just talk to you— do you have time?” And there it is. One more burden to bear. Or is this the one Xinhua has already told her? Will this be the day Xinhua tells her of the mantle she carries— a secret shared that can only divide them if spoken aloud. Or will this be the day Xinhua finally means to tell her mother, Lin, that Xinhua cares for women? Shurui cannot imagine what Lin will make of that knowledge; knowing that her daughter will be the last of the Xun Long. She remembers well the days when Lin’s own voice issued from behind the blank mask of the Xun Long’s costume. The Fenghuang and the Xun Long have been at odds a long time. But she does not know Lin well enough to know if she can make peace with that legacy’s end.

Whereas Shurui already knows all too well that everything ends.

How long will it be before
this
Xifeng at her side, too, is consumed by her fire. Before she has to leave behind Xinhua, and the rest of the life she has built here. How long before the next Xifeng? And the next. And the next…

For now, there is only this moment. This time.
This
Xifeng.

It is enough.

Shurui lays her head on Zetian’s shoulder. Closes her eyes. And lies. To herself. To Zetian. To Xinhua: “Always.”

* * *

Michael Matheson is a writer, editor, book reviewer, and anthologist from Toronto.

Afterword:
The Death of the Death of the Superheroes!

Mark Shainblum

I have been writing, editing, and publishing superhero stories on and off for over thirty years now: doing this in 2015 is profoundly different from doing it in 1985.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, it had become fashionable among intellectual comics fans to prophesy the imminent demise of superhero comics. The genre was embarrassing for its silly underwear-on-the-outside conventions, scary because of its dark vigilante (maybe even
fascist
?) heart, and artistically stultifying due its big-fish-in-a-little-pond dominance of the comics medium. Popular only among a dwindling minority of hardcore fans, superheroes were bound to disappear, and we shouldn’t even mourn them, because their death would finally allow the comics art form to flourish.

Yet here we are, in the 21st century, and the superhero genre has done anything
but
“go away.” It has, in fact moved from the outer spiral-arm fringes of the pop-culture galaxy to the all-devouring black hole at its core.

In previous generations, superheroes had occasionally erupted out of comics and into the mass-consciousness, only to fade away again as the two or three years of the fad ran its course. But that’s changed, there no longer seems to be a boom-and-bust cycle. Rather than liberating the comics medium by conveniently dying, the superhero instead
escaped
its single-medium ghetto and became a permanent, mass-culture icon as ubiquitous as the knight, the fairy-tale princess, the cowboy, the secret agent, and the cop. In transcending comics, superheroes also managed to step aside just enough for the whole art form to flourish. But that’s another story.

Why is this happening? Superhero fables tap into cross-cultural archetypes and suit a globalized entertainment marketplace particularly well. And our movie-making technology is finally equal to the task of capturing the epic scale and scope of superhero sagas. But it’s obviously more than that.

By the standards of 1985 we’ve all
become
superheroes. We have instant access to almost all of the world’s knowledge and virtually limitless, externalized memory. We all now have, thanks to personal technology, something like telescopic vision and super-hearing and are constantly in contact with one another at levels only slightly short of telepathy. There are people alive right now who can control computers with their thoughts or who have silicon chips wired directly into their nervous systems. And we’re just at the infancy, at the blastocyst stage, of this process. We haven’t even really
begun
.

Superheroes may have a dark vigilante heart that can never fully be trusted, but that’s only one side of that infamous double-headed coin. As our own, very real superpowers increase exponentially with every passing day, how can we be surprised that we’re becoming more and more fascinated by superhero stories and what we can glean from them?

I’m not.

—Mark Shainblum

Ottawa, Ontario

April 2015

* * *

Mark Shainblum is the co-creator of
Northguard
and
Angloman
. He received an Aurora Award for co-editing
Arrowdreams: An Anthology of Alternate Canadas
.

* * * * *

Details

Superhero Universe: Tesseracts Nineteen

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by

Edge Science Fiction
and Fantasy Publishing

An Imprint of

HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

P.O. Box 1714,
Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,
Canada

Cover art by Jason Loo

e Book ISBN: 978-1-770530-88-1

* * * * *

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* * * * *

EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.