Moderan

by David R. Bunch

  Well, so much for positive thinking and ghost headlines. So much for phantom victory in the mind too. So much for everything. To lose is hard, even for those who lose and lose and are accustomed. For a champion to lose is walking death come down, and all things bad; it is destruction, it is wreck, it is a man on his back, it is the taste impossible—

  So we opened that great day. My weapons men were up and geared for battle early, their faces in blackface, as was the custom. When the trumpet sounded they bent to their shots and I, high on a parapet, stood glued to observation screens, seeing those shots sink home all over the world, all over the enemy, shot-deserving world. My pale green blood sang dancing in its flesh-strips, as it always does when battle is joined, and I gloried in the cause—bad cause? good cause? what cause?—who could care?—we were fighting!

  Well, I did not lose easily. I fought them toe-to-toe, as the saying is. If I lost with any kind of grace, it was not grace-grace, and you can count on that. I lost snarling, complaining, pleading for another shot, pleading for a recount of the votes, pleading for ANYTHING that would reverse defeat. I was burned up. Losing is not my style. My iron guts still writhe at the thought of it.

  You know who won? You know how he won? No! I won’t say who won; that name and number stick on my phfluggee-phflaggee even yet, until my speech gears almost toss their teeth if I try to say who won. I hate with a very completeness, you see; I hate all winners, you see, only excepting me; in that I am man typical. But I realize I cannot, just by mouthing philosophy, get out of telling you how he won. He won with a rotten underhanded dirty trick, this vile vile man, this winner. Well, it was a dirty war, he was a dirty man, and I cannot, in honesty, say that tricks were exempt from the scheme. But I went in there straight and let them have the dirt clean; you have to say I did that. And can’t you see how I should have won? CAN’T YOU? —But it’s no use me to argue with you. I could argue a hundred pages and convince you twice, and three times and four times and a thousand times! and you still would not, could not, rise up and go and get for me those prizes—that first-place plaque, that crossed-bombs trophy. Where they hang, damn! damn! on another’s walls. OH GOD! but I hate to lose! AND DAMN! I DETEST IT!!—But calm, calm I must somehow be. After all, I have won some. Yes, I have won lots. YES! I am still the World’s Greatest Man. And I will be winner once again when we go back to straight war. I know I will be. I KNOW IT!

  How did he win? He won with a trick. But I told you that. He won with a miserable trick. He won with a miserable Miserable MISERABLE trick. But it was legal. Yes, I have to admit, in a “dirty war” it was legal. Am I sorry I didn’t think of it? I’m sorry I didn’t win. Does that answer your ask-it? —You see, he converted, I figure, about half of his total of blasters to loft up flower bursts, bags of “I love you so’s” and Ho-Ho banners, beautiful pennons of colored smoke laughing in the vapor shield. Can you imagine it!? No, I know you can’t. You would have to have been there, part of this dirty war, to be able even to start in to understand really just how diverting this all could be. Amidst all the really low-down stuff the rest of us from our complexes were lofting up at each other would float his pretty “I love you so” balloons, the flower shots and the Ho-Ho flags. All sugar-lump stuff and posy-roses, see, with laughs. It hit most of the Stronghold masters right where they couldn’t comprehend it; it struck them tickle-tickle. Some of them just stood there, turned giddy on their parapets at the incomprehensibility of it all, set their phfluggee-phflaggees (voice buttons) to LOUD LAUGH and guffawed right there in the middle of a war. I? I doubled the guards, as I always do, automatically, when someone, ANYONE! starts lobbing “I love you so’s” and chum shots at me. By that I did escape complete humiliation and destruction, as I so often have at such times in times past. YES!

  You see, he had converted, I would say, only about half of his blasters to the capability of “I love you so’s,” bloom and laugh shots. The other half shot hardware, and, I tell you, even now I choke on this every time I think of it; I envy his brains! He had collected vast stores of iron dust and steel filings, any fine bits of iron and steel he could find—mostly from the spare parts tooling places and the weapons man factories of Moderan—and had this magnetized. Then, using his conventional blasters, he deposited all this fine mass in bags in close range of all the enemy Strongholds, shot after grim shot sneaking through the flowers, the laugh flags and the love. Next he sent in the big walking doll bombs to walk these big loads in for the pay-off kill. The walking bombs by the millions climbed Stronghold walls by the thousands, all over the world that war, carrying bags, and settled upon hapless hopeless weapons men and surprised laughing Stronghold masters, who, everyone being almost entirely metal except for the few flesh-strips of the Commanders, were soon smeared. It was a dirty trick. It smothered them down; it encrusted them deeply. For life? Nay. Death!

  I escaped because, as I’ve hinted, love and blooms and laughs are ever my rising signals for vigilance, my sharp nudges for THINK SHARP! NOW! and my perceptor buds’ high times to yell HEY! HEADS UP, YOU! GO HIDE! Not a single doll bomb penetrated at Stronghold 10; not one got over the walls with a bag. We stopped them, all right.

  BUT DID I WIN? NO! He won. The war judges, state ministers, stale ministers! those little wrinkly bums with the gold offices in the L-Towers all over the world, gave him high points for dirty planning, high points for dirty execution and those big red bonus points for creative underhandedness that paid off. I? I with my clean straight-in honorable direct high-minded approach to dirt was given high points only for dirty execution. I won second. He won first. My plaques are smaller than his. To put it another way, his plaques are bigger than mine! HIS ARE FIRST-PLACE PLAQUES. Mine are second—I HATE HIM! I HATE HATE HATE EVEN THE VERY THOUGHT OF THE DIRTY WAR! I HATE HATE HATE EVERYTHING and will until I win again.

  I can hardly wait until the next war starts up.

  WHEN THE METAL EATERS CAME

  SURE, we didn’t have to run from hearses then or speculate on coffins. See a flesh kid dragging his playmate through the streets and pounding him down with a bat, we didn’t care. So who’s to die and what’s to go? Not us, we thought. Let all flesh-land fall on stones and cut its noses on razors—good riddance! We’d just pump up and down on our all-weather new-metal knee joints, push the phfluggee-phflaggee button on our talkers at them each and every one and laugh and laugh. And anytime we wanted to, we could pull back over the line into Our Country, sit in our hip-snuggie chairs in a Stronghold and gloat upon our buttons, Good-Gadget buttons.

  And then it happened. Just when you think you’ve got it made, all nailed up and zippered down, the thing starts pulling loose at the hinge-joints. Take us, for instance. We’d fought to a fine standstill and a victory conclusion, we thought, the dread human idea that, soon or late, all humans had to die. I think our bold defiance of this concept and our attempted solution of the problem should rank with some of science’s better things. Or at least I thought that before. But now—!

  Well, what are you going to do when everything goes black, when the bright dream fades and the dark cover pulls over your guide stars? Try again? Sure! That’s the human way. Be sorry you laughed when the flesh kid died in the streets? Be appalled that you just yawned when the big fat milk horse at the noonday curb was half halved by that runaway factory wagon? Well, perhaps be sorry. But not too much time to be sorry over the mishaps of flesh-land. What’s to gain by being sorry?

  And speaking of mishaps—If you have not by this time seen someone half eaten by our new-metal all-metal metal eaters, you have missed one of the world’s stark horrors. You cannot say, “I have seen deep tragedy.” You have seen nothing! By comparison all other mishaps must seem but soft landings and easy fractures. Or at least it seems so to me. But then, I might be prejudging in favor of my own condition. You be the judge.

  You see, we had it made in steel-topped Moderan, the country of the peotals, where metal-and-people people lounged in Stronghold homes with their Good-Ga
dget buttons. There is to that no reasonable doubt to have—we had it made. We’d had ourselves done over. Long ago. After that, standing around in a truce time in our new-metal alloy “replacements,” our bulk like new-metal armor, our flesh-strips few and played-down, couldn’t we spit at time then, couldn’t we laugh it down? Our organs made up of tireless gadgetry, hearts like little engines, lungs like accordion boxes, flexi-flex new-metal bellows—couldn’t we max out of a dormant whenever we chose for a spree, couldn’t we push buttons and flick switches on a big-daddy go!? And food—that introven! purer than fresh mountain snow and GOOD! great for a flesh-strip feed. Oh things were fine indeed then, and no hurry in steel-topped Moderan where the plastic yard sheets covered our sterilized acres. Germless as new mountain snowballs in Old Times we had eternity! all sacked and tied and slung upon our backs like golden apples in a bag.

  And then they came, low like damp dark smoke over the metal flowers, dropping in out of nowhere one spring day. Others were riding the air high up like eagles floating in Old Times. A million of them perhaps would, lumped, make a speck as big as a small-small pencil dot. Under our powerful lenses they had jaws and teeth like ocean sharks of Old Days. Just say they were the dread metal fly-fleas, strangest mutants of all time. So what’s to tell? Just tell that they ate us? Oh, how portray the horror?

  One moment, say, you’re sitting outside the eleventh, outermost Wall of your Stronghold. It’s between wars, a fine June Tuesday, and your Warner hangs dormant while the cone-balls that are your ears for danger go silent round-and-round in a slow circling above your armor in this pleasant time of truce. And then the cloud flings up, small, far out, where the flower tops meet the vapor shield, grows and keeps on coming. And it hits. In an incredibly short time, under your Warner’s heavy and helpless danger clangor, it lands with a small-small sound like the buzz a very fine sleet might make tack-tacking against a window. In Ancient Weather. You feel nothing, being mostly that hitherto all-protective invincible survival metal, but you see the deep black film settle, shift, go up and down and across you. You try to wipe it off. Ha. There is no method. You try to think of things. You try to pretend that nothing is happening. You sit and sing. You speculate on a Max Fire to blast his threat when it’s winging. Ho! Did you ever try to fell a cloud—or bring down smoke—with rifle fire? —After a while the deep black film lifts with a tiny sound, like small-small sand falling across a rock. There is a darkness in the air for a fleeting instant. You watch the darkness go. You try to sing. You try to pretend nothing has happened. But something has happened! You’re smaller by a little than you had been. For you have just had your visit from the new-metal all-metal metal eaters, deadliest mutants ever known.

  And all over Moderan it goes on, this thing. The dark droning clouds rage up countless times in the morning, countless times in the afternoon, sweep in upon us and chop out a metal fill. Or if it’s a time of war, and we’re inside tending to launcher buttons, the clouds film across our Strongholds and eat there on the roof. We or our Strongholds, it is the same, in time it is the same. Inexorably they will eat all.

  And so we who once had forever, Eternity, like a bright wish tied down, feel the great thing go little by little in a black film drifting over us from time to time. And when the wings fan up of the shark-jawed atoms, loaded and going away, and we fling a pocko-scope viewer up to our wide-range mechanized eyes for a better peep at our tormentors, and see them so magnified, sometimes we think of a black drift of condors all plated with terrible scales. It is then that we know, and we see how we stand. They go away on a Joy-flight digesting a little of us on the wind each day, each day. And so we are mortal after all, to a degree as vulnerable as any in simple flesh-land? Is it only a question of time?

  But the dream! The magnificent dream lives on and feeds upon eternity—or the quest for that. It clothes its bones in hope again and comes out fighting. Perhaps it is only a minor setback after all, this of the metal “fleas.” Perhaps tomorrow, some shiny-new tomorrow, we shall “replace” ourselves with the pure dream—a thing like rubber, maybe. Yes! a new-cell rubber alloy, that could be the answer. And the metal metal eaters will starve then, their vile steel bellies sucked up in terrible tiny ribs and mouths chopping hard in a foodless hopeless time. They will drift out to die, as all things shall and must that have annoyed king Man. YES!

  A LITTLE GIRL’S SPRING DAY IN MODERAN

  IT WAS in rain-time springtime that Little Sister danced across the planned-greening yards, one of her tiny hands lumped into a fist as though she concealed great treasure. She stopped outside his bubble dome orange-screaming door that was marked with the flying FW in fresh-peas green, the alphabet’s winged sixth and twenty-third letters designating “formula worker.” “DADDY!” she shrieked in her “normal” voice that was often these days apt to be near-hysterical, “come see what came in the mail tube. TODAY! It’s here! I sent a thousand dollars for it. TWO WEEKS AGO. I ordered out of an old Learner’s Catalog! And now it says, ‘See Daddy or Mother. FOR HELP!’ ” With the hand that was not a fist she waved; the waving contained a green sheet that had yellow and purple and pink and blue and red and orange writing on it in a kind of rainbow show, or in the Old Days it would have been so designated. Probably.

  He moved like a man stung by a sudden pang in the head; he lurched and stared, still sitting in his Formula Worker’s hip-snug, strapped in. And he peered carefully and long out through the tube of his Outer Scan to make sure the voice was really that of Little Sister and not some Enemy come disguised. After a good scanning while and after a goodly number of voice-a-grams had been analyzed and declared authentic, without-doubt Little Sister, he thumbed the switch that would alert Control a thousand miles away that he wanted loose from his chair bands. After a while of authenticating and negotiating over Formula Worker’s long-com, Control gave the go-ahead and he came loose from the metal straps of that place where he sat at work.

  Control windings unwinding, harsh restrainers metal-mumbling along the floor, free he lurched up at last. Tall and tottery he stood for a bit, a whit wild-headed and uncertain just for a while, for it had been more than a month now since he had been free of the bands. He shook his head to clear it and make peace with the strange height he was suddenly in and he called on all the reserves of his pride as a vaunted FW to keep him now from the dark disgrace of suddenly tumbling down. His thoughts sloshed furiously in the metal brain pans and went back a long way as he sought to rearrange and pattern into sense his unaccustomed feeling at the voice that had just said, “Daddy,” and had also said, “See Daddy or Mother.”

  Was the chance worth it? Could he trust his analyses? Could he even trust the Outer Scan to accurately gather the impressions for the analyses? What if his eyes were just that nth part “on the blink” today for out-viewing, after all that close work in? But everything said yes, this really is Little Sister outside your door. And yes, he did want to believe them. But oh, the world is such a place of tricks now. What if it wasn’t Little Sister, but a walking doll bomb come made-up, disguised, a calamity device designed to blow him at a handshake, at a hello, to high shrieks and all winds-and-skies and thus weaken Control by one Formula Worker less? Who would want to? Oh, anyone who was against Control would want to. And there are always those—OH YES!—those who would pick the Beautiful Precision to pieces and set the imprecision of choices loose in the world, in the name of Freedom. Boooo brrrrrrkkkkkk blaaahhh boooo. And he belonged to Control. He was Control! and Control was he! one and one and always one, bonded in inseparable union for greater for greater for greater for—It boggled; the metal brain pans died to a stop for an instant; he moved, not knowing why, on some older far-back Plan. He whistled the signal at his orange-screaming door; the door, never disobeying the signal, seemed eaten by the wall it slid into, and the proud flying FW was gone. He pressed his button for a voice.

  “Hello hello HELLO, Little LITTLE Sis-Sister.” Damn! after this long, talking was VERY hard. He stood as though fro
zen to the floor. He looked out and down at her from the exaggerated and very skinny height of his metaled feet and legs. Then he took five agonizingly slow and clanking steps toward his door. Exactly at the edge of his door he drew himself up. He planted himself in all his flying-FW dignity—drawn up and planted, yes! Next he did the “toeing of the line.” Exactly to the edge, but no more. No Formula Worker, except in the most extraordinary of circumstances (called in the jargon of Control an E.O.C.) ever recrossed the edge of his door. Once in was IN. It was all too fraught with BIG CHANCE, BIG DANGER, such leaving, and besides, where would they go? Out to meet a girl FC (Formula Checker) in some mad rendezvous of clanking hot metaled sex and randy sloshing brain pans crying LOVE? Ah no. The State (Control) needed them too badly; only an E.O.C. could break them out past their door.

  “A thousand—” he started to explode, some older far-back set of values nudging him, and then he thought, why, this is Little Sister, and this is spring. Forgetting for a little the iron urgency of his formula, he said, pressing the right button for “general small talk with close relative” on his voice box phfluggee-phflaggee. “What have you there, Little Sister, what have you got?”

  She opened her fist-squeezed hand to reveal two ancient seeds that looked like pumpkin seeds, and she said, “Really now! Glad you asked. According to the Programs, I’ve got Nature’s Packaged Life. As it used to be. And they showed a picture, like two big suns on the ground. And they claimed these two little teensy tiny things once could cause those two big giant things to come out and LIE IN A FIELD! If you followed instructions right. And tended everything right, in the Old Days. WITH DIRT. Oh my. Hmph! And water. And they said something about sun-sunlight. Do you think so? Whattya think, Daddy? Whattya think? WHAT’S DIRT?”