But hey! Let me not forget now to emphasize that this man had hate. It plays through the stories like a cold cold wind, a hot all-searing flame and a leaking ball of acid that put all human endeavor and aspirations to the test of gall. In fact, it seemed at times that he almost was consumed by, or at least was fully absorbed in, his hates, which he gave full play to as almost a kind of virtue. When he sat back in his War Room with his fort on the status of continuous blast, his blamm guns turned to world objectives, his doll bombs inexorably walking that walk to programmed target, the White Witch rockets firing, “the high-up weird screaming wreck-wrecks homing in to kills,” it seems to me, thinking back in my beams, that in all the long history of warring man there had never been another human being who had gunned so successfully. Or so futilely either, for this man’s wars, according to these documents I have, were continuous wars, broken only by small truces spent, you guessed it, in preparing for more wars. I am somehow hypnotized by this idea, and yet I have to see it as not quite right, not quite. Were they just being their true-bad selves in Moderan? Well, there are statements in the tapes to substantiate this thinking, where war was their “main play” and hate their “chief virtue.” And yet, there must be something a little wrong in fighting all, or substantially all, of the time. And I don’t mean morally, conscience-wrong. Pshaw phhoooeee phaw phaw and pshaw phhoooeee phi phi—of course I don’t mean that I mean wrong, somehow, in emphasis on something unnecessarily aggressive and violent that undercut man’s slickness in the universe and made him laughably jagged and out of phase in the world scheme. (Just look at us! slick beams that slide over all the world now and prowl the universe in harmless splendor, from those big engines in the Earth-North to all the ports of Place and Space and timeless Time . . .) But our man rode his all-consuming hates, sometimes sublime, oftentimes tawdry, right on into “How It Ended.” He never learned. . . .
•
It was between “The Final Decision” and the deciphering of “How It Ended” that we became tired a little from the book, not bored, you understand, but a bit lethargic from so much work, and dreamish, and suddenly I remembered that my companion had very beautiful beams. Or, taken all together, it would not be wrong to say, “She was, and is, a very beautiful beam!” Her name had been Beatrice, I had been told, in the Old Life before she had gone down to have her essence copied in the “copy kitty” machines for eternal transmission from “the big transmitters in the North.”
Though we were under direct surveillance by the Love Dictator’s office, since we had applied for and been granted “visas” for a love excursion to the coast (and now later, this permission to stay up all night with a book), I still thought it might be possible to be a bit romantically-exciting on the sly. I believe man will never be refined enough that he will not continue to try to find out ways to “beat the system.” It’s part and parcel of being man, I believe. In this case, some of us had learned that by a slight warping and bending of our beams, our essences, as it were, we could communicate desires and other information to each other, without alarming the particular monitoring office of the moment. Our monitoring office in this instance would be, of course, one of the Love Director’s many stations. In this case, I planned, through the warping and bending of my beams, to tell Beatrice that something had come over me, due to the cozy scene at her place probably, together with our working so well as a team all night long, and now I hoped for a little more than conversation and companionship to show for our long time together, in such close effort!
Her beams were warped and bent for receiving, just as mine were warped and bent for sending. She got the message! Now, what I aimed to do when she said “YES!” was not any kind of a rational plan. Is it ever!? I was not, for instance, remembering that one of the big monitoring walls on one of the Love Dictator’s many stations would pinpoint our actions. We would show up “like a sore thumb,” to employ an old expression, as we bumped the charts and humped the graphs, making love. I was just thinking how NICE! it would BE! to be WRAPPED! in Beatrice’s BEAMS! That’s all. YES! And Beatrice? Well, I don’t know. I don’t know at all what she was thinking or what she really wanted. Do we ever? I only know that with her warp she whammed my warp a tremendous rap and said, “Cheap chaser! What do you take me for? One of those hot joy-slams? NO!”
So we went back to work to wrap up this book. And we soon saw that “How It Ended” was really how it ended!
PART ONE
The Beginnings
THINKING BACK (OUR GOD IS A HELPING GOD!)
FLESH seemed doomed that year; death’s harpies were riding down. The once-beautiful, sweet and life-sustaining air was tinged with poison now, and man drank at his peril from the streams that had once been pure. He prayed to a God that was said to be in all things good, true and beautiful, but especially was thought to be all sternness and goodness, justice and loving-care, in some milk-white place far away, “On High.” And those prayers if answered were answered very obliquely indeed. For the air got deeper in poison from the tinkering with lethal things the flesh-man indulged in when not praying, and the water got fuller with danger as each new explosion pounded the bomb-fevered air. There was talk of the End; great discussions were handled in great halls across the land. Treaties were signed among statesmen to help the air get better, to allow the streams to recover and run pure once again. But even as the flesh-hands grasped the pens to scrawl the marks of good faith in some countries, fear lashed at capitals in other countries. Arsenals were tested anew. Things done were undone. The air got sicker; the streams ran not pure but pure danger—There seemed no chance for flesh-man, and his God seemed entirely silent wherever He was, wherever His white throne was. The HOPELESS signs were out everywhere. Little children asked that they be allowed to go quickly and not grow up hurting and maimed. Adults in what should have been the full flower of brave manhood and fair womanhood quaked, looked heavenward for some hopeful sign and, finding none, fell down and cried bitterly. The aged ones, quavering and whining now, finally decided that yes, truly they were most glad that they were so very old. The flesh billions courted at the Palace of Danger so ardently had turned against them and the mass wedding of Death and Destruction seemed now all but assured.
And then—and then this chance! Offered to all. It came first as small hope, the rumor of it, a faint faint breath of a chance seeping through the flesh-fouled metropolises. And then it was confirmed as glowing fact when the tour went round that year, year of the Greatest Darkness. And yet—and yet they scoffed, scoffed by the billions at this man working his hinges and braces, would not believe his heart was an ever-last one, had no credulity for his new wonderful lungs that could breathe him a forever-life even in bomb-tainted air. When they saw that his hands were steel they yelled robot! robot! When they saw that his eyes were wide-range, mechanism-helped, and that he’d a phfluggee-phflaggee button on his talker that he pressed from time to time to aid in his speech expression they laughed and yelled . . .
Somewhere in the wide blue space heavens there are this day a billion laughs still going, a billion raw guffaws orbiting, each closely chased by a shriek, a yelled scream that never quite catches the laugh it matches. Those strange laughs and scream nose cones that circle, and must forever, make a queer motion-monument to the unbelievers who could but laugh when they had the great dream shown them plain and who screamed over a chance that was gone when the swift black wagons of death came with death’s own personal cloth-lined boxes. But some of us SAW! We BELIEVED! We came over to the New Land. We submitted our bodies for help. We were not disappointed.
Consider the dreams we have captured here in New Processes; think of the fears turned back now in New Land; stand up and bow the head for Moderan. And know it has changed our outlook from quaking oh-God-help-us fear to massive and stalwart non-fear. Now we have Time! We can hold Time in our firm sure hands and regard it as the brightest brightest candle, one that will never burn down. We have Time arrested and shackled, imprisoned in our “rep
lacements.” Though it run with the speed of light a million times over, though it run with inexpressible speed, it is as though it stayed just with us here. A million years of it can slip past our ever-last hinges and we nod, wave, ride on deep in our hip-snuggie chairs and give thanks. To our god. For YES! when we captured Time we placed it in the rib cage of each man and sealed it there in each man’s calm-beating heart. And should a heart falter in the rib cage of any man, it is not the worry of a piffle’s worth. We have but to send off to the Big Parts Warehouse where, with other spare parts, gleaming hearts rest in rows, acres and acres of beating hearts, warmed-up and idling, ready to see a man through, each man having at least ten replaceable good ones in full repair at all times. YES, we, The Believers, intend to keep what we have; we’ll never let go! We have Time, once the arch enemy of all, like a babe in a basket—calm. We have taken an old man’s scythe blade; his long, dirty beard we have shorn. He still stands gaunt with his gloomy clothes wrestled about him, sardonic and wishing for a chance at us, to do harm. But his hourglass is out at both ends now and for us, endless, the endless sands roll through.
Our god? YES! Let us speak of our god. Once, in a long-ago almost-forgotten time, there was this Truce of the Dozen Days among the Stronghold folk while all of us made the pilgrimage. By foot or tunnel car or roll-go all of us came to the great plastic plain of the Dream Realized, and in one massive movement, at a prearranged signal in Time, told by our carefully synchronized etern-tells, all of us toggled our knee switches over to the setting marked Kneel Down. And with a crash and tinkle that thundered through the red vapor shield of that happy September we were all folded down. Some thought he bestowed a blessing on all of his children that day. Some said that he waved and nodded, and still others held that he smiled. And some there were who would swear through all the rest of their lives, eternal lives, that YES! there had been this miracle, when the voiceless gave voice in thunder, when the eyeless gazed rays of lightning through the gay and thick pink air. But I heard only the silence that day across the wide shimmering acres of gleaming radiant folk all folded down, beheld only a sharp sheen as of silver when the sun slid through for a little as some small hitch came about in a place far away where many great drive wheels and drive shafts were supplying our vapor-shield power.
So we see what we need to see, hear what our needs make us hear. Something deep in the flesh-strips of some of them required a vision, a man-like thing smiling, reassuring them, and so they “saw” a smile. Some needed a nod, a fatherly wave of the hand, and some required words even from essentially a silent god. But for me it was enough to behold—silent, adamant, marvelous—the calm strength of the moveless voiceless gleam and be reassured. Yes, he was our silent great god on the wide plastic plain of the Dream Realized, a massive reminder to homage, and our guide star since a time when New Processes Land was very new.
And when you think of all we are delivered from by his wonderful workability and help, you will not smirk at that gleaming presence, that shining shimmering wonder, the very substance of Deliverance, tall and pure. For a tall god stands in our country to remind us always of the greatest deliverance from fear ever conceived in this world. See a New Processes man in all of his staunch stainlessness, deep in his hip-snuggie chair, sitting calm as a cold bowl of oil. Know his heart is set to Dormant-Cool, and know his flexi-flex New Processes lungs are breathing him just enough of the skull-and-cross-bones air to keep him calm-cool alert. Further know he is happily, languidly, working on some Universal Deep Problem for his truce-time amusement until Big Shoot starts up again and his Stronghold can shudder to action once more, happily, totally involved with total war. And furthermore be firmly reassured that New Processes man has no worries pounding his think-tapes to gray, no anxiety about Time going by, no apprehensions concerning surprises at war, no fears in the pale green “blood” of his brain pans—none at all.
And then the flesh-man—oh, consider. CONSIDER him—the sick few that are left. Please do. Then perhaps you will see why we in our new-shining glory, flesh-strips few and played-down, pay homage to a massive stick of new-metal placed as our guide star when New Processes Land, our great Moderan, was new!
NO CRACKS OR SAGGING
SOMETIMES, from the brink of our great involvements, we move in our minds back to remember things of seemingly small-bore significances that loom, in the recalling times, extra-large. The day I crossed over, the day I went in to Moderan, out in the rolled and graded fields, far as the eye could reach, were these long-legged tamping machines. Essentially they were huge black cylinders swung spinning between gigantic thighs and calves of metal. There seemed an air of casualness about these strange black monsters as they loafed on their tall-thighed legs and twirled their cylinders about in what appeared to be, at times, almost totally contrived, excessive and meaningless nonchalance. Then, at no signal that I could detect, at no prompting that I could learn of, one or another of the machines would rush right over to a spot of ground and, seeming to bend forward a little at the waist, unleash the fury of its cylinder at the fresh earth underneath as though in great glee and highest concentration. The two-legged machine, once started, would really pummel that spot of earth with the front end of its cylinder for upwards of, say, thirty minutes or maybe even three-quarters of an hour, increasing its battering motion as the minutes passed. Then, appearing to know without any guessing when enough was plenty, and withdrawing a dirt-caked cylinder-end, the machine, as it erected to full height from its leaned position, would wander away and rejoin other loafing, waiting machines as though nothing of any consequence had really occurred at all.
Once two machines started for the same spot of earth, and it was quite a show to watch them both hunch into battering position at the same time, take aim at the same place and start battering each the other’s cylinder almost as much as they pummeled the ground. An overseer for tamping machines watched this ridiculous punching contest for awhile before he went over and drummed each machine on the rump just enough to break up the rhythm of their misdirected jab-jab-jab and send them both packing off twirling their cylinders as though they hadn’t really wanted to use them anyway. The job was awarded to a third machine, a troubleshooter reserve type who soon hunched into position and went about poking away at the place as though the world were entirely new and jolly to him and heigh-ho, jig-jig, holiday, holiday, go Go GO!
“What goes WHAT GIVES!?” I asked the overseer of tamping machines, my voice with wonder like a child’s, my eyes surely bulged out like, in the Old Days, a frog’s.
“Time goes, life stays, heigh-ho heigh-hey,” he recited. And then he said. “What are you, some kind of a humorist, or something? What do you mean, what goes, what gives?”
“What goes, what gives? Explain these grim, grotesque and altogether hilarious actions. I wish to be instructed. I want to understand. I see nothing but burlesque here. Is there more?”
“Is there more!? Man, is there more!!” Then he looked at me more closely. “Why! you’re from Out There! Old Times!” he ejaculated. “Perhaps you really do not understand at all. Maybe you really do mean, ‘What goes, what gives?’ ”
“I mean WHAT GOES, WHAT GIVES!” My fists were doubled by now and I saw I could easily go into my punch-now talk-later mood for sure.
“Travel far?”
“I came far enough. In miles. In time. In blasted hopes and withering dreams. In tear I came. In trouble. YES, I came far enough. And now to find, near the place of my chartered destination, if I came on course and if I drew my lines correctly on the charts they gave, a kind of antic Silly Farm. Where big two-legged machines that are essentially, as I see it, just contrivances for carrying around those big proddy rammers, at wholly random instances and to no practical purpose at all, try to have sexual intercourse with the soil.”
“You’re quite a talker. Why don’t you cut through, more? Go direct to your statement and pummel your meaning? Be more like these machines? You can see, when they get that signal, they d
on’t beat around the bush. They go right over there and then it’s just phoo phoo phoo, jig jig jig, bam bam bam, until the job’s done.”
“WHAT JOB? WHAT’S DONE?”
“The solution is to cover the pollution. The answer is to get rid of the cancer. Ho ho ho.”
Moderan Page 3