EVERY YEAR AT THE time of the harvest carnival, the Borderers came to Hemhill. They came in trucks with darkened windows, came fast down the highway through the ruins of the old city, past the low white houses and on into the big compound at the far end of the valley. For most of the year the warehouses behind the shockwire lay silent, the avenues and huts and wide concrete spaces were empty. But the Borderers rolled back the gates and powered up the shockwire. They filled the doors and windows with light. They fixed and they tested. They set to work.

On clear autumn nights after his bath and his storybook, John would lie in bed and listen as the hum of the compound carried across the fields. When his mother’s kiss and his father’s smile had faded, he liked to think of the Borderers down in the valley, those faceless people working shift upon shift through to morning.

Later, on the best nights, Hal would sometimes look in, sliding the door open to check for a wakeful glint in his little brother’s eyes. It was Hal, sitting at the edge of the bed with his broad figure outlined against the glimmering room, who first told John about the Borderers. He explained how the harvest—the reducing of the hoppers of jelt to fibrous bricks, winnowing the wheat, pressing the oilnuts, draining chloroethane from the tree-tappers netted in the late summer hills—created conditions that were too dirty and dangerous for machines or Europeans.

“I’ve seen the Borderers working,” he once said to John. “And I’ve been in the fields and watched them go by. They’re skilled in ways that we aren’t, Skiddle, and they work hard to earn the money they send back to their homes in the Endless City. Don’t ever believe anyone who says otherwise. Really, if it wasn’t for the color of their eyes, they’d be the same as you and I…”

Hal’s voice rose and then faded as he leaned down to kiss John goodnight. He stood up from the bed and the door closed and his footsteps passed into silence along the landing, and gravity shifted as once again the room filled with the hum of the compound riding on the darkness down the valley. John thought of the Borderers working and of the city from which they came, of the Endless City, dark and empty as he now saw it, abandoned like the compound in the times between the harvests, yet infinitely vast. In his dreams, he wandered those soundless streets alone, was swallowed in the loneliness of black windows and untenanted doors, of turns and alleys and avenues unfolding forever into vacant squares beneath a sky without moon or stars.