Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  The large circles of these circular walls are quite quite many in number, when you really consider them with a clear-headed brain. And then each material circle is filled with those pesky atoms, which of themselves are not the end (it’s perfectly conceivable—to me, at least—that within each of these pesky atoms there may be a peopled Stronghold, complete with “little” tin men, all organized for war and fighting, as we in Stronghold 10 are organized for war and fighting; it staggers the mind, even a Stronghold master’s mind, really does, but I can think of it—sometimes) and each of all this would have a goodly number of its own circles. And when we had done all this—OHHOHHHWEEOOOH!—think of the tasks not done. There would still be the hollow space around me and under my hip-snuggie throne in this Innermost Room of Authority that, alas, was not quite empty-hollow space, but was beset with the common air, a gas containing countables. So each perfect circle in the particles of the gas would have to be taken the measure of after the larger circles of the room and air had all been tabulated in this not-quite-hollow place. But it can be done by a dedicated man, and I am a dedicated man, a new-metal man! This is not any kind of infinity, because, as I have just told you, I can “feel” the walls on the inside. And I can “feel” the walls on the outside. Anything that I can thus contain must be such that I can take its measure, full-number it and mentally bring it to account.

  So do you wonder that I sit in my hip-snuggie throne in the Innermost Room of Authority, sometimes for days on end, calm as a cold bowl of oil, my heart on REST, my brain on MAX and think on Universal Deep Problems? I have so many problems! We have so many problems, inlooping problems, intertwining problems, interwoven problems. And, really, how to do these circles is not even a beginning of THE PROBLEM.

  THE PROBLEM

  THE PROBLEM really is this: Can we last forever? That is our dream in Moderan. That is the whole Big Moderan Dream, the Forever-lasting Dream. Will the hinge joints hold? Oh, yes, the hinge joints will hold. The whole new-metal complex will hold. The everlast lungs will go on and on, and the heart will piston that steady life-beat throughout the centuries, throughout the millenniums—FOREVER. For these parts are of and for forever, though all replaceable. Yes, should a part prove not to be of and for forever (there is always the chance of a flaw, you know, so shore up the chances) a multitude and plenty of big warehouses hold spare parts for each and every new-metal man. Should a heart, say, falter in a Moderan forever-man, it will be a simple matter to send out for a pump change, and the Problems-Circulatory warden for that district can soon slip the new unit in, close the housing, put on the official seal and send his big bill up to Central Health.

  Even the flesh-strips, I believe, can be shored up with new-metal alloys and made to last forever. At least, we have to believe that they can, for they are, in a way, all that we have. And these may be the one small, not-to-be-remedied, flaw that will finally do us down and clear back to reality. But we have to believe that it will not. I look at my flesh-strips sometimes, when I am alone, and I’m mostly alone, for I am a King (due that Splendid Isolation that is a King’s great due), and I cannot believe I CANNOT BELIEVE all that is therein implied in the flesh-strips, all that is purported, in the Old Days, to have happened in that pulpy mass, all that, they say, even now transpires. It is MIRACLES, it is MAGIC, it is witchcraft! And to think that once I lived as all of this—miracles walking, magic talking and witchcraft transpiring within me every part of every second of every day. Weeoohhhh! WeEoOhHhH!! WEEOOHHHH!!! It is a wonder that I lasted until noon of the first day. It is a wonder—

  We have to keep working on improving the introven, the only flesh-strip food that will do. We have to keep experimenting to discover ways to cut the flesh-strips down. (The flesh-strips are our godliness, in a way, and yet we have to keep working to cut our godliness down to become more godly. It does seem a paradox. But a Moderan man with his Great Science Plan understands. YES! And it is not a paradox. NO!) We have to keep watching day and night for better ways to care for the flesh-strips we own. Flesh-strip hygiene must become a major science. Hypochondria must become an honored thing. No more must we point the finger of scorn and say, “HAH, hypochondriac!” Health worrying must become a national second occupation (our main occupation is war) for every man, not the preoccupation of the few nerve-nuts it is now considered to be. For only by complete and dedicated fervent health worrying can we be sure that throughout all our waking hours we’ll be fully conscious of, and properly worried about, the dangers that beset our flesh-strips. It must not be fidgety finicky thought-worrying only; it must be bold and forthright physical worrying to the extent that we’ll turn on gut-disturber buttons to the chancy world and yearn seriously. We’ll feel out our flesh-strips, thump them and pinch them at any hour of the day or night, to see if all is yet well. Or is something going wrong!? And perhaps we’ll call in neighbors to substantiate our fears and claims. We’ll check out each the other’s flesh-strips at any hour of the day or night that a health checkup seems to offer some chance of turning up a flaw. That must become a call that must be always answered. We must pass laws to make it a high crime not to check out a neighbor’s flesh-strips whenever he calls for our assessment of his situation. (Or in times when no one calls, go over and volunteer a checkout anyway; assess them gratuitously as a good-neighbor turn.) Even in grimmest grandest war, when the wreck-wrecks are out and homing in for the kill, when the White Witch rockets are on the line and launching, when the doll bombs are taking that staunch straight-and-steady targetward stroll, it must not be unusual for a neighboring Stronghold Captain to drop over for a flesh-strip feel-out. What we must own is that we are all in this together, in it together to such an extent that nothing NOTHING must deter us from protecting each the other’s flesh-strips in a logical medical scientific and neighborly way. That we must become a ONE-WORLD of health-worriers is to put it mildly, indeed. We must be more than mere worriers. We must be alarmists where our flesh-strips are concerned. We must go with every fad that may offer some chance of turning up a weakness in a flesh-strip. Only by such extreme means can we protect and cherish that most precious of our possessions and, I regret to say, the most vulnerable.

  Ah, yes! To one not of Moderan it might seem most unusual to contemplate the situation: We are in, say, a grim all-out all-universe to-the-last-death war. All the blow-and-bang stuff is trying for kills. But we’ll not wait for any truce time for us to keep check on each the other’s godly parts. Maybe some hot all-out shot-out time I’ll see old neighboring Stronghold to my left scoot out from his eleventh, outermost Wall. I’ll see him “hurrying” to me, slow, slow as we go toggling our hinges and braces. I’ll not let up for a moment my bombardment of his fort. I’ll not recall even one walking doll bomb walking in to blow up him and his Walls. And he’ll not expect me to. Should I do it he’d no doubt be extraordinarily, even extremely, embarrassed. For the war must go on in all its grim inevitability. But we must try for long life too. And that may be a paradox to the lesser peoples. But not to a Moderan man. OH, NO! It is as logical as progress itself.

  And should, some fine truce day, say, old neighboring Stronghold to the east beam me a message telling me that he is well and feels fine, I’ll not let him get away with it. I’ll beam right back at him the question: How can you be sure, man!? Then I’ll go on to beam him a whole multitude of suggested conditions, things he probably never would think of on his own, maybe things that his medical steel men have not even thought of for him, but things which in part or in total may tend to convince him that he is most probably not as well as he feels, and maybe not even well at all.

  PLAYMATE

  IT WAS on a July Monday that Little Sister was under his window, very early, with a big box in her arms. The vapor cover that day was pink, as indeed it would be for all of July, as set by the Central Vapor Shield Control and the Vapor Light Saving people. The temperature was controlled to a pleasant 70 degrees F. inside and outside, and he, as usual, was working on a formula.


  “My little playmate came,” she shouted, “my little sister! Come see.”

  He, plastic-legged and iron-x “replaced,” arose from his hip-snuggie chair and went to the edge of his door. “What’s the nonsense?” he asked, metal-fogged and weary. “Why aren’t you napping? Or behaving with Mox?” Mox was her iron man who looked after her needs like a mother, in the red plastic hut where she lived apart from other folk while awaiting the age of “replacements.”

  “It’s my little companion!” Little Sister shrieked. “I sent for her. She came today, in the mail.”

  He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his gold-seal hands. He tried to think across the metal fields. A man of Advanced Times, he had submitted to many iron-x, and a few gold-seal “replacements” since coming up from Olderan, in a move toward durability, in a move to conquer immortality for the corporeal self. But sometimes this metal self, that was fast becoming his main self, dominated the flesh-strips to such an extent that he found it difficult to force thoughts to track the petty paths of everyday. Across the pathless fields of the high dimensions he was a keen hot hound on the scent of formulae. With what was left of his family, Little Sister, he sometimes found it hard going even to converse on plain terms. “Tell me slowly,” he pleaded.

  She took a deep breath. Her good full chest swelled in a triumph of flesh and bone. Her brown eyes were sparkle-bright when she said, “I mustn’t grow up alone, even if I am the last little girl. As I await the age of ‘replacement’ I must have a companion, which same just came in the mail, Daddy. And you will put her together, Daddy, so we can play. I have named her already—Little Slots.”

  Slots was a box full of slotted metal, a few wires, some power wafers, many tapes, a head, various curved pieces of white plastic, certain parts that were almost flesh and the printed sheet of directions. Slots was a pile of junk and a headache confronting a man dedicated to solitude, eternity and calm, companionless thinking on universal deep problems. Slots as she was, unassembled, had cost five hundred thousand dollars cash—by gift certificate from the Organization for the Entertainment of Little Flesh People.

  There was a clatter in his joints, of metal scraping on metal and the wincing of the flesh-strips, as he knelt to one knee there on the gray bare yard and took up the box that contained Slots. He opened the box and saw a wax-warm face smirking up at him, an enigmatic face that could have been a nine-year-old girl’s face, or a much older girl’s face, made of plastic and wreathed in real hair. The mechanical mouth tumbled open and beautifully formed white teeth gleamed out of the rubbery lips. “I’ll bite your big feet off if you aren’t good to me,” the beautiful flirtatious head threatened right away, mechanically and pleasantly enough. Then a clamor started up, “Change the tape, change the tape . . .”

  He jumped like a bucket full of the sun had just come high-boiling down through all those miles, through all the pink vapor shield, to spill on a jot of his flesh. When he jumped, pieces of Slots and the box in which she had been mailed scattered fanwise across the gray yard. But the head sitting smiling in the middle of the scattered pieces had a tape for the situation. “Butterfingery old cold widower and a half-wit moron girl,” it said. Then it spent about five minutes bouncing up and down on the plastic yard sheet and screaming, “Shame, shame . . . foul, foul . . . save me, save me!” After that the head, very businesslike, rolled about picking up its parts and slotting everything together until a pleasingly tall and slim fair girl of metal and white plastic stood smiling in the cool rose glow of the pink vapor shield of July. “Well, and where’s the bogs?” She deftly stooped to tear out the white nylo-wov lining of the box in which she had been mailed. She wrapped the long piece of snowy cloth about her in such a way that it was tastefully full and loose in places and taut across other places to enhance her fine plastic curves. “Always pays to please the bogs.”

  “The bogs?” said Little Sister, bewildered and still somewhat dazed by the performance she had just seen. “What do you mean, bogs?”

  “The oggosite rex. Like the meg for the wogen . . . Damn! faulty tape.” She made a sour face. Then she said with a throaty voice and a new clear tape, “I mean where are the boys? The opposite sex. Like the men for the women. I’m a girl!” She smiled.

  “You’re to be my little playmate until I’m ready for ‘replacements,’ ” said Little Sister, simply and with a heart full of love for the warm metal and plastic thing towering over her. “I’ve got ever so many card-wov cut-out dollies. You can have one. And two changes of clothes for her. Today!” Little Sister’s face shone beatific from the beautiful gesture and the open-hearted strain of such hard giving. “And I’ll let you color a little with my ray spray, if you’ll promise, cross your heart, not to bust it.”

  Slots was coldly eyeing Little Sister, distaste and boredom and pitying amusement in every stare. “Aw go grow up!” She was gritty voiced with the tape for the occasion. “I’m here to play with your dad. I think.” Little Sister was near to tears.

  But Father, eager as ever, he thought, to get the silly diversion over with, get Little Sister back to her place and himself in his hip-snuggie chair for more formula thinking, had been scientifically and purposefully reading the directions, after he had recovered from the initial shock of hearing Slots talk and seeing her put herself together. He remembered that the first of these dolls was at least ten years old now, and the idea for them was much much older, and all this helped him regain his confidence in the all-rightness of things. When he came to the CAUTION part of the instructions, he just slipped over quickly, caught Slots firmly by an arm, took the long sections out of her legs and proceeded to secure her range-change to the place calibrated LITTLE-GIRL-PLAYMATE-COMPANION. “We ship them from our factory on BIG-GIRL-LOVEMATE-DIVERSION,” the directions stated, “the calibration of widest versatility and greatest demand. But they function quite as well on LITTLE-GIRL-PLAYMATE-COMPANION, if wired to it securely after first being relieved of the long sections of the legs.” And Slots, down to Little Sister size now, was busily rewinding her dress to make up for her new status in stature. Then she said, a little dully it seemed, with the tape for the occasion, “Let’s go play cut-outs. And really, I’d love to use your ray-spray coloring thing, if I may.”

  So Little Sister and Little Slots went arm-in-arm off across the gray plastic yard toward Little Sister’s red hut, and Father, with the long sections of legs tucked firmly under one arm, hastened fast as he could back to his hip-snuggie chair and his big desk for thinking. But just as he feared might be the case, he found that he was not now thinking clean on universal deep problems. YES! he had this other problem now that would have to be solved before he could get his heart out of the bumps and jumps and back to universal cool-gear smoothness. Oh, why did these things have to happen? Why couldn’t Little Sister have just behaved with Mox, her iron man, instead of ordering this silly doll playmate? But Father, like the dogged fighter he had always been, did not dodge the issue; he got right to grips with the problem, even if his heart was not yet quite as smooth and reliable as it should have been. Then too he had to work with a mind that was really not much good now at pertinent flesh-type questions, but he would decide. YES! Should he order a doll of his own, or just change the legs back and forth on this one when Little Sister was sleeping?

  A HUSBAND’S SHARE

  IT WAS in hopeful April that he stirred. The vapor shield had been turned off for that beautiful and rainy month, and when the sun shone bright on Moderan there was a touch of heaven in that iron and plastic place. A few true flowers, red and yellow and purple, peeped up at the edges of plastic yards; a sprinkling of grass sprigs lanced through at places of join and wear cracks in the gray surfacing of the yards and fields. How many other seedlets and bulbs and grass blades must have broken their heads against the steel-gray crust of Moderan, seeking to come to the sun!

  Like a young man dreaming of his love, like a man of old going on carpets of peacock feathers and rose-pink scented air, he came in his
imagination across the slate-gray yard. But in reality it was plunk plunt tap ta-rap tunk tunka tap that his iron feet went on the plastic, and his silvered joints responded in their own way to the urgency of his need.

  He had started at sunrise on this bright Easter Sunday, had whistled the three sharp notes that opened the door of his house and had inched out jauntily, remembering a promise given at Xmas. By noon he was almost half to her, with hard walking. On down the yard he went through the hours of the afternoon, jaunty in his mind and hopeful as songs of birds, but shackled in movement to inch-along progress by the metal that had “replaced” him. “Maybe by Easter I can’t walk,” he remembered saying at Xmas. And she, his wife, had promised then to see him. At her place. To talk a bit at Easter. If Jon got through in time. Jon? Jon was her plastic man.

  Sweat oozed up, from his great need, out of the urgency, out of the terrible exertion, to the flesh-strips on his face. Fatigue was coming in him, all the flesh of him, like a giant hand of lead slowly pulling him back and down. But his keen “replaced” eyes and the scientific detached brain noted clearly that he was making progress; the join cracks of his yard inexorably were inching by, or rather, he was passing across them in his bold struggle. If she ever would want me again, he thought, if she regularly wants me again, he thought, I’ll have to have a roll-go put in the yard. He wiped the flesh-strips of his face. I wonder if she can walk now, he mused, and then dismissed the thought. It had been years since he had seen her in any pose except reclining or sitting on her white plastic bed. He remembered her reclining. He recalled the deep richness of the nylo-wov gowns she wore, the dancing ever-changing sheen of them. He thought of her legs—“replaced” just enough and in just the places to bring them up to most-beautiful-legs-in-the-world standards. He remembered them in the rich sunnylons, and how she would sit sometimes, coy legs dangled off bed edge, her small feet decorated with slippers of milky glass, the tall stemmy heels of which were clear, usually, glowing and shouting with diamonds. A tiny ball of pink or red feathers, expensively woven from plumage of some exotic bird kept from the Old Days, sometimes enhanced each slipper. If with straps, these were of new-gold mesh, either white or yellow or green gold.