Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  YES! let it be known, they gave wide berth to The Hammer. Even on a Sunday they (“my friends”) usually waved only from the tops of hills or from other and sundry wide distances, and that usually upon the point of just separating away.

  JUST THE WAY IT SHOULD BE. COULDN’T HAVE BEEN BETTER. YAY! FOR THE HAMMER.

  And sometimes in a kind of celebration I would make a heap of all my hammers, the Stronghold would be emptied, every nook and cranny would be outsearched for them and my weapons men would come carrying hammers to make that lovely mound of thousands of these in orange. And while the Big-Punch missiles swung slow and easy in the launch slings and all the other dread devices of my dominance and danger rested dormant for a Truce, I’d dance around my hammers, the tripping, but necessarily heavy, dance of the wonderful new-metal man.

  Why hammers? Why the celebration? Two reasons, and perhaps more. One reason, and perhaps the most enjoyable—when I had my shriek-orange hammers all out, mounded on display and I dancing around them, with all my weapons men polished and drawn up for a review, there was no doubt that a shudder went through all the neighboring Strongholds that viewed this as symbolic and a preparation, as some great American Indian Chief of the Old Days might hold a war dance, with his face painted, just prior to Scalp Harvest.

  YES! another reason. To me bladed hammers are quite emblematic of a considerable quantity of all man’s great progress to his GREAT TOP place of today. Take away the cutting and pounding, implicit in the symbolic cutting hammers, my own special symbol, and, without it, see how much would be forever given away. Left out! Have we not cut and pounded (and fitted) our ways to the top? YAY! cutters, pounders and fitters, give old defeat a kick. You’ve won the game!

  And on the TOP what happens? We sit there and kick our heels of steel at all the world. On TOP we snarl. We dare them to come get us. We lay plans to go for them. It is all conflict. The living time of man is conflict and essentially nothing else. The living time of any life is conflict and essentially nothing else. By even the littlest wriggle into the most rudimentary “becoming” of life the substance that wriggles had issued the biggest challenge of all up to the universe. This substance that wriggles has designed to be able to get up and move itself across its environmental space and place, all against the meant stability-instability of its environmental home. Even a tree and even the smallest smallest plant struggling toward the sky fit this. In other words a new and VERY STRANGE force had entered the seethe and writhe and twist and change of the cosmic dead things that moved to their own lawed pattern. Life truly is the outlaw, the cosmic maverick, and, being so, its time must be forever a fleeing of the dread sheriffs of dead-substance laws, those constables of the dead lawed order-disorder of the Universe that could not have foreseen this VERY STRANGE accident.

  So we (THEY, our wonderful science-men) have picked up the VERY STRANGE accident (life) at its highest development (man) and have turned it to its ultimate durability, which is the eternity-durability of new-metal man. YES! We (THEY) caught it just in time, those science-men. How lucky we to have had those top-dog giants waiting in the labs at that grand time in history to pick up the VERY STRANGE accident (life) at its ultimate flesh-needs development (man) and freeze it for all times. YAY! good science plan, take your bows now, you good old Saviour Men, you’ve won the game for sure.

  Now, to turn tedious for a time, this is what happened. Flesh-man had developed to that place on his random Earth-ball home where it was to be the quick slide down to oblivion. All the signs were up, the flags were out for change for man and the GO was DOWN. To ENDING. Flesh-man was at the top, far as he could climb as flesh-man, and from there he was certainly due to tumble. But he had the luck to have these brave good white-maned men in the white smocks, the lab giants, the shoulders, and great-bulged thighs of our progress (what matter if they were weazened, probe-eyed, choleric, scheming, little men sometimes—more often than not, REALLY?!), authors of so much of man’s development and climb to that place where he was just due to die, expire, destroy himself and his home. These great good lab giants then froze man and his Earth-ball home at this grand stage of development to make new-metal man and set him in the Strongholds upon the plasto-coated Earth that had once been man’s random and inefficient home. New-metal replaced the flesh (down to the few flesh-strips and those, we hope, may soon be gone), the bones were taken out and new-metal rods, hinges and sheets put in (it was easy!) and the organs all became engines and marvelous tanks for scientifically controlled functional efficiency forever. YAY! Don’t you see?! Our scientists made of life-man (the VERY-STRANGE-accident man) essentially a dead-elements man, one who could now cope with eternity, but he certainly was not a dead man. AH! heavens no! He was alive! with all the wonderful science of the Earth ages, and just as functional as anyone could wish. YAY! science, take your plaudits now! You’ve shown what was meant from the beginning for the VERY-STRANGE-accident man.

  But I imagine God stands stunned at your successes, your versatility, not to mention your audacity. And if God should happen to be dismayed and displeased too much, I further imagine you could just dismiss him, write him out of the sky, pull his plugs, as it were. You then could make your own very personal God, out of rods and sheets and those wonder chemical changes you are so capable of, as, for instance, the brain pans of man. But who needs a God, other than “our god,” that massive stick of new-metal placed, when Moderan was very new, on the great plastic plain of the Dream Realized? We’re all gods now, or parts of—new-metal gods! I stand a-tiptoe in my optimisms now and I touch all the stars. We’ve got it made, you good old leaned-down dogs, you relentless racers of scientific knowledge, you keen thin blade-sharp minds of elemental thought, you keen kings, you lab technicians! I thank you for the death of my “life” (my poor-flesh weaknesses) and I commend you for the resurrection of my essence in steel. You kept the main essence of man—man the fighter—and now we’ll prove that good hard worth through all eternity. WE’LL FIGHT! We’ll fight each other. We’ll make harsh monsters, set them loose and fight such monsters across all our space. We’ll move with engines and hard, programmed thoughts. We’ll make all manner of dragons for our involvement, and we’ll overcome them. For we’ll program the conquests a little more carefully than we’ll feed in the threats. But mostly we’ll just fight each other—each other and ourselves, the truly tireless enemies.

  AH SCIENCE! AH MAN! AH ETERNAL STRIFE, life of our life. In Moderan. . . .

  THE STRONGHOLD

  THE STRONGHOLD—under its steel roof hangs all that we are meant. It is a place that corners off the mind, new-metal mind. Some days I tour my Stronghold and that is all I will do, just gloating on the power that I own and the indestructible presence that it and I comprise. From the top down she is wonder, fixed in steel—concrete and new-metal steel. She is protection. She is threat. She is “don’t tread on me” but “I definitely WILL tread on you!” You cannot trust a Stronghold unless you are in it and it is yours. Then you can trust a Stronghold. The tours will be enjoyable then, from the top down, from the bottom up.

  As you perhaps do not know, my Stronghold is walled cylinders tipped with cones, the tops of which stick far far up toward where heaven is not, nor ever was, although once thought to be, yes, strongly thought to be! Atop the tips my flags stack up like challenges, like chins stuck out, like threats, like braggadocio, like accomplishments. They are all these. And more. They are the coal-black pennons emblazoned with the glowing-glinting-gleaming number 10. And sometimes, in a manufactured wind, when they all fly and flap it is a show!

  Other than the glowing-glinting-gleaming number 10 there is on the pennons one decoration and one only, a cruel, big-bladed war hammer in shrieking orange. It is a tool to pound the world down and, while pounding, slice it.

  2064, OR THEREABOUTS

  HE WAS just a tall spot moving slow out of the Down Provinces when first I picked him up on the Warn. But he came on dogged and inexorable until he stood dour and spent-seeming
, frowning at my armored gates, the noon sun of a sun-flashing day glinting upon his sheathed face.

  I allowed him through my gates one by one, when the weapons report and all the decontaminators signaled he was clean, and I saw that his heart was exposed as well as some of the gears activating the breath bags. There were tatters of flesh, and torn metal, over half of his upper shell. It was as though some giant claw, I thought, had ripped him across the chest in some accidental quick encounter. Or more it was, I thought, like a madman might work and rip at himself after some long time of frustration.

  “You’re hurt!” I impulsively said, a strange compassion working through me as I stared into his rusted sorrowing eyes.

  “NO!” he said, putting down the small easel he carried, “not the way that you think I am hurt. The heart works well still, and the covering being off the gears of the chest does not slow them one whit. But I am hurt, deep-wounded, daily killed by the long unrewarded years of looking, not finding.” He dropped his head forward then and his shoulders were bent, and I knew enough about burdens to know that he had one. “Each of us seeks for his own view of the Dream,” he went on, “each in his limited way, each to his own degree of time-spent-in-searching looks for his Ultimate. Mine has been almost a total involvement, and the years seem growing late now, mine and the world’s. That’s why when you saw me, though perhaps I did not seem to be, I was speeding. I was up almost to total maximum with my hinges and braces working, oh, I was on the trail of the Dream again, hotly. Coming down here.”

  “But why,” I stammered, “why have you, an artist, come to this place of an obvious involvement in strength, a citadel of real firmness? I suppose you are en route?”

  “NO!” He snapped his head up, the old shoulders straightened and the white metal strings in his beard trembled. His head shook on the spring-strips in his neck. “No, I am not en route, except in that larger sense that we are always en route as we wander here and look here. But I hope I am Here now, arrived. I hope I have found—after this to wander no more the Long Search.”

  “I—I don’t understand.” In my general uncertainty and surprise I trembled more than I meant to. Instinctively I looked to the better positioning of weapons men and edged a little nearer a steel sentry who stood nearby. “This is no artist’s colony,” I blurted, “nor an old painter’s rest home. This is a working Stronghold, and we hold no dances for maimed Dream Seekers here. I would hope not to have to be unkind.”

  He ignored my words almost entirely. “Through the Down Provinces,” he continued, “word spread of a most wonderful armed place by the plastic land of the steel dogs near the Valley of Witch. A man was in a citadel there, according to rumors passed round, a New Processes man of New Processes Land, replaced, metal-shored, flesh-stripped to the very minimum of flesh allowable for mortal man. That man sat serenely living, month in month out, years long, decades long, never influenced by family or friend or enemy, completing his great self through the days of his living, really living a Life. Surrounded by so many security devices and Walls and all the Wonderful Appliances of the Sciences that serve and nourish mankind in this year of Our Discoveries, 2064, he lounged like a superb nut, a giant seed in a great shell, ripening day by day to new Meanings. After wandering life-long, frantically, the fear-tossed world and not finding—well, to see such beauteous calm—and Life-Meaning—I must before I die!

  “Yes, I have been of the wanderers,” he talked on, “the lost and searching wanderers, who sometimes never find because we pick, to look for, a Dream too shining to ever be.” He plucked a small raveling piece of metal loose from his malleable nose. “Yes, they replaced me, metal-alloyed me, gave me there at the last mostly a mechanical metallic heart, one perhaps as faultless and smooth-working as yours or your great master’s. But I was never content to go behind some weapons and a Wall to live with the Wonderful Appliances. In short, I could never quite find my place in the stability of the New Processes society. Something writhed unfed, always.

  “Frantically it seems I was always chasing the wind to the edges of frightening bottomless caverns of Despair, while such as your great master, with what must have been a surer grasp of The Values, slipped with effortless beauteous calm into the chair of The Dream. I have longed to make some enduring monument; I have hungered after the Great Painting; ever haunted by questions I have tried throughout a long failure to express the Life-Meaning, the essence of YOU and ME. And now, changing my course a little, I have come to do it as a single portrait, one of your great firm master calmly in his chair! Right here in this Stronghold!”

  More than a trifle alarmed now I looked at the gauntness of him where he stood trembling, his rusted metal flexing, sending up small squeaks and screams. And I noted how his flesh-strips with the years had gone all wrinkled and sere. There was a stench about him of old grease in the hinge joints, and certainly he needed an oil bath to brighten his metal shell. What poor specimens profess to our greatest dreams and questions, I reflected. This smelly vagrant, I thought with the greatest contempt, peasant-robot-thing, probably doesn’t have a single Wall or weapons man to his name, and yet he staggers addle-waddle over the countryside, with his easel and paint brushes, talking about his Ultimate, talking about Meaning. As though such as he had any right to question and conjecture! But when his rusting eyes with all their piercing sorrow looked into mine again, I felt a queer watery feeling, that was not fear, flood through my flesh-strips. “Perhaps you have not had your introven,” I said. “Perhaps you have food-hunger.” I went for a needle and a cup of the special fluid that serves to nourish our flesh-strips, that small part of mortality the Rebuilders have had to leave between metal and metal, even here in Moderan.

  When I came back he was lying along the floor, looking like the small beginnings of an interesting stack of scrap steel. His hands were over his face, the fingers spread, and except his eyes gleamed through his fingers like two brown fires, I would have thought him entirely “done with it all.” With the snap of a rusty spring he came to a sitting position. “I do not wish to dine,” he said. “I am quite well and strong, really. It’s just that so near to Dream’s find, to trail’s end, to final realization one grows a little fluttery in the dream bag, a little tight in the think box, oh God! oh God! A kind of tightening around the mind cups it is; a kind of great hammering of the heart that has waited so long comes on. And a throbbing beats just under the gears of the eyes to make one see phantom wings. One feels suddenly tired and close to death on the brink of the Great Jubilation. That’s why I lay down.”

  He stood erect, just unfolded up from the floor with a snap of all his joints. In some ways it reminded me of an way they do when spring comes round to Big Calendar and someone thumbs the switch to Green Things in Season Control. “Take me to him,” he cried, “for it grows late, late in my years as well as old in the years of the automatic tree coming out of the plastic earthshell, the world. Let us waste no more time. Take me to your great master, that man who sits living like a great firm nut, a splendid seed, the earth’s finest fruit, ripening in the hull of his Walls, guards and guns. His Meaning I would record; such an adaptation, such a fearless calm in the face of the ever-lurking Disaster is surely the Beauty I have sought.”

  Unfortunately, at that juncture I had one of my panic times. Certain wheels had spun round, the slots had been spread, and in my mind now it was time for my cowardice. While he stood there waiting to be conducted to the Great Calm Face, I passed totally into the Trembly Country of Fear, my own personal Nation of Dread. While he stood watching, wondering, I went completely into my Cycle of Anguish, and I could not help how it was. I trembled violently; metal parts clanked and zinged; my face steel became so gaunt and distorted that metal-complaint started up a high shriek-and-whine. I started wildly to think of all the happenstance things that might befall me and my fort. Though the sound-buzz was constant now, meaning that all was well in the Wonderful Appliances that often served me so well, how long would it be so? Let a wheel falter
a thousand miles away, let a shaft break where a billion phantom buckets dropped uncountable billions of power droplets upon a blade, upon a thousand blades, and lights would blink, the wonderful buzz would go scratchy, and my fort would cough and catch its breath and flounder like a bent-down sick old man. And the sun! What of the sun, the giver of all? The sun burns up! The sun falls out of the sky! A bigger sun comes flying flaming out of the Great Yon and burps and my sun is wafted away, or even it eats my sun, opens up like some great boa mouth and gulps a small flaming egg. Fears, Fears, FEARS! In my personal cycle, far in the Kingdom of Dread, I think of all the fears, fears founded, fears unfounded, fears old, fears new, fears not before dreamed up perhaps by any man. An attack! a space launch from far-off dangerous old Mars! Some strange metal-rot works all unknown, unsuspected, in my hinge joints for years! I fall into chaos and parts. Suddenly. What else is there but fears ever for any reasonable man? What? WHAT?

  When I came back to a calmer place and found somehow the small firm Fortress of Hold in my groping mind I saw how he waited and stared. A pounding as of hammers on huge steel tubes filled my metal ears then; wave on wave of shame washed up from my mortal strips. I clung to two steel men and braced my feet hard on a pillar of iron fitted around marble slabs. Fighting hard I managed to meet the intensity of his gaze. “There’s no one here but me—I swear,” I finally said, “I’m master here. I’m the one you would paint! Shall we move to my calmness chair?”

  For a moment too intense to measure in the long hurling on of Time the brown balls of his eyes seemed awash in his battered head. His face steel wrinkled and screamed, the white threads of his beard trembled as if a sharp wind passed through. I watched the Dream finally die in the iron face of a man, and being what I was there was no thing I could do. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say as from some im-measurably great distance, and I felt something of how sorry he really was for us all.