A Once Crowded Sky (16 page)

The boy panicked. Pen’s in trouble. Where had Pen gone? Pen was his favorite. Pen has to go on! And the end of the game? No, the game was his favorite. No! The game has to go on! It has to. This is perfection. The boy will live here forever, and, like all heroes, like Pen, he will always come back—he will never go back.

The boy spent the next weeks scouring his volumes for clues of how such a tragedy could come. But he found nothing.

Then Pen quit the game. The most fun hero of them all just left. The other masked men easily shrugged it off, dismissing the decision as another temporary change of status soon to be undone by upcoming and no doubt thrilling events. But they couldn’t understand what Pen meant, that Pen’s leaving signaled to the boy an ending was coming, the game would have to end, the lovely game. An end to Pen. An end to the game.

The boy returned to the spout on his parents’ expanse of land and scratched out the circle once again. He released the light, then knelt in front of its eternal intricacies. Tears in his eyes, the boy begged the fountain to tell him how it had happened, how he could stop it from happening, how he could please, please, stay here forever among the great, powerful myths that seemed imbued with a meaning and purpose that
could not be found in the banal world. He begged, he prayed, and he cried.

At first the fountain gave nothing, just the same grand stories he’d already read and recorded; but eventually he was guided to a solution, to the same spark of light again and again—Ultimate and PenUltimate, brave and bold smiles penciled across their faces, flying through a welcoming sky—again and again and again until the fountain consisted of nothing but that, an endless expanse of these two heroes and that perfect, patient sky.

And the boy stood back, hushed by its beauty, awed by the purity of its color. It was blue. It was all blue.

4

Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face #571

Pen grabs an anonymous red from the never-used wine cellar and drags it with him to the Metal Room. He uncorks it with his thumb and takes a wide sip. The wine gags him, pushes back out through the corners of his mouth.

The liquid’ll quash the adrenaline that can come with the end of a hard fight. Normally, he wouldn’t need it; in fact, Ultimate would probably have scolded him for taking advantage of this particular wired loophole. But it’d been so long. He swings the bottle to his lips again and waits for the coming calm.

Pen stumbles into the cavernous, spherical room that lies beneath Ultimate’s mansion, Pen’s old home. He hasn’t been here for years, since he quit, since he handed in his wondrous windboard and told Ultimate that he was done with the game. Ultimate was so quiet; he didn’t argue. He just took the thing, gave Pen a hug, told Pen to take care. Easy, professional. Pen left, and he never came back.

They’re taking the place apart now, selling it off, and the lights don’t
seem to work. But Pen doesn’t mind. There’s nothing to see anyway. The Metal Room is always empty, bare metal floors leading to bare metal walls leading to a bare metal ceiling. Pen looks up into the dark, knowing nothing is above him but a naked steel dome.

A lot of heroes kept stuff in their headquarters, little mementos of battles fought and won. It was all so important, punching their fists through all the villains’ crackling laughs, and they all collected souvenirs afterward, hung them up in their secret lairs. Pen and Ultimate had visited most of them, and at every one you’d see all those nifty trophies: Bugger’s Spider-Spear-of-Death, or Patrician Assassin’s Neutron Crossbow; a shrunken moon-castle here, a seventh-dimensional monkey there; dozens of these chintzy war treasures, proof someone beat up someone.

(One time during a team-up with Starry and Star-Knight, Pen’d helped SK out by carrying one of these things back to their Star-Ship. Hard enough to surf the air tied to a flying robot, try doing it with one hand wrapped around an obscenely large toothpick that’d been left over by the . . . what was his name? The big one. Giant something. Giant of the North.)

“Giant of the North!” Pen drinks and laughs, and more wine spills over, drips down his chin onto the metal floor below.

Not Ultimate though. He didn’t need any of that. Souvenirs. Trophies. The Man With The Metal Face never got sick of going on about how they didn’t do it for glory; we do what we do because we put the good above the man, and blah, blah, blah, diddy blah. Ultimate probably had the whole lecture on tape inside his fancy brain so whenever Pen showed any pride in their work, or maybe complained they weren’t getting enough credit, Ultimate could press a button in his ear, and his mouth would start:
We do this for the good, for them, not for us, never for us . . .

So their headquarters remained empty, reserved for meetings, after-action reports, and endless training: Pen and Ultimate sparring, flipping, slipping around each other, until Ultimate decided he’d seen enough and ended the session by slapping Pen into a metal wall. All of it was done in an empty room. Pen tips the bottle. Well, mostly empty.

Pen picks at the scar on his chest and walks over to the north side of the room. He stares up at a lonely framed comic book mounted ten feet up on the wall. It’s some Superman thing, showing the great Man of Steel soaring up through a blue sky, surrounded by dozens of other heroes,
all headed up and off the page. In all that time spent working under this metal dome, this was the only decoration Ultimate allowed.

There’s an explanation for it of course. Why this. Why nothing else. Everything in the game can be explained. Every mystery solved. Just ask Ultimate. He’d tell you.

It’s kind of a sad story, though it has a nice ending. It starts simply, with a mysterious scientist working alone on a cloudy night, polishing and perfecting a robotic face. No one knows why he did it, why he built Ultimate. We can only guess at the original intention of this poor genius who first molded the steel, first energized the heart. You see something went wrong. At the moment that the scientist gave Ultimate life, there was an explosion,
crack
, and the scientist died, leaving no trace of what Ultimate was supposed to do, what he was for.

Surrounded by death and debris, the robot opened his eyes for the first time. He was uninjured of course, all that destruction bounced carelessly off his hard skin. But now he was alone, lost. He looked around at the burnt world beneath him, the empty sky above him, and he stood still. He had no purpose. Nowhere to go. Nowhere to be. Metal without meaning. Wires inside him glowed with strength, poured strength into a thousand steel muscles, and the robot knew only that it meant nothing, a shapeless electric buzz pushing his newly moved flesh in every direction, rendering him inert.

The robot stared down on the torn body of the scientist, his face beaten back and in, blood and flesh mixed together coming to nothing. Explain me, the robot said. You created me, he said, you have to tell me, you have to explain me. I am strength. I am violence. I am power. Explain me, the robot said, but the scientist lay still and kept his quiet.

Then the robot found the book. In the midst of all that chaos, all that random garbage left over from the explosion, the robot found a comic book, a Superman comic book with a picture on the cover showing the great man of steel flying up through the sky, surrounded by a mass of heroes.

The robot looked at the cover, his eyes clicking and whirling. There were so many of them. So many costumed men and women. Their blast of color hid the sky. On each of their faces was the drawn determination to conquer the next obstacle, to defeat the next villain. They fought with courage, grace, without doubt in their mission, their ultimate purpose.

The robot picked up the comic, folded the paper into his fist. This is who I am. This is why I was built. The cape. The tights. The mission to save the world. Superman, The Man of Steel. Ultimate, The Man With The Metal Face.

Without another thought, Ultimate flew up and out, cutting through clouds, splitting moonlight, joining the stars. His creator died; Ultimate’s life killed him. But a greater plot had been revealed. Ultimate was a hero. Ultimate would save the day. He clutched the comic to his metal chest and flew up and away, claiming with every second of ascent that the world was safe now; he was a hero, and we were all saved.

And wasn’t that a sad, nice story. Death and redemption and meaning lost and found. The hero explained. The comic mounted on the wall, reminding Ultimate every day of what he was, what he was supposed to do. It was all very nice. Pen drinks deep, and it’s all very nice.

Pen’s father used to beat him ragged. His mother too, sometimes. With that ring. She had a hell of a ring. It wasn’t to be cruel or anything. They just didn’t really see a use for Pen, and they didn’t have as much time as some other parents had. It was just their way. And it wasn’t all bad all the time. But sometimes it could get pretty bad.

But it was getting better. Pen’s pretty sure it was getting better toward the end. When Ultimate came into their house. It was better by then. Or maybe it wasn’t. He was so young when they died, who can remember?

Pen was ten then, when Madame Evil decided she liked their house. She liked the drapes. She had used some hypnosis thing to take over Ultimate, to make him love her, to make him do whatever she wanted. She told Ultimate to get that house for her, the one with the drapes, and that was it. It wasn’t anything bigger than that. Drapes. Nice ones.

That huge fist wrapping around Dad’s neck. The punch right to the body that sent Mom somersaulting backward over their dining room table. She flipped. When she hit it. She flipped. As if she were made of air.

Pen watched it all, watched the big monster robot—three of whose toys he had back in his closet—he watched this hero tear through his family, and he had them in a box in the closet, and he doesn’t know if they were his favorites, but maybe. Then Ultimate came after Pen, just fists, metal fists swinging, and he still has the box, the toys, somewhere in his apartment; he’d kept the toys.

Before Ultimate came, sometimes Pen thought about being rescued. When you’re a kid, and there’s nothing else, that’s all you want. Some hero to come and make things better. And there he was, in Pen’s house, swinging away.

And afterward, how cool was that? After Ultimate freed himself from the evil plan. Out of guilt or maybe compassion, Ultimate saved Pen, healed him, wired him up. Then Ultimate offered to take Pen in, teach Pen to fight so that Pen could stop villains from doing to other kids what’d been done to Pen. Pen had had it all in him now, Ultimate’s metal, powering him. PenUltimate! How great is that? Every child’s fantasy.

Ultimate asked, and Pen said yes. Pen said he wanted to fight bad guys. He wanted to be good, like Ultimate. Then the training, the fog descending, the thousands saved, the little boy saving them all.

Pen finishes the bottle and drops it on the floor. He stands. Ultimate’s comic is ten feet up, and Pen jumps, wires in his thighs glowing. Pen grabs the frame, hugs it to him as he falls back down, landing easily, lightly.

Drapes. Metal fists. He should be bitter about it, plagued by it in some heroic, tragic way. Like some of these guys out here. Got to exact revenge on all the criminals who’d do this to a poor, poor lad who most certainly did not deserve it. And all that crap. It should be in front of him when he fights. His origin. He should be haunted. It should drive him forward, force him to enjoy all the kicking and flipping and triumph and loss and redemption and all of it.

It should have been there when he decided to leave, when he gave Ultimate the board. He should have remembered his parents, what happened to them, how he needed to avenge them, to be the hero for them. And when the call came, when they asked him to return for the sacrifice, he should have seen his mother’s face, her bloody face, his father’s body, Ultimate’s fists, the drapes, all of it, and he should’ve gotten up, he should’ve cried for them, cried out for them, “It’s time to feel our metal!” And to battle once more, defeat The Blue, save the day.

Even now. It should justify it. It should explain why he didn’t have to be afraid, falling from that building, saving sixteen people, why he didn’t need to come here. He should be home. He should be celebrating, wrapped in the honor of it all. His origin. He should’ve remembered. His
parents dying. Ultimate empowering him. A hero born. Like Ultimate, a comic book in his hand, flying up and away. The world is safe. Pen’s saving the world, and he should always remember the drapes.

Pen looks at the framed comic, the lines and colors forming the hero. How easy it was for him, the Metal Man soaring above us all. Good was good. Evil was evil. Ultimate was born, and there was death, and he found meaning, an explanation, and he fought, he fought for all of us. It was all there. A man ascending. A man explained. A picture on the cover of a comic book. How easy. How sad. How nice.

Pen takes the frame and throws it, watches it spin into the darkness of the metal room before shattering against the south wall.
BANG! CRASH! POW!
Pen stands still for a while, waits for the echoes to fade, then he walks across the room, picks the comic off the floor, crumples it into his fist.

He wants to shout. He wants to cry and shout and let it all come back; he wants to drop to his knees, to clutch Ultimate’s comic and cry out to the empty metal, “Explain me! Explain me! Explain me!” The floor is metal. The walls. The ceiling. The sky. He wants to feel it all, and shout again and again.