“You got nothing on me,” says John Michael Montgomery.
Point out that you have witnesses. You have the guns he doublefisted across the border, and the Mexican orphans with bellies full of balloons.
“What that is, is covered,” he says. “I’m a celebrity. We can’t legally be prosecuted.”
Wasn’t Mel? Wasn’t Martha? Wasn’t he himself tried for multiple charges in 2006?
“No no.” He’ll snap his handcuffs easily. “That was for underdoing it. We were punished for the sin of daring too little.” Then he’ll reach forward, and break your neck like a string.
“And I,” he’ll smile, “learned my lesson.”
“My suit,” gasps Peter in slow horror. “It’s somehow turned… black…”
Jameson squints at him. “Still looks like navy to me,” he says.
“I feel so powerful!” Peter flexes. “And I know what comes with great power.”
“Great responsi–”
“No responsibility at all.”
“We just did the corporate ethics seminar,” says Jameson. “And I’m pretty sure you’re wrong.”
“Really?” says Peter. “Why don’t we discuss it over lunch?”
On the way, he jerks the steering wheel and sends the car off a bridge. “To the rescue!” he cries, shoving the door open and leaping, mind’s eye thick with spiderwebs.
The Justin stands booted and ponchoed in the town’s dusty street, gently playing his own standoff music.
Doors down the strip burst open, and howling varmints blaze their guns. The Justin draws the Martin and assumes Defensive Southern Mantis, blade spinning and sparking; bullets make unlikely noises and bury themselves in facades. His opponents fall flat. They were only cardboard standups.
“Not bad,” says a chuckle behind him. “Ready to duel someone worth your time?”
The Justin turns slowly to look at his opponent. Oily mustaches outline a too-white grin, and the razor teeth of his monstrous accordion bellow wide.
“Let the Trial of the Pyx begin!” declares Bourse. Red-breasted guards march the defendant up the aisle to her bench. “Stole a double armful this time, eh? Gold twonies?”
The Pyx’s golden eyes saccade. “I claim sanctuary under the Exigencies Act of 1844!”
Bourse hits clerks with her gavel until they look that up. “‘Serving the interests of Queen and Motherland?'”
“Removing metal money from circulation! It’s archaic! An electronic credit-system would be far less problematic. I’m an agent du change! In a few years I could–”
“Be a billionaire?”
“Not,” says the Pyx nobly, “the kind who spends anything.”
“Am I the only one you love?” Diana asks him once.
“Hardly,” he says. “I mean, aside from my grandma and all that, I’m still pretty much hung up on Jane Delleon from middle school. And her friend Ruthie Ponce. Oh, and I’d sell them all to pirates for that girl from Mythbusters.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say those things.”
“Then let me out of the goddamn lasso!”
Eventually she throws all his stuff out of the house; newspapers will report its landing in Phoenix. Stomping away for the last time, he almost gives himself a concussion on her stupid jet.
Every night Dinah finds people committing crimes and hurts them until they stop, and they go to jail and do awful things to each other, and then they get out and–having few other options–mostly go back to committing crimes. She knows this, but it’s not as if she can pretend that exploitation and rape and murder aren’t happening. So she has to fight. It makes her want to scream.
Humanity: a race digging itself deeper and deeper, looking for gold in a coal mine. How deep do you have to be, she wonders, before even the canary turns black?
Surfacewards he has one name, of course, but below Orin has more beautiful titles: Deep-Diver, Lord of the Water Planet, Sword of Atlantis. The Speaker. The Fisher. King.
The first is truest. No other has the strength to follow the ocean floor to the deep trenches. The Earth suffers, but only down here does it groan of its ache.
He removes the gauntlet, presses his missing left hand into the ooze. I too am wounded, he says, with the great voice of his mind. I understand.
Not even the whales hear him crying; the rumble of ships is too loud.
“That is a huge cocksucker,” says Henchman 48 in awe.
Henchman 97 lifts the long gatling from its crate. “Comes with a harness, too. You actually hold it under your arm–”
“All my dad ever got,” says 48, “was an Uzi.”
“The rat-with-wings got a bulletproof cape, didn’t he? So we got depleted uranium. He cut those up with the little boomerangs, we got EMP guns, he went poly-camo.” 97 snaps on the eyepiece. “And now we got infrared…”
“Yeah, well, you know who wins an arms race.” 48 strokes the steel of his own gatling. “The arms.”
They called it a rocket.
It’s like calling the Pietà a “funny rock.” A tiny intergalactic vessel, traveling so close to lightspeed that its contents aged only months–seeking out intelligent life, landing without harming a baby–that’s no rocket. That’s a miracle.
Enfield knows it was the journey, not the destination. That much time at relativity’s edge will change anybody, in ways that have nothing to do with a yellow sun.
Enfield is no genius, no Jor-El. But he’s got the pieces. He’s got to believe. He’s got a chance to make his baby boy a man of tomorrow.
“This was definitely not on the syllabus,” pants Phlange, as they hack their way through steaming vines.
“ECO 302,” calls Professor Ballyforth from his sedan chair. “Practicum in Environmental Issues! Seems straightforward to me.”
“We flew here in a jet,” says Phlange, “and came upriver by a coal-burning barge.”
“Pretty indulgent, eh?” Ballyforth waggles his eyebrows. “Guilt is extra motivation.”
“I already had motivation! That’s why I enrolled!”
“But did everyone? Havis, pop quiz! What is the daily waste footprint of a midwestern American?”
“Yiiii,” Havis replies, providing an Amazon tree boa with sustenance.
“Good!” says Ballyforth. “Six carbon credits.”