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Miguel Cervantes: balíček 2 elektronických knih (PDF+ePub)     za 98  74 Kč (-25%)

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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.

(...)

(Terry Pratchett, Strata)

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