Chapter Five: The Pitfalls and Pleasantries of Kryptonian Multiplication

Chapter Five

*Explanation and Exasperation*

“Uh oh,” Clark said as he and his parents came in for a landing on his balcony.

“Is there a problem?” Jor-El asked.

“Yeah, those other two are back, and Lois looks pretty steamed.”

“Steamed?” his mother asked. Clark thought she might be a linguist, with all of the definitions she’d been asking him for, both before and during their flight. If she were, it would surely explain why he liked writing so much, since Martha and Jonathan Kent were more “doers” than writers.

“You’ll see,” he answered, leading the pair through his bedroom window as the male Kryptonian just inside the doorway to his apartment asked when he would return.

“Right now,” Clark answered him. He saw Lois turn to watch Jor-El and Lara, and opened his mouth to ask what the other Kryptonian pair wanted, but Jor-El spoke first.

“Lady Zara of the colony of New Krypton, I presume?”

Silence answered the question, and then Lois asked Clark, “Who?” as Zara mentally breathed, *Lord Jor-El, Lady Lara.*

Clark interjected telepathically to Zara, *You know them?* Then, he said with a shrug to Lois, “Don’t look at me, I’m just as stumped as you are.”

This statement seemed to surprise the elder Kryptonian, for he said, “Surely, my son, you were diligent in your studies?”

At this question and the double distraction of Zara’s, *Only from images in historical records taken from Krypton,* Clark blinked. “Well, yes,” he answered Jor-El, “but no teacher I know had even so much as heard of Krypton before three years ago, much less a whole colony of Kryptonians.”

“Did you not receive the lessons I sent with you in the capsule’s memory banks?”

“You mean the five messages in the globe?”

“No,” Lara interjected, stepping farther into the room. “Although we had hoped you would not need it, the ship itself held the knowledge you would need to function competently among other Kryptonians, should you encounter them.”

Jonathan spoke up then. “I think I understand what happened here.”

“Oh!” Clark exclaimed, realizing he’d been remiss as a host. Taking a moment to spin into casual clothing--a feat which, he was pleased to note, seemed to impress Jor-El and Lara--he introduced Lois and his parents to . . . his other parents. “Martha and Jonathan Kent, Lois Lane, this is Jor-El and Lara.”

While the three humans made their greetings verbally, Jor-El and Lara nodded politely.

*To be “steamed,” then, is to be annoyed?* Lara asked him silently once the formal introductions had been made.

Clark mentally chuckled. *Annoyed, irked, angry--take your pick,* he answered.

“Please, Jonathan Kent,” Jor-El said, unknowingly interrupting Clark’s conversation with his mother. “Do continue.”

“Just ‘Jonathan’ will be fine; family names are reserved for more formal occasions here,” Jonathan advised before clearing his throat. He waited for Jor-El’s nod, then continued, “When Clark’s ship first landed, a few strange people--rogue elements, I guess you could call them--kept coming by our house in Kansas asking about meteorites and such. Martha thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the ship, so that suspicions would die down. I buried it nearby three days after we found Clark, but somebody found it anyway.”

Lois took up the tale, and Clark--who was still processing the fact that there really was more knowledge of Krypton that he’d missed--was grateful for the opportunity to keep silent.

“Clark didn’t even see the ship until three years ago, when Bureau 39 and Jason Trask were trying to find him,” she explained. “Bureau 39 is--was--a branch of the military which was supposedly shut down nearly fifteen years ago. They believed that Clark was the scout for an alien invasion, and basically wanted to kill him.

“And Trask nearly succeeded once, too,” Martha interjected from the sofa area. “That was the first time any of us had ever seen Kryptonite. Clark was at about human strength for the better part of a day and a half.”

“You call him Clark?” Lara asked Martha.

“Well,” the other woman answered, hands fidgeting in her lap. “We didn’t really know what else to call him, so we named him for my family. Before Jonathan and I were married, I was Martha Clark.”

“It is an honorable name which brings one to reflect on one’s ancestors,” Jor-El intoned.

David, forgotten at the top of the entry staircase with Zara until Clark heard him speak, quietly mused, “This changes our plans considerably.”

“It changes nothing, Ching,” the woman--Lady Zara, Clark mentally corrected himself--answered just as softly. “Especially not our need for Kal-El’s assistance or our lack of time before New Krypton is plunged into civil war.”

-----

“New Krypton, huh?” Lois asked from the couch where she sat between Martha and Clark. “Not very imaginative, is it?”

“It was to be a temporary name,” Jor-El explained as he paced in front of the television set, Lara standing silent by the bedroom archway. ”The expedition on which Lady Zara’s family embarked was to be the first of many Kryptonian colonial expeditions, and each new colony was to call itself New Krypton for the space of five years, after which the colony’s elders were to choose a more appropriate name.”

“Unfortunately,” Zara continued the explanation, “mere weeks after the expedition was launched, Krypton was destroyed. My father and the other expedition leaders spent ten years searching for a habitable planet, desperate and despairing because when the last transmission from Krypton was not followed by any more, they realized that they were the last of a once-proud race with no homes to return to. Either the colony would survive, or the Kryptonian race would become extinct. The elders, my father among them, unanimously agreed to keep the name New Krypton, in honor of their dead home. It is perhaps a mercy that the colonists were sent at the same time as those searching for a suitable world, otherwise there would have been no possibility of life past the third generation due to the risks inherent in too much inter-breeding.”

“But why did the colonial expeditions start so late?” Martha called from the kitchen, where she’d gone to make some tea for their guests. As she walked back into the living room with a tray full of cups and saucers, she continued, “If Earth were dying, and I had warning, I think I’d want to get as many people as possible off of the planet, and the sooner, the better.”

Zara, regal even in shame, hung her head. “Jor-El himself--” she nodded at the older man, “--repeatedly warned the council of the imminent demise of Krypton.”

“But?” Lois prodded.

“The council,” the lady answered, “were mostly too proud to believe him, and those who might have listened--my father, Sen-Ra, included--were afraid that the knowledge would cause hysteria among the masses. Instead, the council decreed that colonial expeditions would be sent in five-year intervals to increase trade between Krypton and the other peoples of the twenty-eight known galaxies.” The last Zara said through her teeth, eyes hard and distant.

“But if you know about twenty-eight galaxies,” Martha questioned, “why didn’t you have trade already? And why not go to one of those already-inhabited planets?”

Jor-El answered, “Krypton once did do much trading with other planets, but thirty years ago, no Kryptonian had left the planet in over three millennia. We became a race of reclusive, complacent scholars. By then, we knew of no other civilized races which would take in Kryptonian refugees, and many on the council felt it best to strike out on our own until we could re-build those diplomatic ties which had unraveled throughout the millennia.”

Ching, who had taken a position standing at attention behind Zara’s seat on the stairs, elaborated. ”Now, only ten thousand out of what was once a population of ten billion still live, barely surviving on the only habitable planet to be found after the death of our home world. Were it not for the final visuals received from Krypton’s satellites before their annihilation, we would not have known that Kal-El yet lived.”

Lois looked at Jor-El and Lara just as they looked at each other, familiar blank looks on their faces. ”You look surprised,” she remarked.

“Yes,” Lara answered. “We knew the time limit we had before Krypton’s end, but Kal-El had just come to the age when the birth-marriage ceremony was to be performed. The council--”

“Birth WHAT?!?” Lois shouted, jumping to her feet.

“--would have been suspicious if the ceremony was not done, so we found it fortuitous that Sen-Ra, who had recently had a daughter, would be leading the first colonial expedition within weeks.” Lara had continued throughout the younger woman’s outburst.

Somewhere in the back of her consciousness, Lois registered Clark’s arms coming around her as he asked, “The WHAT ceremony?”

Each of the eight people gathered in the small apartment began to speak at once, and there was a sudden cacophony. Lois wondered if it was as loud telepathically as it was verbally.

A shrill whistle cut through the din of argument.

“Enough!” Martha shouted into the sudden silence. She waved in the general direction of the clock on Clark’s VCR, and Lois--kind of concerned at the tangents her thoughts had been taking that night--was amazed that it showed the same time as the watch on her wrist, since her own VCR was constantly flashing “12:00.”

Martha continued, her voice softer, “It’s late, Jor-El and Lara have had a long journey, and I’m sure Lois and Clark have to work in the morning. We’ll all be able to better appreciate what’s being said after we’ve had some sleep anyway.”

“Of course,” Jor-El acknowledged the wisdom of her statement. “Let us then retire.”

“I guess I should get going too,” Lois muttered around a yawn. Giving Clark a kiss which even she had to admit was meant as a possessive gesture, she said, “I’ll see you at the Planet. It was nice to meet you, Jor-El, Lara.”

“Wait, Lois,” Clark said. “I’ll just get everyone settled here, and then I’ll fly you home.”

“Okay, but make it quick; if I sit down I’ll fall asleep, but if I stay standing I may not stay that way for long--I’ll fall over, asleep where I stand.”

She returned the soft smile he gave her, then watched as her fiance organized things. “Mom, Dad, you’ve gotten set up in the guest room, right?” He turned to Jor-El and Lara, pointed with his thumb back through the archway toward the balcony and said, “You can take my bed, through there. I’ll take the couch--or the air above it, anyway.”

“That may not be wise, Kal-El,” Zara said, and Lois’s fists clenched at her sides. She didn’t want to break her nails trying to claw the woman’s eyes out of their sockets.

“Oh, would you leave him alone?” The words jumped out of her mouth unexpectedly. “He hasn’t seen them since he was a baby, and all you can do is talk about wisdom? And what’s so ‘unwise’ about giving up his own bed for his parents’ comfort, anyway?”

“Nothing,” Zara answered. “However, it would not be wise for the parents of Superman to be seen staying with Clark Kent.”

“Superman?” Lara asked, and Lois guessed that Clark hadn’t filled his birth parents in on the whole “defender of truth, justice and the American way” thing yet.

“Another topic which can wait until tomorrow to be discussed,” Martha interjected. ”And Zara’s right. Jimmy was told that Superman’s parents were coming, and he already sees Jonathan and me as Clark’s parents. But where else could they go? They couldn’t go to Lois’s place.”

“There is sufficient room at the place we have inhabited during our stay on Earth,” Zara offered. ”Of course, it would only be temporary, but it would keep Superman’s parents from association with Clark Kent, and allow people to believe that Kryptonians as a whole, and not just the one individual they know, are solitary--or at least extremely insular--beings, thereby perpetuating the illusion you have cultivated that Superman goes to some remote and untraceable place when he is not helping the people of Earth.”

“I hate it when they’re right,” Lois mumbled.

“Who?” Clark whispered. “Zara and Ching?”

“No,” she answered, forgetting in her fatigued state that she really had no reason to be jealous of Zara, just as she had none in Mayson Drake, Toni Taylor, Antoinette Baines and Lana Lang. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t hate it when they were right.

-----

The colonel had taken the corporal’s report, and made his own report in person to General Taineckew.

“And inside the ship?” the general asked once the colonel had finished speaking.

“The reconnaissance team was unable to attain entry with the standard equipment, and has been ordered to return upon acquiring alternate means of entry.”

“Very well,” Taineckew nodded, the gears turning in his head. “Keep me informed as to their progress, Colonel. Dismissed.”

The colonel clacked his heels together smartly, snapped off a salute, pivoted in place, and left the general’s office as Taineckew reached for the intercom on the far corner of his desk.

“Reed, get me Cash,” he commanded his aide. “I want a contingent on standby in Metropolis on the double!”

Chapter Six