Consider the thing that man was from the flesh-fearful day of his birth. CONSIDER. Not a second passed, not an atom moved, not an action transpired in space—ANYWHERE!—that was not totally of gross threat to man. How he cowered through the clawy world, under the giant talons of danger, pulpy, entirely vulnerable—and afraid. He could not make a move, he could not try for any prize but that the fear dogs howled and the stand-back jackals moved in to say, STAND BACK! NOT FOR YOU! And the more he tried to win and the harder he strove to effectively attack, the faster he moved deeper in toward the total defeat of his grave. There was no victory! I envied the rocks, in those days; I envied stone pillars; I envied old bones; I envied the very air. I envied animals, even, for they did not know, I thought, how total was to be their defeat on the bonepile of death. Only man knew. HE KNEW! And yet he threw himself again and again and again upon the iron gates of assured disaster in the little life that he steered. Admirable? Not at all! Stupid? YES! Incomprehensible. Uncalled for. Why do it?
I had no answer in my pulpy days. I had only fears. Long fears. Short fears. Medium fears. Parts of fears. Total fears. Fragmented fears. Figments of fears. Unreasoned fears. Unreasonable fears. All the kinds of all the fears.
And yet—and yet, I had a kind of courage in those days. Oh, yes. A kind of bravado. Don’t tell me that I did not. To go to sleep at night sometimes took all the courage that I could find in all my total pack. To face that dark, not knowing, silent and asleep, without my usual sensory sentinels out, more vulnerable, if possible, than all my waking total vulnerability—oh total TOTAL risk. And yet I went to sleep almost every night at one hour or another. So I faced Death every night. Night, each night, my little death to face. Don’t tell ME I didn’t have problems in those days. And then to awake. Oh, what a relief, for just an instant, to find I had not died. Don’t tell ME I didn’t have my victories in those days! But then the defeats closed in quick-following on the instant, all old and sad and black, accumulated defeats, to slam me back to non-victory. Let once ten pulses quick-falter in the shaky house of man’s blood and see what shows up next. A coffin edged in black and a man the main star in it on a coffin day. What monster god of chance put together this faltering contrivance, designed to fail and fail and fail and fear-shake us through the taloned days and the doubly-taloned nights? Where laughs he now and why?
WHERE LAUGHS HE NOW AND WHY? He does not laugh now, not at me! and I’ll tell why. I am a Stronghold master, BIG, in the armor plate of total invulnerability. My ammo is stacked in heaps roundabout, and I can win ANY war. My blasters stand itchy on the GO pad, ready, at the speed of a metal thought, to launch for TOTAL SMACK. As it whirls the world in space our planet stands out bold now and surely indestructible, coated as we have plasto-coated it, with nothing to grind it away at the big middle and nothing to wear it out at the far hubs. And I do not have to envy stones now, nor stone pillars. Nor animals either. I am harder than the stones were and more mind-set than the animals. SCIENCE HAS MADE A MAN! NEW-METAL MAN! Science has coated and made clean the dirty EARTH-ball for him to stand on.
YAH! good Science plan, come bring your old white head and let me shake your grip. You’ve lifted me from the pit. You’ve saved me from the gummy dark, the ground-wet and the worms. I’m honored to be MAN now, new-metal MAN. Whereas once I was dishonored to be man, mocked at, jeered at, put upon by a god or gods who sat out laughing somewhere in a mystic mystery sky or high on smoky mountain tops and jotted me down in ledgers of harsh light. The balance to be used against me as I crept toward Judgment. And I once believed all that!? And let it be said forever to the total credit of man that though he believed these primitive and freaky things and counted the hopeless odds, he came out fighting, every time! Truly something indestructible in man must have saved him for this complete victory that I know now, the triumph of new-metal, the godhead of the chosen few, the total forever-security of the “replacement” Kings! (Too scared to leave, too scared to stay, caught on untenable ground, he gulped the air for battle in the spitting mouths of death, knotted his courage to all the fists he owned and prayed for endings that would not be unbearable. And sometimes, quite surprisingly, he won a little skirmish, even in the inkiest night of his despair. Sometimes he came through with flags flying and trumpets blasting to look the winner for sure. And sometimes he made speeches to say it was all feasible and worthwhile. But mostly it was not feasible, and never worthwhile. And you flesh-bums out there know what I mean. All victories to you must be hard-won and temporary, and hardly worth the candle. For down from it all looms the biggest, the most unwinnable, the most conclusive battle of all battles. Any win claimed there HAS to be conditional and entirely smoky lanterns surrounded by the blackest black of dark. FORGET IT, you flesh-bums. YOU won’t win there, and you know it. In the deepest marrow of your trembly fear-sick bones, you know you won’t win the Battle of Death—not even if you’re Pope.)
But now we do not have to win the Battle of Death. That battle for us will never be waged—NEVER, for we have overwhelmed the Adversary ahead of the battle he planned. YES! We are the moving, functioning substance of the Moderan Dream. Long ago our scientists, those great clear-eyed Kings of the laboratories, where theories were put to the test-tube test, saw that flesh life and plant life were essentially intolerable, improbable, implausible and probably impossible on our Earth-ball home. If we had not had these cool clear-eyed men growing along with the puddlers and the muddlers and the myth magicians that were our other vaunted progress, I do not, quite frankly, know what we should ever finally have done. Here on this ball that was our threatened, improbable, unpredictable and near-impossible home.
But now we’re in the clear, thanks to science, our once-dirty Earth-ball clean now, coated with plastic, our hardly-used air, mostly a decoration now, colored in beauty with a different hue each month (oh, lovely vapor shield!), our once garbage-wrecked oceans frozen to solid, with any surplus space-hauled long ago, and our temperatures as quiet and as changeless as ever we want them to be, through Season Control in Central. And the birds! The birds are colored tin now! And the animals all are engined. While the trees in ersatz leap through the planned Earth holes and bloom us up “real” leaves that last the course. AH MODERAN! Land where leaves do not drop; land of the plasto-coated land—sweet sweet my shard-hard home.
HEAD THUMPING THE TROOPS
I DIDN’T know then that the Stronghold would run itself, all fixed in the tapes of “automatic administration,” and that my main function would be to war with neighborhood Strongholds, gun worldly at times (when required), enjoy the standard Joys of the ruling-class new-metal man and engage in such splinter other diversions as I might want to dream up on my own from time to time for kicks. Oh, no, I was a new King and a new King WILL be a King. I called them out, about as soon as I was “home,” for verbal head thumping, to let them know first-off that one King, and ONE King only, existed at Stronghold 10. YES!
“Men,” I said to my crew assembled, phfluggee-phflaggee voice on STERN, but still a little bit emotional, “you play ball with me and I’ll play ball with you.” (GOD! what a thing for a King to say.) I thumped the tapes. “Just an old expression,” I apologized and laughed, “Ha huk! Disregard it, and let’s start again. MEN! Don’t play ball with me and I’ll shove the bat up.” (GOD! so this was going to be one of THOSE days.) “MEN! Cooperate and all WILL be well. Do what I say and we’ll have a good life here, and maybe even a little bit of fun. OBEDIENCE is the first consideration. Respect for law is THE FIRST law. And your King, I, is THE LAW!” Did I hear a metal robot laughing? Or did I hear a long silence from my assembled crew resting on the laurels of their cold silent switches?
At any rate, with the newness of my metal ringing in my mechanized ears, and not just a little bit confused and unsure, I rambled on, saying the things I thought a new Commander should say to let the troops know that the new regime was HERE! gung ho and it was NO NONSENSE now and GO! GO!! GO!!! all the way. “When I find a man not pullin
g his weight,” I said, “when I find a man not giving ME one hundred and twenty-five percent, at least, effort, I’ve found an enemy. If that man IF THAT MAN, THAT RAT, cannot come to me and show me health reasons why he’s lagging, God help him to his grave. He’d better wish his father and mother, nay twenty-five hundred forebears farther back removed than that, had never been born, much less him. I’ll flay him clear back to Adam for his ancestry, if need be!” (And God, these were just little metal people, but I was off and running now.)
“I’ll ask my Corps of Engineers to install some of the most sophisticated snoop gear in the history of mankind. I’ll have them install signals and graphs and all kinds of metering devices. And as a fair little warning to you, let me say, and let it not be misunderstood, that I have never in all my life been fooled in my own personal estimate of an individual, his potential, his behavior, his overall utilization of self. Not that I’ll need it, but I’ll tell you ahead of time what I’m having put in to verify to all what I will know already. It will be called the ‘Beep for Record’ plan. When any man ANY MAN! is remiss in any one of the many categories in which a man can be remiss, throughout all this great new Stronghold a giant BEEP will sound, alerting all. Then that man’s name—you do have names, I trust, or numbers—anyway, that man’s designation will be loudmouthed throughout all this vast fort; his designation will reverberate from wall to wall, from hall to hall, from ceiling to floor, ALL EVERYWHERE, as a miscreant. Let each man EACH MAN, please, now make a silent vow to keep his personal part of the ‘Beep for Record’ silent. Then he’ll know he’s doing what he should be doing anyway, without this threat. That’s all. Just what he should be doing anyway. He can expect no prizes for his silent BEEP. It will only mean that he is functioning adequately. Is that understood?
“For prizes? Well, I have BIG plans for that, which we’ll go into at some better, later time. But for just right now, I’d much rather that you get clear that this is a no-nonsense place, and we mean business at this Stronghold. I’m King here and you are my subjects. I mean to be the greatest King in Moderan and that will mean that you will be the greatest subjects in Moderan. Let’s work hard. Our goals are simple. To be first First FIRST, those are our plans. Let no man shirk. Heaven HEAVEN help him if he does. Do I want a happy Stronghold? Ha phaw! Happy Strongholds are for old women warriors. I want a steel-driven Stronghold. I want a cold Stronghold. I want a Stronghold such that when the steel birds hit our air they’ll feel a chill along the very wings they flap to flee our space. I want no mollycoddles. And I’ll not be a mollycoddle’s nursemaid. I’ll take heads off; I’ll melt people down. It could well be that the most obedient man in all the Stronghold will inexplicably one bleak day find himself in the pot. He won’t know why; I won’t know why, except that these things work out. Strength answers to strength. Let no one feel secure. Yet let every man go at that special speed which leaves no room for acceleration. What I mean, you’ll be at MAX at all times and all the way. When you wear out I’ll replace you with no thought whatsoever concerning what you were. The GOAL of the overall effort is the ALL that counts. The little component parts mean nothing NOTHING, except they contribute. And then their meaning is only in their time of function. I HOPE I HAVE MADE MY POSITION PERFECTLY CLEAR.”
I was quite exhausted along my flesh-strips and tired around the rims of my loins as I thumbed the phfluggee-phflaggee to SILENT. Was I trying too hard? Is a speech from the heart ever “trying too hard”? Were the troops fired up? Had I impressed them? A silence greeted me in a stopped Stronghold, a complete cessation that could mean ANYTHING, EVERYTHING or NOTHING. I walked over and touched one of them and even through my steel hand such a coldness was transferred that I rejoiced and thought of a million acres of ice. I touched another and it was quite the same.
NEW-METAL MISTRESS TIME
EVERY Stronghold master had one. It was part of the game in the land of the “replaced” people, where the parts were mostly new-metal, with the flesh-strips few and played-down. In the days when I was a neophyte Stronghold master, one of the elite-elite brand new, just out of the nine-month series in that hospital where they rebuilt people mostly to new-steel, it came my time. So I moved out to get it.
An idealist still, as always, I thought it could be the mending time of the Dream. For us all. But to see them there, the snot-punky kids, pulling on their Moderan big-bite longer stronger goofy-fags, and leering lasciviously, I thought of little pimply punks slipping smokes in dark back alleys and drawing sex on smeared board fences and scarred stone walls. In the Old Days. And telling dirt-color jokes.
Even change them to steel, can you change them!? I retreated my thoughts and hopes and hopeful dreams across old disappointments grounds and into Sadness Field. (Were these the ONES CHOSEN—they to become the battle-great and power-tall renowned feared masters of Stronghold Moderan!?) I went back home to total woe. Almost. For but one small small while. Then I rallied back up out of the Despair Darkness, pulled by a Light like that from our wonderful star, the sun—propelled by a thought, holding to the point, filled with a wholesome gladness like spring coming to the long-night fields of snow. I had my Dream MY DREAM! Let others cling to their baseness and be kings on the field of shame. I’d move into the Light with MY DREAM.
MY DREAM was the pedestal woman, part imagined, part actual and always walking away. But now was my chance! To have THE DREAM! From old memories, long-carried tight-held, I had sent in the specifications to the new-metal mistress shop, along with the photos I had with great effort and tedious pains kept safe through all danger and despair—heart-shatter, mind-havoc, even unto world destruction, the conflagrations of war. And now, for my Stronghold haven, to have the Dream in a package that I could take home with me! Has ever man had more?
Through the punks lounging by the wall (these were Stronghold masters!?), eagerly awaiting tryouts and a field day of selection in the new-metal mistress store, I moved up to the warehouse window. I handed in my card and the clerk-type new-metal warehouseman looked a little out at sea, sort of misted in, a wee bit PUZZLED. “You mean you just want to take a chance!? You don’t want tryouts and selection, the same as the others!? You actually mean you want me to just go back there to the pile and pick a random package!? Why you might get a-a-a-uh, a redhead. Ha ha. Or a bleach-bottle platinum blonde. Even a wig! Ugh!”
“Read the instructions; look at the card,” I said, as coldly as I could. He looked. His face trembled open and horrored through confused miles and areas of surprise. When he had recovered a little he said, “Oh, yes, sir! I should have looked, sir. These forms all look so much the same, sir. I just assumed—”
“Assume nothing, guess nothing, check everything,” I recited to add salt and acid to his little open boil of confusion.
So we took her home in the truck, which was really the Moderan new-metal mistress delivery van driven by a noncommittal new-metal fellow who was rumored to be absolutely without settings that would tempt him to stop for awhile and turn on the goods, should he happen to be delivering on a lonely stretch. I guess you could call him a new-metal eunuch. Yes, I guess you could.
When at last we were alone, I fell to unwrapping her. In my hurry I snarled the cords; I drew loose knots tighter; I made knots where no knots had been before. YES! When a man has the key to heaven for the very first time, he is not apt to be calm. My heart, despite the settings staying solid, catch-locked on CRUISE, was pounding away like a big mallet hitting a one-pound sack of marshmallows in the Old Days. For one terribly giddy moment of sickness I thought I might lose consciousness altogether. But calling on all the forces of determination in the flesh-strips I still owned I hung in there doggedly and fought with the knots in the twine. . . .
Now, with my new-metal mistress at last unwrapped, and for the very first time all mine . . . I think it only necessary, and fitting, to tell you that we had a very nice time . . . the first time . . . and each and every time subsequently and thereafter we had a very nice time. The rest is per
sonal, private and not necessarily for publication at all.
And yet, and yet—something loose in the flesh-strips I still own somehow nags at me, pushes at me, asks me to set down this greatness, tell how it was . . . share . . . even brag a little of the truth . . . be fair with those less fortunate . . . keep nothing back . . . enrich the world with the telling of a great GREAT moment in love. OH! YES! YES, I WILL!!
The cords all in scattered snarls and little tangle-ball heaps now. . . the shredded paper torn hastily, frantically from and in its own wild piles now. . .The room a shambles, but THE DREAM there cool . . . the blonde doll all turned on, the real and true-copied image of an old Dream in the mind . . . there waiting in the body that science had made, the little bow of a mouth all moist and rosy red, the blue eyes blue-bulb blue and like small glass globes sliced carefully out of that heaven when June was all clear-and-bright . . . and now here to look at me like two sweet queens from paradise, light and language and love-bespeaking-love for this empress come visiting from heaven . . . no more than a body’s length away. . . SO I MOVED INTO THAT MOMENT. . . snatching away what was necessary to snatch away of her clothes . . . my heart on MAX entirely now, hers on LOVE ME COOL . . . factory set. . . .
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