I PASSED through a gate of glowing orange M’s and went up to a man who stood guardlike, watchful and stiff. He had a butcher’s clothes on, or was it a scientist’s neat smock a bit loose-and-hanging on a watchman’s ramrod pose?
“You may cut me in! I came to join! If you’re the butcher—”
He eyed me through two cold and passive globes that jumped about half a foot out from his face on sticks and glinted like sheet steel can. But when he drew them to him I noticed that these eye globes were really just some pretty ordinary ice-blue steel eyeballs. “Let us not be mind-reading.” He said it very calmly, evenly; the voice had a machine sound. “Nor wild-guessing neither. I’m dressed as a butcher, yes, one way you look at it. And a scientist too, I’m sure you must agree. But I do not make cuts; nor do I experiment. I’m a guards-man and a symbol. I mainly stand here just inside the gate of the M’s of Moderan, to greet you as you come stumbling in from Old Land. I listen to your very best personal story of adversity and woe, if you want to tell me it. And I check you for the M’s that you must have, from that other gate a long way back, if you’re to stay here.”
“I’VE GOT THEM! I really have the M’s!” And I moved in to the total strip-down so that he might see how really much I was M-ed up.
He looked quizzical. The ice-ball blue eyes jumped about six inches out, each on its own stick again, and they nodded, but not in unison. It was one at a time, like alternate crazy winking. “WOW! WOW! WOW!” he finally said, “WHOOEE! ZOWEE! and WUP! WUP! you really do. And I’m programmed to give you the wow! wow! wow! whooee! zowee! wup! wup! when I see something like this. It’s not too unusual, and yet it’s not everyday either. What I mean is, you’re to be a Stronghold master, right up as far as anyone can do it. That is, if you can stand the operations. Each M is a major awful cut, you may or may not know.”
“I have the M’s,” I said simply, humbly as I could. “I’ll try to honor them in every way that courage, steadfastness, bravery, common true grit, love of country, and respect for my ancestors can do for any cause. And if that be not enough, I’ll throw in some generous portions of élan and a lot of spirit of the corps! I WILL NEVER SURRENDER.” Sure, I was half scared to death, as I most usually am in unsure situations, but I wasn’t about to let anyone but me know a thing about it. Especially was I not going to show the white feather to this talking tin can dressed up as a butcher-scientist-guardsman and poking blue-glass in-out abracadabra crazy unearthly eye globes at me. And besides, pose and all, fears and all, braggadocio and bluff on the rocks—I had parlayed it all one time all the way up to Chief-in-Chief of the Bangs, in the Old Life. Not exactly a nobody. . . I could do it!
While I was standing there being scared and determined not to show it, indeed committed even to being courageous, the guardsman simply stamped on a switch and where we stood became at once a roll-go. We moved along swiftly past houses shaped like bubbles, past bubble-dome homes, toward a tall building a short way in, and during the small ride he dutifully helped me regain my clothes. While he was doing that he gave me the wow! wow! wow! whooee! zowee! wup! wup again, and that made me feel better. Near the entrance to the tall building he handed me my certification, the forms of which I suppose he already had made up in big duplicate stacks which he carried in some secret space just under the door to his breastplate. I noticed that the certification was a very simple orange card carrying on one side, in heavy lettering in midnight black, the code w! w! w! w! z! w! w! (which I saw no reason whatsoever to try to translate) and on the other side the simple typed notation saying, “Entitled to full schedule.”
“I hope every last M is a big Big BIG success and each and every awful cut worthwhile.” He just said it in his strange machinelike voice, surely programmed, as I headed toward the doors of the tall white building and he reversed the roll-go to ride back to the gate of M’s. I never saw him more.
Do you like to watch blood? Do you like to watch your own blood? Do you like to watch any blood spurting, gurgling, gushing, falling into very clear clean glass containers, missing and falling on to the floor sometimes, going all over until everything is that funny foamy red color, with all your towels, rugs, cloths and sponges soaked and the smell . . . ? Do you? Do you like to watch flesh being snipped, sliced, carved, shredded and made over. Do you? Do you like to watch your own flesh . . . . . . . . . ? How about bones? Do you like to see bones sawed? I mean, like butchers in a butcher shop? Do you like to watch live near-relative bones being gone after with big axes? Do you like to see own bones slipped out of flesh and skin? (Oh, they seem strange, so unhomed wet and slick!) I mean, do you like personal boning? Do you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ?
Two doctors, steel-spliced, tall and coldly no-nonsense business got after me right soon. I don’t mean I was running, but I did intend to move in slow-on-slow on the white building, reconnoiter, take my time, rubberneck a little, scout the washrooms, the furniture, the iron bedpans and the steel nurse corps. But the doctors soon led me away, one of them eagerly snatching from me the card of “full schedule.”
We went in to where the lights were blue and cold. I was walking with all my flesh-self going for the last time that day. I had my mind closed in close as I could about me, cold and tight-holding, my body tucked in small, to walk into the Terrors Total and the hell of the Blue Unknown. What a mispicture it is, this scene of the big bluff fighter striding in tall into his danger, chest puffed, shoulders winged, and breast being battle-drummed, tom-tommed, if you will, in a rousing challenge of pure defiance. A nice painting, this! But give a man some ultimate testing and see how he fares in. He crouches in all low, small, shrunken, clutching and clawing his keepsakes in the pockets and the mind, scared-scanning eyes trying to see every direction at once, talking to himself, cursing, praying, muttering, crying, and hoping with all the hope he owns one of two things he may do—get through it with some honor to see another day, or die without too much dishonor and brave the Total Night.
I knotted my thoughts that day to all the fists I had ever owned in the whole perilous world of men and events. I flashed a message to my nerves to be as solid as cement pipes if ever they could for just ten minutes now of testing in Total Time. But what gains it? Why try so hard? What could it matter, ever, in the face of the Total Dark, whether or not one more little flesh bum flew his life ship into the Wall, pretending to be somewhat jaunty? Yes, I thought I had been tricked for the Journey all the way in to Death’s big sky, and I was determined to go there as bravely as any man can do it. I just didn’t know . . . what really was . . . in store. . . .
How do you like push-button surgery? How do you like WATCHING push-button surgery? How do you regard being marked off in cuts and boning plans more than ever was a side of Angus in the Old Days? How do you get along with the idea of conferences about the orange M’s, huddling with the steel-spliced doctors—battle-planning for pain—before they’d go for you each day with the overhead-rigged knives?
For know, we took it M by agony M, bleeding by bleeding cut, starting in early November, for nine months, I and the steel-spliced medicos. (Without a shadow of a doubt they were surgeons of keenest skill.) I watched every cut of the flesh, every nick of the bones, every taking out of a member, every putting in of an implant, for that was part of the plan. The doctors would not make a move, would not so much as scratch the boundary of an M, unless I was fully awake, competently aware. To be born again! and to feel and see how that you were born again. YES! For some time, some later Moderan time, when you stood up tall at your buttons of war, your fort on the status of continuous blast and all the world gunned in against you and each other, it would not prove out well for you to prove out squeamish. To be a Stronghold master was a duty and a trust, not to mention a terrific opportunity. And it might as well be found out in the bed of the cutting-in whether or not a candidate had the “guts.” So ran the thinking of the Planners of Moderan.
Oh, sure, there were deadeners, but never quite enough. Always just on the edge of all the hurt you could take, clamped down in a stark white bed in a cold blue room and watching from a box of glass that separated your head from the rest of you, the box of glass being very clear for viewing and, with the sized slot for your neck, fitting quite snugly and putting your head in a still still world of its own. To watch pain! Do you like to watch pain, the surgical refinements poised above you, high on ceiling tracks, and the not-quite-human doctors working the buttons and smirking, and you wondering where it would fall, oh God, where would it next fall? and it falling and bringing up blood, always the blood, and a part of you and holding that part of you for the too long time just right for you to observe through the box of glass . . . the blood dripping, always the blood . . . and when it came time for the move up to head, they made that move, planned the points-and-edges adjustments, changed the tracks, got settings so right-on-the-nose precisely right that the gleaming knives would fall . . . and thus they made the move up there to do MY head! to work on the face flesh-strips, the brain slosh pans and the green brain fluids, the knives falling and flicking and snicking like cold silver rain in that area of former sanctuary-stillness where the glass box had been . . . Did I see it? DID I SEE IT!? They flashed it all, almost realer than real, on a wall viewer, and the only part I didn’t get to see all the way at the doing was the doing over of the eyes, when they gave me that miraculous wide-range Moderan eyesight. But I heard that all on the provided screen: “Knives in left-side eye socket; knives in right-side eye socket; coring out left-side eyeball now; coring out right-side eyeball now; and folks, there’s blood! don’t think there isn’t blood comes up and out when you core eyeballs; always the blood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .” And sure, later they played all of it over for me, in accent colors, on the biggest wall viewer they had. . . .
The bones were special special rock-bottom hurt, like drilling a thousand dozen teeth all at one time for you might be and all drills touching nerves—WEEEAAAOO-OHHH . . . WEEAAAOOOHHH . . . WEEEAAAOO-OHHH . . . OOOHHH . . . OOOHHH . . . It was at the boning of bones that I discovered that the hospital was providing me with special things in my foods and beverages so that I might experience more pain per second without losing consciousness—WEEEAAAOOOHHH . . .WEE-EAAAOOOHHH . . . WEEEAAAOOOHHH . . . OOOHHH . . . OOOHHH . . . than I would have otherwise been able to do . . . (It is well known that the ordinary everyday average person in the Old Days went through his entire average-Joe or average-Jane life without scratching the surface even of the solid experiences of physical pain that the human body can be made capable of. And that was of course, in a way, a total-experience loss.)
I will say in passing (and I will admit this had had me concerned at first) that they did a little-miracle splendid job on my penis and other sex parts—all complexities of the system being left responsive and vibrant, and yet all parts of the complex done to forever-last. BRAVO!
. . . while the sterile steel hard-driving nurses ran efficient and cold on spur tracks up to the edges of beds. . . .
Finally it was over, the whole pain-crammed rebuilding thing, OVER! I guess I stood it quite well, really, looking back. I stood it! And that was the main thing. I was true to the orange M’s. I became a Man of Moderan! My flesh-strips were few and played down now and the “replacements” of new-metal alloy were the bulk of my bodily splendor. And no matter to what high posts of honor and power I may attain in the world now, which is my oyster, I’ll always remember with special fondness and a jaunty pride the day I crossed over, the day I passed through the gate of the Moderan M’s, the day that the butterflies of apprehension and resolve were eagle-big in my stomach and my mind.