Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

Experimentally, she ran the tip of her finger along it. The sensation was a quite regular vibration: the paper had been perforated…

Careful not to damage the drawing, she separated the tape from the wall, and took the sketch down.

On the back she discovered that a column of numbers had been printed down one side. One or two of them were asterisked.

Printed in pale blue ink along the side were the words: IBM Multifold ™.

She taped the sketch back on the wall… and stared at it uncomprehendingly for a long time.

In the morning Elizabeth put in another teleprinted request for a doctor, then set off for the village.

The daytime heat was flooding the village when she arrived, and already the listless mood of lethargy that had so infuriated her at first had set in. She sought out Luiz, who was sitting in the shadow of the church with two other men.

“Well… have they been back?”

“Not today, Menina Khan.”

“When did they say they’d come again?”

He shrugged idly. “Sometime. Today, tomorrow.”

“Have you tried that — ?”

She stopped, irritated with herself. She had meant to take the purported fertilizer to headquarters to have it analysed, and in her preoccupation had forgotten it.

“Let me know if they come.”

She went to see Maria and her new baby, but her mind was not fully on her work. Later she supervised a meal, which was served to all comers, then talked to Father dos Santos in the workshop. All this time she was aware that she had one ear cocked for any sounds of horses.

No longer trying to make any excuse for herself, she went down to the stable and saddled up the horse. She rode away from the village, towards the river.

She was trying not to dwell on her own thoughts, trying not to examine her own motives, but it was inevitable. The last twenty-four hours had been momentous in their own way. She had come out here to work in the field because of a feeling that her life at home was wasted, only to find a new kind of frustration here. In spite of intents and appearances, all the voluntary workers could offer was a sight of recovery to the impoverished people here. It was too little, too late. A few government handouts of grain, or a few inoculations, or a repaired church were all right, and better than nothing. But the root of the problem remained unsolved in practice: the central economy had failed. There was nothing on this land but what the people themselves could take.

The intrusion of Helward into her life was the first event of interest she had experienced since she arrived. She knew, as she rode the horse across the scrubland towards the trees, that her motives were mixed. Perhaps there was simple curiosity there, but it ran deeper.

The men on the station were obsessed with themselves and what they imagined their roles to be; they spoke in abstracts about group psychology, social readjustment, patterns of behaviour… and in her more cynical moods she found such an outlook simply pathetic. Apart from the unfortunate Tony Chappell, she had formed no kind of interest in any of the men, which was not as she had anticipated at all before she arrived.

Helward was different. She refrained from spelling it out to herself, but she knew why she was riding out to find him.

She found the place on the river-bank, and allowed her horse to drink. Later, she tethered it in the shade, and sat down by the water to wait. Again she tried to blank out the turmoil of mental activity: thoughts, desires, questions. Concentrating hard on the physical environment, she lay back on the bank in the sunshine and closed her eyes. She listened to the sound of the water as it ran across the pebbles of the river-bed, the sound of the gentle wind in the trees, the humming of insects, the smell of dry undergrowth, hot soil, warmth.

A long time passed. Behind her, the horse whisked its tail every few seconds, patiently flicking away the swarm of flies.

She opened her eyes as soon as she heard the sound of the other horse, and sat up.

Helward was there on the opposite bank. He raised his hand in greeting, and she waved back.

He dismounted immediately, and walked quickly along the bank until he was opposite her. She smiled to herself: he was evidently in high spirits because he was fooling around, trying to amuse her. When he stood opposite her, he leaned forward for some reason and tried to stand on his hands. After two attempts he made it, then toppled right over and landed with a shout and a splash in the river.

Elizabeth jumped up, and ran through the shallow water towards him.

“Are you all right?” she said.

He grinned at her. “I could do that when I was a kid.”

“So could I.”

He stood up, looking down ruefully at his soaked clothes.

“They’ll soon dry,” she said.

“I’ll get my horse.”

They splashed back through the river to the other side, and Helward stood his horse next to Elizabeth’s. She sat down on the bank again, and Helward sat close beside her, stretching out his legs in the sun so that his clothes might dry.

Behind them the horses stood nose to tail, whisking away the flies from each other’s face.

Questions, questions… but she suppressed them all. She enjoyed the intrigue, didn’t want to destroy it with understanding. The rational account was that he was an operative from a station similar to hers, and that he was enjoying an elaborate and somewhat pointless joke at her expense. If that was so, she didn’t care; his presence was enough, and she was herself sufficiently emotionally suppressed to relish the break with routine he was unwittingly bringing her.

The only common bond she knew of was his sketches, and she asked to see them again. For a while they talked about the drawings, and he expressed his various enthusiasms; she was interested to see that all the sketches were on the back of old computer print-out paper.

Eventually, he said: “I thought you were a took.”

He pronounced it with a long vowel, like shoot .

“What’s that?”

“One of the people who live round here. But they don’t speak English.”

“A few do. Not very well. Only when we teach them.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“The people I work for.”

“You’re not from the city?” he said suddenly, then looked away.

Elizabeth felt a glimmer of alarm; he had looked and acted like this the day before, and then he had suddenly left. She didn’t want that, not now.

“Do you mean your city?”

“No… of course you’re not. Who are you?”

“You know my name,” she said.

“Yes, but where are you from?”

“England. I came here about two months ago.”

“England… that’s on Earth isn’t it?” He was staring at her intently, the drawings forgotten now.

She laughed, a nervous reaction to the strangeness of the question.

“It was the last time I was there,” she said, trying to make a joke of it.

“My God! Then—”

“What?”

He stood up abruptly, and turned away from her. He took a few steps, then turned again and stood over her, staring down.

“You’ve come from Earth?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you from Earth… the planet?”

“Of course… I don’t understand.”

“You’re looking for us,” he said.

“No! I mean… I’m not sure.”

“You’ve found us!”

She stood up, backed away from him.

She waited by the horses. The aura of strangeness had become one of madness, and she knew she should leave. The next move must come from him.

“Elizabeth… don’t go.”

“Liz,” she said.

“Liz… do you know who I am? I’m from the city of Earth. You must know what that means!”