"See you there, buddy." Thomas rang off.
Hershie folded his comm, wedged it in his belt, and stroked his parents' crypt,
once more, for luck.
#
Hershie loved the commute home. Starting at the Arctic Circle, he flew up and up
and up above the highest clouds, then flattened out his body and rode the
currents home, eeling around the wet frozen cloudmasses, slaloming through
thunderheads, his critical faculties switched off, flying at speed on blind
instinct alone.
He usually made visual contact with the surface around Barrie, just outside of
Toronto, and he wasn't such a goodiegoodie that he didn't feel a thrill of
superiority as he flew over the cottage-country commuters stuck in the
end-of-weekend traffic, skis and snowmobiles strapped to their roofs.
#
The Belquees had the best Ethiopian food and the worst Ethiopian decor in town.
Successive generations of managers had added their own touches -- tiki-lanterns,
textured wallpaper, framed photos of Haile Selassie, tribal spears and grass
dolls -- and they'd accreted in layers, until the net effect was of an African
rummage sale. But man, the food was good.
Downstairs was a banquet room whose decor consisted of material too ugly to be
shown upstairs, with a stage and a disco ball. It had been a regular meeting
place for Toronto's radicals for more than fifty years, the chairs worn smooth
by generations of left-wing buttocks.
Tonight, it was packed. At least fifty people were crammed around the tables,
tearing off hunks of tangy rice-pancake and scooping up vegetarian curry with
them. Even before he saw Thomas, his super-hearing had already picked his voice
out of the din and located it. Hershie made a beeline for Thomas's table, not
making eye-contact with the others -- old-guard activists who still saw him as a
tool of the war-machine.
Thomas licked his fingers clean and shook his hand. "Supe! Glad you could make
it! Sit, sit." There was a general shuffling of coats and chairs as the other
people at the table cleared a space for him. Thomas was already pouring him a
beer out of one of the pitchers on the table.
"Geez, how many people did you invite?"
Tina, a tiny Chinese woman who could rhyme "Hey hey, ho ho" and "One, two,
three, four" with amazing facility said, "Everyone's here. The Quakers, the
commies, a couple of councilors, the vets, anyone we could think of. This is
gonna be _huge_."
The food hot, and the different curries and salads were a symphony of flavours
and textures. "This is terrific," he said.
"Best Ethiopian outside of Addis Ababa," said Thomas.
_Better than Addis Ababa_, Hershie thought, but didn't say it. He'd been in
Addis Ababa as the secret weapon behind Canada's third and most ill-fated
peacekeeping mission there. There hadn't been a lot of restaurants open then,
just block after block of bombed-out buildings, and tribal warlords driving
around in tacticals, firing randomly at anything that moved. The ground CO sent
him off to scatter bands of marauders while the bullets spanged off his chest.
He'd never understood the tactical significance of those actions -- still didn't
-- but at the time, he'd been willing to trust those in authority.
"Good food," he said.
#
An hour later, the pretty waitress had cleared away the platters and brought
fresh pitchers, and Hershie's tights felt a little tighter. One of the Quakers,
an ancient, skinny man with thin grey hair and sharp, clever features stood up
and tapped his beer-mug. Gradually, conversation subsided.
"Thank you," he said. "My name is Stewart Pocock, and I'm here from the Circle
of Friends. I'd like us all to take a moment to say a silent thanks for the
wonderful food we've all enjoyed."
There was a nervous shuffling, and then a general bowing of heads and mostly
silence, broken by low whispers.
"Thomas, I thought _you_ called this meeting," Hershie whispered.
"I did. These guys always do this. Control freaks. Don't worry about it," he
whispered back.
"Thank you all. We took the liberty of drawing up an agenda for this meeting."
"They _always_ do this," Thomas said.
The Quakers led them in a round of introductions, which came around to Hershie.
"I'm, uh, The Super Man. I guess most of you know that, right?" Silence. "I'm
really looking forward to working on this with you all." A moment of silence
followed, before the next table started in on its own introductions.
#
"Time," Louise Pocock said. Blissfully. At last. The agenda had ticks next to
INTRODUCTION, BACKGROUND, STRATEGY, THE DAY, SUPPORT AND ORGANISING and
PUBLICITY. Thomas had hardly spoken a word through the course of the meeting.
Even Hershie's alien buttocks were numb from sitting.
"It's time for the closing circle. Please, everybody, stand up and hold hands."
Many of the assembled didn't bother to stifle their groans. Awkwardly, around
the tables and the knapsacks, they formed a rough circle and took hands. They
held it for an long, painful moment, then gratefully let go.
They worked their way upstairs and outside. The wind had picked up, and it blew
Hershie's cape out on a crackling vertical behind him, so that it caught many of
the others in the face as they cycled or walked away.
"Supe, let's you and me grab a coffee, huh?" Thomas said, without any spin on it
at all, so that Hershie knew that it wasn't a casual request.
"Yeah, sure."
#
The cafe Thomas chose was in a renovated bank, and there was a private room in
the old vault, and they sat down there, away from prying eyes and autograph
hounds.
"So, you pumped?" Thomas said, after they ordered coffees.
"After _that_ meeting? Yeah, sure."
Thomas laughed, a slightly patronising but friendly laugh. "That was a _great_
meeting. Look, if those guys had their way, we'd have about a march a month, and
we'd walk slowly down a route that we had a permit for, politely asking people
to see our point of view. And in between, we'd have a million meetings like
this, where we come up with brilliant ideas like, 'Let's hand out fliers next
time.'
"So what we do is, go along with them. Give them enough rope to hang themselves.
Let 'em have four or five of those, until everyone who shows up is so bored,
they'll do _anything_, as long as its not that.
"So, these guys want to stage a sit-in in front of the convention centre.
Bo-ring! We wait until they're ready to sit down, then we start playing music
and turn it into a _dance-in_. Start playing movies on the side of the building.
Bring in a hundred secret agents in costume to add to it. They'll never know
what hit 'em."
Hershie squirmed. These kinds of Machiavellian shenanigans came slowly to him.
"That seems kind of, well, disingenuous, Thomas. Why don't we just hold our own
march?"
"And split the movement? No, this is much better. These guys do all the
postering and phoning, they get a good crowd out, this is their natural role.
Our natural role, my son," he placed a friendly hand on Hershie's caped
shoulder, "is to see to it that their efforts aren't defeated by their own
poverty of imagination. They're the feet of the movement, but we're its
_laugh_." Thomas pulled out his comm and scribbled on its surface. "_They're the
feet of the movement, but we're its laugh_, that's great, that's one for the
memoirs."
#
Hershie decided he needed to patrol a little to clear his head. He scooped trash
and syringes from Grenadier Pond. He flew silently through High Park, ears
cocked for any muggings.
Nothing.
He patrolled the Gardner Expressway next and used his heat vision to melt some
black ice.
Feeling useless, he headed for home.
He was most of the way up Yonge Street when he heard the siren. A cop car,
driving fast, down Jarvis. He sighed his father's sigh and rolled east, heading
into Regent Park, locating the dopplering siren. He touched down lightly on top
of one of the ugly, squat tenements, and skipped from roof to roof, until he
spotted the cop. He was beefy, with the traditional moustache and the flak vest
that they all wore on downtown patrol. He was leaning against the hood of his
cruiser, panting, his breath clouding around him.
A kid rolled on the ground, clutching his groin, gasping for breath. His
infrared signature throbbed painfully between his legs. Clearly, he'd been
kicked in the nuts.
The cop leaned into his cruiser and lowered the volume on his radio, then,
without warning, kicked the kid in the small of the back. The kid rolled on the
ice, thrashing painfully.
Before Hershie knew what he was doing, he was hovering over the ice, between the
cop and the kid. The cateyes embedded in the emblem on his chest glowed in the
streetlamps. The cop's eyes widened so that Hershie could see the whites around
his pupils
Hershie stared. "What do you think you're doing?" he said, after a measured
silence.
The cop took a step back and slipped a little on the ice before catching himself
on his cruiser.
"Since when do you kick unarmed civilians in the back?"
"He -- he ran away. I had to catch him. I wanted to teach him not to run."
"By inspiring his trust in the evenhandedness of Toronto's Finest?" Hershie
could see the cooling tracks of the cruiser, skidding and weaving through the
projects. The kid had put up a good chase. Behind him, he heard the kid regain
his feet and start running. The cop started forward, but Hershie stopped him
with one finger, dead centre in the flak jacket.
"You can't let him get away!"
"I can catch him. Trust me. But first, we're going to wait for your backup to
arrive, and I'm going to file a report."
A _Sun_ reporter arrived before the backup unit. Hershie maintained stony
silence in the face of his questions, but he couldn't stop the man from
listening in on his conversation with the old constable who showed up a few
minutes later, as he filed his report. He found the kid a few blocks away,
huddled in an alley, hand pressed to the small of his back. He took him to Mount
Sinai's emerg and turned him over to a uniformed cop.
#
The hysterical _Sun_ headlines that vilified Hershie for interfering with the
cop sparked a round of recriminating voicemails from his mother, filled with
promises to give him such a _zetz_ in the head when she next saw him. He folded
his tights and cape and stuffed them in the back of his closet and spent a lot
of time in the park for the next few weeks. He liked to watch the kids playing,
a United Nations in miniature, parents looking on amiably, stymied by the
language barrier that their kids hurdled with ease.
On March first, he took his tights out of the overstuffed hall closet and flew
to Ottawa to collect his pension.
He touched down on the Parliament Hill and was instantly surrounded by
high-booted RCMP constables, looking slightly panicky. He held his hands up,
startled. "What gives, guys?"
"Sorry, sir," one said. "High security today. One of Them is speaking in
Parliament."
"Them?"
"The bugouts. Came down to have a chat about neighbourly relations. Authorised
personnel only today."
"Well, that's me," Hershie said, and started past him.
The constable, looking extremely unhappy, moved to block him. "I'm sorry sir,
but that's not you. Only people on the list. My orders, I'm afraid."
Hershie looked into the man's face and thought about hurtling skywards and
flying straight into the building. The man was only doing his job, though.
"Look, it's payday. I have to go see the Minister of Defense. I've been doing it
every month for _years_."
"I know that sir, but today is a special day. Perhaps you could return
tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow? My rent is due _today_, Sergeant. Look, what if I comm his office?"
"Please, sir, that would be fine." The Sergeant looked relieved.
Hershie hit a speed dial and waited. A recorded voice told him that the office
was closed, the Minister at a special session.
"He's in session. Look, it's probably on his desk -- I've been coming here for
years; really, this is ridiculous."
"I'm sorry. I have my orders."
"I don't think you could stop me, Sergeant."
The Sergeant and his troops shuffled their feet. "You're probably right, sir.
But orders are orders."
"You know, Sergeant, I retired a full colonel from the Armed Forces. I _could_
order you to let me past."
"Sorry sir, no. Different chain of command."
Hershie controlled his frustration with an effort of will. "Fine then. I'll be
back tomorrow."
#
The building super wasn't pleased about the late rent. He threatened Hershie
with eviction, told him he was in violation of the lease, quoted the relevant
sections of the Tenant Protection Act from memory, then grudgingly gave in to
Hershie's pleas. Hershie had half a mind to put his costume on and let the man
see what a _real_ super was like.
But his secret identity was sacrosanct. Even in the era of Pax Aliena, the Super
Man had lots of enemies, all of whom had figured out, long before, that even the
invulnerable have weaknesses: their friends and families. It terrified him to
think of what a bitter, obsolete, grudge-bearing terrorist might do to his
mother, to Thomas, or even his old high-school girlfriends.
For his part, Thomas refused to acknowledge the risk; he'd was more worried
about the Powers That Be than mythical terrorists.
The papers the next day were full of the overnight cabinet shuffle in Ottawa.
More than half the cabinet had been relegated to the back-benches, and many of
their portfolios had been eliminated or amalgamated into the new
"superportfolios:" Domestic Affairs, Trade, and Extraterrestrial Affairs.
The old Minister of Defense, who'd once had Hershie over for Thanksgiving
dinner, was banished to the lowest hell of the back-bench. His portfolio had
been subsumed into Extraterrestrial Affairs, and the new Minister, a young
up-and-comer named Woolley, wasn't taking Hershie's calls. Hershie called Thomas
to see if he could loan him rent money.
Thomas laughed. "Chickens coming home to roost, huh?" he said.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hershie said, hotly.
"Well, there's only so much shit-disturbing you can do before someone sits up
and takes notice. The Belquees is probably bugged, or maybe one of the commies
is an informer. Either way, you're screwed. Especially with Woolley."
"Why, what's wrong with Woolley?" Hershie had met him in passing at Prime
Minister's Office affairs, a well-dressed twenty-nine-year-old. He'd seemed like
a nice enough guy.
"What's _wrong_ with him?" Thomas nearly screamed. "He's the fricken
_antichrist_! He was the one that came up with the idea of selling advertising
on squeegee kids' t-shirts! He's heavily supported by private security outfits
-- he makes Darth Vader look like a swell guy. That slicked-down, blow-dried
asshole --"