It is perhaps terrifying to contemplate that the worst of the horrors in the Moderan universe do not seem so unimaginable from the vantage of the present day. Yet the humor, insight, energy, empathy, and rare moments of beauty in these stories also suggest that there may be light in even the worst kinds of darkness.
Many thanks to Phyllis Deckert for allowing me to interview her about her father and to Matthew Cheney for his writings about Bunch. Some biographical information has been taken from The Big Book of Science Fiction (Vintage).
—JEFF VANDERMEER
MODERAN
INTRODUCTION
QUAINT they were, these records, strange and ancient, washed to shore when the Moderan seas finally unthawed. Played in the old-fashioned machine way we, the beam people, the Essenceland Dream people, easily divined, they told of a very different world, a transition world, if you will, between what we are now and the death and defeat these people hoped to overcome. New-metal man! It does have a ring. MODERAN! It did seem pretty great in concept, I’m sure, and, who knows, perhaps it had a reasonable chance for success. But all societies, all civilizations, all aspirations it seems must fail the unremitting tugs of shroudy time, finally, leaving only little bones, fossils, a shoe turned to stone maybe, a bone button in the sea perhaps, a jeweled memento of an old old love. In this case, tapes were left, wherein a great “King” had set down his story of hopes, fears, wars—yes, WARS! Perhaps this “King” was a writer of some skill, a kind of doomed King James. His prose does have a flair, although sometimes it turns tedious, I’m afraid; sometimes he belabors the obvious and becomes vague when he needs to elucidate; sometimes he’s fat when he should be lean, lean when fat would be better. Or at least it seems to me these things are true. But then, I am the true machine efficiency, here as essence man, my perfections against his human flaws—quite unfair!
Yes, we are the essence people, a long way up the world from the world that these tapes told of. We truly have gained the immortality that these knaves could only dream of. CRUDE! Oh, yes, crude they were, and yet they had a certain verve and élan, surely, as evinced by these things a “King” set down, a kind of clown “King” certainly, but oh, so serious all the same. He was self-centered—who could doubt it? He was running scared most of the time, scared of himself, scared of time, scared of his Enemies, all other men; scared of the White Witch—scared scared. And yet there is, we have to say, the matter of the very human redeeming grace in this shell of a man who could, so terribly encumbered, screw braggadocio to the sticking point and go windily through the world, crowing, “I am greatest I Am Greatest I AM GREATEST—and I’ll prove it!” And “hearing” these tapes and setting these stories down for you, I have become more than doubly convinced that this man, this “King,” if you please, this Stronghold #10, had somehow a concept of his own worth that at least equaled his arsenal of fears and overcame them. And that would have to be quite a concept of worth, and quite an overcoming, for his fears were truly great.
I have not given you all of the tapes, because, as most people before us have done, he tended to repeat himself in hammering home his fears, his aspirations, his accomplishments, his failures. To be truthful with you about what I have done, I have picked out the tapes that, while telling his “tale complete,” made the greatest impression on me. —That’s pretty human, isn’t it?
And, have no doubt, I am human. I’ll tell you briefly a little more about who I am, and then we’ll get on with the business of MODERAN. I am, as I said, essence man, as almost all of us are now, with the exception of those in a little landlocked and sea-starved country that—YES! still calls itself Olderrun. I am from the big machines. I do not have to die. I and my kind are truly, if you will, the heirs of the MODERAN Dream as set forth in these stories I am going to give you from the tapes (give them to you essentially unaltered, although, certainly, I could improve upon them, for I am from the Machines! I am efficient). To be brief, it was discovered for us, nay! not discovered, evolved, a way to save man from the grave soil and the Eternal Dark. A real way to save him, not an abracadabra way of dreams or religion or any other myth-fakery—nay, not even the way of MODERAN, which almost won the game. This way we have is real and complete so long as those big machines keep rolling in the North to succor our beams. And of course they WILL! We have machines watching and keeping up machines. We have an entire hierarchy of spies and counterspies of the machines and the most complete machine-machine repair service ever dreamed up by either mortal or immortal man. They’ll endure. I KNOW THEY WILL! (They just have to.)
•
When she and I, my dear love dream of the moment (we were paired by punched beams!), went on this beam excursion, transported by those big transmitters in the North, who would have thought we would come up with one of the rare literary finds of our, or any, generation? It was to have been just one of those routine love trips of the essence people, you know, just riding out to a dream love-place picked by the Love Dictator of Essenceland and having an essence time to break the monotony, a little petting of the sex beams, could be, a lot of beamish talk, surely surely, and, in short, a love picnic in the beamish essence times. And then I looked down at my beamish feet, and there it was! washed up from the thawed, once machine-frozen, Moderan sea, the tapes of this book. I whooped; I spilled my love and her beams into the sea water as I dropped her fast for this unique thing. Good sport that she was and is, she dried her beams and agreed with me that this possibly was more important than love. We gave the signal to be beamed home again, the Love Dictator gave his consent and we stayed up all the beamish night at her place, playing with this book, figuring out the tapes, marveling at the literary finesses of it. And from such a crude age too! Well, one never knows, does one?
An early tape, “No Cracks or Sagging,” is a rather long, leisurely thing, but it does cover a lot of ground! It’s a waggish tale, I fell in love with it—(those jammy-rams and their solemn mission so ridiculously executed!)—and I believe it is a key and dominant chapter to set the stage for your initial good concept and growing understanding of the Mighty Dream these Moderan people worked at. To coat the whole solid earth with plastic—imagine! To freeze the very oceans solid—whew! To tamp, anywhere and everywhere, all the soft places . . . And my beamish hat off to them, they did it! They truly, in their world, one of the great great worlds in the long long history of man, had, for a time, “No Cracks or Sagging.”
After “No Cracks or Sagging” came several tapes dealing with the “replacement” operations that set this man “firmly on the road to the Moderan Dream.” But this man was generally so hung up on his own suffering and apprehensions through this period of his life that these stories came out to be generally in very poor taste, indeed. There wasn’t a fingernail pulled out or a bone sawed in two or a new-metal part put in that this man didn’t feel strongly about. Yet, he was no coward. Ah no, not this man who was ultimately to become the great Stronghold #10, “one of the greatest Captains in all wide Moderan.” I believe he was set in the teeth with as much bravery and determination as any man who has ever lived.
After that dreary nine months in the hospital, during which time our man was repeatedly sawed, hacked and “replaced,” which he more or less summarizes in the gruesome tape “The Butterflies Were Eagle-Big That Day” (in the name of all squeamishness, I’ve heavily cut and censored that one), we see him up and out in the generally more hopeful one, “New Kings Are Not for Laughing” and claiming his fort in “One Time, a Red Carpet . . .” In these, understand, he has already become a man of Moderan, “the bulk of him new-metal man now, his flesh-strips few and played-down, his organs ever-last engines, his brains ingenious green fluids sloshing in pans.”
Not long had he been out of the nine-months nightmare of the operations and fully ensconced in his fort than, like true lust-man that he was, he set out to get it. What I mean is, with the wife-nuisance problem due to be settled for him, as well as for all the Stronghold masters of Moderan, he went for hi
s new-metal doll, his “tin can mistress,” if you will, his “Faithful Fun.” It was his due, it was not as unseemly as it may somehow seem, and he was not really a bad man and a dirt-head all-the-time, not by the standards of his age. And we see, in the tapes, implications that he had suffered some reverses on the “field of love,” long before he became a new-metal man. So I for one am rather glad, I feel good in my beams, I mean, that he could so love a tin can doll (a new-metal mistress, you know) that he could give all his Big-Joy-Time to it if he so chose and never tire of it. And then, if he did tire, he did not have to explain. The OFF switch would just place the night down in that sweet cog-wheeled brain of his sweet metal doll, and he could be about more manly things then, such as blasting a neighbor’s Wall down, say, or smearing a whole continent away. CONVENIENT!
So “New-Metal Mistress Time” to you!
But lest you gain the false notion of universal new-metal mistress bliss and no sex-worry in Moderan, it was, I must in fairness hasten to amend, not always quite that way. Our man it seems, being human, was a walking welcome mat for many problems. However much he might try not to, wherever he went, whatever much percentage of steel he might attain to (except 100%, I suppose, which sublime state he never quite reached), he would, sooner or late, feel that cold hand clutch the shoulder and hear that hard voice command, “Come with me, man, I have some human-type adversities for YOU to battle.” So it was with a new-metal mistress he became more than just a little unwisely fond of. Yes, in “Remembering” we see him in the love-anguish wringer just as much as any all-flesh man might be. His new-metal mistress of the current moment has run away. With a tin man? With another Stronghold master? With a rival? With a stranger? Whom? whom? What? what? How? how? and why? why? It’s a wry little thing, really. I mean, truly it’s something to think that a mighty Stronghold master could become so enamored of a tin can woman that, upon betrayal, he’d spend long dormant months just thinking up punishments for her. The more I think about this little sketch and certain other stated and implied attitudes that keep cropping up in the other tapes, some of which I have set forth for you, some of which I have kept back for one reason and another (considerations of personal likes and dislikes, mostly, because I’m so human yet), the more I am SURE that this man HAD suffered former great reverses on the “field of love.” His Armies of Amour had, I believe, been betrayed, tricked, surrounded for ignoble capture, sent flying in panic rout, fought to terrible losses and standstills—just about every adverse condition, I mean, that could happen to a pressing force. And he probably had become almost incapable of self-confidence or trust, out on the flesh-fouled fields. Then to find, as new-metal man, exactly what he wanted, something manufactured to his very own specifications and a thing that he could really enjoy and count on (he thought!) and then to have this become strayed, stolen or ignobly enticed—it did quick-boil his brains. And I don’t wonder!
And so, “Remembering” to you too . . .
But let me not neglect to emphasize that all these new-metal mistress times were possible because very early in Moderan the mighty Stronghold masters had solved for themselves the flesh-woman question, or, to be more precise, the wife-nuisance roadblock. And for that I honor them. I mean, my beamish hat is off to them, for that was QUITE a solving! We have no such problem, of course, in the essence times. If I don’t like the beams of the woman I’m with, or if I like too much the beams of the woman I’m with and she won’t reciprocate, I just signal back to the Love Dictator’s office my discontent and he orders one of his little clerk mechanics to call the old beams home, and the Love Dictator then transmits me, personally, a new package. It does work out! But remember, these were crude times and crude people. You have to know they were. But White Witch Valley was a step in the right direction, as, indeed, Moderan generally was steps in the right direction. “And So White Witch Valley”. . .
There was a multitude of tapes concerning the home life of the little clutter-people of Moderan, who were, many of them, not so fortunate as to have complete husband-wife segregation. Now, I, to tell you true was surprised to learn that Moderan, even at its height, was not entirely free of the burden of the rag-tag flesh people. Our man of Stronghold 10 deplored it, as you will see, yet he, finally, could not have found the strength, it appears, had he been possessed of the final say, to have made it different. This seems to me somehow to sum up the failure of both flesh-man before him and this new-metal man we have here. Neither could bring himself, finally, to rid himself of the eternal war that was in himself, the old old tug and fracas between what he naturally wanted to do (which was therefore “right” for him to do) and what he somehow had been led to believe he should do because of conscience, that foul unnatural and totally impossible contrived concept. It kept man, even this new-metal man, in such a constant dither of debate and “can’t-do want-to” frustration as to make him finally just a spotted, soggy mass of compromises and self-invented shames. Oh, it was not so noticeable in new-metal times, but it was there. As long as the foul softness of even one flesh-strip was there, this terrible immobilizing flaw of trying to be good, according to conscience, would be there. Good!? And what is good? Hmmmpppphhh . . . It is nothing really but the false trying toward the falsest notion that has ever crossed man’s mind. Could he early on have torn this notion from him in flinty chunks and sent it clattering in broken death to the native-natural ground, or whammed it totally from him in some big explosion of foul gas and sent it riding up to heaven in phantom balloon-sacks where it supposedly was to be some GREAT DAY gathered whole—what a difference it could have made to man-natural! But he apparently couldn’t quite do it. It remained for us, the essence people, finally to do it. But be not in doubt, there were nuts during the great formative stages of us, the beam people, who argued for conscience beams and moral clutter and therefore the perpetuation of the foul self-defeating debate of natural man versus contrived man forever and forever. But natural man won out in the end, and we have, finally, the real man-self distilled, if you will, in our essence beams. YAY! essence man, natural beam man, the finally true man, live forever!
But I got carried away! Forgive me my disgressions. I started out to explain to you about the provisions for the rag-tag people of Moderan. And thus I chose “Bubble-Dome Homes” for your education here and, we trust, some entertaining reading too. Also, I chose other tapes from the many concerning home life in Moderan some revealing that this “King” in his anguish, divorced from that regular pose of the regular Stronghold master, which pose was mostly hate and war, war and hate, with sometimes truce-and-Joy times and periods of Universal Deep Thinking thrown in—divorced from all that he would oftentimes unmask his human feelings. And who, for instance, can withhold a kind of cold rational pity from him upon reading such a strange little story as “Was She Horrid?”? (So strong he was, so scared he was, so weak he was—and she got him with a doll in the very heart of his complex!) But mostly he set down the home life of Moderan in tight little third-person classics that, while revealing the common life of “common” Moderan, revealed also his considerable authorial skills. For instance “A Husband’s Share,” “It Was in Black Cat Weather” and “A Little Girl’s Xmas in Moderan” I considered three literary jewels of such a fine cut that I left them word for word, comma for comma, exactly as he set them in the tapes!
Then came those great stories that are “Intimations of the End.” There seems a note of searching and sadness through these, a bit of “listening,” if you will, a kind of quiet crying and a yearning bigger than all Moderan, bigger than the world. You somehow see a man a victim of his age, and the profiteer of his age, the sufferer and the rewarded, finally asking WHY? and WHAT GAINS IT? and TO WHAT PURPOSE ANYHOW? Then too there is this grudging note of admiration through many of these last stories, admiration for the “man from the past” who will hold the course. I could feel this note strongly through such pieces as “The One from Camelot Moderan,” “Reunion” and “Has Anyone Seen This Horseman?” But the
great GREAT stories in this group have to be, if not “Reunion” and “How It Ended,” then “Interruption in Carnage” and “The Miracle of the Flowers.” In “Interruption in Carnage” we see our man for the first time right up against natural-causes death and appallingly aware, for the first time, that it could, despite all the Great Dream, happen to a man of Moderan. I’m man enough to admit that I cried a little in my beams when I saw how he tried so very hard to repair this death in another, needed so very much to fix it and couldn’t do it. Finally up against the Wall, and remarkably close to total chaos in the mind, he made the adjustment, bargained his deal with reality, re-entered the current general war, won himself another world shoot-out and helped sack once more the great battle dead. (Yay for new-metal man! yay for Moderan!) In “The Miracle of the Flowers” we see how he is ready to believe, at least just a little, in something more subtle, and perhaps a little more rewarding, than fortresses and guns. But the world outside the fortresses and the guns is a diddling world, finally, and our man is diddled by a craftsman at diddling, the man with the flower hand!
It is no wonder, really, considering all that our man had passed through, that he came at last to a “Final Decision.” And what he might have done for himself if he had followed through on “The Final Decision”! What he might have done for the world! Let’s admit it. All the way up from those fighter apes (who, I am convinced, were our true ancestors) to the Essenceland beams, and we still don’t know the answer to that Riddle he might have solved for us. (We still don’t know! And I’m man enough to admit it.) And because we still don’t know, that’s why I’m on the knees of my beams more often than you would ever guess. Oh yes! silent prayers, beam prayers, prayers that fill the universe with my silent fears and wonder—asking mostly that those great machines keep firing in the North. So that I may stay, stay with a life I know. And not risk that other, or NO other, or what other, oh! risky risk! But sometimes on beamish windy days when the earth roils up in stormy weather, or on silent-sun days when all the universe seems locked in a quiet hug, or on days when the wind and the silence play intermittently together it will grab me in the throat of my beams, this Thing. Then I will be caught with an anger at this man, this person of Moderan, this individual like bacon strips and steel plate a long long time ago, this human being who had a chance to go out there and KNOW for us all, and didn’t do it. I cannot blame him really, but I CAN be sorry that he didn’t go. It does seem that an excellent chance passed, slipped by, rode on into that vast irretrievably-dark wasteland of human missed-chances; and I have to confess that we even here in Essenceland Beam have not a plan yet to match his. Sometimes I think essentially that we just ride our beams and dawdle around. (NO! that’s not true.) But we must plan to do better. Tomorrow. TOMORROW! . . .
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