The Last Days of Krypton (39 page)

The red sun of Rao
dawned on the last day of Krypton.

The ground began to shake. All through the previous night, Jor-El hadn’t been able to drive the vivid pictures from his mind, knowing what was happening at the core of the planet. For days, the Phantom Zone had swallowed more and more incandescent lava, and by now the singularity must be dangerously close to its critical point.

Jor-El did not give up. Even though he knew the energy drain on the cobbled-together components was too great to accommodate two adults and one child, he refused to accept that he couldn’t make it function. He
needed
to save Lara and the baby; he simply couldn’t imagine—or allow—any other outcome.

Working feverishly, he stripped out some of the systems, reduced the mass of the vessel’s framework, and recalibrated the life-support controls to work with two passengers. He and Donodon had crowded together in the original tiny vessel…but that had been only for a short flight from Kandor to his estate.

He was willing to sacrifice himself in order to save his wife and child. But he
must
save them.

Again, though, he could not succeed. While Lara watched, her face pale and drawn, he made a second attempt to power up the internal systems of the modified ship. She bit her lip, rocking the baby in her arms, and she realized what he was doing. “You’re going to stay behind, aren’t you? But you want me to go with Kal-El.”

“You have to.” His tone had a ragged edge of raw desperation, and it allowed for no argument.

Even so, the built-in generator systems could not power up to the bare minimum requirements. A tear slid down his cheek from reddened eyes as he just stared at the vessel, feeling as if it had betrayed him.

“I can’t do it. The only possible craft will be barely large enough to accommodate a baby. I can send Kal-El away from Krypton and pray the life support keeps him alive.” The very idea sounded hopeless.

“But we can’t send our baby out alone,” Lara said. Her voice was almost a moan. “He’ll be helpless and lost.”

“That is why I so desperately needed you to go along. I failed.” His whole body shuddered with the enormity of what he faced, what they
both
faced as parents. “But would you rather we didn’t try? Would you rather we kept him with us so that we die together along with all of Krypton?”

She shook her head. Her eyes sparkled with tears, but both she and Jor-El knew the answer. “No, he is our son. If there is even one chance in a million that he can survive, then we have to take it.”

“I was sure you would say that.” He had faith in what Donodon’s technology could do, and he clung to the slenderest hope that Kal-El would find a way to survive, a new place to call home, a people to accept him. “We will do what we have to.”

Working swiftly together, he and Lara guided the new, much smaller starship out of the tower lab and onto the lush purple lawn. Constructed of a sturdy framework inlaid with the toughest Kryptonian structural crystals, many of which he grew using his father’s best techniques, the ship looked quite different from Donodon’s. During the urgent restructuring, Jor-El had made last-minute improvements to accommodate all of the memory crystals, all of the items Kal-El would need, wherever he went. The craft was as much Jor-El’s design as the alien’s, and the single life-form—the baby—finally did not cause the safety shutdowns to engage. To his great relief, he saw that at last the power levels were stable. The engines functioned.

There was a chance.

Jor-El and Lara had spent precious moments on an important task, each recording their heartfelt wishes and advice into a special crystal, dictating letters that their son would hear one day. As he grew older, Kal-El would have only these few hints of who his real parents had been. It had to be memorable.

With so much to say, Lara found herself at a loss for words when she recorded her message. Jor-El had struggled as well, reminded of how he had lost his own father to the Forgetting Disease and how Yar-El had found the strength and focus one last time to record a poignant message sealed into the wall of his mysterious tower. How could Jor-El do any less for his own baby?

Standing out in the open beside the small ship, Lara gazed around the beautiful estate, choked with emotion. “This is where we first met. This is where so much has happened.”

“And now here is where everything is coming full circle,” Jor-El said.

The ground shuddered beneath them, a wrenching, disorienting twist that made the couple stumble. He and Lara caught each other, kept each other from falling. Jor-El knew it would only get worse—and swiftly. Soon they would have no choice but to send the infant away forever.

After he had completed his frantic work on the new spacecraft, Jor-El then spent another hour poring over his calculations until his head pounded and his eyes ached. He had to be absolutely convinced he wasn’t wrong, that there was no flaw in his reasoning. If he sent his innocent, helpless baby off into the unknown, and Krypton did
not
explode, then he would never forgive himself for what he had done. Kal-El would be lost to them forever.

Lara loaded the last few memory crystals into the strange hybrid ship, remaining brave. “Where will we send Kal-El?”

He gave her a rare smile. “I think I found the perfect place.”

She suddenly remembered. “Earth? That beautiful world near Mars. In Donodon’s recorded images, those people looked very much like Kryptonians.”

“We can’t tell exactly how different Kal-El will be from them. Simply growing up under a yellow sun may impose unpredictable physiological changes. Who can say? But on Earth, maybe our son won’t be alone. Maybe those people will accept him.”

She forced strength in her voice. “At least it’s a chance.”

When the crystal-inlaid ship was prepared, they had only to pack up the baby, say their farewells, and make sure that Kal-El got safely away before it was too late.

The ground shuddered more violently than before, and Lara fell to her knees on the grass. The surface heaved as if some monstrous subterranean thing were squirming, breaking free. The baby began to cry. These tremors were just the precursors. All of Krypton’s continents were buckling, twisting as the world’s interior spasmed.

Fro-Da came running out of the large manor house still wearing his apron; flour and cooking oil had spilled down his chest. The chef blinked as a jagged black crack snaked its way up one thick wall. Then, for reasons he must have considered urgent, he rushed back into the building. Jor-El shouted a warning, but his voice remained unheard as the load-bearing pillars buckled. The entire wing of the house fell in upon itself, burying Fro-Da with his kitchens.

In the Redcliff Mountains by the now-abandoned Rao-beam outpost, the cliffsides cracked, and avalanches slid down the slopes. House-sized blocks of stone broke free and tumbled into the valleys.

The sky overhead became a turmoil of spoiled-looking clouds, dust, and fire mixed with a fresh outpouring of gases from volcanic eruptions in the southern continent. Monster storms had begun to brew in the atmosphere, tumbling over one another as they raced across the landscape like unleashed hrakkas.

The whole engine of the planet’s core shut down.

On the nearby plains, the telescopes and observation arrays shuddered and groaned. Girders and support stalks snapped, and the broad dishes slowly collapsed to the ground, breaking apart and crumbling under their own weight. In control rooms, all the images crackled into static and went off-line.

Fissures split the grasslands, spreading like fanged mouths. The floor of the crater of Kandor swelled into a huge dome much larger than Zor-El’s force-field cap, and then split like a festering blister. The reawakened lava geyser shot a pillar of liquid orange fire to the sky.

A flat communication plate mounted on the curved wall inside Jor-El’s tower laboratory crackled to life, sending an urgent transmission. Though he and Lara stood outside on the open lawn, Jor-El could hear the shouts and pleas of people begging him to help. But it was too late. As the ground heaved with another sharp shock, the tower twisted. A long, jagged crack shot up the side of the curved wall, and the communication plate tumbled over to shatter on the floor.

“It’s time,” he said to Lara, who clung protectively to their baby. “We can’t wait any longer.” Tears ran down her face, and Jor-El realized that he was weeping, too.

Lara wrapped their son tenderly in the blankets of their great house, the finest blue and red fabric emblazoned with the prominent symbol of Jor-El’s family. “Kal-El, you have to go, or you’ll die with us.” She trembled, then straightened. This was their only hope.

Now that the baby was to be the only passenger, they had outfitted the interior of the ship like a cradle, a protective nest that would be monitored by the alien’s life-support systems. Kryptonian crystals surrounded the cradle, memory crystals with the cultural and historical recordings Lara had copied, the seeds of Yar-El’s architectural crystals, and the crystals that held Lara’s journals. As the last item, she placed the special shard with the messages from both of them in with the baby. “This is so you’ll know we loved you, Kal-El.”

Lara gave her infant son a final kiss, brushing her lips against the delicate skin of his forehead. Her voice hitched as she said, “I wish you well on your new planet, Kal-El. I hope you find your way among the people of Earth. I hope you manage to be happy.”

The planet continued to tear itself apart. “It has to be now,” Jor-El said. Thunder in the sky competed with the cracking explosions and eruptions. The ground shook, and another split opened the wall of a nearby building, causing it to collapse. “We have to save him.”

Lara desperately reached forward to touch the baby one final time. Suddenly thinking of his father’s last utterance, Jor-El leaned in and whispered, “Remember.” Then he took his wife’s hand and drew her back from the ship so that he could close the hatch. Kal-El’s blue eyes stared at his parents as the humming mechanism sealed the craft. The life-support systems switched on, ready to provide warmth, food, light, air.

With a whistling sound, four huge chunks of lava rock that had been ejected in a nearby volcanic blast slammed like bombs into the ground around them. One smashed entirely through the ceiling and skylights of the research building.

“He’ll be safe, Lara.” They stood bravely together watching the starship’s automated systems lift the craft gently off the ground. “He will be the last son of Krypton.”

The levitating ship turned on its central axis until it locked onto its optimal trajectory. The crystals on its hull shone in the red sunlight. The craft paused for just an instant, and then it rose up and away from the ugly-looking storms that approached from the east and north. Lara caught her breath and reached upward in a final gesture of farewell.

With a sudden flash of acceleration, the craft shot away, and Kal-El was gone.

To Zor-El, the impending loss
of Argo City, of Krypton, made everything seem more beautiful, all details crystalline sharp, each memory vivid with meaning.

His mother sat on a broad, flower-filled terrace and absorbed the world around her, all too aware of the approaching end. In a way, Charys seemed oddly contented. Zor-El said his goodbyes and left her alone.

He wanted to walk with Alura through her greenhouses, to hold her one last time and just wait together. Zor-El had always been an impatient man, insisting on action rather than complacency, but now there was nothing left to do. He understood vividly what was happening far beneath his feet. He stood on a ticking bomb and could not find a way to defuse it.

Another city might have reacted with wild riots, frantic last-moment hedonism, rampant vandalism, but Argo City was brave. The people had accepted the news with remarkable stoicism. He was proud of them.

Zor-El and Alura had walked along the streets, enjoying the gardens that hung like verdant curtains from the balconies and walls. Unaware of the catastrophe about to occur, the blossoms spread their petals wide to entice flying insects to pollinate them. Every breath tasted sweet. Even with the solar storms, the red sunlight felt warm and nourishing. Zor-El’s dark eyes sparkled with tears.

Some stubborn fishermen had taken their boats out onto the water, as if this were any other day. Soon, Zor-El would have no choice but to activate the force-field dome, for whatever protection it might offer. It was likely to be a futile gesture, but it was all the protection he had to offer.

He returned to his tower and watched the readings come in from his distant seismic devices. Deep in the core, the singularity must be on the verge of its sudden, critical expansion. By the time the seismic signals reached his detectors, as soon as the acoustic waves could travel up through the mantle and resonate in the planet’s crust, the fatal shock wave would already be on its way.

As he watched, the needles jumped, shuddered, and went off the scale. His heart leapt in tandem with the traces. “It’s happened, Alura. Krypton’s core just vanished into the Phantom Zone.” He drew a deep breath. “Our world is about to implode.”

Even now, huge portions of the interior were rushing to fill the void. The crust itself would crack and crumble, falling inward under its own immense gravity.

Loud sirens shrieked through the city. People rushed back inside the perimeter that the force-field dome would cover. Gondolas and powered sailing craft plunged through the city’s canals to reach the protected area. Several large fishing boats, either unaware of the alarm or purposely ignoring it, remained where they were.

Zor-El remembered how peaceful it had been that night out on the water with his wife, spreading their gossamer sails and drifting under the starlight. If the world was going to end, he could understand why those fishermen were content to spend their last moments out on the ocean.

One final craft raced into the mouth of the largest canal; sailors jumped from their small vessel and ran along the docks and up the stairs on the seawall. Their abandoned craft floated away.

Zor-El was amazed at how swiftly the knotted black clouds converged overhead. The ground bucked and lurched, and the sea became suddenly stormy, stirred from deep below. Waves crashed into one another, building higher and stampeding toward the coastline. Already a series of enormous waves approached, much larger than the tsunami that had caused so much damage almost a year earlier. Waterspouts, giant pillars of silvery foam, whirled about, careening toward the coastline.

“I’m activating the dome.”

From the control bank, he powered the generators, and the crackling shield appeared, sweeping over the boundaries of Argo City like a huge umbrella and slamming into the ground. Now they were completely isolated. This shield had held against General Zod’s weapons, but Zor-El had no way of testing or calculating whether it would be sufficient to save them now. And even if this chunk of land somehow managed to remain intact, how could Argo City possibly survive if all the rest of Krypton were demolished?

The waterspouts circled like predators searching for anything to devour. An assault of waves obliterated the small gooseneck of land connecting the Argo City peninsula to the mainland, turning them into an island at last.

Tidal waves raced toward them, as if pursued by some terrible demon. A waterfall appeared in a line across the ocean as the deep crust broke open, leaving an enormous fissure, an empty hole that all the seas of Krypton could not fill. The first line of giant waves stumbled upon the fissure and poured down into the inconceivable depths. As the ocean struck the hot magma, an endless army of cannons seemed to fire shot after shot.

Another eruption vomited plumes of
emerald-green
lava, strangely altered minerals that proved to Zor-El that the transformation in Krypton’s unstable core had continued even after he and his brother had released the pressure.

He already missed Jor-El, and he wished he’d had the chance to see their newborn baby. Shortly before all communication cut off, his brother had told him his desperate plan to send the baby off to an unknown planet. Sadly, Zor-El wished he and Alura had had a son or a daughter of their own, if only for a few years….

He wished many things, and now it was too late.

A gargantuan wave crashed over the top of the protective dome, sending up spume and mist all around. Ironically, Zor-El saw a rainbow overhead cast by Rao’s bright light. The chunk of land holding Argo City rose above sea level, broken free as some force from beneath pushed them away.

The catastrophe continued.