Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four Page 6
10.
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.”
11.
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.
One, the tallest of the group, catches our wrists and says, “What is your business in Kingston?”
“I come to purchase books,” Holly declares.
“I come to find my month-wife Silena,” say I.
“Silena! Silena! Silena!” Her name becomes a jubilant incantation on their lips. “His month-wife! Silena! His month-wife! Silena! Silena! Silena!”
The tall one thrusts his face against mine and says, “We offer you a choice. Come and make prayer with us, or die on the spot.”
“We choose to pray,” I tell him.
They tug at our arms, urging us impatiently onward. Down street after street until at last we arrive at holy ground: a garden plot, insignificant in area, planted with unfamiliar bushes and flowers, tended with evident care. They push us inside.
“Kneel,” they say.
“Kiss the sacred earth.”
“Adore the things that grow in it, strangers.”
“Give thanks to God for the breath you have just drawn.”
“And for the breath you are about to draw.”
“Sing!”
“Weep!”
“Laugh!”
“Touch the soil!”
“Worship!”
12.
Silena’s room is cool and quiet, in the upper story of a residence overlooking the university grounds. She wears a soft green robe of coarse texture, no jewelery, no face paint. Her demeanor is calm and self-assured. I had forgotten the delicacy of her features, the cool malicious sparkle of her dark eyes.
“The master program?” she says, smiling. “I destroyed it!”
“You think I still have the program?”
“I know you do.”
“Well, yes,” she admits coolly. “I do.”
My fingers tremble. My throat parches. An adolescent foolishness seeks to engulf me.
“Why did you steal it?” I ask.
“Out of love of mischief.”
“I see the lie in your smile. What was the true reason?”
“Does it matter?”
“The district is paralyzed, Silena. Thousands of people suffer. We are at the mercy of raiders from adjoining districts. Many have already died of the heat, the stink of garbage, the failure of the hospital equipment. Why did you take the program?”
“Perhaps I had political reasons.”
“Which were?”
“To demonstrate to the people of Ganfield how utterly dependent on these machines they have allowed themselves to become.”
“We knew that already,” I say. “If you meant only to dramatize our weaknesses, you were pressing the obvious. What was the point of crippling us? What could you gain from it?”
“Amusement?”
“Something more than that. You’re not that shallow, Silena.”
“Something more than that, then. By crippling Ganfield I help to change things. That’s the purpose of any political act. To display the need for change, so that change may come about.”
“Simply displaying the need is not enough.”
“It’s a place to begin.”
“Do you think stealing our program was a rational way to bring change, Silena?”
“Are you happy?” she retorts. “Is this the kind of world you want?”
“It’s the world we have to live in whether we like it or not. And we need that program in order to go on coping. Without it we are plunged into chaos.”
“Fine. Let chaos come. Let everything fall apart, so we can rebuild it.”
“Easy enough to say, Silena. What about the innocent victims of your revolutionary zeal, though?”
She shrugs. “There are always innocent victims in any revolution.” In a sinuous movement she rises and approaches me. The closeness of her body is dazzling and maddening. With exaggerated voluptuousness she croons, “Stay here. Forget Ganfield. Life is good here. These people are building something worth having.”
“Let me have the program,” I say.
“They must have replaced it by now.”
“Replacing it is impossible. The program is vital to Ganfield, Silena. Let me have it.”
She emits an icy laugh.
“I beg you, Silena.”
“How boring you are!”
“I love you.”
“You love nothing but the status quo. The shape of things as they are gives you great joy. You have the soul of a bureaucrat.”
“If you have always had such contempt for me, why did you become my month-wife?”
She laughs again. “For sport, perhaps.”
Her words are like knives. Suddenly, to my own astonishment, I am brandishing the heat-pistol. “Give me the program or I’ll kill you!” I cry.
She is amused. “Go. Shoot. Can you get the program from a dead Silena?”
“Give it to me.”
“How silly you look holding that gun!”
“I don’t have to kill you,” I tell her. “I can merely wound you. This pistol is capable of inflicting light burns that scar the skin. Shall I give you blemishes, Silena?”
“Whatever you wish. I’m at your mercy.”
I aim the pistol at her thigh. Silena’s face remains expressionless. My arm stiffens and begins to quiver. I struggle with the rebellious muscles, but I succeed in steadying my aim only for a moment before the tremors return. An exultant gleam enters her eyes. A flush of excitement spreads over her face. “Shoot,” she says defiantly. “Why don’t you shoot me?”
She knows me too well. We stand in a frozen tableau for an endless moment outside time—a minute, an hour, a second?—and then my arm sags to my side. I put the pistol away. It never would have been possible for me to fire it. A powerful feeling assails me of having passed through some subtle climax: it will all be downhill from here for me, and we both know it. Sweat drenches me. I feel defeated, broken.
Silena’s features reveal intense scorn. She has attained some exalted level of consciousness in these past few moments where all acts become gratuitous, where love and hate and revolution and betrayal and loyalty are indistinguishable from one another. She smiles the smile of someone who has scored the winning point in a game, the rules of which will never be explained to me.
“You little bureaucrat,” she says calmly. “Here!”
From a closet she brings forth a small parcel which she tosses disdainfully to me. It contains a drum of computer film. “The program?” I ask. “This must be some joke. You wouldn’t actually give it to me, Silena.”
“You hold the master program of Ganfield in your hand.”
“Really, now?”
“Really, really,” she says. “The authentic item. Go on. Go. Get out. Save your stinking Ganfield.”
“Silena —”
“Go.”
13.
The rest is tedious but simple. I locate Holly Borden, who has purchased a load of books. I help her with them, and we return via tube to Hawk Nest. There I take refuge beneath the bookshop once more while a call is routed through Old Grove, Parley Close, the Mill, and possibly some other districts to the district captain of Ganfield. It takes two days to complete the circuit, since district rivalries make a roundabout relay necessary. Ultimately I am connected and convey my happy news: I have the program, though I have lost my passport and am forbidden to cross Conning Town. Through diplomatic channels a new passport is conveyed to me a few days later, and I take the tube home the long way, via Budleigh, Cedar Mall, and Morton Court. Ganfield is hideous, all filth and disarray, close to the point of irreversible collapse; its citizens have lapsed into a deadly stasis and await their doom placidly. But I have returned with the program.
The captain praises my heroism. I will be rewarded, he says. I will have promotion to the highest ranks of the civil service, with hope of ascent to the district council.
But I take pale pleasure from his words. Silena’s contempt still governs my thoughts. Bureaucrat. Bureaucrat.
14.
Still, Ganfield is saved. The police machines have begun to move again.
Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine
There was a time, back in the dear old dead 1960s, when “pertinence” and “relevance” were the watchwords of radical young America. College curricula had to be revised to eliminate “irrelevant” subjects (history, Elizabethan drama, organic chemistry) so that greater prominence could be given to “relevant” ones (ethnic studies, feminism, environmental issues). Writers of fiction were supposed to deal only with socially relevant themes. People were supposed to dress in relevant ways—the uniform of nonconformism—and use relevant vocabulary. I enjoyed the late 1960s as much as anyone, and I regarded much of the political ferment of the time as vital to the survival of our society—the Vietnam war might have gone on for many decades more without it. But the era did have its silly side, and the search for the immediately relevant at the expense of the less immediately practical side was, to me, one of the sillier aspects of it. Throwing most of past human knowledge overboard for the sake of bringing about instant social reform did not strike me as an effective way of achieving anything but ignorance. Evidently it seemed that way to others, too: after a while the traditional sciences and historical subjects returned to the curriculum, Shakespeare and Sophocles were allowed back in also, and not a great deal was heard from the earnest, deadly young decreers of non-negotiable demands who had had such power
over academic life for a time. (Although a lot of them grew up and became university professors, and they are behind the modern craze for political correctness that has spread so much terror through our academic institutions.)
I have to point out that much of what was “relevant” to the Movement folks of the 1960s was also relevant to non-Movement me. But though I agreed with them on many social issues of the times, I disagreed fiercely on the need to discuss those issues, and only those issues, in fiction, and steadfastly went on writing stories that refused to double as political tracts. (The notion that I could singlehandedly end the war in Vietnam, or the oppression of the oppressed, by writing a science-fiction story always seemed transcendentally dim-witted to me.) Nevertheless on at least one occasion I let myself be inveigled into contributing to an anthology of “relevant” science fiction stories that would be packaged for sale to politically conscious students, a sure-fire commercial idea marred only by the fact that very few of the campus radicals were so doctrinaire as to want to read political sermons disguised as science fiction. The inveigler was Roger Elwood, for his book Ten Tomorrows.
I wrote “Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine” in June, 1972, at a time when the current feminist usage of “Ms.” had not evolved and the abbreviation was merely short for “manuscript.” I suppose it could have been considered a properly “relevant” story, in the parlance of the day, since it did embody some thoughts about the need for transformation of contemporary society and did indeed, pre-Watergate, poke some fun at President Nixon, the Pentagon, the polluters of the environment, and other widely acknowledged villains of the day. I still don’t think that stories like this are apt to change the world. I do think this one is a pretty funny story which amiably deflates a lot of contemporary nonsense.