The Last Days of Krypton (7 page)

When his battered silver flyer
finally arrived back in Argo City, Zor-El was burned, exhausted, and greatly disturbed by what he had seen on the southern continent.

While on approach to the lovely city, which sparkled with lights in the darkness, he considered calling for a medical team to meet him on the landing pad. His burns were excruciating, and he could feel hardened pebbles of lava inside the meat of his arm and his left side. But Zor-El did not want his people to see him staggering and weak, hauled off to a hospital. During the return flight across the ocean, he had used the medkit in the cockpit to apply basic first aid.

Landing at night, he left his ash-dusted craft on an empty pad not far from his villa and staggered away before anyone could see him. With unsteady but determined steps, he headed toward his wife, his home. Just smelling the cool, salty air that blew in from the ocean rejuvenated him.

Chains of lights looped between the graceful spires of the five golden bridges that connected the peninsula to the mainland. From the terminus of the bridges, roads led out to the farmlands, the mountains, and the lake district. Cross-country highways led off to Borga City, Ilonia, Orvai, Corril, Kandor, and other villages and mountain communities.

But nothing could compare with Argo City. The Kandor snobs could have their capital, as far as he was concerned. Here the warm, tropical climate made for pleasant days and balmy nights. Ocean mists rolled in regularly to irrigate the lush plant life that graced the streets, buildings, and arboretums. He loved it here.

The city’s circulatory system—a network of glassy-smooth irrigation canals—carried as much traffic as did the paved streets and pedestrian paths. At regular intervals, small bridges arched over the flowing water; each bridge was owned, tended, and decorated by a different family. Hanging vines, flowers, and berries adorned every structure. The city itself—his city—gave Zor-El strength.

He walked through darkness to his villa with its colonnaded entrance and Alura’s two brightly lit geodesic greenhouses. Only a few more steps. His wife was trained well enough in medicine; she could tend him.

He stood at the door, opened it—and somehow she was there to greet him. Alura had shoulder-length black hair even darker than his own, arched eyebrows, and a high forehead, which often showed her focused concentration. Zor-El had always considered her a counterpoint for his passion and energy. Before she could say anything, he collapsed in her arms.

Alura responded in a calm and professional manner, immediately getting to work—exactly as he had known she would react.

“Volcanoes,” he said. “Instability in the core.”

“Quiet, now. Let me tend your injuries. Explanations later.”

“But it’s important…”

Holding him up, she helped him walk down the vine-draped corridors toward their living chambers. “Telling me won’t do any good now. Whatever the emergency is, you’ll have to stay alive to do something about it.” She let him drop onto their foamweave bed as if he were a lightning-struck tree falling in the forest.

Sheets had never felt so cool, and no bed had ever been so comfortable. But the moment the stress and weariness began to drain from his body, the pain of his burns and wounds became paramount. Sweat burst out on his forehead. Zor-El clenched his eyes shut.

Alura leaned over him. Flowers and plants filled the walls, the corners, the alcoves, creating a potpourri of scents. She snatched a smooth, dark-green seedpod from a potted bush and leaned over his face. “Breathe this. Inhale deeply.” She crushed it in her fingertips.

A mist of thin, acrid plant juice sprayed into his sinuses, making him dizzy. “Wait, I must…” Then he couldn’t remember the rest of his sentence, couldn’t speak another word to explain what he had endured. He dropped into an emptiness as black as the lava fields of the southern continent.

Zor-El awoke fuzzy-headed and aching, but much improved. Flower arrangements had been pushed close to the bed—blossoms and aromatic leaves and herbs chosen by Alura for their specific healing properties. He saw coral-colored lilies the size of pillows and blue roses that smelled of pepperspice and sweet berries.

Alura used her botanical genius to breed special plants for medicinal uses. She had developed flowers that produced fragrances or pollens laden with stimulants, analgesics, antibiotics, immune-system boosters, antivirals, and other drugs. During his sleep, Zor-El had been surrounded by a bouquet of the strongest medicines his wife could arrange.

Now, as he struggled to sit up, he noticed that the bedside table was stacked with documents, messages, and urgent requests—items of important Argo City business. With a groan, he turned in the other direction and saw Alura there, watching him. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

“Now, it’s time you told me what happened to you—and where these came from.” She tapped a nightstand on which rested six small dark chunks of hardened lava. The pure black was stained rusty brown from his dried blood. While he had lain unconscious, she had extracted them from his wounds.

His ribs and side were bound with thin, dissolving leaves overlain with tight bandages; his injured arm had been slathered with healing ointments and completely wrapped in gauze. Fortunately—he thought after looking at the pile of documents to review—it wasn’t his writing hand.

He propped himself up on his elbows on the foamweave and told her about the eruptions, the ever-building lava pressure, the readings he had gotten from the diamondfish, and how he had lost all his data in the hrakka attack. “I have to go to Kandor immediately. I need to see Jor-El. He’s got to know what I learned. No one else suspects—”

She pushed him back down. “You have to recover first. A minimum of five days.”

“Impossible! Jor-El and I—”

“Very possible. In geologic time, five days is nothing, and you cannot save Krypton if you drop dead in your tracks because you won’t take care of yourself.” She indicated the stack of documents and decrees. “These may be shorter-term emergencies, but you have responsibilities to Argo City as well. You made that choice.”

Zor-El sighed. “Yes, it was my choice.” Unlike his brother, who entirely eschewed politics (though he could have been a driving force on the Council), Zor-El devoted at least half of his effort and energy to guiding his city and leading his people. Alura was right: Even if Jor-El agreed with his assessment of the rough data, he couldn’t do anything about the planet’s unstable core without a long-term effort. There would be many more investigations, many other measurements.

But the people of Argo City needed him now. He reached over with his good hand and began sorting through the documents. He could take care of most of them from his bedside and delegate the rest.

Alura brought him a drink of potent juice and left him to himself. “Sleep when your body tells you to, and I won’t complain if you awaken to do work.”

He tried to shift his focus to more mundane matters, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what he and his brother could do together. He was two years younger than Jor-El, a genius in his own right, but his brother had always achieved more in science, made more spectacular discoveries, pushed the boundaries of Kryptonian knowledge. Another man might have been bitter about that, but not Zor-El. When he was barely a teen, he’d had an epiphany: Rather than resenting his pale-haired brother for what he was, Zor-El could excel in an area that his sibling wasn’t really very adept at—politics and civic ser vice.

Although Jor-El grasped esoteric scientific concepts better than anyone, Zor-El more easily mastered people skills, pragmatic problem solving, organization, and practical engineering. While Jor-El developed bizarre new theories (most of which were censored by the Commission for Technology Acceptance, unfortunately), Zor-El administered public works in Argo City. He had new canals installed throughout the peninsula, set up fog catchers, designed new boats for efficient fish harvesting, extended the main wharves. The city’s population turned to him with their problems, and they also listened whenever he made requests.

Though he was impatient to make a presentation to the Kryptonian Council, he did as Alura instructed. He healed.

Finally, two days before his wife believed he was ready to travel, he got up and packed for his trip. He could have sent a direct message via the communication plates, but he preferred to do this in person. Since he had lost all his hard data, he wanted to face his brother, describe exactly what had happened, and get his advice. With Jor-El’s aid, he could speak directly to the Council, and they would not be able to brush off his claims as hysteria.

Or maybe his brother would decide there was little to worry about, that a simple geological explanation could account for what he had seen. Zor-El could only hope that was the answer…but he couldn’t be sure.

After Alura changed the bandages on his severely burned arm and side, he kissed her and set off for his brother’s estate.

Angry, but not surprised that
Commissioner Zod had confiscated the Phantom Zone, Jor-El insisted on doing something useful before he left Kandor and returned to his estate. He had plenty of other important projects to occupy his time and his mind.

With Rao staring like a gigantic bleary eye from the western sky, Jor-El used his access to ascend to the very top of the Council ziggurat. On the highest open-air platform, sharp-tipped condensers sprouted like steel thorns around a viewing radius, projecting a highly detailed hologram of the giant red sun. Even at night, collectors from the opposite hemisphere captured the solar image and projected it to Kandor exactly half a day out of phase. Therefore, according to the priests and politicians, the sun never actually set in Kandor.

Many Kryptonians saw the projected orb as an object of worship or a beacon to the heavens. Intrepid artists, diligent philosophers, and reverent priests smeared protective creams on their faces and sat on special benches around the safe perimeter. Wearing masks or goggles to shield their eyes, they gazed for hours into the bright face of Rao, searching for inspiration or enlightenment in the churning gases.

For Jor-El, though, the high-resolution projection was useful as a solar observatory. Oily ripples of heat made the air shudder around the hologram, which, like a caged beast, never seemed to stay still. The star churned and roiled, its plasma layers boiling. Magnetic field lines trapped dark sunspots; feathery streamers of the corona wafted outward.

In addition to the telescopes he had placed on his own rooftops, Jor-El had constructed a similar—if smaller—solar observatory on his estate. Here atop the main Kandor temple, though, the image clarity was greater. Among his many fascinations, the life cycle of the gigantic sun had occupied much of Jor-El’s time over the past several years.

He adjusted the thick goggles over his face and walked around the blazing image, always studying. One of the artists sketched furiously, using his fingers to make swirls and patterns in colored levitating gels; Jor-El could see many technical inaccuracies in the young man’s representation, but he didn’t think
precision
was the artist’s goal. A middle-aged woman wearing a philosopher’s gown with a ragged collar sat cross-legged on the hard tiles in front of a bench; she nodded cordially at Jor-El, though he didn’t recognize her. The group of red-robed priests did not take their eyes from the swollen sun. The power and fury of the red giant was enough to inspire religious awe, and not surprisingly, some people worshipped Rao as a deity.

Jor-El was one of the few who dared to suggest that their god might be dying.

Eschewing the available seats, he stood on the fringe of the three-dimensional image, as close to the shimmering heat as he could stand. The solar storms, the magnetic anomalies, the dark sunspots like diseased patches—all were signs of an unstable sun. How could the priests, the Council, the artists, and the philosophers not recognize such obvious danger signs?

The bloated red star was undergoing its final stages of evolution. After countless millennia of converting hydrogen into helium, the fuel at the core was running out, leading to more complex nuclear reactions. Unsettled by its new diet, the sun had swelled over the past millennia, expanding until it had swallowed up all of the solar system’s inner planets. The engine at Rao’s heart would keep burning until it used up the remaining fuel, and then an abrupt collapse would initiate a shock wave sufficient to create a cataclysmic supernova.

That could happen at any time. Maybe tomorrow, maybe thousands of years from now.

A year earlier, Jor-El had warned the Council that the red sun would eventually explode. After listening to the evidence, old Jul-Us had spoken slowly. “Over the past hundred years or so, other scientists have also mentioned such a catastrophe as a means to frighten the gullible.”

“Even if we believed you, no one can stop the changes in Rao,” said Kor-Te, who was always confident in the security of the past. “The sun has burned without incident for all of recorded history.”

But Jor-El had found an ally on the Council in its youngest member, Cera-Si. “We can’t ignore a problem simply because there’s no immediately obvious solution. Jor-El’s science is impressive. We would be foolish to ignore him.” When Cera-Si had been appointed to the Council, he’d begun his work with great dreams and interesting ideas. Jor-El had placed hope in him, but although Cera-Si had a more open mind than some of the older members, he didn’t have the fortitude to persuade others.

The young man had long flaming-red hair that he bound behind his head with a single gold ring. Because of the red hair, the Priests of Rao had courted him for years, trying to recruit him as one of their number. But he had no patience for the hours of wearing goggles and solemnly staring at the giant red sun. Cera-Si had trouble sitting still and was famous for requesting frequent breaks during long and ponderous Council sessions.

“We need to think in the long term. There are ways we can prepare.” Jor-El began to list options. “We must think beyond Krypton. We can explore other planets. We can be ready to evacuate our people, if it becomes necessary.”

Al-An just laughed, looking at the other Council members to see if they would join in.

“That goes against the prime resolution of the Seven Army Conference,” grumbled Silber-Za, the only female member of the Council. She had long yellow hair, a bright smile, and a razor-edged temper that she directed toward those who dared to challenge her. She was also the reigning expert in nuances of Kryptonian law. “Doing so would expose us to outside contamination. It could be the end of us.”

Jor-El jabbed a finger toward the high ceiling.
“Rao
will be the end of us if it goes supernova.”

“There’s no reason not to let Jor-El continue his studies,” said Mauro-Ji, another occasional ally. He was a cautious Council member, always willing to give each question due consideration. “It seems only prudent. I say he should draw up his plans, document his ideas. Centuries from now, when and if the sun does become slightly more unstable, our descendants might be glad that we had such foresight.”

“That does seem prudent,” Pol-Ev conceded. “Let the historical record show that we did indeed plan ahead.”

Jor-El had nodded his appreciation to Mauro-Ji. He knew the man had his own reasons for keeping on the scientist’s good side. Centuries ago, the noble Ji family had been powerful and prominent, but in recent years their holdings had fallen on hard times. After they had invested heavily in a new set of vineyards to compete with those in the Sedra region, a blight had killed the vines, and an earthquake had leveled one of their large manor houses. Mauro-Ji often invited Jor-El to social events, weddings, and feasts, as if proximity to the esteemed scientist might increase his own standing. Jor-El wasn’t sure that anyone could benefit from being his friend, given the vagaries of Kandor’s high society.

After looking at his supernova data, the Council members had discussed the matter interminably before finally agreeing that he should continue his work, just in case. Jor-El had hoped they would begin a full-scale investigation with many other scientists, exhaustive probes, and contingency plans. Instead, they saw the unstable sun merely as a theoretical issue, a problem of esoteric scientific interest rather than immediate urgency.

At least they had not commanded him to stop his work. Jor-El could only hope there would be enough time to save his people if anything terrible should happen. When the star went supernova, the shock wave would disintegrate Krypton and its moons. In all likelihood, the population would have only hours of warning. So he had to plan ahead.

He turned away from the giant rippling hologram as turbulent Rao continued its slow-motion upheavals. When the diligent young artist caught his attention, still playing with his colored gels to form a three-dimensional sculpture of the sun, Jor-El realized that there were so many more important investigations to do.

He needed to get back to his estate, where he could continue to work undisturbed, without the interference of unimaginative people. Yes, once he returned, he would launch another probe into the glowering red sun.

Somebody
had to take the initiative.