Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

“You’ve been listening to the Terminators.”

“Maybe I have. If you listen to them they make a bit of sense. Not completely, but they’re not as bad as the Navigators make out.”

“You’re out of your mind.”

“O.K. Who wouldn’t be in this heat?”

“You’d better not repeat that in the city.”

“Why not? Enough people are saying it already.”

“Not guildsmen. You’ve been down past. You know what’s what.”

“I’m just being realistic. You’ve got to listen to people’s opinions. There are more people in the city who want to stop than there are guildsmen. That’s all.”

“Shut up, Norris,” said the man who had so far not spoken, the one who had addressed the crowd.

They continued on their way.

The city had been in sight for some time before Elizabeth recognized it for what it was. As they came nearer she looked at it with great interest, not comprehending the system of tracks and cables that stretched away from it. Her first assumption was that it was some kind of marshalling yard, but there was no sign of any rolling-stock and anyway the length of track was too short for any practical use.

Later she noticed several men apparently patrolling the tracks, each of whom carried a rifle or what appeared to be a crossbow. More than this she could not absorb, since most of her attention was on the structure itself.

She had heard the men refer to it as a city, and Helward too, but to her eyes it was not much more than a large and misshapen office block. It did not look too safe, constructed mainly of timber. It had the ugliness of functionalism, and yet there was a simplicity to its design which was not altogether unattractive. She was reminded of pictures she had seen of pre-Crash buildings, and although most of those had been steel and reinforced concrete they shared the squareness, the plainness, and lack of exterior decoration. Those old buildings had been tall, though, and this strange structure •was nowhere more than seven storeys high. The timber showed varying stages of weathering; most of what she could see had been well bleached by the elements, but there were newer parts visible.

The men took them right up to the base of the building, and then into a dark passageway. Here they dismounted, and several young men came forward to lead away the horses.

The men took them to a door in the passageway, up a staircase, and through another doorway. They emerged into a brightly lit corridor.

At the end of this there was another door, and here they parted company with the men. There was a printed sign on the door, which said: TRANSFERENCE QUARTERS.

Inside they were greeted by two women, who spoke to them in the badly accented language of the people.

Once Elizabeth had adopted her pose, there was no way of abandoning it.

In the next few days she was subjected to a series of examinations and treatments which, had she not suspected the reason, she would have found humiliating. She was bathed, and her hair was washed. She was medically examined, her eyes were tested, her teeth were checked. Her hair and scalp were inspected for infestation, and she was given a test which she could only imagine was to determine whether or not she had VD.

Without surprise, the woman supervising the examination passed her with a clean bill of health — of the ten girls, Elizabeth was the only one who was so passed — and she was then given over to two more women who began to instruct her in the rudiments of speaking English. This caused her some considerable private amusement, and in spite of her best efforts to delay the learning process she was soon considered fit and educated enough to be released from this initial period of habilitation.

The first few nights she had slept in a communal dormitory in the transference centre, but now she was given a tiny room of her own. This was scrupulously clean and furnished minimally. It contained a narrow bed, a space to hang her clothes — she had been given two identical sets of clothes to wear — a chair, and about four square feet of floor space.

Eight days had passed since coming to the city, and Elizabeth was beginning to wonder what she had hoped to achieve. Now she had been cleared by the transference section she was assigned to the kitchens, where the work she was given was straightforward drudgery. The evenings were free, but she was told that she was expected to spend at least an hour or two in a certain reception-room where, she was told, she was supposed to mix socially with the people she met there.

This room was situated next to the transference section. It had a small bar at one end with, Elizabeth noted, a distinct shortage of choice, and next to this an ancient video set. When she switched it on a tape device attached to it showed a comedy programme that she frankly couldn’t understand at all, although an invisible audience laughed all the way through. The comic allusions were evidently contemporary, and thus meaningless to her. She watched the programme through, and from a copyright notice at the end learnt that it had been taped in 1985. More than two hundred years old!

There were usually only a few people in this room when she was there. A woman from the transference section worked behind the bar, maintaining a fixed grin, but Elizabeth could not work up much interest in the other people there. A few men came in occasionally — dressed, as Helward had been, in the dark uniform — and there were two or three local girls.

One day, working in the kitchen, she accidentally solved a problem that had continued to nag at her.

She was stacking away some of the clean crockery in a metal cupboard used for this purpose, when something about it caught her attention. It had been changed almost out of recognition — its components had been removed, and it had been fitted with wooden shelves — but the IBM motif on one of the doors still showed through the covering layer of paint.

When she could, Elizabeth walked around the rest of the city, curious about almost everything she saw. Before entering the city she had expected to find herself a virtual prisoner, but beyond the bounds of the duties she had to perform she was free to go wherever she liked, do whatever she wished. She talked to people, she saw, she registered, and she thought.

One day she came across a small room set aside for use by the ordinary people of the city in their leisure hours. Lying on a table she found a few sheets of printed paper, neatly stapled together. She glanced at them without much interest, saw the title on the first page: Destaine’s Directive.

Later, as she walked through the city she saw many more of these printed sheets, and in due time, with her curiosity piqued, she read one set through. Having seen its contents, she immediately concealed a copy in the bedclothes of her bunk, meaning to take it with her when she left the city.

She was beginning to understand… She returned again to Destaine, read his words so often they became almost photographically recorded. And she thought about Helward, and his apparently wild behaviour and words, and she tried to remember what he had said.

In time, a kind of logical pattern appeared… but there was one ineradicable flaw in everything.

The hypothesis by which the city and its people existed was that the world on which they lived was somehow inverted. Not only the world, but all the physical objects in the universe in which that world was supposed to exist. The shape that Destame drew — a solid world, curved north and south in the shape of hyperbolas — was the approximation they used, and it correlated indeed with the strange shape that Helward had drawn to depict the sun.

One day Elizabeth saw the flaw, as she walked through one of the parts of the city presently being re-built.