“What About Lazarus?”
6060 A.D. Stahlfast. Earth-Alpha II.
The woman took in her breath. Her eyes dilated. She went to her knees and with efficient darts of her eyes, she covered the vital points of this strange uniform with the young body inside it. Her heart pounded briefly, and when she got up again she acted like he had been struck in the face. She walked unsteadily to the rungs.
“Logan!” she called down the hole in a numbed voice. “Logan, come up here! Quick!”
She was Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Remy, born in 1756 in Fontette, France to a very poor family. Her father, Jacques de Valois, the Baron de Saint-Rémy was in a direct male-line descendant of Count Henry de Saint-Rémy, an illegitimate son of King Henry II and Nicole de Savigny. Despite having royal Valois blood, Jacques was known as a drunkard and to live from expedients. Jeanne’s mother was Marie Jossel, a debauched court servant girl. Jeanne was the third of six children. Three of the six children died in infancy: Joseph, Marie Marguerite Anne and Jean. The three surviving children, Jacques, Jeanne, and Marie-Anne, were neglected, went barefoot, tended the cows, and often found it necessary to beg for food. The family eventually moved to Boulogne near Paris where a priest and one of his rich parishioners, Madame de Boulainvilliers, took care of them.
In June of 1780, Jeanne married Marc-Antoine-Nicolas de la Motte, Mr Surmont’s nephew and an officer of the gendarmes. When it became clear that Nicolas was unable to meet the couple’s financial needs to maintain them in the extravagant style that his wife avidly desired, Jeanne resolved to ask a more generous pension from the royal family due to her royal blood. She decided to approach Marie Antoinette, as she felt the Queen, being a woman, would be more sympathetic to her plight; Jeanne therefore made frequent visits to Versailles in the hope of catching the Queen’s attention. At that time, any ordinary citizen dressed in suitable attire could enter the palace and its gardens, and observe the royal family. Nevertheless, Marie-Antoinette had been told of Jeanne’s questionable lifestyle and refused to meet her.
Jeanne ultimately became a highly placed confidence woman whose greatest scam, referred to in history as the “Affair of the Diamond Necklace,” sped the fall of the French monarchy. The French jewelry firm Boehmer and Bassenge had invested a great deal of money into the stones needed to make a great necklace of diamonds, which they attempted unsuccessfully to sell, first to Madame du Barry, the mistress of Louis XV, and then to Louis XVI’s wife, Marie Antoinette. This necklace became an incredibly expensive prop in a convoluted intrigue: Louis René Édouard, Cardinal de Rohan, was out of favor with the queen, and wished to regain her good graces. Jeanne claimed to him that she was a favorite of the queen and could effect reconciliation. She then encouraged the cardinal to correspond with the queen, but she herself provided the answers, which were inscribed by a confederate and signed with the queen’s name. Jeanne even arranged a meeting with a Marie Antoinette impersonator, and after a while the cardinal became persuaded that not only was the queen no longer angry with him, she was in love with him. Jeanne then convinced him that the queen wanted to buy the great diamond necklace, and that he should negotiate the purchase for 1,600,000 louis d’or, which he did, apparently in good faith. He then handed the necklace over to Jeanne for delivery. The deception came to light when the jewelers asked to be paid. Jeanne herself was condemned to whipping, branded with a V on each shoulder, and sent to life imprisonment in the prostitutes’ prison at the Salpêtrière. In June the following year, Jeanne escaped from prison by being disguised as a boy. She was then transported to the year 6060 A.D. by Chronarch, who offered her freedom and more if she joined him in his plans to conquer the era of this time.
The man she called Logan climbed lazily up, emitting grunts and smoke.
“Look here!” Jeanne said to him, kneeling again by the body.
Logan looked and didn’t believe it. “Where in hell’d you get that?”
Lying there, the face of the body was like snow framed by the ebon-black of the hair. The eyes were blue jewels caught in the snow. There were slender fingers reclining against the hips. But, most important of all, was the cut of the silver metal uniform, the grey leather belt and the bronze triangle over the silent heart with the numerals 51 on it.
Logan held onto the rungs. “Three hundred years old,” he whispered it. “He’s got to be three hundred years old, if his uniform be the correct sign!”
The Numerals 51 were enough for Jeanne to see. “Yes.”
“After all these centuries, and in perfect condition. Look how calm he is. Most corpse faces aren’t — pretty. Something happened, three hundred years ago, and he was left here all alone, ever since!”
“Then he is indeed ‘Number 21’, as our lord Chronarch proposed.”
Number 21 was a myth. Or, he was supposed to be. The story went that he was a traveler of time, and had been to many places during his time. But something went wrong during his last foray, and he perished because of it. Chronarch explained Number 21’s body was very likely still laced with temporal particles he could use for his own purposes, and this was why he instigated the search for his body, with Jeanne heading the expedition, a task she thought beneath her, but readily accepted since her fate was in Chronarch’s hands.
“What’s wrong?” Jeanne snapped when she saw the look on Logan’s face.
“This man,” he answered, wonderingly, “committed suicide.”
“How do you figure?”
“There’s not a mark of decompression, centrifugal force, disintegrator or ray-burn on him.”
All of that passed over her head. She just nodded for him to continue.
“He simply stepped out of a ship. Why should a Scientist of the 51st Circle commit suicide?”
“They had wars then, too,” said Jeanne, “during the time of his meandering. Perhaps…?”
“No. He should’a been messed up by meteors that fell that day. Our lord explained it to me.”
“Well, he didn’t explain it to me!” Jeanne grumbled.
“I’m think it be the fact that your a woman.”
She wanted to slap his face, but she held back. Women weren’t exactly treated well in this new time in which she had found herself lost. Except Chronarch. Chronarch treated her well, like the cunning little cat she was.
“When I was a kid, I remember thumbing through history books,” Logan said, “reading about those famous 51 Scientists of the Circle who were doing experimental work on Pluto back in the year 6200. I memorized their uniforms, and this bronze badge. I couldn’t mistake it. There was a rumor that they were experimenting with some new universal power weapon. But that was so very, very long ago.”
“A myth?” Jeanne wondered.
“Who knows? Maybe. Maybe not. But before that super weapon was completed, Earth fell beneath Mars’ assault. The 51 Scientists destroyed themselves and their Base when the Martians came. The myth says that if the Martians had been only a month later — the weapon would have been out of blueprint and into metal.”
Logan stopped talking when he realized his words meant nothing a woman not amid her own time, and instead once again looked at the long-boned, easily slumbering scientist.
“And now he shows up,” he went on. “One of the original 51. I wonder what happened? Maybe he tried to reach the future and had to leap backwards to escape the Martians. We’ve got history with us, pulled in out of space, cold and stark under our hands.”
Jeanne laughed uneasily. “You are talking nonsense now. Get him away from here and be done with it!”
In the darkness, Irene Adler watched. She had been drawn to this location seeing it so important to the Chronarch that he had the area quarantined off. She just had to see what it was that was here, and she was stunned. One of the original 51. Right there on the ground, underneath all of the pavement and dirt and piping above her. Without giving it a second thought, Irene left the darkness and rendered Jeanne unconscious, after which she gave the man called Logan a swift uppercut and chloroformed him. She then made off with “Number 51”, though it was quite the arduous journey carrying a heavier person than she. Once back at the hidden compound with the others, Irene called for Leonardo da Vinci, the Vitruvian Man to work on it.
“Fascinating,” he said, as his pumps throbbed warmly under the medical table, while manipulating tendrils darted swiftly and effectively over the dead temporal scientist’s body. Irene watched him move like the machine he was using. In a fury, he had forced Irene to hurry the body down into the preparations room, inject adrenalin, thermal units, apply the blood pump and accomplish a thousand other demanding and instantaneous tasks. He hadn’t even thanked her, but Irene couldn’t really care less about it, as long as his work and this discovery aided the cause.
Irene could see nothing. She just heard Leonardo’s voice muffled, far away now as she left him to his work. There was only the surge of pumps, the sweating heat of the little cubicle, and niche number 12 waiting to receive this body if he failed. Irene swallowed tightly. Niche number 12 waiting, cold, ready, waiting for a body to fill it, like a coffin.
She began to hear Leonardo sing-song words over and over as he injected stimulants into the body. She didn’t know where the words came from, from childhood, maybe, from his old religious memories:
“Lazarus come forth,” Leonardo said softly, bending close, adjusting the manipulatory tendrils. “Lazarus, come forth.”
Irene ignored her intuition and returned to Leonardo’s medical bay. By this point, Leonardo was speaking to himself.
“Inside his brain he’s got that energy weapon that Earth can use to end the war against that insane madman, Chronarch. It’s been frozen in there three hundred years. If we can thaw it out —”
“Whoever heard of reviving a body after that long?” Irene couldn’t help but ask.
“Oh, he’s perfectly preserved!” Leonardo insisted. “Perfectly frozen. Oh, God, this is Fate. I know it. I feel it! I found something big! Lazarus! Oh, mighty Lazarus, come forth from the tomb!”
The machines thrummed louder, beating into his ears. Irene listened, watched for just one pulse, just one beat, one word, one moment of life.
Story partially culled from Ray Bradbury’s Lazarus Come Forth, published in 1944. No copyright infringement is purposeful. This usage is for entertainment purposes only, and no money is being made from it.
Sunburst Comics 