The “open city” system had remained, and non-guildsmen were allowed to attend Navigators’ meetings as spectators. Within a few hours of the announcement about the barter for women being renewed, everyone in the city knew, and there were many voices raised in protest. Nevertheless, the decision was implemented.
Although hired labour was again being used, it was to a far lesser extent than before, and there was always a considerable number of people from the city working on the tracks and cables. There was not much that wasn’t known about the city’s operations.
But general education about the real nature of the world on which we lived was poor.
During one debate, I heard the word “Terminator” used for the first time. It was explained that the Terminators were a group of people who actively opposed the continued movement of the city, and were committed to halting it. As far as was known, the Terminators were not militant and would take no direct action, but they were gaining a considerable amount of support within the city.
It was decided that a programme of re-education should begin, to dramatize the necessity of moving the city northwards.
At the next meeting there was a violent disruption.
A group of people burst into the chamber during the session, and tried to take the chair.
I was not surprised to see that Victoria was among them.
After a noisy argument, the Navigators summoned the assistance of the Militia and the meeting was closed.
This disruption, perversely, had the effect desired by the Terminator movement. The Navigators’ meetings were once again closed to general session. The dichotomy in the opinions of the ordinary people of the city widened. The Terminators had a considerable amount of support, but no real authority.
A few incidents followed. A cable was found cut in mysterious circumstances, and one of the Terminators tried one day to speak to the hired labour in an attempt to get them to return to their villages… but by and large the Terminator movement was no more than a thorn in the side of the Navigators.
Re-education went well. A series of lectures was mounted, attempting to explain the peculiar dangers of this world, and they were well attended. The design of the hyperbola was adopted as the city’s motif, and it was worn as an ornament on the guildsmen’s cloaks, stitched inside the circle on their breasts.
I don’t know how much of this was understood by the ordinary people of the city; I overheard some discussion of it, but the influence of the Terminators perhaps weakened its credibility. For too long the people of the city had been allowed by omission to assume that the city existed on a world like Earth planet, if not Earth planet itself. Perhaps the real situation was one too outrageous to be given credence: they would listen to what they were told, and perhaps understand it, but I think the Terminators held a greater emotional appeal.
In spite of everything, the city continued to move slowly northwards. Sometimes I would take time off from other matters, and try to view it in my mind’s eye as a tiny speck of matter on an alien world; I would see it as an object of one universe trying to survive in another; as a city full of people, holding on to the side of a forty-five degree slope, pulling its way against a tide of ground on a few thin strands of cable.
With the return to a more stable environment for the city, the task of future surveying became more routine.
For our purposes the ground to the north of the city was divided into a series of segments, radiating from optimum at five degree intervals. Under normal circumstances the city would not seek a route that was more than fifteen degrees away from due north, but the city’s extra capability to deviate did allow considerable flexibility from this for short periods.
Our procedure was simple. Surveyors would ride north from the city — either alone or, if they chose, in pairs — and conduct a comprehensive survey of the segment allotted to them. There was plenty of time available to us.
On many occasions I would find myself seduced by the feeling of freedom in the north, and it was one which Blayne once told me was common to most Futures. Where was the urgency to return if a day spent lazily on the bank of a river wasted only a few minutes of the city’s time?
There was a price to pay for the time spent in the north, and it was one that did not seem real to me until I saw its effects for myself. A day spent idling in the north was a day in my life. In fifty days I aged the equivalent of five miles in the city, but the city people had aged only four days. It did not matter at first: our return visits to the city were so comparatively frequent that I saw and felt no difference. But in time, the people I had known — Victoria, Jase, Malchuskin — seemed not to have aged at all, and catching a sight of myself in a mirror one day I saw the effect of the differential.
I did not want to settle down permanently with another girl; Victoria’s notion that the ways of the city would disrupt any relationship took greater meaning every time I considered it.
The first of the transferred women were coming to the city, and as an unmarried man I was told that I was eligible to mate with one of them temporarily. At first I resisted the idea because, to be frank, the idea repelled me. It seemed to me that even a purely physical affair should have some complement in shared emotional feelings, but the manner in which the selection of the partners was arranged was as subtle as it could be under the circumstances. Whenever I was in the city I and other eligible men were encouraged to mix socially with the girls in a recreation-room set aside for this purpose. It was embarrassing and humiliating at first, but I grew used to these occasions and eventually my inhibitions waned.
In time, I formed a mutual liking with a girl named Dorita, and soon she and I were allocated a cabin we could share. We did not have much in common, but her attempts to speak English were delightful, and she seemed to enjoy my company. Soon she was pregnant, and between my surveying missions I watched her pregnancy proceed.
Slowly, so unbelievably slowly.
I began to grow increasingly frustrated with the apparently sluggish progress of the city. By my own subjective time scale, a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred miles had elapsed since I had become a Future guildsman, and yet the city was still in sight of those hills we had been passing through at the time of the attacks.
I applied to transfer temporarily to another guild; much as I enjoyed the leisured life in the future I felt that time was passing me by.
For a few miles I worked with the Traction guild, and it was during this period that Dorita gave birth. She produced twins: a boy and a girl. Much celebration… but I found that the city life discontented me in another way. I had been working with Jase, someone who had once been several miles older than me. Now he was clearly younger than me, and we had little in common.
Shortly after she had given birth, Dorita left the city and I returned to my own guild.
Like the Future guildsmen I had seen as an apprentice, I was becoming a misfit in the city. I enjoyed my own company, relished those stolen hours in the north, was uncomfortable when in the city. I had developed an interest in drawing, but told almost no one about it. I did my guild work as quickly and efficiently as possible, then rode off alone through the future countryside, sketching what I saw, trying to find in line drawings some expression of a terrain where time could almost stand still.
I watched the city from a distance, seeing it as alien as it was; not of this world, no longer even of me. Mile by mile it hauled itself forward, never finding, nor even seeking, a final resting place.
PART FOUR