Strata (15 page)

Kin thought she could feel the cold air through the suit’s twenty-five layers as she dived. The sky was pure blue, ice-clean.

The creature was floating belly upwards. Most of it was tail, which snaked back until it was lost in surf. When a particularly heavy swell moved the body, Kin glimpsed a long equine head and one empty eye socket.

It must have been old. No creature could grow that big fast. And the white belly was pitted with seaworm holes and studded with shellfish.

She flew back up. It would be nice to get it on a dissecting table – with a winch.

‘It’s dead,’ she announced. ‘There’s a gash in it you could sail a boat through. Fresh, too. It’s the same sort of creature as the one we saw this morning, I think.’

It had been far to the right, looping through the water like a scaly-backed sine wave.

‘It’s very definitely dead,’ she said reassuringly, seeing Silver’s face.

‘What is currently occupying my mind is what killed it,’ said the shand. ‘I will be happy to get my feet on terra firma.’

The more firmer the less terror, thought Kin. She found she preferred the sky. There was something reassuring about lift belts, far more so than the disc. She knew belts didn’t fail. The disc might break up at any moment, but she would remain safely hanging in space.

‘There is an island a few miles off,’ said Silver. ‘Just a dome of rock. I can see the marks of fires. Shall we land?’

Kin peered ahead. There was a smudge, a long way off. The sea seemed to be calm, too. The idea of a short stop had merit. The flying suits had never been designed for extended use in gravity. Her legs had been trailing uselessly below her since they left the settlement, and felt like lead. It would be nice to stamp some new blood into them.

‘Marco?’ she said. He was hovering some way off, still wrapped in self-recrimination.

There was a sigh in her ear. ‘I can hold no useful opinions,’ he said, ‘but I see no obvious dangers.’

The island was small and obviously tidal. Seaweed, now almost dry, covered most of it. So many fires had been lit at the highest point of the rock, about three metres above the sea now, that it was black.

Kin landed first, and keeled over as her legs refused to support her. A crab scuttled out of the seaweed in front of her face.

Silver landed lightly and then hauled on the line to tow the dumbwaiter out of the sky. While Kin sat massaging some life back into her legs the shand bustled round cutting seaweed for the machine’s intake hopper. In normal use the dumbwaiter extracted all its molecules from the air around it, but Silver had a big appetite.

After a while she tapped Kin on the shoulder and handed her a cup of coffee, reserving a large bowl of something red for herself. It was quite possibly synthetic shand. So what?

‘Where’s Marco?’ said Kin, looking round. Silver swallowed and pointed upward.

‘He’s switched off his transmitter,’ she said. ‘He has problems, that one.’

‘You’re not kidding,’ said Kin. ‘He thinks he’s a human and knows he’s a kung. And every time he acts like a kung he feels ashamed.’

‘All kung and humans are crazy,’ said Silver conversationally. ‘He’s craziest. If he thought about it he would realize there’s a logical impossibility about all this.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Kin wearily. ‘I know he’s not
physically
human, but the kung believe one’s being is determined by the place—’ She stopped. Silver was grinning encouragingly, and nodding.

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘You’re nearly there. Kung think the nearest available soul enters the offspring at birth. But Marco is supposed to be human. Humans don’t really believe that kind of superstition, do they? Ergo, he must be a body-and-soul kung.’

There was a gasp in Kin’s ear. Marco may have switched off his transmitter, but kung were paranoid. He’d never switch off his receiver. Kin looked up at the distant dot in the air. Silver mouthed the words: ignore him.

‘I suppose Leiv’s people lit those fires,’ said Kin vaguely. ‘We must be on a trade route.’

‘Yes. Have you noticed the variations in the sea’s roughness?’

Kin had.

There were billions of tons of water on the disc, constantly draining over the edge. It had to get back somehow. Assuming the disc builders couldn’t work magic, there was a molecule sieve down there, connected to – Kin writhed – a matter transmitter. Simple. You clamp receivers to the sea floor and pump the water back, only things were going wrong.

Over the last day and a half they had passed over circular areas of raging sea. Too much was coming up, or maybe only a few receivers were still available to take the volume.

‘I keep forgetting this is just a big machine,’ she said.

‘I think you are being too hard on the disc builders,’ said Silver. ‘Apart, of course, from the possibilities of a breakdown, there is no great disadvantage to living in a cosmos like this, surely? You can still evolve a science.’

‘Sure. The wrong science. Science is supposed to be the tool with which you can unscrew the universe, but disc science is only fit for the disc. It’d be closed, stagnant. Try to imagine a sophisticated disc astronomer trying to figure our sort of universe! The disc is only good for religions.’

Silver dialled herself another bowl of goo. When she looked back Kin was shrugging out of her suit.

‘Do you think that is wise?’

‘Almost certainly not,’ said Kin, swaying slightly as a swell caught them. ‘But I’m damned if I’m going to sweat in there all day long. I’d give a handful of Days for a hot bath.’

She walked naked towards the water and stopped abruptly as another swell nearly made her miss her footing.

On an island?

Marco dived out of the sky, screaming in Kung. A wave washed over Kin’s feet, and as she turned the next one came in waist high and knocked her over. Through stinging spray she saw Silver and the dumbwaiter rocket out of the surf.

Cold water rolled over her. She groped in the green, ear-blocking light and managed to grab the fabric of the suit. It dragged at her as the dead weight of the lift belt pulled it down.

Beside her the water exploded into bubbles. Marco thrashed past, and there was a horrible moment before the suit pulled again – upwards.

Silver was waiting. As the suit came up with Kin gripping it desperately she drifted closer. Marco surfaced in a rosette of foam.

‘No!’ he screamed. ‘Height! Get height! We’re too near the sea!’

The grim pantomime started again two hundred metres up. With Silver holding Kin by the shoulders and Marco arranging the suit, they managed to slot her into the lower section, then forced her freezing arms into the sleeves. The inner thermal suit clicked on; by the time Kin was fit to talk the inside of the suit was a turkish bath.

‘Thanks, Marco,’ she said. ‘You know, I never would have had the intelligence to switch—’

‘Look below,’ said the kung.

They looked.

A shadow moved under the sunlit waves, a big turtle, island sized, with four paddle legs and a head the size of a small house. As they watched it flapped lazily into the depths.

‘I saw it wake,’ said Marco. ‘I had been pondering the regularity of the legs, wondering if they were shoals, and then one moved. No doubt it makes a practice of this and feeds on the unfortunates who light fires on its shell.’

‘A carapace length of a hundred metres,’ mused Silver. ‘Remarkable. Do such exist on Earth, Kin?’

‘No,’ said Kin, through chattering teeth.

‘Enough of this scientific chit-chat,’ said Marco. ‘We must make speed for the nearest land mass. Silver, will you look yonder? About out-by-right, middle heaven. I only see a dot.’

Silver turned her suit.

‘It’s a bird,’ she said. ‘Black. Possibly a raven.’

‘Then at least we cannot be far from land,’ said Marco. ‘I was afraid it was a dragon.’

They switched the belts to maximum horizontal motion and headed on. Imperceptibly Marco pulled ahead, so that they travelled in delta formation. Kin assisted by slowing her suit fractionally, and noticed that Silver had done the same. Marco the kung was in command.

After a while he started to climb, the others following obediently. Below …

… the disc unfolded. At their old height Kin could have believed they were on a globe, but now the disc spread out below them for what it was – a lunatic map, a madman’s Great Circle projection.

Cloud and the opacity of the air were the only barriers to vision. Kin could see the far rim of the disc, a darker line against the sky, and from that distant confusion of earth and sky two white horns grew and spread outward. The waterfall. The oceanfall, encircling the disc like a snake.

There was a hurricane building up, off the coast of Africa. As Kin climbed she watched the frozen spiral of cloud, fascinated.

She had seen worlds from space, but the disc was
different.
And it was big. She was used to thinking in terms of millions and the disc, spinning through space inside its own private universe, had sounded small. Seen from a few hundred miles up it was huge, real. It was the light-years of nothingness that were small and meaningless. It was enough now just to stare …

‘Note the circles of disturbance in the ocean,’ said Marco.

‘Kin suggests there is something the matter with the mechanism that recirculates the sea water,’ said Silver.

‘Logical. Certainly I feel increased admiration for a people who face all this in small boats, with no air support.’

Silver said, ‘Seeing the disc like this, one feels one would be nervous of setting foot on it again. It is too thin, too artificial. We do not as a rule suffer from vertigo, but seeing the disc like this I begin to comprehend what it means.’

Marco nodded. ‘Quite so. It gives one an uneasy feeling around the ankles, akin to standing on a ledge a hundred storeys up – a wide ledge perhaps, but a high one.’

‘I begin to see what Kin meant when she wrote about the Spindles’ insistence on having a few thousand miles of planet beneath their feet,’ said Silver. ‘It is a mental anchor. The subconscious fears the endless drop towards the bottom of the Universe. Could our vague feeling be a shadow of the Spindle imperative?’

‘It is said that they helped us evolve, so that is always possible. What do you think, Kin?
Kin
?’

‘Hunh? Wassat?’

‘Were you listening?’

‘Sorry, I was looking at the scenery. Silver, what’s that smudge down there? In what would be Central Europe.’

‘I see it. That, I suspect, is where our ship crashed.’

They all looked. The smoke was a mere wisp at this distance.

‘It looks like a pretty lifeless region,’ said Silver, in tones of comfort.

‘It is now,’ said Kin bitterly.

Invisible a few miles below, its wings a blur of speed, the raven focused on the smoke. Behind its eyes, something went click.

The moon rose, full but reddish, underpowered. It illuminated a speeding landscape that was mainly forest. Here and there patches of land and a few orange lights indicated a settlement.

Marco called them to a halt after a long stretch of dark forest-roof had passed below.

‘Marco, let’s land,’ said Kin wearily.

‘Not until we have spied out the land!’

‘That bit immediately below us looks unmatched, believe me.’

Silver landed first, on the reasonable assumption that wild animals would be unlikely to attack her. She switched off her suit and unzipped the helmet, then stood silently, nostrils dilating. After a minute she turned, sniffed again.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I smell wolves, but the scent is old. There are some boars about a mile hubward, and I think there’s some beavers in that river about two miles towards the rim. No men.’ She sniffed again, and hesitated.

‘There is something else. Can’t identify it, though. Odd. Vaguely insectile.’

They landed anyway. Kin was dozing in her suit, but concentrated just long enough to stop the belt from crashing her into the turf at the side of the hill. She switched off, and allowed herself to sink gently into the scented grass.

She awoke when Marco gently put a bowl of soup into her hands.

He and Silver had lit a fire. Orange flames shot up and illuminated the forest leaves thirty metres away, and made the camp a circle of comforting firelight. It glittered off the dumbwaiter.

‘Who should know better than I that it is unsafe,’ said the kung, seeing the questioning look in her face, ‘but I’m human enough to say, what the hell. Silver has taken first watch. Then it’s you. Better get some more sleep.’

‘Thanks. Uh, look, Marco, about that floating island—’

‘We will not mention it. We will be over land most of the rest of the way to the hub.’

‘We may find nothing.’

‘Of course. But what is all life but a journeying towards the Centre?’

‘I’m more worried about the belt power sources. Can we be sure they’ll last out?’

‘No, but there is a built-in hysteresis effect. If the power sinks below a certain level it’ll waft you gently to the ground.’

‘Or the sea,’ said Kin.

‘Or the sea. But I know what is worrying you. It is the fear that your Company did all this. But why should they?’

‘Because we can.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. But we could build dragons, we could create people in the vats as easily as we breed up extinct whales. The theory is all there, but we don’t do it because of the Code.
But it is possible.
We could have built this disc, but no one would dare do it in home space. Out here – it’s a different matter.’

Marco looked at her sadly. ‘Silver convinced me,’ he said. ‘If I’m rational, I’m a kung. I’m
glad
I’m not human.’

Kin finished her soup and lay back. She felt warm and full. Marco had curled up with four Norse swords beside him, but she could dimly make out Silver sitting motionless higher up the hill. Always a comforting sight, she told herself. As long as the dumbwaiter works.

She did not dream.

Silver shook her awake before midnight. Kin yawned and staggered to her feet.

‘Anything been happening?’ she mumbled.

Silver considered. ‘I think an owl hooted about an hour ago, and there were some bats. Apart from that, it has been pretty quiet.’

Silver lay down. Within a few minutes deep snores told Kin she was on her own.

The moon was high, but still too red. The stars had taken on that deep light that always comes around midnight. Grass, heavy with dew, rustled as she walked away from the dying fire.

Even now there was still some light on the sunset rim, a green glow that just managed to delineate the boundary between disc and sky. Moths hummed past her face, and there was a smell of crushed thyme.

Later, she wondered if she had dozed on her feet. But the moon was still up and the – call it the west – was still a line of faint luminosity. Yet the music came pouring down the hillside confidently, as though it had been there all the time.

It trilled, then soared into a few bars of evocative melody. Evocative of what, Kin could not decide – perhaps of things that never were, but which ought to have been. It was distilled music.

The fire was a sullen eye between the two sleeping figures. Kin started to climb the bare hill, leaving darker footprints in the damp grass.

A picture came into her mind of the music as a living thing, coiling around the hill and disappearing into the hushed forest. She told herself she could always turn back if she wanted to, and walked on.

She saw the elf on a mossy stone at the top of the hill, outlined against the afterglow. It sat crosslegged, hunched over the pipes, intent upon the music.

Inside the woman who stood entranced, another Kin Arad, imprisoned in the corner of the mind, hammered on the consciousness: (It’s an insect! Don’t listen! It looks like a cross between a man and a cockchafer! Look at the antennae! Those things aren’t ears!)

The music stopped abruptly.

‘No—’ said Kin.

The triangular head turned round. For a moment Kin looked into two narrow, glittering eyes that were greener than the light behind them. Then there was a hiss and a patter of feet over the turf. A little later, there was a rustle in the forest. Then the night closed in again, like velvet.

At dawn they rose above the forest and headed hubwards, leaving long curling trails in the rising mists.

On the horizon a pillar of smoke loomed like the finger of judgement. It was so thick it cast a shadow.

‘I don’t know what effect it has on the natives, but it terrifies me,’ said Kin. ‘We should have blown up the ship in the air, Marco.’

‘Their planet hit us,’ he said testily. ‘It is their responsibility.’

The forest gave way to fields, striped with crops. A distant man, walking behind a plough drawn by ant-sized oxen, fell on his knees as their shadow passed over him. From the boundaries of the field a dirt road ran through a cluster of turf huts, forded a river and disappeared under the trees.

‘He didn’t look like a whizz planetary technician,’ said Kin.

‘No,’ said Marco. ‘He looked shit-scared. But
someone
built this disc.’

Breakfast they had on a cliff top overlooking the sea. Marco watched it carefully. After a while he asked: ‘Kin, if you were the disc master, how would you arrange for tides?’

‘Easy. Have a water reservoir under the disc and occasionally allow extra water into the sea. Why?’

‘This tide is bloody high. There are half-drowned trees down there. What is the matter? Are you being attacked?’

‘Yes, and the sooner I can get a nice hot bath the better. With soap. Soap! Ever since Greenland I’ve been carrying passengers.’

Marco looked blank. Kin sighed.

‘Fleas, Marco. Irritating parasites. Right now I could forget about the Preservation of Extinct Species Law and kill the lot.

‘And you can’t scratch very well in a bubble suit.’

Silver coughed. ‘I too would like the chance of some hygienic reparations,’ she said.

Marco finally consented to make an extended stop later in the day, after Kin announced that if he did not she would land outside the first building that looked like a tavern.

As they sped over the sea Silver added, ‘We are heading for Germany. Not a good place.’

‘Why?’ asked Marco.

‘A battleground. Danes spreading southward meeting Magyars heading westward and Turks heading everywhere, with the locals fighting everyone. According to history, that is.’

‘Anyone have an airforce?’

‘The technology was pri—’

‘It was a joke.’

Kin itched, and stared morosely at the sea. She thought she saw a boat, hull uppermost, rolling in the waves. They were past before she could take a closer look. But she was the first to see the rosette.

From above, the sea had put forth a flower, green petals edged with white. Losing altitude, they saw the mounds of water burst through the surface every few seconds and spread in a succession of roaring, concentric waves.

‘Tide pump,’ said Marco, and flew on.

They crossed a wide beach, a chequerboard of fields, and a forest. And then a town – small, bucolic, but a town.

‘The fortress I can recognize,’ said Marco, pointing to a squat stone building among the canted roofs, ‘but what is the large wooden construction?’

‘Could it be a large heated swimming pool?’ murmured Kin. ‘Don’t look at me like that. The Remens had hot baths.’

‘Romans,’ corrected Silver. Marco grunted and glided off, leaving them to chase after him.

‘Why the big rush?’ said Kin.

He pointed to the smoke column. Kin had to admit it was impressive, even at this distance.

‘That’s why,’ he said. ‘According to Silver the disc people are ripe for mob hysteria. What do you think they’d be doing now that’s in their sky?’

They landed in a mixed forest well out of sight of habitation, where a stream flowed between low sandy banks.

Kin stripped off her suit as soon as she landed and, while Silver scrabbled at the sand, switched the dumbwaiter to one of its least complicated settings. Soon it gushed hot water, filling the hole. She wallowed.

Marco prowled uneasily along the bank and disappeared up a steep, tree-shaped slope. A moment later he came bounding down.

‘We must leave! There’s a track up there!’

Silver looked at Kin and shrugged, then wandered up the slope. She came back looking thoughtful.

‘There is a distant odour of humans,’ she said, ‘but it is a forest track that’s all, and there are plants growing undisturbed all over it.’

They glared at Marco.

‘People use it,’ he said. ‘They may have weapons.’

‘Only axes, I should think,’ said Kin. ‘Anyway, superstition will protect us. There are tidal forests on Kung, aren’t there?’

‘I understand so, yes.’

‘Well, what would be the reaction of a simple peasant kung forester who suddenly chanced upon strange and fearsome monsters in his forest?’

‘He would fall upon them and destroy them utterly!’

Kin bit her lip. ‘I guess he would, at that. Well, humans are different. Don’t worry.’

Later she dialled for soap and did her laundry. Silver had paddled off downstream and found a deep pool, nicely cold, in which she was floating contentedly. Marco relaxed sufficiently to bathe his broad feet in the stream.

There was a sudden movement in the water and he hissed shrilly, jumping up and landing ready to fight. Kin watched wide eyed, then reached down and quickly grabbed a small yellow frog.

She showed it to him without speaking. Marco glared. Finally Kin ran out of air and burst out laughing. The kung looked from her to the impassive frog, hissed menacingly, turned and stomped off along the river bank.

That was unfair of me, she thought. Kung have no sense of humour, even kung brought up on Earth. She released the frog and paddled further out into the stream.

It was clear, and slow enough for yellow water lilies to have established a roothold. Water boatmen rowed furiously underwater to escape her as she dived.

She drifted in the golden brown water between the lily stalks, moving with just the faintest motion of wrists and ankles. There were ramshorn snails with red skin, and small fish darting like swallows in the shadowy cathedrals made by the weeds …

She rose in a cloak of bubbles and surfaced in a clump of flowers, shaking the water out of her hair.

The archers were well disciplined. Kin looked at the row of arrow heads, wavering only slightly, and quickly decided against diving. Refraction of light or not, they could still hit her under water.

There were eight archers in rough clothing and a haphazard assortment of armour and chain mail. They wore close-fitting metal helmets and beneath them their blue eyes bored into Kin stolidly.

A voice was squeaking in her earpiece.

‘… and don’t start anything stupid,’ it said. ‘There’s too much risk of being hit. We must handle this carefully.’

Kin looked round slowly. There was nothing to be seen downstream but stands of reed-mace and thick bushes.

‘I like the
we,’
she said aloud.

‘Just don’t stare too intently at the big bush with the purple flowers,’ said Marco.

Before she could answer, a man pushed his way between the archers and grinned down at her.

He was short and built like a wall. Even his skin was brick coloured. A thatch of yellow hair and wide moustaches framed eyes that glittered enough to remind Kin that intelligence didn’t necessarily start with an industrial revolution.

He wore leggings, a belted smock that fell to his knees, and a red cloak. They all looked as though they had been slept in, if not worse. One calloused hand tapped thoughtfully at the hilt of a half-concealed sword.

Kin smiled back.

Finally he stopped the grinning contest by kneeling down and extending a hand. Jewels gleamed on the dirt-engrained fingers, with a suggestion that they had once belonged to other people.

Kin accepted the hand as gracefully as she could, and climbed out onto the bank. There was a faint sigh from the men. She treated them all to another smile, which caused them to step back uneasily, and plucked a waterlily flower from her hair.

Brickface broke the spell with an appraising glance and a short comment that caused a general snigger.

‘Turn up the gain control,’ said the voice in her ear. ‘If he is speaking Latin, Silver may be able to translate.’

‘I don’t need a translation of that,’ said Kin. She treated her audience to another toothpaste grin and stepped forward. Brickface nodded and one man darted hurriedly out of the way.