“They’re a…political group in the city. They’ve been trying to get the city to stop. If this news leaked out at the moment, there’d be a lot of trouble. We’ve just survived a major crisis, and the Navigators don’t want another.”
Elizabeth stared at him without saying anything. She had suddenly seen herself in a new light.
She was at an interface of two realities: one was hers, one was his. However close they came together there would never be any contact between them. Like the graph line Destaine had drawn to approximate the reality he perceived, the nearer she came to him in one sense the further she moved away in another. Somehow, she had drawn herself into this drama, where one logic failed in the face of another, and she knew she was incapable of dealing with it.
Persuaded as she was by Helward’s sincerity, and the manifest existence of the city and its people, and further by the apparently strange concepts around which they had planned their survival, she could not eradicate from her mind the basic contradiction. The city and its people existed on Earth, the Earth she knew, and whatever she saw, whatever Helward said, there was no way around this. Evidence to the contrary made no sense.
But when the interface was challenged, there was an impasse.
Elizabeth said: “I’m going to leave the city tomorrow.”
“Come with me. I’m going north again.”
“No…I’ve got to get back to the village.”
“Is that the one where they bartered for the women?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going that way. We’ll ride together.”
Another impasse: the village lay to the south-west of the city.
“Why did you come to the city, Liz? You aren’t one of the local women.”
“I wanted to see you.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You frightened me, but I was seeing the other men who were like you, trading with the village people. I wanted to find out what was going on. Now I wish I hadn’t, because you still frighten me.”
“I’m not raving at you again, am I?” he said.
She laughed…and she realized that it was for the first time since she came to the city.
“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s more…I can’t say. Everything I take for granted is different here in the city. Not everyday things, but the bigger things, like the reason for being. There’s a great concentration of determination here, as if the city itself is the only focus of all human existence. I know that’s not so. There are a million other things to do in the world, and survival is undoubtedly a drive, but not the primary one. Here the emphasis is on your concept of survival, at any cost. I’ve been outside the city, Helward, a long way outside the city. Whatever else you may think, this place is not the centre of the universe.”
“It is,” he said. “Because if we ever stopped believing that, we would all die.”
8
Leaving the city presented Elizabeth with no problems. She went down to the stables with Helward and another man, whom he introduced as Future Blayne, collected three horses, and rode in a direction which Helward declared was northwards. Again, she questioned his sense of direction as by her reckoning of the position of the sun the true direction was towards the south-west, but she made nothing of it. By this time she was so accustomed to the straightforward affronts to what she considered logic that she saw no point in remarking on them to him. She was content to accept the ways of the city, if not to understand them.
As they rode out from under the city, Helward pointed out the great wheels on which the city was mounted, and explained that the motion forwards was so slow as to be almost undetectable. However, he assured her, the city moved about one mile every ten days. Northwards, or towards the south-west, whichever way she cared to think of it.
The journey took two days. The men talked a lot, both to each other and to her, although not much of it made sense to her.
She felt that she had suffered an overload of new information, and could absorb no more.
On the evening of the first day they passed within a mile or so of her village, and she told Helward she was going there.
“No…come with us. You can go back later.”
She said: “I want to go back to England. I think I can help you.”
“You ought to see this.”
“What is it?”
“We’re not sure,” said Blayne. “Helward thinks you might be able to tell us.”
She resisted for a few more minutes, but in the end went on with them.
It was curious how she succumbed so readily to the various involvements of these people. Perhaps it was because she could identify with some of them, and perhaps it was because the society within the city was a curiously civilized existence—for all its strange ways—in a countryside that had been wasted by anarchy for generations. Even in the few weeks she had been in the village the peasant outlook, the unquestioning lethargy, the inability to cope with even the most minor of problems had sapped her will to meet the challenge of her work. But the people of Helward’s city were of a different order. Evidently they were some offshoot community that had somehow managed to preserve themselves during the Crash, and now lived on past that time. Even so, the makings of a regulated society were there: the evident discipline, the sense of purpose, and a real and vital understanding of their own identity, however much of a dichotomy existed between inner similarities and outer differences.
So when Helward requested her to go with them, and Blayne supported him, she could put up no opposition. She had by her own actions involved herself in the affairs of their community. The consequences of her abandoning the village would have to be faced later—she could justify her absence by saying she wanted to know where the women were being taken—but she felt now that she must follow this through. Ultimately, there would be some official body who would have to rehabilitate the people of the city, but until then she was personally involved.
They spent the night under canvas. There were only two tents, and the men gallantly offered her one of them for her own use…but before that they spent a long time talking.
Helward had evidently told Blayne about her, and how she was different, as he saw her, from both the people of the city and the people of the villages.
Blayne now spoke directly to her, and Helward stayed in the background. He spoke only rarely, and then to confirm things that Blayne said. She liked the other man, and found him direct in his manner: he tried not to evade any of her questions.
By and large he affirmed what she had learned. He spoke of Destaine and his Directive, he spoke of the city and its need to move forward, and he talked of the shape of the world. She had learnt not to argue with the city outlook, and she listened to what they said.
When she eventually crawled into her sleeping-bag she was exhausted from the long ride through the day, but sleep came slowly. The interface had hardened.
Though the confidence in her own logic had not been shaken, her understanding of the city people’s had been deepened. They lived, they said, on a world where the laws of nature were not the same. She was prepared to believe that…or rather, prepared to believe that they were sincere, but mistaken.
It was not the exterior world that was different, but their perception of it. By what manner could she change that?
Emerging from woodland, they encountered a region of coarse scrubland, where tall grasses and scrawny bushes grew wildly. There were no tracks here and progress was slow. There was a cool, steady wind blowing now, and an exhilarating freshness sharpened their senses.
Gradually, the vegetation gave way to a hard, tough grass, growing in sandy soil. Neither of the men said anything; Helward in particular stared ahead of him as he rode, letting his horse find its own route.
Elizabeth saw that ahead of them the vegetation gave way altogether, and as they breasted a ridge of loose sand and gravel, only a few yards of low sand-dunes lay between them and the beach. Her horse, who had already sensed the salt in the
air, responded readily to the kick of her heels and they cantered down across the sand. For a few heady minutes she gave the horse its head, and exulted in the freedom and joy of galloping along a beach, its surface unlittered, unbroken, untouched by anything but waves for decades.
Helward and Blayne had ridden down to the beach behind her, and now stood close together by their horses, looking out across the water.
She trotted her horse over to them, and dismounted.
“Does it extend east and west?” said Blayne.
“As far as I explored. There’s no way round I could see.”
Blayne took a video camera from one of his packs, connected it to the case, and panned it slowly across the view.
“We’ll have to survey east and west,” he said. “It would be impossible to cross.”
“There’s no sign of an opposite bank.”
Blayne frowned at the beach. “I don’t like the soil. We’ll have to get a Bridge-Builder up here. I don’t think this would take the weight of the city.”
“There must be some way.”
The two men entirely ignored her. Helward erected a small instrument, a tripodal device with a concentric chart suspended by three catches below the fulcrum. He hung a plumb-line over the chart, and took some kind of reading from it.
“We’re a long way from optimum,” he said eventually. “We’ve got plenty of time. Thirty miles…almost a year city-time. Do you think it could be done?”
“A bridge? It’d take some doing. We’d need more men than we’ve got at the moment. What did the Navigators say?”
“Check what I reported. Do you check?”
“Yes. I can’t see that I can add anything.”
Helward stared for a few seconds longer at the expanse of water, then seemed to remember Elizabeth. He turned to her.
“What do you say?”
“About this? What do you expect me to say?”
“Tell us about our perceptions,” said Helward. “Tell us there’s no river here.”
She said: “It’s not a river.”
Helward glanced at Blayne.
“You heard her,” he said. “We’re imagining it.”
Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned away. She could no longer confront the interface.
The breeze was chilling her, so she took a blanket from her horse and moved back to the sandy ridge. When she faced them again they were paying no more attention to her. Helward had erected another instrument, and was taking several readings from it. He called them out to Blayne, his voice whipped thin by the wind.
They worked slowly and painstakingly, each checking the other’s reading at every step. After an hour, Blayne packed some of the equipment on his horse, then mounted and rode along the coast in a northerly direction. Helward stood and watched him go, his posture revealing a deep and overwhelming despair.
Elizabeth interpreted it as a tiny weakness in the barrier of logic that lay between them. Clutching the blanket around her, she walked down across the dunes towards him.
She said: “Do you know where you are?”
He didn’t turn.
“No,” he said. “We never will.”
“Portugal. This country is called Portugal. It’s in Europe.”
She moved round so that she could see his face. For a moment his gaze rested on her, but his expression was blank. He just shook his head, and walked past her towards his horse. The barrier was absolute.
Elizabeth went over to her own horse, and mounted it. She walked it along the beach and soon moved inland, heading back in the general direction of the headquarters. In a few minutes the troubled blue of the Atlantic was out of sight.
PART FIVE
1
The storm raged all night and none of us got much sleep. Our camp was half a mile from the bridge, and as the waves came crashing in, the sound reached us as a dull, muted roar, almost obliterated by the howling gale. In our imaginations, at least, we heard the splintering of timber in every temporary lull.
Towards dawn the wind abated, and we were able to sleep. Not for long, for soon after sunrise the kitchen was manned and we were given our food. No one talked as we ate; there would be only one topic of conversation, and none wished to speak of that.
We set off towards the bridge. We had gone only fifty yards when someone pointed to a piece of broken timber lying washed up on the river-bank. It was a grim foreboding and, as it turned out, an accurate one. There was nothing left of the bridge beyond the four main piles that were planted in the solid ground nearest to the water’s edge.
I glanced at Lerouex who, for this shift, was in charge of all operations.
“We need more timber,” he said. “Barter Norris…take thirty men, and start felling trees.”
I waited for Norris’s reaction; of all the guildsmen on the site he had been the most reluctant to work, and had complained loud and long during the early stages of the work. Now he showed no rebellion; we were all past that. He simply nodded to Lerouex, picked a body of men, and headed back towards the camp to collect the tree-felling saws.
“So we start again,” I said to Lerouex.
“Of course.”
“Will this one be strong enough?”
“If we build it properly.”
He turned away, and started to organize the clearing up of the site. In the background the waves, still huge in the aftermath of the storm, crashed against the river-bank.
We worked all day, and by evening the site had been cleared and Norris and his men had hauled fourteen tree-trunks over to the site. The next morning we could start work yet again.
Before then, during the evening, I sought out Lerouex. He was sitting alone in his tent, apparently checking through his designs of the bridge, but in fact I realized his stare was vacant.
He did not seem pleased to see me, but he and I were the two senior men on the site and he knew I would not come without purpose. We were now of roughly equal age: by the nature of my work in the north I had passed many subjective years. It was a matter of some discomfort between us that he was the father of my former wife, and yet we were now contemporaries. Neither of us had ever referred directly to it. Victoria herself was still only comparatively few miles older than she had been when we were married, and the gulf between us was now so wide that everything we knew of each other was totally irretrievable.
“I know what you’ve come to say,” he said. “You’re going to tell me that we can never build a bridge.”
“It’s going to be difficult,” I said.
“No…impossible is what you mean.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m a Bridge-Builder, Helward. I’m not supposed to think.”
“That’s as much crap as you know it is.”
“All right…but a bridge is needed, I build it. No questions.”
I said: “You’ve always had an opposite bank.”
“That makes no difference. We can build a pontoon.”
“And when we’re mid-river, where do we get the timber? Where do we plant the cable-stays?” I sat down unbidden, opposite him. “You were wrong, incidentally. I didn’t come to see you about this.”
“Well?”
“The opposite bank,” I said. “Where is it?”
“Out there somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you know there is one?”
“There must be.”
“Then why can’t we see it?” I said. “We’re striking away from this bank a few degrees from perpendicular, but even so we should be able to see the bank. The curvature—”
“Is concave. I know. Don’t you think I haven’t thought about that? In theory we can see forever. What about atmospheric haze? Twenty or thirty miles is all we can see, even on a clear day.”
“You’re going to build a bridge thirty miles long?”
“I don’t think we’ll have to,” he said. “I think we’re going to be O.K. Why else do you think I perse
vere?”
I shook my head. “I’ve no idea.”
He said: “Did you know they’re going to make me a Navigator?” Again, I shook my head. “They are. Last time I was in the city we had a long conference. The general feeling is that the river might not be as wide as it appears. Remember, north of optimum dimensions are distorted linearly. That is, to north and south. It’s obvious that this is a major river, but reason demands that there’s an opposite bank. The Navigators think that when the movement of the ground takes the river as far as optimum we should be able to see the opposite bank. Granted, it might then still be too wide to cross safely, but all we need to do is keep waiting. The further south the ground takes us, the narrower the river will become. Then a bridge would be feasible.”
“That’s a hell of a risk,” I said. “The centrifugal force would—”
“I know.”
“And what if the opposite bank doesn’t appear then?”
“Helward, it has to.”
“You know there’s an alternative?” I said.
“I’ve heard what the men have been saying. We abandon the city, and build a ship. I could never approve that.”
“Guild pride?”
“No!” His face reddened in spite of the denial. “Practicalities. We couldn’t build one large enough or safe enough.”
“We’re having the same difficulty with the bridge.”
“I know…but we understand bridges. Who in the city would know how to design a ship? Anyway, we’re learning by our mistakes. We just have to keep building until the bridge is strong enough.”
“And time’s running out.”
“How far north of optimum are we?”
“Less than twelve miles.”
“City-time, that’s a hundred and twenty days,” he said. “How long do we have up here?”
“Subjectively, about twice that.”
“That’s plenty.”
I stood up, headed for the flap. I was unconvinced.
“By the way,” I said. “Congratulations on the Navigatorship.”
“Thanks. They’ve put your name forward too.”
The Inverted World Page 25