IT WAS spring again. April—and the vapor shield was pale new-apple green. A gnawing was in my flesh strips, sharp ache and longing tear—or many tears, maybe, attempting to bring my heart rain, trying to surface and soften my new-metal steel. The Stronghold air was all at once too thick, too hot, and it smelled like old brass doorknobs dropped in a trash-box blaze. Yes! Spring is that season! Caution is the word—iron control and bird-dogging of the mind are the strategy. Against betrayal, self-betrayal. And maybe I was not the only one. Maybe the other Stronghold masters, too, were trembling in their innermost Cells of Authority, fighting a silent battle as the flesh-strips writhed and remembered spring . . .
“Assembly!” I shouted the word. I screamed the call. I thumbed the button that let loose Noisy-Din. “Emergency!” And they all came toggling as I had trained them to do, as they knew they must do, moving with shank’s mares of new-metal, the hinges and braces of speed. Our speed! Yes. They tended toward the Great Hall of Discussions with all the clank and hurry they owned, the multitude of the weapons men, the servants—just a few—and the couple or so mutants (little flesh bums dressed all in tin) I allowed at times in the Stronghold so that I might be amused. (Horrible soft mushy people inside their tin, the flesh bums; not at all the bright and shiny solid grace we Stronghold people are, taut and straight in our new-metal steel replacements, with just a few flesh-strips holding our godhood bound.)
While they “ran” toward the Great Hall of Discussions I left my hip-snuggie throne in the innermost Room of Authority. I moved the same way they moved, toggling my hinges and braces to be there on time. Yes, with our new-metal steel replacements, from the commonest churl to the King we have given up grace of animal movement in walking. But when we bang into a corner or fall to the floor in a misstep or when a piece of battle-flung metal catches us on a part we do not bruise or break. We do not bleed. The real world’s beatings we take now and just pay them a never-mind, as though those terrible hammers were in thick, soft velvet gloves. Yes. We win some and lose some. To defeat old enemy Time we bartered well for the long gains and paid the fee of the losses as we had to—as we cut our flesh selves down.
They were all there waiting as I toggled onto the stage. The silence was that hushed respectful absence of any sound at all that benefits the entrance of the King. They had to be ready to storm the gates of utter impossibility if I so hinted—and they knew it. But my request this time was mild, though not so mildly put. I was emotional. I let them know the wish of their gleaming King—I screamed it. But what I demanded should not have been a thing too hard to come by even at this late date.
“Make me an acre!” I cried. “An acre of soil!” The looks of the weapons men and the servants were all of disbelief. “I would plant crops and cultivate, this softest of the spring months of the year. Something deep in my flesh-strips grows, unfolds, flowers and cries for husbandry at this year-time that was once verdant with newborn leaves and stems. But now in our great steel times nothing is born, all is made. Only the vapor shield is live new-apple green—the rest is all cold steel. Ah, it is beautiful, the precision we’ve gained, the flowers all up in metal in their rows, the leaves all folding out ersatz and shiny as the great trees leap through the yard-holes at the press of a switch. And the grass that comes is just-so green, a nice ever-last carpet as chunks of the prearranged plastic tumble upside down! All this at the turn of a switch. But it leaves a somehow hunger deep in some empty wells. The flesh-strips writhe and remember. So make me an acre of soil!”
•
The looks of the weapons men and the servants continued all disbelief. Whispers marched through the room and a small stale ribbon of sighs went out. And finally my head weapons man, Slag Morgbawn, dour and efficient, once himself a Stronghold master and a “replaced” man, his lone flesh-strip alive now in a built-in pickle jar, spoke.
“With all due respect to our chief,” he said, “and your station of merit and the fact that you are a kind of King—an acre of soil is about as possible just now as our handing you the sun nestled in a little bucket of ice. Not that we wouldn’t do it, if we could, Sire, you understand—hand you the sun, I mean, nestled in a little bucket of ice. But some things are just not to be done, Sire, no matter how keen the desire of the would-be doer. Or how shining great and honored the demander.”
“An acre of soil!” I repeated my cry. “Excuses are for old-women warriors who exaggerate always the deed to be done. Are any old-women warriors present? Ah, I thought not. There are millions of acres of soil, many as close as the reach of our ever-last mechanized eyeballs. And one acre’s procurement for me, your King, you compare with the sun riding a small bucket of ice and set at my feet? Break out the little blasters! Don’t tell me the greatest Stronghold on Earth will boggle at such a tiny request as the need of a little planting dirt for its master’s spring cropping. I know our soil now, for many sterilized reasons, is under a few feet of plastic and that on top of a goodly apron of concrete sometimes laid on steel. Certainly we’ve hidden the soil after ‘they’ mined it, raped it, poisoned it, totally ravaged it for the things of ‘their’ greed. But break out the little portable blasters! I’m sure our great Stronghold—toward which all other Strongholds think in shudder and shame, being so deeply in fear of us—can blast down a hill or two. We can penetrate those few feet of plastic, that concrete and, if need be, that bedrock of steel! Will we find soil to our liking? Has the ransacked dirt come back after lying for years under its blanket of plastic, its comforter of concrete and, in some cases, its bundler of steel? Has the soil been cleansed? Has the sick Earth sweetened? Listen,” I said, pulling taut my leg uplifters to make me the tallest of the tall and pressing the small neck button that would give my voice more shove, “if we ask doubting questions what will ever get done? Where will our destiny be? If we had never done more—wouldn’t we still be tail-tied to trees, hairy and dumb, meat-bodied, flesh-aped to nothing, not knowing? Break out the little blasters. Pulverize me a hill! But don’t blam it. Don’t blow it to high skies and all winds—just make me an acre of soil!”
•
So there we were that apple-green April day preparing to war on a hill. All the kill-potential of Stronghold 10 could be employed to expedite our task, if need should dictate an all-out war on the plastic mound. But I had given the order for little tag-along blasters, as seemed to fit the need. All my weapons men and their mechanical stale ribbon of doubting sighs would obey. Yes!
Soon we were out in the field as if geared for war, riding our crawl-track transports with our portable weapons of ultimate destruction all to the sides and the rear and I felt more like a god than a King. (After all, how many Kings have created an acre of soil in an apple-green vapor month?) The logistics of the little blasters attack and all the attendant problems of invasion were handled ably by my weapons men headed, a little reluctantly I’m afraid, by Slag Morgbawn, the most feared weapons man in all wide Moderan. I’m thinking he thought it a little beneath him to be planning attacks on a hill that had no purpose other than being hill. But perhaps the fierce and the mighty need some shame at times, a homely humbling little task to take them clear back to themselves and restore them to the realities.
I carried a tiny sprig of spring-metal blooms and hummed a lilting tune as we pressed toward the hill. The tin and silver birds of Central Seasons spring, released by throwing switches in Bird Control, flew far and wide, filled the air with the whooshing of their jets and blew their sharp metal shrill. Ah, spring!
We opened on the hill. We moved in close and let it have our shots. We cracked it wide! We crushed it down. We went through plastic, concrete and steel with penetrating blasts. In some ways it was like cracking and peeling some giant bird’s three-layered egg. What did we find inside the three-layered egg?
Had rattlesnakes come back? Had buzzing death been imprisoned to live all that while in our little hill? Our instruments droned their warning and we moved away from the illness that spoke to us from the unwell soil. It was contaminated, ruined, still ailing.
We moved against other hills. We blasted and cut them down. We moved in with our gauges and heard that awful drone. Hill after grim hill. Until very late in the afternoon my pride came loose and I stood up and shouted at the whole wide high mocking air and green heaven, “Two buckets of good soil! I’ll settle for two buckets of good soil!”
Did a god somewhere hear? Well, what’s to believe about such things?
They stood before me, two little flesh mutant-men, disfigured, all down-drooped in the shoulders and looking back-sprained, with gristle-meat faces and hands that must have been through a broil. But smiling. Smiling at the clown King now with his pride all on the ground. And offered two small buckets of soil, one from each man.
Oh, God . . .
So we went on home—all that kill potential now led by a King cut down to clown, carrying two precious buckets of soil through the apple-green spring air as though they were jewel boxes filled full of diamonds in gold. (Don’t ask me where they got soil. Under some secret hill, out of some dark lost cranny, up from some deep-down well? Two buckets of pure uncontaminated soil that just sat there and looked glum and quiet at all our instruments’ cajoling. Not a peep, not a tick was uttered when our gauges passed nearby or probed in deep to see if this soil would talk, speak of an illness.)
Yes, I planted sunflowers that spring to grow the sun out of two buckets of sweet pure soil. They came up and flourished. In July they bloomed, high on the Stronghold wall, two gold spots waving. Slag Morgbawn came to look one day in mid-July. He stood by my side high on the Stronghold wall, his lone flesh strip alive in its solution in the built-in pickle jar, his manner dour, as always.
I could not resist saying: “When your King seems to want the sun, just obey the orders, huh?”