Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  On the first block of First Street in Neon Town they came to an ancient building, a thick-walled boxy structure of concrete and old-made steel. Tubed pale blue neon said it was THE FIRST NATIONAL BANK AND TRUST COMPANY, and bright red tubed neon said dancingly a figure of assets that was fully past any sensible meaning. Luu and Emm gasped at the dancing numbers and allowed phfluggee-phflaggeewise that assets were certainly up well at FIRST NATIONAL.

  They went in to cool sterility and a kind of clean mustiness, sensed often in the past in such places as First Nationals, and they saw the well-groomed, efficient, surface-smiling little zero-man, the bank clerk borrowed from Olderan for the exhibit. Emm, with Luu ta-rumping hard behind her, tapped toward his window. The total zero behind the window waited patiently, quietly smiling his zero smile, toying a little at his shirt cuffs and drumming his well-done fingers a little on the counter, nervously, as bank clerks are always apt to do while waiting for old ladies to make that long hitchy walk across the foyer. But withal he seemed altogether well-adjusted to waiting patiently for old depositors and old withdrawers. There was no problem.

  After a long and hard ta-rumping time Emm and Luu reached the window. “We seek financial counsel and advice,” Emm recited from her guide. “What would you consider adequate for our downtown shopping tour? Remember, this is our initial encounter and first contest with your lights and slogans.” There was no smile upon zero-man now. He was dealing in financial advice, and already, no doubt, he reminded himself of some great bank vice president advising two old female tycoons. He eyed the two metal ladies as though they were as detestable as bugs might have been in the Old Days, on the spotted plants along the foyer. After eyeing them coldly awhile and giving the impression of efficient calculation by making some meaningless straight parallel lines and some very pretentious X’s on a sheet of paper that he carefully kept concealed, he came up with a bleak smile. “How about securing a loan and setting up a checking account of five hundred million dollars for each of you?” he said.

  “We have no collateral,” Emm recited. “We are just come down from Upper Moderan for an educational shopping tour in this Old Place, this transplanted bit of Olderan.” The little bank clerk smiled a more real smile now, relieved that his part of the act was over, handed them two blank checkbooks and wished he were back home in Olderan for some good-hole golf. “Good luck. Don’t overbuy!” he called at the backs of the hard ta-rumping Luu and Emm.

  They went upon the streets and it was noon and the flesh ribbon clerks, the flesh five-and-dimers, the flesh file people, the flesh type thumpers and all the many other office achievers common to Olderan were darting at the hamburger places, fretting in line at the cafeterias and hoping to do everything in a great hurry so they could have a little shopping time on their thirty-minute noon “hour.” To compensate a little for their daily indigestion and those big heart attacks later to come! “Well, I never!” said Luu to Emm. “What are they doing?” Emm leafed at her guide. “If you happen to be caught in the noon crush,” she recited, “the flesh people will be eating.” And Luu and Emm looked through the steamy windows of “joints” and saw the people rudely gulping great plump hamburgers and daintily fingering out brown sticks from heaped saucers of French fries. “Well! I never!” gasped Luu to Emm.

  Then, since it was near the center of the day, they remembered that it was time for something for themselves. They looked wildly about and they looked wildly at each other. “The guide, the guide,” gasped Luu.

  “Of course,” replied Emm, calmer now, “it’ll tell . . .‘Near the center of the day,’ ” she read, “ ‘at the normal period for lube and introven, you are to enter any one of the numerous comfort stations, marked in the usual Moderan way FE for the use of those of female descent, MA for the male types. A full line will be available for your convenience, if you forgot your totem bag.’ ”

  “I brought mine,” volunteered Luu. “I know it’s clean.”

  “I never like the public ones either,” agreed Emm swinging her own totem bag as they ta-rumped on down to find a place marked FE. Once inside the comfort station they each took out their own little bottle of lubricant and oiled well the metaled parts, with an especially liberal application at all the places of jointure. “Wouldn’t it be nice if this were all we had to do,” sighed Luu. But it was not. Now came the more involved thing of feeding the flesh-strips that held together the “replacements.” This involved much dissolving of tablets and many fractionings of many wafers, many grains from many big and little capsules and drops from bottles of diverse sizes and colors and shaking all this well before assembling the tubes and the needles and the feeding jars. First Luu lay upon the feeding strip, a black steel slab pulled out of the wall and fixed perfectly level, and Emm “fed” her by sticking one of the nutriment needles into each of her flesh-strips. Luu lay as though dead while feeding, which was the correct pose at “mealtime” in Moderan. When Luu’s “meal” was through, she arose vigorously and “fed” Emm. Not that each lady couldn’t have “fed” herself, if need be, but they cooperated today to save more time for shopping.

  When they emerged from the comfort station, they found that the streets were quieter. The workaday people of Olderan had gulped their hamburgers and French fries, had drunk their colas and their coffees, had grabbed their few minutes of shopping time from their thirty-minute lunch “hour” (to do something, some little something, even, in buying to ease the ache from the lure of all those signs) and then they had dashed gaily back to their challenging stimulating endeavors. YES!

  Luu and Emm went shopping in Neon Town. While there was nothing for sale there that they needed or could possibly use, ever, let it be known that the compulsion of the merchandising was so subtle and so aggressive and so compelling and so friendly and so entirely completely effective there that these two good old new-metal ladies were swept loose from their sales-resistance moorings almost completely. They bought lawn mowers and trash cans and panty girdles and nylon stockings and life insurance and Easter hats and Christmas cards and Halloween pumpkins and birds in cages and men’s suits and the latest apparatuses and aids for feminine hygiene, not to mention fabulous foods and drinks and birth-control pills that they could not possibly in any way need to employ, ever.

  After a long and thoroughly educational and completely stimulating day in Neon Town the tired but happy Luu and Emm ta-rumped back to their homes in Moderan, leaving all their purchases at a building provided just for that, near the outer gate. “Well! I never!” gasped Luu to Emm. “I never could have believed it either, if I hadn’t seen it,” agreed Emm.

  IT WAS IN BLACK CAT WEATHER

  IT WAS in black cat weather and jack-o’-lantern times that she stood beneath his window, hallooing, holding five long slim boxes stacked in her scabbing arms. A vague iron shadow over by the fence was holding some object that a little resembled a boat.

  “Daddy,” she yelled, “come see what we have brought to you. And there’s lots more. Over in Good Long Rest. And think how many more—all over, in all the others. And think how many more . . . Come see!”

  Of course he knew that her five boxes contained nothing really, at least not anything you could—well, not anything. And of course iron Mox was carrying one of the THINGS out of Good Long Rest. Entirely forbidden. . . .

  He arose from his hip-patty chair, the good den lounger, the gentle undulater, where he sat mostly now, one-childed and wifeless, the Calm Waiter, and thought on Universal Deep Questions, problems of the world. He chewed at his throat with the fixer, probing and prying, trying to ease some at the place that was worked all in gold against cancer, and he said in his preplanned speech, working hard with his mouth, following along with the tapes, “Daphalene! you are not to take the iron Mox with you anymore to Good Long Rest. Because he gets the THINGS! Even though I set him on Dumb Servant, Alternate Set, he still somehow changes to Human Set and goes for the THINGS. I don’t care if you want to take those long stocking boxes down there alo
ne day in and day out three hundred and sixty-five days a year for the twenty-five next years and bring back—well, bring back whatever it is you say you find down there. But no more of this stuff of Mox and the big dirty damp THINGS. Understand?

  “And Mox!” Mox came lumbering in on his blunt boat-shaped feet, holding a big box lightly out as though it contained something much wanted. When it was not taken at once, Mox dropped the box resoundingly to the ground and shook his arms high up into himself until his iron hands were hanging like calm leaves from his shoulder beams, a strange shrug. Then he flapped his hands and flashed his bulb eyes on and off in his usual greeting manner. “Skip the fawn stuff. Flick off your Human switch, Mox, and go on Dumb Servant, Alternate Set switch. NOW!” He complied. “Pick up that dirty THING you dropped almost on my feet.” He did that. “Back to Good Long Rest! And fix! Fix so no one knows you’ve disturbed.”

  They disappeared into the black-cream night, and his throat being tired from the shouting, and without tape fixed now to yell Daphalene to come back, they both walked away, an iron thought-tape thinker and a little girl wading into the shadowless thick dark under a moonless low sky and clouds on the edge of late October rain. She was Daphalene, his daughter Daphalene in the monster times, in the times when strange machines and strange mutants roamed the homeless plastic of Moderan, juggling their switches and angers. In an age past the age for virtue, or even a try, he let her run with the iron tape-fed thinker as the lesser of many evils, in her springtime, gathering what experiences she would against, in those times, the dark tendency toward hopelessness wide and thick and tall as the rubbery wet sky above. He tried to teach her nothing. In due time she would grow to “replacements” and part by part her flesh would go for metal and plastic in the new great surgery and what remained would be fed with the introven. But now let her, motherless, go with her stocking boxes into the deep night following the thought-taped thinker, and let her cope with her loneliness and her grown-up problems as best she might until, finally, hard and firm and unshockably “replaced” she’d be a woman to survive!

  Good Long Rest was a cemetery. When she came back, perhaps he would leave his hip-patty chair long enough to go to her. Perhaps, faking, he would take one of her stocking boxes and look inside, pretending interest. And perhaps there would be, for once, lightning bugs fluttering and flashing in the long hollow dark of the stocking box. And then he could say with the fatherly tape, against the gold block for the cancer, “Why Daphalene, how nice! You have been out catching the bug lights in the great night of this cemetery world like a normal little-child-player should. Just as I told you to do. Against the long dark a little spark. How nice! And you have brought them, in boxes burning and chafing your scabbing little arms, all up to me, your daddy. How nice nice nice nice. . . .”

  He found it best to have his speech preset these days, the tape tape-planned, so all would go smoothly around the gold block for the cancer. Sometimes, caught off balance, the tape wrong or not ready, and circumstances changed, his words would go past a situation in a kind of silly commentary, and weird beyond all imagining, because circumstances, for which one cannot always preplan, can Change speech need. Circumstances should not do that to him, he felt, but they did. And whereas overall, he should have been, cautiously, saying less and less these days, he found himself loudly saying more and more all the time, making his plans in hopes and letting the comments flow up the gold flue in a challenge at black conditions—pleas, really.

  Against the noise of iron feet in the night and the soft chuff-chuff of little-girl shoes moving, he let his monster throat start its trial run. His words beat like flailing clods in the gold stovepipe where should have been supple workings of thought sound. “HELLO,” it shouted at the dark. And then they were lumps in view. Mox was a tall square hump over by the plastic pear tree; she was a much smaller and slenderer blob in the dark, a little apart from her iron friend. He sprang toward his daughter, his mouth going hard at the words he had planned. “Why Daphalene, how nice nice nice . . .You have been—”

  She thrust a stocking box up to him, and for one ice-struck ice-stark moment her eyes fathomed into his under the rays of the beamo light that was just then circling past from his rooftop. The beamos were cutting across the yard from the other rooftops too, crisscrossing the tops of him and her in alternating shakes of light and thick dark. Mox stood fluttering his hinge arms up and down in his shoulder holes. She was straining quietly as a stone.

  The stocking box in his hand was heavy. Nothing fluttered in it; no lights pulsed in its housed darkness. He waited for the next sweep of his rooftop’s beamo, holding the box where he thought the ray would pass. It swept across something white and cold and dead of eye in the box. Daphalene waited, upthrust there like a pedestal, with her scabbed hands wrap-twisted. Mox was hinging and unhinging the full length of his arms still. And a throat, strangely, felt an old ache that was not all from the gold part of a voice trough.

  He let the beamo pass again across the white thing in the box, and amidst an ice-mist feeling along all of his flesh-strips quivering he suddenly realized. At the third sweep he held it out until he could see the jag places where Mox had sundered it from its spot where it had for five years rested upon a gravestone flower-and-angel-burdened in Good Long Rest. At the fourth sweep he threw it hard as he could at the iron sheet he stood on. The whizzing beamos from the many rooftops caught flashes of shattering white, and his throat ached so from an old ache that he could not finish his preplanned conversation. And a white eye smote him with a smooth chalky star of cold—cold. Then the iron Mox, suddenly quitting that silly business of hinging and unhinging his arms, bent squarely, through the big hinges in his waist loop only, and lifted a THING from the ground. “It’s her!” Daphalene shrieked with a cry of celebration. “You had his switch on Servant, so I just ordered him to do it. He’s found Mother!”

  As he collapsed quietly across the white dust of an angel, the iron Mox and the frightened little girl again slipped cemeteryward, into the gummy dark, guessing they had not pleased him.

  SOMETIMES I GET SO HAPPY

  THINKING of those still in the plight of the family stew, with their many flesh burdens and tortures, sometimes I get so happy with my steel condition—I laugh. I clap out beats with my big steel hands and I thump and stamp with my heavy new-metal feet until, tired, I go to throw a long steel log on the fire in some massive new-metal fireplace of my mind. And then I sit in my hip-snuggie chair and draw on recorded tapes of contentment for hap-thinking. . . .

  But it has not always been so easy nor so fine. NO! Let me tell you . . . I remember one stark and tragic time in Olderan before I was “replaced.” The rotations and revolutions had gone once more according to the Track, the orbiting had all styled in as fine and fixed as anyone could ask, and so once more it was all blue and gold and green of days—and spring. I walked, walking a pet beige bulldog, into a gentle liquid wind that was sowing the air with seed floats, petals, old husks of leaf buds and, of course, perfume. And grimly, yes, grimly, I was on time for a chance meeting. YES! One minute either way, ONE! and the fount of the Old Earth’s agonies would have stayed emptier by two big heartfuls. One minute out of all the eternities of the seconds, sixty of them were our need. But some jokesmith god of love denied us our need.

  So I went on into the encounter at the street cross. And life cross. And suddenly there’s my pet beige bulldog growling and groaning and clawing the general ground in a very tall excitement. Yes, we’ve come to the Meeting, but I’m still yonder, thinking as usual on Universal Deep Problems, Questions of the World. I have my gleam ships all lofted in the liquid wind, routed on runs to star-tracked Marsoplan, and all the White Galaxies of heaven are joining a union of Suns. I’m manning all the Ramparts of Light with new sun scopes for some final smash on Dark—ah, dreaming. But there’s my real and solid, though quite impractical now, old beige bulldog grunting and groaning and whining at the ground in a high-fever state of a very tall excite
ment. Well, on the groundward end of a purple-jeweled dog lead there is this small French dog, hair carved to a poodle do, neck all beribboned and body all perfumed, thus explaining in full the whole intent of my bulldog’s grunts and groans. For yes, yes, she’s a fine big girl for a dog. YES! On the heavenward end of this purple-flashing dog strap, slanted up to hands so small pale and fine—all ringless on the left—well, what’s to say? Just say, there holding a small French dog by an amethyst-studded tether stood the blue-gold goddess of all tall-heaven dreaming, face pointed athwart the liquid wind and me. And there stood I, dazed and dream-vulnerable, holding the slack chain lead of a huge old Boston bulldog who has just collapsed in a kind of ecstasy and is even then sprawling on the sidewalk, breathing hard, lapping his tongue about (you could almost see those dog brains go) thinking of that little French poodle dog.

  But how did I—so long ago in Olderan, flesh-encumbered, dream-burdened, fuzzy-brained and woolly-minded—make out with the heavenward end of that purple-jeweled dog strap? Sometimes I’m tempted to tell you how it was, how the sky fell down in great blue diamond pieces that day of the tragic beautiful instant, how a whirlwind blew three rages through the mind there in the soft liquid air with the seed floats, and how a million sunburst voices spoke of greatest GREATEST Joy. At other times I’m tempted to rattle my steel-ball eyeballs at you, pump up and down on my new-metal all-weather knee joints, juggle a hundred new-metal bubble globes all at once with my new-metal hands, stick out my plate tongue at you each and everyone and press the phfluggee-phflaggee button on my talker at you one and all—BLAAHHH!!!

  But just say there was this blue-eyed instant. Say there was this place made out of that one instant, and in it was the all-that-matters world. For it was spring and there stood I, young and dream-vulnerable. And there stood she, all ringless on the left, pushing blue and gold and white, outdoing the very flowers with her own expensive color tones and scents.