Inverted World (31 page)

“Look,” Elizabeth said at once, “I’m sorry about the last time we met. I understand better now.”

“And I’m sorry if I frightened you.”

“Have you said anything to any of the others?”

“About you being from Earth? No.”

“Good. Don’t say anything.”

He said: “Are you really from Earth planet?”

“Yes, but I wish you wouldn’t refer to it as that. I’m from Earth, and so are you. There’s a misunderstanding.”

“God, you can say that again.” He looked down at her from the nine inches advantage he had in height. “You look different here … but what are you doing as a transfer?”

“It was the only way of getting into the city I could think of.”

“I would have taken you.” He glanced around the room. “Have you paired up with any of the men yet?”

“No.”

“Don’t.” As he talked, he kept looking over his shoulder. “Have you got a room to yourself? We could talk better.”

“Yes. Shall we go?”

She closed the door when they were inside the room; the walls were thin, but at least it had the appearance of privacy. She wondered why he needed to be guarded in speaking to her.

She sat on the chair, and Helward sat on the edge of the bed.

“I’ve read Destaine,” she said. “It was fascinating. I’ve heard of him somehow. Who was he?”

“The founder of the city.”

“Yes, I’d gathered that. But he was known for something else.”

Helward looked blank. “Did what he write make any sense to you?”

“A little. He was a very lost man. But he was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

“The city, and the danger it was in. He writes as if he and the others had somehow been transported to another world.”

“That’s so.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “You’ve never left Earth, Helward. As I sit here and talk to you now, we’re both on Earth.”

He shook his head in despair. “You’re wrong, I know you’re wrong.

Whatever you say, Destaine knew the true situation. We are on another world.”

Elizabeth said: “The other day … you drew me with the sun behind me.

You drew it like a hyperbola. Is that how you see it? You drew me too tall. Is that how you see me?”

“That’s not how I see the sun, that’s how it
is
.  And it is how the world is. You I drew tall, because … that’s how I saw you then. We were a long way north of the city. Now… It’s too difficult to explain.”

“Try it.”

“No.”

“O.K. Do you know how I see the sun? It’s normal… round, spherical, whatever the correct description is. Can’t you see that it’s a question of what we ourselves perceive? Your perceptions inform you incorrectly … I don’t know why, but Destame’s perception was wrong too.”

“Liz, it’s more than perception. I’ve seen, felt,
lived
in this world.

Whatever you say, it’s real to me. I’m not alone. Most of the people in the city carry the same knowledge. It started with Destaine because he was there at the beginning. We’ve survived here a long time, simply because of that knowledge. It’s been the root of everything, and it’s kept us alive because without it we would not keep the city moving.”

Elizabeth started to say something, but he carried on. “Liz, after I saw you the other day I needed time to think. I rode north, a long way north. I saw something there that is going to test the city’s capacity for survival like it has never been tested before. Meeting you was … I don’t know. More than I had expected. But it led indirectly to a much bigger thing.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell anyone, except the Navigators. They’ve declared it restricted for the moment. It would be a bad time for the news to get out.”

“What do you mean?”

“Have you heard of the Terminators?”

“Yes … but I don’t know who they are.”

“They’re a … political group in the city. They’ve been trying to get the city to stop. If this news leaked out at the moment, there’d be a lot of trouble. We’ve just survived a major crisis, and the Navigators don’t want another.”

Elizabeth stared at him without saying anything. She had suddenly seen herself in a new light.

She was at an interface of two realities: one was hers, one was his.

However close they came together there would never be any contact between them. Like the graph line Destaine had drawn to approximate the reality he perceived, the nearer she came to him in one sense the further she moved away in another. Somehow, she had drawn herself into this drama, where one logic failed in the face of another, and she knew she was incapable of dealing with it.

Persuaded as she was by Helward’s sincerity, and the manifest existence of the city and its people, and further by the apparently strange concepts around which they had planned their survival, she could not eradicate from her mind the basic contradiction. The city and its people existed on Earth, the Earth she knew, and whatever she saw, whatever Helward said, there was no way around this. Evidence to the contrary made no sense.

But when the interface was challenged, there was an impasse.

Elizabeth said: “I’m going to leave the city tomorrow.”

“Come with me. I’m going north again.”

“No … I’ve got to get back to the village.”

“Is that the one where they bartered for the women?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going that way. We’ll ride together.”

Another impasse: the village lay to the south-west of the city.

“Why did you come to the city, Liz? You aren’t one of the local women.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You frightened me, but I was seeing the other men who were like you, trading with the village people. I wanted to find out what was going on. Now I wish I hadn’t, because you still frighten me.”

“I’m not raving at you again, am I?” he said.

She laughed … and she realized that it was for the first time since she came to the city.

“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s more … I can’t say. Everything I take for granted is different here in the city. Not everyday things, but the bigger things, like the reason for being. There’s a great concentration of determination here, as if the city itself is the only focus of all human existence. I know that’s not so. There are a million other things to do in the world, and survival is undoubtedly a drive, but not the primary one. Here the emphasis is on your concept of survival, at any cost. I’ve been outside the city, Helward, a long way outside the city. Whatever else you may think, this place is not the centre of the universe.”

“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.