The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [31]
Alura used her botanical genius to breed special plants for medicinal uses. She had developed flowers that produced fragrances or pollens laden with stimulants, analgesics, antibiotics, immune-system boosters, antivirals, and other drugs. During his sleep, Zor-El had been surrounded by a bouquet of the strongest medicines his wife could arrange.
Now, as he struggled to sit up, he noticed that the bedside table was stacked with documents, messages, and urgent requests—items of important Argo City business. With a groan, he turned in the other direction and saw Alura there, watching him. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
“Now, it’s time you told me what happened to you—and where these came from.” She tapped a nightstand on which rested six small dark chunks of hardened lava. The pure black was stained rusty brown from his dried blood. While he had lain unconscious, she had extracted them from his wounds.
His ribs and side were bound with thin, dissolving leaves overlain with tight bandages; his injured arm had been slathered with healing ointments and completely wrapped in gauze. Fortunately—he thought after looking at the pile of documents to review—it wasn’t his writing hand.
He propped himself up on his elbows on the foamweave and told her about the eruptions, the ever-building lava pressure, the readings he had gotten from the diamondfish, and how he had lost all his data in the hrakka attack. “I have to go to Kandor immediately. I need to see Jor-El. He’s got to know what I learned. No one else suspects—”
She pushed him back down. “You have to recover first. A minimum of five days.”
“Impossible! Jor-El and I—”
“Very possible. In geologic time, five days is nothing, and you cannot save Krypton if you drop dead in your tracks because you won’t take care of yourself.” She indicated the stack of documents and decrees. “These may be shorter-term emergencies, but you have responsibilities to Argo City as well. You made that choice.”
Zor-El sighed. “Yes, it was my choice.” Unlike his brother, who entirely eschewed politics (though he could have been a driving force on the Council), Zor-El devoted at least half of his effort and energy to guiding his city and leading his people. Alura was right: Even if Jor-El agreed with his assessment of the rough data, he couldn’t do anything about the planet’s unstable core without a long-term effort. There would be many more investigations, many other measurements.
But the people of Argo City needed him now. He reached over with his good hand and began sorting through the documents. He could take care of most of them from his bedside and delegate the rest.
Alura brought him a drink of potent juice and left him to himself. “Sleep when your body tells you to, and I won’t complain if you awaken to do work.”
He tried to shift his focus to more mundane matters, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what he and his brother could do together. He was two years younger than Jor-El, a genius in his own right, but his brother had always achieved more in science, made more spectacular discoveries, pushed the boundaries of Kryptonian knowledge. Another man might have been bitter about that, but not Zor-El. When he was barely a teen, he’d had an epiphany: Rather than resenting his pale-haired brother for what he was, Zor-El could excel in an area that his sibling wasn’t really very adept at—politics and civic ser vice.
Although Jor-El grasped esoteric scientific concepts better than anyone, Zor-El more easily mastered people skills, pragmatic problem solving, organization, and practical engineering. While Jor-El developed bizarre new theories (most of which were censored by the Commission for Technology Acceptance, unfortunately), Zor-El administered public works in Argo City. He had new canals installed throughout the peninsula, set up fog catchers, designed new boats for efficient fish harvesting, extended the main wharves. The city’s population turned to him with their problems, and they also listened whenever he made requests.