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."
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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