Part 4

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; loving someone deeply gives you courage.

-Lao-Tzu

Caelie placed her dolls in a row. She stepped back and surveyed the neat line, then stopped for a moment. One of the buttons on her favorite doll's dress was missing. She was certain that it had been there before. She had said goodnight to her little doll last night before she fell asleep, and the row of buttons was complete. That had been before her mother went inside to make sure that Caelie had gone to bed.

Maybe her mother plucked the button off. She bit her lower lip, because Caelie knew that there was nothing she could do. Her father always told her that Caelie deserved the best. Caelie had even heard her parents arguing about her. She was five but she could feel it. It was so obvious. Her mommy didn't love her as much as her daddy did. But no one really loved her as much as her daddy did.

He was one of a kind.

But Caelie was still upset about her doll's missing button.

The door to the bedroom swung open and in stepped her friend Lex-ar. She momentarily forgot about the button when she saw how neatly pressed and slicked he was.

Lex-ar frowned at her stunned expression. "I'm going to a big person's dinner," he announced. "I look good." He fidgeted with his coat and shook his legs to show her how well his slacks fell around his ankles. It was only then that he noticed her expression. "What's wrong Caelie?"

She held up a doll towards him, and he noticed that it was the one doll that his father had bought for her. Lion-ar had asked Lex-ar to give it to Caelie on her birthday. He assessed the toy carefully, and saw the problem. Lex-ar's eyes dropped to the floor, and he started looking around, under the bed, crawling on all fours in his expensive clothes.

"It's gotta be here somewhere, Caelie."

Her pout did not leave, but she reached down idly to shuffle Lex-ar's hair as he passed by her in his search. "So soft," she murmured. "Like my doll's."

As he reached out with his arms under the bed, Lex-ar grinned. Since she was a baby Caelie had had a fascination with his golden hair. When he straightened, he had the button between his fingers. "We'll ask someone to fix her up for you."

Caelie beamed with pleasure, and graciously handed the doll to Lex-ar. "Thank you."

"Anything," he replied. Then, as was his wont, Lex-ar reached inside his jacket and drew out a thin case. Caelie knew what he would show her. She had seen it countless times before. It did not mean she did not wish to see it again, or hear what he would say. Lex-ar pushed the button on the side and a photo lit up, of a young golden-haired boy carrying a flame-haired infant in his arms. "I've taken care of you since you were very little. You should know by now I would take care of anything you need."

She took it in her hands and did not mention that she saw how someone else's hands were holding her steady even as the photo only captured the two of them.

"You should fix your hair," he told her. "Didn't you comb it?"

Her eyes widened. Even at age seven, Caelie's perspective on life was so different from others in the Argo City schools. "No time," she said breathlessly. Then she narrated a story from her prep school. "My teacher has been missing for two days." She held up her fingers. "No one can be sick for two days, Lex-ar." And she was correct. With Krypton's advanced medical technology, with which any illness can be removed with the beam of laser, no one was out of commission for more than an hour. "The Council has done something."

Conspiracy and mystery were her favorite themes, and Lex-ar was used to it. He walked over to the dresser and opened the drawer. From it he took a brush and waved Caelie over to sit on the chair. "Tell me about your theory," he said, as he started running the brush through her hair.

As Caelie launched into her thoughts on the missing teacher, Lex-ar worked quietly. She spoke of advances in methodology that the Council did not sanction. Caelie defended her teacher's right to change the content of what the schools autofed Kryptonian children. "What do you think?"

"Your hair is like the red sun," was his reply.

She frowned. "And what about my teacher?"

Lex-ar put the brush on the dresser again. "Caelie, you have found nothing to support your claim. Evidence, Caelie, is the most important thing in any investigation. Without it, your theories would only be the claims of a girl."

"Then help me find it!" she urged.

He had no intention of doing so, but Lex-ar did not want her snooping around either. If she was right, as she so often was, then it would be better not to be associated with the teacher. Krypton was so successful, according to his father, because of the Council. If the Council decided on something, then it must be followed. It would be the only way to keep Kryptonian civilization so advanced.

"Ride to school with me tomorrow," he offered.

Her response was automatic and eager. Caelie clapped. "Are we going to fly?" Lex-ar had the best solo rocket tube in their school. It strapped to his back and enabled him to fly the way people traveled in Kryptonopolis. The House of Ar, being so wealthy and influential, was able to have units imported from the capital city into Argo before anyone else.

"Strapped to me you'll get to fly."

Lex stopped the hologram. The figure, which he now vaguely recognized as truly looking somewhat like the child he had been watching, looked at him in wonder.

"You're convinced that I'm Lex-ar?" The hologram did not answer, because it was rhetorical. "Caelie, what happened to us then?"

"I am only a representation you had seen fit to preserve," she corrected him. "I am not Caelie. But if you really want, then I can tell you how you and Caelie ended based on all that you had saved." She closed her eyes needlessly. As a program, she needed no human action to retrieve data. To indicate the search completed, the hologram looked at Lex again. "Lex-ar, you preserved nothing where you should have saved the end."

"There is no end?" he clarified.

"None that you had provided for yourself." The image flickered a bit, then returned. "Lex-ar, do you want answers?"

"Isn't that what I was asking for?"

She shook her head. "Then allow the story to unfold as you had intended it to be seen."

"I am not as patient in this world as I was when I was Lex-ar then." Lex sat back in realization. He had saved nothing in the end, and he had made certain he would receive this record. If he knew himself, and by some absurd chance the hologram was not a fake, then there was something else. "It did not end," he whispered. "It had not ended yet."

"Do you want me to continue?"

"You will show me instead not the end, but what I had first believed to be the end." He hit play and saw the golden haired Lex-ar, now a full grown man, standing before the prison shuttle in which she was trapped, suspended love meant to be exiled into space. He reached and placed his hand on the cold glass.

The Dome was the place where exiles began. It stored the prison shuttles that had been used by the Council for the years before the Phantom Zone. Now here he stood, once a child well cared for by Krypton's politics, being broken and torn by the same good laws of the land he had always abided by.

"Here we are at the end, my love. Is it a happy ending?" he thought he heard her voice in his head.

As the cold of the glass that parted him from her seeped into his skin, he said aloud, "We are nowhere close to the end, Caelie." He vowed, "I will search for you even in the farthest reaches of the universe. I will not rest."

The loud noises that accompanied the arrival of the Kryptonian Security Force did not cause him to stumble away and hide the fact that he was illegally inside the Dome. Lex-ar stood there in front of the prison shuttle even as the authorities clasped him by the arms and started pulling him away. Mag-el stood on the far side, the only one who had the right to see the ejection. As her husband, Mag-el would stay inside the Dome and push the button to release her into the sky.

"No, no!" he cried out, struggling against the men who were pulling him away. "Mag-el," he pleaded, "do not allow them to do this."

Caelie's husband and Lex-ar's friend looked down in despair. He then met Lex-ar's eyes and claimed, "I cannot do anything else, Lex-ar. Just be grateful you have escaped your punishment."

His eyes wide with disbelief and outrage, Lex-ar was pushed out of the Dome's doors. The heavy latch was placed, and Lex-ar pounded on the doors. He screamed against the walls when he heard the Dome's roof part. "Stop them, Mag-el!" he yelled. "Caelie!" His voice was raw then. His limbs melted at the sound of the rocket firing.

The crime and judgment was played for Kryptonopolis. "Judged guilty of adultery and exiled into boundless space."

Lex-ar fell to his knees, clutching his gut as he stared up into the red sky. When he saw the capsule shoot out into the air, he collapsed onto his side. For endless hours, it seemed, he lay on the ground unmoving. When it seemed that ages had passed, Lex-ar picked himself up unsteadily, leaning against the Dome and pushing himself towards the Hall of Worlds.

"You have such beautiful hair, Lex-ar. It is the color of the molten lava of the Gold Volcano, came so deep and hot from the center of Krypton," Caelie's voice played in his head.

He had laughed then, he remembered. Lex-ar stumbled towards the basement of the Hall. Once there, he took a knife and stood in front of the mirror. Then chunk by chunk, he started shaving off his hair. He closed his eyes as he shed remnants of the man he had used to be.

"It's your twentieth birthday, Lex-ar," she had whispered into his ear. He had not seen her for so long. He had left her in Argo City when he joined the famed scientist Jor-el in Kryptonopolis as his apprentice in the Hall of Worlds. On his birthday, because of his great desire to catch up with his master, he had stayed in Kryptonopolis and worked. To his surprise, she had traveled from Argo City to Kryptonopolis to give him a gift on his birthday. He had opened the package to receive from her a dreamweaver.

She had placed her palm over the pad of the gift, and a miniature older image of herself appeared, with a baby in her arms. "This is my dream. His name is Col-ar, a golden son who will be all that you are."

Lex-ar had taken the dreamweaver in his hands and placed his palm over the pad. A miniature image of Caelie appeared, swathed in white and standing on a pedestal carved from a single-multifaceted jewel.

"It's the Jewel of Truth and Honor from the Palace of Marriage," she had whispered.

"This," he had replied, taking her hand in his, "is mine."

Lex-ar opened his eyes and stared at himself in the mirror. She would no longer be able to run her fingers through his hair, the way she had loved so much. He tossed the knife onto the sink and picked up a black marker. Then he went to one whitewashed wall and hastily scrawled his calculations.

"I am nothing without you," he whispered.

Numbers upon numbers, formulas upon diagrams. There was always an answer.

In the arithmetic of love, one plus one equals everything, and two minus one equals nothing.

Mignon McLaughlin