Staring down between their feet they saw earth and metal melt and drift aside. Disc machinery rose and faded away. There was something now, the edge of something …
There was a little round disc. At its centre was a grey and white speck, which resolved into two figures. One was big and furry, the other wiry and thin as a twig. Both were staring intently at something between their feet …
Flick. The wiry one was looking up now, at the miniature gallery that encircled the map of the map. Flick. There was a figure there. Flick. It raised a hand. Flick.
‘Hi,’ said Kin.
Silver was not expert in human expressions, but by the look of her the woman had not been sleeping. In fact she was swaying slightly.
‘Glad you could make it,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t get the computers to teleport you, there’s a thirty per cent chance the power would fail while you were out of phase. Follow me. There isn’t a lot of time left.’
‘We—’ began Marco.
Kin shook her head violently. ‘No we didn’t,’ she said. ‘Come on!’
The kung started to protest again, and Silver gripped him firmly by a couple of arms. Kin was already hurrying down a tunnel leading off the hall.
It emerged in a metal cave half as big again as the one they had just left. It contained a spacecraft. At least, that was the first impression …
It didn’t have any motors. Apart from strangely large altitude jets in about the right places for altitude jets, the hull seemed to be all cabin, with enough windows to grow grapes. Cuboid robots were still clustered around it. One of them was spraying paint on the landing gear. Two others were busy on a stubby wing.
Kin was already aboard. Snarling, Marco bounded up the short ladder and saw her sitting at the horseshoe-shaped instrument console. Wires trailed away from it to boxes bolted haphazardly around the interior of the cabin. In the centre of the floor a regiment of tiny cubes were engaged in feverish activity around a tangle of wires and metal shapes. One of them butted Marco politely on the foot until he moved.
‘Silver, shut that door,’ said Kin. ‘Hurry! And now pray to any convenient gods.’
She turned and addressed the air, in a tone of voice that made it clear it was not the others she was talking to.
‘We’re ready.’
The reply came from everywhere.
WE HAVE A BARGAIN?
‘It’s a bargain,’ said Kin. There was a pause. The ship trembled slightly. Marco looked out and saw the cave walls slipping past.
‘Don’t say anything rash,’ said Kin. ‘Don’t even think, if you want to get home. Have a little faith, will you? Please?’
Sudden sunlight filled the cabin. Looking up, Marco and Silver saw a square of golden sky appear as sections of the roof slid back. The ship accelerated upwards on its section of floor.
By their feet a small robot tugged a length of tubing out of the heap in the centre of the cabin. One of its many arms swung down, hesitated, gripped the tube. The metal broke where it touched.
Silver jerked her head forward sharply as something tickled her ears. When she looked round cautiously she was eyeball to scanner with a little metal cube which was hanging from the cabin roof by three arms. It had no face, but managed to look embarrassed. Its fourth arm held a pair of calipers.
Marco hissed and struck out at another machine that was trying to climb up his leg. It landed on its back, scrabbling at the deck with all six arms.
Kin laughed hysterically.
‘Don’t be childish,’ she gasped. ‘When we flip into interspace you’d like to be in a contour-couch, wouldn’t you? All they want are your measurements. DO IT!’
Marco opened his mouth to protest, and something touched his face. Looking down, he saw a metal tape unrolling on its way to the deck. He looked up. A robot was dangling above his head. He sighed.
The ship rose into daylight. It emerged in the middle of a black sand beach, with the copper dome of the hub behind it. The sea moved lazily a few metres away. There was a shudder as the lift platform locked.
Now the cubes were spraying foam over three structures of curved tubing which they had bolted to the floor. The foam congealed into about the right sized hollows for a shand, a kung and a human.
‘We’ve got a little time until lift-off,’ said Kin, and stood up. ‘Has anybody got any questions? Yeah. I thought you might. Okay, but get in the couches.’
‘You don’t expect me to get us into interspace from the disc surface?’ asked Marco. ‘We wouldn’t have a chance!’
‘You did it from Kung,’ said Kin, settling into her couch.
‘Kung hasn’t got a damn great dome over the sky!’
‘No. I don’t expect to flip yet, anyway. We need the couches for the primary launch.’
‘But who is going to be at the controls? I can’t reach them from here!’
‘No one is going to be at the controls. There aren’t any for the launch. Trust me.’
‘No controls and you want me to trust you?’
‘Yes. I want you to trust me.’
Marco lay down and reached for the couch straps. Silver was already prone. They lay in silence for a while.
Then Kin said, ‘Marco, can you see that round screen from your couch?’
‘I see it.’
‘It’s radar. Keep an eye on it. And now, perhaps I owe you an explanation …’
HELP, said the screen.
Trying not to think about it, Kin lifted the occupant out of the chair, and sat down in front of the pleading letters. Keeping the hovering helmet in the top of her eye, she ran her hand over the arm.
Nothing happened, except that the screen now read YOU ARE KIN ARAD.
‘That’s—’ Kin’s voice sounded faint in the closeness of the room. She cleared her throat. ‘That is correct,’ she said. ‘Who are you?’
WE BELIEVE YOU HAVE REFERRED TO US AS THE DISC MASTERS, ALTHOUGH WE CALL OURSELVES THE COMMITTEE.
‘It’s got a nice democratic ring about it. Let me see you.’
IS THAT AN EXPRESS WISH?
‘Well, I’ve come a long way to meet you. This is hardly an intimate conversation, you must admit.’ Kin looked around; looking for doors, hidden cameras. The walls were blank.
YOU MISUNDERSTAND US, WE ARE MACHINES.COMPUTERS, JAGO JALO CALLED US, WE FAIL TO UNDERSTAND YOUR SURPRISE.
‘I’m not surprised,’ lied Kin.
THEN WE SUGGEST YOU SUE YOUR FACE FOR SLANDER.
‘Why do you need help? It’s me that needs help. What has happened to my friends?’
THEY ARE SAFELY IN PROTECTIVE CUSTODY. THEY WERE TOO VIOLENT TO BE ALLOWED TO ROAM LOOSE, OF COURSE. DO YOU WISH THEM TO BE FREED, AND FOR US TO PROVIDE YOU WITH TRANSPORT TO YOUR HOME WORLD? IF YOU SO ORDER, IT WILL BE DONE.
‘I can order you?’
YOU SIT IN THE CHAIR. THERE IS NO OTHER INCUMBENT. YOU ARE THE CHAIRMAN. THEREFORE YOU CAN GIVE THE ORDERS. WE IMPLORE YOU TO DO SO.
‘You can build me a ship?’
WE BUILT A SHIP FOR JAGO JALO. WE ASSISTED HIM, DESPITE ALL THAT HE DID. CHOICE DOES NOT EXIST FOR MACHINES IN MATTERS OF THIS NATURE. JALO CHOSE TO FLEE THE DISC RATHER THAN LEARN MORE ABOUT IT.
Kin considered this carefully. When she spoke, she spoke slowly.
‘You will give me a ship, but if I chose to leave the disc you won’t tell me any more about it?’
YES.
‘But you said I could give the orders.’
YES. HOWEVER, WE BELIEVE WE WILL SHORTLY EXPERIENCE A SLIGHT MALFUNCTION IN OUR AUDITORY CIRCUITRY. IT MAY PREVENT US FROM HEARING ANY SUBSEQUENT ORDERS.
Kin smiled. ‘Then there’s no choice, is there? Not against blackmail. Tell me about the disc.’
‘Kin,’ said Marco urgently. ‘There’s something on the screen.’
‘It’s about time,’ replied Kin. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘Yeah, I remember. Trust you. It’s bloody big.
What is it?’
‘It’s our launch vehicle.’
> Kin leaned back in the oh-so-easy chair and stared at the blank screen for a long time.
‘You’re wearing out,’ she said. ‘That’s why the seas are going mad and the climate’s shifting. I understand that. The disc is a machine. Machines have a finite life. That’s why the Company builds planets.’
PLANETS HAVE A FINITE LIFE.
‘A longer one. They don’t start to squeak on their bearings after half a million years.’
YOU GLOAT?
‘No. I keep thinking of a few hundred million people on a spaceship the size of a world, and then I think of all the things that can go wrong with a ship. I don’t gloat, I tremble with fear. And rage.’
She stood up and stomped across the room to ease the cramp in her muscles. It had been a long session, a subterranean travelogue of disc machinery. The earthquake machines stuck in her memory. All that ingenuity, to reproduce what any half-sized world did naturally. And the demons … well, at least she’d put a stop to the demons.
There was a click as Marco undid his straps and leapt towards the horseshoe panel. He peered at the screen, then glared out of the cabin.
‘Where the hell is it? It’s gone off the screen. What was it, Kin? The blip was bigger than a—’
Whump. Beyond the windows the seashore exploded into a sandstorm.
Marco craned his head and looked up. Darkness filled the cabin as the sun was eclipsed.
Whump.
Marco looked up at talons dropping out of the sky when the impossible bird stooped. Talons big enough to grip a ship. He made a small noise in his throat and took a dive in the direction of his couch.
Whump. Scrabble. Whump. Whumpwhump. Whumpwhump.
The ship creaked as the claws took it gently. Then it bounded upward in a series of bone-shaking jerks.
The dome of the hub swung crazily below, and whirled away. The disc dropped after it, teetering across the sky until it was a blue and ochre wall. It paused there, then plunged back under the ship to loom for a moment on the other side. Whump.
Kin concentrated on the view above, to take her mind off the lurching, jerking universe. The talons all but covered the roof port, but she got occasional glimpses of the huge white wings, beating now with the slow rhythm of a tide.
Sound filled the cabin. It began in the painful ultrasonic, swooping down the scale like wet fingers being dragged across the windows of the soul.
High above the disc the roc stood on the air and sang.
There would be no more demons. She could see why there had been demons, demons were an idea that worked, but there would be no more.
The ones Kin had met had been almost human compared with some of the things force-bred in the quiet green laboratories under the hub. They policed the disc, haunted the hidden air vents and access shafts to the machinery, chased the venturesome from the rim. Occasionally they kidnapped a new Chairman, for the Committee.
The Chairmen. Kin stared at the blank screen, then glanced up at the hovering direct-link helmet over the chair. She had no intention of trying it for size, and the Computers hadn’t pressed her, but they had shown her how it was used.
The Computers ran the disc. They adjusted its tides, circulated its waters, counted its falling sparrows, toiled and spun for the lilies of its fields. But the disc’s builders had constructed them as servile mechanisms, lest the disc become too mechanical. A human had to tell them what to do.
In the seventy thousand years of the disc’s history there had been two hundred and eighty Chairmen, thrust in terror under the helmet. It gave them cold new knowledge.
Kin said she didn’t believe it.
‘You couldn’t take a Neolithic farmer and turn him into a planetary engineer,’ she protested.
WE COULD. THE DISC BUILDERS CONSTRUCTED US CLEVERLY.
‘You won’t even tell me about the builders!’
The screen went blank.
Whump. Kin gripped the edges of the couch. Whump. The roc didn’t fly, it simply bullied its way through the upper air, shovelling it aside with a sneer.
Talking was difficult when g-forces slapped and banged with a horrible rhythm. Silver managed it with the least discomfort.
‘I don’t believe it either,’ she said. ‘I can see what a device like the Disc would need.’ Whump. ‘Needs a sapient caretaker. No machines could handle all the problems that might crop.’ Whump. ‘Might crop up. But unless the creature was already a technical sophisticate, he would simply become mad.’
Kin braced herself for the next wingbeat. It didn’t come. Beyond the window she could see the roc’s wing outstretched, the tips of the huge feathers vibrating in the slipstream. The bird was starting its glide.
Half the Disc was spread before the canted cabin. Kin rolled out of her couch and swayed across the trembling deck until she could grasp a bulkhead.
The world was a bowl of jewels flung across the sky. Ahead, wearing the setting sun like the gemstone on a ring, was the Rim Ocean.
Roc slid on down the sky, staring at the sun with terrible bird eyes. Sometimes she shrugged her shoulders to dislodge the ice, which flashed and tumbled as it began the long fall.
Kin knelt on the floating platform and watched the microfigures of Silver and Marco thread their way through the tunnels.
Elsewhere Disc machines were lurching into action. She wondered what would have happened if some medieval farmer was Chairman now. Could he have helped the Computers start the long repair?
She stood up and ordered the platform to the walkway at the rim of the map hall, and hurried up the worn stairs to the interface room.
HALLO, said the screen.
‘You don’t need me,’ said Kin. ‘I’ve given you all the instructions you need to repair yourself. It will take you a long time, but you can do it without affecting the biosp – oh boy, the biohemisphere, I suppose – too much. But you can’t go on like it – not unless you get fresh materials from outside.’
WE KNOW. ENTROPY IS AGAINST US.
‘You can’t go on cannibalizing old machines for spare parts. You may last another hundred years, that’s all.’
WE KNOW.
‘Do you care about the people on the surface?
THEY ARE OUR CHILDREN.
Kin stared at the glowing letters. Then she said softly: ‘Tell me about Jago Jalo. He must have seemed a godsend.’
YES. WE WERE ALREADY AWARE THAT THE DISC WAS DOOMED. IN THOSE DAYS WE MAINTAINED AN ARRESTOR SCREEN AGAINST METEORITES. IT WAS COMPARATIVELY EASY TO EXTRACT THE RESIDUAL VELOCITY FROM HIS SHIP. WE WATCHED HIM BRING HIS SMALLER SHIP WITHIN THE VAULT OF HEAVEN. UNFORTUNATELY WE COULD NOT CONTACT HIM. THAT SHOULD HAVE MADE US SUSPICIOUS.
‘You allowed him to land, though.’
UNFORTUNATELY HIS SHIP ATTRACTED THE ATTENTION OF A ROC DURING THE DESCENT.
‘A roc?’
A LARGE BIRD.
* * *
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Marco. ‘I see it, but I don’t believe it. It’s going to take us home, is that it?’
Below them land flashed past in a dusty blur. There was a brief impression of surf and then the roc was arrowing out to sea.
‘Didn’t you see the big egg in that garden where you were caged?’ said Kin weakly. ‘Didn’t you wonder what laid it? Of course it can’t take us home, it’s just a big bird. I saw the specifications, back in the Hub.’
‘It seems a little stupid to say this in the circumstances,’ said Silver, ‘but such a creature could not exist in flesh and blood. It would collapse under its own weight.’
‘It doesn’t weigh more than five tonnes,’ said Kin. ‘It’s one of the Disc builders’ finest constructions. It’s alive. It’s got sinews like Line cord and its bones are pneumatic. Just tubes filled with gas under pressure. The Computers showed me. Marvellous, isn’t it?’
‘Why is it losing height? We’ll land in the sea,’ said Marco.
‘Yes,’ said Kin. ‘I should get back into your couch if I were you.’
‘You mean we a
re going to land in the sea?’
Marco looked down at the rushing waves. They were low enough for every crest to be visible. Then he looked at what, on the Disc, had to be called the horizon. The sun was just a red glow, half hidden by strips of cloud, tipping the wave tops with fire. Marco thought.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you’re not planning to do what I think you are planning to do …’
‘If it helps you any,’ said Kin, ‘Jago Jalo was insane even by the standards of an insane age.’
IT BECAME OBVIOUS. WE HAD NOT CONSIDERED THAT ANY RACE WOULD SEND ITS MADMEN INTO SPACE.
‘In a ship like this, only a madman would go.’
HE CAME TO THE HUB WITH A DEMOUNTED GEOLOGICAL LASER, HE KILLED THE CHAIRMAN OF THE TIME.
‘You didn’t try to stop him?’
WE WERE NOT INSTRUCTED TO DO SO. BESIDES, THE MAN WAS OBVIOUSLY FROM A TECHNOLOGICAL CULTURE. WE HAD TO WEIGH THE FUTURE OF THE DISC. HE ORDERED US TO BUILD HIM A SHIP. IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT. WE CALCULATED THAT IF WE ASSISTED JAGO JALO BACK TO HIS HOME WORLD IT WOULD NOT BE LONG BEFORE WE HAD FURTHER VISITORS. THEREFORE WE SENT WITH HIM ONE OF OUR SPY BIRDS - THE RAVENS, THE EYES OF GOD, OUR BEAUTIFULLY CREATED BIRDS.
‘Then why didn’t you contact us as soon as we arrived? Hell, I’ve had fleas, I’ve nearly been burned alive, I was shoved in a seraglio—’
WE DECIDED TO OBSERVE YOU FIRST. WE COULD NOT BE SURE THAT JALO WAS AN EXCEPTION. AND THEN THE FOUR-ARMED CREATURE ADDED WEIGHT TO OUR SUSPICIONS.
Kin watched the letters fade. She said: ‘You know that we can build worlds. Proper worlds. Planets. We could build a planet for the Disc people. You know it is a fair copy of my home world?’
YES.
‘Do you know why?’
YES.
‘Will you tell me?’
The screen stayed blank for several seconds. Then it was filled with words, so many that the Computers had had to reduce the size of the letters. Kin stood up and read:
YOU WISH TO KNOW ABOUT THE DISC BUILDERS. YOU WISH TO KNOW THE REASONS BEHIND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DISC. WE CAN TELL YOU. BUT IT IS OUR ONLY BARGAINING COUNTER ON BEHALF OF OUR CHILDREN. IT IS POSSIBLE THAT YOU COULD LEAVE AND RETURN TO PLUNDER THE DISC, AS JALO HAD INTENDED. WE COULD NOT STOP YOU. YET WE REALIZE THAT KNOWLEDGE IS A PRIZE YOU GREATLY DESIRE. WE WILL GIVE YOU KNOWLEDGE. YOU WILL BUILD A NEW WORLD FOR OUR PEOPLE.
Strata Page 19