Inverted World (21 page)

As the afternoon drew on, the track led in a winding route around the side of a hill, and as they reached the crest of the hill they saw the city ahead of them, stationary in a broad valley.

They stopped, stared down at it.

The city had changed.

Something about it made Helward run forward, hurrying down the side of the hill towards it.

From this elevation they could see the signs of normal activity about the city: behind it four track-crews tearing up the rails, ahead of it a larger team sinking piles into the river that presently barred the city’s way.

But the shape of the city had changed. The rear section was misshapen, blackened …

The lines of Militia had been strengthened, and soon Jase and Helward were halted, and their identities checked. Both men fumed at the delay, for it was clear that a major disaster had struck the city. Waiting for clearance from inside the city, Jase learned from the militiaman in charge that there had been two attacks by the tooks. The second one had been more serious than the first. Twenty-three militiamen had been killed; they were still counting bodies inside the city.

The excitement of their return was instantly sobered by what they saw.

When the clearance came through, Helward and Jase walked on in silence.

The crèche had been razed: it was the children who had died. Inside the city there was more that had changed. The impact of these changes was severe, but Helward had no time to register any reaction. He could only mark them, then try to push them aside until external pressures eased. There was no time to dwell on his thoughts.

He learnt that his father had died. Only a few hours after Helward had left the city, the angina had stopped his heart. It was Clausewitz who broke the news to him, and Clausewitz who told him that his apprenticeship was now over.

More: Victoria had given birth to a baby—a boy—but it had been one of those that had died in the attack.

More: Victoria had signed a form that pronounced the marriage over. She was living with another man, and was pregnant again.

And more, implicitly tied up with all of these events, yet no more conceivable: Helward learnt from the central calendar that while he had been away the city had moved a total of seventy-three miles, and was even so eight miles behind optimum. In his own subjective time-scale, Helward had been gone for less than three miles.

He accepted all these as facts. The reaction of shock would come later; meanwhile another attack was imminent.

The valley was dark and silent. Across on the northern side of the river I saw a red light flash on twice, then nothing.

Seconds later, I heard from deep within the city the grinding of the winch-drums, and the city began to inch forward. The sound echoed around the valley.

I was lying with about thirty other men in the tangled undergrowth that spread across the face of the hill. I had been drafted temporarily to work with the Militia during this most critical of all the city’s crossings. The third attack was anticipated at any moment, and it had been judged that once the city could reach the northern bank of the river it would, by nature of the surrounding terrain, be able to defend itself sufficiently long for the tracks to be extended at least as far as the highest point of the pass through the hills to the north. Once there, it was thought that it could again defend itself for the next phase of track-laying.

Somewhere in the valley we knew that there were about a hundred and fifty tooks, all armed with rifles. They presented a formidable enemy. The city had only twelve rifles taken from the tooks, and the ammunition for them had been spent during the second attack. Our only realistic weapons were the crossbows—at short range, deadly—and an awareness of the value of intelligence work. It was this latter which had enabled us to prepare the reserve counter-attack of which I was a part.

A few hours earlier, as darkness fell, we had taken up this position overlooking the valley. The main force of defence was three ranks of crossbowmen deployed around the city itself. As the city started out across the bridge they would retreat, until they formed a defensive position around the tracks. The tooks would concentrate their fire on these men, and at that moment we could spring our ambush.

With fortune on our side, the counter-attack would not be necessary.

Though intelligence work had established that another attack was likely, the bridge-building work had been completed faster than anticipated, and it was hoped that the city would be safely across to the other side under cover of darkness before the tooks realized.

But in the still of the valley, the sound of the winches was unmistakable.

The forward edge of the city had just reached the bridge itself when the first shots were heard. I placed a bolt in the bow, and held my hand over the safety-catch.

It was a cloudy night, and visibility was poor. I had seen the flashes from the rifles, and estimated that the tooks were ranged in a rough semi-circle, approximately one hundred yards from our men. I could not tell if any of their bullets had hit, but so far there were no answering shots.

More rifles fired, and we could tell the tooks were closing in. The city had half its bulk on the bridge … and still crept forward.

Down below, a distant shout: “
Lights!
"

Instantly, a battery of eight arc-lamps situated on the rear of the city came on, directed over the heads of the crossbowmen and into the surrounding terrain. The tooks were there, not taking any kind of cover.

The first rank of crossbowmen loosed their bolts, hunched down, and started to reload. The second rank shot, hunched down, and reloaded. The third rank shot, reloaded.

Taken by surprise the tooks had suffered several casualties, but now they threw themselves down against the ground and fired at all they could see of the defenders: the black silhouettes against the arc-lamps.

“
Lights off!
"

Darkness fell at once, and the crossbowmen by the city dispersed. A few seconds later the lights came on again, and the crossbowmen fired from their new positions.

Once again the tooks were taken off aim, and more casualties were inflicted. The lights went off again, and in the sudden darkness the crossbowmen returned to their former position. The manoeuvre was repeated.

There was a shout from below, and as the arc-lamps came on we saw that the tooks were charging. The city was now on the bridge.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion and a gush of flame against the side of the city. An instant later a second explosion occurred on the bridge itself, and flames spread across the dry timber of the rail-way.

“Reserve force,
ready!
"  I stood up, and waited for the order. I was no longer frightened, and the tension of the waiting hours had disappeared.

“
Advance!
"

The arc-lamps on the city were still burning, and we could see the tooks clearly. Most of them were engaged in a hand-to-hand battle with the main defence, but several more were crouched on the ground, taking careful aim at the superstructure of the city. Two of the arc-lamps were hit, and they went out.

The flames on the bridge and against the side of the city were spreading.

I saw a took near the bank of the river, swinging his arm back in preparation to throw a metal cylinder. I was no more than twenty yards from him. I aimed, released the bolt … and hit the man in his chest. The incendiary bomb fell a few yards away from him, and exploded in a burst of heat and flame.

Our counter-attack had, as anticipated, taken the enemy by surprise. We managed to hit three more of the men … but suddenly they broke off and ran towards the east, disappearing into the shadows of the valley.

There was considerable confusion for a minute or two. The city was on fire, and beneath it the bridge was burning fiercely in two separate places.

One concentration of flame was directly beneath the city, but the other was a few yards behind it. It was obviously urgent to deal with the fires, but no one was certain that all the tooks had retreated.

The city continued to winch forward, but where the bridge burned large sections of timber were falling away into the river.

Order was restored quickly. A Militia officer shouted orders, and the men formed into two groups. One group renewed the defensive position around the tracks; I joined the second group sent out on to the bridge to fight the fire.

After the second attack—in which incendiaries had been used for the first time—fire-points had been fitted to the outside of the city. The nearest of these had been damaged in one of the explosions, and water was gushing away from it uselessly. We found a second one, and unravelled the short length of hose.

The intensity of the track-fire was too great, and it was almost hopeless to try to fight it. Although the city had now passed over the worst of the damage there were still three of the main runner-wheels to roll over the burning timber...and as we fought in the dense smoke and billowing flames I saw the rail beginning to twist under the combined forces of heat and weight.

There was a roar, and another section of timber fell away. The smoke was too thick. Choking, we had to back out from under the city.

The fire in the superstructure was still blazing, but a fire-crew inside the city was attempting to deal with it. The winches turned... the city crept slowly towards the comparative safety of the northern bank.

In the morning light the damage was assessed. In terms of lost human life, the city had not fared too badly. Three of the militiamen had been killed in the shooting, and fifteen had been injured. Inside the city, one man had been seriously wounded in one of the incendiary explosions, and a dozen more men and women had been overcome by smoke in the ensuing fires.

The physical damage to the city itself was extensive. A whole section of administrative offices had been gutted by the fire, and some of the accommodation section was uninhabitable because of fire or water damage.

Beneath the city there was more damage. Although the main base of the city was steel, much of the construction was timber, and there were whole sections which had been burnt out. The rear ruiiner-wheels on the right outer track had been derailed, and one of the great wheels had sustained a structural crack. It could not be replaced: it would have to be discarded.

After the city had reached the northern bank, the bridge had continued to burn and was now a total loss. With it had gone several hundred yards of our irreplaceable rails, warped and twisted by the heat.

After two days outside the city, working with the track-crews who were salvaging what there was of the rails on the southern bank of the river, I was summoned to see Clausewitz.

Apart from an hour or two spent inside the city when I first returned, I had not reported formally to any of my senior guildsmen. As far as I could determine, the normal protocol of the guilds had been abandoned for the duration of the emergency, and as I myself could see no end to the serious situation—the attacks had caused inevitable delays, and the optimum was ever further away—I had not expected anyone to call me off my work outside.

There was a disturbing mood amongst those men who were outside—half-way between despair and desperation. The work continued on laying the tracks towards the pass, but the relaxed energy of my early days outside the city seemed to be a long way behind us. Now the tracks were being built in spite of the situation with the tooks, rather than in the way I now understood the motivation of the city to be derived, from an internal need to survive in a strange environment.

The talk among the track-crews, the Militia, the Traction men was all centred in one way or another around the attacks. No longer was there talk of gaining ground on the optimum, or what dangers lay down past. The city was in a crisis, and this was reflected in everyone’s attitude.

When I went inside the city the change was apparent here too.

Gone was the light, aseptic appearance of the corridors, gone was the general atmosphere of workaday routines.

The elevator was no longer working. Many of the main doors in the corridors were locked, and at one point an entire wall had been torn away—presumably as a result of one of the fires—so that anyone walking through that part of the city could see what was outside. I remembered Victoria’s frustrations of old, and reflected that whatever secrecy the guilds might have tried to maintain in the past, no longer was such a system possible.

Thought of Victoria pained me; I still did not realize fully what had happened. In what seemed to me to be the passage of a few days, she had abandoned all the tacit understandings of the marriage between us, and gone to pursue another life without me.

I had not seen her since my return, though I had made sure that she would have known I was back in the city. Under the conditions of the external threat it had not been possible to see her anyway, but that aspect of my life was one I needed time to consider before meeting her. The news of her pregnancy by another man—I was told he was an education administrator named Yung—had not hit me too hard at first, simply because I had just not believed it. Such a situation could not possibly have developed in the time I knew I had been away from the city.

I found my way to the first-order guild area with some difficulty. The interior of the city had changed in many ways.

There seemed to be people, noise, and dirt everywhere. Every spare yard of space had been given over to emergency sleeping-room, and even in some of the corridors lay wounded men from outside. Several walls and partitions had been taken down, and just outside the first-order quarters—where there had been a series of pleasantly appointed recreation rooms for the guildsmen—an emergency kitchen had been placed.

The smell of burnt wood was everywhere.

I knew a fundamental change was coming over the city. I could feel the old structure of the guilds crumbling away. The roles of many people had already changed; working with the track-crews I’d met several men for whom it was the first time outside the city, men who until the attacks had worked on food synthesis, or education, or domestic administration. Took labour was now obviously impossible, and all hands had to be called to move the city. Why at this moment Clausewitz had summoned me I could not imagine.