No one alive could say how long the city had been turning, or if it might be possible to stop it.
Certainly there were those who had tried. Couldn’t it be as simple as descending to where the great, flat wheel of the city ground against the earth and sticking something sufficiently large between them?
At least one man who no longer had both the arms he’d been born with would say that, no, it couldn’t be that simple. Besides, others would argue, wasn’t it possible the turning of the wheel was powering something important? What if the mighty course of the river, or, as the blessed sunward chapel believed, the very course of days and nights was bound to its ponderous progress? Talk of evaporation and grand mountain lakes and celestial bodies was all well and good, but the turning of the wheel was what they all knew. They could stand on its edge and look down at the bald track it had worn into the great golden plains. They could walk opposite its slow revolution so that time seemed to move strangely, the sun slanting the wrong way, certain mossy sides of buildings lying always in shadow.
Had anyone ever been below the wheel to check its mechanisms? What they might be driving, or if they were, themselves, in good condition? Now that question would have a high cost in laughter, whether asked in the sunward chapel or the sacrilegious little tavern that only followed the moon. Go under the wheel? Dig under the city? What a lot of work that would be to, at best, find oneself crunched to pieces in an underworld of sound, mysterious machinery. And at worst…well, did any of them really want to know how the city ran? Maybe it was best for all concerned to just know that it did. Maybe the clanking sounds that wandered beneath the moonlight were only the lost shovels of those who hadn’t been so prudent.
