Alasdair Gray - Unlikely Stories Mostly

The canteen was the most essential part of the axletree, for nobody would work on it without regular meals. The earliest foremen had indeed been poor cooks by modern standards but only because the laws of the time stopped them using a decent kitchen.

Building had not come to a halt. More people laboured on the work than ever before. There was no amusement park on the summit, just a good hotel for important visitors.

The protesting agent responded by calling on kings and people everywhere to seize the axletree and restore it to co-operative management. So great armies assembled, some to defend the work and some to seize it, for many were jealous of the wealth it contained.

Before the fighting began one of the architects employed on the fabric made a surprising suggestion. He said the building had run into financial trouble because it was conical — every three feet on the height required an addition of two to the entire circumference. This ensured stability, but unless the workforce continually increased it also ensured that the growth of the building became imperceptible, as was the present case. Since steady growth was financially impossible the work was therefore condemned by its shape to a history of booms and slumps. The last slump had destroyed the old construction company. The next would break up the building society, unless it used a cheaper method of working. He suggested that if the axletree were built on a framework of iron beams and hoops it could rise from the present summit in a straight, safe, and surprisingly cheap shaft. Even if heaven were twice the height of the present structure he would undertake to reach it in fifty years. Our foreman and the protesting agent found the idea so ludicrous that they hardly even denounced it, for both thought the shape of the axletree was as much God’s gift as its purpose, and to doubt one was to doubt the other. So armies marched inside and warfare spread along every gallery from base to summit.

At first the foreman’s people held the high places and the attackers tried to starve them by intercepting food supplies from the base, but the base was vast, and when the attackers got onto higher platforms they lost control of it. Soon both sides held vertical sections converging at the top and separated by uncertain people in the middle. The contestants paused to gather more wealth and weapons from their supporters on the ground, and during this pause leaders on both sides started squabbling — each was a king in his own lands and disliked sharing his gains with the rest. So by mutual agreement, by force or by fraud the great work was split into as many sections as the surrounding nations, and this arrangement was also unstable. Many had fought for their king because he had promised to share out the profits locked in the axletree. They now found they had given him extra power to tax them and were not even getting the social benefits granted by the building society. Revolts broke out at ground level, kings fought their own people and did not always win. Many new sorts of government got into the axletree but all looked rather like the old construction company. We had monarchies ruled by a company chairman, and plutocracies with a strong board of directors, and republics with a parliament of shareholders; yet all got their food, fuel and raw material from poorly paid people on the ground outside. Half these companies acknowledged the works foreman and ate food cooked by his agents, but they did not pay him enough money to go on building. His hotel on the old summit was now ringed by a crown of separate summits, for each national company had begun building on the highest part of its own side, using the methods of the discredited architect. Iron frames were common but conservative companies built as much as possible with stone, so their summits tended to top-heaviness. Very competitive companies over-awed their rivals with grandiose summits of bravely painted plaster, for the highest had reached a level of calm air high above the cloud and winds which soaked and buffeted the building lower down. And all these summits were bright with flags and glittering weapons, though fear of warfare at that height prevented fighting from rising far above ground level. It was a long time before the strength of the super-structures was tested. The managers in them were much closer to each other than to their employees lower down, so the summits were linked by bridges which provided reinforcement, though each bridge had a section which could be pulled back when neighbours quarrelled. And the word tower was never spoken, because towers were still notorious for sometimes falling down.

Now that a dozen competing companies owned the axletree it grew so fast that the continent below could no longer supply enough material. Our merchants crossed oceans, deserts and mountains to tell remote people of God’s great unfinished house in the middle of the world, and to persuade them to contribute to its enlargement. They were being honest when they spoke like this, for from a distance the axletree was clearly a single work. Some foreigners tried to resist us but they could not withstand the tools and weapons we had devised to elevate our axletree. The best produce of every sea and continent on the globe was brought by ship and carriage into our insatiable market. The food was eventually excreted in rivers of sewage which streamed for leagues across the surrounding country and fuel was turned into mountains of cinders which kept light from the inhabiters of the lowest galleries. Smoke poured down from vents in the national towers, staining the clouds and discolouring everything below them.

And then the national companies found the material of the whole world was not enough for them and began fighting for it in the biggest wars the world has ever seen. Armies fired on each other from ground level up to the axletree’s highest platforms. Summits crumbled and toppled through clouds in avalanches of soldiers, flags and weapons which crushed whole populations on the lower levels, sweeping them down to the ashes and excrement of the land beneath. The axletree seemed to be reducing itself to a heap of ruin, but when the smoke cleared most of it was intact and only very old-fashioned parts were badly damaged. One superstructure was so top-heavy that all the directors and shareholders went down in the first shock of war, and the remaining managers were labour-leaders who tried to organize their people into a co-operative building society. Critics say they eventually failed in this, and the workers were as ill-treated as in the worst construction companies. Even so, the new co-operative worked until its summit was one of the biggest, and other summits were repaired just as quickly. The death of millions delayed the building by only a few years, for the strength of the work was not in armies and leaders, but in the central markets and bankvaults which companies shared while their employees murdered each other in the sunlight. Some historians suggested that great wars were the axletree’s way of shedding obsolete structures and superfluous populations, and described the great work as a growing creature with its own intelligence. Others said that a growth which shed old branches by burning off its healthiest leaves and fruit did not show intelligence of a high kind.

An uneasy time began. The managers of the largest summits tried to keep their fights for material to remote lands producing it, while secretly preparing for a war vast enough to kill everyone in the world. Construction companies tried to raise their profits by pressing down the wages of the workforce, and labour leaders fought back by organizing strikes and threatening to turn their companies into co-operatives. Some of the worst-run companies did turn co-operative, and signed treaties with the first co-operative, which wanted allies. And whether they headed construction companies or co-operatives, very few directors in the high summits trusted their employees, but spent more and more money on spies and policemen. And the summits went on rising until one day, among rumours of revolt and corruption and increasing poverty and accumulating weapons, we came to the sky.