Getting Across

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!”