Generation X

  Scott Lobdell & Elliot S! Maggin

  Illustrations by Tom Grummett & Doug Hazlewood

  Generation X created by Scott Loisdf.i.l & Chios Bachalo

  BYRON PREISS MULTIMEDIA COMPANY, INC. NEW YORK

  BOULEVARD BOOKS, NEW YORK

  CHAPTER ONE

  BIOSPHERE

  The pine forest to the north of Snow Valley, Massachusetts, near Stockbridge, is a little blank smudge on the road maps. There is no road. The only distinguishing feature is the snaky path that the Mad River takes down Sugar Mountain, eventually to join the Housatonic River, and wash into the Atlantic. Only the property map sketched out at the home of Edna Gross, the County Registrar of Deeds in Lenox, tells what really occupies that smudge of Mad River Valley at the base of Sugar Mountain, somewhere between the boyhood home of singer James Taylor and the old art studio of the legendary illustrator Norman Rockwell: a large irregular tract of acreage to either side of the river, once belonging to a prestigious private school, now owned and operated by the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning.

  Rockwell was the visual scribe of rural New England, the place where America takes place. He made a great deal of the people he found here. The artist chronicled, through the faces he rendered on the covers of Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post, what the American nation was becoming through the folk of these little towns. One has to wonder what he would have made of Jono-thon Starsmore.

  Jonothon really had no face to speak of. More accurately, he had about half a face. A top half. The bottom half was a free-floating suspension of plasma waves, matter in the process of converting to pure energy, over which Jono had only nominal control. That was what he

  needed to change at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

  Jono had been a cute kid. He shined back in the old country, like a jewel. Like pretty much all the homo superior kids until they start manifesting their special abilities. On weekends in Glasgow in the little towns in western Scotland, he had been a promising young rock musician, swooned over and chased around through basement clubs and the odd hotel hallway until his voice box started to turn into pure energy.

  It started for Jonothon Starsmore when he was an eleven-year-old Glasgow schoolboy. He casually blasted a noisy political sound truck out of existence with a burst of energy from his midsection. The blast left a pinhole of roiling psionic power that doctors who didn’t know any better mistook for a birthmark until they looked closer.

  Gradually, Jonothon had occasion to do away with increasingly large chunks of the matter that composed his body. There was the rescue of the old lady who was tumbling onto the tram track. Then the young woman on that bridge by the Firth of Clyde being chased by those toffs whose brass knuckles fused to their teeth as they chewed their fists in pain. That one was the first time he got the idea that he could use this power surgically: he could pull back on it, limit it through force of will. But that little maneuver cost Jono what was left of his stomach cavity. No one would ever accuse Jono of being a cute kid again.

  Just, a few years ago, Jono scared some of his classmates by undoing his bandages to reveal the white -hot plasma suspension of his former body from thighs to sternum. This prompted the local authorities to encourage his parents into putting together a home schooling program for which they were ill qualified and less inclined. So for a few months Jonothon’s math teacher was his father who still ran his dry cleaning shop out of an old NCR cash register. He took French with his mother, also a condition of dubious benefit. Jono once walked with his mom into a little restaurant in Normandie, both of them excited to try out their French on someone who didn’t speak anything else. When Mum said a simple burr-infested “Oui” in answer to the hostess’s question, “Deux pour petit-dejeuner?” the hostess’s cute smile darkened and she turned, saying in English, “Oh, right this way.”

  Uncle Ian the auto mechanic, though, sure did know his physics. Ian and Jono figured out the proper oil-to-air ratio in Master Tomas’s old beater of a ’55 Mercedes using an ohm-meter, checking the results against an oscilloscope. Pretty soon they measured the side-particle throw-weight in photons through the micro-pores in the bandages over Jono’s chest. They found that if Jono could harness the waste material of his personal biogenerator alone, he could focus enough power to lift downtown Glasgow to Saturn and back between lunch and dinner. It was Uncle Ian’s physics classes that prompted Jono to take seriously the possibility of enrolling at Xavier’s School.

  Now here he was in America not a year later, climbing up the geodesic grid on the inside of the biosphere to spy on Emma Frost, the headmistress, and Monet St. Croix, one of Jono’s fellow students. Jonothon could not imagine that either Emma or Monet could be unaware of him there—particularly given that Emma was a powerful telepath; very little got by her—but they were both too busy to notice. So he watched as they worked out their combat maneuvers. Monet, who was some kind of Algerian princess according to what little she let on, flexed somehow, in that ineffable, more-than-human way, all over her body when she launched herself into flight. Like Hideo Nomo about to launch a pitch, only hotter.

  Emma was the White Queen, the mutant telepath who once trained a group of mutant kids called the Hellions. They were all gone now. Squashed like bugs by some super-powered doofus named Fitzroy, but Jono knew what’d really gotten the Hellions: government. Not like the government in Washington or London. All governments. Everywhere. The collective hive mind of people that set themselves up with great ceremony and ritual and derive their respectability from identifying with those who win a war or step on a problem or perpetuate a delusion. Government got the Hellions and Jono had come here to throw in with other people like himself— or enough like himself—so government would have a harder time and take longer to get him.

  Outside, winter was cracking open at the edges. Here in the biosphere, a pair of stupefyingly beautiful superpowered women wove in and out among the treetops of the indoor jungle stalking one another like enemy predators. The game was simple: Monet hunted Emma and Emma hunted Monet. To win, one had to slap the other on her heel.

  It was impossible to sneak up on the White Queen. No one sneaks up on a telepath. But Monet had an effective weapon in her speed; she simply had to move faster than either she or Emma could think.

  No problem.

  The biosphere was a controlled environment in a geodesic dome with the ground space of a football field inside. The various species of vegetation within shouldn’t be able to coexist. Tropical herbs from the Amazon basin mixed roots with trillium from the Great White North. An unnaturally fast-growing saguaro from Arizona fought it out for its water supply with a larch from the foothills of the Italian Alps.

  Like the school itself, the biosphere was a laboratory. Every time the lavish strains of flora produced what looked to be a mutant strain, Sean Cassidy (aka Banshee, former member of the X-Men), the headmaster, would send out a call over a secret cellular line, and within twenty-four hours Dr. Henry McCoy (aka the Beast, current member of the X-Men and a leading biochemist) would come barreling in to pick apart the little shoot, classify it, and send cuttings to who-knew-where. If it was lucky, the new plant would grow up someday. A lot like the kids here.

  Jonothon Starsmore, code-named Chamber—potentially one of the most powerful beings on the planet if only he were to learn how to harness his psionic powers and live until, say, his eighteenth birthday—hung on the struts of the biosphere like a fly on the wall. And if anybody asked why he was here, which they probably wouldn’t, he would say that it was to study the training session as Emma drilled Monet. In truth, he just liked to watch the two of them move.

  Emma Frost elbowed through the root system of a giant yucca plant to evade detection by Monet. At first glance, Emma seemed to have little in the way of defense against a girl who could fly and lift a mountain and move faster than the image could register on a person’s eyes.

  Monet flew through the air over the treetops of the biosphere, whipping around in circles. She flew around in an ever-tightening pattern, faster and faster, until the Monet Jono watched was laps behind the one up front.

  To Jono, Monet was perfect. Monet was the golden apple under the sun. She spoke the Queen’s English with the slightest touch of an accent leftover from a collection of French tutors in Algeria. She grew up as the treasured daughter of a sultan whose tradition generally reserved privileges only for sons. Her skin was golden brown. Her voice was a slow crackling flame. Jono could see how a guy could fall in love with her. He saw it every time she walked among a crowd of people she didn’t know to go into a store or wave down a cab or watch a soccer game. Guys fell in love with Monet as the dust settled in her wake, but they lost all illusion of such things when she spoke to them. She was imperious

  and demanding with every resonation of her being.

  Jonothon thought it was odd to see Emma appear uncertain, but in terms of raw power, Monet appeared to outmatch her instructor easily. It was all Emma could do to find a hiding place somewhere in the dirt in the hopes that the girl would trip up, blow her advantage, open herself to attack before she could determine where the White Queen hid.

  It didn’t seem likely.

  As Jono watched, Emma lurked and Monet threw off a humming sound as she vibrated the air. Then, like a skier missing a gate, Monet broke her pattern.

  Monet swooped down from the air like a falcon in a power dive. Behind her, the blurred circular image of her spinning path faded like skywriting.

  Monet plunged into the earth underneath the yuc
ca tree which Emma rooted around in. As she plowed into the ground, earth sprayed upward. She hardly noticed how far down she dove, so intent was she on finding her teacher’s heel.

  Then Monet felt a light tap on her own right heel, then her left, just as she submerged into the dirt below the biosphere. Monet was so caught up in the hunt that she had no plan to stop her plunge. Fortunately, the ground broke her descent.

  She flapped her arms and she swallowed dirt and she tried to spin but that only bored her in further. She thought about that awful movie about premature burial she’d sneaked a look at as a child. She thought about being in a box below the ground screaming and pulling her hair out and then she thought about being a ghost with nowhere to go except to hang around watching your body decompose and she thought it was going to make her crazy if she didn’t stop plowing into the dirt—and then she stopped. Only the two lately insulted heels of her terribly fashionable, antelope-hide super heroine boots jutted out of the ground.

  Jono, watching from high on the triangular struts of the inside wall of the dome, scrambled down. Emma, laughing that cruel laugh of hers, got on her knees amidst the yucca root and pulled to no avail on Monet’s ankles.

  ‘ ‘Is she all right?’ ’ Jono projected onto sound waves in the air as he reached the White Queen. He had no mouth, after all, but he had enough psionic energy to simulate pretty much anything—other than his boyish good looks.

  “How would I know?”

  “Well read her mind or something!”

  “Oh 1 did,” Emma offered, “at least enough to know she’s healthy. Any deeper into that black hole I don’t care to go just now.”

  “How’d you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Sneak up behind her when she was moving that fast.”

  “She’s fast,” the White Queen said, “but not faster than thought. She’s an intellectual creature who must sometimes learn to use her instincts.”

  “Well stand back then,” Jono said, and began to unwrap the bandages over what had once been the lower part of his face.

  “Wait a minute, Jono,” Emma put a hand on the shoulder of his jacket, which was squishy and shapeless to the touch. There was no flesh to pad him, only free-floating energy. ‘ ‘Are you good enough yet for this kind of surgical gardening?”

  “Trust me,” Jono said.

  The girl’s feet waved violently, despite her pinned torso. He shot the first beam of psionic energy at the ground near Monet’s head—as thin as a round of psionic energy gets. It chewed up the earth and left a big gully alongside Monet and the perimeter of the Yucca root.

  Jono was about to loose another blast between Monet and the main body of the root itself when Monet moved. Fingers, then hands, reaching upward awkwardly, surfaced to either side of the girls’ boots. Monet yanked back at the surface of the ground—

  —and her hands sank again, deep into the ground that Chamber’s bolt of energy had softened to make it easier for her to get out.

  Jonothon revved up his power again, concentric circles of energy crackling the air around his body, and Monet leapt out of the ground with the sort of desperate alacrity usually reserved for people in the paths of industrial accidents and nuclear shock waves.

  “Are you all right?” and Jonothon’s veneer of concern was less obvious than his feeling of guilt at his lame attempt at a rescue.

  “Do you know what could have happened,” Monet started softly and slowly, inquiring as to Chamber’s sanity, “if the heat of your next bolt of energy had gone just a touch out of control?”

  “Well—”

  “The dirt itself could have fused into silicon and trapped me in there for, for maybe days.”

  “Well actually, it’s only sand that turns to silicon. Sometimes actually to glass. This is mostly loam and silt and it tends—”

  “It tends—” Monet realized that her voice had risen to a shrill pitch and so cut herself off. She brushed off the silt and loam that muddied her face—-casually, as though she had meant to get dirty—and lowered her voice to an imperious stage whisper. “—to do what?” Her usually red spandex flying suit was covered in a layer of mud and filth. She looked like the star of a grunge Kabuki play. Little pieces of mud dribbled to the ground as she talked, and Jonothon almost laughed. Nevertheless, he plunged in: “It tends to harden under heat into a kind of concrete and compress in volume. It’s a much more brittle material than glass.”

  “And you know this from ... what?”

  ‘ ‘Experimentation. ’ ’

  “You run around melting different kinds of soil?” “Well I did, one day. Back in Scotland, when I was walking the moors with the guys in the band.” “Walking the moors? With your band?”

  “Well it was Scotland. There were lots of moors around.”

  “Fusing soil into cement?”

  “Well only that once.”

  Monet nodded a slow, exaggerated nod.

  “And this time too, of course,” Jono added.

  Jonothon was actually shuffling one foot, looking for activity through which to displace his embarrassment. But Monet, dripping with topsoil, was in charge of the conversation anyway. He wondered whether it would keep her up all night if he slipped a pea under her mattress.

  He had very little time to wonder before both of them heard Emma yell.

  It was not a blood-curdling scream of the sort you might hear from a woman being attacked by a guy with an eyepatch brandishing a particularly nasty-looking piece of cutlery. It was more like the howl you heard from your mother half-a-second after she walked into your room to find one wall papered with the entire 1986 run of Topps baseball cards fastened there with Elmer’s glue.

  Monet reached Emma first, her sudden speed removing most of the dirt that had caked on her.

  Emma had composed herself by the time Monet arrived, and was staring at something that, as far as she knew, did not belong in the biosphere. It was a kind of big hazy red egg hovering over a big horizontal branch of one of the trees. Emma was looking at it intently, with the kind of look you get when you’re surprised by the appearance of an old friend.

  “Do you see that?” Emma asked, as if making sure that she wasn’t imagining it.

  “It’s some sort of phenomenon,” the student told her teacher in that authoritative way she grew back in her father’s court in Algeria. Monet jumped toward the manifestation, floating through the air with a hand extended, “Certainly nothing to be alarmed—” and as she touched it, the shape wobbled and fell out of the air.

  “Are you ladies all right?” Jono’s artificial voice projected from behind a nearby clump of succulent bushes of a type never before found outside the Amazon rain forest. He stepped into view just in time to see Emma and Monet standing over something on the ground that glowed for a moment, and then vanished.

  “What was that?” Jono wanted to know.

  Monet shrugged. Emma muttered something, turned on her heel and went for the biosphere airlock.

  Monet and jonothon followed Emma. The White Queen had gotten fairly far in front of them, but the trail of shallow footprints in the corn snow led to the main building.

  “What was that thing?” Jonothon asked Monet on their own way along Emma’s path.

  “She thought she recognized it,” Monet said.

  “Recognized it? She’s seen it before?”

  ‘ ‘No, I believe she recognized a thought pattern from it.”

  “She told you she thought the glowing egg was a person?’ ’

  “Not as such. She just said ‘Haroun,’ and then you showed up and she left.”

  “Haroun?”

  They came into the big hallway of the old building that was now their principal classroom. Xavier’s School occupied the grounds that used to belong to the Massachusetts Academy, one of the oldest private schools in the country. In fact, its existence predated the American Revolution by fifty years. When Emma was owner and sole headmistress of the Academy, she trained the Hellions here.

  Then Jono remembered something. “Haroun was Jetstream’s name.”

  “Jetstream? One of the Hellions. The Moroccan

  guy”

  “I don’t know. He was from one of those places. He could blow hot plasma blasts behind him and shoot himself up through the air. Better not stand underneath him, though.”