Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  But I was young then, for Moderan. Perhaps I was feeling a little ego-bloated that night after the gaudy event in Warwington, winning the double honors. Perhaps they had spiked the punch-introven that they served at the Table of Heroes, and not being used to it could be it lingered long in my flesh-strips. Or maybe it was just that time for something long dead in my heart-box to shudder again to life and confound me. At any rate, I did not take her home, look at her long and well once and then set her among my statuary, the ball men, the string-metal maidens and the other monstrosities of art that delight me. I did not feel her rivets and weld joints well and then melt her down to a lump, either! Ah no, not old double-awards winner mush-head me. I flipped her life-switch to ON! And there stood the goldy-blonde maiden, my darling, my sweetheart—ONE! I knew all at once, somehow that things would never be the same, not quite, for me.

  But I will not bore you with the full-rose song of our love. How it would delight me to tell! How it, perhaps, would pall on you to read, for there are not words for its justice, and where there words—well, who is a master chooser? Let the measure of the event be read by you, between the lines, as it were, of what happened to my fort.

  Stronghold 10, my fort, was expected, after the big deal of the double-awards win, to blossom and bloom into the terror of all Moderan. No one would believe otherwise. After all, I was young then (for Moderan) and a world of war and hate seemed full of promise for a young man and his fort. Ultimately we fulfilled all the hopes of our well-wishers, but that was—well, ultimately. Right after the Warwington ceremonies, when I went home with my wagons full of ladies and melted them all down but the ONE! Stronghold 10 passed into almost total eclipse. Disgraceful? Sure! My missiles moulded in their launchers, the walking doll bombs did not walk, the cold winds whirled through the holes the enemy warheads made in my ramparts. But it was warm, warm! in one inmost room of my Stronghold where I dallied. The head weapons man would beat a tattoo on my door day and night to report the battle damage, to tell of our walls being honeycombed. “In hell’s name, sir, shall we fire?” he’d shriek. “Fire? Fire!? What fire?” I’d mumble, warm and dazed with love, and then it’d be back to the lips of my new-metal mistress to work the lever bed in our great ecstasy and leave the head weapons man wringing hands and wailing because I would not give the order to fire. How could I? I, give the order to fire in war! I had the great blaze of my own right there in bed, the big bonflame of love.

  But ultimately, of course, I came to my senses. Everything palls in awhile, even the Joys of a new-metal mistress, and you find you want something else, even if she is your ON-darling, your sweet-honeydoll, the one great bang-boom of your heart. I wanted honors. The way to get honors in Moderan was to let the doll bombs roll, let the Honest Jakes scream out, let the high-up weird shrieking wreck-wrecks home to targets far and wide. The morning I finally turned her life-switch to OFF I was a madman; I was everywhere at once, ordering here a wall shored up, here a missile fired and here a doll bomb armed with a greater blaster head. I covered miles that day in the Stronghold, in my little runabout scoot, and the world shuddered with war. Yes, Stronghold 10 was again in the lists, battle-joined. Just say I made up enough hate ground that year to offset the laggard months and again won on points the award of the crossed missiles and stood down in Warwington for the tinseled Banquet of Heroes. The award of the eleven steel walls, given for internal meanness, eluded me that year, and would until the departure of the ONE. But later we got that fixed up too.

  And now perhaps you’ll wonder why I stand here on the brink of a Final Decision, as I mentioned earlier, and why I make this Decision, I the greatest, most honored man in all Moderan. Not to be long-winded, just say I’m quitting, here to search a larger field. Temporarily, I hope, but it could very well be permanent. Why? Perchance—nay, not perchance—most surely I do not know why, clearly, I go. And surely the conjecturing should rest right here. But something nags me, nay, compels me, as it has man for long, to talk much about that I know of least. It is an urge not to be denied, a thing of must-do, surely.

  Not to confuse you at the outset, when I speak of quitting. I mean QUITTING. I mean DYING! Oh, didn’t it seem fine when first we discovered the trick of “replacements” and knew, with new-metal alloy the bulk of our bodily splendor and our flesh-strips few and played down, we could live, could be, endlessly? How the world in our dreams opened up like a sweet-trance song going forever. What a chance to win honors. How much time for the blasting, and time to improve the techniques of blasting. Well, I think we came through on that point. We have improved the techniques of blasting. And honors—many honors were won. But though we talk on and nibble in for a million words, how blast to the heart of the problem? What’s to say? I could say I’m tired. I’m not tired, not physically. New-metal alloy doesn’t tire. I could say I’m full up with honors, quite bloated with achievement and have no more worlds to conquer. That’s nearer the truth, but that’s not quite it—not the last part, at any rate. There is a world left to conquer, or be conquered by, or slip into quietly like a new-metal mouse holing behind a wall. There is a world—

  And now I’m faced with it, by my own Decision. I may as well tell you. The greatest in Moderan to be the first to crack in Moderan? Irony! Irony! Irony! But the years have piled up on my flesh-strips, the honors have come, have come, the blasting has gone on and goes on year after year, the truth of hate in our land goes beautifully, and yet the final thing comes no closer to a settlement. Purpose? PURPOSE! That I would know. Must know.

  By my own hand—and this is MY Decision—I shall disassemble myself. I have one trusted servant. None of you know him. I keep him in a box in a most secret far place. At my signal he will come, at midnight from that far place through a secret tunnel, along an ancient and forgotten tube, up through a lid in the floor. He will help me with the last rivets. Perhaps we’ll jest a bit—who knows?—while we’re taking my body down. Perhaps a last toast taken in introven. And then we’ll—oh Lord, only he will, the thought disturbs me though I try to mash it down—only he will stack my body along a wall! All except the flesh-strips. Those he will take with him quietly that night, stored in preservative, back through the secret floor hole and along the dim tunnel miles to store “me” (my flesh) with him in the box, all according to my prearrangement of commands on a tape I have prepared. And I will go—who, what knows HOW I will go? Somehow at the separation of the last flesh-strips, the last nerve strand and the last rivet. Who, what knows WHERE I will go?

  But I must go. To find out PURPOSE. The years have brought me finally to that decision. My Stronghold I will put on dormant for the planned duration of my departure. I have let my truce credits accumulate until I have, in funds, many white flags. As the top blaster in Moderan, far ahead of war, I have no battle commitments that are crucial.

  Will I come back? I plan to. I plan to come back and tell all of you of my travels. If I do not come back? If I am trapped out there, held in some stillborn quietness, some hanging immensity of voice, incomprehensible, space-locked stillness of stillness, oh God? Well, that has been arranged for, for indeed it is a possibility. After a certain time, all commanded in the tape of my prearrangements, the little servant man will return from the secret box in the far place. I expect to be back then waiting to help him put me, my body, back together. But if I am not back then, I will not be back, then. (Oh, let us pun a little here even on the brink of Death.) My flesh-strips will go to my head weapons man then, in a different arrangement, of course, for he cannot, must not, be me, and Stronghold 10 will go on, almost as before, into a new era of blasting.

  So you see this Final Decision is indeed a final decision. But if the risks are high, the stakes are indeed of the highest. I take this course freely here on the eminence of my heaped honors. I have sought TRUTH and found it existed for me not only in the fine clean hates of the Moderan Strongholds but also in the fine hot love of a new-metal mistress long ago, when I was very young. I now seek a higher thing—PU
RPOSE. Since I have not found out PURPOSE completely in the blasting, the Joys, the loves, the hates, the life of Moderan, I’ll seek it across the line. May fortune smile on my venture. Oh yes, for us all!

  WILL-HUNG AND WAITING

  I NEVER went. . . .

  I waited, will-hung in fear, to implement my “Final Decision” dream. Old graveyards, black coffins and white tombstones strung in my memory down for a thousand miles. It seemed. Generation upon generation of normal death-fearing ancestry spoke through my pale green blood and said don’t go! DON’T GO! The flesh-strips writhed and remembered, cowered and fear-shriveled to panic-fright all up and down my new-metal shell and would not come on brave. YES! it was a sorry show for the great Stronghold 10, I’m sure, but I’m afraid, in the final analysis, the very best I could do. Having beaten the Mighty Adversary with my flesh-strips, new-metal and the introven, was I now to go to him by my own hand and give him the chance to keep me forever and forever?

  All the great victories, all the fine honors, all that heavy fact of my great GREAT love—all were finally nothing now, faced with this final hour. I laid it all in dust, and it was dust! Nothing to keep, nothing whatever to keep. Final Decision was a fine decision. But. . . .

  I found, faced with the most personal personal fact of my own possible stark going down irrevocably to never-coming-back, I longed for a Final War! One more great shoot-out and a world gun-down to prove anew my lusty strength and presence as mortal man! Let all my enemies, all other men, go up in battle smoke this war. Let parts of men blown high-skyward fill the air once more, and better than ever this time. One more war, one more, to complete my Final Victory as a Man of Earth. Then I would go, with no man left at my back to betray me, to seek that final condition, Purpose, across the line . . . OH GOD . . .

  I never went . . . I vacillated year after year after year, while the seasons turned and turned on Moderan’s great Central Seasons Control, Drum of the Changes, and ran one into another. I lingered on in the lists as mighty battle-man war after war after war, and so did my contemporaries, pulsating to the battles and the truces in Moderan. Purpose, alas, we might have found it out. . . .

  HOW THEY TOOK CARE OF SOUL IN A LAST DAY FOR A NON-BEGINNING

  THE DEFECTION started on a drowsy early-summer Monday. One of the lesser metal-and-people people of Moderan (a peotal) found a soul. Or rather, to be quite correct, it was only a piece of a soul. It was not even a very good piece of a soul, perhaps, having been lost in Moderan for quite a few long years. But it was what it was, and it set the others searching. They looked beneath the plastic yard sheets and under the iron pear trees and around the spots where the steel pansies came through the garden holes. And every once in awhile they would in fact, or imagining it, turn up another piece of soul. These were exciting things to find, or even imagine, because they were so intangible and different there among the iron power-towers, the whirling precise gogos and the shining accurate monster gears that drove the complicated apparatuses of this land.

  They played all day with the pieces they had found of souls. They would toss them up in the air and catch them and wear them on their sleeves for awhile, or in their buttonholes for a space, and think at them and gaze and gaze. The peotals who had found pieces of soul did this. Other peotals, who had not found pieces of soul, came over and looked through the sparkling green-hued air that was controlled to a precise humidity and a precise temperature and a precise flavor by a gigantic air-conditioning system. And these peotals could not see anything unusual except that some of their neighbors were slapping at the healthy controlled atmosphere and catching pieces of it in quite an odd way indeed in front of their bubble-dome homes.

  But a soul, or even a piece of one, can be, to the finder, a very moving thing. When soulless peotals came over to ask what all the sense-less slapping and aimless hitting and lively jumping were about and were told that pieces of soul had been found, naturally these peotals said, “Hah? What’s soul? And so what if found?” And the peotals who had found the soul parts became at once evangels and told all the others about soul, speaking especially loud and clear upon significances.

  Of course news of such curious nature would spread rapidly, and when it reached the Needle Building in the Pale White Capital, where the Council of the Palest Greens sat mulling, there was consternation. The Council members were all “replaced” people—graduate Stronghold masters, of course—metal except for minor flesh-strips holding them together and feeding the oversize brains held suspended in green blood in metal brain-pans. Because their flesh-strips were the smallest, their blood the palest, and because they had been longest away from souls, they were preeminent of course. But they knew about souls, from old records, and they knew how dangerous such interesting intangible things might be to this precise, mechanical, and very automatic land that was designed to be forever. So they laid their plans; they called for the counter measures. Maximum diversion! was the cry.

  The Council pressed the buttons. And these were the buttons of total war on defection. The Maximum Diversion Birds arose from a million bird “boxes” on the perimeter of this land that was called Moderan. With bomb bags of blue oil and bomb sacks of pink sand the Birds started salvoing the peotals. The Birds screamed and red fluids strung from their keening mouths, and the gleam of their shiny wings all together was an awesome thing to see as they stepped higher and ever higher into the lime-vanilla air and whirled in the tight formations of the bird daisies. Far below this show in the clear air tin mandolin men strummed madly in the yards. Tinnily they yelled the go-go-go songs and brassily they hummed the try-try-try tunes about a strong state living forever where tin robots worked brother-brother together. The perfume men ran in all the streets and alleys of the bubble-dome homes, across all the yards and fields of Moderan, with the most heady of scents, with the most delicious odors yet put together. The form men shot the sky full of a panorama so diversified and delightful that its like may never be seen again, making a curtain of shapes above the Birds still frantically bombing the peotals with bags of blue oil and sacks of pink sand. Then, in a gesture that tried to fake love, some hand in the Pale Council pushed the button marked FLOWERS, and with a great rush, with a mighty whoosh, the tin blooms whoofed through the yard-holes and waved gaudy metal petals at the feet of tin mandolin players still yelling about a state of tin comrades getting along brother-brother together, without soul. And a made sun peeked pleasant speckles through the shape men’s work and the bird daisies holding their order. But all this did no good. The peotals still clutched the pieces they had found of souls and refused to be diverted. And they organized the trains, ten long jet-pushed soul movers.

  Up from the south the great trains came, jet-hustled, stream-lined swifties, but loading strange cargo. All day they whistled across the land, ten great white trains. Though the Central Council of the Palest Greens broadcast an urgent plea for yet another try at pleasing the peotals, yet another chance at diversion, the doom cars came on down. And yet they were cars of hope, too.

  Stalog Blengue, peotal first-class, flesh-robot overseer of a block of air-conditioning machines for many a soul-lost year struggled up to a train. “How we have used ourselves!” he shrieked. “How we have been put upon by ‘discoveries.’ ” He tore off a piece of “replacement” and held it up in tin fingers. The green blood seeped from the arc where the “replacement” alloy had joined flesh. “Under sentence of life forever!” said Stalog Blengue. “Or so the Pale Council thinks. Ha. Ha. If that’s life I’ve lived for these many soulless years—for my work, watching these tin air digesters sort the natural air for flaws; for my pleasure, oiling my metal joints so I’d not creak when I hovered pipe-wrench watchful among the tin air sorters; for my food sticking myself with the introven, putting the complicated fluids in all the poor-flesh places—if that’s life I’ve lived for these terrible, inhuman years—” He fell to shrieking then in a kind of fit as he tore himself apart.

  The peotals then, with a stripped-down S
talog Blengue yelling in the lead engine, ran the soul trains down to the cold white capital city. They let the soul trains stand all day in front of the Needle Towers of the ice stark government palace of the cold white capital city of the Palest Greens. Near the end of the day, when the shrinking colding sun was falling down the last stretches of the lime-vanilla air over Moderan, Stalog Blengue walked his iron shoes toward the tallest blankest door of the ground floor of the Capitol Building. The metal parts of him clanked eerily; the green blood of his flesh-strips boomed urgently around the tin parts of his ears. “Hello, the Capital,” he called at the blank of the tallest door. “Hello, the Council,” he cried, and a sound like striking a hollowed anvil crept up a long time out of him and up through the hollow spaces of the tall spires of the Capitol Building, for the voice of Stalog Blengue had been worked long ago in iron, against cancer, in a “discovery.”

  Slowly the long door opened and the “giant” standing there was so tall he had tiptoed to try average height. Back of this doorman, in the reflectors, the Council of the Palest Greens sat sorting their brains in tin brain-pans, many stories away. “I wish to see the Head Man!” cried Stalog Blengue.

  When he arose from the honored place of the raised dais of chairmen, splinters of wan green stars seemed to fall from him for a time. A sheen of emerald flashes was all about him palely. And this at last was the very palest of the Palest Greens! He said no word at all, but, skimpy and clanking metal, he stood just right for the reflectors to send his image down through all those stories to Stalog Blengue.