Authors: Christopher Priest
The quarters for the Militia were in the area next to the stables at the very base of the city. These consisted of two large dormitories, and we were obliged to live, eat, and sleep in conditions of intolerable overcrowding and filth. During the days we went through apparently endless periods of training involving long marches across the countryside; and were taught to fight unarmed, taught to swim rivers, taught to climb trees, taught to eat grass, and any number of other futile activities. At the end of the three miles I had learned to shoot with a crossbow, and I had learned how to defend myself when unarmed. I had made myself some bitter personal enemies, and I knew I should have to keep out of their way for some considerable time to come. I wrote it off to experience.
After this I was transferred to the Traction guild, and at once I was much happier. Indeed, from this point to the end of my apprenticeship my life was pleasant and fruitful.
The men responsible for the traction of the city were quiet, hard-working, and intelligent. They moved without haste, but they saw that the work for which they were responsible was done, and done well.
My one previous experience of their work—when watching the city being winched—had not revealed to me the extent of their operations. Traction was not simply a question of moving the city but also involved its internal affairs.
I discovered that a large nuclear reactor was situated in the centre of the city, on the lowest level. It was from this that the city derived all its power, and the men who operated it were also responsible for the city’s communication and sanitary systems. Many of the Traction guildsmen were water-engineers, and I learned that throughout the city there was a complicated system of pumping which ensured that almost every last drop of water was continually recycled. The food-synthesizer, I discovered to my horror, was based on a sewage filtration device, and although it was operated and programmed by administrators inside the city, it was in the Traction pumping-room that the quantity (and in some respects the quality) of synthesized food was ultimately determined.
It was almost as a secondary function that the reactor was used to power the winches.
There were six of these, and they were built in a massive steel housing running east-west across the city’s base. Of the six, only five were used at any one time, the other being overhauled by rotation. The primary cause for concern with the winches was the bearings, which, after many thousands of miles’ use, were very worn. During the time I was with the Traction men there was a certain amount of debate on the subject of whether the winching should be carried out on four winches—thus allowing more time for bearing servicing—or should be increased to all six winches, thus reducing wear. The consensus seemed to be to continue with the present system, for no major decisions were taken.
One of the jobs I worked on with the Traction men was checking the cables. This too was a recurring task for the cables were as old as the winches, and breakages happened more frequently than was ideal, which was never. Each of the six cables used by the city had been repaired several times, and in addition to the weaknesses this caused there were several parts of each cable which were beginning to fray. Before each winching, therefore, each of the five cables to be used had to be checked over foot by foot, cleaned and greased, and bound where frays occurred.
Always in the reactor-room, or working outside on the cables, the talk was of catching up the lost ground towards the optimum. How the winches might be improved, how new cables might be obtained. The entire guild seemed to be alive with ideas, but they were not men fond of theories. Much of their work was concerned with mundane matters; for instance, while I was with the guild a new project was begun to construct an additional water-reservoir in the city.
One pleasurable benefit of this aspect of my apprenticeship was that I was able to spend the nights with Victoria. Although I came back to the room at night hot and dirty from my work, I was for this short period enjoying the comforts of a domestic existence and the satisfactions of a worthwhile job.
One day, working outside the city as one of the cables was being hauled mechanically out towards the distant stayemplacement, I asked the guildsman I was with about Gelman Jase.
“An old friend of mine, apprenticed to your guild. Do you know him?”
“About your age is he?”
“A bit older.”
“We had a couple of apprentices through a few miles back. Can’t remember their names. I can check, if you like.”
I was curious to see Jase. It had been a long time since I’d seen him, and it would be good to compare notes with someone who was going through the same process as myself.
Later that day I was told that Jase had been one of the two apprentices the man had mentioned. I asked how I could contact him.
“He won’t be around for a while.”
“Where is he?” I said.
“He’s left the city. Down past.”
Too soon, my time with the Traction guild ended and I was transferred to the Barter guild for the next three miles. I greeted this news with mixed feelings, having witnessed one of their operations at first hand. To my surprise I learnt I was to work with Barter Collings, and to my further surprise I discovered it was he who had requested I work with him.
“I heard you were joining the guild for three miles,” he said. “Thought I’d like to show you our work isn’t all dealing with rioting tooks.”
Like the other guildsmen, Collings had a room in one of the forward towers of the city, and here he showed me a long roll of paper with a detailed plan drawn on it.
“You needn’t take too much notice of most of this. It’s a map of the terrain ahead of us, and it’s compiled by the Futures.” He showed me the symbols for mountains, rivers, valleys, steep gradients—all vital information for those who planned the route the city would take on its long slow journey towards optimum. “These black squares represent settlements. That’s what we’re concerned with. How many languages do you speak?”
I told him that I had never found languages easy when in the crèche, and only spoke French, and that haltingly.
“As well you’re not planning to join our guild permanently,” he said.
“Ability with languages is our stock in trade.”
He told me that the local inhabitants spoke Spanish, and that he and the other Barter guildsmen had to learn this from one of the books in the city library as there were no people of Spanish descent in the city. They got by, but there were recurring difficulties with dialects.
Collings told me that of all the first-order guilds only the Track guild used hired labour regularly. Sometimes the BridgeBuilders had to hire men for short periods, but by and large the major part of the Barters’ work was in hiring manual labourers for the track-work… and what Collings referred to as “transference.”
“What is that?” I said immediately.
Collings said: “It’s what makes us so unpopular. The city looks for settlements where food is short, where poverty is widespread. Fortunately for the city this is a poor region, so we have a strong bargaining position. We can offer them food, technology to help their farming, medicines, electrical power; in return, the men labour for us, and we borrow their young women. They come to the city for a short while, and perhaps they will give birth to new citizens.”
“I’ve heard of this,” I said. “I can’t believe it happens.”
“Why not?”
“Isn’t it … immoral?” I said hesitantly.
“Is it immoral to want to keep the city peopled? Without fresh blood we would die out within a couple of generations. Most children born to people in the city are male.”
I remembered the fight that had started. “But the women who transfer to the city are sometimes married, aren’t they?”
“Yes … but they stay only to give birth to one child. After that, they are free to leave.”
“What happens to the child?”
“If it is a girl, she stays in the city and is brought up in the crèche.
If it is a boy, the mother may take it with her or may leave it in the city.”
And then I understood the diffidence with which Victoria had spoken on this subject. My mother had come to the city from outside, and afterwards had left. She had not taken me with her; I had been rejected. But there was no pain in this realization.
The Barter guildsmen, like those of the Futures guild, rode out across the countryside on horses. I had never learnt to ride, and so when we left the city and headed north I walked beside Collings. Later, he showed me how to ride the horse, telling me that I would need to ride when I joined my father’s guild. The technique came slowly; at first I was frightened of the horse and found it difficult to control. Gradually, as I realized the animal was docile and good-natured, my confidence grew and the horse—as if understanding this—responded better.
We did not travel far from the city. There were two settlements to the north-east, and we visited them both. We were greeted with some curiosity, but Collings’s assessment was that neither settlement displayed any great need for the commodities the city could offer, and so he made no attempts to negotiate.
He told me that the city’s needs for labour were met for the moment, and that there were enough transferred women to be going on with.
After the first journey away from the city—which took nine days, and during which we lived and slept rough—I returned to the city with Collings, to hear the news that the Council of Navigators had given the go-ahead for a bridge to be built. According to the interpretation Collings gave me, there were two possible routes ahead of the city. One angled the city towards the north-west, and although avoiding a narrow chasm led through hilly country with much broken rock; the other led across more level country but required a bridge to be built across the chasm. It was this latter course which had been selected, and so all available labour was to be diverted temporarily to the Bridge-Builders guild.
As the bridge was now the major priority, Malchuskin and another Track guildsman and each of their gangs were drafted, about one half of the entire Militia force was relieved of other duties to assist, and several men from the Traction guild were to supervise the laying of the rail-way across the bridge.
Ultimate responsibility for the design and structure of the bridge lay with the Bridge-Builders guild itself, and they requested fifty additional hired labourers from the Barter guild.
Collings and another Barter guildsman left the city at once, and headed for the local settlements; meanwhile, I was taken north to the site of the bridge, and was placed in the charge of the supervising guildsman, Bridges Lerouex, Victoria’s father.
When I saw the chasm I realized that the bridge presented a major engineering problem. It was wide—about sixty yards across at the point selected for the bridge—and the chasm walls were crumbly and broken. A fast-running stream lay at the bottom. In addition, the northern side of the chasm was some ten feet lower than the southern side, which meant that the track would have to be laid across a ramp for some distance after the chasm.
The Bridge-Builders guild had decided that the bridge must be suspended.
There was insufficient time to build an arch or cantilever bridge, and the other favoured method—that of a timber scaffolding support in the chasm itself—was impracticable owing to the nature of the chasm.
Work started immediately on the building of four towers: two each to north and south of the chasm. These were apparently insubstantial affairs, built of tubular steel. During the construction one man fell from a tower and was killed. The work continued without delay. Shortly after this I was allowed to return to the city for one of my periods of leave and while I was there the city was winched forward. It was the first time I had been inside the city knowing that a winching operation was taking place, and I was interested to note that there was no discernable sensation of movement, although there was a slight increase in background noise, presumably from the winch motors.
It was during this leave too that Victoria told me she was pregnant; an announcement that caused her mother much joy. I was delighted, and for one of the few times in my life I drank too much wine and made a fool of myself. No one seemed to mind.
Back outside the city, I saw that the usual work on tracks and cables continued—if with a general shortage of labour—and that we were now only two miles from the site of the bridge. Speaking to one of the Traction guildsmen as I passed, I learnt that the city was only one and a half miles from optimum.
This information did not register until later, when I realized that the bridge itself must actually be to the north of optimum by about half a mile.
There followed a long period of delay. The bridge-building proceeded slowly. After the accident more stringent safety precautions were introduced, and there were recurring checks by Lerouex’s men on the strength of the structure. As we worked, we learnt that the track-laying operations at the city were going slowly; in one sense this suited us, as the bridge was a long way from being ready, but in another it was a cause for anxiety. Any time lost in the endless pursuit of the optimum was not good.
One day, word passed around the site that the bridge itself was at the point of optimum. This news caused me to look anew at our surroundings, but there seemed to be nothing unusual about optimum. Once again, I wondered what its special significance was, but as the days passed and the optimum moved on in its arcane way northwards it moved also from my thoughts.
With the resources of the city now being concentrated on the bridge, there was no chance of furthering my apprenticeship. Every ten days I was allowed my leave—as were all guildsmen on the site—but there was no thought now of my acquiring a general knowledge of the functions of the various guilds. The bridge was the priority.
Other work continued, though. A few yards to the south of the bridge a cable-stay emplacement was built, and the tracks were run up to it. In due course the city was winched along the tracks, and it stood silently near the chasm waiting for the completion of the bridge.