Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

“Down past?”

“Yes.”

“I’m still trying to understand it,” said Helward. “What about you?”

“I don’t know. The same, I suppose. I can’t make logic of what I’ve seen and yet I know I’ve seen and experienced it, and so it must be so.”

“How can ground possibly move?”

“You noticed it too?” said Jase.

“I think so. That’s what happened wasn’t it?”

Later, each told his own account of what had happened after he left the crèche. Jase’s experiences had been remarkably different from Helward’s.

He had left the crèche a few miles before Helward, and undergone many of the same experiences working outside the city. An essential difference, though, was that he had not married, and had been invited to meet some of the transferred women. As a result of this, he already knew the two women he was assigned to when he began the journey down past.

He had learned many of the stories told by the local inhabitants about the people of the city. How the city was populated by giants, how they plundered and killed, and raped the women.

As his journey southwards proceeded, Jase had realized that the girls were growing more frightened, and when he asked them why they said that they felt certain they would be killed by their own kind when they returned. They wanted to go back to the city. At this point Jase had been noticing the first effects of the lateral distortions, and was growing curious. He turned the girls back, and told them to make their own way back to the city. He intended to spend one more day on his own, then he too would return northwards.

He traveled south, but did not see much that interested him, then attempted to find the girls. He discovered them three days later. Their throats had been cut, and they were hanging upside down from a tree. Still recoiling from the shock, Jase himself was attacked by a crowd of local men, some of whom were wearing apprentices’ uniforms. He had managed to escape, but the men had given chase. There followed three days of nightmare. While making his escape he had fallen and badly twisted his foot, and in his lamed state could do little more than hide. During the chase, he had gone a long way from the tracks, and had moved south by several miles. The hunt had been called off, and Jase was alone. He stayed in hiding… but gradually felt a slow build-up of southwards pressure. He realized that he was in a region he could not recognize. He described to Helward the flat, featureless terrain, the tremendous pressure, the way in which physical distortions took place.

He had tried to move back in the direction of the tracks, but his weakened leg made progress difficult. Finally, he had been forced to anchor himself to the ground with the grapple and rope until he could walk again. The build-up of pressure had continued, and fearing the rope would hold no longer he had been forced to crawl northwards. After a long and difficult period he had managed to escape from the zone of worst pressure, and had headed back towards the city.

He had wandered for a long time without finding the tracks. As a consequence his knowledge of the terrain away from the immediate neighbourhood of the tracks was considerably greater than Helward’s.

“Did you know there’s another city over there?” he said, indicating the land to the west of the tracks.

“ Another city?” said Helward incredulously.

“Nothing like Earth. This one is built on the ground.”

“But how… ?”

“It’s immense. Ten times, twenty times as big as Earth. I didn’t recognize it for what it was at first… I thought it was just another settlement, but one much larger. Helward, listen, it’s a city like the cities we learnt about in the crèche… the ones on Earth planet. Hundreds, thousands of buildings… all built on the ground.”

“Are there any people there?”

“A few… not many. There was a lot of damage. I don’t know what happened there, but most of it seemed to be abandoned now. I didn’t stay long because I didn’t want to be seen. But it’s a beautiful sight… all those buildings.”

“Can we go there?”

“No… keep away. Too many tooks. There’s something going on out there, the situation is changing. They’re organizing themselves better, there are lines of communication. In the past, when the city went to a village we were often the first people from outside that the inhabitants had seen for a long time. But from things the girls said to me, I got the impression that that’s not likely to be the case any more. Word is spreading about the city… and the tooks don’t like us. They never have, but in small groups they were weak. Now I think they want to destroy the city.”

“And so they dress as apprentices,” said Helward, still not grasping the seriousness of Jase’s tone.

“That’s a small part of it. They take the clothes of the apprentices they kill to make further killings easier. But if they decide to attack the city, it’ll be when they’re well organized and determined.”

“I can’t believe that they could ever threaten us.”

“Maybe not… but you were lucky.”

In the morning they set out early, and travelled hard. They walked all day, not stopping for more than a few minutes at a time. By their side, the scars left by the tracks had returned to normal dimensions and both were spurred on by the thought that the city could not be more than a few hours’ walk ahead.

As the afternoon drew on, the track led in a winding route around the side of a hill, and as they reached the crest of the hill they saw the city ahead of them, stationary in a broad valley.

They stopped, stared down at it.

The city had changed.

Something about it made Helward run forward, hurrying down the side of the hill towards it.

From this elevation they could see the signs of normal activity about the city: behind it four track-crews tearing up the rails, ahead of it a larger team sinking piles into the river that presently barred the city’s way. But the shape of the city had changed. The rear section was misshapen, blackened…

The lines of Militia had been strengthened, and soon Jase and Helward were halted, and their identities checked. Both men fumed at the delay, for it was clear that a major disaster had struck the city. Waiting for clearance from inside the city, Jase learned from the militiaman in charge that there had been two attacks by the tooks. The second one had been more serious than the first. Twenty-three militiamen had been killed; they were still counting bodies inside the city.

The excitement of their return was instantly sobered by what they saw. When the clearance came through, Helward and Jase walked on in silence.

The crèche had been razed: it was the children who had died. Inside the city there was more that had changed. The impact of these changes was severe, but Helward had no time to register any reaction. He could only mark them, then try to push them aside until external pressures eased. There was no time to dwell on his thoughts.

He learnt that his father had died. Only a few hours after Helward had left the city, the angina had stopped his heart. It was Clausewitz who broke the news to him, and Clausewitz who told him that his apprenticeship was now over.

More: Victoria had given birth to a baby — a boy — but it had been one of those that had died in the attack.

More: Victoria had signed a form that pronounced the marriage over. She was living with another man, and was pregnant again.

And more, implicitly tied up with all of these events, yet no more conceivable: Helward learnt from the central calendar that while he had been away the city had moved a total of seventy-three miles, and was even so eight miles behind optimum. In his own subjective time-scale, Helward had been gone for less than three miles.