Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  As they walked along, over the yard to Mother’s place, she kicked up snow and chortled and laughed and told off-color jokes—she had heard them on the programs—almost like a normal little girl should. Father tracked dourly through the unmarked snow under the featureless gray sky and thought only how all this nonsense of walking so early was making the silver parts of his joints hurt, and before he’d had his morning bracer, too. Yes indeed, Father, for the most part, was flesh only in those portions that they had not yet found ways to replace safely. He held on grimly, walking hard, and wished he were back in his hip-snuggie thinking chair where he worked on Universal Deep Problems.

  At Mother’s place they found her having one of her plasto-rubs from the plastic man, who did truly act a little odd about Mother. Do you suppose he wasn’t really all machine but was a man who had been replaced part by part until it was impossible now to tell where the man left off and the robot plastic began? Father worried about it for half a second and then dismissed it. So what if he was? What could he do to Mother? And what if he did, what would it matter? Mother—new alloys now in almost all the places.

  Little Sister yelled MERRY XMAS! at the top of her good flesh lungs, and Mother turned through the waist only, as though on a swivel in that portion, and Father coughed dry in the metal of his embarrassment.

  “’Twas Little Sister’s idea,” he mumbled. “So sorry, Marblene. I guess Mox hasn’t been watching her programs right, her insisting on Xmas trees and all this year, and now the idea of a visit among the folks of the family. I’m sorry, Marblene.” He coughed again. “So out of date.”

  Mother blazed at him from her very plain blue eyes that were almost all “replaced” now. It was clear that she wished to continue her rub with the plastic man as soon as possible. “Well?” she demanded.

  “That’s all,” he mumbled, “if Little Sister’s ready.” Then for some silly reason—he couldn’t explain it afterwards, unless it was because he wasn’t all “replaced” yet—he said a silly thing, something that would obligate him months hence. “Do you—I mean, would you—I mean, could I,” he stammered, “could I see you a couple of minutes, maybe at Easter? Our places are just across the yard from each other, you know. Maybe when I’m all ‘replaced’ I won’t be able to walk.” He hated himself for pleading.

  She airily tossed her left hand, and fluttered those fabulous “replaced” plastic fingers, and great rays of light shot and quavered and streamed from rings of “moderne” diamond. “Why not?” she said resignedly. “What’s to lose? If Jon’s through in time—” Jon was her plastic man—“we’ll talk a bit on Easter.”

  And so it was done, and over, and soon they were again outside in the yard. “I guess I won’t have to walk you back, will I? You have your whistle, don’t you?” he said.

  “No,” she said, “I dropped it in the red rug. I just remember I did. I heard it. It squished down in the wet. While the snowballs were melting. Maybe I could come to your place!”

  Damn these little girls, he thought. So tricky. Always scheming. He’d have to start having her “replaced” as soon as he could after Xmas.

  “There’s nothing of interest at my place,” he hastened to say. “Just my hip seat and my thinking space and Nugall.” He didn’t see any use to tell her about Nig-Nag, the statue woman who wasn’t quite all metal, that he kept under the bed until he needed her so much that he had to . . .There were some things you just didn’t tell a daughter, not until she was much older or well on the road toward being all “replaced.” “Tell you what we’ll do,” he said. “I’ll walk you back to your place and I’ll whistle at the door and you can go in to Mox. Your star’s all fixed and everything. You’ve had quite a Xmas!”

  So they walked back through the iron-cold snow to her place, under a sky that was rapidly thickening in a day turning black. And as her door glided open he felt so relieved that he stooped and kissed her on top of the head, and he tapped her playfully a little on her good flesh buttocks as she passed through the plastic entrance. When she was gone he stood there thinking a little while outside her house. Like an old man in the starting third of good dreaming, he stood nodding, prompted perhaps by things from a time before the time of “replacements,” wondering maybe if he had not paid some uncalculated and enormous price for his iron durability.

  While he stood thus idly musing, a light high and wee came up suddenly—from eastward, from toward the coast airports—and moved fast down the murky sky toward him, gaining speed. Soon the countryside all around recoiled from a giant blow as the barrier burst. He heard Little Sister behind him scream and beg for him to come back, and he knew without looking that her star was off its iron hook again. Like some frightened monster eager to gain its lair he dug in harder with his metal feet and lumbered off across the yard to his place, anxious to rest again in his hip-snuggie chair, desirous to think further on Universal Deep Problems.

  The light, unswerving, went on down the sky, high and wee, like a fleeing piece of star, like something for somewhere else in a great hurry.

  THE FLESH-MAN FROM FAR WIDE

  I HAD JUST nailed the mice down lightly by their tails to the struggle board, was considering how happy is happy, and was right on the point of rising from my hip-snuggie chair to go fetch forth the new-metal cat when my warner set up a din. I raced to my Viewer Wall where the weapon thumbs all were, set the peep scope to max-sweep and looked out, wide-ranging the blue plastic hills. And I saw this guy, this shape, this little bent-down thing coming not from the Valley of the White Witch, my main area of danger now, but coming from the Plains of Far Wide, from which I had not had a visitor for nigh on to five eras.

  Was he sad, oh, was he sad! He came on, this little toad-down man, tap-tap, mince-mince, step-walk-step, but with tense carefulness in his slowness, as if every inch-mince were some slipping up on a bird. It made me itch just to see him, and to think how walking should be, great striding, big reaching, tall up with steel things clanking long-down by your side and other weapons in leather with which to defy your world. And your wagons coming up with maces and hatchets on end. Though I go not that way myself, truth to say, for I am of Moderan, where people have “replacements.” I walk with a hitch worse than most, an inch-along kind of going, clop-clip-clap-clop, over the plastic yards, what little I walk, for I still have bugs in the hinges. I was an Early, you know, one of the first of Moderan. But I remember. Something in the pale green blood of my flesh-strips recalls how walking should be—a great going out with maces to pound up your enemies’ heads, and a crunchy bloody jelly underfoot from the bones and juices of things too little even to be glanced at under your iron-clad feet.

  But this guy! Hummph. He came like a lily. Yes, a white lily with bell-cone head bent down. I wondered why my warner even bothered with him. But yes, I knew why my warner bothered with him. My warner tells me of all movement toward my Stronghold, and sometimes the lilies—“Stand by for decontamination!” He was at my Outer Wall now, at the Screening Gate, so I directed my decontaminators and weapons probers to give him the rub-a-dub. To be truthful, two large metal hands had leaped out of the Wall to seize him and hold him directly in front of the Screening Gate, so my call to “Stand by for decontamination!” was merely a courtesy blab. When the Decontamination and the Weapons Report both gave him a clean bill I thumbed the gates back in all my eleven steel walls and let the lily man mince through.

  “Hello, and welcome, strange traveler from Far Wide.”

  He stood trembling in his soft-rag shoes, seeming hard put on how actually to stop his inch-mince walk. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I seem nervous.” And he looked at me out of the blue of his flesh-ball eyes while he tugged at a cup-shaped red beard. And I was appalled at the “replacements” he had disallowed, the parts of himself he had clung to. For one wild blinding moment I was almost willing to bet that he had his real heart, even. But then I thought ah, no, not at this late year and in Moderan. “This walking,” he continued, “keeps going. You see, i
t takes awhile to quiet. You know, getting here at last, I cannot, all of me, believe I am really here. My mind says yes! My poor legs keep thinking there’s still walking to do. But I’m here!”

  “You’re here,” I echoed, and I wondered, what next? what goes? I thought of the mice I had nailed and the new cat waiting and I was impatient to get on with my Joys. But then, a visitor is a visitor, and a host most likely is a victim. “Have you eaten? Have you had your introven?”

  “I’ve eaten.” He eyed at me strange-wide. “I didn’t have introven.”

  I began to feel more uneasy by the minute. He just stood there vibrating slightly on thin legs, with those blue-flesh-ball eyes peeking my way, and he seemed to be waiting for me to react. “I’m here!” he said again. And I said, “Yes,” not knowing what else to say. “Would you wish to tell me about your trip,” I asked, “the trials and tribulations?”

  Then he started his recital. It was mostly a dreary long tune of hard going, of almost baseless hopes concerning what he hoped to find, of how he had kept coming, of how he had almost quit in the Spoce Mountains, of how something up ahead had kept him trying, something like a gleam of light through a break in an iron wall. “Get over the wall,” he said, “and you have won it, all that light. Over the wall!” He looked at me as though this was surely my time to react.

  “Why did you almost quit in the Spoce Mountains?”

  “Why did I almost quit in the Spoce Mountains!? Have you ever tried the Spoce Mountains?” I had to admit that I had not. “If you have never tried the Spoce Mountains—” He fell in to a fit of shaking that was more vivid than using many words. “Where are all the others?” he asked when the shaking had stopped a little.

  “All the others? What are you talking about?”

  “Oh, yes. There must be great groups here. There must be long lists waiting.” His white cone-shaped face lit up. “Oh, they’re in the Smile Room. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  My big steel fingers itched to crush him then like juicing a little worm. There was something about him, so soft, so trustful and pleading and so all against my ideas of the iron mace and the big arm-swing walk. “There’s no Smile Room here,” I blurted. “And no long lists waiting.”

  Unwilling to be crushed he smiled that pure little smile. “Oh, it must be such a wonderful machine. And so big! After all the other machines, the One, the ONE—finally!”

  Great leaping lead balls bouncing on bare-flesh toes! What had we here? A nut? Or was he just lost from home? “Mister,” I said, “I don’t know what you’re driving at. This is my home. It’s where I wall out danger. It’s where I wall in fun. My kind of fun. It’s a Stronghold.”

  At the sound of that last word his blue eyes dipped over and down in his white-wash face; his head fell forward like trying to follow the eyes to where they were falling. And out of a great but invisible cloud that seemed to wrap him round his stricken mouth gaped wide. “A Stronghold! All this way I’ve come and it is a Stronghold! You have not the Happiness Machine at a Stronghold. It could not be.

  “Oh, it is what kept me going—the hope of it. I was told. In the misty dangerous weird Spoce Mountains when the big wet-wing Gloon Glays jumped me and struck me down with their beaks I arose and kept coming. And on one very sullen rain-washed hapless morning I awoke in a white circle of the long-tusk wart-skin woebegawngawns, and oh it would have been so much easier, so very much less exacting, to have feigned sleep while they tore me and opened my soul case with death. But no! I stood up, I remembered prophecy. I drew my cloak around me. I walked. I walked on. I left them staring with empty teeth. I thought of my destination. And now—It was a dream! I am fooled! Take me to your Happiness Machine!”

  He was becoming hysterical. He blabbed as how he wanted to go and sit in some machine gauged to beauty and truth and love and be happy. He was breaking down. I saw I must rally him for one more try, to get him beyond my Walls. “Mister,” I said, “you have, no doubt, known the big clouds and the sun failing and the rain-washed gray dawn of the hopeless time. You have—I believe it—stood up in disaster amid adversity’s singing knives and all you had going for you was what you had brought along. There were no armies massing for you on other fields, no uncles raising funds in far countries across seas; perhaps there were no children, even, coming for Daddy in the Spoce Mountains, and with death not even one widow to claim the body and weep it toward the sun. And yet you defied all this, somehow got out of disaster’s tightening ring and moved on down. I admire you. I truly am sorry I do not have what you want. And though you are a kind of fool, by my way of thinking, to go running around in flesh looking for a pure something that perhaps does not exist, I wish you luck as I thumb the gates back and make way for your progress. You may find, up ahead somewhere, across a lot of mountains, and barren land, these Happiness Machines for which you cry.” He trembled when I spoke of mountains, but he moved out through the gates.

  And though I was sure he would find nothing the way he was going, I have not been entirely able to forget him. What would prompt such a creature, obviously ill-equipped for any great achievement, to hope for the ultimate and impossibly-great achievement, happiness? And such an odd way to expect it, happiness dispensed by some magic machine gauged to beauty and truth and love. In a resplendent place at the end of a long trip.

  To hear him talk you’d think happiness could be based on lily-weak things. How weird. Power is joy; strength is pleasure; put your trust only in the thick wall with the viewer and the warner. But sometimes, in spite of myself, I think of this little flesh-ridden man and wonder where he is.

  And when I’m at my ease, feeding my flesh-strips the complicated fluids of the introven, knowing I can live practically forever with the help of the new-metal alloys, a vague uneasiness comes over me and I try to evaluate my life. With the machines that serve me all buzzing underneath my Stronghold and working fine—yes, I am satisfied, I am adequate. And when I want a little more than quiet satisfaction, I can probe out and destroy one of my neighbor’s Walls perhaps, or a piece of his warner. And then we will fight lustily at each other for a little while from our Strongholds, pushing the destruction buttons at each other in a kind of high glee. Or I can just keep home and work out some little sadistic pleasure on my own. And on the terms the flesh-man wanted—truth, beauty, love—I’m practically sure there is no Happiness Machine out there anywhere at all. I’m almost sure there isn’t.

  PART THREE

  Intimations of the End

  THE ONE FROM CAMELOT MODERAN

  ONE OF them was coming! I had heard of them; I hadn’t more than half believed it. But there he was on a big metal horse riding straight at my Warner—out of a long far-back time, a strange medieval shape. All that metal set up a din as I watched him riding, slow and parade-like. Or was it the funereal movement of sadness? Who could say as the slow hoofs rose and fell, clop-clip-clop, clop-clip-clop, making the ears of my Stronghold shudder with the thunderous sound of Approach? It might be a hoax; it might be all kinds of tricks. Or it might be one of them, truly.

  I alerted everything. We went on stand-by with the weapons men posted and all my launchers armed and at ready, just in case. And of course if the screening gates gave him a bad mark on either contamination or weapons we’d blast him without so much as a hello. But he passed the tests with small trial; he was clean as a new-metal tooth. When he had ridden the distance to nothing and that great metal steed was through the eleven walls of my Stronghold and reined up at the final circle where I stood in my peep-box of steel, I saw it truly was what I had suspected. Or say it was more than I had suspected, for I had heard the stories without half believing them.

  Yes, he was of the Red Rose Lancers, from that strange colony of Evol-on-the-Coast in what we sometimes derisively termed the State of Camelot Moderan. But why did he have that set stare to him, his eyes dead in his face? Why did he have that heart clutched in a steel gauntlet, and the look of a great wounding that did not bleed? Had he lost a tournament i
n Evol; had he done himself less than knightly on some far field?

  “Hello,” I said from my peep-box, “and welcome, rider from Evol. Do you wish to fit here to tilt against Launch Switch Valley?” I asked that more as a wide, coarse joke, because I knew, as only a Stronghold man of Moderan can know, that Evol was of the past, that Evol, even if no more than half the stories were true, was a pathetic small province of eccentrics allowed to continue some romance in their lives because—well, so long as they lived apart from the rest of us they could do no real harm to our thinking. But to ride in an armorsuit against the reality of Launch Switch Valley, ha. Imagine, if you can, a small quantity of flesh-strip being flung into that big solar cooker they are completing in the South, the same one that can at a single boiling purify enough introven to feed the flesh-strips of all Moderan for the next ten eras. Having imagined that, perhaps you can picture all the riders of Evol riding into the plastic hell of the Valley where every other square foot of a thousand acres of weapons space has an ON switch for a launcher. About the question of fitting for Launch Switch Valley he didn’t answer me, my strange horseman from Evol; he didn’t even smile. He just sat there; the horse stood. Two frozen shiny figures of contradiction they were in my Stronghold that advanced year of the Greater Reality.

  I suspected I had angered him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Forgive me the coarse jest about tilting against Launch Switch Valley. Light down, get off, dismount, or whatever it is you do from one of those things, and I’ll have one of my ‘boys’ oil him up where he needs it and file his hoofs if they’re getting saw-toothed. You and I can have introven and a talk.”