Strata (6 page)

An alarm bleeped. Kingdom’s sun bulked in the forward screen as a fire-rim black disc, the sensors having long ago been appalled by its brightness.

Kin switched off the ship’s voice, because she hated the count-down to an Elsewhere jump. It was like waiting for death. If the computer was right, and it was never wrong, the ship would jump just as soon as it was at an acceptable orbital speed with regard to— (a few seconds of vertigo, a brief agony of despair. Soullag, it was called on little evidence. Certainly
something
in the human mind refused to travel faster than – it had been experimentally verified – 0.7 light years per second, so that after even a short jump through Elsewhere-space there was a hollow black time before the rushing mental upwellllll—)

—the destination world. Kin caught her balance, and looked out. The Kung sun was a cool red dwarf. Statistics said it was small. They lied. From four million miles away it was a giant. Kung practically rolled through its upper atmosphere – and there it was, a perceptible black disc. Kin smiled. Kung, living under permanent cloud cover, were mad enough to begin with. What sort of religion would they have developed if they had been able to see the sky?

Three hours later she left the ship a few miles from Kung Line Top.

The satellite was decorated in Kung style – grey and brown-purple predominated, with startling touches of heart-attack red. There was no immigration control. Kung welcomed smugglers. Smugglers were rich.

Her suit’s jets wafted her gently into one of the airlocks, which cycled automatically.

Line Top! The spaceward end of the mono-molecular wire that linked every civilized world with the greater galaxy! The gateway to the stars, where robots jostled with ten-eyed aliens, spies moved circumspectly, golden-bearded traders of strange and subtle wares sold curious powders that made men go mad and talk to God, and cripple boys busked strange electronic instruments that plucked emotions. Line Top! A hefty kick and you had escape velocity. Line Top! Threshold of the universe!

Anyway, that was the idea. But this was reality, and Kung was in a poor time for the tourist trade. The kung that loped through the tethered satellite’s corridors were admittedly colourful, but familiar. There was an unipodal Ehft operating a sweeping machine in one corridor. If it was a spy for the Galactic Federation, it was a master of disguise.

The big board on the main concourse said there was an hour to wait until the next downward shuttle. Kin found a bar with a window overlooking the shuttle hall. The bar was called The Broken Drum.

‘Why?’ she asked the kung behind the bar. Saucer-eyed he fixed her with the bland stare of barmen everywhere.

‘You can’t beat it,’ he said. ‘Your wish?’

‘I thought kung had no sense of humour.’

‘That is so.’ The bar-kung looked at her carefully. ‘From Earth?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Kin.

‘Which one? I’ve got a brother-uncle on Real Ea—’

‘The genuine one,’ said Kin sharply. He looked at her thoughtfully again, then reached under the counter and pulled out a filmy cassette that Kin recognized with a sinking heart.

‘I thought the face was familiar,’ said the barkung triumphantly. ‘Soon as you walked in, I thought, very familiar face – of course it’s a bad holo on the filmy, but still … Ha. Do you think you could do a voice print on it, Miss Arad?’ He grinned horribly.

She smiled valiantly, and took the tape translation of
Continuous Creation
from his damp four-fingered hands.

‘Of course, it’s not for you, I understand, it’s for your nephew Sam,’ she murmured cruelly. The kung looked startled.

‘I have no nephew Sam,’ he said, ‘although I had intended it for my son-brother Brtkltc. How did you know?’

‘Magic,’ sighed Kin.

She took her drink to the big window, and idly watched tugs shunting cargo shuttles across the marshalling wires while behind her she half-heard the bar-kung talking excitedly to someone on the intercom. Then a someone was standing by her chair. She looked round, and then up. A kung was standing beside her.

Look at the kung. Seven feet tall, and then topped off with a red coxcomb that was made of something like hair. Two saucer eyes filled the face, and they were now two-thirds closed against the lights that had been turned up by the bar-kung out of deference to Kin. The body was skeletal, with body-builder’s muscles strung like beads on a wire and a bulge between the shoulder blades for the third lung. The shipsuit it wore was a masterpiece of tailoring. It had to be. The kung had four arms.

It grinned. A kung grin was a red crescent with harp strings of mucus.

‘My name is Marco Farfarer,’ he said, ‘and if it will help you to cease staring, I am a naturalized human being. You only think you’re seeing a kung. Don’t let a mere unfortunate accident of birth confuse you.’

‘My apologies,’ said Kin. ‘It was the second pair of arms.’

‘Quite so.’ He bent lower, and said in the voice laden with the breath of swamps: ‘A flat world?’

Then he sat down, while they sought for clues in each other’s face.

‘How did you know?’ said Kin.

‘Magic,’ he said. ‘I recognized you, of course. I enjoyed your book. I know Kin Arad works for the Company. I see her sitting in Kung Line Top, a place one would not expect to find her. She looks ill at ease. I recall that about a month ago, when I was on Ehftnia and couldn’t get a ship out – being only the third best long-haul pilot in the region – I was approached by a man who—’

‘I think I know the man,’ said Kin.

‘He said certain things and made certain offers. What did he offer you?’

Kin shrugged. ‘Among other things, a cloak of invisibility.’

The kung’s eyes widened. ‘He offered me a small animal skin pouch which produced these,’ he murmured. Kin picked up the notes he laid on the table. There was a wad of 100 and 1000 Day bills, an Ehftnic ceramic 144-pjum bar, a thin roll of assorted human currencies, several hundred Star Chamber tokens and a computer card.

‘Some of the currency I tendered to a moneychanger on Ehftnia,’ said Marco, ‘and she accepted it. There can be no greater proof of its genuineness, if you have ever done business with an Ehftnic. I think the card is a keycard to an autobank, probably on Ehftnia.

‘There was a lot more, mostly Ehftnic dollar bars. I was poor at the time.’

Kin flicked a pjum bar and watched it roll across the table.

‘The bag produced them?’ she asked slowly.

‘Aye. ’Twas no more than hand sized. I watched it all come out. I thought he was Company. He wished to buy my services.’

‘As a pilot?’

The kung waved two hands vaguely. ‘I can fly all kinds of ship, no error. Even without matrix tapes. I’m the best – what do these want?’

The bar-kung approached the table diffidently towing behind him a very large hairy bell, which kept up by hopping on its one foot. There was a voicebox strapped to the tuft at its tip.

‘This is Green-shading-to-indigo. It’s an Ehft,’ he said, helpfully. ‘It’s the Line Top Sanitary Officer.’

‘Pleased to make its acquaintance,’ said Kin. With a deft flick the Ehft produced a transparent box from under its – cloak, skin? – and flourished it a few inches in front of Kin’s eyes. She heard Marco hiss.

‘Voilà! Regardez!’ screeched the voicebox. ‘Earthian! Moutmout! Sapient! Question!’

A large black bird in the box looked beadily at Kin, and went back to preening its feathers.

‘It turned up yesterday,’ said the bar-kung. ‘I told him, it’s a bird, an Earth animal. Only it talks.

‘We looked it up in the
Guide to Sapient Species
, but there is only one avian, and this is not it.’

‘It looks like a damn big raven,’ said Kin, taking the box. ‘What’s the problem?’ She paused. ‘I see the problem. You want to know, do you arrest it or destroy it? Anyway, how did a bird get in here?’

‘Puzzle!’

‘We don’t know.’

On an impulse Kin opened the box. The bird hopped up onto the rim and looked at her.

‘It’s harmless,’ she said. ‘Probably someone’s pet.’

‘Pet?’

‘Mental symbiote,’ drawled Marco. ‘Humans are crazy.’

The Ehft shuffled forward uncertainly and shoved its tentacle towards Kin again. It held a thick loop of intricately-knotted string. With a sinking heart she recognized it as an Ehftnic touch-book.

‘When I told it you were you, it went all the way back to its pod for its translation of your book,’ said the bar-kung proprietorially. ‘It wants you to—’

But Kin was already tying a personalized knot at the beginning of the coil.

‘Understand! Not! Self!’ squawked the voice-box. ‘For! Pup! Belong! Sibling!’

‘He means—’

‘I understand,’ said Kin wearily.

‘Jalo,’ screamed the raven.

‘You take it away,’ said the bar-kung, thrusting the ‘cage’ into a pair of Marco’s arms. ‘She can feed it or eat it or make love to it or teach it to sing or whatever humans do with pests.’

‘Pets,’ said Marco. He took the cage. There didn’t seem to be any alternative.

The Ehft watched them head towards the shuttle bay.

‘Crazy?’ it ventured.

‘Humans run the universe now,’ said the bar-kung bitterly. ‘Such craziness, I wish I could get hold of some. Notice the way humans walk as if they own the galaxy?’

The Ehft considered this. It had always found it an effort to comprehend a method of locomotion that didn’t involve tentacles.

‘No,’ it said.

There were few passengers on the shuttle. There was a moment of high-gee as strap-on rockets sent it swinging out of the hangar and down the Line.

‘At least I’ll have a native guide,’ said Kin, and grinned to show that it was a joke. But this kung seemed to know about humour.
Legally
human?

‘I was hoping you might be able to help me there,’ said Marco, fishing a pouch out of his travelling bag. ‘I’ve never been down there in my life. Sometimes I’ve run freighters here, but only as far as Up.’

‘You mean you got that close and never went to look at your people’s world?’

‘Whose people’s world? I was born on Earth.’

He brought out a bone-coloured pipe, filled it from a pouch and lit it with an everglow. Kin wrinkled her nose.

‘What’n hell’s that?’

‘Tobacco,’ said Marco. ‘Cutty Peerless VI. There’s a man in London sends it out to me. That’s London England, you understand.’

‘Do you enjoy it?’ There was a click as the cabin air filters came on. Marco took the pipe out of his mouth and looked at it reflectively.

‘On the whole, no,’ he said, ‘but it is historically satisfying. May I ask you a question?’

‘Go right ahead.’

‘Do you have a thing about kung? Sexually, I mean?’

Kin stared into the great grey eyes and at the mottled skin, and the snappy answer died in her throat. She recalled occasional rumours. Marco radiated maleness from his matchstick figure. Kung males were almost unbelievably masculine. And priapic, apparently. Kung were directly polarized, male and female, with none of that subtle elision between the absolute male and absolute female psyches that humans possessed. To some human women the kung machismo was magnetic.

‘Never in a thousand years,’ she said levelly. ‘You can call me old fashioned if you like.’

‘Thank goodness,’ said the kung. ‘I hope I did not cause offence?’

‘Nothing that won’t heal. What, er, made you ask?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t credit the stories I could tell you, Kin Arad. Of young human females with
Freffr
-comb hairstyles and what they think is genuine kung style dress and a superficial and uninformed taste in
Tleng
music. When I played piano in a nightclub on Crespo during the spacer slump I had to lock my windows at night, and once two young—’ He paused, then went on. ‘Of course, I realize you are a cosmospolitan woman. But I once had to hit the wife of a New Earth Ambassador with a chair.’

The raven fretted in its transparent cage. Kin glanced at it.

‘What are we going to do if Jalo contacts us?’ she said.

Marco took the pipe out of his mouth. ‘Do? I intend to visit this flat world. What else?’

Tide was up when the shuttle juddered into the terminal, smoke pouring from the brake pads. The kung had solved the water level problem by building the terminus buildings on a raft that rose up and down the Line as the migrating oceans shifted around the planet.

Kin peered out into the grey rain. Around the station raft other woven buildings were bobbing at their anchor poles. A few kung were abroad this early, paddling coracles along the shifting streets like a regatta for Gollums.