The Big Book of Science Fiction

by The Big Book of Science Fiction (retail) (epub)

  “But you still haven’t told me why those jammy-rams ram at the soil in such a ridiculous way!” Yes, I could listen to the grandest plan in all the universe and still feel the bones of a jagged ragged uncomfortable question nag at my dissenting throat. And anyway, I felt he owed me an answer on less grandiose terms. Anyone could have a big puff-ball dream about how to make the earth into such an ordered place as almost to stump the imagination. But would it ever happen? Well, I for one would call it more than a small cosmic miracle if man, a spark of life tediously evolved from the dead cold elements himself, should so organize his forces as to rearrange those elements to have essentially a dead cold planet again before he departed. It would seem to me a dismal, and more than a little depressing, closing of the ring, for sure. “Tell me about the jammy-rams!” I shouted.

  “Well, as you should have guessed a while back, the jammy-rams are just clever and sophisticated machines, science’s marvels, you might say, for making sure that the surface we’re coating is packed and solid everywhere. We want no cracks or sagging in the plastic. The mammoth graders and rollers do the big smoothing and packing jobs, and they’re now miles on beyond. And miles back the other way, as we saw in our flap-hap airabout scoot ride, is the ice edge of the plastic this whole thing is all about. And my jammy-rams and I are in between, the artistic effort really, the ones who care, seeing that the whole thing comes not to naught because of small soft places left untended to make an improper bedding for the plastic. YES! we’re the crux of it!” I could see that his was a proud calling.

  I looked about and far and wide strolled still on that smoothed and rolled-down earth the tall cylinder-carrying monsters, and many was the jammy-ram that was hunched into the position and having a go at the jug-jug-jug, phoo-phoo-phoo, bam-bam-bam that was its main mission. “How long will I be in that hospital,” I asked abruptly, thinking now of my future and many things.

  “Nine months,” he answered at once, gently rump-stroking a nearby jammy-ram that was having a go at a soft place in the hard hide of the soil. “That’s the full transformation, and you’re scheduled for it, from the markings I read under the orange M’s.” He stuck out a hand, and I shook it, felt its cold steel. “Good luck, boy, with the operations. When we meet again, if we meet again, you’ll be a Stronghold master, one of the elite-elite. Youth will be served. I missed my chance, failed my hunt, ordered my gray battalions on to the impossible fields too late and lost—due to no fault of my own. It was age—and fate.” He turned away, and I knew he was fighting a battle.

  I went on up toward the place where the operations were nine months long, where according to rumor, iron nurses, sterile and capable, ran on spur tracks up to the edges of beds, where a man, if of the CHOSEN, might receive enough part-steel to be a king in his times.

  NEW KINGS ARE NOT FOR LAUGHING

  Out of the hospital, out of the nine-months mutilation, out of the nine-months magic, released and alone. The steel-spliced doctors knew they had made a monster. They were proud of me, their monster, as doctors must always be proud of successes in their field; but they knew that now I was a kind of king, and they were merely doctors. Their arrogance was small-town lording now, their lording outlorded, as it were. No matter how born or made, a king WILL be a king. They got rid of me. They loaded me out. They quick-shifted me into the seething yeasty world; and with almost no parting ceremony. And with the very minimum of instructions and equipment (which was load plenty-enough) to stand me down on my trip. But somehow a king must be a king, know how to behave as a captain of his times and domesticate his wild situations, no matter what the odds.

  With my portable flesh-strip feeder, my book of instructions for new-metal limb control, my plastic mechanical tear bags (for even a king must sometimes cry, you will allow), and all the other paraphernalia to get me started, or at least to sustain me until I should attain my Stronghold sanctuary, I sailed out from the hospital steps, the arrogant doctors watching. Something like a small iron frigate from the Old Days, I guess I was, loaded to the gunwales and standing forth on end.

  Walking was easy, really. Plop-plip-plap-plot—one foot in front of the other, pick-them-up-and-plunk-them-down, toggle your hinges and braces, go with the arm swing for balance, flail the air with those blades when you go to tumble down—determine, determine, DETERMINE! determine that you will move along. Go for the tear bags when things get too uncertain, stop—think—cry (oh yes, a king can cry), curse if you want to, and hate, hate, hate. But keep on walking, don’t let those steel-spliced doctors see, don’t let anyone see how it is.

  GOD! Being a new-metal man wasn’t going to be easy. Let me tell you here and now, being a new-metal man was going to take some swinging. BUT I WOULD.

  According to the little packet of special maps and instructions the steel-spliced ones had slung around my neck at our parting, I was to be Stronghold 10. I looked at that number and at first it meant nothing. Nothing at all. Then I thought more, the new green juices in the fresh-made brainpans sloshing and fuming, and I thought, STRONGHOLD 10! YES! STRONGHOLD 10 FOREVER! Stronghold 10 must never disgrace Moderan. Stronghold 10 must achieve. Stronghold 10 must win honors. Stronghold 10 must be heroic. Stronghold 10 must be brave. Stronghold 10 must be the strongest, toughest, meanest, most hateful, most arrogant, loudest-mouthed, most battle-hungry hellion-hearted Stronghold in all the wide wide world. YES!

  But first, just right now, soon, THE NEXT ORDER OF BUSINESS! Stronghold 10 must find his Stronghold.

  After five hours of walking hard and going perhaps a stingy mile and a half, and some of that in circles, I stood lost in a little plastic draw, and quite bewildered. The vapor shield was scarlet August that burning month, the tin flowers were up in all the plastic plant holes, the rolling ersatz pastures were all aflutter with flash and flaunt of blooms. A sheen was in the air, a shimmer, and a million devils of heatstroke walked out and wrapped me close in my shell. And I was lost on this seventh day of hot August.

  I’ll always remember him, the way he came walking, a big man all shrunken in the torso, all bent down along the back curve, all sere and wrinkled in the face areas, so very terribly black-brown, like meat cooked too long on the bone. He had surely been through some maximum havoc—fire maybe, maybe fire and wind together, maybe flood too, wife-trouble and relatives thrown in could be, almost surely a war, possibly all standard disasters known to man, and some not so standard. He looked that bad. Yes, truly. THE WAR mostly—probably. And when he talked, I knew some problem surely had wrecked him even past what showed. Perhaps he had lost some parts that really counted one time. Anyway, his voice was a womanly squeak now as he said, “Lost, mister?”

  I swiveled to take him in fully, practicing coming down to hard-stare with my new wide-range Moderan vision, and I thumbed at the book, seeking the page on speech. (Oh, remember, I was new new-metal and the hospital had not kept me over for many practice runs. Not in any phase, let alone speech.) But it wasn’t so hard really. NO! of course not. All one had to do was be a mechanical genius to run oneself, a broadcaster speech specialist in order to talk, and a few other things to be able to operate as a new-metal man smoothly and with élan. Mostly, for just right now, forget the refinements and just try to find the right buttons. When I pushed the phfluggee-phflaggee too hard and it shouted, I mean shouted, “SURE AM,” he jumped about five feet in the air. I could guess he wasn’t used to that voice-button shouting, and I could also suppose he expected lip movement (I learned to do that later) and maybe better inflection too (which I learned later, as well). I tried again and said, passably I hoped, phfluggee-phflaggee voice going smoother, “I’m looking for Stronghold Ten. I AM Stronghold Ten. When I get there.” Then I tried a little voice-button laugh, just for kicks, and it came out “HA! Huk!”

  “OH!” he said, wet slop slopping, gristle-meat tongue doing a dance, wind in the windpipe working, GOD! what an old-fashioned method just to communicate a few verbal salutes. Hadn’t we needed improvement for quite a long ti
me there? “I think I know,” he finished, squeak-voiced and all, and still scared, “but you look so funny! Like a polished-up scrap heap, sort of. And all that load!” His fried-like wrinkled cheeks puffed then and he was consumed for a while with a tiny squeaky belly laugh.

  “Well, I’m not funny,” I snapped, furiously working the buttons, “not funny at all. I’m to be a king. I AM A KING! If I can just find where. And this stuff is all stuff I need to get me started, be sure of that.”

  “I guess I know,” he piped up, stopping the laugh off tight. “I mean, you said Stronghold Ten. And well, there’s a big pile up there of stuff. I mean, it’s a castle, really. WOW! I mean it’s like nothing I ever saw!” And he stood entranced, thinking, I had to guess, on what he’d seen.

  “HOO! It’s got a big ten on it that shines out day and night. That ten must be in jewels. Or maybe just some kind of paint. But it’s too much for me. I’ve walked by just to look at that ten sometimes. And usually things would happen. Or I should say ALWAYS, here of late, things would happen. I guess they’ve got all that BLAM! stuff working and perfected now. And all those walls and towers.”

  “YEAH?” I phfluggee-phflaggeed. “Really?”

  “Yeah! Last time I’s by—yesterday, it was, late, I mean—they must have had ALL of it systems-GO! When I move in close I activate something. I’ve found that out, found it out months past, and I’ve been teasin’ ’em for months, too. But I guess they didn’t mind, ’cause it gave ’em a chance to test. And practice. And yesterday, WHEE! I have to believe everything was ready. Such a bedlam, such a warning display, such a response for just a harmless lost human wreck-pile like me, who’s ‘ad it and ‘ad it really. I mean, I’m done. THE WAR, you know. And all.”

  “Sorry,” I push-buttoned at him the very best that I could. “Really sorry. But go on about what happened. The response, I mean.”

  “The response?—YEAH! Well, if you were in THE WAR, we have some background for conversation. Were you in THE WAR?”

  “Yes, VERY!”

  “Were you in on the response at Landry, say, or the push-button flattening of Whay? Happened all in just seconds, you know. That’s where I got it, got it bad and really—at Landry, and lost the parts that, being gone, cause me to squeak at my conversation just right now. Know what I mean?”

  “Know what you mean. And yes, I was in on the things you mention. In fact, I was the young Bangdaddo, the Commandaddo, the Chief-in-Chief of the Bangs, who pushed the buttons on Whay. My job, you know, just doing my job.” God, maybe I was the one who had ripped him.

  He looked at me straight on and a sun came out of either eye just then and shone at me with a million warm pats of adoration. “YOU’RE HIM!” he squeak-voice shouted. And I thought I knew what he meant. Yes, I had been very BIG at the response on Landry and the push-button flattening of Whay. I had been the First Bangdaddo, THE COMMANDADDO.

  “And now they’ve fixed you to be one of the BIG ones here! That figures.”

  “I’m lucky. And I’m sorry you got it, got shot up so badly. Truly sorry. No one won, finally, you know. NO ONE. Maybe they can fix you.”

  “Nah. Once gone like this is gone GONE. For me it’s downhill to the bone hill. But I’m staying as long as I can!” And I had to admire him for that last little singing out of the bones-in-the-teeth determination. “Just to see what happens to you guys who made it,” he finished.

  “But now,” I asked, “would you be kind enough to lead me to my castle? So I can get started on whatever it is I’m supposed to be. I’d be ever so grateful to you.”

  “I’ll do it, and gladly. And if you don’t know by now why GLADLY, I guess you never will.” He looked at me with not a begging look, just a quiet questioning look from eyes that didn’t waver now, and I guessed that within this wreck pile there had once been a very proud human being. Something about that stance, the set of the once-champion shoulders, the head lowered a little more now with the eyes peep-glaring out, the fists ready to hammer the world down to tiniest wreck-size pieces—and a bulb flashed on, far deep in the reaches—“MORGBAWN!” I shouted, hitting all the phfluggee-phflaggee buttons I had, and suddenly we were clasping each other while time had rolled quite away. “Oh God, what happened HAPPENED?”

  I remember him as he had not-too-long-ago been, a man quite up among men, tall and giant-seeming in his neat uniform of the BANGS, just before Landry, where everything for him and for me went wrong. I had lost him, my great second in command, in the hell and the flame and the noise of Landry, where I thought he had been blown to high skies and all winds. I had escaped by the merest chance of a miracle myself, to try the retrieval of all on Whay. There was no retrieval of anything that war, and especially not on Whay. YES! I had flattened it with the launchers and the big zump-blasters, but the other side took me out just as badly. And right after that all the world seemed to turn to flame as everyone gunned in.

  “To start again!” I said to Morgbawn. “Maybe we can both start again.”

  “No,” he replied in the very smallest of piping voices, quite eerie, “I’m nothing but the dust now. Essentially. It’s just a matter of a very small small while until whatever I was must lie and lie and lie, grave-housed—FOREVER. The battles can never be joined again for me.”

  Then an idea took me, a great boiling steaming kind of thought, the kind that could, when I was all flesh in the Old Days, give me goose crinkles along the brain. My new-metal shell now rasped and wrinkled and roared in my flesh-strips and new green blood reacted while the brainpans steamed. “Come be my weapons man!” I cried with the button-crying, “and we’ll flatten the world! as we once hoped we could do it when we were fresh and deadly in our new uniforms of the BANGS. It’s a chance to fight again and maybe win it all, maybe make up our losses.—Every Stronghold master, as I understand it, has a head weapons man. You’ll be my lead!”

  The look from his haggard killed fried-meat face was wan and wintry through storms of glooms. And yet, I thought I detected a very tiny pinpoint spark of yearning hope too, deep back, struggling behind his gaze. But he said, “Ah no, I’ve been here long enough to know what a weapons man is in Moderan. He’s a moving bit of mechanical servant nonsense meaning nothing, nothing at all. I think I’d rather lie out in my grave than to rejoin the battles that way. Not even one flesh-strip!”

  “I’ll see that you get one. I swear it. One of mine!”

  “Ah no, what could it mean? One flesh-strip. HA-ha. Why, a person has to have a whole network, with the blood coursing, to be anything. Otherwise it means nothing. You have to admit it, God still made the best people. One flesh-strip! HA! Why, I’d have to have a built-in pickle jar to keep it alive.”

  “We’ll do it. A built-in pickle jar!”

  “Ah, no.” But there was still that tiny spark of hope, and I thought I detected it stronger now. YES! I was beginning to wonder if Morgbawn wasn’t finding it a worlds better idea, that of being up and moving with even just one flesh-strip in a pickle jar rather than to lie totally quiet out there, the Battles finally and forever completely renounced for him.

  “How about it?”

  “Maybe!” he said. “I don’t know. Come find me where I fall. We’ll keep in touch, maybe. It shouldn’t be long now. When I feel myself finally going, wherever I am, I’ll head for your place. I’ll struggle in as close as I can get. Come find me—” His face retreated and commenced to break up then, he started to move away, and I think in that one anguished moment I understood just a little better than I ever had before what it might be like to be, as Morgbawn surely was, at the very brink of the Forever Total Dark. He was far down the plastic draw, the heart-rending wreck of my once great second in command, before I came back to the moment of now and remembered that he could have helped me find my way home. Ah well, it was near. He had said so. And maybe, after nightfall, that glowing 10 he had told me of would reach out and beam me in. I turned all the settings on LOW, fixed the alarm at a time for awakening, and, surrounded by my equipm
ent and instructions, simmered into sleep right there on the plastic that very hot summer eve, to awake, I hoped, in the light of a gleaming 10.

  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.