Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  “We’ll let you go,” he said, “and good luck. I didn’t really want to take your Stronghold from you and award your flesh-strips to another, you with such a good record once and with now—I can tell—such a really great sadism in you.” He nodded again, that little neck-jerk nod, and I knew it was an endorsement.

  So I left the god-piece and summoned a tunnel car. I was swished in a twinkling more than a thousand steel miles eastward, back to the Lid. I rested for awhile in the comfort room of the small station, more relaxed and at peace with my times than I’d been for many a vapor shield past. After awhile I fed myself introven from my portable flesh-strip feeder. It was full night when I passed out of the Lid and, the vapor shield being retired for those hours, the cold stars in a numb moonless sky seemed to speak to me of unlimited ways to be cruel and a really good Stronghold master in Moderan, if I’d just set my heart and brain to it. I vowed to try to be worthy of the hopes of FIP Z-U. Never again would I let the god-pieces in Capitol be so disappointed with me that they could think of awarding my flesh-strips to another. Let a thousand temptresses come in the forms of a thousand new-metal mistresses—let even her come back and talk of love—I’d not digress. For me now it’s onward in meanness and cruelty.

  THE WALKING, TALKING I-DON’T-CARE MAN

  SINCE I had made my terms with the Court men, and especially FIP Z-U, the days had danced for me, they had played music, they had passed like dreams of mean. . . .

  I remember I was feeling especially good on a day; the worries were all cut back, a sheen was in the air, a shimmer, as the sun beat through the lean white vapor shield of August and smote our plastic yard sheets. I was wondering what for diversion, what for Joys, what summer sport should I choose to program into my Sched, the big brain that served me, tweetle and shimmer and flare.

  But who knows, just because the day dawns fair, with worries cut back to dormant, a fine sheen of sun and the tin birds turned on in the silver trees—who knows? There are clouds that wander the world, there are storms that walk in the land, there are disgruntled men who would hammer-stroke the very face of omnipotent God if it got in their walking way.

  He was such a one.

  I knew that a lot of new-metal was headed down the track; my warner set up that almost-steady whine. There were very few bleep-outs, those smaller softer sounds that jag at the metal drone of danger and indicate flesh-strip. I envied him in a way, for perhaps he was more metal than I; I think I did not fear him, for I had all the Stronghold guns at my beck and the other great kill potential at my call. But I accorded him an honor that usually is from fear, an honor generally reserved for armies, or new invasion principles my Enemies send in to get me, or men I know as deranged. I set him up for Study, flashed him on the Close Look. And in a way, by so doing, I had him awesome and dread while he was still a long way out.

  But it did no hurt; he was awesome and dread while still a long way out. YES! Truly. His head was shaped more like a hammer’s head than a human head, and he seemed to peck and tap and pound at the distances as he came on steadily, a huge sun-glinty shape, not hurrying, not loitering, but just coming on at a dogged peck, peck, peck. Straight and gradual he came, not looking aside at all, right down the slot. And I began to wonder if he was coming to see me, or if I and my great complex of weaponry just happened to be flat athwart the road he had chosen to peck, peck, peck. But soon it would be time to know, for soon it would be time to stop him and either open the gates or not open them. He could be God’s own Chosen or Satan’s righthand help, either one, and he couldn’t come on down this close to me and my fort and not be judged. The time for turning aside he had passed a good while back, when the orange flares went up and the warning leaflets pattered down. It was the generally understood Warning of the Line that we used in the Stronghold country. And if ever it was ignored, I had just seen it ignored by this hammer-headed shape. A man? Well—? Who could say?

  All the warning formalities slid past him as though they had never been; the greeting, if heard, was flagrantly left unreturned. He came on, pressing up to the gates, which I allowed him to do since I had checked him well on the Close Look, and the weapons and decontamination reports had both given him clear sail. But even against the closed gates he did not stop; he continued his dogged footwork and the peck, peck, peck of his head. CRAZY! Well, I suppose.

  I eased the gates back gently with the OPEN power on SLOW and he passed through the hollow square. When he came close to where I stood half down from my peep-box of steel, but with one foot, for safety, still in the door, he seemed to sense my presence and he swiveled his head a very few degrees from the straight-on that seemed to be his choice.

  “Owner?” The voice was a raspy drone; he was still moving.

  “Yes. And halt!”

  For a surprise he halted, stopped dead in his pecking tracks, then spun until he faced me. “Just passing through. I hurt not where I walk. I respect the life-rights of others. But generally I do not deviate. My mission? If I have one—well, it’s very hard to know.”

  “I am Master of Stronghold 10,” I said, “the fortress with the best war record in all this wide land. Your coming on past the flares and the dropping leaflets was my choice to give; your pecking past the gates was my choice to allow; your going at all, unblasted, past the Warning of the Line was my choice to extend. I hope for no misunderstand—”

  “If I’ve found God, then this is the end of the trail!” He reached at a tin belt that seemed low on his solid waist, and faster than I could follow he held a huge black hammer lightly in either hand. My face could almost feel them crashing through metal and flesh-strip and bone. Then strangely he laughed, a cracked unbelievable sound that was hardly of mirth, and he returned the hammers to the tin belt where they hung like two black questions, I could not help thinking. “I’d almost given up finding God.” Then he laughed again. “But all jesting aside, and satire, let us not speak of God. He’s why I’ve gone over to metal for the rest of the Long Trip.”

  “Are you an iron minister?” I asked. “Do you speak up for an old faith sometimes? Do you cry out for redemption of a world?” I meet them all here in the slot where the Big Travel goes past my fort, and I’m ready to make allowances for them all. But with him I thought maybe I had gone too far when I saw those long steel hands turn to hunting birds in stoop and then become snake heads as they fell. He rested them on the hammers lightly where they hung.

  “Mister,” he said, “I’m in your Stronghold not by choice, certainly not as a guest. And yet I would not be mocked at either. You opened the gates. I didn’t ask it. If you had left them closed I’d still be pecking at them, with my feet going. I’d use the hammers after awhile. I was once stopped a year at a little mountain cliff, down province, a whole pecking year. After that long the cliff began to crumble, and I walked on through. With me it absolutely doesn’t matter—pecking at a Stronghold here, battering a mountain cliff down province, or walking on through cleared and free in the open vapor-shield air. I’ll wear out time until I’m tired of time, and then I’ll just turn off the knobs I move by. I have absolutely no faith, no known purpose for being, and if I find God’s face, or any part of that face, I’m programmed to strike it with both hammers as fast as I can hit, and as hard. There are reasons for all this, which I fully explain about once every twenty-five years.” He looked at an elaborate time device swung down from his new-metal neck and I knew years, months, weeks, days, hours—all of it down to the last second-tick were cornrningled there in a jumble of calendars and red whirling blades. If metal can grin—well, he grinned, an open kind of smirk. “You just missed the big recital by a year, some six weeks, five days and a certain assorted amount of ticking seconds, round minutes and dragging jumbly hours,” he said.

  “Maybe you could camp here until the time comes up to talk, and then I could hear your tale,” I said, because I had my humor about me as well as one of my feet in safety, in the door of the peep-box of steel.

  “Just say I f
ound the Answers,” he said. “Just say you’ve seen the walking-talking Don’t-Care man, one being who has escaped The Grip. It wasn’t easy, it took a long time, and planning, but I think I’ve achieved it finally, the ultimate resolution of that built-in agony, the Life-Death Predicament of Man.”

  That was a big statement he’d just loaded out there at the last.

  “YES! the walking-talking Don’t-Care man rests well at night. He just leans up somewhere against a post, a creek bank, a tree, an old missile launching shell, anything—turns off the switches and leaves it programmed so that he’ll be turned back on at a suitable morning time. And always in him there’s the assurance of the wonderful option; at any time the walking-talking Don’t Care decides to, he can, when he shuts down the switches at night, neglect to program his awakening, and it’ll be all over—OVER!”

  “But here!” I could not help suggesting, “hasn’t any kind of a man, at any time in history, in effect always had that option, to not awake in the morning? Self-death is just a little less old than life. Or did I miss something?”

  “YES!” he howled in derision, “you missed it almost all. The walking-talking Don’t-Care man is different because he is so indifferent. I’ve outsmarted God by a long and slow maneuver. I’ve left myself on a hundred dozen operating tables, down the days, down the line. The flesh I was and the soul I was supposed to be have left out through a hundred dozen hospital garbage pails and thus were scattered on many many big rivers and many many refuse-burning fires. And now I’m all ‘replacements’—heart, brain, blood, nerves, everything—all metal now, all automatic, all programmed—wonderful! And you know something? I never dream at night. How could I dream at night? I’m all turned off when I turn in. HA!”

  This fellow had a point. I began to see his plan. The rest of us new-metal folk, with our flesh-strips few and played-down, had schemed to defeat the Predicament of Man, the agony of his transience and long-death fears in the world, by simply living forever. We’d conquer the big conundrum by never facing it. YES! But truly I was beginning to see how that could turn tedious. And now this one, who styled himself the Don’t-Care one, had come up with a new and shining plan that beat ours very much. Man slowly turned to metal, with all his thoughts, actions, needs programmed! Well, that certainly would seem to have solved the Great Mystery and the Great Fear in a logical scientific way. The flesh-body and the soul so piecemeal gone that neither existed now anywhere at all, neither to be held accountable and neither to be up for redemption. And who could say he had transgressed? Had he killed himself? Ho! He had merely transformed himself. And when he turned off the switches for the last time and, tiring of it all, did not program another day, could you say he then had killed himself? I think you could not reasonably charge metal with suicide, not logically.

  Then a question took me as he stood there so bland and self-assured, his two snake-head hands lightly on the hammers where they swung. “Why, since He has allowed you to solve it, The Problem, would you wish to strike at His face with those two hammers, if you met that face ever, partly or in whole?”

  For awhile he just stared at me, and, if metal can hate, I would say that he hated. He whipped out the two black hammers and stood there, each one threat-posed. For all his metal bravado and the total-defiance stare the voice seemed old when he spoke: “Intelligence was not left out when they built my head back together. My thoughts are metal now, but they work out. Don’t I know who put me in The Predicament in the first place? Don’t I know!? And the fact that He allowed me to change, warns me that He could probably change me back. And by God, I’ll go down fighting, striking until these hammers are all worn down and my arms are all metal shreds, before He’ll change me back to a man!”

  Then he left me, pecking through the walk-out part of the Stronghold square. When he attained the far side, I thumbed the gates back for his leaving. He went out still pecking, going going—for his ending. Who—what knows where?

  PART TWO

  Everyday Life in Moderan

  TO FACE ETERNITY

  I THINK most of us knew that to face Eternity on its own terms we’d need a host of gimmicks, or one BIG never-failing master gimmick to see us through. That’s a lot of time out there—forever! Of course we had our new-metal mistresses, the diamond-tooth tiger cubs and the new-metal kittens to fight them, the skirmish trees that came through the yard-holes and fought each other for supremacy, the steel birds of Moderan (with war heads substitutive for bird heads), the different-colored vapor shields and a clutch of other diversionary phenomena to grab the mind and make for us variety times in Joys.

  But we needed really some bread-and-butter diversion to ease us across the long haul, something that we could do or watch or count or accomplish or make love to over and over and over and it would all still seem fresh and rewarding. New-metal mistresses are fine. They’re just great little sports and they add a bit of Joy and groovy-goo to even the most cold and metallic of situations. Their settings are various and they can be arranged and rearranged to suit any man’s taste and changing taste as to size, vital-statistic measurements, color of hair, general deportment and overall love technique. And when you consider the super-luxury special-made new-metal mistress kit—WOOOO WOOOO WOW WOW WOW WOWEEE!!!!!!

  STILL, I do not think making love to a tin can, no matter how great and versatile and playful the tin can is, can, by itself, see a man through the long-haul of Eternity. The only thing, we finally decided, that would see us through was war, total and continuing war. Plotting for each the other’s total destruction and coming up with countermeasures to protect each his own new-metal hide at all costs are the kinds of human enterprises that put the human animal up close to godliness. Gods, as everyone knows, are both destructive and creative. On destruction we have always been strong qualifiers. And the only kinds of beings that can actually cope with Eternity on anything like easeful and self-assured terms are gods. So we must destroy and create as gods.

  YES! we lived each as a god in a great steel-and-concrete redoubt. We hurled the thunderbolts and took on the task of trying to destroy everything but ourselves, with great relish. There were no lengths to which we would not go if we thought we could do even a new-metal flea’s worth toward destroying a neighborhood man and establishing our own supremacy. Even though our own Strongholds might be severely damaged in the process. Then, to be creative, we’d all start shoring up and rebuilding in a truce time.

  Actually, as steel men we were essentially but extensions of what man has always been. The essential man had been extended, I’m trying to say. The essence of normal man was and is and always will be the feeling of, “I AM the greatest and most deserving thing in all the Universe and I should have preference wherever I go.” This is true collectively and it is equally true individually. There was never normal man so lowly but what he, if given the smallest smallest chance to rise, would start regarding himself as a winner for sure. The domain of his aspirations will have no NO ceiling and no NO walls. The whole universe will be his pumpkin, his and his alone. A ghastly, slimy, ungodly contrivance he, in many ways, is. But he has, let’s face it, one saving grace. He is to be counted on to be his ghastly, rotten, slimy, true-bad self until the end. He is reliable, let us say, in that his total badness is assured. And in that he is godly.

  IN THE INNERMOST ROOM OF AUTHORITY

  IT WAS a ball-round new-steel marvel deep-swung in the very exact mathematical center of my complex. And the center of gravity of my hip-snuggie chair, the throne of authority and of good rest, was positioned in the very exact mathematical center of this ball-round place. The walls were the rind of a room-orb, shiny new-metal skin-orb, so perfect in its globular perfection that I used to gloat on the number of perfect circles that must be thus enclosed—nay, not only enclosed, but part and parcel of the room-orb. Sometimes I sat for days, near-hypnotized, but imagining, “counting” the perfect circles that must be thus enclosed and part and parcel of this great steel onion. It staggered the brain, even
a Moderan man’s brain, honed to the precision of a billion computers of the Old Days, each one of the billion computers complementing the others to make completely unfathomable to any ordinary mind the power by which a Moderan man’s brain outclassed the computer from the Old Days. And yet I could not “count” the perfect circles that had to be there contained in the room-orb.

  Sometimes I thought that this must surely be that highest thing for which man was made up, to finally sit, completely invulnerable as forever-man, in the innermost part of the onion of his world, a Stronghold hollow ball, and pull the final count of the layers of his onion home in an innermost room of meditation and authority of the self. For each circle of that gleaming globular room must be a kind of final closing of our safety, emblematic of our Victory, our total win through Great Science Plan over all the inadequacies that once were US. YES! And yet the skins were not infinity, although they were close, very close to that. Given the right instrument, or instruments, to augment my billion-computered brain, surely these circles could be counted, no matter how they crossed and spiraled and tangled and were each part of many others in the room-orb. For this was a thing with limits, I could, with the help of ladders (or tin men to hold me, sometimes making great pyramids of tin men with me at the top for the high parts) touch it, feel it all over on the inside to my heart’s content. And then I could, toggling my hinges and braces, “dash” out and with that inside feeling still warm in my steel hands and my steel mind take tin men, or extensions of ladders and tin men, and feel the room all over on the outside—with, necessarily, a bit of tough climbing. So I had it contained! There was an Inside and there was an Outside. In a word, it was a Thing in my hands. So therefore, the circles must be countable. Although it almost staggers MY brains to think of the true difficulty of the task of the counting.