Terry Pratchett - Strata

VIP免费
2024-12-20 0 0 273.37KB 101 页 5.9玖币
侵权投诉
Terry Pratchett - Strata (text) v1.0
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS LTD
61-63 Uxbridge Road, Ealing, London W55SA
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS (AUSTRALIA) PTY LTD
15-z5 Helles Avenue, Moorebank, NSW 2170
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS (NZ) LTD
3 William Pickering Drive, Albany, Auckland
First published 1981 by Colin Smythe Ltd
Published 1982 by NEL
Published in paperback 1988 by Corgi
This edition published 1994 by Doubleday
a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd
Copyright © 1981 Cohn Smythe Ltd
The right of Terry Pratchett to be identified as the author of this work has
been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
ISBN 0385 404751
This book is sold subject to the Standard Conditions of Sale of
Net Books and may not be re-sold in the UK below the net price fixed by the
publishers for the book.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publishers.
This book is set in 11/14pt Palatino by
Phoenix Typesetting, Ilkley, West Yorkshire.
Printed in Great Britain by
Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
I met a mine foreman who has a piece of coal with a 1909 gold sovereign
embedded in it. I saw an ammonite, apparently squashed in the fossil footprint
of a sandal.
There is a room in the basement of the Natural History Museum which
they keep locked. Among other oddities in there are the tyrannosaurus with a
wristwatch and the Neanderthal skull with gold fillings in three teeth.
What are you going to do about it?
Dr Carl Untermond
The Overcrowded Eden
It was, of course, a beautiful day -- a Company brochure day. At the moment
Kin's office overlooked a palm-fringed lagoon. White water broke over the
outer reef, and the beach was of crushed white coral and curious shells.
No brochure would have shown the nightmare bulk of the pontoon-mounted
strata machine, the small model for islands and atolls under fifteen
kilometres. As Kin watched, another metre of beach spilled out of the big back
hopper.
She wondered about the pilot's name. There was genius in that line of
beach. A man who could lay down a beach like that, with the shells just right,
deserved better things. But then, perhaps he was a Thoreau type who just liked
islands. You got them sometimes; shy silent types who preferred to drift
across the ocean after the volcano teams, dreamily laying complicated
archipelagos with indecent skill. She'd have to ask.
She leant over her desk and called up the area engineer.
'Joel? Who's on BCF3?'
The engineer's lined brown face appeared over the intercom.
'Guday, Kin. Let me see now. Aha! Good, is it? You like it?'
'It's good.'
'It's Hendry. The one who's the subject of all those nasty depositions
you've got on your desk. You know, the one who put the fossil dino in--'
'I read it.'
Joel recognized the edge to her voice. He sighed.
'Nicol Plante, she's his mixer, she must have been in on it too. I put
them on island duty because, well, with a coral island there is not the
temptation--'
'I know.' Kin thought for a while. 'Send him over. And her. It's going
to be a busy day, Joel. It's always like this at the end of a job, people
start to play around.'
'It's youth. We've all done it. With me it was a pair of boots in a
coal measure. Not so imaginative, I admit.'
'You mean I should excuse him?'
Of course he did. Everyone was allowed just one unscripted touch,
weren't they? Checkers always spotted them, didn't they? And even if one went
unnoticed, couldn't we rely on future palaeontologists to hush it up? Huh?
Trouble was, they might not . . .
'He's good, and later on he'll be great,' said Joel. 'Just gnaw one
ball off, eh?'
A few minutes later Kin heard the machine's roar stutter and stop. Soon
one of the outer office robots came in, leading--
--a squat fair-haired youth, tanned lobster pink, and a skinny bald
girl hardly out of her teens. They stood staring at Kin with a mixture of fear
and defiance, dripping coral dust onto the carpet.
'All right, sit down. Want a drink? You both look dehydrated. I thought
they had air conditioning in those things.'
The pair exchanged glances. Then the girl said, 'Frane likes to get the
feel of his work.'
'Well, OK. The freezer's that round thing hovering right behind you.
Help yourself.'
They jerked away as the freezer bumped into their shoulders, then
grinned nervously and sat down.
They were in awe of Kin, which she found slightly embarrassing.
According to the files they were both from colony planets so new the bedrock
had hardly dried, while she was manifestly from Earth. Not Whole, New, Old,
Real or Best Earth. Just Earth, cradle of humanity, just like it said in their
history books. And the double-century mark on her forehead was probably
something they'd only heard of before joining John Company. And she was their
boss. And she could fire them.
The freezer drifted back to its alcove, describing a neat detour around
a patch of empty air at the back of the room. Kin made a mental note to get a
tech to look at it.
They sat gingerly on the float chairs. Colony worlds didn't have them,
Kin recalled. She glanced at the file, gave them an introductory glare, and
switched on the recorder.
'You know why you're here,' she said. 'You've read the regulations, if
you've got any sense. I'm bound to remind you that you can either choose to
accept my judgement as senior executive of the sector, or go before a
committee at Company HQ. If you elect for me to deal with it, there's no
appeal. What do you say?'
'You,' said the girl.
'Can he speak?'
'We elect to be tried by you, Mizz,' said the boy in a thick Creed
accent.
Kin shook her head. 'It's not a trial. If you don't like my decision
you can always quit -- unless of course I fire you.' She let that sink in.
Behind every Company trainee was a parsec-long queue of disappointed
applicants. Nobody quit.
'Right, it's on record. Just for the record, then, you two were on
strata machine BVN67 on Julius fourth last, working a line on Y-continent?
You've got the detailed charge on the notice of censure you were given at the
time.'
' 'Tis all correct,' said Hendry. Kin thumbed a switch.
One wall of the office became a screen. They got an aerial view of grey
datum rock, broken off sharply by a kilometre-high wall of strata like God's
own mad sandwich. The strata machine had been severed from its cliff and moved
to one side. Unless a really skilled jockey lined it up next time, this
world's geologists were going to find an unexplained fault.
The camera zoomed in to an area halfway up the cliff, where some rock
had been melted out. There was a gantry and a few yellow-hatted workmen who
shuffled out of camera field, except for one who stood holding a measuring rod
against Exhibit A and grinning. Hi there, all you folks out there in Company
Censure Tribunal Land.
'A plesiosaur,' said Kin. 'All wrong for this stratum, but what the
hell.' The camera floated over the half excavated skeleton, focusing now on
the distorted rectangles by its side. Kin nodded. Now it was quite clear. The
beast had been holding a placard. She could just make out the wording.
' "End Nuclear Testing Now",' she said levelly.
It must have taken a lot of work. Weeks, probably, and then a very
complicated program to be fed into the machine's main brain.
'How did you find out?' asked the girl.
Because there was a telltale built into every machine, but that was an
official secret. It was welded into the ten-kilometre output slot to detect
little unofficial personal touches, like pacifist dinosaurs and mammoths with
hearing aids -- and it stayed there until it found one. Because sooner or
later everyone did it. Because every novice planetary designer with an ounce
of talent felt like a king atop the dream-device that was a strata machine,
and sooner or later yielded to the delicious temptation to pop the skulls of
future palaeontologists. Sometimes the Company fired them, sometimes the
Company promoted them.
'I'm a witch,' she said. 'Now, I take it you admit this?'
'Yarss,' said Hendry. 'But may I make, uh, a plea in mitigation?'
He reached into his tunic and brought out a book, its spine worn with
use. He ran his thumb down it until the flickering pages stopped at his
reference.
'Uh, this is one of the authorities on planetary engineering,' he said.
'May I go ahead?'
'Be my guest.'
'Well, uh. "Finally, a planet is not a world. Planet? A ball of rock.
World? A four-dimensional wonder. On a world there must be mysterious
mountains. Let there be bottomless lakes peopled with antique monsters. Let
there be strange footprints in high snowfields, green ruins in endless
jungles, bells beneath the sea; echo valleys and cities of gold. This is the
yeast in the planetary crust, without which the imagination of men will not
rise." '
There was a pause.
'Mr Hendry,' asked Kin, 'did I say anything there about
nuclear-disarmament dinosaurs?'
'No, but--'
'We build worlds, we don't just terraform planets. Robots could do
that. We build places where the imagination of human beings can find an
anchor. We don't bugger about planting funny fossils. Remember the Spindles.
Supposing the colonists here turn out like them? Your fossil would kill them,
blow their minds. Docked three months' labour. You too, Miss Plante, and I
don't even want to know for what reasons you were helping this nitwit. You may
go.'
She switched off the recorder.
'Where are you going? Sit down. All that was for the benefit of the
tape. Sit down, you look dreadful.'
He was no fool. She saw the embryo hope in his eyes. Best to scotch
that now.
'I meant it about the sentence. Three months' enforced vacation. It's
on the tape, so you won't talk me out of it. Not,' she added, 'that you
could.'
'But we'll have finished this job by then,' he said, genuinely hurt.
Kin shrugged. 'There'll be others. Don't look so worried. You wouldn't
be human if you didn't yield to temptation. If you feel bad, ask Joel Chenge
about the boots he tried to lay down in a coal seam. They didn't ruin his
career.'
'And what did you do, Mizz?'
'Hmm?' The boy was looking at her sidelong.
'You sort of give the impression I've done something everyone else has
done. Did you do it too?'
Kin drummed her fingers on the desk. 'Built a mountain range in the
shape of my initials,' she said.
'Whee! '
'They had to rerun almost half a strip. Nearly got fired.'
'And now you're Sec-exec and--'
'You might be too one day. Another few years they might let you loose
on an asteroid of your very own. Some billionaire's pleasure park. Two words
of advice don't fumble it, and never, never try to quote people's words
against them. I, of course, am marvellously charitable and understanding, but
some other people might have made you eat the book a page at a time under
threat of sacking. Right? Right. Now go, the pair of you. For real this time.
It's going to be a busy day.'
They hurried out, leaving a coral trail. Kin watched the door slide
across, staring into space for a few minutes. Then she smiled to herself, and
went back to work.
Consider Kin Arad, now inspecting outline designs for the
TY-archipelago:
Twenty-one decades lie on her shoulders like temporal dandruff. She
carries them lightly. Why not? People were never meant to grow old. Memory
surgery helped.
On her forehead, the golden disc that multiple centenarians often wore
-- it inspired respect, and often saved embarrassment. Not every woman
relished attempted seduction by a man young enough to be her
great-to-the-power-of-seven grandson. On the other hand, not every elderly
woman wore a disc, on purpose . . . Her skin was presently midnight-black,
like her wig -- for some reason hair seldom survived the first century and the
baggy black all-suit.
She was older than twenty-nine worlds, fourteen of which she had helped
to build. Married seven times, in varying circumstances, once even under the
influence of love. She met former husbands occasionally, for old times' sake.
She looked up when the carpet cleaner shuffled out of its nest in the
wall and started to tidy up the sand trails. Her gaze travelled slowly round
the room as though seeking for some particular thing. She paused, listening.
A man appeared. One moment there was air: the next, a tall figure
leaning against a filing cabinet. He met her shocked gaze, and bowed.
'Who the hell are you?' exclaimed Kin, and reached for the intercom. He
was quicker, diving across the room and grabbing her wrist politely yet
agonizingly. She smiled grimly and, from a sitting position, brought her left
hand across and gave him a scientific fistful of rings.
When he had wiped the blood out of his eyes she was looking down at him
and holding a stunner.
'Don't do anything aggressive,' she said. 'Don't even breathe
threateningly.'
'You are a most unorthodox woman,' he said, fingering his chin. The
semi-sentient carpet cleaner bumped insistently around his ankles.
'Who are you?'
'Jago Jalo is my name. You are Kin Arad? But of course--'
'How did you get in?'
He turned round and vanished. Kin fired the stunner automatically. A
circle of carpet went wump.
'Missed,' said a voice across the room.
Wump.
'It was tactless of me to intrude like this, but if you would put that
weapon away--'
Wump.
'There could be mutual profit. Wouldn't you like to know how to be
invisible ?'
Kin hesitated, then lowered the stunner reluctantly.
He appeared again. He wiped himself solid. Head and torso appeared as
though an arm had swept over them, the legs popped into view together.
'It's clever. I like it,' said Kin. 'If you disappear again I'll set
this thing on wide focus and spray the room. Congratulations. You've managed
to engage my interest. That's not easy, these days.'
He sat down. Kin judged him to be at least fifty, though he could have
been a century older. The very old moved with a certain style. He didn't. He
looked as though he'd been kept awake for a few years -- pale, hairless,
red-eyed. A face you could forget in an instant. Even his all-suit was a pale
grey and, as he reached into a pocket, Kin's hand moved up with the stunner.
'Mind if I smoke?' he said.
'Smoke?' said Kin, puzzled. 'Go ahead. I don't mind if you burst into
flame.'
Eyeing the stunner, he put a yellow cylinder into his mouth and lit it.
Then he took it out and blew smoke.
This man, thought Kin, is a dangerous maniac.
'I can tell you about matter transmission,' he said.
'So can I. It's not possible,' said Kin wearily. So that was all he was
-- another goldbricker. Still, he could turn invisible.
'They said that it was impossible to run a rocket in space,' said Jalo.
'They laughed at Goddard. They said he was a fool.'
'They also said it about a lot of fools,' said Kin, dismissing for the
moment the question of who Goddard was. 'Have you got a matter transmitter to
show me?'
'Yes.'
'But not here.'
'No. There's this, however.' He made a pass and his left arm
disappeared. 'You might call it a cloak of invisibility.'
'May I, uh, see it?'
He nodded, and held out an empty hand. Kin reached out and touched --
something. It felt like coarse fibre. It might just be that the palm of her
hand underneath it was slightly blurred, but she couldn't be sure.
'It bends light,' he said, tugging it gently out of her grip. 'Of
course, you can't risk losing it in the closet, so there's a switch area --
here. See?'
Kin saw a thin, twisting line of orange light outlining nothing.
'It's neat,' said Kin, 'but why me? Why all this?'
'Because you're Kin Arad. You wrote Continuous Creation. You know all
about the Great Spindle Kings. I think they made this. I found it. Found a lot
of other things, too. Interesting things.'
Kin gazed at him impassively. Finally she said, 'I'd like a little
fresh air. Have you breakfasted, Jago Jalo?'
He shook his head. 'My rhythms are all shot to hell after the trip
here, but I think I'm about due for supper.'
* * *
Kin's flyer circled the low offices and headed northward to the big complex on
W-continent. It skirted the bulk of what had been Hendry's machine, its new
pilot now laying down a pattern of offshore reefs. The manoeuvre gave them an
impressive view of the big collector bowl atop the machine, its interior
velvety black.
'Why?' said Jalo, peering. Kin twirled the wheel.
'Beamed power from orbiting collectors, slaved to the machine. If we
flew over the bowl we wouldn't even leave any ash.'
'What would happen if the pilot made a mistake and the beam missed the
bowl?'
Kin considered this. 'I don't know,' she said. 'We'd certainly never
find the pilot.'
The flyer skimmed over some more islands. Vatbred dolphins, still
frisky after their journey in the megatanker, looped through the waves
alongside its shadow. Blast Continuous Creation!
But at the time it had seemed a good idea. Besides, she had done just
about everything else but write a book. The actual writing hadn't been
difficult. The real problem had been learning how to make paper, then hiring a
staff of robots and setting them to building a printing press. It had been the
first book printed in 400 years. It had caused quite a stir.
So had the words inside the expensively produced card covers. They said
nothing new, but somehow she had managed to assemble current developments in
geology in such a way that they had struck fire. According to reports the book
had even been the basis for a couple of fringe religions.
She looked sideways at her passenger. She was unable to trace his
accent -- he spoke meticulously, like someone who had just taken a learning
tape but hadn't had any practice. His clothes could have been bought out of a
machine on a dozen worlds. He didn't look mad, but they never did.
'So you've read my book,' she said conversationally.
'Hasn't everyone?'
'Sometimes it seems so.'
He turned red-rimmed eyes to her.
'It was OK,' he said. 'I read it on the ship coming here. Don't expect
any compliments. I've read better.'
To her disgust Kin felt herself reddening.
'No doubt you've read plenty,' she murmured.
'Several thousand,' said Jalo. Kin kicked the flyer on to automatic and
spun round in her seat.
'I know there aren't even hundreds of books; all the old libraries are
lost!'
He cringed. 'I did not mean to offend.'
'Who do--'
'It isn't necessary for an author to make the paper,' said Jalo. 'In
the old days there were publishers. Like filmy factors. All the author did was
write the words.'
'Old days? How old are you?'
The man shifted in his seat. 'I can't be precise,' he said. 'You've
changed the calendar around a few times. But as near as I can make out, about
eleven hundred years. Give or take ten.'
'They didn't have gene surgery in those days,' said Kin. 'No-one is
that old.'
'They had the Terminus probes,' said Jalo quietly.
The flyer passed over a volcanic island, the central cone fuming gently
as a tech squad tested it out. Kin stared at it unseeing, her lips moving.
'Jalo,' she said. 'Jalo! I thought the name was familiar! Hey . . . the
big thing about the Terminus ships was that they would never come back . . .'
He grinned at her, and there was no humour in it. 'Quite correct,' he
said. 'I was a volunteer. We all were, of course. And quite mad. The ships
were not equipped to return.'
'I know,' said Kin, 'I read a filmy. Ugh.'
'Well, you've got to see it against the background of the times. It
made a kind of sense, then. And of course, my ship didn't come back.'
He leaned forward.
'But I did.'
The Ritz was in the unofficial city that had grown up around what had been the
first and was now the last Line. Now even the city was breaking up, being
towed back up the wire to the big freighters in orbit. In another month the
last Company employee would follow it. The last snowfield would have been
laid. The last humming-birds would have been released.
Their conversation on the roof garden of the restaurant was punctuated
by the slap and rattle of yellow tugs climbing the Line two kilometres away,
towing strings of redundant warehouses like beads on a wire. They were soon
lost in the cirrus, bound for Line Top.
Kin had ordered framush, saddleback of loom and breasens. Jalo had read
the menu intently and had ordered, in frank disbelief, a dodo omelette. He
looked now as though he regretted it.
Kin watched him pick at it, but her mind persisted in showing her
pictures. She remembered the bell-shaped bulk of a Terminus probe, the pilot's
life-system a tiny sphere at the tip. She remembered the frightening logic
that had led to the building of the monsters. It went like this
It was far better to send a man into space than a machine. In the
complete unknown, a man could still evaluate and decide. Machines were fine
for routine, but they flipped when presented with the unforeseen.
It was cheap to send a machine because it did not breathe and it sent
its information back alone.
Whereas a man breathed, all the time. This was expensive.
But it was very cheap to send a man if you did not arrange to bring him
back.
'Is that celery in the jug?' said Jalo.
'It's snaggleroot shoots,' said Kin. 'Don't eat the yellow bits,
they're poisonous. Now, do I have to sit here waiting? Speak to me,' she
murmured, 'of the Great Spindle Kings.'
'I only know what I read,' said Jago. 'And most of what I read, you
wrote. Can I eat these blue things?'
'You've found a Spindle site?' Only nine Spindle sites had been found.
Ten, if you included the derelict ship. The prototype strata machine had been
found on one. So had the details of gene surgery. No wonder more people
studied palaeontology than engineering.
'I found a Spindle world.'
'How do you know it's Spindle?'
Jalo reached over and took some snaggleroot.
'It's flat,' he said.
It was possible, Kin conceded.
The Spindles had not been gods, but they would do until gods showed up.
They had evolved on some light world . . . possibly. The surviving mummies
certainly showed them to be three metres tall but weighing only ninety pounds.
On worlds as heavy as Earth they wore marvellous exoskeletons to prevent
themselves collapsing with multiple fractures. They had long snouts, and hands
with two thumbs, legs banded alternately in orange and purple and feet big
enough for a circus clown. They had no brain or, to be more precise, their
whole body could act like a brain. No-one had ever been able to find a Spindle
stomach, either.
They didn't look like gods.
They had cheap transmutation but not FTL travel. Possibly they had
sexes, but exobiologists had never found out where little Spindles came from.
They sent messages by modulating a hydrogen line in the spectrum of the
nearest star.
They were all telepaths and acute claustrophobes . . . They didn't even
build houses. Their spaceships were . . . unbelievable.
They lived nearly for ever, and to while away the time they visited
planets with a reducing atmosphere and played with them. They introduced
mutated algae or oversized moons. They force-bred lifeforms. They took Venuses
and made Earths, and the reason, once you accepted that Spindles were
different, made sense at least to humans. They were spurred by a pressing
population problem -- pressing, that was, to Spindles.
One day they had ripped up a planetary crust with a strata machine and
found something dreadful -- dreadful, that was, to Spindles. In the next 2,000
years, as the news spread, they died of injured pride.
That was 400 million years ago.
A tug plunged down the Line, the braking roar leaking through its sonic
screen. The Line marshals were cutting the loads adrift a few thousand miles
up and sending them on their way by strap-on rocket, to keep Line weight down.
The tug swung through the switching system and hummed off towards the
distant marshalling yards. Kin looked at Jalo with narrowed eyes.
'Flat,' she said, 'like an Alderson disc?'
'Maybe. What's an Alderson disc?'
'No-one ever built one, but you hammer all the worlds in a system into
a system-wide disc with a hole in the middle for the sun, and you plate the
underside with neutronium for gravity, and--'
'Good grief! You can work neutronium now?'
Kin paused, then shook her head. 'Like I said, no-one's ever built one.
Or found one.'
'This one is not much more than thirteen thousand miles across.'
Their gazes met. She rolled out the word he was waiting for.
'Where?'
'You'll never find it without me.'
'And you think it's a Spindle artefact?'
'It's got things you'd never believe in a million years.'
'You intrigue me. What is your price?'
For an answer Jalo fumbled in a belt pouch and brought out a wad of
10,000 Day bills. Company scrip was harder than most world currencies. Any one
of them represented almost twenty-eight years of extended life if cashed at a
Company trading post. The Company's credit was the best. It paid in extended
futures.
Without taking his gaze off Kin, Jalo summoned the nearest robot waiter
and pushed a handful of bills into its disposal hopper. Every instinct cried
out to Kin to leap up and grab them back, but even with science on your side
one did not live past the first century by obeying instincts. The automatic
incinerator would have burned her hand off.
'How . . .' she croaked. She cleared her throat. 'How juvenile,' she
said. 'Forgeries, of course.'
He handed her a methuselah bill, the highest denomination issued by the
Company.
'Two hundred and seventy years,' he said. 'A gift.'
Kin took the gold and white plastic. Her hands emphatically did not
tremble.
The design was simple, but then there were more than 200 other tests
for the authenticity of Company scrip. Nobody forged it. It was widely
advertised that any hypothetical forgers would spend all the years that had
been fraudulently manufactured, in the Company vaults, passing them in novel
and unpleasant ways.
'In my day,' said Jalo, 'I would have been called rich, rich, rich.'
'Or dead, dead, dead.'
'You forget I was a Terminus pilot. None of us really believed in the
inevitability of our death. Few people do. I have been proved right so far. In
any case, you are welcome to test the bill. It is genuine, I assure you.
'I have not come to buy. I want to hire you. In thirty days I'm
returning to the . . . flat world, for reasons that will become obvious. I
intend to be away less than a year, and the pay I offer is the answers to
questions. You may keep that bill, of course, even if you do not accept.
Perhaps you would like to frame it, or maybe keep it for your old age.'
He vanished like a demon king. When Kin lunged across the table her
hands met empty air.
Later she ordered a check on all shuttles going up the Line. Not even
an invisible man could have got past the telltales secreted in the gangways.
He'd hardly attempt to board a freight shuttle -- most were not even
pressurized.
He didn't. Kin realized later that he had bought a ticket under an
assumed name and just walked past the security net, flaunting his visibility
like a cloak.
The message came twenty-five days later, along with the first wave of
colonists.
The main Line had long since gone, winched up into its
synchronous-orbit satellite and loaded aboard a freighter. There were still a
few cosmetic teams just finishing work at the antipodes.
Around Kin, as she stood on a knoll in the midst of the tangled jungle,
the steaming, scent-encrusted land was bare of any obvious human mark. Eight
thousand miles under her feet, she knew, men, robots and machines were
converging on and boiling up the antipodal wire; soaring into the last of the
freighters, a twelve-mile skeleton with one big fusion motor, and leaving the
world to the newcomers.
Despite appearances, it would be a planned withdrawal. Last off would
be the sweepers, carefully scuffling over the ruts. A Company publicity film
had once shown the last man off being winched up a few feet on the Line, then
bending back to brush out his footprints. Not true, of course -- but it missed
the truth by mere inches.
It was a good world. Better than Earth, but they said now that Earth
was improving -- population up to nearly three-quarters of a billion now, and
that didn't include too many robots.
Better than her childhood. Kin had long ago dispensed with most of her
early memories in a periodic editing, but she had kept one or two. She winced
as she recalled the oldest.
A hill like this one, overlooking a darkening countryside wreathed in
ragged mists, and the sun sinking. Her mother had taken her there, and they
stood in the small crowd that was the total population of almost half of a
country. Most of them were robots. One of them, a Class Eight, hide
criss-crossed with repair welds, lifted her on to its shoulders for a better
view.
The dancers were all robots, although the fiddler was human.
Thump, thump went the metal feet on the dark turf, while early bats
hunted for insects overhead.
The steps were perfect. How could they be otherwise? There were no men
to hesitate or stumble. The world was too full of things for the few humans to
do that they should concern themselves with this. Yet they knew that such
things must be continued against the day men could once again pick up the
reins. Back and forth; crossing and leaping, the robots danced their caretaker
Morris.
And young Kin Arad had decided then that people should not become
extinct.
It had been a near thing. Without the robots, it would have been a
certainty.
While the stamping figures rocked darkly against the red sunset sky,
she made up her mind to join the Company . . .
The first of the big gliders swept over the trees and touched down
heavily on the grass. It slammed into a tree, spun around and stopped.
After a few minutes a hatch slid back and a man stepped out. He fell
over.
Kin watched him haul himself up and lean back into the hatch. Two other
men came out, followed by three women. Then they saw her.
She had taken pains. Now her skin was silver and her hair black, shot
with neon threads. She had chosen a red cloak. In the absence of wind,
electrostatic charges kept it floating about her in a sufficiently impressive
way. No sense in skimping details. These people were coming to a new world.
They had probably already drawn up a proud constitution writ in gold and
freedom. They ought to be welcomed with dignity. There would be too much time
later for reality.
More gliders were drifting down, and the man who had been the first to
step out climbed up to Kin on her knoll. She noticed his pioneering beard, his
chalk-white face. But most of all she noticed the silver disc on his forehead,
glinting in the first rays of sunlight.
He topped the rise still breathing evenly, pacing himself with the
effortless self-control of most centenarians. He grinned, exposing teeth filed
to points.
'Kin Arad?'
'Bjorne Chang?'
'Well, we're here. Ten thousand of us today. You make some good air --
what's the smell?'
'Jungle,' Kin said. 'Fungi. Decaying pumas. Purple scents from the
flowers of hidden orchids.'
摘要:

TerryPratchett-Strata(text)v1.0TRANSWORLDPUBLISHERSLTD61-63UxbridgeRoad,Ealing,LondonW55SATRANSWORLDPUBLISHERS(AUSTRALIA)PTYLTD15-z5HellesAvenue,Moorebank,NSW2170TRANSWORLDPUBLISHERS(NZ)LTD3WilliamPickeringDrive,Albany,AucklandFirstpublished1981byColinSmytheLtdPublished1982byNELPublishedinpaperback1...

展开>> 收起<<
Terry Pratchett - Strata.pdf

共101页,预览21页

还剩页未读, 继续阅读

声明:本站为文档C2C交易模式,即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载,本站只是中间服务平台,本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间,仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理,对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私,请立即通知玖贝云文库,我们立即给予删除!
分类:外语学习 价格:5.9玖币 属性:101 页 大小:273.37KB 格式:PDF 时间:2024-12-20

开通VIP享超值会员特权

  • 多端同步记录
  • 高速下载文档
  • 免费文档工具
  • 分享文档赚钱
  • 每日登录抽奖
  • 优质衍生服务
/ 101
客服
关注