Strata

'What was that?' said Kin as she was jerked up the slope. Pine needles clung and pricked her feet.

'Silver threw a stone,' said Marco, the awe in his voice recognizable even in earpiece reproduction. Kin looked back and saw the 'waiter, her suit and the fallen man lying forlornly near the water's edge.

'There is little we can do at present,' said the kung conversationally. "The weaponry is laughable, but the situation is not sufficiently desperate to warrant a direct confrontation.'

'Uh?'

'I would not wish you to think that I am motivated by anything other than intelligent caution.'

'No, Marco.'

'Now Silver would like a word.' There was a rustle.

'You are thought to be some kind of water spirit,' said Silver. 'Apparently they're not uncommon. You should have screamed when they showed you that figure of the Christos. My immediate advice is to cover yourself as soon as possible. There appears to be some rigid prohibition concerning nudity.'

There were more armed men waiting on the track, with some robed men among them. Brickface swung himself into the saddle of a waiting horse and lifted Kin up behind him, dumping her on the beast's rump without a word and then ignoring her. At his brief command the entire troop moved off.

'This is Silver again. Do not despair.'

'I am not despairing,' said Kin. 'I am just getting good and mad.'

'We have returned to the clearing. Marco is reviving the stunned priest.' There was a thin scream which stopped abruptly. 'Kin?'

'I'm still here,' she said. One of the robed men had ridden up alongside Brickface. He wore a fur-edged cloak over his robe and appeared to be important. He was also furious.

This is a perfect opportunity,' said Silver. 'Hopefully we shall shortly learn more about these people. If you find yourself in difficulties, you can of course initiate sexual relations with your captor. The men call him Lothar.'

The cloaked man was shouting and pointing back along the trail, with occasional poisonous looks at Kin. Lothar's replies were distant and monosyllabic, until he reached over and in one movement grabbed the priest by the front of his robe and almost lifted him off his horse. He snarled a sentence and spat a full stop. The other man went white, out of either fury or fear.

'This is exceptionally interesting,' said Silver. Kin thought she could also hear a babble of high-pitched Latin in the background.

'Is the 'waiter badly damaged?' said Kin.

'Not badly. It can be repaired. Another centimetre and the sword would have hit the 5,000 kV line -- Marco! It is essential he does not faint again!'

The party left the forest and headed hubwards by Kin's estimation, on a track that ran alternately between stretches of half-cultivated ground and marshes.

The smoke pillar loomed, dominating the sky. Its tip was now made ragged by high-altitude winds.

Soon they met a straggle of people coming the other way. They ran off the track when they saw Lothar's band, but he wheeled after them and one man was caught. He was brought before Lothar, struggling and gasping out answers to the questions that were grunted at him.

'Silver,' said Kin, 'how do you say "I'm nearly freezing to death"?'

Silver translated. Kin tapped Lothar on the shoulder and repeated the phrase, as best she could.

He turned in the saddle and stared at her in astonishment, before unfastening the heavy brooch that held his cloak. Kin wrapped the heavy and odorous cloth around her. There was a comment, almost inaudible, from the senior priest.

'He said "Soon you will both be warmed by the fires of Hell"' murmured Silver helpfully.

'Great. I've only been here a few hours and already I've made friends.'

'Listen carefully. Your party contains priests of the Christ-Creator religion. They are heading towards the smoke column in the belief that it is a sign that the Christ has returned. Lothar, however, is a minor noble with a line in brigandage and part-time looting. According to our informant, he is a son of Saitan.'

'Saitan has a lot of relatives in these parts,' said Kin.

'It is a strange religion. Everyone is evil until proved holy. Our informant says the priests met up with Lothar on the road and they banded together for mutual protection, but this liaison is likely to end at any moment.'

'Are you telling me that Lothar's God is returning and he's thinking of nothing but pillage?'

'Probably rape and murder as well,' said Silver. 'You are heading for a holy house for the night. We will endeavour to rescue you then. Now I must sign off for the moment, I've got an injured man to attend to. I'll say this for these Christers, they're brave. This one hit out at Marco. Picture the result.'

'Dead?'

'I persuaded Marco that the man was more useful alive. He just broke both his arms.'

In the early evening they came to a town of thatched houses surrounding what Silver identified as a religious foundation. The muddy streets were thick with people and carts. The party got through only after Lothar sent men ahead to clear a path with the flats, and sometimes the points, of their swords.

There were noisy crowds around the holy buildings dressed in the main in drab and holy colours. The senior priest was greeted effusively, even frantically, and helped to dismount. Lothar watched impassively. Looking round, Kin saw that his men had fanned out among the crowd with drawn bows, sometimes glancing at the sky.

The senior priest, identified by Silver as Otto, spoke sharply to a holy man. He ran off and returned a few minutes later at a respectful distance in front of one who, to judge by the way the crowd parted for him, was even holier.

He was tubby and red-eyed, as if he hadn't slept for some time. Over the standard robe he wore a red cloak with patterns in gold thread, now crusted with dirt. He listened gravely as Otto spoke. Then he walked over to Lothar's horse and peered at Kin. Finally he reached out and pinched her sharply on the thigh.

In the circumstances, she decided against any action.

Lothar dismounted and fell on one knee in front of the priest, one hand on his heart. He spoke eloquently. To Kin he sounded like a salesman.

She tried to raise Silver.

'I can be of little help,' the shand reported. 'Latin is a ceremonial language, like a religious allspeak. This is one of the early German tongues, I think. The fat man is possibly the local bishop, and this is a trial. What appears to be at stake is whether Lothar keeps you or hands you over.'

'What about the heroic rescue? It's wearying, you know, constantly being tensed up waiting for one's friends to plummet out of the sky with lasers blazing--'

'I had intended using your stunner, but it was not in your suit,' said Silver. 'No doubt you lost it on the floating island. Plan B also will not work. Marco intended to swoop down wearing two belts to carry you off, but Lothar's men maintain a constant skywatch. For dragons, do you think?'

'What's plan C, then?'

There was a sigh. 'Marco intends to land and hack and slash at everyone.'

'That's a good plan,' said Kin.

'He is mad. The Norsemen have a term, berserker. It was designed for Marco.'

Lothar stopped speaking. The bishop looked down at him, then up at Kin. He beckoned.

After a few seconds she slid off the horse's back, the cloak slipping from her as she landed. There was a rustle of voices from the crowd.

The bishop nodded and waddled off, beckoning Kin to follow him. The crowd pressed in silently behind her.

They went between the holy buildings to a stamped earth yard, full of long shadows in the sinking sunlight. Part of the yard was roofed. Under the roof were bars.

'I'm about to be locked up, Silver!' she hissed. 'Where the hell are you?'

'A wooded eminence outside the town. The bars do not look alarmingly thick. They may trust to them to guard you.'

'Silver, how can you see the bars?'

'Marco is behind you in the crowd. He is giving me eyewitness reports. Do not look for him.'

The bishop stopped by the middle cage, and swung open the door. When Kin stopped there was a gentle prod of a sword in her back. She stepped in.

The lock was primitive but big. The bars did not look alarmingly thick, according to Silver. They were six-inch posts. What was normally kept there that needed six-inch thick bars?

They left her sitting in the dirt and walked away. After a while the last of the crowd left the compound, leaving a group of bowmen who spread out, watching the sky. Presently a man brought her a bowl of scraps, dropped them within her reach, and bolted.

A few stars lit up. Beyond the compound's walls came the rattle of carts, and many shouts.

'Silver?' she said querulously.

There was a heart-stopping pause before the reply came back.

'Ah, Kin. I am now better informed. Your precise status is still to be determined. Your friend Lothar has at least saved you from arbitrary execution. I have also learned more about the current disc situation. Would you be interested in hearing it? We will not collect you until it is fully dark. I doubt if those bowmen can better Marco's excellent night vision.'

'Go ahead and amuse me,' said Kin, wrinkling her nose over the food bowl. It could make me sick, she decided, it looks as though it's already done so to someone else.

'This is all exceptionally interesting,' said Silver. 'There is no doubt among the populace that this is either the return of the Christ or the end of the disc or both. Fires are raging -- our ship, you understand. There have been strange signs in the sky. The town is divided between travellers hastening to the advent and those fleeing from it.'

Kin listened to the cries outside.

'What are they fleeing for?' she asked.

'He's a very choosy god.'

'How did you find out about this?'

There was a pause. At last Silver said, 'Promise me that if we get back home you won't reveal the information-gathering system we, uh, evolved. I could be subject to severe disciplinary action from the all-planet committee on anthropological research procedures.'

'My lips are sealed,' promised Kin.

'Marco slugs a likely-looking subject, flies him over here and knocks the shit out of him until I've heard enough.'

Kin grinned. 'It's not like drawing circles in the sand, is it?'

'Much more efficient, though.'

There was a commotion at the entrance to the compound. In the half-light Kin saw a knot of men approaching, surrounding a taller shape that moved across the ground in hops.

When it drew nearer the cages Kin saw that it was roughly man-shaped but at least three metres high. Once it reared and spread a pair of dark wings the size of sheets. One of the men darted forward. The tall shape whimpered, and cowered. Kin, pressed against the bars, got an impression of scales, and pectoral muscles like barrels.

She jumped back as the door of the neighbouring cage was opened and the thing prodded inside. She saw a stubby-horned head and glowing green eyes that narrowed when they saw her.

The door slammed shut and the men retreated quickly. The creature grunted, gave the door an experimental shake, went and sat down in the far corner of the cage with its arms around its knees.

The men returned, and they were carrying a small struggling body. Kin made out the shape of a creature like the one she had seen on the hilltop -- part-human, part-animal, part-insect. It whistled shrilly as it was carried. As one of the men let go to reopen the cage door, it screeched and raked his chest with a claw. When he fell back it wriggled free, kicked another man in the stomach with a small hoof, and sank its teeth into a third's arm before it was grabbed.

The man who had been clawed stood up silently and landed a swinging blow that crunched when it hit, like the crushing of beetles. It landed in a heap inside the cage, and lay still.

The men retreated but did not leave the area. After a while a watchman's fire sprang up. Kin called up Silver.

'They are staying,' she said. 'There must be ten of them now. Marco'll never get in!'

'I think the guard is for the benefit of your friend in the next cell,' said Silver. 'Marco has a plan, though. Two plans, in fact. If the first doesn't work, he proposes to explode the 'waiter's powerpack.'

Kin thought about it. 'That would kill us all,' she said, 'and leave a crater about a mile across.'

'Quite so. But we would have won.'

There had never been a man-kung war, just a few early skirmishes now diplomatically forgotten. Kung had no concept of conquest, mercy, prisoners or rules. Marco was tainted with human ideas, but...

'Is he serious?'

'I think he is frightened almost to death.'

The big winged creature was watching Kin. She was aware of two pale lights in the gloom.

'I have my own plan,' said Silver.

'Oh, good. I like listening to plans.'

'I have compiled a speech. When a priest next approaches you will recite it to him.

'You are an Ethiopian princess, left stranded in this country when your party was attacked by robbers. You demand to be released. You are a devout Christer, by the way. So is your father, who is a king, and who will be angry in very physical ways when he hears about this treatment.'

'It sounds a bit contrived,' said Kin. She was watching the giant in the next cell. Three metres high. What did it use for ankle bones?

'KIN ARAD' said the winged demon.

She stared. Nothing had moved. The creature was still slumped against the bars, watching her. When he spoke again -- Kin couldn't be sure in the dim light, but the lip movements didn't seem to coincide with the sounds she heard, as if something was being badly dubbed.

'I am Kin Arad,' she said.

'WHAT IS YOUR DOMINION?' said the demon in perfect allspeak.

'I don't know what you mean.'

'l AM SPHANDOR, OF THE DOMINION OF AGLIERAP. I CANNOT DETERMINE YOUR DOMINION OR PLACE.'

'It seems to be speaking shandi,' said Silver.

'SPEAK. ARE WE PARTNERS IN ADVERSITY?'

'I hear it in allspeak,' said Kin urgently. 'I think it's using some kind of direct mind stimulation. Its lips aren't moving properly.'

'DO NOT MUMBLE. DO YOU THINK I DO NOT KNOW OF THE CREATURES TO WHOM YOU TALK BY THE POWER OF THE LIGHTNING? THE THINKING BEAR AND THE UPRIGHT FROG WITH FOUR ARMS? AND THE MECHANICAL DEVICE THAT PREPARES FOOD BEYOND THE POWERS OF HUICTIIGRARAS?'

'Are you reading my mind?'

'OF COURSE I AM, YOU STUPID BITCH. BUT IT IS DIFFICULT. YOU ARE OF THIS WORLD YET NOT OF THIS WORLD, NEITHER ARE YOU OF THE BROTHERHOOD OF THE DAMNED, YET THE PRAYING ONES HAVE CAPTURED YOU.'

'Keep it talking,' said Silver.

'The Christers think I am a water sprite,' said Kin.

'SPRITES CANNOT SPEAK AND ARE OF LOW INTELLIGENCE, AS EVERYONE KNOWS. THEY ARE LIKE THIS THING.'

Sphandor kicked out and managed to hit the wheezing faun with a curved toenail. It whimpered.

'It's injured,' said Kin. 'Can we do anything to help it?'

'WHY SHOULD WE? IT BARELY KNOWS IT IS ALIVE. ELVES BREED LIKE FLIES IN THE WOODS. YOU THINK THEY MAKE NICE MUSIC, BUT IT IS AS A CRICKET CHIRPS -- MINDLESSLY.

'l GATHER YOU HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH THE EXPLOSION THAT KNOCKED ME OUT OF THE AIR THREE DAYS AGO?'

'Uh, yes.' Kin thought quickly. 'There was a flying chariot, you see--'

'A THREE THOUSAND TONNE STARSHIP' Sphandor agreed, 'IMPACTING AT FOUR HUNDRED MILES AN HOUR.'

'Do you know what those words mean?'

'NO, BUT THEY WERE AT THE FOREFRONT OF YOUR MIND. THE SHOCK WAVES KNOCKED ME OUT OF THE AIR, AND SOME CHRISTERS REACHED ME AND BOUND ME BEFORE I COULD RISE. IF I BUT HAD MY FREEDOM I WOULD TEAR THEIR EARS OFF.'

It must be vat-grown, thought Kin. Nothing like that could have evolved naturally. If those wings worked it would have to be very light, bird-boned. She would have to ask it questions -- later.

'I want to escape,' she said. 'Silver?' There was no answer from the earpiece.

'l LIKEWISE. IT IS UNFORTUNATELY IMPOSSIBLE. TOMORROW WE SHALL BE BROUGHT BEFORE THE BISHOP'S COURT. I SHALL CERTAINLY BE EXECUTED.'

'Will they waste time with a court when they think their god is coming?'

'ALL THE MORE REASON TO BE SEEN GOING ABOUT WHAT THEY CONSIDER TO BE HIS BUSINESS, KIN ARAD.'

'What will they execute you for?'

'I AM SPHANDOR! I SPREAD ARTHRITIS, THE BONE ACHE AND AGUE OF THE NECK. I BLIGHT CROPS AND CAUSE ABORTION IN CATTLE. THEY SAY I FOUL STREAMS AND HURL THE LIGHTNING STONE.'

'And do you do all that?'

'l SUPPOSE SO. I CERTAINLY ALWAYS INTEND TO.'

Kin glanced towards the fire. The men had spread out, and she could just see them outlined against the last stains of sunset, watching the sky.

'THEY THINK MY BROTHERS WILL TRY TO RESCUE ME' said Sphandor. 'FAT CHANCE!'

A holy man entered the compound with a tray of food. Kin watched him absently.

One of the guards sauntered over to the priest and took a bowl off the tray. He had his back to Kin who saw him stiffen, drop the bowl and slump down. A third hand had shot out of the robe, holding a sword...

Some of the others came running after hearing the priest's anguished cry, and the fallen man was lost to sight as his fellows gathered round.

There was an explosion of flesh.

Two men staggered back and two, a little faster, turned to run and slid along the ground with knives in their backs.

Laughing like a hyena, Marco leapt barehanded at the others. The few seconds of astonishment they experienced helped him, and he worked through them with a mixture of kung digitsju and blind destruction while arrows from the men who had the sense to stay out of it hissed around him. Sphandor giggled.

Marco screeched a kung battle-cry and stalked towards the nearest archer, glistening in the firelight. The man fired one arrow which hit him fairly in the chest, rocking him back on his heels for a moment. Then he walked on. The archer was still staring when two hands grabbed him by the throat and two more swung up in a gristle-cleaving arc.

As one man the surviving guards dropped their weapons and ran for the compound entrance.

'Marco!' shouted Kin. 'Keys! Find the keys.'

Marco glared at her stupidly, then looked up. A white shape dropped out of the night, towing the familiar form of the dumbwaiter behind her.

Silver landed lightly. Behind her, Marco wrenched the arrow from his chest and looked at it absently.

'NEAT,' commented Sphandor with interest.

The shand examined the cage closely.

'I do not like to damage private property,' she said, 'but speed is of the essence.' She stepped back a few paces and hit the bars at a dead run. As Kin jumped over the debris the shand nodded towards Sphandor.

'What about that?' she said.

'I PLEAD,' said the demon.

'Let him out,' said Kin, taking her suit and stepping into the lift belt. 'Right now I'd just love him to spread bubonic plague or whatever it is he spreads.'

'Does he do that?' said Silver. 'The ancients always said demons spread disease.'

'This one is a mobile disaster area,' said Kin.

'Is it wise to let him loose, then?'

'We might learn a lot from him. If you've got any scruples, remember Marco's just killed half a dozen men and you've been involved in the molestation of research subjects.'

Silver considered this. 'True,' she said, and splintered the bars with a backhand swipe. 'If we're baddies, let's be bad.'

Marco stepped forward with two knives levelled to throw as the demon wriggled through the gap. There was a smear of pink blood around his wound. Would it have helped the dead archer to know that a kung in a fighting rage was practically awash with regenerative enzymes? It had been hard enough for Earthmen to see kung fight on with their flesh healing like boiling wax.

'I do not trust this creature. Grab him!'

Silver shot out an arm and caught Sphandor by his scaly tail. With the other hand she unwrapped a length of cable from her waist and knotted it several times around the creature's neck. Sphandor screeched.

'WHERE ARE YOU, SOIGNATORIE, UNSORE, DILAPI-DATORE--' he began.

'Shut up,' advised Marco, taking the other end of the cable from Silver. 'All ready? Soon people will overcome their fears.'

They rose quickly. Marco hovered fifty metres up and looked down at the demon, a tall shadow in the moonlight. Sphandor shrugged. The big wings unfolded.

'l SHALL REQUIRE A RUN TO TAKE OFF.'

Kin watched Marco bob above him as the demon loped across the ground, the wide wings rattling. Halfway across he brought them down with a whump that threw up a dust cloud, and he hung there for several seconds while the wings hammered on the air. Then he rose ponderously, like a giant heron.

When he was level with them, but a hundred metres away, he took a length of cable in his talons.

'FAREWELL, FOOLS!' he bellowed, and tugged. A look of dismay crept over his face.

With the belt's lateral stabilizers full on Marco hung immovable in the air. When he reeled in the line no amount of wing-flapping could budge him. When the horned head was just a few metres away the kung whispered: 'I'm told you can read minds...'

'ONLY SURFACE THOUGHT, LORD.'

'Read mine.'

After a second Sphandor's face was a mask of terror.

With the creature in tow they moved slowly, because the wide wings acted as an air brake. The demon held a loop of cable in both hands and glided behind them unsteadily, peppering them alternately with entreaties and curses.

The smoke no longer dominated the sky. It was the sky. Winds in the upper air had teased it out into a ragged mushroom.

Apart from the background noise behind them they flew in silence, Kin and Silver following a little behind Marco. Finally Kin's radio chimed.

'This is Silver, transmitting on your suit frequency only, Kin. You had something to say? If you move the switch to position four Marco will not hear,' the voice added.

'Silver, he slaughtered them! They didn't have a chance!'

Silver made a noncommittal noise. 'They outnumbered him ten to one.'

'They weren't expecting a kung, damn it!' Kin felt the bottled-up words rushing to be said. 'He enjoyed it! You saw him, he even killed ones who were running away, he threw... their only crime was that they happened to be in his way, it was completely inhu--' She choked on the word.

After a while Silver said: 'Quite.'

Kin thought about the first contact with the kung. Men had already met the shandi, who apart from their duelling had no concept of warfare and viewed mankind's ragged history with barely concealed horror. So the first ship to land on Kung had no weapons aboard at all.

Five deaths served to convince men that, considered on the galactic scale, they were gentle and peace-loving. Perhaps it had been worth it.

'We all think we understand each other,' Kin heard Silver say. 'We eat together, we trade, many of us pride ourselves on having alien friends -- but all this is only possible, only possible, Kin, because we do not fully comprehend the other. You've studied Earth history. Do you think you could understand the workings of the mind of a Japanese warrior a thousand years ago? But he is as a twin to you compared with Marco, or with myself. When we use the word "cosmospolitan" we use it too lightly -- it's flippant, it means we're galactic tourists who communicate in superficialities. We don't comprehend. Different worlds, Kin. Different anvils of gravity and radiation and evolution.

'If that winged creature is used to reading human minds, no wonder Marco's terrified it.'

Marco's voice cut in, spiky with suspicion.

'What are you two talking privately about?'

'Female hygiene,' said Silver crisply. 'Marco, shouldn't we land again? We should interrogate this creature.'

'I agree. I will watch for a suitable site. I am sorry to have interrupted your conversation.' There was a click as he switched out.

There was a noise that might have been a shand chuckling. Then Silver said, 'There is another minor matter, Kin. Are ravens a very common bird?'

'Hmm? I don't think so. Why?'

"There has been one in the sky ever since we left Eirick. Sometimes it merely tags behind, sometimes it flies a parallel course.'

'It could be just coincidence,' said Kin doubtfully.

'We've been flying at well over a hundred miles an hour at times, Kin.'

'Good grief! You mean it's keeping up with us?'

'Yes. No, don't try and find it. It's well beyond human visual range, as it doubtless intends. It's only by accident I saw it once or twice, and then I started watching for it. At the moment I'm thinking in terms of a small flying robot.'

'There was the raven in the ship,' said Kin. 'It got out of the box, remember? And before that it had arrived mysteriously at Kung Top. But we killed it in vacuum, didn't we?'

'I wonder if we did?'

They passed over a village where the only movement was in the flames of a burning house, and Marco cut in briefly to tell Kin to take Sphandor's tether while he went lower to investigate.

The demon hung a few metres away, wings pounding the air heavily. In the early morning light Kin looked at him closely for the first time. She looked again.

There was no doubt about it. He was fuzzy around the edges.

'I see it too,' said Silver. 'As if it's slightly out of focus. How odd.'

Sphandor regarded them sullenly.

'YOU MEAN TO KILL ME' he whimpered.

'Not unless you attempt to do us harm,' said Kin.

'THE SKINNY ONE, THE KALI-ARMED, HE WISHES TO KILL ME.'

'That's just his general wish to the universe in general, not specific to you,' said Kin. 'I won't let him harm you.'

'l WILL IMPLORE BERITH TO GIVE YOU GOLD! TRESOLAY I SHALL SUMMON TO MAKE YOUR BEAUTY EVEN MORE...'

Marco was a dot on what, if it had been more than just a muddy open space, would have been called the village square.

'The place is empty,' came his voice, 'unless you count corpses.'

They tethered Sphandor to a post in what had been the village forge. Kin touched his skin gingerly, and under her fingers the demon appeared to be vibrating like a wineglass in a concert hall. Touching what looked like skin felt like fur, sticky with static.

A puzzle. She dozed off in the shade, watching Silver strip panels off the dumbwaiter and take the workshop manual from its drawer.

When she awoke the sun was high and 'waiter modules were stacked neatly in the dust. Silver was half visible behind a pile of panels.

Through half-closed eyelids Kin watched Sphandor. He was hopping around anxiously on his tether, sometimes darting forward and passing a tool to the shand. When Silver's hand came out and groped in the air over a make-shift brazier for the soldering iron she'd made out of a piece of scrap copper, Sphandor reached into the coals and withdrew the rod by its glowing end, laying the other carefully in Silver's black palm.

'He just picked up a piece of red hot iron,' said Kin, 'hot end first.'

Silver looked at her blankly, then looked at Sphandor, then at the rod in her hand, then shrugged and turned back to the 'waiter's innards with a preoccupied air.

'It is a function of demons that they can withstand heat,' came her muffled voice.

'How's the 'waiter?'

'Only superficial damage, but you know how it is - one has to remove half the machinery just to reach one wire. I've nearly finished.'

Kin stood up, stretched, and wandered out into the square. She remembered something, and looked up at the sky.

'There is a raven perched on the big stone building over yonder,' said Silver behind her.

'Do you think it's some sort of spy?'

'What do you think?'

'I think it's some sort of spy.'

'That's what I think.'

Kin turned round. 'Where's Marco?' she asked. 'It's time we interrogated wrinklebelly here.'

'I PLEAD.'

Silver slotted the last module into the dumbwaiter and started to clip the panels back before answering.

'He said he was going to have a look around. I told him about the raven.'

Kin shook her head. 'Not clever,' she said. 'Now he'll want to catch it. Sphandor could tell us more. About matter transmission, for one thing.'

Silver glanced up sharply, then looked at the demon. He cringed. The shand walked over and stared at him, which made him attempt to shuffle behind the pole. Finally she took a magnifier out of the 'waiter toolkit and held it against his skin.

'Commendable reasoning,' she said at last. 'What gave you the idea, Kin?'

'He shouldn't be able to fly, even with chest muscles like that. And at that weight he should have legs like an elephant. And there's the fuzziness, of course, and the slight vibration.'

Silver switched off the magnifier.

'I imagine the fuzziness is due to a malfunction in the transmitter,' she said. 'Well, well. It's a neat solution to the transmission problem, I'll give them that. Very neat. Frankly, Kin, you can stuff the disc. It's just a toy, a nasty toy. But this is something worth having.'

'Right. Let's find Marco.'

They found him inside the stone building that dominated the village. At one end of it was a square tower, but he was standing like a statue in the gloom of the main hall. He turned as they came in, and in two of his hands were a pair of long candlesticks.

'What's this place?' asked Kin, staring up into the shadowy roof.

'A house of religion, I think,' said the kung. 'I was considering investigating the tower. There appears to be a stairway inside.' He was unnaturally cheerful, and looked at her in an odd way.

'The view from the top should be extensive. We could plan the rest of the day's flight without putting a further drain on the belts' batteries.'

'But the belts are perfectly--' Kin began, and stopped. Marco was semaphoring wildly with his two free arms.

'We must conserve our power!' Echoes bounced back from the depths of the building. He looked at Kin and pressed a finger to his lips for silence.

'Stay here, Silver,' he said. 'I want to show Kin this carving.'

But when she went to step forward he pressed her back with one hand and walked away alone. He moved the two candlesticks expertly. It sounded as though two people were walking across the floor.

He's going really mad this time, Kin thought. Silver was smiling to herself.

Marco came back. 'Now let's all go up the tower,' he said. 'This way, folks.' He handed the sticks to Kin and pointed to the further end of the hall, then soft-footed it towards the open door. They saw him flatten himself against the wall.

'Well, let's go,' said Kin weakly, and started swinging the sticks. There was some difficulty in getting Silver up the winding staircase at the far end, and Kin felt a real fool helping two sticks to climb stairs.

'Learned something very interesting about the demon, Marco,' said Silver. Then she replied in a remarkable impersonation of a kung: 'What was that, Silver? Well, you know matter transmission has been tried and doesn't work? Well, it does on the disc. How do you mean? Kin noticed it. Tell him, Kin.'

I'd better join in, she decided, otherwise they'll think I'm nuts... What do I mean, they?

'The Company put a lot of research into straight matter transmission,' she said. 'In theory it ought to work, it's a logical extension of strata machine or dumbwaiter operation. Trouble is, it takes power. Far too much. And the best anyone managed was a two-millisecond displacement, then the subject just snapped back to the here.'

'Aye, I heard about that,' said Silver in Marco's voice. 'The continuum is very anti sneaky stuff like matter transmission. Starhopping it has to put up with because we go through the Elsewhere, but straight teleportation is like trying to throw away a ball that's tied to your hand by elastic.'

'Yes, there seems to be rules that say you stick to your predestined space-time point.'

'What's that got to do with the demon?'

'He's transmitted. Something transmits him out maybe a hundred times a second, just as fast as the continuum snaps him back. That's how he can fly. They just move the focus of the transmitters. He's here, he can see and hear and touch, but he's not here. I don't know why he stays tied up,' she added as an afterthought. "They could move him outside the ropes.'

"Then the sooner we get back--'

There was a scream.

When they arrived breathless at the doorway Marco was standing with all four hands clasped around a bundle of black feathers. Two small shining eyes watched them intently.

'It just sauntered in through the door,' said the kung.

'What was all the business with the candlesticks?' said Kin. Silver snorted.

'Marco deduced the creature must have phenomenal sound-detection apparatus,' she said. 'It seemed logical that if it heard three of us climbing the tower--'

'It's far too heavy for a bird,' said Marco. 'It must be a machine. Now we can talk to the disc controllers and explain--'

The raven turned its head 180 degrees. Marco's mouth closed like a clam.

Quoth the raven: 'You're the bastard that dumped me in vacuum. You're going to find out what happens to people who don't act respectful to one of the Eyes of God.'

Marco's mouth opened and shut.

'Heaven help your hands if you're still holding me in five seconds,' the bird added conversationally. 'Four, three, two--' A thin wisp of smoke escaped from the feathers.

'Marco!'

His hands jerked back. The raven stayed in mid-air, balanced on a thin actinic flame that filled the hall with shadows and set the flagstone below cracking like springtime ice.

Then it wasn't there. Kin had just enough sense to throw herself backwards as pieces of roof rained down. They looked up at the ragged hole, far above, and heard the cry:

'You'll be sorreeee!'

'Talk,' suggested Marco.

'I PLEAD.'

'Who runs the disc? Where are they? How may we contact them? We shall require adequate directions and a detailed assessment of probable risks.'

Kin stepped forward and smiled reassuringly at the tethered giant. 'Where did you come from, Sphandor?' she said.

'l HAVE ALWAYS UNDERSTOOD THAT A DOG WITH STOMACH GRIPES PAUSED NEAR A LOG AND THE SUN HATCHED ME OUT, LADY. DO NOT LET HIM NEAR ME! I CAN SEE HIS THOUGHTS AND--'

'I won't let him hurt you--'

'Oh yes? Just how?' Marco began angrily. Two of his hands were heavily bandaged.

'There is an island at the hub of the disc,' said Kin sweetly, ignoring the interruption. Tell me about it.'

'GREAT LADY, GREAT BEASTS ROAM THERE OR SO IT IS SAID. NONE OF US MAY GO THERE ON PAIN OF -- OF--'

'Of what?'

'AGONY, LADY. PAIN. THE WORLD DISAPPEARS, AND THEN ONE IS IN A NEW PLACE AND THERE IS AGONY.'

'But you have attempted to go there?'

'THERE is NOTHING THERE BUT BLACK SAND, LADY, AND THE BONES OF SHIPS, AND IN THE CENTRE A DOME OF COPPER, AND TERRIBLE ENGINES! THEY CANNOT BE TRICKED! '

Kin kept trying for another ten minutes, then gave up.

'I believe him,' she said, joining the others and dialling for coffee.

'He's manifestly a product of complex technology,' said Marco.

'Yah, but he thinks he's a demon. What am I supposed to do? Argue?'

'If I chopped a foot off perhaps he would think differently?' said Marco, reaching for a knife.

'No,' said Silver, drumming her fingers on the dumbwaiter's dome. 'No. I think not. Marco, we must assume that the disc builders tend to think like human beings, and humans set great store by mercy and fair play, at least when it does not conflict with their interests. Let us therefore set the creature free, thus demonstrating our moral superiority. The action will declare us to be merciful and civilized. In any case,' she added, and they instinctively looked up for ravens as she lowered her voice, 'I fail to see any further use in him.'

Kin nodded. Silver walked and pulled at the knots in the cable and let it fall away. Sphandor stood up, looked at them solemnly, and walked out into the light.

He raised a cloud of dust as he took off, jerking upwards like a man heron, and hovered fifteen metres up.

'ZAIGONEN TRYON (TFGKl) BERIGO HURSHIM!'

'So much for gratitude,' said Silver.

'You understand the language?' said Kin.

'No, but I think I got the drift of that.'

'ASFALAGO TEGERAM! NEMA! DWOLAH NARMA! WHERE ARE YOU, SOIGNATORIE, USORE. DILAPIDATOR -- NOOOOOOOO--'

For an instant the demon was a black cloud that filled the sky, a fog of flickering, fuzzy images -- each one staring in terror. Then he was gone. There was a thump of inrushing air.

They flew high and fast over forests flattened by the falling ship. The smoke column was thinning, but now they were within miles of it the sky was all smoke.

Marco aimed directly at it, daring it to contain enemies. Ahead of Kin, his suit glittered like a silver spark against the darkness.

Once inside, Kin was surprised that she could still see. It might have been better if she could not. Between billows was the landscape of hell.

After five minutes inside the smoke Marco spoke.

'I don't understand it,' he said. 'There's no radiation. There shouldn't be. But there's far too much damage. Silver?'

Below them a drunken forest burned. Before the shand answered the ground below them disappeared abruptly, as if there had been a cliff.

'I can see nothing in this gloom,' said Silver. 'Can you?'

Marco could. Kung eyes had better night vision. He swore, and slowed his suit. The others did the same, drifting together so that the suits bobbed as in trio in the smoke. Marco was still staring down.

'I don't believe it,' he said softly. 'Let's go down.'

'I'm flying blind,' complained Silver. 'You must direct me so that I don't hit the ground.'

'You won't,' said Marco.

Kin let herself drop, tensing herself for the crash until she came out of the smoke into moonlight.

Shining upwards.

Vertigo gripped like a wrench. She could take space, because everywhere was down and direction lost its meaning. Skimming over a landscape was fine, it was no different than driving an aircar.

But not this. Not hanging legs down over a hole in the world.

The moon was directly below, hovering near infinity at the bottom of a tunnel that went down and down and down...

'Five miles deep, wouldn't you agree, Silver?' said Marco in the distance. 'And at least two wide. Are you all right, Kin?'

'Hunh?'

'You're still descending.'

She fumbled dizzily for the suit controls. On a level with her eyes, a quarter of a mile away, was the lip of the hole, striated with bands of rock. Lower -- she forced her eyes to move slowly. More bands, then a line of something metallic.

And a pipe, gushing water. Kin started to laugh hysterically.

'We're fine!' she giggled. 'We don't need to go any further, all we have to do is wait for the repairmen! You know what it's like with plumbers, when you want one they're never--'

'Cease gibbering. Silver, see to her,' snapped Marco. Kin saw his hand poised over his chest panel. Then he dropped, fast. Her eyes started to follow him down before Silver's gloved paw jerked her round. She felt motion, and realized dimly that she was being steered away from the hole.

After a while she heard Marco say, "There's a pipe thirty metres across. Guess what? The water's pooling about two miles down -- on air. That's why we're not in the middle of a descending hurricane, there's some kind of a gravity base down there. There's going to be one hell of a lake there soon.

'I've gone down forty metres. It looks like an explosion in a power station. There's sheared -- cables, I guess, multicored, and what could be waveguide tubes or access tunnels or something. Silver?'

'I hear you. I suggest the ship impacted on top of one of the disc environmental machines, which blew up,' said the shand.

'It looks like it. There's a lot of fused stuff and -- scrub that. Here's a tunnel, a real tunnel. Can you hear me?

I'm hovering in front of a semi-circular tunnel, it's even got rails in it! The whole of the interior of the disc is one big machine! You should see this hole, it's big enough for a spaceship. There's, uh, eighteen rails across the floor. Access for machinery repairs, I assume, but it's half choked with rubble.'

'The ship impacted five days ago,' said Silver sombrely. "They have had five days in which to effect repairs. The disc builders are dead, Marco. There can be no other explanation.'

'I can see no signs of repair,' came the voice from the pit.

'Quite so. Something has gone wrong somewhere, just as the seas are erratic and the heavenly bodies misbehave. Which way does the tunnel run? Is there a continuation on the further side of the pit?'

There was a pause.

'Yes, I can see the other mouth of the tunnel. It runs direct from the rim to hub,' said Marco. 'I had considered suggesting we continue our flight along the tunnel but--'

'--it would be better to face any dangers in the open sky. Precisely.'

Kin opened her eyes. She was hovering over blessed earth -- scorched, maybe, baked and half molten, but solid.

Thanks,' she said. 'Stupid, wasn't it? My forebears used to hang from trees by their knees.'

'No shame,' said Silver. 'I do not like darkness. We all have our phobias. Kin? You look a little pale...'

Kin didn't try to speak. She knew she couldn't. She managed a strangled grunt, and pointed.

Something was rising out of the pit, with difficulty.

That difficulty arose because it was almost too big. All she could think of was the Mt Tryggvason Memorial.

It was one of the Valhallian tourist attractions. Someone had carved the high-relief heads of Presidents Halfdan, Thorbjorn, Weasel Moccasin and Teuhtlile out of solid rock a few hundred feet high in the side of the mountain.

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.'

'OK, 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, palaeotechs, 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. Anthro-pocentricity 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 on to 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 halfway 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 cross-legged 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.

'I wonder where he keeps his antipersonnel blaster?' she asked. 'Marco, you know you and Silver had this idea about how I could survive on the disc by using sex?'

'You have that advantage, yes.'

'Well, forget it.'

'Your meaning?'

'Just forget it. Our fat friend with the sword is--' She stopped, furious to feel herself reddening. 'Marco, can't you recall anything else from that storybook?'

Marco's face was blank for a while. Then he winced. 'Ah, yes,' he said. 'You mean, like, unique.'

'Not too unique for this time and place,' said Kin, and turned towards Silver. The shand looked up at her.

"This could be Arabic,' she said. 'I've never heard it spoken. I've tried a bit of Latin, which I think he understands but he's not letting on. The only thing I've established so far is that he wants our suits.'

Kin and Marco exchanged glances. A look of almost Ehftnic guile spread across the kung's face.

'Tell him they're very precious,' he said. 'Tell him we wouldn't exchange them even for his aircraft. Tell him we need to get to the coast quickly.'

'He'll never fall for that,' said Kin. 'Anyway, there's hardly any juice left in the belts.'

'That's his worry,' said Marco. 'I have a plan. But first of all I'd like to see how he operates that flying rug. Tell him it is too hot to negotiate out here -- it's true, anyway.'

There followed a long exchange of cracked phrases and words repeated at varying levels of exasperation. Finally the man nodded and stood up, motioning towards the servant with a hand.

The big man stepped forward and reached into his pouch, handing his master the -- call it the--

Hell, thought Kin, it is a flying carpet. Only we don't like to say it because it sounds crazy.

It was about two metres by three, and patterned with an intricate geometrical design in blue, green and red.

Spread out on the ground it hugged the bumps and hollows limply.

The man said a word. Some dust was blown up as the carpet straightened, stiffened, and hovered a few inches above the sand; Kin thought she could hear a faint hum.

It didn't rock even when Silver stepped aboard. The man with the sword sat behind them. The old man said another word. The ground fell away noiselessly.

'One could coat a surface with flexible lifting units,' said Marco after a while, with a brave little quiver in his voice, 'but what about power? How could you get batteries this thin?'

Similar thoughts had been passing through Kin's mind, since she was staring intently at the carpet between her knees so that her eyes didn't stray over the edge. She was aware that Marco was sliding gingerly towards her.

'You nervous too?' she said.

'I am conscious of mere millimetres of unknown and unproven flying machine underneath me,' he said.

'You weren't nervous in the lift belts.'

'But they were under an unconditional hundred-year guarantee. If one belt failed, how long would the manufacturer stay in business?'

'I do not think one could fall off this if one tried,' said Silver. She hit the air beside her with a paw and it made a noise, as though someone had punched a jelly.

'Safety field,' she said. 'Try it.'

Kin waved a hand gingerly over the carpet's edge. It was like moving through treacle and, as she pushed, like leaning on rock. Ali Baba turned round, grinned at her and spoke a sentence.

When the carpet was finally flying level again there was silence. Finally Marco said flatly: 'Tell the lunatic if he attempts that again I will kill him.'

Kin released her numb fingers from their grip on the patterned pile.

'Be diplomatic,' she added. 'Be tactful. Say that if he does it again I will maim him.'

Two loops and a triple roll!

On the disc-generated gravity, shaped fields and direct vocal control came wrapped up in one neat carpet-shaped vehicle.

She wondered how Marco intended to steal it.

They skimmed low over the flat roofs of the city. Kin saw people in the narrow crowded streets look up, then turn back and go about their business. Magic carpets, apparently, were familiar objects.

They homed in on a minor palace, a squat white affair with a central dome and two ornate towers. There was a garden behind decorative trellises -- now, that was odd...

'It must have its own source of water,' she said aloud.

'Why?' said Marco.

'Everything else round here is parched. That's the one green spot we've seen today.'

'That would not be surprising, if he is a disc builder,' said Marco. 'A fact which I doubt.'

'And I also,' rumbled Silver, 'yet he handles the carpet well enough and our flying belts evinced only cautious greed, not awe. I am thinking now in terms of some hermetic order, maybe, handing down disc builder machines and relics with no proper understanding of their internal workings -- like a savage may competently drive a groundcar while believing it to be powered by little horses under the engine cowling.'

Ali Baba brought them down perfectly, the carpet drifting slowly across a balcony and through an arch into a high-ceilinged room. It hovered a few inches above the intricately tiled floor, then settled.

He leapt up and clapped his hands. By the time the others had untwisted their limbs and, in Marco's case, eased the steel grip his hands had been maintaining, a posse of servants had entered the room. They carried towels, and wide bowls.

'That'd better be water,' growled Marco, "cos I'm gonna drink it.'

He pushed his head noisily into the bowl in front of him, causing mild consternation among the servants. Silver picked up hers and, after a preliminary sniff, opened her mouth like a funnel and tipped it down. Kin drank her fill in a reasonably ladylike manner, and used the rest to wash the dust off her face.

She took the opportunity to look around.

There was hardly any furniture. The room was just an ornate box, walls decorated with geometrical and horticultural patterns and several large screens at one end. By the grounded carpet was a low table, its top apparently one thick slab of crystal.

Ali had disappeared, along with the servants. Silver peered around the room.

'The water was ice cold,' she stated. 'There were crystals in it. Show me iced water, and I'll show you civilization.'

'Anywhere else it would mean a refrigerator,' Kin admitted, 'but here, I'd bet they've got hot-and-cold running demons in all rooms.'

Marco walked over to the carpet and inspected it carefully. Then he stepped on it and said the word.

'I imagine it's slaved to his voice pattern,' said Silver, without looking round. Marco cursed quietly.

Ali Baba appeared from behind the screens, followed by two men with swords. He was carrying a small black box on a red cushion.

He looked sideways at Silver and spoke a few words in halting Latin.

'He is going to, uh, summon that-which-speaks-all-tongues,' she said. 'I think.'

While they watched he laid the box on the floor and opened the lid. The thing he took out puzzled Kin. It looked like a small flat teapot made out of adulterated gold.

He polished it with his sleeve.

'Will You Give Me No Peace, Sorcerer?'

IT had appeared a few feet away, hazy in a cloud of purple smoke. It was immediately obvious to Kin why Marco's appearance hadn't bothered the man -- if he was used to things that looked like this, he was used to anything.

It was man-height, or would have been if it stood erect. But it was bent almost double, two thick gold-scaled arms and oversized hands serving as a second pair of legs. Clusters of tendrils grew out of its neck. Its face was long, vaguely horse-like, topped by a pair of pointy ears and tailed by two moustachios that trailed on to the floor. It wore a small cone-shaped hat.

'Know All That I Am Azrifel,' it began in a sing-song voice, 'Djinnee Of The Desert, Terror Of Thousands, Scourge Of Millions And, I Must Be Frank About It, Slave Of The Lamp. So What Do You Want This Time, Master?'

There was a long speech from the sorcerer. The djinnee turned around until it faced the trio.

'My Master Abu Ibn Infra Presents His Compliments And Welcomes You To His Humble Abode And A Lot Of Stuff Like That. If You Want To Eat, Just Tell The Table. Your Wish Is Its Command. There's A Lot Of That Sort Of Thing Goes On Around Here,' he added.

Kin hunkered down beside the table and looked at it more closely. It was one block of crystal, but now that she paid close attention there seemed to be something else in there too, something like a moving wisp of faint smoke.

She thought of cucumber and green paprillion salad, and the cinnamon ice-cream she used to buy from Grnh's Olde Drugge Store in Wonderstrands, the one with the recipe that Grnh had refused to sell to the dumbwaiter programmers. There was always a black Treale cherry on the top. The memory of that taste welled up until she drooled.

It grew out of the table. There was an impression of swirling movement in the crystal and then it was there, smoking with frost.

There was a black Treale cherry on the top. And -- Kin picked up the carton and stared.

It was in a familiar blue, black and white and showed an anthropomorphic penguin in a chef's hat. Around the side was: The Olde Drugge Store, corner of Skrale and High, Upperside, Wonderstrands 667548. Tregin Grnh and Siblings, reg. WE FREEZE TO PLEASE.

Marco stared at the carton, then looked down at the teasing shadows in the tabletop.

'I don't know how you managed that,' he said carefully, 'but what I have in mind is the Blue Plate special they serve in Henry Horse's Kung Food Bar in New--'

He stopped, because it was already there. There was one bowl, heavy pottery containing something under an orange-yellow crust that rumbled with internal eruptions.

'It must be telepathy,' he said uncertainly. 'It's just a telepathic dumbwaiter. Come on, Silver. I'm hungry.'

'You're hungry,' said Silver. She drummed heavy fingers on the table edge, then doubtfully:

'I have in mind a dish of ceremonial truduc.'

The shadow swirled, disappeared. Silver's fingers drummed on.

'Smoked guaracuc with grintzes?' she suggested.

A vague shape appeared above the crystal, then faded.

'Dadugs in Brine? Chaque sweetbreads? Xiqua? Dried qumqums?'

Kin sighed, and pushed the ice-cream away untasted.

'There Is A Problem?' said Azrifel.

'The table can't handle Shand proteins,' said Silver, sitting down heavily and drawing her knees up to her chin.

'What Is A Protein?'

Abu Ibn Infra seated himself comfortably by the far side of the table and put out his hand to grasp a crystal glass of pinkish liquid as it materialized beside him. Azrifel stirred, and nodded as the man spoke.

'My Master Wishes To Talk About Your Flying Clothes And Similar Matters.' More consultation. 'My Master Presents His Compliments To His Fellow Collectors And Offers, In Exchange For All Three Items, A Mirror-To-See-All-Things-Be-They-Never-So-Far And Two Bottomless Purses.'

Kin was aware of the other two looking at her. She said, 'Leaving aside for a moment his somewhat derisory offer,' -- she had a feeling that a lack of the haggling spirit might be regarded as signs of general weakness -- 'we come from a far-off land and do not quite understand the reference to Collectors. Collectors of what?'

Abu Ibn Infra frowned as he listened to the translation. He spat out a reply. Kin wouldn't have thought it possible for anyone to spit several lengthy sentences, but he managed, he managed.

'My Master Is Puzzled. You Possess Gifts Of God But You Do Not Know Of The Collectors. He Says: How Can This Be?'

'Listen, demon,' said Kin, 'you know. You're a projection, like Sphandor. Aren't you?'

'I Find Myself Forbidden To Answer That Question At This Moment In Time,' said Azrifel smugly. 'You Are In The Shit, That's All I Know. If You Think You're Coming Out Of This Alive, My Reaction Is Ho Ho Ho.'

'I will kill it,' said Marco, half rising. The guards behind Ibn Infra stirred.

'Sit down,' hissed Kin. 'You, demon, answer the question. What is a collector?'

'My Master Says It Is No Secret. He Himself Was Once A Humble Fisherman Until, Upon Gutting A Fish, One Day, He Discovered Inside It A Gift Of God, To Whit, The Lamp To Which I Am Shamefully Enslaved. I Am Azrifel Of The Ninth Dominion Of The Damned. I Can Find Anything -- Even The Power To Talk To You. That Is My Power.

'For Five Years I Have Laboured Mightily For This Jumped-Up Pig Of A Nouveau Riche Former Fisherman, Spiriting To This Somewhat Pretentious Palace Such Gifts Of God As Are Unclaimed By Other Collectors Or In The Possession Of Collectors Unfortunate Enough To Have Demons Weaker Than I. I Have Combed The Depths Of The Sea And The Bowels Of Volcanoes, I Have--'

'Hold it,' said Kin. 'The flying carpet, the table, these damn money purses -- they're Gifts of God?'

'Aye. The Carpet I Liberated From A Merchant In Basra, The Table I Found Encrusted With Barnacles On The Sea Floor--'

'But your master doesn't know how they operate? I mean, they're just magical items to him?'

'Aren't They, Then?' said the demon, grinningly.

'Just as I thought,' snapped Marco. 'He's just an ignorant man who doesn't know any more about the nature of the disc than does anyone else in these parts. I'll take out these guards, then we'll grab him and ride the carpet out of here.'

'Wait a minute,' said Kin sharply.

'What for? He knows nothing except how to operate the toys this creature finds for him.'

Kin shook her head. 'Just once, let's try diplomacy,' she said. 'Demon, tell your master we are not Collectors. We will give him these flying belts for his collection if he transports us on his magic carpet to the circular island that lies off the coast to the south-east of here.'

She knew she had said something wrong as soon as the words were out of her mouth. When Azrifel's translation died away Abu's face went white.

Marco sighed, and stood up. 'OK, so much for diplomacy,' he said. He sprang. So did Azrifel. There was a grey and yellow blur in mid-air and a small thunderclap. Then the demon was back, unruffled. Marco had vanished.

'What have you done with him?' said Kin.

'He Has Been Deposited In A Place Of Safety, Unharmed Except Maybe For A Few Friction Burns.'

'I see. And his ransom is our flying belts, right?'

Abu spoke. The demon said: 'No, My Master Says He Knows Now That You Come From Another World.

There Was Another Such Traveller, Some Time Since Who--'

'Jago Jalo?' said Kin. Abu glared at her.

'Crazy fool,' hissed Silver.

'That Was His Name,' agreed the demon. 'A Madman. He Abused Our Hospitality. He Stole From Our Collection. He Sought The Forbidden Island Too.'

'What happened to him?' said Kin. The demon shrugged.

'He Escaped From Here With A Carpet, A Bottomless Purse And A Cloak With Unusual Powers. Even I Have Been Unable To Locate Him. My Master Feels, However, That All Is Not Lost.'

'No?'

'He Has Three New Flying Devices, Two Captive Demons And You.'

Kin sprang round. More guards had appeared on the balcony, and they were archers. She considered taking a dive for the open air with the belt on full throttle. She might get hit. She doubted whether the disc's medical facilities were satisfactory. Anyway, that wouldn't solve Silver's problem.

So she collapsed into tears of inconsolable grief.

She heard a brief conversation between the demon and his master. Then two servant women were summoned to take her away.

She had one glimpse of Silver's impassive face before she was escorted out of the room and into a maze of ornate arches and screens. A male guard walked behind her with a drawn sword.

The women chattered at her solicitously. When they reached one arched doorway the guard left them, and took up a post outside the door. Kin was briefly surrounded by a gaggle of small dark-eyed women in scanty clothing before the older of her escorts shooed them away. She felt helpful arms guiding her to a bench. She sat and stared.

Later a middle-aged woman brought her some food. Kin looked up at her gratefully. Under the strange makeup the woman was watching her with simple-minded sympathy.

So Kin apologized silently as she hit her, as nicely as possible. The woman sighed and collapsed, but Kin was already on her feet and running.

She sped through several low and airy rooms and had a blurred impression of fountains, singing birds and bored women sitting on large cushions. Kohl-eyed, they stared after her and began to scream as Kin cannoned into a servant carrying a tray.

A long way behind her a new series of screams suggested that a guard had reluctantly invaded the seraglio.

Kin reached a balcony, considered the courtyard below, then scrambled up a decorative trellis that trembled even under her weight. It took her on to a flat roof and into the full glare of the noon sun.

Shouts below meant that a guard had got as far as the balcony. Kin threw herself down, chest heaving, hoping that he would think she had taken the easy way and dropped into the courtyard. He didn't. There was a sudden silence, broken by some heavy breathing.

Then wood cracked, and there was the beginnings of a wail that ended with a noise like a falling man hitting hard stone flags.

She jogged across the roof to the nearer of two towers that pierced it. It wasn't a wise choice really, but she couldn't think of anything else. There was an arch with no door, and a dark spiral stairway as cold as ice after the glare of the sun off the roof.

The stairs ended in a turret room with glassless windows looking out over the city. Kin peered around in the gloom. It looked as if she was in a storeroom. There were a few carpets rolled up against the wall, and boxes in untidy heaps beside them. A tall bronze statue in vaguely Middlesea dress was propped against a three-legged table with what looked like the wreckage of a drinking party strewn across it. There were several swords, including one that looked -- Kin couldn't believe it, but closer inspection bore out the first impression - one that was half-buried in an anvil.

In the middle of the floor was a statue of a horse, cast in some dark metal. The musculature had been done well, but the pose was uninspiring. It just stood four-square, looking at the floor.

'Junk,' said Kin. She tried to pull an iron-bound chest across the stair-hole, then gave up and sat on it instead. There was no sound below.

'A person could hold out here for weeks,' she thought. 'With food and water, that is.' Food! She thought longingly of the magic table, or even of the dumbwaiter. But she couldn't have eaten a meal with Silver watching her sorrowfully, knowing that inside two days the shand would turn despite herself into a ravening, ravenous animal.

'Marco? Silver?' she whispered.

At the fifth attempt Marco answered.

'Kin! Where are you?'

'I'm up in -- is there anyone with you?'

'We're in a zoo! You wouldn't believe it! You must get us out!'

'I'm in some sort of museum attic,' she said. 'I'll have to wait until it's dark. Where are you exactly?'

'I assume we're somewhere in the palace grounds. You must work quickly. Silver and I are in the same cage.'

'What's she doing now?'

'Moping.'

'Oh-oh.'

'What?'

Kin sighed. 'I'll do my best,' she said. She padded over to a window and peered out. Someone was shouting in the distance, but the roof lay hot and empty below her. There was, she noticed, a black speck wheeling in the sky. One of the Eyes of God, whoever He was.

Most of the swords she could hardly lift with both hands, so they were out.

'Let's face it' she told herself, 'how are you going to make the big heroic rescue in any case?'

On the other hand, she answered, it'll be expected of you. The races of the galaxy look towards mankind as the essential lunatic element.

She stepped backwards, and knocked against the table. The jug on it fell over, and spilled vinegar-smelling wine across the table and on to the floor in a thin stream. Kin watched it for a while, then carefully set the jug upright.

It swished.

Looking inside, she saw dark liquid rising. She waited until the jug was brim full of swirling redness then grabbed the handle, sloshed the liquid across the room and brought the base of the jug down hard against the tabletop.

There was a sizzle and a brief smell of ozone. Bits of circuit laminate bounced on the floor.

'Fine' she said softly, 'that's just fine. So long as it wasn't the fairies that were doing it.' On the other hand, the Company didn't believe in matter transmission either. But it might have been, say, a tiny single-function dumbwaiter in the base of the jug, sucking up molecules from the ambient air. She decided she'd believe anything but magic.

Someone moved, down at the base of the staircase.

There was nowhere to hide. Correction -- the tower room was bursting with hiding places, but none of them promised to be permanent. Kin grabbed a sword from a pile near by and considered hacking at the first head to appear on the stairs.

No good. She looked up at a small trapdoor in the ceiling, and decided it would be easier to defend. If it led on to the roof, perhaps the raven would see her as if that would do any good. Anyway, she could then slice at fingers.

She walked over to the horse statue and hoisted herself into a stirrup, then stood on tiptoe in the saddle to fumble with the trap door.

The horse whirred. Kin swayed, landed sitting in the saddle but with enough force to knock the breath out of her. Then she couldn't move her legs. She looked down in panic. Padded clamps had extruded from the horse's flanks and were gripping her gently but firmly.

The neck in front of her came up. The head swivelled 180 degrees and the horse looked at Kin with bright insectile eyes.

'YOUR WISH IS MY COMMAND,' it said inside Kin's head. 'Hell!'

'THOSE ARE NOT MEANINGFUL CO-ORDINATES.'

'Are you a robot?' She felt the click and whirr of gears underneath her.

'l AM THE FABULOUS MECHANICAL HORSE OF AHMED, PRINCE OF TREBISOND.'

Kin heard scurrying footsteps on the stairs.

'Get me out of here!' she hissed.

'PLEASE HOLD ON TO THE REINS. PLEASE LOWER THE HEAD. IN CASE OF MALAISE OF THE AIR, PLEASE USE THE RECEPTACLE PROVIDED.'

There was a thud inside the animal, and the noise of heavy wheels tumbling into motion. The horse took off. As they glided smoothly through the window Kin flung herself forward to avoid the edge of the wall. And then the horse was free and moving, legs galloping on the air as it soared into the copper sky.

Kin looked at the sword in her hand. It was night-black and unnaturally light, but it would do. It would be surprising if Abu had learned how to use the lift belts yet, so possibly his only other aircraft was the carpet.

If it came to an aerial flight, she'd prefer to be on the horse.

'YOUR FURTHER WISH IS MY COMMAND.'

'You can start by telling me how you fly,' said Kin, peering at the gardens below.

'ABANAZZARD THE MAGICIAN FABRICATED ME. I FLY BY APPLICATION OF THE COMPOUND UPSWINGING WEIGHT ENGINE, WHICH REQUIRES THE CONTINUED INTERVENTION OF THE DJINNEE ZOLAH AT THE CRITICAL POINT.'

'Do you know of a zoo in the palace grounds?'

'YES.'

'Land inside it, then.'

'TO HEAR IS TO OBEY, O MISTRESS.'

The horse started to gallop in a descending spiral. Kin was briefly aware of upturned faces as they raced at roof height back towards the palace. A ragged line of dusty trees flashed past and Kin realized they were landing in a wide avenue between rows of low cages, dark and forbidding in the gathering dusk.

Her mount touched down neatly, hooves galloping smoothly from empty air to packed earth. Something hurled itself against the bars of the nearest cage, and she got a vague impression of wings and teeth. Plenty of teeth.

'Marco!' Things shrilled and sneezed in the shadows of the cages.

'Over here!'

Kin urged the horse forward until she saw Marco's gleaming eyes looking urgently between bars thick enough to have been tree trunks. Perhaps they were.

Kin jiggled them until they slid back noisily. Marco came out as though on a spring.

'Give me the sword' he commanded. Kin had almost handed it over before it occurred to her that she could have refused, and then it was too late. He snatched it.

'Is this the best you could do?' he hissed. 'It's blunt as a ball.'

'Big deal! I could have gone off and left you!'

Marco tapped the flat of the black sword on one opened palm, and looked at her reflectively.

'Yes,' he said. 'You could. This sword will do. Thank you. From where did you obtain the flying robot?'

'Well, I went--'

'How do you make it fly?'

'It just obeys, and -- get down!'

Marco settled himself in the saddle, and ignored her.

'Do you know the way to the palace, robot quadruped?'

'YES, O MASTER.'

'Then proceed.'

There was a brief drumming of hooves and the horse was a dwindling speck against the sky. Kin watched it disappear and then peered into the back of the cage.

'Silver?' she said quietly. A light shape stirred in the gloom.

'Come on' said Kin. 'We'd better be going. How do you feel?'

Silver sat up.

'Where is the kung?' she said thickly.

'Gone to beat up the baddies, the lunatic fool.'

'Then where should we go?' said the shand, lumbering to her feet.

'After him, I think. Got any better ideas?'

'No' said Silver. 'I imagine everyone will be far too occupied to notice us.'

They stepped out into the avenue of bars.

'There are unicorns in that one' volunteered Silver, pointing. 'We saw them being fed. And mermaids, I think, in a pool. They were given fish.'

'Abu is a born collector, it seems.'

They passed a white dome, temple size. Close up, it was a large white egg, the lower third buried in the sand. There was a small hole in one end.

'Laid by a bird?' said Silver, indicating it with a thumb.

'Search me. I wouldn't put out crumbs for it. There's another one over there. No--'

It wasn't. It was, however, the derelict shell of the planetary lander from a Terminus probe. A memory arose in Kin unbidden, of an ancient copy of a still more ancient publicity film. It looked smaller in real life. There were three deep gashes in it, as though some great beast had tried to grab it.

Perhaps it had. If the thing beside it was an egg, something laid it.

The interior was a mess.

'Jalo landed near the centre of the disc, at least' said Silver. Kin looked at the -- oh, all right -- call them talon marks, they could have been.

'I don't envy him,' she said. 'Our Abu is a genuine enthusiast, Silver. He never throws anything away.'

There were running feet behind them, and they turned to see two men gaping at them. One held a pike, and prodded it gingerly towards Silver. It was a mistake. The shand merely grabbed it behind the point and felled its holder with a vicious downward slash, bringing it back afterwards to knock the other man's scurrying legs from under him.

Then she started running towards the palace, wielding the shattered shaft like a club.

Kin trailed after her. There didn't seem any alternative.

They found Marco by following the screams.

There was a courtyard, and a mob of fighting men, and in the middle a blur behind a fence of swords. Marco was fighting five men at once, and seemed to be winning.

One man, who turned and found himself a few feet from Silver, slashed at her with desperate bravery. She blinked at him sleepily, then brought a fist down with vertebrae-crushing speed.

And all the time the sword sang. Kin had heard the phrase used poetically, but this one was singing -- a weird electric ululation punctuated by clashes and screams.

Marco was holding it at arm's length, almost cringing away from it. It moved of itself, darting from blade to blade, from blade to body, without appearing to pass through the intervening air. Blue light crackled along its edge.

Silver padded up to two men and hit them hard. Of the ones who turned to stare before running away, three keeled over as Marco took advantage of their distraction.

Alone in the courtyard, except for the dead, Marco sagged and dropped the sword. Kin picked it up and looked at its edge. It should have been bloody. It wasn't. It was merely black, like a hole through the universe into something else.

'It's alive,' said Marco sullenly. 'I know you will scorn, but--'

'What we have here,' said Kin loudly, 'is merely a frictionless-coated blade with an electronic edge. The metal blade is merely a conductor. You must have seen similar things. Carving knives, for example?'

There was a pause. Marco nodded. 'Of course you are right' he said.

"Then let's get the hell out of here!'

She oriented herself as best she could and made for the nearest flight of steps.

'Where are you going?' shouted Marco.

'To find the magician!' Before you do, she added to herself. I don't want him killed. He's the only way out of here.

She trotted through empty passages, heading upwards. A short flight of stairs looked familiar. She bounded up them, and there, at the end of a vaulted corridor, was the magician's chamber.

Abu Ibn Infra sat pensively cross-legged on the magic carpet, watching her carefully over the top of thin, steepled fingers. Somewhat nearer the horse-faced shape of Azrifel crouched, splay-toed.

Kin glanced around the room. There was no-one else there.

Abu Ibn Infra spoke.

'Why Have Your Creatures Attacked And Slaughtered My People?' translated Azrifel.

'We had expected better treatment,' said Kin.

'Why? You Come From The Place Of Thieves And Liars With Two Renegade Demons--'

'They're not demons,' she said sharply. 'They're intelligent living creatures. They just happen to be of different races. Now, about that flying carpet--'

'They Are Demons.'

Kin felt a gust of air from the far side of the room, and was in time to see two figures coalesce.

They were kung. Not perhaps perfect copies, and they moved curiously as if whatever had created them had aimed for kung shape without a knowledge of kung anatomy.

Abu had summoned demons to deal with her, and somewhere there was something that had observed that the kung shape was good for a fighter...

It had added disc touches. In battle kung usually carried no more than a short sword and a small blast deflector, leaving two arms for freelance throttling. These carried a weapon in each hand, and each one was different. One even twirled a morningstar.

It would be like being hit by colliding lawnmowers.

Kin stared at the two expressionless faces, dead faces, and stopped herself from turning to run. She'd be running downstairs, with those behind her.

She raised the sword hopefully.

Something squirmed under her hand. Pain exploded up her arm and rattled her teeth. As the kung-things loped towards her the sword crackled.

Movement slowed. Through a pink glow Kin saw the demons slow as if they'd run into jelly, but there was no sound at all. Hate settled on her dreamily, comfortably, and she watched the sword come up with interest.

There was no shock when it drifted through an axe blade, and went on to shear through an arm -- the flesh was grey, boneless and bloodless -- and another sword.

She folded away from a snail's-pace spear, and started a long slow leap that let her slice through a neck.

She swung her feet round in time to land lightly, twist, and let the sword sweep like a scythe.

Now there was a third enemy, backing away through the red mists. The sword jerked and Kin jumped, feeling her body curve behind the blade like the tail of a comet. It struck the figure in the chest, and Kin left it there.

She drifted on and into the wall, colliding gently with a faint prickling sensation. Then she began a lazy tumble to the floor, several miles away.

It had no right to hit her so hard.

She felt as though one side of her body was one long bruise. Her shoulder muscles were screaming. Her arm suggested that it had been dragged through a sieve.

For a blissful few seconds she was able to view the clamouring sensations objectively, looking into the kaleidoscope of her own head. Then subjectivity set in with a rush.

There was a slithering noise behind her, and a soft thud. With a certain amount of agony she turned her head to see Abu sprawled against the wall, with a long red smear above him.

Kin lay cherishing the coolness of the floor. Then she used her left arm, which merely ached horribly, to walk it on its fingers to the magician's outflung hand. She uncurled his fingers from the lamp, and dragged it back until it was in front of her eyes.

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-years sphere from a distance of a hundred and fifty 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 You 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 maths. 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 exposéd 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 anti-personnel 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 to 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.

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 bloodstains 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 of 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.

'OK. 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 OK?'

'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 rpbots 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 squinted 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 runnel.

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... robot-like. 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 stepped 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.

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. OK, 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 ASISSTED 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 boneshaking 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 70,000 years of the disc's history there had been 280 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. 'Need 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 are 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.

Kin had already been considering it. It would mean building a G-type star within a few light-minutes of the Disc, unless there was a suitable one that could be moved...

'We'd need access to Disc technology,' she said. Teleportation, the force-grow vat theories, the lot.'

YOU WOULD HAVE IT, OF COURSE.

'Then you will have your new world. If the Company won't do it, I could float a Company of my own with that bait. I could go to one of the small operators -- yes, I'll do it.'

WE HAVE A BARGAIN.

'Just like that? You don't need any -- well, I guess I can't give you any sureties,' said Kin, surprised.

WE HAVE OBSERVED YOU. WE ESTIMATE THERE IS A 99.87 PER CENT CHANCE THAT YOU WILL HONOUR THE BARGAIN. DON THE HELMET.

Kin looked up at the padded metal rim above her head.

WE TRUST YOU. TRUST US. THE HELMET WILL LINK YOU TO CERTAIN CIRCUITS DESIGNED FOR THIS SITUATION. WE CAN GIVE YOU NOT INFORMATION BUT KNOWLEDGE, THAT YOU WILL OBTAIN NOWHERE ELSE IN THE UNIVERSE.

'The purpose of life is to find things out,' said Kin doubtfully.

YES. WHO WOULD SHUN KNOWLEDGE?

Kin sighed, reached up, grasped, pulled.

The robots were busy in the centre of the deck. One of them rolled towards the horseshoe panel, trailing a cable behind it. The rest were clustered around an oddly bent piece of mirror-bright rod. When Kin looked at it her eyes ached. It seemed to be twisted in ways that normal matter just couldn't go, which meant she was looking at the heart of a matrix drive.

She was glad -- she'd had a horrible thought about what would happen if one didn't get built.

The robots had also built a proper pilot's seat in front of the controls. Marco was sitting in it, swearing.

'It'll be like finding a hole in fog,' he said. 'I hope your tin friend builds good jets.'

'The hole will show up on the screen,' suggested Silver.

'Yeah. But we'll be going at a hell of a lick. Kin, are you sure it's all worked out?'

Kin smiled. 'Right down to the Disc's tumbling speed and the rotation of the Vault of Heaven. Don't you believe that machines capable of running the Disc for seventy thousand years are capable of--'

'--threading a needle ten thousand miles away by dropping the thread over a waterfall? No. I want a chance to experiment with the jets.'

'You'll have it.'

The roc's wingbeats thundered in the night as it wheeled about and skimmed across the dark water. It dropped the ship, fought frantically for height again, wingtips brushing the waves.

There was a moment of free-fall, then a slap as the ship hit. It bobbed, and spun slowly.

The roc passed across the stars, wings booming, heading back to its secret valleys. And Kin relaxed. Through the hull of the ship there came a new sound, a soft murmur as of distant engines. The Rimfall.

She waited, with the soft padding of the helmet pressing against her closed eyes. Nothing happened.

Then she remembered. It came as a shock, but that dwindled as She took control over the body. How could She have forgotten? Then She remembered about that, too. Unless One forgot, how could One learn?

She could feel Kin somewhere in Her mind, a little flask of tastes and textures, senses and experiences. Around Her She could experience the Disc, and She knew there was danger there. It would be too easy to lose Herself in the sheer exhilarating enjoyment of it. She turned her mind back to the Computers.

You have done well.

THAT WAS MY TASK.

I will allow some recollection to Kin Arad. She is Me, after all. She will awake knowing something about Us. And she will understand about the Disc.

YES.

She reached into the mind within Her and made certain amendments. Then, contented, She let Herself forget...

Kin remembered. The memories were there, cold, hard, real, like shards of ice in the mind. She recalled the Disc.

'The Disc,' she said, her voice flat in the shock of it, 'is the boot in the coal measure, the coin in the crystal. The filling in the tooth of the triceratops. The secret mark that reveals the maker. They couldn't resist it. They built a perfect universe to specifications, but they couldn't resist adding the Disc out here, hard to find, but a clue. How do I know?' she shouted.

The screen stayed blank.

'I know it. They weren't just the Disc builders. They built the lot -- the real Earth, kung, all the stars. They laid down our fossils. We thought maybe the Great Spindle Kings had done that, but the Spindle Kings never existed. They were all part of the false strata of the new universe. We wondered if we'd evolved with the help of the Kings. We never evolved! We were created, just like we recreate whales and elephants for our colony worlds.

'We're a colony universe. The Builders just moved in and built it, and because everyone needs a history, they gave us a history. Just as we do with the new worlds. Ancient bones. Fabulous monsters. Great Spindle Kings, Wheelers. And we never realized it. We did it ourselves, and we never tumbled to it.

'Then one of them built the Disc. Almost as a joke, maybe? Certainly for no important reason. An exercise in ingenuity. It must have been an afterthought, a collection of neat ideas, put together after the main work was done.

'Seventy thousand years! That's the age of the universe -- it's hardly got its paint scratched! We thought it was four billion years old. The evidence said that it was, and we believed in the evidence.'

She leaned back. She could still feel the memories there, like old facts forgotten until now. She probed them gingerly, as a tongue explores a hollow tooth.

'Old. Intelligent. Divorced from matter. That's how I remember the Builders. Each one bigger than we can imagine, or maybe smaller, because -- because there would be nothing to measure, except the ego. I said old? Even their age couldn't be measured, because until they built the universe there was no time. Am I right?'

WE CANNOT ANSWER THAT QUESTION BRIEFLY. WE KNOW NOTHING OF THEM OTHER THAN THAT WHICH THEY TOLD US.

'What do you know of them, then?'

BEFORE THEM, THERE WAS ONLY PROBABILITY. THEY IMPOSED A PATTERN ON THAT PROBABILITY.

'Why?'

YOUR COMPANY BUILDS WORLDS. THERE IS NO REAL NEED. YOUR NATAL WORLD IS NOT OVERPOPULATED. WHY?

'Once we were overpopulated. And we found that the more people there were, the more they were the same. It was the only way we could survive. People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer one. It wasn't. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost accountancy, but it didn't mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no-one remembered how to dive for pearls.

'Then the Mindquakes got us. That would have been -- yes, a couple of years after the Terminus probes. People just died. Died in their billions, too, their minds just kind of folded in on themselves.

'Afterwards, we had to start over. At least we had all the toys of the Spindle Kings to play with, and we could spread out -- we had to spread out, after the Quakes. They made us look hard for mental elbow-room, new worlds where we could flee and learn the forgotten ways. We had built robots to remember some of them for us!

'We thought it was natural, a trodden path. You see, we had the example of the Spindle Kings. We thought that any intelligent species filled its home world until the sheer mind pressure started killing them off, and then the survivors embarked on interstellar colonization; whatever way they rationalized it, the real reason would be a fierce desire to escape from other people. And then, since usable worlds aren't that common, they'd start to learn planetary engineering. Oh, we had it all carefully calculated. Race after race, fruiting and bursting across the evolving galaxy, creating new worlds before they died and in the process making new seed-beds for new races. I wrote a book about it, called Continuous Creation, haha.'

NOW YOU CAN WRITE THE SECOND EDITION.

'It'll be a bit short, I'm damn sure about that. What can I say? "The lights in the sky are scenery"?'

WHY NOT?

'You haven't told me why the -- Builders built.'

The words flashed on to the screen immediately, as if the Computers had been preparing them.

HUMANS ARE INQUISITIVE. THAT IS A FUNCTION OF THEIR HUMANITY. THE BEINGS THAT BUILT THIS UNIVERSE DID SO BECAUSE IT WAS UNTHINKABLE THAT THEY SHOULD NOT. CREATION IS NOT A THING THAT GODS DO, IT IS SOMETHING THAT THEY ARE.

'And afterwards? What did they do next?'

There was white water around the ship. Kin could see a little tree-shrouded island beyond one port, a humped black shape in the twilight, and could feel the hull bouncing over the water. The sky wheeled. There was no jolt, it was simply that now the floor was just a wall. Foam covered the ports for a moment, and then Kin could look -- down.

The Rimfall hung before them, looking exactly like a luminous white road. Marco in the pilot's seat was outlined against it, and Kin could see that he had instinctively braced himself with his feet scrabbling for a hold.

Down, way down, there was a ball of fire in the sky. The Disc was in darkness now, but the little orbiting sun was giving a brief day to the face of the waterfall. While Kin watched, it climbed above her and disappeared as the ship overtook it.

Later there was a cloud at the limit of vision. It stayed there for a while, then raced up the glittering stream at a speed that made Kin flinch. There was the faintest of lurches and a second's darkness as the ship left the water behind at the molecule sieve, and then there were stars.

There was a long hiss from Marco. It may have been a sigh of relief.

Silver said, 'I would have felt happier if the Computers had been able to arrange a more conventional launching, but I must admit that it had style.'

'From their point of view that was the most efficient way,' said Kin. The sky spun again as Marco turned the ship so that 'down' was where long tradition had always put it, in the region of the feet.

Silver unfastened her couch straps, then looked across at Kin.

'We built the universe, didn't we,' she said. 'Not us precisely, these lumps of bone and brain, but the thing in us that makes us what we are. The thing that dreams while the rest of us is asleep.'

Kin smiled. "The Computers wouldn't tell,' she said. 'But yes, you're right. I think the Computers had a certain extra function, they could suppress all the mental static so the -- oh hell, why avoid the word? -- so that the god inside could surface just for a while and perform. That's why practically anyone could be the Disc master. If Jago Jalo had tried the helmet, he'd be there still.'

'No-one will believe you,' said Marco, without turning his head.

'I'm not sure that would be a tragedy,' said Kin. 'The Disc was put there as a hoax, or a hint. No-one has to believe it. We'll build a planet for the Disc people and transfer them, and that is the thing that needs to be done.'

The challenge warmed her. The building of a new Earth; so carefully done that the Disc people could be transferred and not know it. There'd have to be new continents designed, and the Disc people would have to be put into a freeze-sleep until some of their number had bred enough to populate them. It could take a thousand years. There'd be a whole solar system to drag into place, great planets around far stars to be ringed in some vast fields and flipped across light-years.

Buffaloes to be designed.

Life wouldn't be boring.

Would what the Computers could tell them pay for it?

It would.

They slept and they ate, while the ship dipped under the monstrous shadow in the sky. The little toiling sun shed no light on the blackness as it swung across it.

Presently the far edge of the Rimfall began to grow larger. Marco slid back into his seat and spoke to the ship's little brain.

'OK,' he reported, 'major burn coming up. This is where we say goodbye, so get into those couches. The Committee are timing this one for us.'

It took ten minutes of slight discomfort, listening to the faint roar from the outrigger jets. Kin heard a sigh from Marco's couch as the engines shut off.

'That's it,' he said. 'Now we hit the hole, or we miss the hole. I never thought I'd have to worry about running into the wall of the universe.'

The Rimfall raced past a few thousand miles away, phosphorescent in the light of the full moon. Even Marco took a deep breath as the ship rose above the edge of the Disc and plunged towards the sky.

The Disc was a design of white and black, a silver and ebony coin floating under a sky wild with stars.

The stars were getting nearer. The moon became a pearl hovering over the Disc, and the stars were definitely getting nearer.

The hole that Jago Jalo had cut in the Vault of Heaven had been big enough for the ring ship to go through, and this one was much smaller. But it would be approaching it at a low angle.

The Computers had told Marco that the hole would be wide enough. They had told Kin the same, but had added their estimate of the distance to spare. Kin hadn't dared pass it on to Marco. The minimum clearance was a little less than a metre.

She found she was staring ahead, searching the sky. The other two were doing the same. Stars were drifting overhead. While Kin watched, their silent, snowflake movement became a brisk race.

Then they were a blur. There was the briefest impression of something around the ship as a star swelled, blazed and disappeared. A slight shudder marked the demise of one of the outrigger jets, knocked off against the edge of the sky.

Then there were stars again, deceptively similar, and the ship was dropping into the gulf.

She could hear Marco breathing noisily. Silver was humming a tune in a rolling baritone.

Kin watched the stars she knew were only 70,000 years old, marginally older than their cousins hanging from the Vault of Heaven. Stars were just lights in the sky, but bigger skies demanded bigger stars.

Kin thought about the second edition. The ship fell onwards, into the scenery.

THE END