Strata (20 page)

That was what was rising out of the pit – a Mt Tryggvason with one head missing, a three-headed Thing. Only the head facing them was human. The others could have been a monstrous toad and some sort of insect, giant faces merging sickeningly into an impossible head, and atop the head were three crowns big enough for houses. Below the heads a cluster of spider legs dangled, each one a hundred metres long.

The effect was slightly marred by the fact that the far side of the pit could be seen through the image.

‘Marco,’ said Silver.

‘I don’t think there’s any more to be learned down—’

‘Did anything pass you on the way up?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Look up, Marco.’

‘Holy shit!’

Kin choked.

‘Do not be afraid,’ said Silver reassuringly.

‘Afraid of that?’ said Kin. ‘That monstrosity? I’m just good and angry, Silver. Know what that thing is? A comic scarecrow, an image sent out to scare away anyone who might look into the pit and find out about the disc.

‘If we get back I won’t care who built the disc, I’ll see that they’re broken. Busted. Bankrupted. They’ve built a world people sail off the edge of, and get chased by demons and are superstitious because that’s how they survive! I’m beginning to hate it!’

Marco rose like a rocket in the centre of the image, became a glitter in the eye of Saitan, a spark in the brain of God.

‘Intangible,’ he reported. ‘A mere image.’

The great human face, kingly and cold, twisted. The mouth opened and the pit echoed to a great sad sigh. And a lightning bolt struck out of the smoking sky and melted the dumbwaiter so thoroughly that droplets of hot metal spilled towards the bright obversical sky.

Hail drummed off Kin’s suit. They were flying now against a deadline.

In fifty hours, or less, Silver would go mad and attempt suicide. Kung and men could go for a long time without food. Shandi could not.

The storm raged all round them, but sank away as Marco led them upwards. They burst out of the clouds into a disc sunset.

It was far behind them, red and angry and barred with cloud. Judging from the sky the whole of the disc was having bad weather, and bad wasn’t really the word. Some of those cloud shapes were mad.

Marco broke the silence. ‘We have a thousand miles to cover,’ he said.

‘That gives us an average speed of twenty miles an hour,’ said Kin. ‘We could easily reach the hub, even with a few rest stops.’

‘So we reach the hub. Do we find a dumbwaiter there?’

‘Anyone capable of building the disc could build a dumbwaiter.’

‘Why didn’t they repair the hole, then? Eirick, Lothar – they are descendants of your disc builders, reverted to savagery. Or the disc builders are dead.’

‘Okay, have you got any better ideas?’

Marco snorted.

Silver was trailing half a mile behind them, a dot against the livid sky. She rumbled politely to show that she was in circuit.

‘There is a possibility we may find a ’waiter,’ she said, ‘if the disc was built by the Company. Don’t groan, Kin. In many ways the idea of the disc would fit in with the Policy.

‘By the way, there is a raven flying half a mile behind me.’

Kin stared at the rushing clouds below. Policy. Perhaps the disc was Policy …

The Great Spindle Kings, Wheelers, paleotechs, ChThones – people of the universe. The universe
was
people.

Once upon a time astrohistorians had thought in terms of a vast, empty starry stage, a blank canvas waiting for the brush of life. In fact it was now understood that Life of a kind had appeared within three micro-seconds of the monobloc’s explosion. If it hadn’t, the universe would now be randomized matter. It was Life which had directed its growth. Life had once resided in the vast spinning dust clouds that became stars – every star was the skeleton of one of the great dust-accreting dinosaurs of the universe’s Jurassic.

Later lifeforms had been smaller, brighter. Some, like the Wheelers, had been evolutionary dead ends. Some, notably the Great Spindle Kings and the shameleons, had been successful in the only way that evolution measured success – they survived longer. But even star-striding races died. The universe was tombs upon graves upon mausoleums. The comet that brightened the pagan skies was the abraded corpse of a scientist, three eons ago.

The Policy of the Company was simple. It was: make Man immortal.

It would take a while, and had only just started. But if Man could be spread thinly on many different planets, so that he became many types of Man, perhaps he would survive. The Spindles had died because they were so alike. Now, upon dozens of worlds, men were being changed by different forces, maddened by different moons, bent by different gravities.

Since the universe could not be said to have a natural ending, because the universe was not natural but only the sum of the lives that had shaped it, Men intended to live for ever. Why not?

Preserve meme pools, preserve ideas, that was the secret. If you had a hundred planets there was room for different sciences, curious beliefs, new techniques, old religions to flourish in quiet corners. Earth had been one united civilization and had nearly perished once because of it. Diversify enough, and somewhere you’ll always find someone capable of catching anything the future throws at you.

People on a disc guarded by demons and ringed with a waterfall, what memes would they contribute to the genetics of civilization? She tried to explain to Marco.

‘What are memes?’ said Marco.

‘Memes are – ideas, attitudes, concepts, techniques,’ said Kin. ‘Mental genes. Trouble is, all the memes likely to develop on the disc are host-destructive. Anthropocentricity is one.’

A pale red moon rose above the curdled clouds. Now they flew a mile apart, flew high and fast to make the hours count. Kin kept an eye on the speck that was Silver, and worried.

Quite wrong, of course, to project human thought patterns on an alien, but a man in Silver’s position would live in hope that sooner or later food would be forthcoming. Men were optimists.

You couldn’t expect a shand to think like a man. It was so easy to think of your friends as humans in a skin, and for good and noble reasons people were encouraged to think of aliens as funny-shaped men. Just because they learned to play poker or read Latin didn’t make them human.

In short, Kin wondered when Silver would attempt suicide. She signalled Marco and told him.

‘We can do nothing,’ he said. ‘I have already decided to eat no food until we reach the hub, as a gesture of solidarity. We could take disc proteins, if the ’waiter’s analysis was right,’ he added.

‘Will that make her feel better?’

‘It may make
us
feel better. However, there is another problem that has recently forced itself on my attention. I hesitate to mention it—’

‘Mention it, mention it.’

‘Look at the panel on your left wrist. There’s an orange fluorescent line against a green strip. See it?’

Kin squinted down in the flickering light.

‘I see it. Only it’s an orange dot.’

‘Quite, but it should be a line. We really are running out of gas, Kin.’

They flew in silence for a while. Then Kin asked, ‘How long?’

‘About six hours for you and me. Perhaps an hour less for Silver. That will solve one problem. She’ll come to earth miles behind us.’

‘Except that we will of course stay with her,’ said Kin flatly. Marco appeared not to have heard.

‘If we still had the ’waiter the problem would not have been insurmountable. The hub is not too far. We could have terrorized disc people into transporting us. A hundred suggestions leap to the mind. It might have been quite enjoyable, and good experience.’

‘Experience for what?’

‘Hobnobbing with the disc folk on a superior basis. I had planned, should the hub hold nothing of interest, to set up an empire. Surely the idea had occurred to you?’

It had, in passing. Kin thought for a while of Genghis Marco, Marco Caesar, Prester Marco. He could do it, at that. A four-armed god king.

‘How long would you say it would take the disc to get onto a space-going footing?’ he asked. ‘If that was made a goal, I mean? We have the knowledge.’

‘No, we don’t. We
think
we do, but all we know is how to operate machines. Of course, you could get a spaceship built inside a decade.’

‘That soon? Then we could—’

‘No we couldn’t.’ Kin had been thinking about this, too. ‘What could be built is a primitive capsule powered by solid-fuel rockets with enough oomph to ram the outer dome. You could launch it by dropping it over the waterfall.’

‘First we’d have to unify the disc,’ said Marco thoughtfully. ‘Not difficult. Give me five hundred Norsemen and—’

‘There’s Silver,’ said Kin. ‘And, anyway, I have great hopes for the hub.’

Even so …

She had been doing a lot of thinking, before they lost the ’waiter. With the ’waiter they might have conquered the disc, filling the void left by the presumably departed disc creators. Without it, the best they could hope for was a comfortable life. In a strange way it wouldn’t be so bad for the other two. They would be aliens, marooned on a strange world.
She
would be marooned among people. It was possible that she had more in common with Silver and Marco than she did with the barbarians down there. It was a dreadful possibility.

‘These belts are supposed to be able to fly you half-way across a system and land you on a planet,’ she complained.

‘They were not expected to carry people thousands of miles against gravity, including many changes of altitude,’ said Marco. ‘It is most vexing.’

‘Vexing!’

‘If you feel so strongly, I suggest you make a complaint to the manufacturers.’

‘How can – was that a joke?’ said Kin. ‘Good grief!’

Dawn saw them flying over semi-desert and scrub, in a sky free of clouds. Once they passed over a camel train, almost invisible were it not for its skeletal, juddering shadow on the sand.

They had drifted slightly off their course during the night, and as far as Marco could estimate were speeding down the Tigris-Euphrates valley.

‘That puts us in south-east Turkey,’ said Marco, and added wistfully, ‘That means Baghdad. I should like to have seen Baghdad.’

‘Why?’ said Kin.

‘Oh, when I was a kid my foster-folks bought me a book of fantasy stories about, well, genies and magic lamps and such. It made a big impression on me.’

‘Don’t suggest landing,’ said Kin. ‘Don’t even
think
about it.’

But they passed over a city of low white houses surrounding palaces and strangely domed buildings. A tent town lay outside the walls. The river the city straddled was noticeably a different colour downstream, and low enough between its banks to speak of drought. Now the sun was well up the ground shimmered.

A mile later Silver’s belt failed. There was no question of a crash – instead all forward power ceased as the batteries’ waning ergs buoyed her gently to the ground.

The others followed her down into a grove of knotted, sweet-smelling trees. When Kin took off her helmet the heat hit her like the breath of Hell.
Too
hot, she decided. No wonder the fields looked scorched. From here the river was a blood-coloured snake winding weakly between slabs of cracked mud.

‘Well,’ she said vaguely. She meant This Is It.

‘I am at a loss,’ said Marco, moving hurriedly into the heady shade under the trees.

‘You mean you don’t have a plan?’

‘Your meaning?’

‘Oh, forget it.’ Kin took a sip of water from the suit’s reservoir. Have to be careful about that, too.

Silver sat with her back against a trunk, staring vaguely at the city. Behind her the sun was a copper rivet in a sky like hot iron.

Then she commented, ‘An aircraft has just risen.’

He was old in looks at least, his face wrinkled like an old apple. His grey beard was intricately styled. His eyes seemed to show neither whites nor expression. Certainly he did not seem surprised.

Disc builder? While Kin watched him and Silver talking, facing each other crosslegged under the trees, she thought hard and fast. His clothing didn’t look anything but barbarously splendid, but she was no arbiter of disc fashion. His craft was technologically advanced, and he knew how to use it – at the moment it was folded up inside a pouch on the belt of his travelling companion, a large broad man wearing nothing but a loincloth and a dour expression. He held a long curved sword, and his eyes never left Marco.

Kin slid across to the kung.