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Here's the second, and last, part. The first part is here.
After a while, she starts to notice something about her classes at Met U. In a few years she’s going to need another identity change; even a one-digit alteration in her national ID will prevent the computers from picking up on the anomaly of a permanent student, but right now she’s just another part-timer, slowly working on her second degree.
What she notices is that most of her classmates are about her apparent age. The eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds are thin on the ground, and, honestly, they drag the level of the discussion down so she doesn’t mind their absence. But one day she looks around and realizes that she’s in adult education classes, not college classes.
There are two questions – Lex has taught her that there’s never just one side to a problem – first, where are the kids, and second, why are all these adults here?
The first is easier to answer: birth rates have been dropping for some time, after the postwar surge in the Thirties. Immigration isn’t making up for the decline as it did in the twentieth century, now that the US is less a promised land and more a making-promises-it-can’t-keep land. Met U is the healthiest public university in the nation, but even it’s had to drop its standards to get an entering class that won’t embarrass the institution with its size. They’ve taken to having graduation in the second largest quad, nonetheless.
The second answer could just be a function of the first – Met U has been marketing adult education to make up for the loss in younger bodies. But that’s been going on for decades. Why is it suddenly successful now?
She makes more friends, carefully, and draws them out over coffee. When she asks about their lives, she finds that they have husbands, wives, lovers, pets.
“Any children?” she asks, knowing that she’s sticking a dagger in, feeling it in her own chest, but asking anyway.
Some shake their heads and look down, some tear up, some are forthright in a way that barely covers the pain, and some don’t mind at all. Some ask her in return, and are silenced when she says that her two children are dead. She apologizes to Clark and Mary in her mind for using their lives as trumps, and keeps on using them.
She goes home to Lex and holds him tight, hurting for the people who are suffering as she suffered. She’s a little afraid of telling him, because he will never have children, but she thinks that he’s probably satisfied with his own, more direct way of achieving immortality.
Lex holds her, strong arms at her waist and shoulders, whispering words of comfort. They’re finding satisfaction in other ways, in learning and improving the world. People with children have pain too, he points out. It’s just that they can’t blame the childlessness for their sense of emptiness, of being not quite good enough. Too often, they blame the children instead. Wanting children isn’t the same as being a good and loving parent, he says; you’re the exception and not the rule.
She protests that people rise to challenges they never knew they could face. Lex says that some do, and gives her a significant look. Maybe, then, the challenge these people are facing is that their lives won’t be like their parents’, their lives won’t be parents’ lives.
All this makes sense, but it still bothers her.
She doesn’t figure out the niggling concern until, over another ridiculously expensive coffee (and fortunately it’s plain old coffee, the fad for hair-thin distinctions and exponential variations having faded decades ago), one of her friends confides that she’s been approved for assisted reproduction at the only clinic in town with a success rate above 12%.
“Over two-thirds of their clients have a healthy child within twenty months of beginning treatment!” Genene whispers, leaning over her cup so that her voice won’t carry. Some eavesdroppers might be jealous and unkind.
“What’s the name of this miracle place?” If the newspapers reported on the birth dearth, she’d probably know already. But even the Daily Planet respects the government’s wishes on this point, and the government wishes people not to unduly concern themselves with the problem, which is the subject of much federal spending and privately funded research and will no doubt resolve itself soon.
“Ausar,” Genene says, like a benediction.
****
The logo looks like an unfinished child’s drawing of a house: a flattened triangle like a roof on top of lopsided lines suggesting walls. She tells the computer to match the pattern and finds the constellation Libra, the scales of justice. Ausar is another name for Osiris, the Egyptian god of life and death. She looks at the variants of the myth long enough to see that it’s got the essentials: a father, a son, a brother, a betrayal. The necessary resurrection. As a bonus, Osiris brought farming techniques to Egypt, ending the tradition of cannibalism.
It couldn’t be Lex’s any less if it had had his name and profile, like a Roman coin.
No conversation with Lex Luthor ought ever to begin with “Why didn’t you tell me …?” She needs to do more research before she confronts him, so that she’ll be able to see past his explanation.
She goes home to him, where he is rereading The Great Gatsby. “Do you identify with Gatsby?” she asks, and he smiles up, putting the book aside.
“I identify with Daisy,” he says, and holds his arms out for her to slide into his lap.
She holds him with extra vigor, which makes him look at her quizzically until she twists so she’s straddling him and kisses him, wet open-mouthed kisses that make her hands itch to touch him. He makes a pleased sound in the back of his throat and tugs her blouse free of her skirt. She raises her arms so that he can pull it off, and it’s been long enough now that she doesn’t feel exposed, much, even though her body won’t ever again match the taut youthfulness of his. Lex makes his appreciation of her heard, and felt, with enough assurance that the original fluttering insecurity has faded.
She unbuttons his shirt slowly, biting at each inch of newly exposed skin, as she slides to her knees in front of the couch. His skin is so fine, untouched by the sun that gave Clark his strength, and yet Lex isn’t a creature of darkness so much as he’s made for electric lights, cities that outshine the stars.
Lex throws his head back against the soft leather of the couch and rests his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll buy you West Egg if you just keep going,” he promises, and she smiles against his stomach.
He breathes in deeply when she takes his cock in her mouth. He doesn’t often come this way – either he thinks it’s impolite or he associates it with casual blowjobs he got while he worked at his desk, maybe both. But he likes it, likes running his hands through her hair, dragging his fingers along her scalp. He lets her set her own rhythm, familiar to both of them now.
By the time he pulls her back up, she’s almost forgotten to wonder what he’s doing with Ausar. Maybe, she thinks as he pushes her into the cushions, he wants to be a parent, the way she did, but without chancing the harm to a child raised to be a Luthor. Lex as Great White Father. The thought has some appeal, and contrasts nicely with the consequence-free pleasures in which they’re indulging.
Lex sucks at her nipple with focus and vigor, and she arches up against him.
She’s naked now, neither knowing nor caring where the rest of her clothes went, and his hands push against her thighs until she’s bent at just the right angle. Lex can be as precise as a surgeon when it pleases him, and right now it does.
When he enters her, she cries out, and he sucks kisses just under her jaw.
He’s slow, stroking her until she’s saying nonsense words, then pulling back so that the wave doesn’t crash over her, again and again until she can’t distinguish anticipation from pain. And then his hands turn quick and decisive, and she goes under, a roaring in her ears like an angels’ choir, lights flashing behind her eyes like sun on water.
By the time she recovers scraps of thought, he’s pulled the convenient blanket over them both and his arm lies heavy on her chest, his hand stroking her shoulder.
“What was that?” she asks, feeling like unbaked dough, boneless and light.
“Did you like it?”
She turns her head to stare at him, disbelieving. He smiles.
“Then that’s what it was,” he says, and she can tell it makes sense to him.
She’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth – Lex and his myths have made her exquisitely aware of this failing – and she’s exhausted. In a few hours, she’ll get up and make them a late dinner, which Lex will eat with his usual evident enjoyment, but right now she’s content to lie there and feel him breathe against her.
“Martha –“ he says, then shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“Are you all right?” she asks, concerned. It isn’t like Lex to change his mind once he’s decided to speak. She cups his cheek with her hand, runs it over his unwrinkled forehead.
He turns his head, leaning into her touch until her hand is on the crown of his head, as if she were anointing him with oil. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am,” she says, and thinks she believes it.
****
A few months or days later, after many fruitless hours talking to the computer, she figures Ausar out.
Lex is waiting in his office when she comes home, a snifter still damp with brandy sitting empty on the desk in front of him. It’s a certainty that he monitors both her computer use and any queries of the type she’s been making; that the two coincided was, perhaps, convenient for him.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks. Lex only respects subtlety when there’s some point to it.
What she’d been overlooking was that Ausar was just the edge of the empire. Even now, Lex’s core business is agriculture, with biologics and chemicals emanating from the central endeavors.
Lex presses a button and his video screen shows the graphic she had the computer create.
The world is shaded from white to royal purple, depending on the per capita percentage of calories originating with LuthorCorp. Inverse correlation of LuthorCorp food consumption with fertility per 1000 women of child-bearing age: 0.86.
“You know,” he says, “it’s easy to make maps like this.” He presses a button, and the world turns shades of pink and red. The legend shows that it’s correlating fertility with pesticide, antibiotic, and prescription drug concentrations in the drinking water, and the number on the screen is 0.78. Another tap of his finger, and it’s green, correlating income inequality with fertility, for 0.81. Another, and blue shows that cellphone penetration as of 2050 gets 0.90. “That’s why the first rule of statistics is that correlation is not causation.”
“Except when it is.” She stares at him. He’s not going to hurt her, even assuming he could.
He looks back. His face is as smooth and impenetrable as an icefall.
“It doesn’t make sense as a money-making endeavor. The chemical treatment on the food must cost ten times as much as the revenues.”
He makes her wait another minute, but when she doesn’t say anything else, he sighs and nods at her to sit down. She does, wondering if that’s a mistake.
“It’s more like fifty times,” he says when she’s seated, “though even I find it hard to follow the accounting.”
“Then – why?” There must be some profit in it, Lex never does anything without –
“No one can become a parent unless you allow it,” she says slowly, then realizes that’s not it. “No one can become a father unless you allow it.”
Lex’s eyelids twitch, but that’s all.
“Lex, not everyone – your father was not a good man, but that’s not what it’s like for most people –“
He smacks his hand down on the table, and she jerks in her chair. “Bull. What about your father, whose expectations burdened you so much that you threw it all away to marry a man he hated? What about Jonathan’s father, who left him to fight an unwinnable battle with the land and the banks? What about Clark’s, throwing him out into nothingness so he could be raised to be a stranger in his own home – or teaching him to be ashamed of what he was?”
She opens her mouth to defend Jonathan, then stops while she gathers her thoughts. It’s enough of a delay that Lex continues to talk. “But it’s not about that, whatever you may think. For decades, the average IQ in the US increased. Then, quite suddenly, the trend reversed. The best theory is that multiple chemical exposure, plus known hazards such as lead, have a pervasive systemic effect. Today, only thirty percent -- *thirty percent* -- of six-year-old girls *aren’t* diagnosable with ADHD or a more severe cognitive impairment, and that’s girls, the hardier sex. We’ve fouled our own nest, Martha, and that has consequences for our fledglings.
“People are becoming less competent as the need for competence increases. Do you remember what an elephant looks like? What about a golden retriever? To today’s children, they’re like tyrannosaurus rex – dead things only. We need population control and genetic improvement, and limiting breeding is the kind way.”
Kind? Tell that to the people hoping, praying for a child, dying inside a little each month.
“Isn’t this the part where you tell me I’m a monster, and I’ll never succeed?” Lex looks relaxed, but she can tell he’s waiting for the blow.
But, of course, he might very well succeed. It isn’t as if she has superpowers she can use against him and all his works. “This – isn’t right, Lex. You can’t just take these choices away from people.”
“I didn’t do that. Their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, sucking up the Earth’s resources and turning our rivers and oceans into witches’ brews. Now we have to deal with that, and my way offers some hope of long-term survival and even recovery.”
She’s searching for logic. “Your way is a hoax, a trick.” But maybe it isn’t about logic. Maybe – as Jonathan and Clark would have said – it’s about something more fundamental than logic, about freedom and being human. Lex is trying to turn the course of history by himself, like a giant asteroid smashing into the planet, and he’s wrong. No logic can change the horror of the deliberate extinction of most of the human race.
“I don’t even discriminate, except by fitness. Compare that to what happened in the Water Wars.”
“If you told people, explained it to them –“
“They’d clap their hands over their ears and continue breeding. ‘Let somebody elsewhere starve; it doesn’t matter as long as my own kids are okay.’ Dancing while the building is burning.”
It would be very easy to believe in him. But who could have predicted what Mary would become? Lex judges by the “fitness” of the parents, but children are more than that. Children are more than their parents ever dreamed or feared. What hope, what cure for humanity’s ills was lost when that possibility was denied?
“I’m sorry,” she says and hates his stricken look. He knows what she’s saying. She stands up, and he does too, rounding the desk so that they’re only a few feet apart.
“I’ll –“
She shakes her head. Faint though the hope is, she needs to at least try to stop him, and that means abandoning his protection and, if possible, his surveillance. There are places he has less control; maybe France. She could learn French.
She’ll take the clothes on her back and the stash of untraceable credit chits Lex insists she keep in the penthouse. She can trade them for others, and then they really might be untraceable. She’ll get rid of the clothes then, because the microchips smaller than grains of sand in the fabric aren’t listening on her behalf any more.
“You’ll be back,” he says, his face full of loss and resignation.
She knows he’s almost certainly right. To him, that means she shouldn’t leave in the first place. After all this time, Lex still can’t understand why anyone would fight an unwinnable battle. Faced with inevitable death, Lex changed the rules when he was too young to understand what that meant, and he’s gone on in the way he began. While Clark – Clark lived the best life he could, because making your own rules is dangerous, is corrupting, and Clark never knew that more than when he looked at her own unchanging face.
Lex’s pain is as real as her own, and she still wants to comfort him. So she reaches out, and he closes the gap between them, and they hang on to each other as if they were drowning. He’s warm and solid and everything she ever thought she needed, and there’s not a cell in her that tells her to stay.
She kisses his cheek, and then his mouth, because there’s no point in denying that she’s mother and lover both. Isn’t that always the way, when a new breed of gods and goddesses arises? When she steps out of his grasp, she’s panting like she’s just been rescued from a fire.
“Be careful,” she says, for lack of anything else.
“Be good,” he says back, and smiles a smile that doesn’t need the well-hidden scar to be broken. That’s all he wants, a world in which it’s easy for people like her to be good. He takes all sin into himself and can’t comprehend that it shouldn’t always be easy to be good. Deep down, Lex is a stranger to compromise, and that’s why he’ll never be a parent.
She squares her shoulders, for Mary and Clark, and turns back to the world.
End
After a while, she starts to notice something about her classes at Met U. In a few years she’s going to need another identity change; even a one-digit alteration in her national ID will prevent the computers from picking up on the anomaly of a permanent student, but right now she’s just another part-timer, slowly working on her second degree.
What she notices is that most of her classmates are about her apparent age. The eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds are thin on the ground, and, honestly, they drag the level of the discussion down so she doesn’t mind their absence. But one day she looks around and realizes that she’s in adult education classes, not college classes.
There are two questions – Lex has taught her that there’s never just one side to a problem – first, where are the kids, and second, why are all these adults here?
The first is easier to answer: birth rates have been dropping for some time, after the postwar surge in the Thirties. Immigration isn’t making up for the decline as it did in the twentieth century, now that the US is less a promised land and more a making-promises-it-can’t-keep land. Met U is the healthiest public university in the nation, but even it’s had to drop its standards to get an entering class that won’t embarrass the institution with its size. They’ve taken to having graduation in the second largest quad, nonetheless.
The second answer could just be a function of the first – Met U has been marketing adult education to make up for the loss in younger bodies. But that’s been going on for decades. Why is it suddenly successful now?
She makes more friends, carefully, and draws them out over coffee. When she asks about their lives, she finds that they have husbands, wives, lovers, pets.
“Any children?” she asks, knowing that she’s sticking a dagger in, feeling it in her own chest, but asking anyway.
Some shake their heads and look down, some tear up, some are forthright in a way that barely covers the pain, and some don’t mind at all. Some ask her in return, and are silenced when she says that her two children are dead. She apologizes to Clark and Mary in her mind for using their lives as trumps, and keeps on using them.
She goes home to Lex and holds him tight, hurting for the people who are suffering as she suffered. She’s a little afraid of telling him, because he will never have children, but she thinks that he’s probably satisfied with his own, more direct way of achieving immortality.
Lex holds her, strong arms at her waist and shoulders, whispering words of comfort. They’re finding satisfaction in other ways, in learning and improving the world. People with children have pain too, he points out. It’s just that they can’t blame the childlessness for their sense of emptiness, of being not quite good enough. Too often, they blame the children instead. Wanting children isn’t the same as being a good and loving parent, he says; you’re the exception and not the rule.
She protests that people rise to challenges they never knew they could face. Lex says that some do, and gives her a significant look. Maybe, then, the challenge these people are facing is that their lives won’t be like their parents’, their lives won’t be parents’ lives.
All this makes sense, but it still bothers her.
She doesn’t figure out the niggling concern until, over another ridiculously expensive coffee (and fortunately it’s plain old coffee, the fad for hair-thin distinctions and exponential variations having faded decades ago), one of her friends confides that she’s been approved for assisted reproduction at the only clinic in town with a success rate above 12%.
“Over two-thirds of their clients have a healthy child within twenty months of beginning treatment!” Genene whispers, leaning over her cup so that her voice won’t carry. Some eavesdroppers might be jealous and unkind.
“What’s the name of this miracle place?” If the newspapers reported on the birth dearth, she’d probably know already. But even the Daily Planet respects the government’s wishes on this point, and the government wishes people not to unduly concern themselves with the problem, which is the subject of much federal spending and privately funded research and will no doubt resolve itself soon.
“Ausar,” Genene says, like a benediction.
****
The logo looks like an unfinished child’s drawing of a house: a flattened triangle like a roof on top of lopsided lines suggesting walls. She tells the computer to match the pattern and finds the constellation Libra, the scales of justice. Ausar is another name for Osiris, the Egyptian god of life and death. She looks at the variants of the myth long enough to see that it’s got the essentials: a father, a son, a brother, a betrayal. The necessary resurrection. As a bonus, Osiris brought farming techniques to Egypt, ending the tradition of cannibalism.
It couldn’t be Lex’s any less if it had had his name and profile, like a Roman coin.
No conversation with Lex Luthor ought ever to begin with “Why didn’t you tell me …?” She needs to do more research before she confronts him, so that she’ll be able to see past his explanation.
She goes home to him, where he is rereading The Great Gatsby. “Do you identify with Gatsby?” she asks, and he smiles up, putting the book aside.
“I identify with Daisy,” he says, and holds his arms out for her to slide into his lap.
She holds him with extra vigor, which makes him look at her quizzically until she twists so she’s straddling him and kisses him, wet open-mouthed kisses that make her hands itch to touch him. He makes a pleased sound in the back of his throat and tugs her blouse free of her skirt. She raises her arms so that he can pull it off, and it’s been long enough now that she doesn’t feel exposed, much, even though her body won’t ever again match the taut youthfulness of his. Lex makes his appreciation of her heard, and felt, with enough assurance that the original fluttering insecurity has faded.
She unbuttons his shirt slowly, biting at each inch of newly exposed skin, as she slides to her knees in front of the couch. His skin is so fine, untouched by the sun that gave Clark his strength, and yet Lex isn’t a creature of darkness so much as he’s made for electric lights, cities that outshine the stars.
Lex throws his head back against the soft leather of the couch and rests his hands on her shoulders. “I’ll buy you West Egg if you just keep going,” he promises, and she smiles against his stomach.
He breathes in deeply when she takes his cock in her mouth. He doesn’t often come this way – either he thinks it’s impolite or he associates it with casual blowjobs he got while he worked at his desk, maybe both. But he likes it, likes running his hands through her hair, dragging his fingers along her scalp. He lets her set her own rhythm, familiar to both of them now.
By the time he pulls her back up, she’s almost forgotten to wonder what he’s doing with Ausar. Maybe, she thinks as he pushes her into the cushions, he wants to be a parent, the way she did, but without chancing the harm to a child raised to be a Luthor. Lex as Great White Father. The thought has some appeal, and contrasts nicely with the consequence-free pleasures in which they’re indulging.
Lex sucks at her nipple with focus and vigor, and she arches up against him.
She’s naked now, neither knowing nor caring where the rest of her clothes went, and his hands push against her thighs until she’s bent at just the right angle. Lex can be as precise as a surgeon when it pleases him, and right now it does.
When he enters her, she cries out, and he sucks kisses just under her jaw.
He’s slow, stroking her until she’s saying nonsense words, then pulling back so that the wave doesn’t crash over her, again and again until she can’t distinguish anticipation from pain. And then his hands turn quick and decisive, and she goes under, a roaring in her ears like an angels’ choir, lights flashing behind her eyes like sun on water.
By the time she recovers scraps of thought, he’s pulled the convenient blanket over them both and his arm lies heavy on her chest, his hand stroking her shoulder.
“What was that?” she asks, feeling like unbaked dough, boneless and light.
“Did you like it?”
She turns her head to stare at him, disbelieving. He smiles.
“Then that’s what it was,” he says, and she can tell it makes sense to him.
She’s never been one to look a gift horse in the mouth – Lex and his myths have made her exquisitely aware of this failing – and she’s exhausted. In a few hours, she’ll get up and make them a late dinner, which Lex will eat with his usual evident enjoyment, but right now she’s content to lie there and feel him breathe against her.
“Martha –“ he says, then shakes his head. “Never mind.”
“Are you all right?” she asks, concerned. It isn’t like Lex to change his mind once he’s decided to speak. She cups his cheek with her hand, runs it over his unwrinkled forehead.
He turns his head, leaning into her touch until her hand is on the crown of his head, as if she were anointing him with oil. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am,” she says, and thinks she believes it.
****
A few months or days later, after many fruitless hours talking to the computer, she figures Ausar out.
Lex is waiting in his office when she comes home, a snifter still damp with brandy sitting empty on the desk in front of him. It’s a certainty that he monitors both her computer use and any queries of the type she’s been making; that the two coincided was, perhaps, convenient for him.
“Why are you doing this?” she asks. Lex only respects subtlety when there’s some point to it.
What she’d been overlooking was that Ausar was just the edge of the empire. Even now, Lex’s core business is agriculture, with biologics and chemicals emanating from the central endeavors.
Lex presses a button and his video screen shows the graphic she had the computer create.
The world is shaded from white to royal purple, depending on the per capita percentage of calories originating with LuthorCorp. Inverse correlation of LuthorCorp food consumption with fertility per 1000 women of child-bearing age: 0.86.
“You know,” he says, “it’s easy to make maps like this.” He presses a button, and the world turns shades of pink and red. The legend shows that it’s correlating fertility with pesticide, antibiotic, and prescription drug concentrations in the drinking water, and the number on the screen is 0.78. Another tap of his finger, and it’s green, correlating income inequality with fertility, for 0.81. Another, and blue shows that cellphone penetration as of 2050 gets 0.90. “That’s why the first rule of statistics is that correlation is not causation.”
“Except when it is.” She stares at him. He’s not going to hurt her, even assuming he could.
He looks back. His face is as smooth and impenetrable as an icefall.
“It doesn’t make sense as a money-making endeavor. The chemical treatment on the food must cost ten times as much as the revenues.”
He makes her wait another minute, but when she doesn’t say anything else, he sighs and nods at her to sit down. She does, wondering if that’s a mistake.
“It’s more like fifty times,” he says when she’s seated, “though even I find it hard to follow the accounting.”
“Then – why?” There must be some profit in it, Lex never does anything without –
“No one can become a parent unless you allow it,” she says slowly, then realizes that’s not it. “No one can become a father unless you allow it.”
Lex’s eyelids twitch, but that’s all.
“Lex, not everyone – your father was not a good man, but that’s not what it’s like for most people –“
He smacks his hand down on the table, and she jerks in her chair. “Bull. What about your father, whose expectations burdened you so much that you threw it all away to marry a man he hated? What about Jonathan’s father, who left him to fight an unwinnable battle with the land and the banks? What about Clark’s, throwing him out into nothingness so he could be raised to be a stranger in his own home – or teaching him to be ashamed of what he was?”
She opens her mouth to defend Jonathan, then stops while she gathers her thoughts. It’s enough of a delay that Lex continues to talk. “But it’s not about that, whatever you may think. For decades, the average IQ in the US increased. Then, quite suddenly, the trend reversed. The best theory is that multiple chemical exposure, plus known hazards such as lead, have a pervasive systemic effect. Today, only thirty percent -- *thirty percent* -- of six-year-old girls *aren’t* diagnosable with ADHD or a more severe cognitive impairment, and that’s girls, the hardier sex. We’ve fouled our own nest, Martha, and that has consequences for our fledglings.
“People are becoming less competent as the need for competence increases. Do you remember what an elephant looks like? What about a golden retriever? To today’s children, they’re like tyrannosaurus rex – dead things only. We need population control and genetic improvement, and limiting breeding is the kind way.”
Kind? Tell that to the people hoping, praying for a child, dying inside a little each month.
“Isn’t this the part where you tell me I’m a monster, and I’ll never succeed?” Lex looks relaxed, but she can tell he’s waiting for the blow.
But, of course, he might very well succeed. It isn’t as if she has superpowers she can use against him and all his works. “This – isn’t right, Lex. You can’t just take these choices away from people.”
“I didn’t do that. Their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, sucking up the Earth’s resources and turning our rivers and oceans into witches’ brews. Now we have to deal with that, and my way offers some hope of long-term survival and even recovery.”
She’s searching for logic. “Your way is a hoax, a trick.” But maybe it isn’t about logic. Maybe – as Jonathan and Clark would have said – it’s about something more fundamental than logic, about freedom and being human. Lex is trying to turn the course of history by himself, like a giant asteroid smashing into the planet, and he’s wrong. No logic can change the horror of the deliberate extinction of most of the human race.
“I don’t even discriminate, except by fitness. Compare that to what happened in the Water Wars.”
“If you told people, explained it to them –“
“They’d clap their hands over their ears and continue breeding. ‘Let somebody elsewhere starve; it doesn’t matter as long as my own kids are okay.’ Dancing while the building is burning.”
It would be very easy to believe in him. But who could have predicted what Mary would become? Lex judges by the “fitness” of the parents, but children are more than that. Children are more than their parents ever dreamed or feared. What hope, what cure for humanity’s ills was lost when that possibility was denied?
“I’m sorry,” she says and hates his stricken look. He knows what she’s saying. She stands up, and he does too, rounding the desk so that they’re only a few feet apart.
“I’ll –“
She shakes her head. Faint though the hope is, she needs to at least try to stop him, and that means abandoning his protection and, if possible, his surveillance. There are places he has less control; maybe France. She could learn French.
She’ll take the clothes on her back and the stash of untraceable credit chits Lex insists she keep in the penthouse. She can trade them for others, and then they really might be untraceable. She’ll get rid of the clothes then, because the microchips smaller than grains of sand in the fabric aren’t listening on her behalf any more.
“You’ll be back,” he says, his face full of loss and resignation.
She knows he’s almost certainly right. To him, that means she shouldn’t leave in the first place. After all this time, Lex still can’t understand why anyone would fight an unwinnable battle. Faced with inevitable death, Lex changed the rules when he was too young to understand what that meant, and he’s gone on in the way he began. While Clark – Clark lived the best life he could, because making your own rules is dangerous, is corrupting, and Clark never knew that more than when he looked at her own unchanging face.
Lex’s pain is as real as her own, and she still wants to comfort him. So she reaches out, and he closes the gap between them, and they hang on to each other as if they were drowning. He’s warm and solid and everything she ever thought she needed, and there’s not a cell in her that tells her to stay.
She kisses his cheek, and then his mouth, because there’s no point in denying that she’s mother and lover both. Isn’t that always the way, when a new breed of gods and goddesses arises? When she steps out of his grasp, she’s panting like she’s just been rescued from a fire.
“Be careful,” she says, for lack of anything else.
“Be good,” he says back, and smiles a smile that doesn’t need the well-hidden scar to be broken. That’s all he wants, a world in which it’s easy for people like her to be good. He takes all sin into himself and can’t comprehend that it shouldn’t always be easy to be good. Deep down, Lex is a stranger to compromise, and that’s why he’ll never be a parent.
She squares her shoulders, for Mary and Clark, and turns back to the world.
End
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part is it? Is there any way I can tempt you into writing more?
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I don' t know what happens next, but if I find out, I'll write more.
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His skin is so fine, untouched by the sun that gave Clark his strength, and yet Lex isn’t a creature of darkness so much as he’s made for electric lights, cities that outshine the stars.
It couldn’t be Lex’s any less if it had had his name and profile, like a Roman coin.
He turns his head, leaning into her touch until her hand is on the crown of his head, as if she were anointing him with oil. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am,” she says, and thinks she believes it.
“No one can become a father unless you allow it.”
She kisses his cheek, and then his mouth, because there’s no point in denying that she’s mother and lover both.
These are just some of the lines that hit me the most. Beautiful.
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You've succeeded, at least in my eyes. Lex doesn't seem quite wrong. But he isn't right either. There is no thin line, it's rather wide and blurry and he's in the middle of it. It's easy to believe in the freedom of choice. Except we only want it when it's applied to us. But I digress. *g*
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I thought the evocative power of many of your lines was very effective, with a particularly skilful culmination in this:
‘She kisses his cheek, and then his mouth, because there’s no point in denying that she’s mother and lover both. Isn’t that always the way, when a new breed of gods and goddesses arises?’
I wonder who’s voice this is. Your description of Lex held upright and bleeding in an Iron Maiden of metaphor is one that has stayed with me since my first reading, and we in the Smallville fandom are trained to see any reference to gods as a purely Luthor trait, but it is Martha who’s mind we are seeing. I love the suggestion of a new pantheon being created, and how you have tied your story and your characters to a mythical and even religious paradigm, creating resonances wherever our minds rest. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while. Thanks, Rivka.
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As for the gods & goddesses, I see Lex as being able to shape the way other people see the world. It seems to me that extended exposure to him, especially if he's being as honest as he can be, would encourage Martha to think in Lex's terms even if she wouldn't ordinarily have done so. Also, immortality (or its near equivalent) seems to require thinking about divinity.
I'm glad you like the iron maiden -- I was really happy with that description.
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I loved it. That's what I was going to say, if I didn't. You've given that cheesy ship-heals-mom moment in "Fever"so much resonance by considering the consequences. It's a wonderfully original plot idea, and it's intriguing to see where you're taking it.
I love the way Lex and Martha are and are not still the same people. With vestiges of their old connection but this whole new sexual element to maneuver around as well. How it uncomfortably makes us wonder what they were thinking and secretly wanting in the past.
And in the present, how Martha needs him because he's her only connection to this world, the only one like her. But how that's all such a tangle, because Lex is still Lex. And that's never going to be straight forward or comfortable.
When she steps out of his grasp, she's panting like she's just been rescued from a fire.
Great line!
I have to say it again. Nobody writes Martha/Lex like you do.I can't wait for more.
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As for what they thought in the long-ago, when they still thought they were human, I buy into the theory that Lex wants to seduce everybody he meets, though he doesn't necessarily plan to do anything about it. He has a sort of "under what circumstances would I fuck him/her?" checklist for everyone he meets, almost subconscious. It's complicated by the fact that he wants Martha as a mommy, and it makes him feel guilty that he's not loyal to Lilian, and he doesn't really know how to have a nonsexual relationship; I suspect that he's fairly self-aware on that, and believes that any close relationship with Martha would end with him, symbolically at least, fucking his mother.
And Martha, I think, would acknowledge that he's attractive without thinking further into it, because she's already got enough to worry about with the father and her own family. Until the rest of them are gone, I imagine that Martha is much more important to Lex than Lex is to Martha.
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Wow.
What a terrible fate for the both of them.
I must admit, though, that I'm in Lex's boat for this one, not so much because I believe that what he's doing is right, per se, just that it might be necessary. It doesn't seem unlikely that humanity would "foul its own nest," and that Lex would do anything he could to correct the problem. He's more of a large-scale guy; he tries to fix everything and doesn't really think about the individuals involved. Or even if he does think about them, they don't really matter, which I must admit, makes a lot of sense to me. He'll watch them die anyway, and so he doesn't care about each individual life, only humanity as a whole. He's lost any sort of connection to the people around him--it died with his generation and with Clark, it seems.
Martha's just the opposite. She's still down and dirty with the population; she still feels their pain, even if she does think that they are terribly ignorant. While Lex is the pragmatist, Martha embodies hope. They truly have become gods and goddesses in that sense.
I also find it interesting that Martha has, in essence, jumped into Clark's role as Lex's moral adversary. It feels wrong, somehow, jarring, as if she's subverted her natural place, that she's the cancer that has replaced the natural tissue, which should have been Clark. I guess that such a thing goes rather well with this story's ideology about corruption and the consequences of defying natural law. "Clark is meant for immortality," is something usually felt by the fandom even if we don't like it, and Lex can function as long as Clark exists because of their mutual obsession; he finds it grounding. But here, Clark's not present, and everything falls apart, really, everything just feels wrong. It's like an AU that took a wrong turn, like something that needs a correction. It's just very chilling.
Also, I'm curious: What happened to Mary? I'm sensing a backstory here...
In any case, thanks for a wonderful story! It was a great read!
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Re: Wow.
I know what you mean about the fandom perception of Clark as immortal. But really, there's no reason he should be. Lex & Martha have claims that are just as good, because something otherworldly changed them physically. Lex would like to think that he and Clark are matched somehow, either Good and Bad or Alexander and Hephaiston, but life isn't as neat as symbols are. At least, that's how I wanted this one to go.
Thanks for commenting.
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Thank You
I have enjoyed your work ever since I first read Iolokus, during my X-Files obsession (betcha never heard that before :0P. May I friend you? I've just started my Livejournal and would love to have you on my friends page.
Thanks again for the lovely story.
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It's always good to hear from a fellow veteran. Please do add me to your list -- my sense of the etiquette is that you don't need to ask, despite the deceptive name. "People whose journals I like to read" seems to be a better description than "friends," which if taken seriously would make me feel extremely presumptuous.
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Re: Thank You
I know! It just seems rather forward of me to just "friend" somebody...but I guess I need to get over it and just do it!
Thanks!
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This story is wonderful, complex and totally believable.
Have you posted it anywhere? I'd like to download it.
I hate the pressure of when people ask for sequels, but you said it best yourself in this story:
“You’ll be back,” he says, his face full of loss and resignation.
She knows he’s almost certainly right.
I'd love to see them in a hundred years. Where are they? We know they love each other. Know that this fight isn't personal, that it's about beliefs.
That’s all he wants, a world in which it’s easy for people like her to be good. He takes all sin into himself and can’t comprehend that it shouldn’t always be easy to be good.
Over the decades, centuries... is he capable of change? Is Martha able to show him the path? What would it be like for Martha to see him as finally able to be good himself without his father there to destroy him?
I'd love to read your thoughts on that.
And I can say one more time...Wow!
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The story should be on Level Three or Wild Coyote. I try to put everything at Level Three (that's the problem with writing het and slash -- at this point only half of my output goes to SSA).