The Inverted World

by Christopher Priest

  He accepted all these as facts. The reaction of shock would come later; meanwhile another attack was imminent.

  PART THREE

  1

  The valley was dark and silent. Across on the northern side of the river I saw a red light flash on twice, then nothing.

  Seconds later, I heard from deep within the city the grinding of the winch-drums, and the city began to inch forward. The sound echoed around the valley.

  I was lying with about thirty other men in the tangled undergrowth that spread across the face of the hill. I had been drafted temporarily to work with the Militia during this most critical of all the city’s crossings. The third attack was anticipated at any moment, and it had been judged that once the city could reach the northern bank of the river it would, by nature of the surrounding terrain, be able to defend itself sufficiently long for the tracks to be extended at least as far as the highest point of the pass through the hills to the north. Once there, it was thought that it could again defend itself for the next phase of track-laying.

  Somewhere in the valley we knew that there were about a hundred and fifty tooks, all armed with rifles. They presented a formidable enemy. The city had only twelve rifles taken from the tooks, and the ammunition for them had been spent during the second attack. Our only realistic weapons were the crossbows—at short range, deadly—and an awareness of the value of intelligence work. It was this latter which had enabled us to prepare the reserve counter-attack of which I was a part.

  A few hours earlier, as darkness fell, we had taken up this position overlooking the valley. The main force of defence was three ranks of crossbowmen deployed around the city itself. As the city started out across the bridge they would retreat, until they formed a defensive position around the tracks. The tooks would concentrate their fire on these men, and at that moment we could spring our ambush.

  With fortune on our side, the counter-attack would not be necessary. Though intelligence work had established that another attack was likely, the bridge-building work had been completed faster than anticipated, and it was hoped that the city would be safely across to the other side under cover of darkness before the tooks realized.

  But in the still of the valley, the sound of the winches was unmistakable.

  The forward edge of the city had just reached the bridge itself when the first shots were heard. I placed a bolt in the bow, and held my hand over the safety-catch.

  It was a cloudy night, and visibility was poor. I had seen the flashes from the rifles, and estimated that the tooks were ranged in a rough semi-circle, approximately one hundred yards from our men. I could not tell if any of their bullets had hit, but so far there were no answering shots.

  More rifles fired, and we could tell the tooks were closing in. The city had half its bulk on the bridge…and still crept forward.

  Down below, a distant shout: “Lights!”

  Instantly, a battery of eight arc-lamps situated on the rear of the city came on, directed over the heads of the crossbowmen and into the surrounding terrain. The tooks were there, not taking any kind of cover.

  The first rank of crossbowmen loosed their bolts, hunched down, and started to reload. The second rank shot, hunched down, and reloaded. The third rank shot, reloaded.

  Taken by surprise the tooks had suffered several casualties, but now they threw themselves down against the ground and fired at all they could see of the defenders: the black silhouettes against the arc-lamps.

  “Lights off!”

  Darkness fell at once, and the crossbowmen by the city dispersed. A few seconds later the lights came on again, and the crossbowmen fired from their new positions.

  Once again the tooks were taken off aim, and more casualties were inflicted. The lights went off again, and in the sudden darkness the crossbowmen returned to their former position. The manoeuvre was repeated.

  There was a shout from below, and as the arc-lamps came on we saw that the tooks were charging. The city was now on the bridge.

  Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a gush of flame against the side of the city. An instant later a second explosion occurred on the bridge itself, and flames spread across the dry timber of the rail-way.

  “Reserve force, ready!” I stood up, and waited for the order. I was no longer frightened, and the tension of the waiting hours had disappeared. “Advance!”

  The arc-lamps on the city were still burning, and we could see the tooks clearly. Most of them were engaged in a hand-to-hand battle with the main defence, but several more were crouched on the ground, taking careful aim at the superstructure of the city. Two of the arc-lamps were hit, and they went out.

  The flames on the bridge and against the side of the city were spreading.

  I saw a took near the bank of the river, swinging his arm back in preparation to throw a metal cylinder. I was no more than twenty yards from him. I aimed, released the bolt…and hit the man in his chest. The incendiary bomb fell a few yards away from him, and exploded in a burst of heat and flame.

  Our counter-attack had, as anticipated, taken the enemy by surprise. We managed to hit three more of the men…but suddenly they broke off and ran towards the east, disappearing into the shadows of the valley.

  There was great confusion for a minute or two. The city was on fire, and beneath it the bridge was burning fiercely in two separate places. One concentration of flame was directly beneath the city, but the other was a few yards behind it. It was obviously urgent to deal with the fires, but no one was certain that all the tooks had retreated.

  The city continued to winch forward, but where the bridge burned, large sections of timber were falling away into the river.

  Order was restored quickly. A Militia officer shouted orders, and the men formed into two groups. One group renewed the defensive position around the tracks; I joined the second group sent out on to the bridge to fight the fire.

  After the second attack—in which incendiaries had been used for the first time—fire-points had been fitted to the outside of the city. The nearest of these had been damaged in one of the explosions, and water was gushing away from it uselessly. We found a second one, and unravelled the short length of hose.

  The intensity of the track-fire was too great, and it was almost hopeless to try to fight it. Although the city had now passed over the worst of the damage there were still three of the main runner-wheels to roll over the burning timber…and as we fought in the dense smoke and billowing flames I saw the rail beginning to twist under the combined forces of heat and weight.

  There was a roar, and another section of timber fell away. The smoke was too thick. Choking, we had to back out from under the city.

  The fire in the superstructure was still blazing, but a fire-crew inside the city was attempting to deal with it. The winches turned…the city crept slowly towards the comparative safety of the northern bank.

  2

  In the morning light the damage was assessed. In terms of lost human life, the city had not fared too badly. Three of the militiamen had been killed in the shooting, and fifteen had been injured. Inside the city, one man had been seriously wounded in one of the incendiary explosions, and a dozen more men and women had been overcome by smoke in the ensuing fires.

  The physical damage to the city itself was extensive. A whole section of administrative offices had been gutted by the fire, and some of the accommodation section was uninhabitable because of fire or water damage.

  Beneath the city there was more damage. Although the main base of the city was steel, much of the construction was timber, and there were whole sections which had been burnt out. The rear runner-wheels on the right outer track had been derailed, and one of the great wheels had sustained a structural crack. It could not be replaced: it would have to be discarded.

  After the city had reached the northern bank, the bridge had continued to burn and was now a total loss. With it had gone several hundred yards of our irreplaceable rails, warped and twisted by the heat.

  Af
ter two days outside the city, working with the track-crews who were salvaging what there was of the rails on the southern bank of the river, I was summoned to see Clausewitz.

  Apart from an hour or two spent inside the city when I first returned, I had not reported formally to any of my senior guildsmen. As far as I could determine, the normal protocol of the guilds had been abandoned for the duration of the emergency, and as I myself could see no end to the serious situation—the attacks had caused inevitable delays, and the optimum was ever further away—I had not expected anyone to call me off my work outside.

  There was a disturbing mood amongst those men who were outside—half-way between despair and desperation. The work continued on laying the tracks towards the pass, but the relaxed energy of my early days outside the city seemed to be a long way behind us. Now the tracks were being built in spite of the situation with the tooks, rather than in the way I now understood the motivation of the city to be derived, from an internal need to survive in a strange environment.

  The talk among the track-crews, the Militia, the Traction men was all centred in one way or another around the attacks. No longer was there talk of gaining ground on the optimum, or what dangers lay down past. The city was in a crisis, and this was reflected in everyone’s attitude.

  When I went inside the city the change was apparent here too.

  Gone was the light, aseptic appearance of the corridors, gone was the general atmosphere of workaday routines.

  The elevator was no longer working. Many of the main doors in the corridors were locked, and at one point an entire wall had been torn away—presumably as a result of one of the fires—so that anyone walking through that part of the city could see what was outside. I remembered Victoria’s frustrations of old, and reflected that whatever secrecy the guilds might have tried to maintain in the past, no longer was such a system possible.

  Thought of Victoria pained me; I still did not realize fully what had happened. In what seemed to me to be the passage of a few days, she had abandoned all the tacit understandings of the marriage between us, and gone to pursue another life without me.

  I had not seen her since my return, though I had made sure that she would have known I was back in the city. Under the conditions of the external threat it had not been possible to see her anyway, but that aspect of my life was one I needed time to consider before meeting her. The news of her pregnancy by another man—I was told he was an education administrator named Yung—had not hit me too hard at first, simply because I had just not believed it. Such a situation could not possibly have developed in the time I knew I had been away from the city.

  I found my way to the first-order guild area with some difficulty. The interior of the city had changed in many ways.

  There seemed to be people, noise, and dirt everywhere. Every spare yard of space had been given over to emergency sleeping-room, and even in some of the corridors lay wounded men from outside. Several walls and partitions had been taken down, and just outside the first-order quarters—where there had been a series of pleasantly appointed recreation rooms for the guildsmen—an emergency kitchen had been placed.

  The smell of burnt wood was everywhere.

  I knew a fundamental change was coming over the city. I could feel the old structure of the guilds crumbling away. The roles of many people had already changed; working with the track-crews I’d met several men for whom it was the first time outside the city, men who until the attacks had worked on food synthesis, or education, or domestic administration. Took labour was now obviously impossible, and all hands had to be called to move the city. Why at this moment Clausewitz had summoned me I could not imagine.

  There was no sign of him in the Futures’ room, and so I waited for a while. After half an hour he had still not appeared, so knowing my services could be better employed outside I headed back the way I had come.

  I met Future Denton in the corridor.

  “You’re Future Mann, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re leaving the city. Are you ready now?”

  “I was supposed to be seeing Future Clausewitz.”

  “That’s right. He’s sent me instead. Can you ride a horse?”

  I had forgotten the horses while I was away from the city. “Yes.”

  “Good. Meet me at the stables in an hour’s time.”

  He walked on into the Futures’ room.

  With an hour to spend on my own, I realized that I had nothing to do, no one to see. All my connections with the city were broken; even associative memories of the physical shape and appearance of the city had been disrupted by the damage.

  I walked down to the rear of the city to see for myself the extent of the damage to the crèche, but there was not much to see. Almost the whole superstructure had been burnt or latterly demolished, and where the children had been housed was merely the bare steel of the main base of the city. From there I could see back across the river to where the attack had taken place. I wondered whether the tooks would try again. I felt they had been well beaten, but if the city was resented as much as appeared I supposed they would eventually re-form and attack once more.

  It came home to me just how vulnerable the city was. Not designed to repel any kind of attack, it was slow-moving, ungainly, built of highly inflammable materials. All its weakest points, the tracks, the cables, the timber superstructure, were easily accessible.

  I wondered if the tooks realized how easy it would be to destroy the city: all they needed to do was disable its motive powers permanently, then sit back and watch as the movement of the ground slowly bore it southwards.

  I considered this for some time. It seemed to me that the local people did not understand the inherent frailty of the city and its inhabitants, because of the lack of information available to them. As far as I could tell, the strange transformation that had overtaken the three girls down past was subjectively to them no transformation at all.

  Here, near optimum, the tooks were not subject to distortion—or only to an indiscernible degree—and so no perception of any difference was possible.

  Only if the tooks succeeded, perhaps not even by design, in delaying the city to such a degree that it was borne to a point so far south that it could never haul itself forward again would they see the effect this would have on the city and its occupants.

  Under normal conditions, the city would be facing difficult country; the hill to the north of us was probably not the only one in this region. How could it ever again hope to approach the optimum?

  For the moment, though, the city was relatively secure. Bounded on one side by the river, and by rising ground which would afford no cover to any aggressor on the other, it was strategically well placed while the tracks were laid.

  I wondered whether I had time to find a change of clothes, as I had been working and sleeping in the same ones for many days. This thought inevitably reminded me of Victoria, and how she had objected to my uniform after ten days in it outside the city.

  I hoped I should not see her before I left.

  I returned to the Futures’ room, and made enquiries. There were indeed uniforms available, and I was entitled to one as I was now a full guildsman…but there was none available at the moment. I was told that one would be found while I was away.

  Future Denton was waiting for me when I arrived at the stables. I was given a horse, and without further delay we rode out from beneath the city and headed north.

  3

  Denton was not a man who would say much unprompted. He answered any questions I chose to ask, but between there were long periods of silence. I did not find this uncomfortable, because it gave me a much needed opportunity to think.

  The early training of the guilds still ran true: I accepted that I would make what I could of what I saw, and not rely on the interpretations of others.

  We followed the proposed line of the tracks, up around the side of the hill and through the pass. At the top, the ground ran steadily downwards for a lon
g way following a small watercourse. There was a small patch of woodland at the end of the valley, and then another line of hills.

  “Denton, why have we left the city at this moment?” I said. “Surely every man is needed.”

  “Our work is always important.”

  “More important than defending the city?”

  “Yes.”

  As we rode he explained that during the last few miles the future-surveying work had been neglected. This was partly because of the troubles, and partly because the guild was undermanned.

  “We’ve surveyed as far as these hills,” he said. “Those trees…they’re a nuisance to the Track guild, and they could provide cover for the tooks, but we need more timber. The hills have been surveyed for about another mile, but beyond that it’s all virgin territory.”

  He showed me a map that had been drawn on a long roll of paper, and explained the symbols to me. Our job, as far as I could tell, was to extend the map northwards. Denton had a surveying instrument mounted on a large wooden tripod, and every so often he would take a reading from it and make inscriptions on the map.

  The horses were heavily laden with equipment. In addition to large supplies of food and bedding, we were each carrying a crossbow and a good supply of bolts; there was some digging equipment, a chemical-sampling kit, and a miniature video camera and recording equipment. I was given the video kit to use, and Denton showed me how to operate it.

  The usual method of the Futures, as he explained it to me, was that over a period of time a different surveyor, or a different team of surveyors, would move north of the city by different routes. By the end of the expedition he would have a detailed map of the terrain through which he had passed, and a video record of its physical appearance. This would then be submitted to the council of Navigators and they, with the help of other surveyors’ reports, would decide which route would be taken.

  Towards late afternoon, Denton stopped for about the sixth time and erected his tripod. After he had taken angular readings on the elevation of the surrounding hills, and, by use of a gyroscopically mounted compass, had determined true north, he attached a free-swinging pendulum to the base of the instrument. The weight of the pendulum was pointed, and when its natural momentum was spent and the pointer was stationary, Denton took a graduated scale, marked with concentric circles, and placed it between the legs of the tripod.