Chapter 6: Voices
From the far end of the kitchen, Lex watched Kal-El stop in the entrance hallway, standing uneasily at the door frame that led to the kitchen. Before today, Lex had never seen the alien in person before — at least, not this close up. Not like this. Not close enough to kill him.
Once, about 15 years ago, Lex had seen him at some charity ball or another, not long after Lionel Luthor died. Lex had attended with Lois, and there Kal-El had been — even though charity had never been a concern of his, not even for appearances or hidden advantage as Lionel had done. Throughout the evening, Kal-El had hovered on the edges, watching them. Or more likely, watching Lois, who had already begun her investigative reporting on Kal-El for the Daily Planet. Although she had been obviously angry at the situation, she had called Lex paranoid, and determinedly ignored Kal-El, not even approaching him for an impromptu interview.
Lex had never seen Kal-El in such close proximity again, until today. Lex knew this. He reminded himself of it, because other spaces in his mind were telling him something very different. He had let them take over for a moment, and had let Kal-El live to now stand in his mother's house, albeit held safely at bay by the ring.
Lois, meanwhile, without a word left Kal-El at the door and walked over to the counter island, where she placed the device she had taken from him.
It suddenly struck Lex that whatever was going on, it could all be related. "Where did that come from?" he asked.
"The old LuthorCorp plant in Smallville," Lois answered.
Lex looked across the room at Kal-El. "Any chance it was on Level Three?"
Kal-El frowned, then granted, "Yes."
"This must be what Dolman was looking for all morning." Lex gave Kal-El a tight, bitter smile.
"What did he say about it?" Kal asked, but Lois cut him off.
"It would have been great if we could have asked Dolman himself, but we can't. So hold off your interrogation for the moment. We're going to deal with this my way. Because they have to understand something first — why any of this concerns them."
Martha looked taken aback at Lois's abrupt dismissal of the Terror of Kansas, but Lex stifled an appreciative laugh. The woman was fearless, no doubt about that. The Terror himself folded his arms and was silent.
Lois looked, in fact, more wary facing Lex and Martha than she was facing Kal-El. With the air of one deciding to plunge in and get it over with, she said, "Evidence strongly suggests that Lex's biological parents were Lionel Luthor and his wife Lillian."
Lex looked at Martha, who seemed just as nonplussed as he felt. Indicating Kal-El across the room with a jerk of his head, he asked Lois, "Did he tell you that?"
"No, but with his complete access to all the government records in this area, he confirmed what I've suspected for a long time. Lionel's wife Lillian left him in 1979. Some seven months later, an unknown woman gave birth to you before she died. I believe it was Lillian."
Martha broke in. "How can you know?"
"The evidence is circumstantial, but —"
"It's not," Kal-El said from the doorway. "I've run a DNA test. Your son's matches Lionel's."
Clearly this was news to Lois. "How did you get his DNA?"
Kal-El shrugged. "It wasn't that hard. I've had a blood sample since before he left for Washington — when he had a doctor here. I was interested in studying people who had been physically affected by the meteor crash."
Lois was visibly struggling to rein in her temper at this revelation. To Lex, having a blood sample stolen years ago by Kal-El was the least shocking thing he had heard in the last two minutes, or all day. He could hardly take in the idea of his Luthor parentage; instead, something else consumed his attention, and he asked his wife, "You said you've suspected this for a long time — why?"
"When I was Metropolis U. — when I briefly had that LuthorCorp scholarship — Lionel Luthor hired me to investigate Lillian's disappearance. My investigation led me to you. I never told him, or anyone, what I found out."
"Or anyone," Lex repeated quietly. "Certainly not me."
"I thought it was too dangerous that anyone know. Too dangerous for you. I was trying to protect you." She paused, then said sincerely, "I'm sorry."
It was hard to forgive her when Lex couldn't quite grasp how angry he was, or whether he understood her reasons. So he just said, "You didn't tell Lionel Luthor — that's why you lost that scholarship?"
"No, he never even knew how close I got. I crossed him in other ways."
It was a family trait, crossing Luthors. Lois's cousin Chloe had done so and had paid for it with her life — another one of Pete's grievances. A grievance against my father, Lex thought distractedly, testing the notion.
"What does this have to do with why Kal-El is here?" Martha asked. "Or with Lex being kidnapped this morning?"
"Or you being here," Lex said to Lois. "Why are you here?" With him was merely implied.
"He wanted my help," she said with a sardonic glance at Kal-El, "and since he's not able to ask for it like a normal person, he brought me to Metropolis forcibly. I'm here in Smallville, though, of my own free will."
She flipped open the device on the counter and said, "What no one ever knew was why Lillian left her husband. This thing has a possible answer to that mystery. And the answer seems to have something to do with the Kent family."
She haltingly hit a sequence of keys on the device, as if working her way through something memorized quickly; once she stopped and threw a glance toward Kal-El, who instructed, "The one on the right," and she nodded and continued. Unadorned boxes on the screen flashed lines of text and numbers, until finally she stopped, and a voice emanated from the machine.
Hesistant at first but gradually gathering urgency, the voice was immediately familiar to Lex, but it took a sentence or two for him to place it.
He was listening to the voice of Kal-El.
"This is an important message for Lillian Luthor," it said. "This is ... Clark. You don't know me, but if you can just trust me — your life may depend on it. You've got to get away from your husband, from Lionel. I have information, proof that he killed his own parents, and he will cause nothing but harm to you and your baby. For your son's sake, and for your own, you have to get him away. And secretly. People who have known about the murders of his parents have died for it. Don't tell him where or why you're going, just get away."
There was a silence; then with a sigh, the voice muttered with chagrin, "What am doing?" before it was interrupted by a sharp, cranky exclamation in the background.
"Kent! Do you think you can grace us with your presence at the meeting?"
"Uh, sorry, I'll be right there —"
Click.
The message ended.
Lois stood with her arms folded and a pensive frown on her face. Even though she had heard the recording before, Lex had noticed her twitch slightly at the shouting man in the background.
Martha spoke first, directing her words to Kal-El: "Clark Kent? I don't know what you meant by recording this, but you did your homework, didn't you? Clark is my family name."
"I had forgotten that," Kal-El said with genuine surprise. "And I didn't record this. At least, I don't remember doing any such thing yesterday, which was when the message was made, according to that device. It was created at 4:04 in the afternoon, and I have nine people who can vouch for my presence at that hour."
"Of course, time stamps can be faked," Lex said.
"So can voices. But I had that one computer-analyzed this morning, and the analysis said it's beyond a doubt mine." He added, "The message was sent more than eight hours after it was recorded, at 12:43 last night. My employees found the device about an hour after that."
Someone had sent a message and changed everything. That was what Dolman had been trying to explain all morning. But Lex hadn't sent it. Neither had Dolman.
"The odd thing is the message's destination," Lois said. "It was sent to a phone number that Kal-El says is still a working one at the Luthor penthouse — in a room that used to be Lillian's office. But it also was sent to a time. And that time was about a month before Lillian disappeared."
"When she decided to take the caller's advice," Martha said.
"I said to Kal, what do we really know about his race's physiology? Maybe their voices are not unique. If another one of his kind were here before, those time stamps could be wrong, or they could be mistranslating some kind of alien time. I don't know, maybe Kal's biological father sent that message, but why? And why ... make up that name? And how —"
"No," Lex said. "Dolman invented that device. He even had a name for it. Chrono ... something. Time. It communicates through time."
"And who is Clark Kent?" Martha asked.
"Kal-El is Clark Kent. Or he was, before he sent that message yesterday and" — Lex's smile was ironic, yet almost affectionate, as he borrowed Dolman's words — "thoroughly botched it for the rest of us."