But as I said, Witch wasn’t the only threat now. I didn’t regard her as even the major threat now. She was a gadfly. The implacable Enemies were somewhere over farther hills, and then there was Time . . . Time trying to get through to my flesh-strips before I could get through to the Ultimate.
“Hello, Little Sister.” The decontaminators had given her a clean bill; the weapons report had indicated that she was clear—RELIABLY as to her person, and a blurred CONDITIONAL was indicated for what she carried. I saw she carried the Littlest Angel so I thought it a reasonable risk—a little girl and her space dolly. I let them through. And now she stood before me, a tiny cherub of three, all flesh and bone and blood, her own, as yet, except her teeth, which were steel. And that was as far as the Rebuilders of Moderan had replaced her as yet, in deference to her years. By the age of twelve, if she lived, she would have all metal limbs, and perhaps, by that time, some of her organs would be plated. (I’m ninety-two and one-half percent metal alloys myself, designed to last forever!) “How are you, Little Sister?”
She lisped, jigging in glee, “I came to live with you, Daddy. I ran away from Witch. You need love!”
“Oh no!” I was taken aback and thoroughly stunned. I rose from my hip-snuggie chair and stood trembling, all my flesh-strips flooding cold sweat. All my metal parts, where they had rebuilt me, clanged and zinged. A little girl living with me! What would it do to my thinking? My work? Wouldn’t she try to follow me into the Atmosphere Room of the Primitive where the walls were stone and bright blood colored . . . ? Wouldn’t she want to know how it was in the White Room of the Innocents when the two tons-heavy black metal balls moved on the chains . . . ? Wouldn’t she wish to be included, embarrassingly, as help when I went to feed my flesh-strips the complicated fluids of the introven? And what if, some capricious day, I not knowing, she wandered alone into the horrors of the Tube of the Million Mirrors where amid awesome flashing desolation I search for my true reflection?
“Little Sister,” I cried, and I held on to all the things I could reach, and I based my knees against two weapons men who stood by me, so that I hardly clanked and zinged at all now, “do you know, Little Sister, what I could do with you with but the press of a finger? Do you know that this is an armed place as well as an armored place, Little Sister? Do you realize that if you were to hold me, or tie me up, I could still throw a sign to one of my automatic weapons men and he would do the right thing to get you? And in the ultimate contingency, Little Sister, if all seemed otherwise at length but really lost, I could say a certain phrase at any one of all these tubes in the ceiling, all these tubes in the sides or the floor, and that would start a chain reaction in a Stronghold I have hidden in a mountain far away from these walls. And all of this would blow up! You wouldn’t win, you see, even then!” I was trembling against the weapons men who stood nearby; for all I tried not to, my hands made a tinkling sound where I held to two steel posts. And the little monster just stood there, a tiny girl in a play spacesuit laughing up at me, two blue eyes of ridicule it seemed, and she was still holding what I could see was the Littlest Angel. “You wouldn’t win, Little Sister!” Sweat from my flesh-strips was falling down to the floor.
“You wouldn’t want me?”
“I couldn’t have you. Don’t try to force me. It would interfere with my deep thinking. I would be entirely a different person with you about. I couldn’t search through to the Ultimate!” I found I was almost screaming.
“I’ll go then. I thought you needed love.”
“Love!!! No, a visit’s fine. Ten minutes or so, since you’re an immediate member of the family, if you didn’t bring anything to hurt me. But love—well, it would be a bother—so unrealistic. And I might forget to watch for the Enemies.”
“I’ll go now!” Her lower lip pouting out indicated that she thought her feelings had been hurt. Or else she was acting. With little girls it’s hard to say.
“I’m glad you could come,” I said. I fear I said it a trifle stiffly. I never could unbend at such times. But since I could see the end of the visit was at hand I found I wasn’t clanking anymore. “Now, if you must go—” I said. “Witch will probably be worried, you know,” I said. “Some other truce time, maybe—come again—”
She left then, out through all the gates, with the weapons tracking her. And I noticed that she kept looking back over her shoulder, but there weren’t any tears in her eyes, and I wondered vaguely why her steel teeth were bared in what seemed to me a little girl’s devilish grin. Then I saw on the floor where she had left the puffed and bulbous space doll, Littlest Angel, and I stooped to take it and rush it to her. When I touched the Littlest Angel both my hands blew off up to the shoulders. And the paw of a giant seemed to lift me and hurl me through ten rooms. Mined! But I wasn’t hurt badly. I recovered in time to see Little Sister riding a roll-go up the last of my plastic hills. When she turned and waved just at the top of the last rise, just windmilled a fat tubular arm of a play spacesuit in my direction before she turned down into the Valley of the Witch, I suppose I should have blasted her with the launchers. For I suppose she was meaning to be waving a last greeting at the place where she thought her daddy was dead. But I didn’t have my arms fixed back yet to press the buttons, and who could say that Little Sister was actually to blame for the mining of the Littlest Angel?
Perhaps it was mostly Witch and that was why the loud bands played and a flurry of flags and victory flares broke out on the air over her valley while I lay on the black stumps of my shoulders, gasping.
And besides, I face other Enemies, bad implacable Enemies whipping their wings through the milky air, watching me from a brown distance. They sharpen horns and claws and teeth full of danger and they shake reptilian tails for the whirring pounce that will end ME! Oh yes! Tomorrow I must stand even closer to my launchers and seek a way to redouble my vigilance on the hills.
A GLANCE AT THE PAST
BECAUSE they had much leisure time in automatic New Processes Country, and also because the roll-gos, those fast expensive conveyor roads of the kingdom, would certainly have been inadequate for such a pilgrimage, the people came walking. Under the red-brown vapor shield of hot July they swept across the yards and fields, bunched, like locusts going toward wheat in the old days. Tap-a-tap tarrump-tarrump tap-a-tap they came on their metaled feet, many all together, until the sound of metal striking plastic was a steady and ominous roar.
Word had spread fast that morning in mid-July. In less than two hours everyone knew of the curious thing’s arrival and shortly thereafter almost everyone was in headlong movement toward it. At the request of the Green Council, airmen from Olderan had flown it in during the very early hours of morning, down a transglobal air corridor under cover of darkness, to the very gates of the Building of Ancient Customs. They had moved it carefully in its cushioned case, from the controlled climate of the ship from Olderan. And they established it, in its specially prepared glass display ball, on a black plastic dais in the Building of Ancient Customs. Then solemnly the Green Council pushed the buttons that advertised the display on all the picture walls in the land, and they declared a week in the queer thing’s honor.
Across the yards and fields the hordes of the curious swept on, in the peculiar iron-on-plastic roar, toward the doors of the Building of Ancient Customs. And conversations were heard among the mightily metaled folk of New Processes Country. One sturdy lady of “replacements” that were mostly of the fairly old alloy known as iron-x was heard to remark to a younger thing of the new gold-seal alloys that according to the stories handed down and handed down her great-great-great-grandfather’s father had been possessed of a little monster gadget much like this they were going to see, and had made constant good use of it too.
“As recently as that! Imagine!” she honked and squawked out of her iron throat that had been worked in iron-x against cancer long ago. She exhibited that universal good feeling common to women everywhere when they are able to impart some fairly scandalous b
it of information to another woman.
“As far back as we’ve cared to search,” the other replied, all in haughty good fellowship, “we’re clean as a flame on that score. But of course I want to see this thing anyway. You know some of my ancestors, ’way ’way back, in the space age probably, must have had these things, must have depended on them. How awful!”
“Well, they say my ancestor got awfully good service out of his, took it wherever he wanted to go, employed it all the time,” iron-x lady remarked in a gesture at ancient family loyalty. “But I guess he would have had it ‘replaced’ as everyone else was doing then, except he was out of the country so much of the time, on space service, to the Million Saucer Battles on Mars, and that awful purple thing on Venus, you know, where they stopped our boys with sheets of purple dust. Just never had time for the change-over, it seemed. And ’tis said he was heard to remark once that because of the things he’d seen, at battles and places, I guess—probably that awful purple thing on Venus, especially—he didn’t want to live forever anyway. Can you imagine anyone saying a thing like that?”
The other one couldn’t imagine it and said so with appropriate honking and ticking and clucking from her gold-seal larynx.
“But of course that was before people had things like we do here in New Processes Country,” the iron-x one kept on, bent still on explaining things for her ancestor. “Imagine not having beautiful and sanitary plastic yards with color-change, and a live-alone house-ball for each person to dwell in. Think if you can back on a time before the time of universal daisies, when it wasn’t possible to bloom a whole metal garden through the yard-holes just at the flick of a button. My ancestor probably never even saw one of the beautiful mechanical flowers, such as we take for granted today. And he didn’t have the tin mandolin men nor even one of the great plastic trios that I can have in my music grotto tonight just at the whim of a beam. The air he breathed was not conditioned unless he was in a room, and then, nine times out of ten, it wasn’t flavored. He didn’t know the glories of the shape men with their nightly panoramas, nor the color throwers we find so diversionary. He didn’t have the different colored vapor shield each month that makes such a pretty world for us. For him it was always blue sky and that awful yellow sun, unless he had clouds, and then gray. ugh! He didn’t even have a sex machine! Just think how much we have that he didn’t have, and maybe you’ll understand.”
“Oh, yes,” the other agreed, wishing to mollify her companion, “and at the time your ancestor lived no one thought much about living forever anyway. Probably. ‘Replacements’ were just then getting well started, I imagine. Why, I’ll bet at that time no one in the whole world could have claimed for more than fifty percent ‘replacement.’ And if he did, it would probably just have been some rebuilt battle victim, or a haphazardly put back together auto-wreck case. And not scientific. But look at you and me. You’re about up to ninety, aren’t you? And scientific!”
“Ninety-one,” her companion lied. “And with these new quick-seal alloys that fuse with the flesh so easily I may be able to go higher. But even now, with only nine percent of me flesh-strip and human blood, I don’t figure there’s much chance I’ll die.”
“I should hope not,” the other agreed. “Of course I’m ninety-two and one-half myself, and I’m starting new treatments tomorrow!” (She too was lying!)
Tap-a-tap tarrump-tarrump tap-a-tump they walked on without talking more, toward the Building of Ancient Customs, part of a horde that swept on all day until very late in the afternoon the vanguard came to the outer gates of the building. Officers from the Society for the Better Understanding of Ancient Customs allowed them to go in single file through an entrance gate that was hung heavily with ersatz moss and tin ivy. They passed on into a room where a small round shell of clearest glass rested on an ancient black velvet cover. And each of the curious folk of New Processes Country was allowed to stare a few seconds at the glass ball and its queer occupant that, in a carefully controlled climate, was alive and slaving diligently away at a task that was unreal now, real to it maybe over a hundred years ago. Next week or so the Society for the Better Understanding of Ancient Customs would write the letter of thanks and appreciation for the loan of the old-fashioned display. And a generous check would be enclosed for Olderan, that little mountain-and-sea-locked country whose devout queer people clung to ways of flesh and the past.
As they stood side by side watching the quaint outmoded little battler staunchly pound away for their amusement, the iron-x lady was heard to read from a pamphlet describing the unique display: “Today, after viewing this monstrosity, you and I must feel great pity for all our ancient ancestors. It was their poor fortune to be born so long ago and inhabit a world where such a thing as this was everyone’s common danger, not the clowning mutant exception, but the common sober rule. No wonder they were wavery and unsure, mushy and vulnerable, scared half to death most of the time and prone to be soft-headed. Let us forgive them, the weak-hearted. Think of the lurking terrors, the anxieties, the insecurities, the deaths! they had to endure—when the little monster decided to have a bad day.”
“Yes!” gasped her gold-seal companion.
Then, in a great outpouring of good feeling and good fellowship, and poignantly aware of their common bond of good luck, they decided, right there in the late afternoon, to recite the Morning Pledge, the early-morning salute, a thing usually reserved for day-start. Together they intoned: “From this day forward, and forever, I truly thank that great iron and plastic idol we have raised in our own image and set to circle our world always on a red and yellow satellite—I thank him truly for my iron and plastic—my everlasting—heart!”
EDUCATIONAL
THEY WERE going across the plastic fields and yards of Moderan, on carnival. There was an air of circusing and picnicking and old last-days-of-school as they went ta rap ta rump tump tumpa tump in their metal-on-plastic way. They were going to the fabulous new shopping district set up in the northwest corner of a Moderan province by the Committee for Better Understanding of Old Times.
They came after a hard-walking trip—they had decided, since this was an outing jaunt, a pleasure sojourn, not to clutter the hard-pressed roll-gos—to a little rise of plastic ground and topping that they could look down a gentle slope to a town of neon. Arrows darted hither and yon under the high-blue vapor shield of June and all over Neon Town spots danced, long lines waved, short lines ran up and down lengths of gay air, squares and diamonds and circles formed and disappeared and formed again, cans of coffee bloomed full-tinned in the sky, tea bags were outlined in red and yellow and blue, life insurance was sold by the hatful by big block letters that ran spelling in the sky and then erased and spelled again in a brighter color until such brightness was reached that the eye begged for relief, and that came in the form of dancing spots of brown and wavy lines of gray where sprightly diet cola was being madly merchandised alongside rock-solid mortuary goods from a nearby undertaker’s establishment. Not to mention articles of wearing apparel of all description, lawn mowers, house trailers, new cars, toy machine guns, burial markers, health plans, exercise schemes and hundreds of dozens of other things that MUST be sold.
The picnickers of Moderan, two tall spare old ladies of many iron-x and a few gold-seal “replacements,” stood spellbound on the gentle slope leading into Neon Town. For awhile they could not speak but could only look and wonder. Then the tallest sparest one, of mostly iron-x, but one or two gold-seal “replacements,” pushed her phfluggee-phflaggee button and said in a high tight phfluggee-phflaggee voice, “Have you your guide book, Emm?”
“Yes, Luu,” replied the other in a voice-button voice that was really jumping now, “isn’t this just too much!? EXCITING!”
So they tapped on down into the neon-sparkling place, and they were met there by no one. “You mean we just go on in?” they wonderingly asked each other. “I thought there would be admission—and committees,” they both thought. Emm thumbed at her guide. “The
book says, ‘When you are in the shopping district, you are to feel as free and relaxed as though you were in your own live-alone bubble-dome houseball having your calmness bath in a soof-air tub. There will be no NO compulsion nor pressuring toward buying, and no attempt whatsoever to set up a false merchandising aspect will be made,’ ” Emm recited on, her face cut and slashed and danced upon by the merchandising neons cavorting prettily. “ ‘Stop at the bank and arrange for whatever financing you will reasonably expect to need.’ ”
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