The Inverted World

  “You’re wrong,” I said flatly. “I know you’re wrong.”

  “All right…but certain things will have to change. There’s no one in the city now who doesn’t know the danger we’re in. We’ve been cheating and stealing our way across this land, and it’s that which has created the danger. It’s time for it to stop.”

  “Victoria, you don’t—”

  “You only have to look at the damage! There were thirty-nine children killed! God knows how much destruction. Do you think we can survive if the people outside keep on attacking us?”

  “It’s quieter now. It’s under control.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t care what the current situation looks like. I’m thinking about the long term. All our troubles are ultimately created by the city being moved. That one condition produces the danger. We move across other people’s land, we bargain for manpower to move the city, we take women into the city to have sex with men they hardly know…and all in order to keep the city moving.”

  “The city can never stop,” I said.

  “You see…already you are a part of the guild system. Always this flat statement, without looking at it in a wider light. The city must move, the city must move. Don’t accept it as an absolute.”

  “It is an absolute. I know what would happen if it stopped.”

  “Well?”

  “The city would be destroyed, and everyone would be killed.”

  “You can’t prove that.”

  “No…but I know it would be so.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” said Victoria. “And I’m not alone. Even in the last few days I’ve heard it said by others. People can think for themselves. They’ve been outside, seen what it’s like. There’s no danger apart from the danger we create for ourselves.”

  I said: “Look, this isn’t our conflict. I wanted to see you to talk about us.”

  “But it’s all the same. What happened to us is implicitly bound up in the ways of the city. If you hadn’t been a guildsman, we might still be living together.”

  “Is there any chance…?”

  “Do you want it?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “It’s impossible. For me, at least. I couldn’t reconcile what I believe with accepting your way of life. We’ve tried it, and it separated us. Anyway, I’m living with—”

  “I know.”

  She looked at me, and I felt at second hand the alienation she had experienced.

  “Don’t you have any beliefs, Helward?” she said.

  “Only that the guild system, for all its imperfections, is sound.”

  “And you want us to live together again, living out two separate beliefs. It couldn’t work.”

  We had both changed a lot; she was right. It was no good speculating about what might have been in other circumstances. There was no way of making a personal relationship distinct from the overall scheme of the city.

  Even so, I tried again, attempting to explain the apparent suddenness of what had happened, attempting to find a formula that could somehow revive the early feelings we had had for each other. To be fair, Victoria responded in kind, but I think we had both arrived at the same conclusion by our separate routes. I felt better for seeing her, and when I left her and went on towards the Futures’ quarters I was aware that we had succeeded in resolving the worst of the remaining issue.

  9

  The following day, when I rode north with Blayne to start the future survey, marked the beginning of a long period which produced for the city a state of both regained security and radical change.

  I saw this process develop gradually, for my own sense of actual city-time was distorted by my journeys to the north. I learnt by experience that at a distance roughly twenty miles to the north of optimum, a day spent was equivalent to an hour of elapsed time in the city. As far as possible, I kept in touch with what happened in the city by attending as many Navigators’ meetings as I could.

  The placidity of the city’s existence that I had experienced when I first left to work outside returned more quickly than most people had expected.

  There were no more attacks by the tooks, although one of the militiamen, engaged in an intelligence mission, was captured and killed. Soon after this, the leaders of the Militia announced that the tooks were dispersing, and heading for their settlements in the south.

  Although military vigilance was maintained for a long time—and never in fact wholly abandoned—gradually men from the Militia were freed to work on other projects.

  As I had learnt at that first Navigators’ meeting, the method of hauling the city was changed. After several initial difficulties, the city was successfully launched into a system of continuous traction, using a complicated arrangement of alternating cables and phased track-laying. One tenth of a mile in a twenty-four hour period was not, after all, a great distance to move, and within a short time the city had reached optimum.

  It was discovered that this actually gave the city greater freedom of movement. It was possible, for instance, to take quite lengthy detours from a bearing of true north if a sufficiently large obstacle were to appear.

  In fact the terrain was good. As our surveys showed, the overall elevation of the terrain was falling, and there were more gradients in our favour than were against us.

  There were more rivers in this region than the Navigators would have liked, and the Bridge-Builders were kept busy. But with the city at optimum, and with its greater capacity for speed relative to the movement of the ground, there was more time available for decision-making, and more time in which to build a safe bridge.

  With some hesitation at first, the barter system was reintroduced.

  There was the benefit of hindsight in the city’s favour, and barter negotiations were conducted more scrupulously than before. The city paid more generously for manpower—which was still needed—and tried for a long time to avoid the necessity of bartering for transferred women.

  Through a long series of Navigators’ meetings I followed the debate on this subject. We still had the seventeen transferred women inside the city who had been with us since before the first attack, and they had expressed no desire to return. But the predominance of male births continued, and there was a strong lobby for the return of the transfer system. No one knew why there should be such an imbalance in the distribution of the sexes, but it was undoubtedly so. Further, three of the transferred women had given birth within the last few miles, and each of these babies had been male. It was suggested that the longer women from outside remained in the city, the more chance there was that they too would produce male children. Again, no one understood why this should be so.

  At the last count, there were now a total of seventy-six male and fourteen female children below the age of one hundred and fifty miles.

  As the percentage continued to mount, the lobby strengthened, and soon the Barter guild was authorized to commence negotiations.

  It was actually this decision which emphasized the changes in the society of the city which were taking place.

  The “open city” system had remained, and non-guildsmen were allowed to attend Navigators’ meetings as spectators. Within a few hours of the announcement about the barter for women being renewed, everyone in the city knew, and there were many voices raised in protest. Nevertheless, the decision was implemented.

  Although hired labour was again being used, it was to a far lesser extent than before, and there were always great numbers of people from the city working on the tracks and cables. There was not much that wasn’t known about the city’s operations.

  But general education about the real nature of the world on which we lived was poor.

  During one debate, I heard the word “Terminator” used for the first time. It was explained that the Terminators were a group of people who actively opposed the continued movement of the city, and were committed to halting it. As far as was known, the Terminators were not militant and would take no direct action, but they were gai
ning a substantial amount of support within the city.

  It was decided that a programme of re-education should begin, to dramatize the necessity of moving the city northwards.

  At the next meeting there was a violent disruption.

  A group of people burst into the chamber during the session, and tried to take the chair.

  I was not surprised to see that Victoria was among them.

  After a noisy argument, the Navigators summoned the assistance of the Militia and the meeting was closed.

  This disruption, perversely, had the effect desired by the Terminator movement. The Navigators’ meetings were once again closed to general session. The dichotomy in the opinions of the ordinary people of the city widened. The Terminators had a great deal of support, but no real authority.

  A few incidents followed. A cable was found cut in mysterious circumstances, and one of the Terminators tried one day to speak to the hired labour in an attempt to get them to return to their villages…but by and large the Terminator movement was no more than a thorn in the side of the Navigators.

  Re-education went well. A series of lectures was mounted, attempting to explain the peculiar dangers of this world, and they were well attended. The design of the hyperbola was adopted as the city’s motif, and it was worn as an ornament on the guildsmen’s cloaks, stitched inside the circle on their breasts.

  I don’t know how much of this was understood by the ordinary people of the city; I overheard some discussion of it, but the influence of the Terminators perhaps weakened its credibility. For too long the people of the city had been allowed by omission to assume that the city existed on a world like Earth planet, if not Earth planet itself. Perhaps the real situation was one too outrageous to be given credence: they would listen to what they were told, and perhaps understand it, but I think the Terminators held a greater emotional appeal.

  In spite of everything, the city continued to move slowly northwards. Sometimes I would take time off from other matters, and try to view it in my mind’s eye as a tiny speck of matter on an alien world; I would see it as an object of one universe trying to survive in another; as a city full of people, holding on to the side of a forty-five degree slope, pulling its way against a tide of ground on a few thin strands of cable.

  With the return to a more stable environment for the city, the task of future surveying became more routine.

  For our purposes the ground to the north of the city was divided into a series of segments, radiating from optimum at five degree intervals. Under normal circumstances the city would not seek a route that was more than fifteen degrees away from due north, but the city’s extra capability to deviate did allow flexibility from this for short periods.

  Our procedure was simply. Surveyors would ride north from the city—either alone or, if they chose, in pairs—and conduct a comprehensive survey of the segment allotted to them. There was plenty of time available to us.

  On many occasions I would find myself seduced by the feeling of freedom in the north, and it was one which Blayne once told me was common to most Futures. Where was the urgency to return if a day spent lazily on the bank of a river wasted only a few minutes of the city’s time?

  There was a price to pay for the time spent in the north, and it was one that did not seem real to me until I saw its effects for myself. A day spent idling in the north was a day in my life. In fifty days I aged the equivalent of five miles in the city, but the city people had aged only four days. It did not matter at first: our return visits to the city were so comparatively frequent that I saw and felt no difference. But in time, the people I had known—Victoria, Jase, Malchuskin—seemed not to have aged at all, and catching a sight of myself in a mirror one day I saw the effect of the differential.

  I did not want to settle down permanently with another girl; Victoria’s notion that the ways of the city would disrupt any relationship took greater meaning every time I considered it.

  The first of the transferred women were coming to the city, and as an unmarried man I was told that I was eligible to mate with one of them temporarily. At first I resisted the idea because, to be frank, the idea repelled me. It seemed to me that even a purely physical affair should have some complement in shared emotional feelings, but the manner in which the selection of the partners was arranged was as subtle as it could be under the circumstances. Whenever I was in the city I and other eligible men were encouraged to mix socially with the girls in a recreation-room set aside for this purpose. It was embarrassing and humiliating at first, but I grew used to these occasions and eventually my inhibitions waned.

  In time, I formed a mutual liking with a girl named Dorita, and soon she and I were allocated a cabin we could share. We did not have much in common, but her attempts to speak English were delightful, and she seemed to enjoy my company. Soon she was pregnant, and between my surveying missions I watched her pregnancy proceed.

  Slowly, so unbelievably slowly.

  I began to grow increasingly frustrated with the apparently sluggish progress of the city. By my own subjective time scale, a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred miles had elapsed since I had become a Future guildsman, and yet the city was still in sight of those hills we had been passing through at the time of the attacks.

  I applied to transfer temporarily to another guild; much as I enjoyed the leisured life in the future I felt that time was passing me by.

  For a few miles I worked with the Traction guild, and it was during this period that Dorita gave birth. She produced twins: a boy and a girl. Much celebration…but I found that the city life discontented me in another way. I had been working with Jase, someone who had once been several miles older than me. Now he was clearly younger than me, and we had little in common.

  Shortly after she had given birth, Dorita left the city and I returned to my own guild.

  Like the Future guildsmen I had seen as an apprentice, I was becoming a misfit in the city. I enjoyed my own company, relished those stolen hours in the north, was uncomfortable when in the city. I had developed an interest in drawing, but told almost no one about it. I did my guild work as quickly and efficiently as possible, then rode off alone through the future countryside, sketching what I saw, trying to find in line drawings some expression of a terrain where time could almost stand still.

  I watched the city from a distance, seeing it as alien as it was; not of this world, no longer even of me. Mile by mile it hauled itself forward, never finding, nor even seeking, a final resting place.

  PART FOUR

  1

  She waited in the doorway of the church while the discussion continued on the far side of the square. Behind her, in the temporary workshop, the priest and two assistants were working patiently on the job of restoring the plaster image of the Virgin Mary. It was cool in the church, and in spite of the part of the roof that had caved in, it was clean and restful. She knew she shouldn’t be here, but some instinct had sent her inside when the two men had arrived.

  She watched them now, talking earnestly to Luiz Carvalho, the self-appointed leader of the village, and a handful of other men. In other times, perhaps the priest would have assumed responsibility for the community, but Father dos Santos was, like herself, a newcomer to the village.

  The men had ridden into the village along the dried-up bed of the stream, and now their horses grazed while the discussion continued. She was too far away to hear the actual words, but it seemed that some deal was being struck. The men from the village talked volubly, feigning no interest, but she knew that if their attention had not been caught they would not still be talking.

  It was the horsemen who held her interest. That they were not from any of the near-by villages was self-evident. In contrast with the villagers, their appearance was striking: each wore a black cape, well-fitting trousers, and leather boots. Their horses were saddled and apparently groomed, and although each of the horses was bearing large saddlebags well loaded with equipment they stood without apparent fatigue. None of the ho
rses she had seen locally was in anything like such good condition.

  Her curiosity began to override her instinct, and she stepped forward to learn for herself what was going on. As she did so, the negotiations appeared to be completed, for the village men turned away and the other two returned to their horses.

  They mounted immediately, and headed back the way they had come. She stood and watched them, debating whether or not to go after them.

  When they were out of sight amongst the trees that grew alongside the stream, she hurried out of the square, ran between two of the houses, and scrambled up the rise of ground behind. After a few moments she saw the men emerging from the trees. They rode a short distance further, then drew up the reins, and halted.

  They conferred for about five minutes, several times looking back in the general direction of the village.

  She kept out of sight, standing in the dense scrub that grew all over the hill. Suddenly, one of the men raised his hand to the other, and swung his horse round. He set off at a gallop in the direction of some distant hills; the other man turned his horse in the opposite direction and walked it at a leisured pace.

  She returned to the village, and found Luiz.

  “What did they want?” she said.

  “They need men for some work.”

  “Did you agree to this?”

  He looked evasive. “They’re coming back tomorrow.”

  “Are they going to pay?”

  “With food. Look.”

  He held out a handful of bread, and she took it from him. It was brown and fresh, smelt good.

  “Where did they get this?”

  Luiz shrugged. “And they have special food.”

  “Did they give you any of that?”

  “No.”

  She frowned, wondering again who the men might be.

  “Anything else?”

  “Only this.” He showed her a small bag, and she opened it. Inside was a coarse white powder, and she sniffed at it.