Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four Page 5

  Three times I am halted by police machines. I produce my passport, display my visa, am allowed to continue. So far getting across has been easier than I imagined. No one molests me here. I suppose I look harmless. Why did I think my foreignness alone would lead these people to attack me? Ganfield is not at war with its neighbors, after all.

  Drifting eastward in search of a bookstore, I pass through a shabby residential neighborhood and through a zone of dismal factories before I reach an area of small shops. Then in late afternoon I discover three bookstores on the same block, but they are antiseptic places, not the sort that might carry subversive propaganda like Walden Three. The first two are wholly automated, blank-walled charge-plate-and-scanner operations. The third has a human clerk, a man of about thirty with drooping yellow mustachios and alert blue eyes. He recognizes the style of my clothing and says, “Ganfield, eh? Lot of trouble over there.”

  “You’ve heard?”

  “Just stories. Computer breakdown, isn’t it?”

  I nod. “Something like that.”

  “No police, no garbage removal, no weather control, hardly anything working—that’s what they say.” He seems neither surprised nor disturbed to have an outlander in his shop. His manner is amiable and relaxed. Is he fishing for data about our vulnerability, though? I must be careful not to tell him anything that might be used against us. But evidently they already know everything here. He says, “It’s a little like dropping back into the Stone Age for you people, I guess. It must be a real traumatic thing.”

  “We’re coping,” I say, stiffly casual.

  “How did it happen, anyway?”

  I give him a wary shrug. “I’m not sure about that.” Still revealing nothing. But then something in his tone of a moment before catches me belatedly and neutralizes some of the reflexive automatic suspicion with which I have met his questions. I glance around. No one else is in the shop. I let something conspiratorial creep into my voice and say, “It might not even be so traumatic, actually, once we get used to it. I mean, there once was a time when we didn’t rely so heavily on machines to do our thinking for us, and we survived and even managed pretty well. I was reading a little book last week that seemed to be saying we might profit by trying to return to the old way of life. Book published in Kingston.”

  “Walden Three.” Not a question but a statement.

  “That’s it.” My eyes query his. “You’ve read it?”

  “Seen it.”

  “A lot of sense in that book, I think.”

  He smiles warmly. “I think so too. You get much Kingston stuff over in Ganfield?”

  “Very little, actually.”

  “Not much here, either.”

  “But there’s some.”

  “Some, yes,” he says.

  Have I stumbled upon a member of Silena’s underground movement? I say eagerly, “You know, maybe you could help me meet some people who—”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.” His eyes are still friendly but his face is tense. “There’s nothing like that around here,” he says, his voice suddenly flat and remote. “You’d have to go over into Hawk Nest.”

  “I’m told that that’s a nasty place.”

  “Nevertheless. Hawk Nest is where you want to go. Nate and Holly Borden’s shop, just off Box Street.” Abruptly his manner shifts to one of exaggerated bland clerkishness. “Anything else I can do for you, sir? If you’re interested in supernovels we’ve got a couple of good new double-amplified cassettes, just in. Perhaps I can show you—”

  “Thank you, no.” I smile, shake my head, leave the store. A police machine waits outside. Its dome rotates; eye after eye scans me intently; finally its resonant voice says, “Your passport, please.” This routine is familiar by now. I produce the document. Through the bookshop window I see the clerk bleakly watching. The police machine says, “What is your place of residence in Conning Town?”

  “I have none. I’m here on a twenty-four-hour visa.”

  “Where will you spend the night?”

  “In a hotel, I suppose.”

  “Please show your room confirmation.”

  “I haven’t made arrangements yet,” I tell it.

  A long moment of silence: the machine is conferring with its central, no doubt, keying into the master program of Conning Town for instructions. At length it says, “You are advised to obtain a legitimate reservation and display it to a monitor at the earliest opportunity within the next four hours. Failure to do so will result in cancellation of your visa and immediate expulsion from Conning Town.” Some ominous clicks come from the depths of the machine. “You are now under formal surveillance,” it announces.

  Brimming with questions, I return hastily to the bookshop. The clerk is displeased to see me. Anyone who attracts monitors to his shop—“monitors” is what they call police machines here, it seems—is unwelcome. “Can you tell me how to reach the nearest decent hotel?” I ask.

  “You won’t find one.”

  “No decent hotels?”

  “No hotels. None where you could get a room, anyway. We have only two or three transient houses, and accommodations are allocated months in advance to regular commuters.”

  “Does the monitor know that?”

  “Of course.”

  “Where are strangers supposed to stay, then?”

  The clerk shrugs. “There’s no structural program here for strangers as such. The regular commuters have regular arrangements. Unauthorized intruders don’t belong here at all. You fall somewhere in between, I imagine. There’s no legal way for you to spend the night in Conning Town.”

  “But my visa—”

  “Even so.”

  “I’d better go on into Hawk Nest, I suppose.”

  “It’s late. You’ve missed the last tube. You’ve got no choice but to stay, unless you want to try a border crossing on foot in the dark. I wouldn’t recommend that.”

  “Stay? But where?”

  “Sleep in the street. If you’re lucky the monitors will leave you alone.”

  “Some quiet back alley, I suppose.”

  “No,” he says. “You sleep in an out-of-the-way place and you’ll surely get sliced up by night-bandits. Go to one of the designated sleeping streets. In the middle of a big crowd you might just go unnoticed, even though you’re under surveillance.” As he speaks he moves about the shop, closing it down for the night. He looks restless and uncomfortable. I take out my map of Conning Town and he shows me where to go. The map is some years out of date, apparently; he corrects it with irritable swipes of his pencil. We leave the shop together. I invite him to come with me to some restaurant as my guest, but he looks at me as if I carry plague. “Goodbye,” he says. “Good luck.”

  7.

  Alone, apart from the handful of other diners, I take my evening meal at a squalid, dimly lit automated cafeteria at the edge of downtown. Silent machines offer me thin acrid soup, pale spongy bread, and a leaden stew containing lumpy ingredients of undeterminable origin, for which I pay with yellow plastic counters of Conning Town currency. Emerging undelighted, I observe a reddish glow in the western sky: it may be a lovely sunset or, for all I know, may be a sign that Ganfield is burning. I look about for monitors. My four-hour grace period has nearly expired. I must disappear shortly into a throng. It seems too early for sleep, but I am only a few blocks from the place where the bookshop clerk suggested I should pass the night, and I go to it. Just as well: when I reach it—a wide plaza bordered by gray buildings of ornate facade—I find it already filling up with street-sleepers. There must be eight hundred of them, men, women, family groups, settling down in little squares of cobbled territory that are obviously claimed night after night under some system of squatters’ rights. Others constantly arrive, flowing inward from the plaza’s three entrances, finding their places, laying out foam cushions or mounds of clothing as their mattresses. It is a friendly crowd: these people are linked by bonds of neighborliness, a common pover
ty. They laugh, embrace, play games of chance, exchange whispered confidences, bicker, transact business, and join together in the rites of the local religion, performing a routine that involves six people clasping hands and chanting. Privacy seems obsolete here. They undress freely before one another, and there are instances of open coupling. The gaiety of the scene—a medieval carnival is what it suggests to me, a Breughelesque romp—is marred only by my awareness that this horde of revelers is homeless under the inhospitable skies, vulnerable to rain, sleet, damp fog, snow, and the other unkindnesses of winter and summer in these latitudes. In Ganfield we have just a scattering of street-sleepers, those who have lost their residential licenses and are temporarily forced into the open, but here it seems to be an established institution, as though Conning Town declared a moratorium some years ago on new residential construction without at the same time checking the increase of population.

  Stepping over and around and between people, I reach the center of the plaza and select an unoccupied bit of pavement. But in a moment a little ruddy-faced woman arrives, excited and animated, and with a Conning Town accent so thick I can barely understand her she tells me she holds claim here. Her eyes are bright with menace; her hands are not far from becoming claws; several nearby squatters sit up and regard me threateningly. I apologize for my error and withdraw, stumbling over a child and narrowly missing overturning a bubbling cooking pot. Onward. Not here. Not here. A hand emerges from a pile of blankets and strokes my leg as I look around in perplexity. Not here. A man with a painted face rises out of a miniature green tent and speaks to me in a language I do not understand. Not here. I move on again and again, thinking that I will be jostled out of the plaza entirely, excluded, disqualified even to sleep in this district’s streets, but finally I find a cramped corner where the occupants indicate I am welcome. “Yes?” I say. They grin and gesture. Gratefully I seize the spot.

  Darkness has come. The plaza continues to fill; at least a thousand people have arrived after me, cramming into every vacancy, and the flow does not abate. I hear booming laughter, idle chatter, earnest romantic persuasion, the brittle sound of domestic quarreling. Someone passes a jug of wine around, even to me: bitter stuff, fermented clam juice its probable base, but I appreciate the gesture. The night is warm, almost sticky. The scent of unfamiliar food drifts on the air, something sharp, spicy, a heavy pungent smell. Curry? Is this then truly Calcutta? I close my eyes and huddle into myself. The hard cobblestones are cold beneath me. I have no mattress and I feel unable to remove my clothes before so many strangers. It will be hard for me to sleep in this madhouse, I think. But gradually the hubbub diminishes and—exhausted, drained—I slide into a deep troubled sleep.

  Ugly dreams. The asphyxiating pressure of a surging mob. Rivers leaping their channels. Towers toppling. Fountains of mud bursting from a thousand lofty windows. Bands of steel encircling my thighs; my legs, useless, withering away. A torrent of lice sweeping over me. A frosty hand touching me. Touching me. Touching me. Pulling me up from sleep.

  Harsh white light drenches me. I blink, cringe, cover my eyes. Shortly I perceive that a monitor stands over me. About me the sleepers awake, backing away, murmuring, pointing.

  “Your street-sleeping permit, please.”

  Caught. I mumble excuses, plead ignorance of the law, beg forgiveness. But a police machine is neither malevolent nor merciful; it merely follows its program. It demands my passport and scans my visa. Then it reminds me I have been under surveillance. Having failed to obtain a hotel room as ordered, having neglected to report to a monitor within the prescribed interval, I am subject to expulsion.

  “Very well,” I say. “Conduct me to the border of Hawk Nest.”

  “You will return at once to Ganfield.”

  “I have business in Hawk Nest.”

  “Illegal entrants are returned to their district of origin.”

  “What does it matter to you where I go, so long as I get out of Conning Town?”

  “Illegal entrants are returned to their district of origin,” the machine tells me inexorably.

  I dare not go back with so little accomplished. Still arguing with the monitor, I am led from the plaza through dark cavernous streets toward the mouth of a transit tube. On the station level a second monitor is given charge of me. “In three hours,” the monitor that apprehended me informs me, “the Ganfield-bound train will arrive.”

  The first monitor rolls away.

  Too late I realize that the machine has neglected to return my passport.

  8.

  Monitor number two shows little interest in me. Patrolling the tube station, it swings in a wide arc around me, keeping a scanner perfunctorily trained on me but making no attempt to interfere with what I do. If I try to flee, of course, it will destroy me. Fretfully I study my maps. Hawk Nest lies to the northeast of Conning Town; if this is the tube station that I think it is, the border is not far. Five minutes’ walk, perhaps. Passportless, there is no place I can go except Ganfield; my commuter status is revoked. But legalities count for little in Hawk Nest.

  How to escape?

  I concoct a plan. Its simplicity seems absurd, yet absurdity is often useful when dealing with machines. The monitor is instructed to put me aboard the train for Ganfield, yes? But not necessarily to keep me there.

  I wait out the weary hours to dawn. I hear the crash of compressed air far up the tunnel. Snub-nosed, silken-smooth, the train slides into the station. The monitor orders me aboard. I walk into the car, cross it quickly, and exit by the open door on the far side of the platform. Even if the monitor has observed this maneuver, it can hardly fire across a crowded train. As I leave the car I break into a trot, darting past startled travelers, and sprint upstairs into the misty morning. At street level running is unwise. I drop back to a rapid walking pace and melt into the throngs of early workers. The street is Crystal Boulevard. Good, I have memorized a route: Crystal Boulevard to Flagstone Square, thence via Mechanic Street to the border.

  Presumably all monitors, linked to whatever central nervous system the machines of the district of Conning Town utilize, have instantaneously been apprised of my disappearance. But that is not the same as knowing where to find me. I head northward on Crystal Boulevard—its name shows a dark sense of irony, or else the severe transformations time can work—and, borne by the flow of pedestrian traffic, enter Flagstone Square, a grimy, lopsided plaza out of which, on the left, snakes curving Mechanic Street. I go unintercepted on this thoroughfare of small shops. The place to anticipate trouble is at the border.

  I am there in a few minutes. It is a wide dusty street, silent and empty, lined on the Conning Town side by a row of blocky brick warehouses, on the Hawk Nest side by a string of low ragged buildings, some in ruins, the best of them defiantly slatternly. There is no barrier. To fence a district border is unlawful except in time of war, and I have heard of no war between Conning Town and Hawk Nest.

  Dare I cross? Police machines of two species patrol the street: flat-domed ones of Conning Town and black, hexagon-headed ones of Hawk Nest. Surely one or the other will gun me down in the no man’s land between districts. But I have no choice. I must keep going forward.

  I run out into the street at a moment when two police machines, passing one another on opposite orbits, have left an unpatrolled space perhaps a block long. Midway in my crossing the Conning Town monitor spies me and blares a command. The words are unintelligible to me, and I keep running, zigzagging in the hope of avoiding the bolt that very likely will follow. But the machine does not shoot; I must already be on the Hawk Nest side of the line, and Conning Town no longer cares what becomes of me.

  The Hawk Nest machine has noticed me. It rolls toward me as I stumble, breathless and gasping, onto the curb. “Halt!” it cries. “Present your documents!” At that moment a red-bearded man, fierce-eyed, wide-shouldered, steps out of a decaying building close by me. A scheme assembles itself in my mind. Do the customs of sponsorship and sanctuary hold good in
this harsh district.

  “Brother!” I cry. “What luck!” I embrace him, and before he can fling me off I murmur, “I am from Ganfield. I seek sanctuary here. Help me!”

  The machine has reached me. It goes into an interrogatory stance and I say, “This is my brother who offers me the privilege of sanctuary. Ask him! Ask him!”

  “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.

  9.

  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.