Too Many Long Boxes!
   
   

End of Summer
 

Paths of Life

by Chaim Mattis Keller

Prologue: In the year 2155...

The minute she walked into the room, I knew the dame was trouble. Every strand of her silver hair looked like the tail of a comet, but not one was out of place. Her eyes had a look that spoke of sadness and longing, but her bearing showed that she was full of life, and unwilling to give in to the gravity of life that had claimed so many other spirits. In my experience, that kind of woman could only do one of two things: she could stay clear and leave you wondering why you didn't deserve her, or she could glance your way and steal your heart. Rather than sit back and leave things to chance, I made the decision for her. I walked across the dance floor while the band was playing a slow waltz, looked her squarely in those sad, beautiful eyes and introduced myself. "May I have this dance?" I asked. "My name is Axel Starker Hawkins, but you can call me Star."

She smiled in return. "Why certainly, Mister Hawkins," she said. "This must be your first time at the New City Senior Center. Otherwise, you'd know that we're so starved for men who are willing to dance, we've had to rent robots a few times. I'm Marie."

As we danced, we talked. "Your name sounds familiar," she told me. "I've heard of you before, haven't I?"

"Possibly." I responded, in as self-deprecating manner as I could manage. "Before my retirement, I worked as a private investigator. I'd bagged some of the meanest zips (* 21st-century slang for criminals) in the galaxy, so I suppose my name may have been mentioned in the media once or twice."

"Star Hawkins! So that's where I've seen you before! Don't be so modest," she said, with a starry twinkle in her eye, "you had quite a career!"

I blushed. "Sixty years ago, yes," I admitted. "It's behind me, now."

"You look embarrassed by it," she observed. "Aren't you proud of your accomplishments? Didn't you enjoy being a detective? It must have been awfully exciting."

"Oh, it was, and I did," I told her. "But after having raised three children, I have to say that it provides a level of pride that even winning a heated blaster duel and capturing a notorious criminal doesn't. Sometimes I feel as though the Star Hawkins who lived that part of my life was a different person, with lesser needs and emotions."

Suddenly, I felt her tense up a bit. She noticed it too, and tried to hide it quickly, but I'm too good a student of human nature not to notice. Sensing my uncertainty over her reaction, she was quick to re-initiate the conversation. "Well, I think that being a private eye – that is what you called yourself, isn't it? -- must have been extremely interesting. However did you get into that sort of thing?"

I was relieved to see that she wanted to keep the conversation going, and I jumped at the chance. No way was this sparrow (* 21st-century slang for a girl) going to get away from me! "Well," I told her, I guess it began with my father...and my brother..."

Chapter 1: Parents and Pirates
The Secret Origin of Manhunter 2070

I began. "John Starker is actually my cousin, but my parents were probably the only parents he had, and as far as I was concerned, we were brothers."

Johnny's mother died when he was very young. His father Blake, who was my mother's brother...her maiden name was Starker, which is where my middle name and nickname come from...was a prospector, who was constantly traveling in search of sources of precious metals. He never stayed in one place for too long, never developed any friendships, never received a formal education, although his father did teach him to the best of his ability.

Then, one day, it seemed that their luck changed for the better. Blake Starker discovered an asteroid containing a huge lode of didanium, one of the most precious metals in the galaxy. He was about to stake his claim when suddenly their good fortune turned sour. My Uncle Blake was killed by pirates, who then took my cousin John to serve as a menial laborer.

Johnny grew up in the brutal company of the pirates. As the smallest person living amongst the pirate crew, he was the subject of outrageously cruel physical abuse. In addition to his ordinary task of washing dishes and serving food, he was given the most degrading tasks that the pirates could imagine. And every day, while enduring the taunts, lashes and orders of the pirates, he had to live with the fact that he was forced to spend his every waking minute in the company of the men who killed his father, impotent to do so much as speak out against them.

After a number of years of living amongst the cutthroats, his hatred of them developed to such a point that it overcame his fear of them. His heart grew colder and colder, until he could no longer think of anything but destroying them. He dedicated the next few years of his life to the task. He observed them carefully, learning how to fight both with weapons and without. He secretly worked out, increasing his body's strength to the best of his abilities, and learning how to aim weapons with deadly accuracy. He explored every nook and cranny of the ship. When he was eighteen, he made his move. First, he beat up the ship's cook, who had been his taskmaster for all those years, and took his job. When he saw that the other pirates accepted this, he knew that he could proceed with his plan. As the ship's cook, he was privy to much more knowledge of its functioning than as a mere servant boy. When he felt he had learned all that he needed to know, he struck. One by one, he hunted down and killed the pirates who were directly involved in the killing of his father. He used the ship's own defenses to paralyze the other pirates, and he turned them in to the nearest law-enforcement authorities. He earned an enormous bounty for turning them in...but, more importantly to him, he laid his father's spirit to rest.

After that, my mother was alerted to the death of Uncle Blake, which had gone unreported all those years while the pirates held Johnny. She organized an official funeral for him, and it was there that we saw Johnny for the first time in almost fifteen years. The child my parents had remembered had become an adult in body and intelligence. But beneath the surface, they saw how his suffering had left him cold and unfeeling, with nothing in his heart save a longing for his father which had driven his every action since the murder years earlier.

After the funeral, my parents went over to John and asked, "Where are you going from here?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "I suppose I can buy a home with the money I got from the police for capturing the pirates."

My mother was almost crying. "Johnny, you could certainly buy yourself a house, but it won't be a home. You've been through a terrible ordeal, and the best place for you to be wouldn't be alone in a house stewing over memories, but with family who love you. Please, say you'll stay with us."

Johnny didn't have much experience with love, but he could feel inside him that he would benefit more from being with us than he would from being alone. He agreed, and ever since then, I had an older brother.

At the beginning, he was very tense. He was formal and polite, but the stony, emotionless expression on his face almost never changed. In those early years, my hanging around him must have been quite a trial. My childhood was everything his wasn't, and my naïve questions about his experience must have, at times, made him upset. But he never showed it. Instead, he seemed to understand my childish lack of empathy for his pain, and, as if striving to preserve an innocence he was never allowed to maintain, opened up to me. In time, as he came to appreciate the uses of having an emotional outlet, he began to open up somewhat to my parents as well, as he had mature things to speak of which weren't yet for my ears. It was a testimony to my parents' belief that parental love is the one constant need in everybody's life, and that no one forced to grow up without it could truly be happy.

But although his emotional health improved greatly in our home, his father and what had happened to him were always in the forefront of his mind. Of course, we never thought he'd forgotten his father, but it was never so obvious as on one specific day, after he had lived amongst us for a few years. I was seventeen years old at the time. My parents sat us both down to chat.

"Sons," my father began, "it's time you learned the facts of life."

I interrupted. "I don't know about Johnny, but Mom told me about that stuff five years ago."

"Not that kind," my mother said. "Be quiet and listen."

My father continued. "You're growing up in a confusing world. Your mother and I have lived through World War III and we've seen the rigid order of nationalism give way to the chaos of war and anarchy and finally emerge into the global unity you see around you today. You know how the united Earth quickly began space exploration and colonization, and how many new races we come into contact with every day. You'll meet beings whose thought processes are so totally alien to you and whose beliefs are in conflict with what you've been taught..."

"To survive in the world, you have to know just who and what you are. Everyone has a place in the universe, and you have to know what your place is. You have to have a solid idea of what path your life is meant to take, because today, there are more options in life than anyone every imagined, and to try to blindly find satisfaction without first knowing who you are is impossible."

My mother picked up from there. "As parents, there's nothing more important to us than to see that you're happy. And doing what you want to in life is the key to being happy and satisfied. When you were born, Star, we set up a growth fund to ensure that lack of money would not be a hindrance in following your life's path. When you came to live with us, John, we set up another."

Johnny interrupted. "That's not necessary, Mom. I received that large bounty when I turned in the pirates..."

Mom cut him off. "John, you're free to supplement the money you receive from us with anything else you want, but we won't let you refuse us. We consider you our own son, and when you find your path in life, we want to know that some part of your lifelong satisfaction came from us."

Johnny was not an emotional man, but he was visibly moved. "Thank you," he said quietly.

My father once again took over. "When you're sure of what you want to do with your lives, come to us. We want to help you fulfill your potentials as human beings. We'll release the funds to you to set yourselves up with whatever you require. All we ask is that you search your own hearts, that you know yourselves well enough to be certain that the path you choose will make you happy. Don't ruin your lives to please others. Be yourself, and the confusion of the universe will not be your problem."

For the next few days, that was all Johnny and I talked about to one another. He had already had his mind set on what he wanted from life. "Axel," he told me...he never called me Star, since it's a shortening of his own last name..."I'm going to end crime."

"That's a pretty big job," I said. "How are you going to manage it?"

"It won't be easy," he said, "but I know that I'll never truly be happy until I can be sure that no one will ever die like my father did, and that no child will ever have to grow up the way I did." He threw punches at the air, acting out the violent thoughts that were going through his mind. "I'm going to get other criminals the same way I got the pirates who killed my dad. One by one, I'll hunt them down until they're all dead or jailed...and until people begin to see that crime doesn't pay."

"You really think you can do it?" I asked.

"I have to think I can do it," he said. "Here, amongst the civilized planets, police are pretty good at keeping crime to a minimum, but I know that out there, where my dad died, it's rampant. I'll never be happy inside until the situation is fixed."

"Then I wonder if you'll ever be happy."

"If I don't try to do this, I know I never will."

That night, he sat down with my parents and told them that he felt it was his destiny to be a bounty hunter out on the frontier. My father had a collection of pre-war fiction and, with his encouragement, both of us used to read from it a lot. His favorite stories were tales of the North American western frontier, in which a single skilled gunman could walk into a lawless town, declare it his own, and clean it up. The thrill of hunting down a criminal in hiding particularly excited him, as it evoked in him the feeling he got when he was stalking the murderers of his father on the pirate ship. Motivated by his and his father's tragedies and inspired by those tales of courage and resourcefulness, he came up with a plan for carrying out his crusade, and presented it to my parents.

My mother was upset. "Are you still so consumed with hatred that you're going to dedicate your life to pursuing it?"

"No, Mom...I love you and Dad and Axel, and I have much more inside me than I did before you took me in. You opened your hearts to me, and I'll be forever grateful for that. But what happened to my Dad and me wasn't because of a few bad people. It was because of a whole space sector where respect for other sentient beings' rights is a total joke. It could happen again, and I have the power to prevent that. How will I ever live with myself if I don't?"

My parents weren't happy about it. They knew that if he followed such a path in his life, he'd never be completely satisfied. But they recognized that some childhood traumas can't be completely overcome through application of love, no matter how much. They realized that there was no way that they'd ever be able to dissuade him. My father stood up and shook his hand. "Make us proud, son," he said. "Remember that we love you, and don't measure your success by how close you are to completing your goal, but by how well you're following the path you've chosen."

Johnny took the money from my parents and from the bounty he got from the capture of the pirates and set himself up in business. He constructed a satellite to use as a home and as a base of operations, bought a robot that served him as a companion and was also connected to a network of information on criminals at large. He bought all sorts of exotic weapons. He bought starships and specialized vehicles that could take him to any locale he could possibly need to go in pursuit of a quarry. It wasn't long before criminals began to tremble upon hearing the words "Starker, bounty hunter." My brother was a hero.

"Wow," Marie said. "So he caught criminals like you. I'll bet that's why you got into it?"

"Maybe a little, but not consciously," I said. "I had my own reasons. For one thing..."

She interrupted me. "Did that poor man ever have peace in his life?" she asked, obviously touched by my description of my brother's life.

"In a way," I told her. "I guess you could say he got religion."

A few years into his career, he developed a reputation for enjoying the chase, and people began to call him a manhunter. He liked this, and, adding to the nickname the date of the beginning of his career, he became known as Manhunter 2070. Not long after that, he began noticing something odd. Many places he went he began to see something off in the corner of his eye. At first, he didn't think anything of it and wrote it off to his subconscious, but as time wore on, he realized someone was following him, carefully staying just out of his sight. He was seeing that person in his peripheral vision, and he wondered whether his mysterious follower was allowing herself to be seen, or whether the fact that he noticed her was an error on her part. Eventually, he began looking intentionally toward the edge of his field of vision, and in time, he managed to make out her features: a blue-faced humanoid female, dressed mostly in red. Finally, after he'd decided he'd observed her well enough, he turned the tables and followed her.

He traced her to Earth, to the Himalayan Mountains, where he found her sitting on a throne of some sort of temple. "Welcome, John Starker," she said. "Are you a Manhunter?"

For some reason, he felt in awe of her, or perhaps of the grandeur of the temple. He composed himself and replied, "I am. Who are you, and why have you been following me?"

"I am a Manhunter," she told him. "And I am the last of my kind. You have taken upon yourself a name that is reserved for a select few, and if you wish to use it, you must prove to me that you are worthy."

She was smaller than he was, but for some reason, her voice bore authority. Johnny respectfully addressed her and asked her, "What do you mean?"

"The name Manhunter represents a tradition that is more than three billion years old," she said. "A race of immortal beings who arrogantly called themselves the Guardians of the Universe created a corps of Manhunter robots to patrol the galaxy and rid it of evil. We served them faithfully for millions of years, until we came to recognize that the Guardians themselves were evil, creating us to fix their errors while they sat in comfort avoiding genuine labor. We refused to serve them any longer and rebelled against them, but they proved to be stronger than we were, and we were stripped of the power they gave us and scattered amongst the stars."

"But we remained committed to the eradication of the Guardians' evil and could not be suppressed for long. As robots, we had infinite patience, and over time, we managed to find other sources of power and to band together with other Manhunters again. We increased our resources by acting as bounty hunters, and there were none more feared than we. This time, though, we recognized the danger in confronting the Guardians or their new corps of warriors directly, and we instead spent our time on worlds which never made contact with the Guardians, building up our power base for the eventual confrontation."

"A little over one thousand years ago, we Manhunters discovered Earth. We recognized the potential of Earthlings to develop into powerful beings, and took note of their warlike manner. We understood that control of Earth could be a good strategic move, and we spent centuries developing the Manhunter base on Earth and recruiting human agents to act in our interests, several of which used the name Manhunter, as you do."

"In the late twentieth century, the Guardians came to Earth with a plan to impose their ideas of progress on the human race. The Manhunters, unwilling to stand idly by while the Guardians corrupted the entire planet, tried fighting them, but they duped the super-heroes of Earth into serving their cause, and they defeated us. We were unable to prevent them from putting their plan into action and destroying most of us. However, the Manhunters intelligently had the foresight to set aside one agent to remain secretly active for another one thousand years, so that the end result of the Guardians' experiment might yet be destroyed further down the line."

Johnny began to understand. "And that's you."

"Yes," the Manhunter told him. "My primary mission is to sit quietly for a millennium and destroy the end result of the Guardians' plan, but my secondary programming mandates that I ensure that the name Manhunter does not become diluted through indiscriminate use. If you wish to use that name, you must earn it."

"What about the Guardians?" Johnny asked her.

"The Guardians were eventually all slain by their own greatest warrior after he discovered their evil and deceit for himself," the Manhunter said.

Johnny accepted her tale and asked her, "How can I prove myself to be worthy?"

"You are already an excellent hunter of men," she told him. "I have watched you, and your skills are superb. But on occasion, when a mission takes too long, you abort it and cut your losses."

"Well, of course," Johnny said. "There's more criminal scum out there that need to be caught. How many people might be dying while I'm chasing one guy?"

"A valid concern," she said, "but not for a Manhunter. For billions of years now, the Manhunter creed has been 'No man escapes the Manhunters.' If you are to use our name, you must take our vow."

Johnny must have been extremely conflicted then. He was committed to hunting down criminals, but he also felt the call of billions of years of tradition beckoning for him to join. His crusade was a lonely one, and he knew it might never be completed. But as part of a greater society of Manhunters, even if it had dwindled to one robot, meant a sense of continuity and community that he couldn't resist. "No man escapes the Manhunters," he vowed.

"Then go forward, Manhunter 2070, and bring honor to our name," the lady robot told him. "May fortune smile upon you."

Ever since that incident, Johnny was a different man. He was still a crusader against crime, but now, there was an air of peace about him, a feeling of satisfaction beyond anything we'd ever seen in him before. My father especially noticed it and believed that Johnny had genuinely found his life's path at last.

"So, how did he end up?" Marie asked me.

"Ever since then, he remained true to the creed that he swore loyalty to, and relentlessly pursued every criminal he set his eye on," I told her. "He began to ignore how long a mission took and instead dedicated himself to completing it thoroughly. After several years like this, he disappeared without a trace, and no one knows what became of him."

"Really!" Marie said, sounding surprised. "Your parents must have been devastated!"

"My mother was," I said, "but my father didn't seem to feel badly at all. He knew that Johnny had taken on the commitment to let no man ever escape him and that that was the path Johnny's life was intended to take. I was already a private eye by then and I offered to search for him, but my father practically forbid it. He was sure that Johnny was doing what he was always meant to do, and didn't want to interfere with that."

"That sounds so cold!" she said, shocked. "How could he not even care?"

"Oh, he cared," I said. "But to him, caring meant respecting the way of life that Johnny chose...even if it meant our losing him to it forever."

Continued on Next Page!

Letters Editor Chaim Mattis Keller, aka Legion-Reference-File Lad, is a computer programmer who lives in New York City with his wife and four children.

 
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