Read Online Inverted World by Christopher Priest - Free Book Online

in structure to mine. The only difference was that there appeared to be less emphasis on experience, and more on theoretical education. Consequently, she had already learnt far more about the city and how it was run internally than I had.
    I didn’t feel free to speak of my work outside, so I listened to what she said with a great deal of interest.
    She said that she had been told that there were two great shortages in the city: one was water—which I knew from what Malchuskin had said—and the other was population.
    “But there are plenty of people in the city,” I said.
    “Yes … but the rate of live births has always been low, and it’s getting worse. What makes this even more serious is that there is a predominance in the live births of male babies. No one is really sure why.”
    “It’s the synthetic food,” I said sardonically.
    “It might be.” She had missed the point. “Until I left the crèche, I had only vague notions of what the rest of the city might be like… but I had always assumed that everyone in it had been born here.”
    “Isn’t that so?”
    “No. There are a lot of women brought into the city in an effort to boost the population. Or, more specifically, in the hope they’ll produce female babies.”
    I said: “My mother came from outside the city.”
    “Did she?” For the first time since we had met Victoria looked ill at ease. “I didn’t know that.”
    “I thought it would be obvious.”
    “I suppose it was, but somehow I never thought.
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
    Abruptly, Victoria fell silent. It really wasn’t of much concern to me, and I regretted having mentioned it.
    “Tell me more about this,” I said.
    “No … there’s not much more. What about you? What’s your guild like?”
    “It’s O.K.,” I said.
    Quite apart from the fact that the oath forbade me to speak about it, I felt no inclination to talk. In that abrupt silence from Victoria I had gained a distinct impression that there had been more to say, but that some discretion prevented her from doing so. For the whole of my life—or at least as much of it as I could remember—the absence of my mother had been treated as a matter of fact. My father, whenever we spoke of it, talked factually about it, and there seemed to be no stigma attached. Indeed, many of the boys in the crèche had been in the same situation as I and, what is more, most of the girls. Until the subject had provoked this reaction in Victoria, I’d never thought about it.
    “You’re something of an oddity,” I said, hoping to get her to return to the subject by approaching it from a different direction. “Your mother is still in the city.”
    “Yes,” she said.
    So that was to be the end of it. I decided to let it drop. In any event, I hadn’t especially wanted to discuss matters outside ourselves. I had come to the city to spend my time getting to know Victoria, not to talk about genealogy.
    But the feeling persisted; the conversation had died.
    “What’s out there?” I said, indicating the window. “Can we go there?”
    “If you like. I’ll show you.”
    I followed her out of the room, and along the corridor to where a door led to the outside. There was not much to see: the open space was no more than an alley running between the two parts of the residential block. At one end of it there was a raised section, reached by a wooden staircase. We walked first to the opposite end, where another door led back into the city; returning, we climbed the steps and came out on a small platform, where several wooden seats were placed, and where there was room to move with some freedom. On two sides the platform was bounded by higher walls, presumably containing other parts of the city’s interior, and the side by which access was gained looked down over the roofs of the residential blocks and along the alleyway. But on the fourth side the view was uninterrupted, and it was possible to see out into the surrounding countryside.