Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

Then he noticed a long black oval near the edge of the water. He went down and examined it. There was a faint smell of burning… and on closer inspection he realized this was the scar of a fire. His camp-fire.

The stream next to it was no more than a yard wide, and yet when he had been here with the girls it had been at least twelve feet across. He went back to the top of the bank. After a long search he found some marks on the ground which could have been the traces of one of the suspension towers.

From the top of one bank to the next, the distance could have been no more than five or six yards. The drop to the water was a matter of feet.

At this point the city had crossed.

He walked northwards, and in a short while found the trace of a sleeper. It was about seventeen feet long. The one next to it was three inches away.

By the following night the scale of the landscape had assumed proportions that were more familiar to him. Trees looked like trees, not sprawling bushes. Pebbles were round, grass grew in clumps, not spread like a smear of green. The tracks by which he walked were still too widely spread to have any resemblance to the gauge used by the city, but Helward thought that his journey should not be much longer.

He had lost track of the number of days that had passed, but the terrain was becoming increasingly familiar to him, and he knew that so far his time away from the city was still considerably less than that predicted by Clausewitz. Even taking into account the two or three days that had seemed to pass so quickly while he was in the zone of pressure, the city could not have moved more than a mile or two further to the north while he was away.

This thought encouraged him, for his supplies of food and water were dwindling.

He walked on, and the days passed. There was still no sign of the city, and the tracks by which he walked showed no signs of narrowing to their more normal gauge. By now he was so accustomed to the notion of the lateral distortion of this world in the south, that he took the evidence of it much in his stride.

One morning, he was disturbed by a new thought: for several days the gauge of the tracks had not appeared to change, and could it be that he had encountered a region where the motion of the ground was directly equal to the speed of his own walking? That is, that he was like a mouse on a treadmill, never making any forward progress?

For an hour or two he hastened his walk, but soon reason prevailed. He had, after all, successfully moved away from the zone of pressure where the southward motion was greater. But more days passed, and the city seemed to be no nearer. Soon he was down to his last two packets of food, and twice he had had to supplement his water-supplies from local sources.

The day he reached the end of his food, he was suddenly taken by a surge of excitement. Potential starvation was no longer a problem… he had recognized where he was! This was the region he had been riding through with Barter Collings: at that time, two or three miles north of optimum!

By his estimate of time he had been gone for three miles at the most… so the city should be in sight.

Up ahead, the line of track-scars continued until a low ridge… and no sign of the city. The sleeper-pits were still distorted, and the next row of scars — the left inner — was some distance away.

All it could mean, Helward reasoned, was that while he was away the city had somehow moved much faster. Perhaps it had even overtaken the optimum, and was in a region where the ground moved more slowly. Already he was beginning to understand why the city moved on: perhaps ahead of optimum there was a zone where the ground did not move at all.

In which case the city could stop… the grand treadmill would end.

Helward passed a hungry night, and slept badly. In the morning he took a few mouthfuls of water and was soon on his way. The city must be in sight soon. .

In the hottest part of the day, Helward was forced to rest. The countryside was barren and open, with little shade. He sat down beside the track.

Staring bleakly ahead, he saw something which gave him fresh hope: three people were walking slowly down the track towards him. They must be from the city, sent out to find him. He waited weakly for them to reach him.

As they approached he tried to stand, but stumbled. He lay still.

“Are you from the city?”

Helward opened his eyes and looked up at the speaker. It was a young man, dressed in a guild-apprentice uniform. He nodded, his jaw slack.

“You’re ill… what’s the matter?”

“I’m O.K. Have you any food?”

“Drink this.”

A canteen of water was offered, and Helward took a mouthful. The water tasted different: it was stale and flat, city water.

“Can you stand?”

With assistance, Helward got to his feet and they walked together away from the track to where a few scrawny bushes grew. Helward sat down on the ground, and the young man opened his pack. With a start of recognition, Helward realized the pack was identical to his own.

“Do I know you?” he said.

“Apprentice Kellen Li-Chen.”

Li-Chen! He remembered him from the crèche. “I’m He!ward Mann.”

Kellen Li-Chen opened a packet of dehydrated food and insinuated some water. Soon a familiar portion of gray porridge was before him, and Helward began to eat it with as near a mood of enthusiasm as he could ever recall.

In the background, some yards away, two girls stood and waited.

“You’re going down past,” he said between mouthfuls.

“Yes.”

“I’ve just been.”

“What’s there?”

Suddenly, Helward remembered meeting Torrold Pelham under almost identical circumstances.

“You’re down past now,” he said. “Can’t you feel it?”

Kellen shook his head.

“What do you mean?” he said.

Helward meant the southwards pressure, the subtle pull of which he could still feel as he walked. But he understood now that Kellen had probably not yet noticed it. Until it had been experienced in its extremeness, it would not be recognized as a discrete sensation.

“It’s impossible to talk about it,” Helward said. “Go down past and you’ll see for yourself.”

Helward glanced over at the girls. They were sitting on the ground, their backs turned quite deliberately on the men. He couldn’t help smiling to himself.

“Kellen… how far is the city from here?”

“A few miles back. About five.”

Five miles! Then by now it must have easily overtaken the optimum.

“Can you give me some food? Just a little… enough to get me back to the city.”

“Of course.”

Kellen took four packets, and handed them over. Helward looked at them for a moment, then handed three of them back.

“One will be enough. You’ll need the rest.”

“I haven’t got far to go,” said Kellen.

“I know… but you’ll still need them.” He looked again at the other apprentice. “How long have you been out of the crèche, Kellen?”

“About fifteen miles.”

But Kellen was much younger than him. He remembered distinctly: Kellen had been two grades below him in the crèche. They must be recruiting apprentices much earlier now. But Kellen looked mature and well filled. His body was not that of an adolescent.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Six hundred and sixty-five.”

That couldn’t be so… he was at least fifty miles younger than Helward, who was by his own reckoning six hundred and seventy.

“Have you been working on the tracks?”

“Yes: Bloody hard work.”

“I know. How has the city been able to move so fast?”

“Fast? It’s been a bad period. We had a river to cross, and at the moment the city is held up by hilly country. We’ve lost a lot of ground. When I left, it was six miles behind optimum.”