Superman Elseworlds: 'In the Name of...'

Chapter 12: Odyssey (part 7)

Extracts from the coded journals of Ishy ibn Yusuf

For a moment I wondered why I had never noticed it before.  I had looked at things in this frequency on numerous occasions, I had been in this barn hundreds of times, but I had never seen this.  It was like there was a fissure in space.  Some kind of hole.  At least, it was a hole when you looked at it straight on, but when you looked at it from the side it looked like some kind of crack or tear.

I’m not sure how long I looked at it for – I’ve noticed that there are a range of time dilations when I accelerate my perceptions and so on – but I took a relative few moments to ascertain whether there were any emissions from the hole that might be of concern.  I don’t have the technology for this kind of thing to hand, but my sensory gifts and the research I’ve looked into in order to make better use of them are a pretty good substitute, I think.  There was nothing out of the ordinary, and I think the ‘fissure’ would have been invisible to the technology we currently have.

I don’t know if that’s a good thing yet, though.

For a moment I wondered why I had never noticed it before, but then I remembered I had the sunstone and that it was the sunstone that had drawn me to this spot.

Abu had told me that the ship that had brought me here had disappeared, from this general area, when he went to check on it the day after he had hidden it.  He told me of the men he had heard about and later seen; about how they were exploring the area where the craft had landed, his conviction that they had not found the ship, and his fear that they would somehow find out about me and take me away.  He told me about how, for weeks and months he worried and worried, convinced that ‘the gift Allah (swt) had given your mother and I would be snatched away’.

Neither he nor Ammi had ever actually given much thought as to where the craft that had brought me to Earth had disappeared to.  To their mind it was a ‘simple’ matter of ‘whatever God gives He can take away’ and ‘whatever God reveals He can hide’.  After the first year of no one coming and nothing happening, they gave it even less thought.  Sometimes, they told me, when word of strange foreigners being in the area would reach them they would worry, but as the years went by they became more relaxed in that regard.

Until I messed things up, of course.

When I held the sunstone over a year ago, just before I changed everything, it told me and showed me certain things.  I understood certain things.  Now, though, I have even more questions...and I’m even more afraid of the answers.

When I looked at that ‘hole in space’, I was afraid.  That hole and whatever lay beyond it...would there be any way of coming back from this?  But then the sunstone pulsed and I felt at ease, and then I held it up and...

...and the hole widened and shimmered, and inside was something that looked more like a massive metallic walnut than any kind of ship.  It turned and rotated and then I saw that a part of it was ‘missing’ – a small area in which the sunstone could fit.

...and then I realised it didn’t just want the sunstone, it needed me in order to be complete.  ‘You two should come see this,’ I whispered.  Kam said there was nothing to see and I raised my right hand, and...

 

Extracts from the Kam’s video notes

‘This is one of those times when I hate that I can’t see what he can,’ I muttered to George as we watched Ishy stare at something invisible to us near the middle of Uncle’s ‘barn’, and then start walking around it and looking under it, and then jumping up, hovering slightly, and looking down at whatever it was that was hidden to us.