Generation X Page 4

  In November and December the forest gradually slowed and the river flow virtually stopped. It iced over, and a shifting blanket of snow covered the ice. And for months, only the face of the snow and the occasional falling tree trunk surrendered to the pressure of change.

  Today, there was only a thin membrane of ice along the edges of the river; in the center, water flowed easily. Still, the forest was heavy with snow and great branches sagged under its weight.

  The sound of the river, along with her familiarity with the twists and dips of this place, guided Paige as she jogged along the river with a three-pound weight in each fist. She kept her eyes shut longer than she ever had before. She was home, navigating the snowy forest as easily as a blind man finds his way among the furniture in his living room. Paige opened her eyes only when she heard a sound that didn’t belong here.

  She heard purring.

  A large boulder sat in the middle of the river, on which stood the hazy figure of a tall purple-haired woman in a red jump suit. She was hazy, indistinct. Her edges faded into the backdrop of the woods, but Paige could swear the girl had a tail snaking around behind her.

  “You’re Catseye,” Paige said to the figure. One of the now-deceased Hellions, Paige remembered her both from the school’s files as well as the descriptions from her older brother Sam. Sam, aka Cannonball, was a member of the New Mutants, the previous group of trainee mutants at the Xavier Institute, at the same time that the Hellions were active.

  The woman crouched on her haunches and began to transform. In a moment, radiating from her middle, her figure became that of an enormous cat; like a purple lynx with a bobbed tail and densely muscular haunches with which the creature sprung directly at Paige, claws extended, even as she transformed.

  She was much more distinct as a cat. Seeing her transform was like adjusting the contrast on a television screen. The air tingled around Paige—or was it just the after-effects of her last transformation? She didn’t know, and she probably shouldn’t be thinking about it just now. What was all this jogging and training and conditioning for? What was the purpose of all these lectures from Banshee about being ready for any eventuality? It was all so that when a monster appeared out of the wilderness—as was monsters’ wont—Paige could deal with it.

  Paige sprung out of the way with the cat-thing in midspring.

  The creature flew claws-first right where Paige had stood. She could smell a wet fur smell as she flew by her, hissing, directly at the tree trunk. Then the cat vanished into the air as though going into an invisible door inches in front of the tree.

  The dining hall, after the others had all finished dinner and cleared the big table:

  “You’re stiH thinking about the Hellions,” Sean said, noticing Emma’s dark mood.

  “Now you’re telepathic?” Emma chided.

  “Doesn’t take a telepath.”

  “They were too young.”

  “We’re all too young,” Sean said. “George Burns was too young. Irving Berlin was too young. Grandma Moses was too young. Wolverine’s too young.”

  “Philosophy doesn’t become you, Sean,” Emma said icily, “and your analogy doesn’t hold up. I wasn’t responsible for George Burns’s death.”

  “Weren’t you, by your reasoning?” Sean posed. “George Burns died of old age a few weeks after his hundredth birthday.”

  “You hustled to try to save the Hellions,” Sean said, “but you didn’t run off to Beverly Hills to feed George Burns hot chicken soup and take him for his daily walks when you heard he’d turned a hundred.”

  “I wasn’t responsible for the life of George Burns!” Emma snapped. “I was responsible for the Hellions— for their lives, and for their deaths.”

  Sean paused, realizing that his flippancy was ill-timed. He started to erect the logical roadblocks he would need to construct in the path of his colleague’s chronic selfflagellation. He did not get the chance, however, because Emma suddenly cocked her head, listening inside it, and said, “Our new student.”

  She pushed aside her uneaten roughage. Sean heard a car pulling into the driveway, kicking up gravel and corn snow as it came.

  * * *

  Walter Nowland seemed reserved, contained—quite unlike the bubbling, outgoing young man Sean had interviewed in Chicago. Emma could offer no suggestions; evidently something about the powerful static charges he emitted blocked her. However, she did notice, as the young boy took off his heavy jacket, the tattoos that lined his arms. She raised her eyebrows. Sean noticed Emma’s expression and smiled.

  Sean had discussed Walter’s tattoos with him when they had met several weeks ago. “My father once said that there are two kinds of folk in the world,” Sean had told Walter when they met back then. “There are people with tattoos and people who are afraid of being hit by people with tattoos.”

  “Your father must’ve been a Dick Van Dyke fan,” the kid told him.

  “My dad never heard of Dick Van Dyke as far as I know. We never had television in Ireland until I was about your age.”

  “Bet the first thing you got was American reruns.” “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “I remember one episode of that show,” the tattooed boy said. “Laura once got her big toe stuck in the bathtub faucet and Rob had to get a guy with a hacksaw to—”

  “Yes!” Sean suddenly reunited with an episode of his childhood. “All you saw through the whole show was her head peeking out behind the shower curtain. Dad loved that show!”

  From then on Walter and Sean got on famously. Walter then confided that he’d gotten his first tattoo when he was nine and his mother fainted. After that, dealing with his mutant power to generate electrical fields and burn rubber with his bare hands was not such a big deal.

  Now Sean studied Walter carefully to see what had changed. He looked like the same boy Sean had sparred and laughed with in Chicago those weeks ago. He just didn’t carry himself the same way. He was fairly tall, with long hair that hung around his shoulder tops.

  Harley, Walter’s father, was long, narrow, and weathered, like a Nebraska highway. His hair was as blond as his son’s, but there was only a fringe of it left along the borders of his scalp.

  “Your room’s the second door on the left up this hall. It’s all yours,” Sean said to Walter, “no roommates.” “Thank you very much,” Harley said as Walter absently ran his hands along the wall as he floated toward the room.

  “Ms. Frost and I can help you get settled if you—” “Ain’t got much stuff,” Harley said. “Just a satchel of dirty clothes. We’ll take care of it ourselves if you don’t mind.”

  “Y’know, Mr. Nowland,” Sean grinned, “I was just going to order a load of clothes for the kids. Seems somebody left a bucketful of diamond chips all over the infirmary floor. Found money for the school. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  “Diamond chips?” asked Harley. “You serious, Cassidy?”

  “Actually, yes. Transmutation accident.”

  Walter disappeared into his room with Harley behind him. “Whatever,” Harley said as he shut the door.

  “Different lad, he seems,” Sean confided to Emma outside the house on the path to the biosphere. Despite the snow, the day was too warm to see their breaths.

  “You mean unusual?” she asked.

  ‘ ‘No more than any adolescent mutant. He just seems more self-involved and quiet now.”

  “I can’t get through to him either for some reason.” Then Emma stopped. “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “I’m getting something. There’s something wrong.” “With Walter?”

  “I think—”

  And before she could finish, a branch of the snow-encrusted Scotch pine under which they stood tumbled out of the sky. Crusted crystals of settled snow whipped down from it around Sean’s cheeks for just an instant less than the time it would have taken for Banshee’s reflexes to have catapulted him out of the way of the dense, ice-logged branch that clapped him on the skull and threw
him off his feet.

  “No, I guess it was something else,” Emma said drily as she helped Sean back to his feet.

  Then they heard a deep belly laugh from somewhere above.

  High in the tree, in a black and purple haze, was the figure of a man as dense and thick as the branch he’d

  apparently tumbled down on Banshee’s head.

  “Beef?” Emma whispered and the figure faded away.

  “Another one of your late charges?” Banshee asked, blinking.

  “Yes. Did you see him?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Banshee felt a rhythmic clapping underneath his feet. Instinctively, he rattled his head and stretched his throat, ready to loose a holler that could turn the iron core of the Earth.

  Along the footpath by the side of the frozen river, Paige ran toward home with her weights in her fists. Banshee and the White Queen stepped from behind their tree, Sean still picking pine needles out from under the collar of his shirt.

  “Hey you guys,” Paige called, excited, “guess what I saw?”

  “A dead Hellion?” asked Sean. Emma shot him a look to rebuke his insensitivity, which he declined to notice.

  “Yeah, Catseye. She nearly clawed me to ribbons. Isn’t it awful?” Her tone clearly said, Isn’t it cool?

  Harley Nowland took off, telling only his son that he was leaving. Walter showed for the evening meeting just long enough to be introduced, and then Sean let it out early. He glossed over the encounters that he, Emma, and Paige had with what seemed to be the ghosts of the lost Hellions. He also agreed to Everett and Angelo’s request for a Boston excursion.

  The kids all tore off to their rooms and Sean excavated his office for the keyboard to his computer. He whipped out his web browser, tapped out the URL for L.L. Bean, and hit enter.

  With the expansion of the Internet, Banshee had discovered a new passion. As long as he could do it sitting in his big comfortable office chair in front of a web browser, he loved to shop. No trying stuff on. No waiting around for some salesperson to tell him what he or she thought. No bopping around from store to store looking over a million pairs of shoes just to make sure the first pair you saw was really what you wanted.

  Sean punched in the secret code that activated the school’s credit card account and threw papers from his second desk drawer onto the floor until he found a list of all of his students’ clothing sizes. He ordered two dozen chamois shirts and ten pairs of leather ankle boots. He ordered all sorts of fleece stuff including an annload of new sweat suits and a couple of pairs of hiking boots for Jubilee and Husk. He got in-line skates, pads, and half-a-dozen helmets for Synch and new lightweight mountain bikes for M and the White Queen. He got a few heavy thermal outfits for Skin who could use the extra support and liked everything about New England but the climate. For Penance he thought a minute and ordered a pair of Rossignol cross-country skis, a few extra pairs of poles, and a geodesic one-person tent; if he kept getting her stuff, there was always hope the girl would develop an interest in something. For Chamber he pulled down another backcountry one-person tent, some winter hiking gear, and the fattest Swiss army knife they made, the one with the little needle woven into the corkscrew. And finally, he hauled in a truckload of fly-fishing gear for Statis, the new kid: rods, reels, boxes full of gear, and one of those floppy hats in which to stick all of his hooks and lures.

  Federal Express would deliver his merchandise bright and early Monday morning. Banshee loved to shop.

  ‘ ‘Perhaps now would be a good time to speak to Walter.” Emma appeared behind him. It was not a question.

  “Is that a telepathic thing?”

  “No, it’s a woman thing.”

  Sean didn’t much like it when his headmistress finished conversations he was having with his unconscious, but he agreed. He spent the next three or four hours in Walter’s room listening and talking about the boy’s secret.

  A little after midnight the rain started.

  A few minutes before dawn, a black-clad figure rode a pillar of white heat through the storming skies. Jono wore a harness and an aluminum cone from his chest to his ankles. He could direct the psionic energy out the bottom of his chamber in a jetstream. With this rig he could actually fly, albeit slowly and for short distances. If he tried to go much farther or any faster than a person could walk, he would bum his own feet. He found a perch high in a good solid oak with a long view of the Mad River raging downstream. Here, Chamber sat and watched an annual event.

  One day a year—every single year—the river broke and the face of the land changed. Under the first good rain of March, the ice at the tops of two mountains that formed the source of the Mad River cracks, pretty much simultaneously. That cracked ice weighs against the ice downriver. Eventually, a tiny floe of melting ice drops against a slightly bigger loosening floe at the intersection of two little trickles. The weight of it all builds up speed until a bundle of cracked ice tumbles through the point where the stream down one mountain meets the stream down the other. Then river run starts in earnest. The ice starts picking up gravel and stones and moves a little faster. A rock hits an unmelted chunk of ice that breaks in a clean chunk and tumbles up and onto a cracking spot and picks up speed. The pressure of breaking up melts the ice and pushes a little harder. By the time the cracking ice under the first spring rain reaches the point where the Mad River widens enough to look like a river, water and ice and tumbling debris are screaming along at breakneck speed and the very land is subject to the vicious moods of the bending river.

  Once upon a time, when Jonothon was a little boy he read a thrilling story about a man who was so powerful he could “change the course of mighty rivers.” It happened here every year.

  Boulders traveled downriver bouncing against the banks, widening them. A tree clapped at the base of its trunk by a wad of frozen dirt leapt up into the air and left an enormous hole where its root had been for a hundred and sixty years. The river clambered hard into the hole and pressed against it with spume after spume of torrential waters until its course changed. Before the day and the storm were done, the course of this river would move half a mile to the east.

  Sometime around a hundred thousand years ago, homo sapiens supplanted Cro Magnon and Neanderthal and every other competing hominid race on the planet and it seems to have happened in just a few generations. Human genes had not changed one whit in that time. True, people were nearly a foot taller now than they were five hundred years ago, but twenty-thousand years ago humans averaged five-feet-eleven and then lost more than a foot when they stopped being hunter-gatherers and started farming the land and eating too many carbohydrates. It has taken a thousand generations to get that foot back, and human DNA still has not changed its essential nature.

  Until the twentieth century.

  Now homo sapiens were spontaneously giving birth to homo superior and the races had to learn to live together or it could all happen again.

  There were groups of dunderheads popping up in all the major cities who called themselves “Friends of Humanity.” They were an anti-mutant hate organization. They had meetings and rallies and wrote letters to newspapers and magazines and trained in the woods with automatic ordnance and occasionally got someone elected to something. Their consciousnesses knew nothing but resentment and fear—but the perception in the depths of their souls that gave birth to that resentment and fear told them that they were doomed. They were people out of their depth in a shallow gene pool.

  Inevitably, homo superior would win out, one way or another. But the generation of whom Jonothon Stars-more and his schoolmates were a member were the pioneers. They were the ones who had to deal with the Friends of Humanity and the hostile governments and the apocalyptic pseudoscientists. Jonothon’s generation were the ones who had to try to make peace because, as the world stood today, it belonged to humanity. Jono hated being a pioneer. And unlike homo sapiens of a hundred thousand years ago, Jono and his generation of mutants could not, in this world, go off
in a quiet secret cave and give birth to an army in the dark.

  No matter how inviting that image was.

  A big old tree came rolling downriver roots and all, caught in a jam between two boulders and water started rolling up and over it like a spout. The Mad River had crested its banks hours ago and the ground below the oak where Chamber perched and all the ground for a quarter-mile to either side of him was awash in angry Mad River and melting snowpack. It was all Jono could do to take it all in.

  “I love that river,” Paige had told him once. “I’ve seen the Mad River in all its moods.” The girl was a love but she wouldn’t recognize a cliche if it bit her on the butt. He should go back to the main building and get her and show her this mood.

  It was easy for Jono to think about Paige. Her florid

  cheeks. Her wild flaxen hair. The roll of her shoulders.

  Then that tree that was wedged in those boulders was suddenly free and flying violently through the storm— through the air toward Jono in his tree—roots-first. And perched atop the flying roots, riding it and hollering like Slim Pickens on the shaft of the H-bomb in the last scene of Dr. Strangelove, was a woman in purple and black and wavy blonde hair that the rain didn’t faze. And she was tossing little black and white disks at him one after the other that faded into nothingness before they reached him. But the tree....

  It was too close. It was in his face. He could blow it from the sky and himself to Kingdom Come, but instead he could—

  —snatch it!

  He rode the root of the enormous missile up into the sky. He had to shed his flying mechanism by hugging the flying tree with one arm and loosing the harness from the other, then repeating the process with the other arm. By the time he clambered up over the soaking filthy roots to the upper side of it the thing had crashed through the roof of the woods and reached the top of its arc. And the blonde woman was gone.