Robert Silverberg: Getting Across

“Is this true?” the machine inquire.

Redbeard, unsmiling, spits and mutters, “My brother, yes. A political refugee. I’ll stand sponsor to him. I vouch for him. Let him be.”

The machine clicks, hums, assimilates. To me it says, “You will register as a sponsored refugee within twelve hours or leave Hawk Nest.” Without another word it rolls away.

I offer my sudden savior warm thanks. He scowls, shakes his head, spits once again. “We owe each other nothing,” he says brusquely and goes striding down the street.

In Hawk Nest nature has followed art. The name, I have heard, once had purely neutral connotations: some real-estate developer’s high-flown metaphor, nothing more. Yet it determined the district’s character, for gradually Hawk Nest became the home of predators that it is today, where all men are strangers, where every man is his brother’s enemy.

Other districts have their slums. Hawk Nest is a slum. I am told they live here by looting, cheating, extorting, and manipulating. An odd economic base for an entire community, but maybe it works for them. The atmosphere is menacing. The only police machines seem to be those that patrol the border. I sense emanations of violence just beyond the corner of my eye: rapes and garrottings in shadowy byways, flashing knives and muffled groans, covert cannibal feasts. Perhaps my imagination works too hard. Certainly I have gone unthreatened so far; those I meet on the streets pay no heed to me, indeed will not even return my glance. Still, I keep my heat-pistol close by my hand as I walk through these shabby, deteriorating outskirts. Sinister faces peer at me through cracked, dirt-veiled windows. If I am attacked, will I have to fire in order to defend myself? God spare me from having to answer that.

Why is there a bookshop in this town of murder and rubble and decay? Here is Box Street, and here, in an oily pocket of spare-parts depots and fly-specked quick-lunch counters, is Nate and Holly Borden’s place. Five times as deep as it is broad, dusty, dimly lit, shelves overflowing with old books and pamphlets: an improbable outpost of the nineteenth century, somehow displaced in time. There is no one in it but a large, impassive woman seated at the counter, fleshy, puffy-faced, motionless. Her eyes, oddly intense, glitter like glass discs set in a mound of dough. She regards me without curiosity.

I say, “I’m looking for Holly Borden.”

“You’ve found her,” she replies, deep in the baritone range.

“I’ve come across from Ganfield by way of Conning Town.”

No response from her to this.

I continue, “I’m traveling without a passport. They confiscated it in Conning Town and I ran the border.”

She nods. And waits. No show of interest.

“I wonder if you could sell me a copy of Walden Three,” I say.

Now she stirs a little. “Why do you want one?”

“I’m curious about it. It’s not available in Ganfield.”

“How do you know I have one?”

“Is anything illegal in Hawk Nest?”

She seems annoyed that I have answered a question with a question. “How do you know I have a copy of that book?”

“A bookshop clerk in Conning Town said you might.”

A pause. “All right. Suppose I do. Did you come all the way from Ganfield just to buy a book?” Suddenly she leans forward and smiles—a warm, keen, penetrating smile that wholly transforms her face: now she is keyed up, alert, responsive, shrewd, commanding. “What’s your game?” she asks.

“My game?”

“What are you playing? What are you up to here?”

It is the moment for total honesty. “I’m looking for a woman named Silena Ruiz, from Ganfield. Have you heard of her?”

“Yes. She’s not in Hawk Nest.”

“I think she’s in Kingston. I’d like to find her.”

“Why? To arrest her?”

“Just to talk to her. I have plenty to discuss with her. She was my month-wife when she left Ganfield.”

“The month must be nearly up,” Holly Borden says.

“Even so,” I reply. “Can you help me reach her?”

“Why should I trust you?”

“Why not?”

She ponders that briefly. She studies my face. I feel the heat of her scrutiny. At length she says, “I expect to be making a journey to Kingston soon. I suppose I could take you with me.”

She opens a trapdoor; I descend into a room beneath the bookshop. After a good many hours a thin, gray-haired man brings me a tray of food. “Call me Nate,” he says. Overhead I hear indistinct conversations, laughter, the thumping of boots on the wooden floor. In Ganfield famine may be setting in by now. Rats will be dancing around Ganfield Hold. How long will they keep me here? Am I a prisoner? Two days. Three. Nate will answer no questions. I have books, a cot, a sink, a drinking glass. On the third day the trapdoor opens. Holly Borden peers down. “We’re ready to leave,” she says.

The expedition consists just of the two of us. She is going to Kingston to buy books and travels on a commercial passport that allows for one helper. Nate drives us to the tube-mouth in midafternoon. It no longer seems unusual to me to be passing from district to district; they are not such alien and hostile places, merely different from the place I know. I see myself bound on an odyssey that carries me across hundreds of districts, even thousands, the whole patchwork frenzy of our world. Why return to Ganfield? Why not go on, ever eastward, to the great ocean and beyond, to the unimaginable strangenesses on the far side?

Here we are in Kingston. An old district, one of the oldest. We are the only ones who journey hither today from Hawk Nest. There is only a perfunctory inspection of passports. The police machines of Kingston are tall, long-armed, with fluted bodies ornamented in stripes of red and green: quite a gay effect. I am becoming an expert in local variations of police-machine design. Kingston itself is a district of low pastel buildings arranged in spokelike boulevards radiating from the famed university that is its chief enterprise. No one from Ganfield has been admitted to the university in my memory.

Holly is expecting friends to meet her, but they have not come. We wait fifteen minutes. “Never mind,” she says. “We’ll walk.” I carry the luggage. The air is soft and mild; the sun, sloping toward Folkstone and Budleigh, is still high. I feel oddly serene. It is as if I have perceived a divine purpose, an overriding plan, in the structure of our society, in our sprawling city of many cities, our network of steel and concrete clinging like an armor of scales to the skin of our planet. But what is that purpose? What is that plan? The essence of it eludes me; I am aware only that it must exist. A cheery delusion.

Fifty paces from the station we are abruptly surrounded by a dozen or more buoyant young men who emerge from an intersecting street. They are naked but for green loincloths; their hair and beards are untrimmed and unkempt; they have a fierce and barbaric look. Several carry long unsheathed knives strapped to their waists. They circle wildly about us, laughing, jabbing at us with their fingertips. “This is a holy district!” they cry. “We need no blasphemous strangers here! Why must you intrude on us?”

“What do they want?” I whisper. “Are we in danger?”

“They are a band of priests,” Holly replies. “Do as they say and we will come to no harm.”

They press close. Leaping, dancing, they shower us with sprays of perspiration. “Where are you from?” they demand. “Ganfield,” I say. “Hawk Nest,” says Holly. They seem playful yet dangerous. Surging about me, they empty my pockets in a series of quick jostling forays: I lose my heat-pistol, my maps, my useless letters of introduction, my various currencies, everything, even my suicide capsule. These things they pass among themselves, exclaiming over them; then the heat-pistol and some of the currency are returned to me. “Ganfield,” they murmur. “Hawk Nest!” There is distaste in their voices. “Filthy places,” they say. “Places scorned by God,” they say. They seize our hands and haul us about, making us spin. Heavy-bodied Holly is surprisingly graceful, breaking into a serene lumbering dance that makes them applaud in wonder.