Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  THE WARNING

  THEY WERE out there, all right. Though we hide in our inmost rooms, our heads under beds, our thoughts turned to trees popping up and tin robins singing and spring coming through the yard-holes, they were out there, all right. Maybe they had always been there. Times when we paused in our wars, we would see their airborne displays, see their threats shooting, the dazzling sky-borne crosses, the winged halos, and know they were massing their armor . . . under banners . . . oh, the soft-symbol banners. . . .

  From the land of the threats into the Stronghold country an old man came back one spring day. Walking slowly he came, plop-plip-plap-plop over the homeless plastic, working his hinges and braces, for he was a Moderan man. The flesh-strips he had kept in his face had grown him a gray long beard and with his arms jerking in that hitch way of his walk I thought of a man scything; I thought of Father Time of the Old Days. But there is no Father Time in Moderan. We are timeless in Moderan, designed for forever!

  It was in a period of truces that the man with the beard came back. He walked into April and no guns fired. The walking doll bombs rode lightly in their launch slings, the missiles poised on their pads, and the White Witch rockets, with no one handing the big orange switch in his War Room to ON, hung silent as painted death. Not many remembered him. He had once been a Stronghold master, long ago, but some minor difference or other with the Authorities had caused his Stronghold to be blasted down as a cleared place for trees, and he had been given the hard choice between banishment and what would have been, for him, essentially death—having his flesh-strips awarded to another. He, choosing banishment, had fled in the night under a small truce, and Moderan had all but forgotten him in the time that had passed.

  We watched him go now while the days of our spring truce lasted. Up and down and across the lines of our fire he walked day and night, keeping our warners dinning, and it was an eerie thing, even for Moderan. Sometimes in the dead of night a small dull sound on the plastic or the sharp clink of a hinge joint working by would tell a late-up Stronghold man, perhaps looking to some better positioning of launchers or arming a doll bomb, that the silent one was near, having moved through the warner. No one offered him introven for his flesh-strips’ hunger. No one paid him mind. Once banished, for us, was banished; he was nowhere. Then, too, when the truce-time lifted and we were once again busily and happily at war we knew he would, at the first go of the launchers, be blasted without a trace. So what was to worry?

  And yet, at high day, the vapor shield not too thick and he alongside a Stronghold, peering—something about him! Partly it was, of course, the mawkish fascination of seeing the dead come back, seeing the banished break banishment, knowing some strange deep kinship with the dead and the banished and yet not being able, or willing, even remotely to own that kinship. Not in Moderan!

  Then one day, one vapor-purpled day, when the spring truce was near to lifting, with my steel hands trembling, my flesh-strips throbbing and the hate needs rising thick and good in my throat for getting on with the war, I heard him clinking near. My warner set up a close-din as he sought admittance through my Walls. Gaunt and wrecked and rusted he appeared in my viewer—a thing of no concern, banished and nowhere. And yet—and yet—who can say no when the dead come back with a message, or even with a look? I directed Decontamination and Weapons Search to give him the usual, and when he proved clean I thumbed the gates back in eleven steel Walls for his entrance.

  He stood before me, his beard looped around his waist. His face pieces went into chaos and at last his mouth came open for speech. “I come to you,” he said, “completely without motive of gain. I have been back to the old place where my Stronghold was once. I have lain among the tin trees that ‘grow’ there now in a little park for birds and plastic dogs. How much better, I think, were it still a thriving Stronghold, and I in it, to take part in the great spring wars due soon to commence. But that is merely, and of no moment, what I think. Once banished is once banished, and as you know there is no road back.” He dropped his head for a little and I said, “There, there,” or whatever it is one says when there is really nothing to say and everyone knows it. I thought of offering him introven for his flesh-strips’ hunger. I thought of saying sorry, sorry. Really I did almost nothing, said almost nothing, and at last his head swayed up and the face pieces went into storm again.

  “I come with hands that seek no gain,” he cried. “At first I thought only to find the old haunts again, before it is too late, enjoy my heart’s lacerations for the time of the truce and then pass slowly southward, south into the Wanderers’ Country ahead of your heavy barrage. But seeing again this pleasant gray domain of such well-ordered hate and firm-planned war I was seized with an old allegiance. I chose your Stronghold to plead in because you have one of the best, if not the best, records of any Stronghold. If I can warn you in time, perhaps we may just save a heritage, by an example.”

  I thanked him for the kind words about my Stronghold, told him modestly that perhaps other Strongholds were nearly as good, and he continued, almost screaming now. “Have you not seen those displays in the north, the south, the east, the west? The wings, the dancing sickening grimness of their grinners, the deadly cherub smiles, the sunshine men and never a vapor shield on their halos? Do you not know what’s massing over the hills? Are the threats not plain, bold-plain?”

  “Rumors have flown,” I said, “word has spread, alerts have come down and we have seen. And yet, what can we do? We live our life out here, the Stronghold life, proving the workability of hate and the efficacy of good clean blasting when everyone knows what to expect from a neighbor and a friend—a missile in the back unless you’re shooting first or guarding. And yet there are always some—some forces—that would beguile reality, transform the proved and proving into something guesslike and dreamlike. They’d put a flower on cleanest clearest Truth, a cross, a haloed star—and call it Love. Whatever that could mean. But we’ll keep sharp watch here, blast always at one another and when the big need comes be ready to turn our kill know-how on the invading hordes.”

  “My friend,” he said, “my friend, you do not know what they can do, to what great lengths they’ll go. Sickening! Terrible! I’ve lived among them, on the edges of their country. Having no country, after my banishment, I went up there. I’ve learned.” For a moment his eyes were dreadful in a face gone ghastly-gaunt; the flexi-holes opened big and the steel balls of his wide-range Moderan vision swished and clinked. In the Old Days that look was perhaps approximated in the face of one who had just seen all his children done and down in an especially dramatic street wreck. “They’ll stop short of no lengths!” he cried. “They’ll move in at some truce time with their slogans. They’ll come cantering, chantering over the hills through a Max Fire. They’ll move down in the night, or at high vapor-shield noon, swiftly. You’ll see. They’ll spread a deadly, planned disorder when they come. They’ll engage you in innumerable head-on slow-down encounters and set up disorganization and diversionary sideshows behind your back. They’ll clap a needle to you when you’re not watching and shoot you with metal softener. And where will you be then? Your fine steel heart that is so hate-sure now will become a soft debater. Not knowing where to stand you’ll stand nowhere, and yet everywhere; jumping and jiggling from stance to stance you’ll be a waverer then, you hypocrite, then!”

  His face became a horror-mask, his beard shook and something he was flunking caused him to be seized with a bad case of honest metal-trembles. His fine steel mouth was a gray opening where shiny new-metal saber-teeth danced and gleamed when he shrieked, “They’ll even stoop to putting truth serum in the introven—their truth. Give me, rather, the blasting—honest, honest blasting.”

  He calmed, the billowing beard lay quiet upon his chest, and somehow, looking at his still face—the calm that had recently been so choppy—I thought of a sea, or a sky perhaps that had in the Old Times just shaken out all its storm. “And now I go,” he said, “through here to my way south,
south to the Wanderers’ Country, ahead of your wonderful barrage. An old old man am I who was, when young, perhaps not worthy of your great hate leagues and so was banished. But I would save Moderan as a place to come back to, to hurt in, for the pleasant heart lacerations. I hope I do not hope unfounded. I trust I’ve warned you well, and in time. And now I think I’ll go. Some trigger-happy Stronghold might lift the truce up early and catch me in a crossfire.”

  He stood looking a little moment directly into my eyes with his face now unstormed completely, and for a heartbeat instant I was tempted to offer him a place as one of my weapons men, thinking perhaps we could coat his flesh-strips with plate and make him nearly all-metal new-metal alloy, at least acceptable to the Authorities at the next year’s screening of weapons men. But I didn’t seize the moment, and perhaps it was just as well. He probably wouldn’t have accepted.

  Soon after he left, out through the eleven steel Walls and over the homeless plastic, plop-plip-plap-plop, working his hinges and braces slowly southward to the Wanderers’ Country, some trigger-happy Stronghold did lift the truce up early. But I hoped, and believed, he had got clear. Most of us in the interests of last-minute preparations and a better Open-Fire! held up until next day when the truce officially lifted, and with the blasting sharper than I had ever remembered it I thought perhaps his fears were all unfounded. So what if they were massing heart symbols and togetherness displays and smile battalions over the hills and preparing for a great Crusade and a Friendship League? We are pretty solid behind our hates here in Moderan. We know how to live. And unless they have something more awesome to wage with than their weak-valentine philosophies and white-grin slogans, they don’t stand a chance, these hymn chanters and smile-league battlers. We’ll blast them on the perimeters; we’ll cut their infiltrators to thinnest flesh-strip ribbons; we’ll execute their spies, without a thought. We’ll stand them off, so help us, until Time itself grows old!

  HAS ANYONE SEEN THIS HORSEMAN?

  ONE MOMENT outside the eleventh, outer Wall of my Stronghold I’m sitting calm as a cold ball of lead, my heart tuned to low-low, my pale green blood on dormant, barely washing through the tube miles of my flesh-strips, my wide-range Moderan vision turned to casual-sweep and scouring across homeless plastic into the red-brown vapor shield of mid-July. I am thinking of nothing; I am looking for nothing; I am between wars, and resting, but properly alert as always, as befits us here. . . .

  It struck me hot-cold and cold-hot how he came riding. My hip-snuggie chair seemed to strike its two front feet down like explosion, sharp down to the plastic from where I had them tilted in air when I was leaned back against my eleventh Wall in my resting. His horse surely filled up a hill when I first saw him, bold on that tenth rise to my left. If I had been on punch-introven, the spiked flesh-strip feeding, I would have thought it a drunken vision, a thing bred in my muzzy sight and born in the red-brown vapor shield as mirage. But I was stark sober and the vapor was the usual and intended one for mid-July.

  My Warner was beginning now its din, and standard prudent Moderan procedure called for my planned withdrawal. A Moderan man sensing danger works his hinges and braces and drags his hip-snuggie chair back through Walls towards launchers. But sometimes one is drawn, held, bemused—even in firm-planned Moderan. A vision clamped me and a horseman came—cantering—in a place where there should be no horse and no rider at all. The rider reined up in a slow uncertain stopping, and I saw at once that the huge brown horse was without sight. Nay, he was not only blind—he had no eyes at all; there were two round red holes and a little stick of dried or drying blood hanging from the lowest arc of each hole. I noted especially how a cold little breeze through Moderan shook the frail blood sticks and how the horse, bracing into the breeze, snorted lustily. I had the strange chill feeling that here was the horse that would walk right into Walls and, not seeing them, pass on through in a casual inexorable cantering. Just a feeling, of course, but it persisted.

  The rider was not of Moderan. I saw that all at once. There was no mark of flesh-strip join upon him. There was no steel. He was as all-flesh as his horse and, in his way, just as odd for these times. He did not have that mutant look about him, though his horse, perhaps, did. As near as I could tell, frantically thinking back to the Old Days, this was a flesh man who had not been “replaced”; not having the flesh-strips join about him, neither did he have steel arms nor the hinges and braces for walking of the “replaced” peoples. But why? And why here?

  Suddenly, and without my seeing how or from where, he had in his hands two glittering gemmy balls about the size of tennis balls in the Old Days. “When we move into that City, he won’t be blind,” he said and gestured at his nag. “I keep these wrapped in oil against the day when my horse must have some kind of showing eyes.”

  My mouth chopped hard up and down and made no sound. I stared and gulped. “We came across the blind fields,” he said, “mile on mile of sterile homeless plastic. And some strange metal bird hung high and on our track all the tedious way. I thought it might be a tin buzzard. I noticed it roosted down somewhere in the Stronghold country.”

  He looked at me hard and asked answer. “We have metal birds of detection here,” I said.

  “Are they warlike? Do they eat people?”

  “Everything is apt to be warlike here. No, they do not eat people.”

  “I’m glad. I would not wish to be eaten by a tin buzzard. Detection does not concern me.”

  “Detection is for our wars,” I said. “You are not of us, I see, and you do not concern us. However, when the truce lifts up, you and your horse will be blasted. Our business here is war, in the Stronghold country, and little flesh-flimsy people and big blind meat-huge horses have no place. I do not wish to be unduly blunt.”

  “If you’re telling me to move, you’re wasting speech. And time. I’m tied to this big horse. His movements are not preplanned. Neither are they stoppable. I thought I should tell you this. I too do not wish to be blunt. Nor do I wish to be unfriendly.”

  I looked, and indeed he was tied on his horse. Two lengths of soiled much-traveled-looking rope, not connected, went under the horse’s belly and lashed the rider on, being knotted above the knees.

  “Who—who trussed you on like this?”

  “Many things, let us say, and tradition. But it was my own choosing hands that knotted the ropes to my knees. Each rope is conscience, if you wish to think it so. My horse is duty, if you like comparisons. Otherwise, just think of me as a man on a blind horse who has ridden the blind fields as he must. And now this Stronghold country! Would you in this land know aught of such talk?”

  “We have not talked so since we have come of age. That sounds like flesh talk and flesh thinking. We are ‘replaced.’ We hate and war by trade; our needs are served by Gad-Goes. We are completely modernized in Moderan. We are ‘replaced’ to live forever and have no need of bargain deals for heaven. We are our own eternity. It seems to me all these things would of necessity make senseless your talk of conscience and duty—too much concerned with emotions and heart palpitations and guess-work, which we have down-played here.”

  He dropped the future horse eyes into long leather pouches on either side his saddle and he stared me with a bold and steady look. My steel eyes smote his flesh ones and there was no give. “I could tell you how my horse is sometimes gaunt,” he said. “Some centuries he has been all knobs, indeed. But now he’s fat and ready, and I’m tied on. I am his eyes, as much as he can have eyes just now. He is my legs. I feel it in my bones we’re near some bright unveiling. I must confess right now I’m riding a little dark, although I’m looking all ways for a sign. Seeing none, it’s onward. That’s all I know. But confidentially, soon I expect a star to point out something.”

  “There’ll be star shells out and big missiles up and doll bombs walking, I’m warning you,” I said. “And whether you’re clear or not to me is of no worry at all. But I’d just as soon you were, I guess, given a choice. What little f
lesh-strip I own compels me to say this, although I’m not sure I’m altogether happy with it said. And since it’s come to a discussion, I guess I’m happiest when I’m steel. I guess I’m happiest when I’m in my War Room handing the big orange switch of war to ON and pressing the buttons of launchers. Or, to put it another way, I’m not unhappy or worried or asking questions then—and I’ll settle for that.”

  “To a man twice tied by conscience on this blind horse of duty that seems a settlement of convenience. And your fight is all a makeshift sham then—purposeless, something to fill out time?”

  “My fight is what I am designed for. And if you stir me, I’ll blast your horse myself. With just a nod of my head it can be done.”

  “Blast him,” he said, and a steel-cold flesh-eye looked at me and so looking stared me down. My head fell forward in shame and deep deliberation, and I thought I heard him continue, “For every piece he’s torn to there’ll be a new and bigger horse grow up and a rider lashed upon him.” Then I snapped my head up to answer and no one—nothing—not even a shadow, a leaf, a bird or a blowing cloud was there between me and the red-brown vapor shield of mid-July. My Warner was dinning that the truce was lifting, my weapons men as they raced for their battle stations were setting up that strange dry sound of metal hurrying inside the Walls, and immediately I had things more real than a horse and a hopeless rider to think about, or a mirage talking about conscience and duty.