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17th NOVEMBER 1969 – GOTHAM CITY, NJ.
Dinah slumped forward at the breakfast table and looked, with a definite lack of focus, at the coffee cup in front of her. Maybe a decent caffeine hit would start those synapses sparking.
She’d slept poorly last night, and she couldn’t think why that was. The dream she could remember having was weird – something about walking into some kind of twinkly light, all soft blues and greens, and her whole body starting to fall away from her like she was suddenly just pure thought, flying through the universe like it belonged to nothing. She remembered an echo of the name Aquarius, like something out of Hair
The thought of it still made her shiver a bit. She’d never done acid herself – too straight for that – but she knew people who had, and the dream felt too much like how they’d described a bad trip. A pity Mom and Dad weren’t here, she thought, feeling for a moment a lot younger than her seventeen years. They may have been the epitome of law and order – Larry Lance was a private detective and former cop, and Dinah Drake Lance was the honest-to-God Black Canary, one of the toughest women on the planet and a pillar of the Justice Society of America – but they were still Mom and Dad and they were the people that little Dinah ran to when the world seemed too scary.
She glanced at the wall clock. Just after 7:30 on a Sunday morning wasn’t the time she wanted to wake them. It wasn’t that often they got much time really to themselves, and she’d been glad that they’d taken up the invitation to spend the weekend over at Ted Knight’s country place. To the world at large, Knight was Starman; to Dinah, he was Uncle Ted – one of the many courtesy uncles who had come into her life as her mother’s friends from the JSA. Ted himself made her a bit uneasy, mind you; not for anything he’d done to her – great God, no! – but, at least a couple of years back, he’d seemed way too friendly towards Mom and Dad either didn’t notice or didn’t say anything. Back then it was grown-up stuff that she didn’t want to look at too closely.
he heard the slap on the porch as the paperboy pitched the Sunday Gazette from the street. Pulling the dressing gown tighter around her, she strolled out of the front door and picked it up. She vaguely noted the headlines – something about the continuing fight about the Generals fighting with the city council about an upgrade to Kanigher Field before the next NFL season – but her eyes fell on the date.
The 17th? That couldn’t be. She was sure that when she fell asleep last night it had only been the 2nd. She’d been on the phone to Samantha, her best friend from school; Sammie had been super bummed that Dinah hadn’t taken advantage of her folks being away to have a party since it had been her own birthday and that would have been just perfect.
She walked back into the kitchen, looked at the calendar stuck with a magnet onto the fridge. All the days in November crossed out until the 16th. What was happening? Growing up as the daughter of a super-hero made you much more aware of weird stuff, but this was way up there. Had she stepped into the Twilight Zone or something?
Dinah had just realised that she was gripping the kitchen counter-top a little too hard when she saw a flash of coloured light over the back garden. Maybe to Samantha and others that would have been weird, too. Dinah was used to it.
As she opened the back door, the coruscating light winked out and two costumed figures resolved into view. Two of the Society – Green Lantern and Starman. Dinah’s breath caught – if Uncle Ted was here, then why weren’t her parents with him? What had...
“Dinah, thank heavens you’re alright.” Starman pushed past Green Lantern as he rushed to the door.
“Of course I’m alright.” But the indignance was just a flash – and not one of Uncle Jay’s doing. “What’s happened?”
“Let us come in,” said Green Lantern, “and we’ll explain… or try to.”
A brief flash of light reconfigured their uniforms – GL’s colour-blind monstrosity and Starman’s ridiculous Flash Gordon helmet – into regular street clothing. In that sense it was simply Ted Knight and Alan Scott sitting on the Lances’ living room sofa.
“Tell me what happened,” Dinah insisted. “There’s been too much strange this morning to make me think things are normal.”
Scott rubbed his chin. Dinah noticed that he looked like he hadn’t shaved for a couple of weeks, and he was usually fastidious about his grooming – Mom joked about it sometimes. “Two weeks lost,” he said. “Just taken.”
“Then it really is the 17th?”
“It is. And yes, it was the 2nd when your parents came to my place,” Knight said. “That’s the best place to start.”
---
“Just before your mom and dad arrived, I’d been in the observatory at the back of the estate.” Knight was knuckling his eyes as though he was trying to hold back tears. “There was a peculiar light phenomenon in the sky, and I suited up as Starman to investigate it.”
“What I found wasn’t light, exactly. Aquarius, as it called itself, claimed to be a sapient star-being – whatever that is – and that it had drifted into contact with Earth by chance as it tried to sustain itself. Bad luck for me that it found the energies of my cosmic rod the perfect buffet. It wrested the rod from me and it juiced him up enough to become a threat that the Justice Society had to take down. Your parents found me, and sent out the summ.ons.”
“We were like bugs being slapped down with insecticide,” Scott continued. “Aquarius was actually powerful enough by this point that he – Lord knows how, but he actually made the Earth vanish. Kent – Doctor Fate – acted quickly enough to contain us all in a magical force-shield, but Aquarius told us that the planet now existed only in our minds. When we died, it died.”
“It was a stand-off.” Knight shook his head. “He couldn’t get in, but we couldn’t come out. Kent somehow managed to sustain us all without food or water for two weeks in the hope that help would come. That it did was a miracle.”
“Courtesy of the Justice League.” The power ring briefly flashed on Alan Scott’s hand. “They’d been off the planet on a mission of their own when Aquarius reached Earth. Their Green Lantern found us hanging onto existence when they came back to what would have been Earth orbit. Kent could finally let himself relax, and he allowed the bubble to dissolve.”
“Aquarius, for all his power, took to his heels – but he’d left an hypnotic command behind him that made us fight them for a while before we could shake it off. And that’s maybe what caused it to go so wrong.” Now Knight wasn’t able to hold back the tears. “During that fight, your mother had been immobilized – stuck to the ground – and couldn’t move when an energy projection from Aquarius rolled towards her.”
“Your father saw it, God bless that man.” Knight seemed to shudder with the memory. “And he ran straight for it. He blocked it with his own body, but the energy discharge was horrific. It went straight through him, like an electrocution.”
Scott briefly patted Knight’s shoulder. “Your mother seemed all right when we got her free, and we were somehow able to restore things. As far as we know, we were able to trick Aquarius into self-destruction. Maybe the universe has a memory; it brought back the world as at today, the 17th. But as we came back home, your mother keeled over. Some of the radiation spillage had hit her. My God, she practically withered away as we approached the ground again.”
“Then…”
The realization struck. Dinah opened her mouth and screamed. The one thing she’d been most careful not to do as she was growing up. The unique metahuman power which she had somehow seen granted to her – the high-frequency “Canary Cry”, as her mother had called it – rattled the whole house for a moment before the power ring caught it and muted it.
Only when Dinah had finally screamed out her agony did the tears finally come.
21st NOVEMBER 1969 – GOTHAM CITY, NJ
To the world at large, it wasn’t the Black Canary who had died. Dinah and Larry Lance dying together was hard enough to explain by itself, but the Society had contacts. Officially, Dinah’s parents had died when their car left the road when it aquaplaned on a wet highway – with Charles McNider (Dr. Mid-Nite) signing the death certificate as a qualified M.D.
For much the same reason, the funeral was quiet. The death of a private detective and a professional florist wasn’t a big deal. Only a few of the Society attended in person – those whom Dinah senior had been closest to. Ted Knight chose to stay away. Alan Scott came, though; so did Jay Garrick, Rex Tyler, Ted Grant, a much-subdued Diana of Themyscira. Even Johnny Thunder, although he’d been out of contact with the Society for some years.
The others had waited at the Society’s base in Gotham, to say goodbye to Dinah Drake and the Black Canary together. Not a raucous gathering, by any means, it wouldn’t have been fitting. Just a sharing of memories. Thunder was looking a little frail and maybe a little unfocused (McNider muttering vaguely to himself about “early-onset dementia”), but regaled them with a tale from the Canary’s early encounters with him and the Thunderbolt, back at the beginning of her career when she was playing at being a criminal to work for the law instead. Wildcat extolled her tenacity and fighting spirit, and told them how she’d skinned him for $500 in a poker game back in 1949 during a lull in one mission. Princess Diana spoke of her kindness and strength, and her value as a role-model for the young women who might walk her path in the future.
Nobody seemed to have anything more that they wished to share; and Carter Hall – as Hawkman, the Society’s chairman – called them to order. “We have lost a legend today, a wonderful woman whom none of us will ever forget. Ladies and gentlemen, please raise your glasses with me and let us remember. Dinah Drake Lance, the Black Canary. God speed your wings, pretty bird, as you fly now to His embrace.”
As the shout of “DINAH!” rang around the room, the big double doors at its entrance swung back as though forced hard. The figure which entered was shockingly familiar.
A mass of curled blonde hair; a black leather bustier/leotard combination; a black leather jacket; fishnet stockings and black swash-topped pirate boots. The Black Canary as she lived and breathed. Or…
Of all the Society members, it was Clark Kent – Superman – who recovered his composure first. “Dinah? Little Dinah?” he said, sounding surprised.
“She was my mother. She was my idol. She was everything that I wanted to be.” Dinah Laurel Lance walked the room like the woman her mother had been, not the seventeen-year-old girl whom she was.
“And this is how you honour her?” It sounded like too much of the Spectre’s disdain was feeding into Jim Corrigan’s voice.
“When I was ten, I found out that Dinah Lance was the Black Canary. I was fascinated. I asked Mom if I could wear that outfit when I was older and grown-up. She always told me no. She said that she’d created the Black Canary for her own reasons. That this wasn’t the kind of life that she wanted for me.”
“But we all learn that the things that our parents want for us aren’t always the things that we want, or that are best for us. You understood a bit, some of you. Uncle Ted…” she looked at Ted Grant now, “you gave in when I kept badgering you to teach me how to fight like she did. I know she was angry with both of us for me going behind her back like that, and I know that hurt you.”
“She got over it, kid.” Grant shrugged. “Your mom never could hold a grudge.”
“Uncle Kent, she turned to you when my Canary Cry started. You helped me get it under my control.”
“It would have destroyed much had I not.” Was that Kent Nelson speaking or Nabu the Wise?
“So yes, Uncle Jim, this is how I choose to honour her. By picking up her fallen torch. And I defy any of you to deny me that right.” She shrieked – not the full-throated Canary Cry, but loud and painful enough to remind them all that she had that gift that even her mother had not owned.
“My name is Dinah Lance. My name is the Black Canary.”