Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

“You ought to be in bed, son. It’s dangerous out here at night.”

“There’s no one around,” I said.

“Not now. But while the softies in the city get their sleep, we save ‘em from the tooks.”

“What are they?”

“The tooks? The dagos. The local thugs who jump out of shadows on young apprentices.”

I moved past them. I wished I’d gone into the city and hadn’t come this way. Nevertheless my curiosity was aroused.

“Really… what do you mean?” I said.

“There’s tooks out there who don’t like the city. If we didn’t watch them, they’d damage the track. See these pulleys? They’d have them down if we weren’t here.”

“But it was the… tooks who helped put them up.”

“Those as work for us. But there’s a lot as doesn’t.”

“Get to bed, son. Leave the tooks to us.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Aye… just us, and a dozen more all over the ridge. You hurry on down to bed, son, and watch you don’t get a quarrel between the eyes.”

I turned my back on them and walked away. I was seething with anger, and had I stayed a moment longer I felt sure I would have gone for one or the other of them. I hated their manly patronization of me, and yet I knew I had needled them. Two young men armed with crossbows would be no defence against a determined attack, and they knew it too, but it was important for their self-esteem not to let me work it out for myself.

When I judged I was out of their earshot I broke into a run, and almost at once stumbled over a sleeper. I moved away from the track and ran on. Malchuskin was waiting in the hut, and together we ate another meal of the synthetic food.

After two more days’ work with Malchuskin the time came for my period of leave. In those two days Malchuskin spurred the labourers on to more work than I had ever seen them do, and we made good progress. Although track-laying was harder work than digging up old track, there was the subtle benefit of seeing the results, in the shape of an ever-extending section of track. The extra work took the form of having to dig the foundationpits for the concrete blocks before actually laying the sleepers and rail. As there were now three track-crews working to the north of the city, and each of the tracks was approximately the same length, there was the additional stimulus of competition amongst the crews. I was surprised to see how the men responded to this competition, and as the work proceeded there was a certain amount of good-natured banter among them as they toiled.

“Two days,” Malchuskin said, just before I left for the city. “Don’t take any longer. They’ll be winching soon, and we need every man available.”

“Am I to come back to you?”

“It’s up to your guild… but yes. The next two miles will be with me. After that you transfer to another guild, and do three miles with them.”

“Who will it be?” I said.

“I don’t know. Your guild will decide that.”

“O.K.”

As we finished work late on the last night I slept in the hut. There was another reason too: I had no wish to walk back to the city after dark and pass through the gap guarded by the militiamen. During the day there was little or no sign of the Militia, but after my first experience of them Malchuskin had told me that a guard was mounted every night, and during the period immediately prior to a winching operation the track was the most heavily guarded area.

The next morning I walked back along the track to the city.

It was not difficult to locate Victoria now that I was authorized to be in the city. Before, I had been hesitant in looking for her, for at the back of my mind there had been the thought that I should have been getting back to Malchuskin as soon as I could. Now I had two whole days of leave, and was relieved of the sense of evading what my duties should have been.

Even so, I still had no way of knowing how to find her… and so had to resort to the expedient of asking. After a few misroutings I was directed to a room on the fourth level. Here, Victoria and several other young people were working under the supervision of one of the women administrators. As soon as Victoria saw me standing at the door she spoke to the administrator, then came over to me. We went out into the corridor.

“Hello, Helward,” she said, shutting the door behind her.

“Hello. Look… if you’re working I can see you later.”

“It’s all right. You’re on leave, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m on leave too. Come on.”

She led the way down the corridor, turned off into a side passage, and then went down a short flight of steps. At the bottom was another corridor, lined on both sides by doors. She opened one of them and we went inside.

The room beyond was much larger than any private room I had so far seen inside the city. The largest single piece of furniture was a bed placed against one of the walls, but the room was also well and comfortably furnished with a quite surprising amount of floor space. Against one wall was a wash-basin and a small cooker. There was a table and two chairs, a cupboard to keep clothes in, and two easy chairs. Most unexpected of all, there was a window.

I went over to it immediately and looked out. There was an area of open space beyond, bounded on the opposite side by another wall with many windows. The space extended to left and right, but the window was small and I could not see what lay at the sides of the space.

“Like it?” Victoria said.

“It’s so large! Is it all yours?”

“In a sense. Ours, once we’re married.”

“Oh yes. Someone said I’d have quarters to myself.”

“This is probably what they meant,” said Victoria. “Where are you living at the moment?”

“I’m still in the crèche. But I haven’t stayed there since the ceremony.”

“Are you outside already?”

“I…”

I wasn’t sure what to say. Outside? What could I tell Victoria, bound as I was to the oath?

“I know you go outside the city,” said Victoria. “It’s not such a secret.”

“What else do you know?”

“Several things. But look, I’ve hardly spoken to you! Can I make you some tea?”

“Synthetic?” I immediately regretted the question; I did not wish to seem ungracious.

“I’m afraid so. But I’m going to be working with the synthetics team soon, so I might be able to find some way of improving it.”

The atmosphere relaxed slowly. For the first hour or two we addressed each other coolly and almost formally, politely curious about one another, but soon we were able to take more things for granted; Victoria and I were not such strangers, I realized.

The subject of conversation turned to our life in the crèche, and this immediately brought a new doubt to the surface. Until I had actually left the city, I had had no clear idea of what I would find. The teaching in the crèche had seemed to me — and to most of the others — dry, abstract, and irrelevant. There were few printed books, and most of those were fictional works dealing with life on Earth planet, so the teachers had relied mainly on texts written by themselves. We knew, or thought we knew, much about everyday life on Earth planet, but we were told that this was not what we would find on this world. A child’s natural curiosity immediately demanded to know the alternative, but on this the teachers had kept their silence. So there was always this frustrating gap in our knowledge: what by reading we learned of life on a world which was not this one, and what by surmise we were left to imagine of the ways of the city.

This situation led to much discontent, evidenced by a surplus of unspent physical energy. But where, in the crèche, was the outlet? Only the corridors and the gymnasium gave space enough to move, and then with severe limitations. The release was manifest in unrest: in the younger children emotional outbursts and disobedience, in older children fighting and passionate devotion to what few sports could be played in the tiny gymnasium… and in those in their last few miles before coming of age a premature carnal awareness.