Strata

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 blacknessoverhead. 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 inthere. 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 computerwas a thousand highly-trained Ehfts, each one handling a small part of the math. It worked.
    But she’d be dipped in dogshit before she’d believe that the disc was built by a thermionic valve technology.
    The robot’s arm whirred out of the wall. The panel was picked up and slotted into place with surprising speed. Almost before Kin could react her new friend was rumbling off down the tunnel. It moved at a fast walking pace. She followed.
    She would survive
. If They were going to kill her, They would have done it already. She’d live. Provided she didn’t bank on it, she’d live.
    Once they passed another cuboid robot, wielding some kind of tool over some kind of exposed circuitry. It could have been a soldering iron. It could have been a printed circuit. Kin couldn’t stop to check.
    Then Kin’s robot reached a robot-shaped slot in the wall. Kin had a brief glimpse of sockets at the back of the slot