Minister Faust by From (html) (best ereader for pdf txt) 📗

transforming the contents of a nearby grocery market into a giant stew whose lingering aroma kept neighborhood animals in a frenzy for months).

• The 1973 service for Doctor Patho saw the evacuation of forty square city blocks after her sidekick Dea Coli wept tears of pure anthrax, which a sobbing Cumulus Maximus accidentally dispersed into the atmosphere.

• Hyperhominid funerals have produced freezings, mutations, growth of vestigial organs, virgin births, impotence, chimpotence, shrimpotence, spontaneous macrophagocytosis, and interdimensional neuroflatulence.

As we saw in the previous chapter, because you as a hyperhominid believe in the myth of your own invulnerability, facing death is even more difficult for you than it is for “mere mortals.” Therefore no experience—outside of death itself—is more traumatic (and dramatic) for you than the funeral. And that is because facing funerals means discarding our idols and becoming, for the first time, independent.

And, fundamentally, more alone.

MONDAY, JULY 3, 8:00 A.M.

Independence Day

Despite the grief-stricken plans that the Pathetic Fallacy announced in The Los Ditkos Sentinel-Spectator, the weather at the sunrise funeral of Hawk King on Sunhawk Island could have dazzled a pharaoh. The disk of the sun glorified the horizon like a divine disco ball, drizzling gold along the eastern face of the distant Tachyon Tower, while the sky above us melted from orange to azure like a child’s crayons left on a hot stove.

Media outlets from FOX and ABC to Mutant TV and CAPES had been camped outside the wall of the Blue Pyramid complex since the previous night, drinking from the stream of primary-colored celebrities marching into the grounds since the dawn.

That day’s costumes were the rarely glimpsed dress uniforms and dress tunics reserved for funerals, replete with gold brocade, left-breast mission tags, ceremonial wands and scepters, gilded armor, and formal capes. Traditional bagpipes, taiko drums, and throat-singers intoned the eschatological atmosphere amid the silent witness of obelisks, the giant Ka-Sentinels, and the radiance of the Blue Pyramid. Everything combined to say that we were truly at the end of an era, the exit of an epoch, the egress of an age.

Even before the service began, it was already clear that the gathering was the largest such funeral in history, exceeding even the final services of the Götterdämmerung. Silver Agers such as the Monolith, the Evolutionist, and the gladiatrix Dynamiss were assembled, joined by Civil Rights–era stalwarts such as the Spook and La Cucaracha, and Digital Age up-and-comers such as the Beaver Brothers, the Cyberpunk, and Bag-Fulla-Asswhuppin. Even the oldest living F*O*O*Jster had arrived, the 173-year-old outgoing Director of Operations and Civil War veteran Colonel Strom Flintlock, floating in his hover-throne with the regalia of oxygen tanks and IVs like a modern-day Charlemagne. Only two people were notably absent—two living founding F*O*O*Jsters, Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid, imprisoned on Asteroid Zed.

Smaller supergroups such as the Merry Men were there, including Dazzle Man, Fabulous Man, Original Fabulous Man, Simply Fabulous Man, Rainbow Man, and Man Boy. The Bold Bots 0001 through 0110 were arranged and buffed to gleaming; the Blue Collars, the Supa Soul Sistas, the League of Angry Blackmen, the Asian Invaders, and the Mohawk-Aztec-Mayan Brotherhood Organization were joined by hundreds of unaffiliated heroes from Alpha Dog to Zed, the Living Phoneme.

Of course, the outpouring of mourning extended beyond the superheroic profession. Government and the international community were represented by President Bill Clinton, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and New Atlantis Comandante Uno Umboot Pinolawi among many others.

Suddenly everyone’s quiet reverence was ripped apart by a media tornado at the entrance of two men: Tran Chi Hanh, FKA Chip Monk, flanking his replacement mentor and the head of Human Citizen, the unrelenting watchdog on the hyper-community, Jack Zenith.

A reporter who’d sneaked in disguised as a fire engine with siren epaulets shoved a microphone into the face of the Flying Squirrel, demanding to know how he felt about Gil Gamoid and the N-Kid being prevented from attending Hawk King’s funeral, while Jack Zenith, the Squirrel’s sworn enemy, was allowed to walk in without even being jeered.

Mr. Piltdown growled, “It’s a disgrace, a travesty,” before hissing a canister of Squirrel Spray into the reporter’s eyes and nose. The man hit the ground vomiting before being scooped up and tossed outside the wall by the elongated arms of Extraneous Man.

No one had any clue that within minutes, two bombs would be detonated that would rip apart the F*O*O*J as we knew it.

Pavanne for a Dead Prince

Never one for brevity, and id-charged by such highly public moments into grandiosity, Mr. Festus Piltdown began his address by thanking Liberty Lady and Captain Manifest Destiny, martyrs of the original F*O*O*J, and then spent the next forty-eight minutes citing every conceivable connection between himself and Hawk King.

“…which is why this city, this state, this country, this planet, yea, even, dare I say, likely this very galaxy, joins me and us this morning in mourning a man-god of such magnitude, might, and magnificence.

“Because this honorable king of hawks embodied all that my gloved hands clutch at the epicenter of my heart: nobility, wisdom, determination, and unflinching defiance in the face of despots, demons, and the depraved defilers of all that is decent, right, and good!”

Mr. Piltdown put his hand over his heart, just to the left of the black-on-bronze squirrel emblem of his dress uniform. Looking up toward the milky moon in the brilliant sky, his eyes glistened.

“And I promise you, sir, my comrade, my liege, my King, wherever you are…that I will follow you into whatsoe’er battle you so will for me, for now and ever after, that perpetually will I hold fast my shield and hold high my spear, and that I will never, ever slip from this crusade divine whose fire you ignited like the sun in the space of my soul!”

Applause spattered up from many of the younger heroes in the crowd, unaccustomed as their generation was to the etiquette of such events. As Mr. Piltdown left the platform, he stooped to lay his hand on the Egyptian sarcophagus of Hawk King