The City of Gold and Lead (The Tripods) by John Christopher Page B

The tentacle that still held my left arm released it and dropped back. The three eyes stared at me. Then the voice said, “Follow me, boy.”
    I had found my Master; or he, rather, had chosen his slave.

Seven

My Master’s Cat

    I was fortunate in my Master.
    He led me to his carriage, which was in a line of others outside the building, showed me into it, and drove us away. The driving would be one of my duties, he explained. (It was not difficult. They were moved by an invisible power that came from below the ground. There was little to do in the way of steering, and some device in the machine made collisions impossible.) I saw that some of the Masters with newly acquired slaves were already forcing them to learn this skill, but mine did not because he saw that I was tired and distressed. The carriage ran on very many small wheels, set beneath one face of a pyramid, the driver having a seat in the pointed front part for controlling it. MyMaster drove it to the place where he lived, in toward the center of the City.
    On the way I examined my surroundings. It was hard to make sense of the place—buildings and streets and ramps were at the same time very much like one another and confusingly different, their construction either unplanned or following a plan I could not begin to understand. Here and there I saw small areas which I supposed were meant for gardens. They were mostly triangular in shape, and filled with water, out of which grew strange plants of various colors—I saw red, brown, green, blue—but all somber. They all had the same general shape, too: a squatness at the base which tapered with height. Many of the garden pools had mists rising from them, and in some I saw Masters, moving slowly about or standing, like trees themselves, rooted in the water.
    My own Master lived in a tall pyramid overlooking a large garden pool. It was five-sided but looked more like one of the triangles of which the Masters seemed to be so fond since three of the sides were shorter than the others and formed almost a straight line. We left the carriage outside the door—I looked back and saw the ground open under it and take it in—and went into the building. At the center we entered a moving room, like the one that had taken us from the Hall of the Tripods. My stomach lurched as it whirred, but this time I understood what was happening—that the room was moving upward and we with it. We came out in a corridor and I trudged along in the Master’s wake to the door which was the entrance to his home.
    There was much that I only understood later, of course. The pyramid was divided into homes for the Masters. Inside there was a smaller pyramid, completely enclosed by the outer one, which was used for storerooms, the place where the carriages were kept, the communal place for slaves, and so on. The homes were in the outer section, and one could tell a Master’s importance in the City from the position of his home. Most important was the one right at the top—the pyramid on top of the pyramid. Next came the two triangular homes immediately below, and after that the homes at the corners of the pyramid, in descending order. My Master was only moderately important. His home was on a corner, but nearer the base than the apex.
    At first sight of the City, with all these towering peaks, I had thought the number of the Masters must be fantastically great. At closer quarters, I realized that the impression had been to some extent misleading. Everything was on a far bigger scale than the human one to which I was accustomed. The homes, in particular, were spacious, the rooms being large and very high, twenty feet or more.
    From the corridor, one came into a passage with several doors. (The doors were circular, and worked on the same principle as the one in the Tripod—a section swung inward and upward when a thing like a button was touched. There were no locks or bolts.) In one direction, the passage turned through a right angle at the end,