“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.
The most difficult and demanding aspect of the bridge-building came with running the chains across the chasm from the south towers to the north, then suspending the rail-way from them. Time was passing and Lerouex and the other guildsmen grew worried. I understood this was because as the optimum moved slowly northwards away from the bridge, the construction of the bridge itself would soon be laying itself open to the same problem that Malchuskin had shown me with the tracks to the south of the city: it was liable to buckle. Although the design of the bridge was intended to compensate for this to a certain extent, there was a definite limit to how long we could delay the crossing. Now work continued through the nights, lit by powerful arc-lamps powered from within the city. Leave was suspended, and a system of shifts devised.
As the slabs of the rail-way were laid, Maichuskin and the others put down tracks. Meanwhile, cable-stays were being erected on the northern side, just beyond the elaborate ramps that had been built.
The city was so close by, we were able to sleep in our quarters inside it, and I found a confusing difference between the extreme activity of the bridge site and the comparatively calm and normal atmosphere of everyday work inside the city. My behaviour evidently reflected this confusion, because for a while Victoria’s questions about the work outside were renewed.