Strata

by Terry Pratchett

  The most obvious thing was the weapon that was sweeping down towards her. Instinctively she flung up an arm, which was still holding Marco’s club. The scythe hit it hard, and shivered into pieces.

  Kin started to laugh. The thing in front of her was a skeleton in a black bathrobe, grinning perplexedly at a wooden handle that now had no blade. Who were They trying to scare?

  The scythe handle in Death’s white claws flowed. What it became was at least appropriate to the age of genocide, and Kin had time to wonder where They had found the pattern. There were two rows of oscillating teeth and a brisk little engine.

  A power-scythe. Kin had used them herself to clear scrub on new worlds.

  Death advanced. Had he lunged Kin wouldn’t have survived, but ancient habits die hard. He swung, instead. And Kin dived forward. She heard the power-scythe crash down behind her and gyrate across the floor as she stared up into eyeless sockets. Struggling, she brought one knee up – a pointless tactic that merely jarred her kneecap. Death had no balls.

  A necklace of bony fingers closed round her throat. She lashed out with the back of her hand, willing the blow home. It hit Death in the face, and then there was something like an explosion in a domino factory.

  Kin was standing alone. There was a black robe on the floor in front of her, and a few pieces of bone scattered around. They disappeared in a series of small thunderclaps. A larger one marked the disappearance of Marco and Silver.

  Kin disappeared, too.

  A minute later a couple of cuboid robots trundled along the tunnel and started to clean up the mess.

  Now she was in a—

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No more. I give in. Do you know how long it was since I last had a drink?’

  A glass of water appeared hovering in the air in front of her. Kin wasn’t particularly surprised. She caught it gingerly, and drank it. When she tried to hang the glass in the air it plummeted down and smashed.

  Now she was in a – call it a control room. The disc control room. This had to be it.

  It was surprisingly small. It could have been the flight deck of a medium-large ship, except that a ship would have more screens and switches. This had one screen and one bank of switches, in front of a deep black chair. Over the chair was what could have been a computer-link helmet.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘Not me. I’m not putting that on.’

  The screen flickered and a word appeared.

  BETS?

  Kin moved forward and got a better view of the chair. It was a disturbing complicated shape, and looked almost alive.

  Its occupant was dead. Not offensively dead, because the air in the room was crisp and dry and had expertly mummified him, but undeniably dead. If he had believed in reincarnation, he’d come back as a corpse.

  There was an old wound on one withered arm. It didn’t look fatal, but there were antique blood stains on the floor. He could have bled to death but that seemed a derisive death for a disc master.

  If he was a disc master. Somehow Kin had never brought herself to think of the disc’s overlords as human, but the man in the chair was human enough. Given a heavy shave and a fresh skin he could have called anyone cousin.

  The screen in front of the chair blurred, then produced a word. It hung in front of Kin, glowing pitifully.

  HELP

  Marco crouched in the semi-darkness when he next heard the voice.

  After a while he surfaced from the mists of rage enough to realize that it was talking to him. It was familiar. The ape-descended woman?

  ‘Kin Arad?’ he croaked.

  ‘Marco, where’s Silver?’ the voice insisted.

  Marco’s eyes felt like fire pits, but the light from the millions of red glows around him suited his vision. He saw a shape a few metres away, eclipsing a constellation on the floor.

  ‘The bear thing is here. She is breathing.’

  ‘Marco,’ said the air. ‘I don’t know how good I am at this thing. You’ll have to help. Don’t move.’

  The air stirred in front of the kung, and there was a knife. Three of Marco’s hands caught it before it hit the ground. In the red light, he stared dully at the jewel-encrusted handle.

  ‘Don’t waste time,’ said the ape voice. ‘I want you to cut a piece out of Silver. Don’t be too enthusiastic. Hide will do, but the flesh would be better.’

  Memories were dripping into Marco’s mind. He looked at the knife, then thought about Silver.

  ‘Not on your life,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Do it. The next knife will arrive at speed if you don’t, and you’d better believe me.’

  With a roar of rage and frustration Marco bounded forward and slashed at Silver’s arm. The big body may have quivered slightly.

  ‘That’ll do. The blood on the knife will do. Let go the knife, Marco. Let go of the knife. Let-go-of-the-knife.’

  Marco was thirsty. He hadn’t eaten in memory. His skin itched in the warm dry air. He was damned if he’d let go of a weapon. If he thought about it at all, that was what he thought.

  ‘Okay. We’ll do it the hard way.’

  There was just something about the voice that made Marco loose his grip on the handle. Thus it was that, when the knife popped out of existence, it merely stripped the flesh of his palm instead of taking his hand off at the wrist.

  Methodically he gripped his wrist to stop the blood flow, and let the pain batter outside his brain. He was still staring at the wound when a rush of air and a thump made him look up.

  Something long and bloody was lying on the floor beside Silver. And the shand’s arm was moving slowly. It fumbled around the meat, gripped it, pulled it dreamily to a mouth strung with saliva.

  Silver ate.

  ‘Where are we?’ said Marco at last.

  Kin’s voice said, ‘I’m not entirely sure. Are you okay?’

  ‘I should like a drink. And some food. You had me slice the shand to get a protein sample?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t move.’

  Something like a squashy bulb of water appeared beside Marco, and bounced limply on the floor. He picked it up and bit into it with shameful haste.

  ‘Food now,’ said Kin. Another bulb, filled with red sludge, rolled obscenely across the floor. Marco tried it. It tasted like solid boredom.

  ‘It’s the best I can manage,’ said Kin. ‘About the only damage you did was upset the disc master’s dumbwaiter circuits. I’ve got robots repairing them, but until then the menu can just about manage to be unexciting.’

  ‘Silver has fared better,’ said Marco indistinctly.

  ‘I told you I hadn’t got time for niceties,’ said Kin. ‘She’s eating shand, cultured from her own cells. Don’t ask me how it was done in seconds, I only gave the order. It might be an idea not to tell her, though.’

  ‘Yes. You are in a position of influence?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘Good. Get me out of here!’

  There was a pause. Then he heard Kin say, ‘I’ve been giving a lot of thought to that.’

  ‘You’ve been giving a lot of thought to it?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to it. You’re in a sort of hold-for-study chamber. There’s no way in or out except by teleportation, and if you knew what I know about that you’d rather stay in there and starve. I daren’t cut in in case you’re harmed. So, all things considered …’

  A long shape exploded into being a metre from Marco, and landed heavily. He picked it up and looked at it suspiciously.

  ‘It looks like an industrial molecule stripper,’ he said.

  ‘It is. I suggest you use it with caution.’

  Marco grimaced in the hellish light and pointed the thing.

  A section of chamber wall became a fine fog. He switched off hastily, and looked round for Silver.

  The shand was kneeling, holding her head.

  ‘How do you feel?’ said Marco, in a concerned tone. He held the stripper lightly, not quite pointing it at Silver. The shand squinte
d at him vaguely.

  ‘Odd things been happening …’ she began.

  Marco helped her to her feet, a more or less token gesture since she weighed ten times his weight – and he needed one hand to keep the stripper not quite pointing at her.

  ‘Right now, can you walk?’

  She could stagger. Marco peered out of the chamber, into a dimly-lit tunnel. Two small cuboid robots were fretting over the still-settling dust of the wall. He glanced back at Silver, and opted to point the stripper’s flared nozzle at a questing waldo.

  ‘Lay off the hardware,’ said the robot, backing away.

  ‘Kin Arad?’ said Marco.

  ‘Marco, that weapon is for your own peace of mind. But if you use it, I’ll rip your arms off from here. And I can.’

  Marco considered this for several moments, while Silver climbed laboriously out of the chamber. Then he shrugged with all four shoulders, and let the weapon thump on the floor.

  ‘Monkey logic,’ he said. ‘I’ll never understand it.’

  ‘I thought you thought you were human,’ said the robot with Kin’s voice.

  ‘So? All the thinking in the worlds doesn’t change some things.’

  ‘Cogito ergo kung,’ said the robot. ‘Follow me, please.’

  They fell in behind it as it rolled off along the tunnel.

  An hour later they were still walking. They had crossed wide metal chasms on lattice bridges and crouched in alcoves as giant machines thundered down side tunnels. On one occasion the little cube had beckoned them to follow it on to a lift platform. At the next level down the lift had stopped again and a dozen humming golden cylinders had drifted on, smelling of ozone.

  They followed narrow walkways between topless towering machines, which boomed. ‘Krells,’ said Silver.

  ‘Huh?’

  The shand grinned. ‘Didn’t you ever see “Forbidden Planet”? Human movie. They remade it five, six times. I had a walk-on part in one, before I went to college.’

  ‘Can’t say I recall anything.’

  ‘… I had to thump doors, mostly, and roar … had to share my dressing room with the robot, too. He was human.’

  ‘A human robot?’

  ‘The rest of the cast were actor-robots, you see. But there was this robot in the plot, and they couldn’t find a robot who could act … robotlike. They had to hire a human. There was a very impressive scene inside a big machine built by the Krells, I think it was. Just like this. Krells, you understand, being fictional creatures invented for the purposes of the movie …’ Silver broke off when she saw Marco’s face.

  He sighed. ‘We have been around humans too long you and I,’ he said. ‘We have been tainted by their madnesses.’

  ‘I thought you were brought up on Earth? Are you not legally human?’

  ‘My race papers are up there in the rest of the ship. Big deal.’

  Silver grunted. ‘Consider yourself a cosmospolitan, then.’

  ‘What does that really mean, my friend?’

  ‘It means the voluntary subjugation of one’s racial awareness in the light of the basic unity of sapient kind.’

  Marco growled. ‘It doesn’t mean that at all. It means that we learn to speak languages that monkey tongues can handle, and we get along in their world. Ever see a human act like a shand, or a kung?’

  ‘No,’ Silver conceded. ‘But, on the other hand, Kin Arad is free and we were imprisoned. Humans always take the lead. Humans always get what they want. I like humans. My race likes humans. Maybe if we didn’t like humans, we’d be dead. What’s that?’

  Marco followed her gaze. Half a mile away a tower loomed above the city-sized machines. It seemed to be made of giant balls stuck one atop another, and it glowed dull red. Silver pointed out the robots that clustered on the gantries that surrounded it, but Marco had to be content with a vague, eye-watering impression of something huge and ominous.

  ‘A giant coffee percolator?’ he hazarded.

  Silver shouted at the little robot, which had rolled on ahead. It reversed neatly.

  Silver indicated the stack of spheres that disappeared into the roof of the cavern.

  ‘Basically,’ it said in Kin’s voice, ‘it’s a simple device for heating rock to melting point and ejecting it under pressure.’

  ‘Why?’ said Marco.

  ‘Volcano,’ said the robot.

  ‘All that,’ said the kung, ‘to give the disc volcanoes? Madness!’

  The robot rolled away.

  ‘You say that now,’ it said. ‘You wait until you see the earthquake machines.’

  The journey under the disc took two days, as far as Marco and Silver could calculate. Sometimes they rode, crouching on flat trucks that glided along low tunnels with agonizing slowness, but more often they walked. Climbed. Inched along ledges. Ran like hell across switch yards, where sub-disc machines shunted and thundered on errands of their own.

  Sometimes they came across dumbwaiters, perched incongruously in the whirring underworld. They had a new look unlike their surroundings, which were worn. Well-looked after, carefully maintained, but worn.

  Marco raised the subject while they were sitting with their backs against a dumbwaiter.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘If the disc people had an industrial revolution and then took a look at the underside of their world, it’d scare the life out of them.’

  Silver chewed on another mouthful of what, Marco presumed, was lightly-cooked shand.

  ‘It seems remarkably remiss of the disc builders to allow this dereliction,’ she said. ‘I have noticed quite a number of obviously broken-down devices. Surely they could be repaired?’

  ‘Who repairs the machines that do the repairing?’ said Marco. ‘A machine like the disc must blow a whole lot of fuses in a hundred years or so. What do you do when the robot that repairs the machines that make the parts for the factory that builds the robots that service the waldoes that make the fuses crashes its cog? Unless you get periodic servicing from outside, the disc gradually breaks down.’

  ‘We could ask the robot,’ said Silver.

  It was a sick joke. The robot would answer any direct question about the mechanical scenery – they had been treated to a ten-minute lecture on the tide regulation machinery, for example – but ignored all the others. Marco had toyed with the idea of prising its lid off with something, but allowed caution to get the better of him.

  ‘The place with the red lights must have been out near the disc rim,’ said Silver. ‘I have a feeling we’re approaching the hub again. Perhaps we can ask Kin.’

  The robot, which had been sitting silently a few metres away, rolled forward.

  ‘We are refreshed?’ it asked cheerfully. ‘We will proceed?’

  They stood up stiffly. The cuboid robot led them along a catwalk that opened on to a wide circular gallery, brilliantly lit. Most of the light came from the luminous mist overhead, but an appreciable amount came from the tiny actinic sun.

  It floated perhaps a hundred metres over a perfect relief model of the disc surface, several hundred metres across. Except that relief maps didn’t have tiny clouds, trailing minute shadows across the land. Marco had never seen them with active volcanoes, either.

  There was no railing to the gallery. The disc-map glittered a metre below it, sunlight glinting off seas that looked disconcertingly real.

  Marco stared down for a long time. Then he said, ‘I give up. It’s beautiful. What’s it for?’

  ‘One thinks of architect’s models,’ rumbled Silver. ‘However, let me draw your attention to a flaw. See over there, just beyond the inland sea?’

  Marco squinted, and gave up. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The disc builders either had damn good eyesight or all this was just for show.’

  He looked around for the robot. It wasn’t there.

  ‘We wish to view the disc map more closely,’ Silver was saying to the empty air. Something like a flying slab of glass glided around the map from the far side and hovered in front of her. She steppe
d aboard gingerly. Under her weight it didn’t even wobble.

  ‘I see it,’ said Marco, ‘but I don’t believe it. How did you do it?’

  ‘Just a knack,’ said Silver. ‘I think I’m getting to understand the way things work around here. Coming?’

  The glass carpet responded neatly to Silver’s spoken directions. It skimmed across the map mere centimetres from the clouds. Marco had a strange urge to reach down and stir some into a cyclone. The map was frighteningly real. If he leaned over and touched it, would a giant hand appear in the disc sky?

  When the shand spoke again he looked down obediently through the glass.

  There was scarred land down there, burned and broken. And in the centre of it was a neat round hole.

  Later Silver found that raising the platform slightly magnified the scene immediately beneath. There appeared to be no limit to the resolving power. There were people down there, microscopic figures that were almost immobile.

  Only almost. Every second the scene flickered, and the figures took up slightly different positions. Marco spent an age entranced at the sight of a homunculus cutting wood. Flick – the axe in the air – flick – biting into the tree – flick – back in the air; and a wedge of raw wood bitten by magic out of the trunk.

  ‘It could be done,’ he said, half to himself. ‘All you’d have to do is correlate sensory inputs and keep reprojecting them as a hologram.’

  ‘You’d need many inputs.’

  ‘Billions. You’d have to plug into the cognitive centre of every living creature.’

  ‘Have you noticed the blank patches?’

  ‘Maybe a bird wasn’t looking in that direction at the time.’

  Silver nodded gravely, and looked around the big map hall.

  ‘Presumably the map of the disc also includes its own miniature disc map,’ she said slowly. She met Marco’s gaze with a quiet smile. Then she ordered the platform to go to the map’s hub. Neither doubted that the map hall was at the hub.

  They looked down at the dome. Silver tried some commands, which appeared to have no effect. So she lowered the platform.