Strata Read online

  It didn’t look anything special. She buffed its surface with a finger.

  ‘I Am Azrifel, Slave Of The Lamp,’ said the demon in a sing-song voice. ‘Your Wish Is My Command.’

  ‘Fetch me a doctor,’ said Kin thickly. The demon disappeared. There was a tiny thunderclap.

  An agony later he reappeared. In his arms, kicking faintly and whimpering, was a small white-faced man in a black robe.

  ‘Wass that?’ said Kin.

  ‘Johannes Angelego Of The University Of Toledo.’

  Kin picked up the lamp and hammered it on the tiles. Azrifel screamed. The small scholar echoed him, then fainted.

  ‘I mean a physician, you horse,’ muttered Kin. ‘Take that man back and bring me a proper doctor. It’s a box eight foot long, demon, with lights and dials on it. A DOCTOR. Unnerstan? Hell, even a human doctor would do.’

  She hit the lamp again. Azrifel shrieked and disappeared.

  This time he took longer, when he reappeared he carried a figure riding pickaback and was holding a large equipment box in his arms. Kin looked up hazily at the familiar green allsuit of an intern at the Company Medical Centre. The man jumped down, landing with all the athletic grace of one with limited access to rejuvenation treatments.

  Kin recognized Jen Teremilt, his face wavering slightly as the pain closed in. Good old Jen – she’d nearly married him, a hundred and forty years ago. He’d have reached a high position in the Company’s medical history if he hadn’t died while hunting chaque on Sister.

  His cool fingers reached out for her.

  Though the carpet could easily carry the three of them – Azrifel did not appear to weigh anything – Marco insisted on ordering the flying horse to follow them closely.

  ‘Are we ready?’ said Marco.

  The sun still hadn’t shown above the disc, but there was enough pearly pre-dawn light to show Kin and Silver sitting on the carpet in the middle of the cool roof.

  Kin’s arm felt numb. She shivered.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. She rubbed the lamp. Azrifel appeared beside her.

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What?’

  ‘What happened to all that O Mistress stuff?’ said Kin, surprised.

  Marco snorted impatiently.

  ‘All Right, Don’t Get Stuffy. That Sort Of Stuff Was All Right For Him – I Gathered You Were More Democratic.’ An etiquette lesson from a hundred and ninety years before jogged Kin’s overloaded memory – a gentleman is someone who always says ‘thank you’ to his robot.

  ‘This lamp,’ she said. ‘Suppose I were to give it to you?’

  The demon blinked, and thought about it. After a moment a green tongue flicked out across its dry lips.

  ‘I Would Take It And Drop It Over The Edge Of The World, O Mistress,’ it said. ‘Then I Would Have Peace.’

  ‘Fly this carpet to the centre of the world and I will give you the lamp,’ said Kin. Azrifel grinned. Kin added, ‘See the kung on the horse? You will note he has the magic sword. I will give him the lamp. Should you betray us in any way, no doubt he will damage the lamp in interesting ways—’

  The demon shivered.

  ‘Point Taken,’ he said, gloomily. ‘Is There No Trust In This World?’

  ‘No,’ said Marco flatly.

  The carpet rose and skimmed over the darkened city, Marco following closely on the flying horse.

  Kin watched the houses pass below and thought:

  Something looks into our minds. The magic table produced food we merely thought of. When I thought of a doctor, it sent Azrifel with the man I had in mind, but it wouldn’t produce an autodoc. Why?

  Azrifel was still crouched vacantly beside her. At the front of the carpet Silver stared blankly at nothing.

  ‘Azrifel,’ said Kin. ‘Bring me – oh, bring me a fully equipped matrix drive MFTL ship with the latest model dumbwaiter.’

  Over the com circuit she heard Marco cackle.

  The demon said, ‘No.’

  ‘Is that a refusal? We have your lamp.’

  Azrifel shook his head. ‘It Is Not A Refusal,’ he said. ‘It Is A Statement. Oysters Cannot Fly, I Cannot Bring You Your Desire. Now Crush The Lamp If You Must.’

  ‘No anachronisms,’ said Marco. ‘Is that it?’

  The demon paused before answering, as though listening to an internal voice. Seen up close, he too was slightly blurred – like a threevee picture in the middle of a bad day for sunspots, Kin thought.

  ‘No Nachronisms,’ he agreed.

  ‘But the man called Jalo left the world and appeared two hundred light – many, many miles away.’ Kin corrected herself. ‘How?’

  ‘I Do Not Know.’

  ‘Jalo’s ship is in distant orbit,’ said Marco. ‘We could adapt the lifesystem, cannibalize bits out of our lander, and go home in that.’

  ‘It’d take too long!’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘What about power?’

  ‘A thousand of these magic carpets joined edge to edge?’

  ‘Navigation?’

  ‘Dead reckoning. We’ll be aiming at a fifty light year sphere from a distance of 150 years. No trouble.’

  ‘Neat. And what about Silver?’

  Marco said nothing.

  When the sun came up, it was tinted with green.

  They flew over a sandstorm half a mile high, which blasted through farms and towns like snow from hell.

  Marco didn’t say much and Silver was now saying nothing at all. She lay curled up on the carpet, looking at the sky.

  They thundered over a port called Basra, where the timber of broken ships clogged the streets while the mad sea methodically destroyed the town.

  Silver said: ‘Something is shining on the horizon.’

  Kin wondered if she could see a faint gleam on the borders of vision. Ten minutes later she was sure.

  Silver stirred again. ‘Leave,’ she ordered. ‘The Kung must come here. With swords.’

  ‘Marco—’

  ‘I heard. Stop the carpet. You can take the horse.’

  ‘But you know what she’s asking!’

  ‘Sure. If things get too bad, I’ll have to kill her.’

  ‘How can you be so emotionless about it?’

  ‘Why not? Better a dead sapient than a live animal. I agree with her.’

  ‘What’ll happen afterwards?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘She’ll reincarnate on the disc, I guess. Better a live human than a dead sha—’

  ‘Will you stop talking like that!’

  The gleam turned out to be a high dome, welded into the rock of a wide island that seemed to be mostly black sand. Kin thought she could make out the remains of a few ships half buried in the sand.

  They circled it, a mile out at first, then moving closer in. Kin saw a black shape spiral down out of the sky and perch on the dome.

  ‘That does it,’ she said. ‘Marco, I’m going in.’

  The kung’s answer was a strangled grunt. Kin spun round in the saddle.

  A few metres away Silver was rearing up on the carpet, the fur of one arm bright orange where it had caught the thrust of the sword. Her hand was around Marco’s waist while he had two hands gripping her throat, and between them the sword screamed as they wrestled.

  The carpet drifted on past. Kin got a brief glimpse of Silver’s contorted face twisted around a saliva-barred mouth.

  Kin grabbed the lamp. Azrifel appeared, standing on air, and watching the silent fighters with interest.

  ‘Separate them,’ Kin ordered.

  ‘No.’

  Marco somersaulted away from Silver, caught her arm in three of his, and threw her over his shoulder. His leg bones bent like springs. Then Silver was over the edge of the carpet.

  But not falling. She hung at an impossible angle in its safety field, snarling and thrashing at the air.

  ‘No?’

  ‘I Dare Not Go Closer To The Dome.’

  ‘I have the lamp, demon.’

  ‘I Suggest Yo
u Do Not Use It.’

  Kin saw Marco lift the sword and hesitate. Silver picked up leverage on sheer fresh air, and hurtled towards him.

  Shand, kung and carpet disappeared.

  Kin stared at the empty space. Below, the sea roared. There was nothing else around but sea, sky and dome, and the horse-faced demon hovering over nothing at all.

  Finally she said: ‘Demon, what happens if I drop the lamp in the sea? The truth, now.’

  ‘Sometimes Fish Or Crabs Will Brush Against It. Their Wishes Are Simple And Easily Fulfilled.’

  ‘What happened to the carpet?’

  ‘It Disappeared?’ said the demon uncertainly.

  ‘I know. Why?’

  ‘Things That Approach Too Close To The Centre Of The World Do So.’

  ‘You didn’t tell us.’

  ‘You Didn’t Ask Me.’

  ‘Where do they disappear to?’

  ‘To? They Just Disappear. That Is All I Know.’

  ‘You’ll know more soon,’ said Kin. She shoved the lamp back into her pocket and urged the horse forward – towards the dome. Azrifel whimpered.

  Presently Kin disappeared.

  Kin awoke at the heart of a galaxy strained through a ruby. Touch told her that she was lying on a floor like polished metal, and an old but hitherto unnamed sense assured her that she was inside something. A building. Maybe a cave.

  Around her a billion pinpoints of red light glowed. They spread away from her in complicated constellations, climbed the invisible wall tens of metres away and met in the blackness overhead. Sometimes the pattern changed instantly, to be replaced by one equally red and forbidding. It was a pointillist’s vision of hell.

  Then Kin moved.

  Stampede. The lights poured down the walls and clustered around her. She stood up and stamped a foot experimentally. Experiment was the word, and she clung to it. Be rational. Don’t go mad.

  She thought she had been prepared for anything. Robots, lasers, long-headed disc builders in silver suits, intelligent slimes – anything. But not these lights. It wasn’t as though they lit anything but themselves.

  ‘Get me out of here,’ she growled.

  Flash. Now she was standing in an arched corridor, her nostrils filled with the hot metal, ozone and oil smell of machinery. The tunnel was brightly lit by a continuous strip overhead. Pipes and cables snaked along the walls, and the floor was a linear maze of rails. There were distant bangs and thumps, and everywhere there was the hum of hurtling electrons.

  Kin picked a direction and walked, carefully avoiding anything that looked highly electric.

  So, she told herself, this is the works. I’m down among the cogwheels of the Universe. But it’s all wrong. The technology looks ancient. Cogwheels is about right. Good grief!

  She was halfway past an alcove giving off from the main tunnel. There was movement in there. Kin started to run for cover, then thought, what the hell?

  It was a robot, a big one shaped the best shape for a robot. Square. One waldo arm was groping in a square hole in the alcove’s metal wall. A square panel lay on the floor.

  The arm clicked back. It held something small that Kin couldn’t quite see properly, which it dropped into a hopper bolted on to the robot’s side. A drawer slid out just above the hopper, and this time Kin got a good view of the objects nestling in its padded interior. The arm waved uncertainly above them, then selected one gingerly and carried it into the hole.

  While the machine was engaged in its mysterious activities Kin strolled forward and picked one of the objects out of the rack in the drawer. It was about the size of an egg. One end was studded with hundreds of pins, and inside was a filigree of wires, tubes and grids.

  Kin had seen things like it in a museum. It was a valve, a sort of neolithic integrated circuit. Only this was a valve such as might be built by someone who had never developed the transistor, so that more and more ingenuity had been devoted to perfecting the existing technology.

  It made Kin think of Ehftnic computers. The Ehfts had never discovered electronics but they needed computers for their complex religio-banking organizations. So an Ehftnic computer was a thousand highly-trained Ehfts, each one handling a small part of the math. It worked.

  But she’d be dipped in dogshit before she’d believe that the disc was built by a thermionic valve technology.

  The robot’s arm whirred out of the wall. The panel was picked up and slotted into place with surprising speed. Almost before Kin could react her new friend was rumbling off down the tunnel. It moved at a fast walking pace. She followed.

  She would survive. If They were going to kill her, They would have done it already. She’d live. Provided she didn’t bank on it, she’d live.

  Once they passed another cuboid robot, wielding some kind of tool over some kind of exposed circuitry. It could have been a soldering iron. It could have been a printed circuit. Kin couldn’t stop to check.

  Then Kin’s robot reached a robot-shaped slot in the wall. Kin had a brief glimpse of sockets at the back of the slot before the robot reversed in, with all the painstaking care of a fornicating porcupine. It stopped humming. Patently, the repairman had gone dormant.

  Kin considered for some time. The tunnels seemed endless. She could wander around in them for days. Then she’d die. But there was an alternative … She went back down the tunnel until she found the soldering robot. Wrenching off one of its arms was difficult, but she managed. She used it to hit the thing until it stopped humming. As an encore she tossed the arm at the exposed circuitry, which sparked satisfyingly.

  Then she waited.

  When a small, hemispherical robot-repair robot rolled up a few minutes later she overturned it. It hummed at her reproachfully.

  The next one was a pear-shaped, multi-lensed blob travelling along a rail near the ceiling of the tunnel. Kin tried to bring it down with pieces of robot, but it swung away hastily.

  At least she had made her presence felt. Someone must repair the robots that repaired the robot-repairing robots. All it took was time.

  Hours passed before a tank-like machine arrived. It was dented and lacked panelling, and bore the stumps of various delicate manipulatory appendages. If this was the ultimate repairer, Kin supposed, then sheer time could have caused its battered state.

  On the other hand, the fact that Marco was sitting on its hull with a robotic arm trailing wires in each hand could have had something to do with it.

  ‘Perhaps there just aren’t any facilities for dealing with humans who get into the machinery,’ said Kin.

  Marco grunted, but didn’t look up from his work. He was doing something neolithic with a length of robot innards, using the small repair hemisphere as a hammer.

  ‘There must be,’ he said. ‘This world must be studded with hidden air ducts, ventilators, power shafts. Humans poke into everywhere. Anyway, we were brought here, remember? Subsequently to ignore us is impolite.’

  He stood up. ‘Coming?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Anywhere with delicate circuitry. This’, he waved a robot limb, ‘is insulated. For short-circuiting.’

  ‘And the other thing?’ asked Kin, her heart sinking.

  It was a connected series of arm sections, terminating in a crude but lethal blade. Marco hefted it experimentally.

  ‘Huh? It’s a weapon, obviously.’

  ‘You were maybe expecting to meet some antipersonnel robots?’ Kin said icily.

  Marco had the decency not to meet her gaze.

  ‘I was thinking of Silver,’ he said wretchedly. ‘Well? Do you imagine she’s found anything to eat yet? And have you got any better ideas?’

  He set off along a tributary tunnel, and called back, ‘Anyway, it can’t have escaped your notice that these tunnels are lit. Robots don’t need light.’

  Kin shrugged. Perhaps soldering robots needed light. A little light destruction to attract attention was one thing, however – intelligent action in the circumstances. But Marco looked ready t
o smash the whole disc.

  In the distance she saw him hacking at cables. This wasn’t action to attract attention – this was Marco vs The Universe.

  What was happening up on the surface? A plague of flies? A rain of frogs? All the seas running dry? The extinction of the dodo?

  Now she was running. Marco was a terrible figure wreathed in smoke, hacking at a solid cliff of planet-sized circuit. There was a jerkiness about his movements that told Kin all she needed to know. Marco had gone mad. Or at least gone kung.

  She stopped when his blade swept a few inches from her throat.

  ‘They want to play games, eh?’ he croaked. ‘Put us on the spot, watch our reactions, eh? I’ll show them.’

  One free hand swept his club into a circuit board, which exploded.

  ‘I’ll show them.’

  Kin swayed back, her eyes on the tip of the blade. Then a movement to the right of Marco’s private smoke cloud made her look away. Marco saw her expression, and hesitated for a fraction of a second too long.

  Silver leapt. Marco disappeared as the huge paddle-like arms swept round in a bone-grinding hug, then appeared again with three arms flailing at the shand’s head. Silver screamed, and one foot came up with claws out to disembowel the enemy. Marco’s bowels had already gone with the rest of him for Silver’s eyes. While the shand staggered across the floor clawing at the demon atop her, Kin saw Marco’s fourth arm swing up with his pike.

  It twirled gracefully, the blade drifting through the hot air like the scythe of death. Then it buried itself in a power cable.

  There was a sound like the snapping of locusts. Silver and Marco appeared for a moment like a tableau, Silver a big fluffy ball as every hair stood out from her body.

  Kin scrabbled on the floor for Marco’s anti-disc weapon with its insulated handle. It took all her strength to knock the vibrating pike out of his hand. When it came away, the two aliens collapsed.

  Aliens, she thought. I called them aliens. Oh, shit. She knelt down and sought for signs of life. Something vague was happening in Silver’s chest, but she didn’t know where even to begin looking for either of Marco’s hearts.

  The lights overhead dwindled to a sickly orange glow. There were footsteps behind Kin – strange, rattling steps. She turned, still crouching, to see the tall figure that had appeared behind her.