Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

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 ruiiner-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.

After 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.