Trips: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Four

by Robert Silverberg

  “No,” Murray said. “Please, no.”

  Inexorably Van had his turn, quick, impersonal. Nate was next. Murray tried not to watch, but his eyes would not remain closed. A strange smile glittered on Kay’s lips as she gave herself to Nate. Nate arose. Finn approached the bed.

  “No!” Murray cried, and lashed out in a backward kick that sent Conrad screaming across the room. Murray’s hands were free. He twisted and wrenched himself away from Bruce. Dirk and Nate intercepted him as he rushed toward Kay. They seized him and flung him to the floor.

  “The therapy isn’t working,” Nate said.

  “Let’s skip the rest,” said Dirk. “It’s no use trying to heal him. He’s beyond hope. Let him stand up.”

  Murray got cautiously to his feet. Dirk said, “By unanimous vote, Murray, we expel you from Group for unGrouplike attitudes and especially for your unGrouplike destruction of Kay’s rig. All your Group privileges are canceled.” At a signal from Dirk, Nate removed Murray’s rig from the container and reduced it to unsalvageable rubble. Dirk said, “Speaking as your friend, Murray, I suggest you think seriously about undergoing a total personality reconstruct. You’re in trouble, do you know that? You need a lot of help. You’re a mess.”

  “Is there anything else you want to tell me?” Murray asked.

  “Nothing else. Goodbye, Murray.”

  They started to go out. Dirk, Finn, Nate, Bruce, Conrad, Klaus. Van. JoJo. Nikki. Serena, Maria, Lanelle, Mindy. Lois. Kay was the last to leave. She stood by the door, clutching her clothes in a small crumpled bundle. She seemed entirely unafraid of him. There was a peculiar look of—was it tenderness? pity?—on her face. Softly she said, “I’m sorry it had to come to this, Murray. I feel so unhappy for you. I know that what you did wasn’t a hostile act. You did it out of love. You were all wrong, but you were doing it out of love.” She walked toward him and kissed him lightly, on the cheek, on the tip of the nose, on the lips. He didn’t move. She smiled. She touched his arm. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured. “Goodbye, Murray.” As she went through the door she looked back and said, “Such a damned shame. I could have loved you, you know? I could really have loved you.”

  He had told himself that he would wait until they all were gone before he let the tears flow. But when the door had closed behind Kay he discovered his eyes remained dry. He had no tears. He was altogether calm. Numb. Burned out.

  After a long while he put on fresh clothing and went out. He popped to London, found that it was raining there, and popped to Prague, where there was something stifling about the atmosphere, and went on to Seoul, where he had barbecued beef and kimchi for dinner. Then he popped to New York. In front of a gallery on Lexington Avenue he picked up a complaisant young girl with long black hair. “Let’s go to a hotel,” he suggested, and she smiled and nodded. He registered for a six-hour stay. Upstairs, she undressed without waiting for him to ask. Her body was smooth and supple, flat belly, pale skin, high full breasts. They lay down together and, in silence, without preliminaries, he took her. She was eager and responsive. Kay, he thought. Kay. Kay. You are Kay. A spasm of culmination shook him with unexpected force.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” she said a few minutes later.

  “I love you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I love you.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “Come live with me. Please. Please. I’m serious.”

  “What?”

  “Live with me. Marry me.”

  “What?”

  “There’s only one thing I ask. No Group stuff. That’s all. Otherwise you can do as you please. I’m wealthy. I’ll make you happy. I love you.”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “I love you.”

  “Mister, you must be out of your head.”

  “Please. Please.”

  “A lunatic. Unless you’re trying to make fun of me.”

  “I’m perfectly serious, I assure you. Live with me. Be my wife.”

  “A lunatic,” she said. “I’m getting out of here!” She leaped up and looked for her clothes. “Jesus, a madman!”

  “No,” he said, but she was on her way, not even pausing to get dressed, running helter-skelter from the room, her pink buttocks flashing like beacons as she made her escape. The door slammed. He shook his head. He sat rigid for half an hour, an hour, some long timeless span, thinking of Kay, thinking of Group, wondering what they’d be doing tonight, whose turn it was. At length he rose and put on his clothes and left the hotel. A terrible restlessness assailed him. He popped to Karachi and stayed ten minutes. He popped to Vienna. To Hangchow. He didn’t stay. Looking for what? He didn’t know. Looking for Kay? Kay didn’t exist. Looking. Just looking. Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Getting Across

  Now it is a little later in the spring of 1972 and I have finished the complicated process of resettling myself in balmy California after a lifetime spent in the grim urban sprawl of New York City. The indefatigable Roger Elwood, he of the multitudinous original-story science-fiction anthologies, was now compiling one on the theme of the future of cities, and invited me to contribute. With the iron acres of the Northeastern United States still clanging in my memory, I could do nothing else but imagine the future of the city as one vast world-wide Northeastern United States, town after town cheek by jowl. I thought of “Getting Across” as a rite of exorcism from my former existence on the crowded East Coast. Looking back at it now, though, I see that I would very much rather live in the relatively orderly urban dystopia I imagined here than in the chaotic actual New York of today, which worries me because it’s only about three thousand miles from the place where I currently make my home, and that doesn’t seem like sufficient distance. New York is one of the great cities of the world, but I have grown accustomed to the slower pace and greener environment of California in all these decades of my transplanted life, and I’m no longer fit, it seems, for the New York style of doing things. California has its own problems, of course. And so, too, does the worldwide city I depict in this story.

  1.

  On the first day of summer my month-wife, Silena Ruiz, filched our district’s master program from the Ganfield Hold computer centre and disappeared with it. A guard at the Hold has confessed that she won admittance by seducing him, then gave him a drug. Some say she is in Conning Town now, others have heard rumors that she has been seen in Morton Court, still others maintain her destination was the Mill. I suppose it does not matter where she has gone. What matters is that we are without our program. We have lived without it for eleven days, and things are starting to break down. The heat is abominable, but we must switch every thermostat to manual override before we can use our cooling system; I think we will boil in our skins before the job is done. A malfunction of the scanners that control our refuse compactor has stilled the garbage collectors, which will not go forth unless they have a place to dump what they collect. Since no one knows the proper command to give the compactor, rubbish accumulates, forming pestilential hills on every street, and dense swarms of flies or worse hover over the sprawling mounds. Beginning on the fourth day our police also began to go immobile—who can say why?—and by now all of them stand halted in their tracks. Some are already starting to rust, since the maintenance schedules are out of phase. Word has gone out that we are without protection, and outlanders cross into the district with impunity, molesting our women, stealing our children, raiding our stocks of foodstuffs. In Ganfield Hold platoons of weary sweating technicians toil constantly to replace the missing program, but it might be months, even years, before they are able to devise a new one.

  In theory, duplicate programs are stored in several places within the community against just such a calamity. In fact, we have none. The one kept in the district captain’s office turned out to be some twenty years obsolete; the one in the care of the soulfather’s house had been devoured by rats; the program held in the vaults of the tax collectors appeared to be intact, but when it was pl
aced in the input slot it mysteriously failed to activate the computers. So we are helpless: an entire district, hundreds of thousands of human beings, cut loose to drift on the tides of chance. Silena, Silena, Silena! To disable all of Ganfield, to make our already burdensome lives more difficult, to expose me to the hatred of my neighbors—why, Silena? Why?

  People glare at me on the streets. They hold me responsible, in a way, for all this. They point and mutter; in another few days they will be spitting and cursing, and if no relief comes soon they may be throwing stones. Look, I want to shout, she was only my month-wife and she acted entirely on her own. I assure you I had no idea she would do such a thing. And yet they blame me. At the wealthy houses of Morton Court they will dine tonight on babes stolen in Ganfield this day, and I am held accountable.

  What will I do? Where can I turn?

  I may have to flee. The thought of crossing district lines chills me. Is it the peril of death I fear, or only the loss of all that is familiar? Probably both: I have no hunger for dying and no wish to leave Ganfield. Yet I will go, no matter how difficult it will be to find sanctuary if I get safely across the line. If they continue to hold me tainted by Silena’s crime I will have no choice. I think I would rather die at the hands of strangers than perish at those of my own people.

  2.

  This sweltering night I find myself atop Ganfield Tower, seeking cool breezes and the shelter of darkness. Half the district has had the idea of escaping the heat by coming up here tonight, it seems; to get away from the angry eyes and tightened lips I have climbed to the fifth parapet, where only the bold and the foolish ordinarily go. I am neither, yet here I am.

  As I move slowly around the tower’s rim, warily clinging to the old and eroded guardrail, I have a view of our entire district. Ganfield is like a shallow basin in form, gently sloping upward from the central spike that is the tower to a rise on the district perimeter. They say that a broad lake once occupied the site where Ganfield now stands; it was drained and covered over centuries ago, when the need for new living space became extreme. Yesterday I heard that great pumps are used to keep the ancient lake from breaking through into our cellars, and that before very long the pumps will fail or shut themselves down for maintenance, and we will be flooded. Perhaps so. Ganfield once devoured the lake; will the lake now have Ganfield? Will we tumble into the dark waters and be swallowed, with no one to mourn us?

  I look out over Ganfield. These tall brick boxes are our dwellings, twenty stories high but dwarfed from my vantage point far above. This sliver of land, black in the smoky moonlight, is our pitiful scrap of community park. These low flat-topped buildings are our shops, a helter-skelter cluster. This is our industrial zone, such that it is. That squat shadow-cloaked bulk just north of the tower is Ganfield Hold, where our crippled computers slip one by one into idleness. I have spent nearly my whole life within this one narrow swing of the compasses that is Ganfield. When I was a boy and affairs were not nearly so harsh between one district and its neighbor, my father took me on holiday to Morton Court, and another time to the Mill. When I was a young man I was sent on business across three districts to Parley Close. I remember those journeys as clearly and vividly as though I had dreamed them. But everything is quite different now and it is twenty years since I last left Ganfield. I am not one of your privileged commuters, gaily making transit from zone to zone. All the world is one great city, so it is said, with the deserts settled and the rivers bridged and all the open places filled, a universal city that has abolished the old boundaries, and yet it is twenty years since I passed from one district to the next. I wonder: are we one city, then, or merely thousands of contentious fragmented tiny states?

  Look here, along the perimeter. There are no more boundaries, but what is this? This is our boundary, Ganfield Crescent, that wide curving boulevard surrounding the district. Are you a man of some other zone? Then cross the Crescent at risk of life. Do you see our police machines, blunt-snouted, glossy, formidably powerful, strewn like boulders in the broad avenue? They will interrogate you, and if your answers are uneasy, they may destroy you. Of course they can do no one any harm tonight.

  Look outward now, at our horde of brawling neighbors. I see beyond the Crescent to the east the gaunt spires of Conning Town, and on the west, descending stepwise into the jumbled valley, the shabby dark-walled buildings of the Mill, with happy Morton Court on the far side, and somewhere in the smoky distance other places, Folkstone and Budleigh and Hawk Nest and Parley Close and Kingston and Old Grove and all the rest, the districts, the myriad districts, part of the chain that stretches from sea to sea, from shore to shore, spanning our continent paunch by paunch, the districts, the chips of gaudy glass making up the global mosaic, the infinitely numerous communities that are the segments of the all-encompassing world-city. Tonight at the capital they are planning next month’s rainfall patterns for districts that the planners have never seen. District food allocations—inadequate, always inadequate—are being devised by men to whom our appetites are purely abstract entities. Do they believe in our existence, at the capital? Do they really think there is such a place as Ganfield? What if we sent them a delegation of notable citizens to ask for help in replacing our lost program? Would they care? Would they even listen? For that matter, is there a capital at all? How can I who have never seen nearby Old Grove accept, on faith alone, the existence of a far-off governing centre, aloof, inaccessible, shrouded in myth? Maybe it is only a construct of some cunning subterranean machine that is our real ruler. That would not surprise me. Nothing surprises me. There is no capital. There are no central planners. Beyond the horizon everything is mist.

  3.

  In the office, at least, no one dares show hostility to me. There are no scowls, no glares, no snide references to the missing program. I am, after all, chief deputy to the District Commissioner of Nutrition, and since the commissioner is usually absent, I am in effect in charge of the department. If Silena’s crime does not destroy my career, it might prove to have been unwise for my subordinates to treat me with disdain. In any case we are so busy that there is no time for such gambits. We are responsible for keeping the community properly fed; our tasks have been greatly complicated by the loss of the program, for there is no reliable way now of processing our allocation sheets, and we must requisition and distribute food by guesswork and memory. How many bales of plankton cubes do we consume each week? How many kilos of proteoid mix? How much bread for the shops of Lower Ganfield? What fads of diet are likely to sweep the district this month? If demand and supply fall into imbalance as a result of our miscalculations, there could be widespread acts of violence, forays into neighboring districts, even renewed outbreaks of cannibalism within Ganfield itself. So we must draw up our estimates with the greatest precision. What a terrible spiritual isolation we feel, deciding such things with no computers to guide us!

  4.

  On the fourteenth day of the crisis the district captain summons me. His message comes in late afternoon, when we all are dizzy with fatigue, choked by humidity. For several hours I have been tangled in complex dealings with a high official of the Marine Nutrients Board; this is an arm of the central city government, and I must therefore show the greatest tact, lest Ganfield’s plankton quotas be arbitrarily lowered by a bureaucrat’s sudden pique. Telephone contact is uncertain—the Marine Nutrients Board has its headquarters in Melrose New Port, half a continent away on the southeastern coast—and the line sputters and blurs with distortions that our computers, if the master program were in operation, would normally erase. As we reach a crisis in the negotiation my subdeputy gives me a note: DISTRICT CAPTAIN WANTS TO SEE YOU. “Not now,” I say in silent lip-talk. The haggling proceeds. A few minutes later comes another note: IT’S URGENT. I shake my head, brush the note from my desk. The subdeputy retreats to the outer office, where I see him engaged in frantic discussion with a man in the gray and green uniform of the district captain’s staff. The messenger points vehemently at me. Just
then the phone line goes dead. I slam the instrument down and call to the messenger, “What is it?”

  “The captain, sir. To his office at once, please.”

  “Impossible.”

  He displays a warrant bearing the captain’s seal. “He requires your immediate presence.”

  “Tell him I have delicate business to complete,” I reply. “Another fifteen minutes, maybe.”

  He shakes his head. “I am not empowered to allow a delay.”

  “Is this an arrest, then?”

  “A summons.”

  “But with the force of an arrest?”

  “With the force of an arrest, yes,” he tells me.

  I shrug and yield. All burdens drop from me. Let the subdeputy deal with the Marine Nutrients Board; let the clerk in the outer office do it, or no one at all; let the whole district starve. I no longer care. I am summoned. My responsibilities are discharged. I give over my desk to the subdeputy and summarize for him, in perhaps a hundred words, my intricate hours of negotiation. All that is someone else’s problem now.

  The messenger leads me from the building into the hot, dank street. The sky is dark and heavy with rain, and evidently it has been raining some while, for the sewers are backing up and angry swirls of muddy water run shin-deep through the gutters. The drainage system, too, is controlled from Ganfield Hold, and must now be failing. We hurry across the narrow plaza fronting my office, skirt a gush of sewage-laden outflow, push into a close-packed crowd of irritable workers heading for home. The messenger’s uniform creates an invisible sphere of untouchability for us; the throngs part readily and close again behind us. Wordlessly I am conducted to the stone-faced building of the district captain, and quickly to his office. It is no unfamiliar place to me, but coming here as a prisoner is quite different from attending a meeting of the district council. My shoulders are slumped, my eyes look toward the threadbare carpeting.