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 cooperative 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 cooperative 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 cooperative, and signed treaties with the first cooperative, 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.
A college of investigators had been founded to protect summits from lightning, to study and stabilize the weather, and to maintain ventilation. This college employed clever people from most companies in the work, for no single company could control the climate alone, and although each company liked to keep knowledge to itself they noticed that knowledge grew faster among people who shared it. I was a secretary in that college, recording its achievements and reporting them to the directors of the highest summit of all, for I had been born there.
One evening I sat beside the professor of air, checking rockets at a table on the balcony of our office. This was in a low part of the work above a gate where the coalfleets sailed in, for one of our jobs was to superintend the nearby smoke station. We had found that smoke, enclosed in bags, could lift large weights, and had used this discovery to create a new transport system. My chief was testing the powder which made the rockets fly, I tested the fuses. Without raising my eyes I could see fat black ships wallowing up the shining creek from a distant ocean. They docked directly under us but it would be a week before they unloaded. This was mid-summer and a general holiday. All building had stopped, most fires were damped, the college had made a gale the night before and swept the sky clear and blue. The cries of children and picnickers came tiny and shrill, like birdnotes, from the green hills and valleys beside the creek. These smooth slopes had been made by giving ashbings a coat of soil and turf, and the lowest people liked to holiday on them. Even I had happy memories of playing there as a child. But the companies had started turning the old ashes into brick, and already half the green park had been scraped flat. The diggers had uncovered a viaduct of arches built two thousand years before by the old imperial construction company. The sight might have given me a melancholy sense of the booms and slumps of history but I was too excited. I was going to visit the height of the axletree.
The chief packed his rockets in a slingbag. I shouldered a light launching tube. We walked through our offices in the thickness of the outer wall and down some steps to the smokestation.
A two-seater lift was locked to our platform. We climbed in and arranged cushions round us while the bag filled up. It was a light blue bag with the college sign on the side: a yellow silk flame with an eye in the centre. The chief unlocked us and we swung into the hot oblique updraught used by very important people. We crossed the docks, the retorts and crucibles of the furnacemen and a crowded circus cheering a ball-game. We passed through the grate of an ancient portcullis, ascended a canyon between sewage cylinders with cedar forests on top, then swooped through a ventilator in the first ceiling. Within an hour we had pierced ceilings which separated six national companies, the customs officers leaping up to salute us on the lip of the ventilators as soon as they recognized the college colours. In solemn music we crossed the great canteen, rising into the dome as the foreman of the work, like a bright white bee, served the sacred food to a swarm of faithful on the floor below. The ventilator in the dome opened into a windcave where an international orchestra was distiling rain with bright instruments into an aquarium that was the head water of three national rivers. We lost the hot updraught here but the chief steered us into a current flowing up a slide of rubble where an ancient summit had been shaken down by earthquakes during the first big slump. It was landscaped with heather, gorse and hunting lodges. Above that we entered the base of the tallest summit of all, ascending vertically through floors which were all familiar to me: hospitals, nurseries, schools, emporiums, casinos, banks, courts and boardrooms. Here we were stopped at a ventilator for the first time, since the highest inhabited parts of the tower belonged to the military. The chief spent a long time proving that his rockets were not weapons but tools for testing the upper air, and even so he was only allowed through when I showed the examining colonel, by a secret sign, that I was not only a member of the college but an agent of his company. So we were allowed to rise up the glass funnel to the scaffolding. On every side we saw officers in neat identical clothes tending the huge steel catapults and firing pans poised to pour down thunderbolts and lightning on the other parts of the work, especially toward towers with cooperative connections. We passed through a builders’ village, deserted except for its watchmen, then nothing surrounded us but a frame of slender rods and the deep blue blue blue of the gloaming sky. The thin cold air began to hurt my lungs. We stopped when our bag touched the highest platform. The chief slung the rockets from his shoulder and climbed a ladder to the very top. I followed him.