Christopher Priest - The Inverted World

“It is,” he said. “Because if we ever stopped believing that, we would all die.”

Leaving the city presented Elizabeth with no problems. She went down to the stables with Helward and another man, whom he introduced as Future Blayne, collected three horses, and rode in a direction which Helward declared was northwards. Again, she questioned his sense of direction as by her reckoning of the position of the sun the true direction was towards the south-west, but she made nothing of it. By this time she was so accustomed to the straightforward affronts to what she considered logic that she saw no point in remarking on them to him. She was content to accept the ways of the city, if not to understand them.

As they rode out from under the city, Helward pointed out the great wheels on which the city was mounted, and explained that the motion forwards was so slow as to be almost undetectable. However, he assured her, the city moved about one mile every ten days. Northwards, or towards the south-west, whichever way she cared to think of it.

The journey took two days. The men talked a lot, both to each other and to her, although not much of it made sense to her.

She felt that she had suffered an overload of new information, and could absorb no more.

On the evening of the first day they passed within a mile or so of her village, and she told Helward she was going there.

“No… come with us. You can go back later.”

She said: “I want to go back to England. I think I can help you.”

“You ought to see this.”

“What is it?”

“We’re not sure,” said Blayne. “Helward thinks you might be able to tell us.”

She resisted for a few more minutes, but in the end went on with them.

It was curious how she succumbed so readily to the various involvements of these people. Perhaps it was because she could identify with some of them, and perhaps it was because the society within the city was a curiously civilized existence — for all its strange ways — in a countryside that had been wasted by anarchy for generations. Even in the few weeks she had been in the village the peasant outlook, the unquestioning lethargy, the inability to cope with even the most minor of problems had sapped her will to meet the challenge of her work. But the people of Helward’s city were of a different order. Evidently they were some offshoot community that had somehow managed to preserve themselves during the Crash, and now lived on past that time. Even so, the makings of a regulated society were there: the evident discipline, the sense of purpose, and a real and vital understanding of their own identity, however much of a dichotomy existed between inner similarities and outer differences.

So when Helward requested her to go with them, and Blayne supported him, she could put up no opposition. She had by her own actions involved herself in the affairs of their community. The consequences of her abandoning the village would have to be faced later — she could justify her absence by saying she wanted to know where the women were being taken — but she felt now that she must follow this through. Ultimately, there would be some official body who would have to rehabilitate the people of the city, but until then she was personally involved.

They spent the night under canvas. There were only two tents, and the men gallantly offered her one of them for her own use… but before that they spent a long time talking.

Helward had evidently told Blayne about her, and how she was different, as he saw her, from both the people of the city and the people of the villages.

Blayne now spoke directly to her, and Helward stayed in the background. He spoke only rarely, and then to confirm things that Blayne said. She liked the other man, and found him direct in his manner: he tried not to evade any of her questions.

By and large he affirmed what she had learned. He spoke of Destaine and his Directive, he spoke of the city and its need to move forward, and he talked of the shape of the world. She had learnt not to argue with the city outlook, and she listened to what they said.

When she eventually crawled into her sleeping-bag she was exhausted from the long ride through the day, but sleep came slowly. The interface had hardened.

Though the confidence in her own logic had not been shaken, her understanding of the city people’s had been deepened. They lived, they said, on a world where the laws of nature were not the same. She was prepared to believe that… or rather, prepared to believe that they were sincere, but mistaken.

It was not the exterior world that was different, but their perception of it. By what manner could she change that?

Emerging from woodland they encountered a region of coarse scrubland, where tall grasses and scrawny bushes grew wildly. There were no tracks here and progress was slow. There was a cool, steady wind blowing now, and an exhilarating freshness sharpened their senses.

Gradually, the vegetation gave way to a hard, tough grass, growing in sandy soil. Neither of the men said anything; Helward in particular stared ahead of him as he rode, letting his horse find its own route.

Elizabeth saw that ahead of them the vegetation gave way altogether, and as they breasted a ridge of loose sand and gravel, only a few yards of low sand-dunes lay between them and the beach. Her horse, who had already sensed the salt in the air, responded readily to the kick of her heels and they cantered down across the sand. For a few heady minutes she gave the horse its head, and exulted in the freedom and joy of galloping along a beach, its surface unuttered, unbroken, untouched by anything but waves for decades.

Helward and Blayne had ridden down to the beach behind her, and now stood close together by their horses, looking out across the water.

She trotted her horse over to them, and dismounted.

“Does it extend east and west?” said Blayne.

“As far as I explored. There’s no way round I could see.”

Blayne took a video camera from one of his packs, connected it to the case, and panned it slowly across the view.

“We’ll have to survey east and west,” he said. “It would be impossible to cross.”

“There’s no sign of an opposite bank.”

Blayne frowned at the beach. “I don’t like the soil. We’ll have to get a Bridge-Builder up here. I don’t think this would take the weight of the city.”

“There must be some way.”

The two men entirely ignored her. Helward erected a small instrument, a tripodal device with a concentric chart suspended by three catches below the fulcrum. He hung a plumbline over the chart, and took some kind of reading from it.

“We’re a long way from optimum,” he said eventually. “We’ve got plenty of time. Thirty miles… almost a year city-time. Do you think it could be done?”

“A bridge? It’d take some doing. We’d need more men than we’ve got at the moment. What did the Navigators say?”

“Check what I reported. Do you check?”

“Yes. I can’t see that I can add anything.”

Helward stared for a few seconds longer at the expanse of water, then seemed to remember Elizabeth. He turned to her.

“What do you say?”

“About this? What do you expect me to say?”

“Tell us about our perceptions,” said Helward. “Tell us there’s no river here.”

She said: “It’s not a river.”

Helward glanced at Blayne.

“You heard her,” he said. “We’re imagining it.”

Elizabeth closed her eyes, turned away. She could no longer confront the interface.

The breeze was chilling her, so she took a blanket from her horse and moved hack to the sandy ridge. When she faced them again they were paying no more attention to her. Helward had erected another instrument, and was taking several readings from it. He called them out to Blayne, his voice whipped thin by the wind.