Strata

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 tunnel.
    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 theycouldn’t find a robot who could act … robotlike. 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 shuntedand thundered on errands of their own.
    Sometimes they came across dumbwaiters,