She was at an interface of two realities: one was hers, one was his. However close they came together there would never be any contact between them. Like the graph line Destaine had drawn to approximate the reality he perceived, the nearer she came to him in one sense the further she moved away in another. Somehow, she had drawn herself into this drama, where one logic failed in the face of another, and she knew she was incapable of dealing with it.

Persuaded as she was by Helward’s sincerity, and the manifest existence of the city and its people, and further by the apparently strange concepts around which they had planned their survival, she could not eradicate from her mind the basic contradiction. The city and its people existed on Earth, the Earth she knew, and whatever she saw, whatever Helward said, there was no way around this. Evidence to the contrary made no sense.

But when the interface was challenged, there was an impasse.

Elizabeth said: “I’m going to leave the city tomorrow.”

“Come with me. I’m going north again.”

“No… I’ve got to get back to the village.”

“Is that the one where they bartered for the women?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going that way. We’ll ride together.”

Another impasse: the village lay to the south-west of the city.

“Why did you come to the city, Liz? You aren’t one of the local women.”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. You frightened me, but I was seeing the other men who were like you, trading with the village people. I wanted to find out what was going on. Now I wish I hadn’t, because you still frighten me.”

“I’m not raving at you again, am I?” he said.

She laughed… and she realized that it was for the first time since she came to the city.

“No, of course not,” she said. “It’s more… I can’t say. Everything I take for granted is different here in the city. Not everyday things, but the bigger things, like the reason for being. There’s a great concentration of determination here, as if the city itself is the only focus of all human existence. I know that’s not so. There are a million other things to do in the world, and survival is undoubtedly a drive, but not the primary one. Here the emphasis is on your concept of survival, at any cost. I’ve been outside the city, Helward, a long way outside the city. Whatever else you may think, this place is not the centre of the universe.”

“It is,” he said. “Because if we ever stopped believing that, we would all die.”

8

Leaving the city presented Elizabeth with no problems. She went down to the stables with Helward and another man, whom he introduced as Future Blayne, collected three horses, and rode in a direction which Helward declared was northwards. Again, she questioned his sense of direction as by her reckoning of the position of the sun the true direction was towards the south-west, but she made nothing of it. By this time she was so accustomed to the straightforward affronts to what she considered logic that she saw no point in remarking on them to him. She was content to accept the ways of the city, if not to understand them.

As they rode out from under the city, Helward pointed out the great wheels on which the city was mounted, and explained that the motion forwards was so slow as to be almost undetectable. However, he assured her, the city moved about one mile every ten days. Northwards, or towards the south-west, whichever way she cared to think of it.

The journey took two days. The men talked a lot, both to each other and to her, although not much of it made sense to her.

She felt that she had suffered an overload of new information, and could absorb no more.

On the evening of the first day they passed within a mile or so of her village, and she told Helward she was going there.

“No… come with us. You can go back later.”

She said: “I want to go back to England. I think I can help you.”

“You ought to see this.”

“What is it?”

“We’re not sure,” said Blayne. “Helward thinks you might be able to tell us.”

She resisted for a few more minutes, but in the end went on with them.

It was curious how she succumbed so readily to the various involvements of these people. Perhaps it was because she could identify with some of them, and perhaps it was because the society within the city was a curiously civilized existence — for all its strange ways — in a countryside that had been wasted by anarchy for generations. Even in the few weeks she had been in the village the peasant outlook, the unquestioning lethargy, the inability to cope with even the most minor of problems had sapped her will to meet the challenge of her work. But the people of Helward’s city were of a different order. Evidently they were some offshoot community that had somehow managed to preserve themselves during the Crash, and now lived on past that time. Even so, the makings of a regulated society were there: the evident discipline, the sense of purpose, and a real and vital understanding of their own identity, however much of a dichotomy existed between inner similarities and outer differences.

So when Helward requested her to go with them, and Blayne supported him, she could put up no opposition. She had by her own actions involved herself in the affairs of their community. The consequences of her abandoning the village would have to be faced later — she could justify her absence by saying she wanted to know where the women were being taken — but she felt now that she must follow this through. Ultimately, there would be some official body who would have to rehabilitate the people of the city, but until then she was personally involved.

They spent the night under canvas. There were only two tents, and the men gallantly offered her one of them for her own use… but before that they spent a long time talking.

Helward had evidently told Blayne about her, and how she was different, as he saw her, from both the people of the city and the people of the villages.

Blayne now spoke directly to her, and Helward stayed in the background. He spoke only rarely, and then to confirm things that Blayne said. She liked the other man, and found him direct in his manner: he tried not to evade any of her questions.

By and large he affirmed what she had learned. He spoke of Destaine and his Directive, he spoke of the city and its need to move forward, and he talked of the shape of the world. She had learnt not to argue with the city outlook, and she listened to what they said.

When she eventually crawled into her sleeping-bag she was exhausted from the long ride through the day, but sleep came slowly. The interface had hardened.

Though the confidence in her own logic had not been shaken, her understanding of the city people’s had been deepened. They lived, they said, on a world where the laws of nature were not the same. She was prepared to believe that… or rather, prepared to believe that they were sincere, but mistaken.

It was not the exterior world that was different, but their perception of it. By what manner could she change that?

Emerging from woodland they encountered a region of coarse scrubland, where tall grasses and scrawny bushes grew wildly. There were no tracks here and progress was slow. There was a cool, steady wind blowing now, and an exhilarating freshness sharpened their senses.

Gradually, the vegetation gave way to a hard, tough grass, growing in sandy soil. Neither of the men said anything; Helward in particular stared ahead of him as he rode, letting his horse find its own route.

Elizabeth saw that ahead of them the vegetation gave way altogether, and as they breasted a ridge of loose sand and gravel, only a few yards of low sand-dunes lay between them and the beach. Her horse, who had already sensed the salt in the air, responded readily to the kick of her heels and they cantered down across the sand. For a few heady minutes she gave the horse its head, and exulted in the freedom and joy of galloping along a beach, its surface unuttered, unbroken, untouched by anything but waves for decades.