Near + Far (15 page)

Ms. Liberty has had
this
conversation before, in the Superb Squadron headquarters.

"If she says she is, who am I to say no?" she says.

"That brings us to you," the Sphinx says.

Ms. Liberty says, "If I say I am, who are you to say no?"

"You're a construct too."

"Constructed to be female."

"Something you could change or reject as easily as throwing a switch."

Ms. Liberty says, "I have to be something more than superhuman. I'm female."

The Sphinx shrugs, drains the last of her coffee, slides from her chair.

"Going on patrol," she says.

Zanycat finds Zenith Arcane in the library, slouched over a couch reading, with three cats laid at intervals along her body. The group has been using Arcane's Manhattan brownstone, which is much much larger on the inside than on the outside, to the point where Zanycat has taken to spending mornings exploring the wings and passages, trying to map them on graph paper. She intends to ask Dr. Arcane about that, but she finds the older mage intimidating.

Right now, though, she has a different question, and Zenith seems like the best to tackle on the subject.

"So what
is
X?" she asks.

Dr. Arcane slides her reading glasses up her nose and closes her book. She gathers herself up, displacing the cats, and regards Zanycat. She steeples her fingers in front of herself in a professorial fashion.

"What categories do you want me to use?" she says.

"Is X an alien? A human? A manifestation of some cosmic force?"

"Ah. She was created by a human scientist who died when she was only a few years old. He kept her entertained with television and the Internet, so she tends to draw on pop culture forms."

"What's her real form?"

"She doesn't have one."

"Doesn't have one? How can that be?"

"I've known her for a few decades now, and I've yet to see her repeat a shape," Dr. Arcane said.

"Then how do you know she's a she? She doesn't just take on female shapes. I saw her do Invader Zim this morning."

Dr. Arcane beams as though a prize student has just won a scholarship. "Excellent question! Because she identifies as such."

"She said so?"

Arcane nods.

Zanycat presses further. "How do she and Ms. Liberty know each other?"

"From Superb Squadron. Ms. Liberty had been a member for a couple of years when X joined. She had been a member of the Howl, the shapeshifter group before then, but she was just a little too non-traditional for them."

"Aren't they villains?"

"You're thinking of the Pack. They're all shapeshifters as well."

"How many shapeshifter groups are there?"

"Four," Dr. Arcane says with the immediate decisiveness of someone who knows every facet of the supernatural world. This is her main power in fact. Not that she can do that much, magically, but that she knows everyone, can connect you to a source on ancient Atlantean texts or a circle of star worshippers or even the Darkness That Crawls on the Edge of the Universe. "The Howl, the Pack, the Changing—which is a loose affiliation of generally good to neutral supernatural beings—and Clockwork Flight, which has a lycanthrope as a leader."

Zanycat makes a face and Dr. Arcane laughs. "What?" she says.

"There's too much to learn about all of this," Zanycat says.

"That's okay," Dr. Arcane tells her. "Most of the time you can go by your instincts."

Ms. Liberty has never talked about why she left the Superb Squadron before. She and the Sphinx stand side by side, watching an alleyway where giant radioactive battery-powered centipedes are emerging. Ms. Liberty says, out of the blue, "You know what bugged me? X always made it clear she thought of herself as she, but they couldn't take that at face value. They called her it, or that thing. And I thought—how far away is being female from being an it? And so I left, even though I forfeited most of my pension."

The Sphinx says, "Do you and X—"

She pauses, as though trying to pick the next word. Ms. Liberty suddenly realizes what she's going to say and says, "No! Nothing like that. We're friends."

The Sphinx looks at her. Ms. Liberty's heart is racing. A person doesn't ask another person that sort of question unless another sort of question is on that person's mind.

Twin menaces, Prince Torpitude and Princess Lethargia, rampage through downtown, smashing store windows, taking whatever pleases them, draping themselves with sapphire bracelets, fur stoles, shoving iPods and bars of shea butter soap in their pockets.

Everyone acquits themselves well. Kilroy shadowwalks behind the duo, distracts them while Rocketwoman swoops in and Ms. Liberty comes at them, Zanycat cartwheeling after, from the opposite side. The Sphinx cuts off their communication gear, keeps them from calling for back-up. Within twenty minutes they're contained and the cops are processing them with shots of hyper-tranquilizer and ferro-concrete bonds.

No press shows up, except for a blogger who interviews them, takes a couple of pictures with his pen-camera.

"What's the name of the group?" he asks, glancing around.

"It's unidentified," Zanycat says in a shy whisper, and he peers towards her, says, "Unidentified, all right. And your name?" Behind her, Dr. Arcane hears Rocketwoman give out a gasp, a happy little fangirl gasp that takes Arcane a moment to process.

He punches info into his Blackberry, takes a few more pictures of the scene of the struggle, and interviews two bystanders.

Ms. Liberty thinks later that she shouldn't be surprised when the post appears calling them the Unidentified.

"It's not a terrible name," Dr. Arcane argues.

"It sounds like a Latin American human rights movement," Ms. Liberty snaps.

X shrugs and moonwalks down the wall. She wears a purple beret and angel wings—no one is quite sure what the shape is, including Dr. Arcane, until Zanycat identifies it as pulled from a recent Barbie video game.

"What do you think, Rocketwoman?" Dr. Arcane says, rounding on her. "How's it stack up for you?"

"It's fine," Rocketwoman stammers.

Dr. Arcane steps closer, "But how's it stack up against whatever we end up with?" she pursues, and is rewarded by seeing Charisse pale. "A-HA, I knew it!" She thumps her fist into her palm triumphantly.

"Knew what?" Kilroy asks.

"She's from the future."

They all turn and stare at Rocketwomen. Time traveling is the most illegal thing there is; there are corps of cops from a dozen cultures that will track a time-fugitive down.

Rocketwoman raises her chin, stares at them squarely. "I don't care," she says, "it's better than going back." Another realization hits Dr. Arcane.

"Goddess," she says, "not just any time-line but one of the Infernos at the end of Time, is that it?"

"I don't know," Rocketwoman says. Everyone can tell she's flickering between relief at finally being able to talk about it and worry that someone's going to come find her.

Dr. Arcane is unstoppable. "And what was our name, in the history books you studied?"

"The Unidentified," Rocketwoman admits.

Dr. Arcane's stare sweeps the room, nails each of them with its significance. "Ladies and ladies," she says, "I think we have a name."

It's hard to argue with that, although X wistfully expresses her symbol a few more times before Ms. Liberty finally tells her to give it up.

Ms. Liberty has taken a front bedroom for her own. It's not that she really sleeps: she can activate a program that is intended to be a simulacrum of sleep, which her creators assure her is far better than the real thing, but it has a disturbing slant towards erotic fantasies that makes her leave it off.

She doesn't sleep. Instead she writes. Romance novels. It's how she keeps herself able to buy cybernetic parts that are very expensive indeed. Let's not even talk about the cost or possibility of upgrades to her very specialized system. Her creators are gone, blown up long ago under highly suspicious circumstances, and she's never been able to track down the malefactor who carried out the deed.

Why romances? There's something about the formulaic quality of the series she likes. She writes for Shadow Press's superhero line, amuses herself by writing in the men of Superb Squadron, one by one, as bad lovers and evildoers. She has little fear they'll ever read one and recognize themselves. She also writes superhero regencies, daring women scientists and explorers, steam-driven plots to blow up royalty, Napoleonic spies and ancient supernatural crystals quarried by emerald-eyed dwarves from the earth's heart.

She works on one now, pausing on the love scene. She writes a kiss, a caress, and stops. She thinks of the feel of lips on her own skin and gives way to the urge to trigger her programming, leaning over the desk, feeling orgasms race along her artificially enhanced nerves.

She touches her face, feels the tears there.

Downstairs in the Danger Room, she works through drills, smashes fast and hard into punching bags, dodges through closing barriers, jump and leaps and stretches herself until she is sore.

The door whispers open and the Sphinx enters. Without a word, she joins the practice.

Is Ms. Liberty showing off or trying to escape? She moves in a blur, demonically fast, she moves like a fluid machine come from the end of Time, she moves like nothing she's ever seen, forging her own identity moment by moment. And feels the Sphinx's skin, inches from her own, fever warm, an almost-touch, an almost-whisper.

"Is this the thing," Ms. Liberty says to the Sphinx, "that it matters because you will only sleep with females?"

"I will only sleep with someone," the Sphinx says, twisting, turning, cartwheeling, "who knows who they are."

Ms. Liberty's arms fall around the other woman, who is iron and velvet in her embrace. Then Ms. Liberty pushes away, stammers something incoherent, and rushes from the room.

The Sphinx looks after her, waits for hours in the room, gives up the vigil as dawn breaks. Several stories above, Ms. Liberty saves the twenty thousand words she's written, a love scene so tender that readers will weep when they read it, weep just as she does, saving the file for the last time before sending it to her editor.