The Last Days of Krypton (17 page)

Far off, other survivors milled about where severed bridges and roads led only to the smoking hole. But Zod had not followed the main route back home, taking his own path, as always. And now he seemed painfully vulnerable and obvious out in the open. He stood alone.

And after slowly circling the deep crater, the ominous vessel came toward him.

The palace of solitude in
the arctic snowfields was breathtaking. Seeing it, Jor-El was reminded of his father’s original genius and creative imagination, before he had degenerated into forgetfulness.

As their enclosed two-person skimmer raced over the icy wasteland, he and Lara came over a line of jagged black peaks buried in glaciers. Various shades of red sunlight dappled the textures of blown snow and polished ice. They saw the exotic angled structure of the palace nestled against a cliff, like a spiny bush grown out of precious gems. Steam wafted up from a fissure where volcanic heat created a warm oasis even in the ice cap.

Lara caught her breath. “Everyone says Yar-El was such a brilliant scientist—but he was an artist, too! Just like my father said at the wedding. It’s beautiful.”

Lara’s parents and her little brother had rushed away from the dacha immediately after the ceremony, called back to their sensitive project in the city. Apparently the crystalsilk weavings had to be monitored precisely, or else the whole web would unravel and they would be forced to start over. Lara insisted that she understood why they had to leave so soon; after all, she had grown up in a family of artists.

“My father was a mathematical artist.” Jor-El knew, however, that simple equations without inspiration could not account for the marvel he saw in the mountains of ice. Thin crystal sheets balanced against one another at low angles, green and white structural columns that at first looked like a randomly stacked pile of broken glass, but further study showed a complex order. As a counterpoint to the low angles, straight pinnacles like watchtowers jutted vertically above, yielding a perfect view of the clean, pristine arctic.

The fortress had remained untouched in the cold, white wasteland for years. He and Lara had the ice cap all to themselves in perfect peace, perfect shelter. They would keep each other warm.

Jor-El landed in a snow-swept area near a majestic front gate guarded by long spearlike crystals. Huge angled shards had grown out of the glaciers themselves, reinforced by metallic and polymer overlays to form the main structure of the palace. The pointed spires interlocked in a geometric tapestry more amazing than any architecture he had ever seen.

The two stepped out into the brittle cold air and stood at the palace’s cold gateway, watching white breath curl from their nostrils and mouths. Peering through the hood of her parka, Lara gazed at the white and emerald spires with absolute delight. When Jor-El pulled her close, she felt very much at home in his arms. Here, for a brief while, they could hide from the rest of Krypton, ignore the Council and its accusations.

Once they had passed through the crystal-fenced entrance, the passageways of the palace were made of blue flowing ice, stabilized with polymer films. As soon as he and Lara entered, thermal gems began to raise the internal temperature, making the chambers comfortable.

She drank in the dazzling light that reflected from everywhere, and basked in the sheer sense of safety and privacy. “I couldn’t ask for a more magical place for our wedding trip.”

“How about better circumstances?”

“You and I are married now, and that is a
wonderful
circumstance,” she said with absolute conviction. “We’re together, for better or worse. Your problems are mine, and I’ll stand beside you just as I stand with you now.” She nestled against him. “No matter what happens. As dark as it seems, we will overcome this.”

He nodded. “Even if the whole Council is against me, Commissioner Zod promised his help. Let’s see if he’s true to his word. And if he can’t help after all, we will have to do it ourselves.”

The palace’s master suite was as large as a throne room. Light sparkled through the faceted walls. Neither of them could imagine any Kryptonian resort being more appropriate. Lara gave him a mischievous smile. “We’ll make do.” She pulled him toward her for a long kiss.

All around them the cold arctic exulted in their union. Yar-El had had the foresight to include warm furs and soft sleeping pallets. Lara held her husband, delighting in every second with him, never wanting to let go. She didn’t care about what might be happening in Kandor. In this place, Jor-El was hers alone, and she would lift the weight of the outside world from his shoulders.

Though only a scant few days remained before his trial, Jor-El and Lara managed to distract each other from their worries. Entirely.

Zod stood by himself on
the edge of the vast pit, realizing that he couldn’t run. Any being with the power to reduce an entire city to a mere plaything could easily catch one man, and he knew that the alien vessel had spotted him.

So he didn’t try to flee. He stood with his hands at his sides, glaring up at the ship, showing no fear. Defiant. He had always believed that as the son of Cor-Zod, he had a great destiny. But now, before his very eyes, his dreams of power, his home, his possessions—all had been stolen away.

The mechanical, razor-edged ship descended to the flat ground outside the yawning crater, still glowing with residual energy. Finally, two of the metal planes shifted and folded inward to reveal a hatch that spilled out hazy yellow light. Silhouetted against the interior of his ship, a manlike figure emerged—an entirely different sort of visitor from the diminutive tentacle-faced Donodon.

The stranger stood with his hands on his sides, facing Zod. Tall and muscular, with sickly looking olive-green skin, he wore a tight body suit and matching boots. The alien was completely hairless, his skin so smooth it seemed to be coated with wax. Across his skull, several glowing red and gold disks were connected with silver lines, like circuitry paths that mapped out the constellation of his brain. The visitor’s face showed no emotion, nor did he speak; he simply assessed the Commissioner.

Finally Zod shouted, “What are you waiting for? Are you not going to take me as well?”

“No. I have Kandor.” The alien spoke in a matter-of-fact voice, not gloating over what he had done.

“And what do you intend to do with it?”

The alien seemed perplexed by Zod’s anger. “As part of my collection, Kandor will be forever safe. I mean no harm.”

No harm?
Zod looked at the huge, deep crater. Even if the population inside the shrunken metropolis somehow remained uninjured, hundreds if not thousands of Kryptonians had been slaughtered in the process of uprooting the city. On the alien’s skull, the red-and-gold disks gleamed, as if amplifying his thoughts. The ship’s hatch opened wider, and the stranger gestured behind him. “You are welcome to see for yourself, if it reassures you.”

Some distance away, Nam-Ek emerged from where he had hidden in the upthrust rubble. He stormed toward the edge of the crater in a misguided attempt to protect Zod. When the green-skinned alien turned swiftly, reacting to the threat, Zod shouted to the big mute. Without thinking, he placed himself between the alien and his big-shouldered friend. “Nam-Ek! Stop! I don’t want you hurt.”

At Zod’s command, the burly bodyguard halted abruptly, as if he had reached the end of a leash. His expressive face was an agony of indecision, ready to tear the alien and his ship to pieces should his master be harmed.

Zod could tell that the fate not just of Kandor but all of Krypton might depend on what he did next. His thoughts raced ahead, calculating, assessing possibilities and discarding them. The eleven members of the Council were trapped in Kandor, completely cut off. Only he, the Commissioner, remained outside. Therefore, this was all up to him.

The open, bright spacecraft might be a looming trap, but the power that this alien exhibited, the audacity of what he had done to Kandor—the Commissioner longed to know much more. If the alien wanted to hurt him, Zod could do nothing about it anyway. He forcibly drove down his inner panic, his natural tendency to fear this powerful vessel and obviously destructive enemy. The only way to take the upper hand would be to show no hesitation.

He gave a cautious signal to Nam-Ek, then gathered his courage and squared his shoulders. He strode toward the alien ship, showing no fear. “I am Zod. I represent Krypton. Explain yourself to me.”

The exotic humanoid gestured toward the hatch. “Come, I will show you all that you wish to know.”

Zod walked up the ramp, determined to radiate an air of confidence. “What are you? Where do you come from?” The interior of the ship smelled of polished metal along with an exotic stew of scents: dirt, vegetation, lightning.

The disks on the smooth green scalp glowed golden. “I am a Brain Interactive Construct, an android. My planet is—was—called Colu. I was created and sent out to catalog worlds for the Computer Tyrants to conquer.”

“So, a spy.”

“A gatherer of data.” With a small gesture of his synthetic hands, the android activated the polished white walls, converting them into projection screens. An image resolved out of many points of light to display a rocky, icy landscape, covered with vast industrial cities and cordoned-off camps on the outskirts where human slaves lived squalid lives. Colu. The image faded after Zod had absorbed it.

As he stepped deeper into the vessel’s watery yellow light, he spotted tiny Kandor in its dome, a carefully preserved model city on display in a museum. And Krypton’s capital wasn’t the green-skinned android’s only prize. He saw a dozen other bottled cities, each one a landmark of unusual architecture, bathed in artificial lights to simulate their respective suns.

One sample city was composed of black rock built up like pieces of a coral reef, and a tiny ocean swirled around the boundaries under the dome; another terrarium contained an intricately grown forest village; a third was filled with dirt and riddled with a labyrinth of tunnels, like a child’s diggerbug farm. One specimen city had buildings that seemed to be made of melting wax; another was a floating cluster of lavender bubbles with butterfly-winged inhabitants flitting from place to place. The populations in each specimen dome seemed to be thriving.

“The Computer Tyrants are long forgotten except by me. I do this for myself. And for
them.
” He looked at the domed cities. “I have saved them all.”

Zod stepped closer to the energy dome that encapsulated Krypton’s capital. He wondered if the tiny people inside could see his gigantic face looming over them. “Is that why you were sent here?”

“I came of my own free will.” The android sounded very proud of the fact. “I am no longer the subservient construct the Computer Tyrants created.”

Zod waited for him to continue, still puzzled by the alien’s oddly nonthreatening attitude after having caused such horrific destruction.

“In order to make me a better spy, the Computer Tyrants twinned me with a slave boy. I took all of his emotions, his thoughts and his desires. I believe he took much from me as well.” The android sounded almost wistful. Another image shimmered on the smooth wall screen, displaying a thin dark-haired youth with lean features and sunken eyes, haunted by a brief lifetime overloaded with fear and oppression. Even so, the image seemed almost…idealized.

“Once we were twinned, the boy should have been my longtime companion. The ship was ready to depart on my survey mission, but the boy escaped just before I took off. He surprised me.” The wall image sparkled and vanished. “I miss him.”

The green android seemed genuinely sad. “And so I went from star system to star system by myself. That was centuries ago. I studied many planets, searching for perfect cities.” In separate projections around the ship’s main chamber, more images showed spectacular landscapes of world after world, exotic places such as Zod had never imagined.

Then he saw a sparkling portrait of Kandor. “Krypton was one of my favorites,” the android said.

Zod drove back his feelings of being overwhelmed. All those places, world after world raided by this creature…and no one on Krypton had ever known of the threat. Kryptonians had been obliviously, and intentionally, unaware of so much. The Council members had hidden their heads in the sand for centuries. Damn them! “Then why didn’t your Computer Tyrants invade us?”

The Brain Interactive Construct stood close to Zod, also staring down at bottled Kandor. “Because I never told them about Krypton.” His artificial face shaped itself into a placid smile. “The Tyrants had programmed me to feel their need to dominate biological life-forms, but after I was twinned with the young boy, I also understood other components of the equation. I valued peace and beauty. I valued harmony and personal interaction. Those were the things the poor slave boy longed for most.” He lowered his voice. “However, when I had gathered all the necessary data, I returned to Colu, as my programming demanded of me. I had no choice.”

Now shimmering images formed on all the wall screens, creating an overwhelming symphony of dark and bleak recordings. Zod saw scene after scene of total destruction, wrecked industrial cities, bodies and machines strewn through streets and across a barren landscape. “But when I arrived home, my planet had been devastated. All of the Computer Tyrants were annihilated in a great war. All of the slaves had rebelled against the machines.”

“Intriguing.” Zod thought he should feel relieved. “They won?”

“In a sense, perhaps. But every scrap of life was wiped out as well. Colu was dead.” The walls grew blank again, as if the android could no longer bear to view the images. He stood stock-still, reviewing files in his cybernetic mind.

“I dug through the rubble for two years alone until I found intact data cores. When I uploaded everything that had happened in my absence, I learned that the cause of the destruction was none other than my own ‘twin.’ After the slave boy had shared with me, after I had become partially human and he had become partially machine, he understood how to overthrow the Computer Tyrants. He destroyed our world.”

Grainy archival images showed the revolt, slaves throwing themselves against the minions of the Computer Tyrants, being slaughtered by the millions, and still coming, and coming, like fanatics. And leading them was an older, hardened version of the haunted boy who had been twinned with the android.

The alien hung his pale green head. “A powerful empire, nothing more than dust. If the boy had learned some key information through sharing with me, then I, by extension, caused the vulnerability that brought about the downfall of my planet.” He looked at Zod, his expression now full of anguish. “How can I endure that knowledge?”

The Commissioner squashed any sympathy he might have felt for the pathetic android. “That doesn’t explain why you stole Kandor—or all these other cities. Just because your world was destroyed, what gives you the right to ransack other planets?”

“Ransack? I mean only to protect them, preserve them. When I take these precious cities back to Colu, I can restore them, put them into their proper places. Kandor was one of my most marvelous discoveries, and so I will keep it safe against anything bad that might happen. It is a good and noble deed.”

Zod was aghast. “But stealing Kandor! Do you have any concept of what that will do to our society?” He had barely begun to think through such questions himself…and maybe the result wasn’t all bad.

The green-skinned alien was unmoved. “As I learned on my own planet, nothing lasts forever, and these gems of civilization deserve to be saved. What if some terrible disaster were to destroy Krypton?”

Zod fought back a disbelieving snort at the suggestion that anything so calamitous would ever happen to his world.

The Brain Interactive Construct gazed at him. “If you wish, Zod, I can allow you to join your comrades. I can miniaturize and insert you into the dome, where you will be under my protection forever. It is your choice.”

“I have no wish to live inside a specimen case.”

Zod suppressed a smile as he began to realize what had unexpectedly fallen into his lap. New thoughts fought through his daze of disbelief. The Kryptonian Council was gone, the old government stripped away…but he remained. Only Zod. And Krypton’s desperate population would demand a strong and confident leader, now more than ever. At last this was the opportunity to work the changes he had always known must be made. He had waited all his life for a chance like this.

Viewed from a certain perspective, this was a miracle, not a tragedy.

“No, I will stay behind to help my people recover from this great loss.” Magnanimously, the Commissioner added, “You can have Kandor—and I will take the rest of Krypton.”

When Zod emerged from the alien ship, he motioned for Nam-Ek to accompany him. The muscular mute was ecstatic to see his mentor unharmed.

Zod was flushed, his mind spinning. The Council, Kandor, Jor-El’s inquisition—everything—simply brushed off the playing board! “It’s going to be all right, Nam-Ek. In fact, everything will be just fine.”

They turned to watch as the ominous ship lifted away from the smoking crater that had been Kandor. It flew off into the night, leaving Zod as the only real witness, the one person who knew the true story of what had happened.

And he could use that to his advantage.