Strata (8 page)

‘I would prefer to talk further without the piftol threatening uf,’ said Silver painfully. ‘It if not kind.’

The raven flew up onto Jalo’s shoulder and screamed in his ear—

—a stream of Clipe needles zonked into the ceiling—

—Marco moved so fast that his passage across the space separating him from Jalo could only be deduced from the fact that he was suddenly astride the fallen figure, the Clipe held in one hand and the other three raised to smash a skull—

—he blinked, and looked around as if waking from a dream.

He stared at Jalo, and then leaned forward.

‘He’s dead,’ he said helplessly. ‘I didn’t even strike him.’

Kin knelt down by the man.

‘He was dead before you got there.’

She had seen the face go snow-white after the bird’s scream. Jalo had already been dropping when Marco reached him.

He was sufficiently recently dead for it to be worth slotting his body into the ship’s medical sargo, which immediately flashed a row of red lights. Kin checked the readings on the panel below. Cell rupture, organ rupture, brain damage – when they got back to a human world it would be six months in a resurrection vat for Jalo.

‘A coronary?’ suggested Silver.

‘Massive,’ said Kin. ‘He’s lucky.’

There was silence, and when Kin turned the shand was looking at her in astonishment.

‘Coronary is easy,’ she explained. ‘We can repair that. Simple job. If Marco had got to work on him there wouldn’t have been anything left to put in a vat. He
threatened
Marco.’

Silver nodded. ‘Kung are paranoid. But he also acts like a human.’

‘You watch him enter a room. That walk of his is a fighting stance. Kung don’t know the meaning of the word fear.’

‘Fine,’ said Silver pleasantly. ‘Half kung, half human. Well, I know the meaning of the word fear, and right now I’m scared.’

‘Yeah, I can see—’

(a few seconds of vertigo, an eternity of despair)

The first thing Kin registered when her sight came back was the cabin window and the view outside. The ship appeared to be surrounded by a fog full of icebergs.

She was dimly aware of an alarm, which cut off abruptly.

She was aware of hazy stars, and of drifting across the cabin because there was no gravity. Silver was floating near what had been the ceiling, out cold.

Let’s see. The ship had been floating on a lake. Now it was floating in space. Outside was frozen air and quite a bit of the lake, so down on Kung storms must be raging since a few cubic hectares of air and water had suddenly been dragged into space inside the ship’s Elsewhere field …

In free fall Kin’s natural genius felt somewhat cramped. She swam and bounced her way to the control room, where Marco was hunched over the main consol like a spider, and screamed in his ear.

He grabbed her out of the air and turned her to face the big screen at the far side of the cabin.

She stared, open mouthed.

After a while she fetched Silver, who was treating a slight headwound in the medical room and cursing in several languages, and made her watch.

When the film was finished they ran it through again.

‘I put Jalo’s reel in the navigator,’ said Marco finally. ‘It included this.’

‘Run it again,’ said Kin. ‘I want to have another look at one or two bits.’

‘The picture quality is exceptionally good,’ said Marco.

‘It had to be. They were meant to be transmitted over tens of parsecs—’

‘If I may interrupt for a few seconds,’ said Silver. She reached up to her tusks, and began to twist them. Kin watched in fascinated horror as the fangs unscrewed and were stowed away in a small leather case. She had seen fangless shandi on Shand itself, but they were children or condemned criminals.

‘In order to be a good linguist one must be prepared to make sacrifices,’ said Silver in faultless allspeak. ‘Do you think I submitted to the operation without much secret shame and soul-searching? However, I have something to say. Do I strike you, Marco Farfarer, as a character of ill-humour and short temper?’

‘No. Why?’

‘If you try a stunt like you just did once more, I will kill you.’

‘I thought it was impossible anyway,’ said Kin, with hasty diplomacy.

Marco looked from one to the other.

‘It’s not impossible, simply tricky and highly illegal,’ he said carefully. ‘Do it wrong, and you end up in the middle of the nearest sun. As for your, uh, statement, Silver – I have noted it.’

They both nodded gravely.

‘Right,’ said Kin brightly. ‘Fine. Now show the film again.’

Either the film was genuine or Jalo was an unsung special-effects genius.

It might have been the polar regions of New Earth, or anywhere on Serendipity. Not Njal and Milkgaard, because those worlds had no birds and one picture showed a flock of birds in the distance – until Silver turned up the magnification. Whatever they were, they were not birds. Not with those horse heads, black scales and bat-black wings. But there was a word for them in human history, and the name Dragon unfolded in Kin’s mind.

There was a seascape, and unless there was something very wrong with the size of the waves, the snake-headed beast looping through them was fully a kilometre long.

There were distant views of what might have been cities. There were several sunsets, at least one taken from the air, and a number of night shots of starscapes.

‘Go back to the aerial sunset,’ said Kin. ‘Now what’s wrong?’

‘Horizon’s odd,’ said Marco.

It was. The curve was oddly flattened. There was something else wrong too, something Kin couldn’t immediately spot.

‘Apart from that, it could be any human world,’ observed Silver.

‘Funny,’ said Kin. ‘Jalo talked about a flat Earth, not just a flat world.’

‘That does not surprise me. Humans have been the only race to entertain the primitive idea of a flat world,’ said Marco, running the film back to the starscapes. ‘If you don’t believe me, look it up. Kung always thought they lived on the inside of a sphere, and shandi always had big Twin hanging up there to teach them a basic lesson in cosmology.’

Kin grunted. Later on she found time to check it in the ship’s library. It was true, but what did it prove? That men were slightly stupid and very egocentric? Aliens already knew that.

‘We shall be able to ascertain the precise nature of the flat world’, said Marco, ‘when we arrive.’

‘Hold it,’ said Kin. ‘Stop right there. What do you mean, when we arrive?’

The kung gave her a withering look. ‘I have already set up the program. That whine you hear is the matrix battery charging up.’

‘Where are we now?’

‘Half a million kilometres from Kung.’

‘Then you can land and let me off. I ain’t coming!’

‘What plans had you, then?’

Kin hesitated. ‘Oh, we could take Jalo to a resurrection clinic,’ she said at last. ‘We could wait around and, uh, we, uh …’

She stopped. It sounded pretty feeble, even to her.

‘We have the course, the ship and the time,’ said Marco. ‘The man will come to no harm in the sargo. If we hesitate we will have to explain, and probably the Company will want to know why you weren’t frank with it in the first place.’

Kin looked at Silver for support, but the shand just nodded heavily. ‘I would not like to lose this opportunity,’ she said.

‘Look,’ said Kin. ‘Taking this trip with Jalo seemed a good idea, right? But now we don’t know the half of what we’re embarking on. I’m just using a bit of intelligent caution, is all.’

‘So much for the vaunted monkey curiosity,’ said Marco to Silver. ‘So much for the dynamic manifest destiny we hear so much—’

‘You’re mad – the pair of you!’

Marco shrugged, a particularly effective gesture with two sets of shoulders, and unfolded his bony frame from the pilot chair. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You fly us back.’

Kin flumped into the seat and pulled the wraparound screen down to her level. She looked at the three-quarter consol. There were several dials that looked vaguely familiar. That black panel might control air and temperature; the rest was gibberish. Kin was used to ships with big brains.

‘I can’t fly this!’ she said. ‘And you know it!’

‘Glad to have you with us, then,’ said Marco, looking at his watch. ‘Why don’t you two get some sleep?’

Kin lay in her bunk, thinking. She thought of how attitudes to aliens got stereotyped. Kung were paranoid, blood-thirsty and superstitious. Shandi were calm, bloody-thirsty and sometimes ate people. Shandi and kung thought humans were blood-thirsty, foolhardy and proud. Everyone thought Ehfts were funny, and no one knew what Ehfts thought about anyone.

It
was
true that, once, four kung had boarded a grounded human ship during the bad old days and killed thirty-five crew before the last kung went down under the weight of Clipe needles. It was true that on certain diplomatically-forgotten occasions shandi had, with great ceremony, eaten people. So what? How could you evaluate this unless you could think like an alien?

We dismiss each other with a few clichés, she thought. It’s the only way we can live with one another. We have to think of aliens as humans in a different skin, even though we’ve all been hammered by different gravities on the anvils of strange worlds …

She sat up in the darkness, listening. The ship hummed to itself.

She padded naked down the equatorial corridor. Something that had been nagging at the back of her mind had surfaced, and she had to find out …

Ten minutes later she entered the control room, where Marco was still sitting under the screen.

‘Marco?’

He ducked his head, then pushed the screen up and grinned.

‘Everything’s going fine. What’s that you’re holding? It looks like a melted plastic sculpture.’

‘This was the box the raven was in. Bioplastic. It doesn’t melt below one thousand degrees. I found it in the airlock,’ snapped Kin, tossing it onto his lap.

Marco turned the shapeless mass over, then shrugged.

‘Well? Are these birds intelligent?’

‘Sure, but they don’t tote cutting torches around.’

There was a pause while they both gazed at the melted box.

‘Jalo could have done it,’ said Marco uncertainly. ‘No, that doesn’t work – he was surprised to see the bird.’

‘To put it mildly, yes. I don’t like this sort of mystery, Marco. Have you seen the raven?’

‘Not since Jalo did. Hmm.’ He reached out one lank arm and punched the ship’s panic button.

Bells and sirens echoed through the ship. Within forty seconds Silver thundered in, crushed snow from her sleeping pit still sticking to her fur. She braked when she saw them watching her, and growled.

‘A human joke?’ she said. They told her.

‘It is odd,’ she agreed. ‘Shall we search the ship?’

Marco spoke at length about the number of small spaces in a spaceship. He added details about what happened if something small and feathered crawled into a vital duct, or blundered into the wrong cable.

‘All right,’ said Kin. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘You two go back to your rooms,’ said Marco. ‘Seal them off, and search for the bird. I will evacuate the rest of the ship. This is standard anti-vermin drill anyway.’

‘But you’d kill it,’ said Kin.

‘I don’t mind.’

Later Marco sat watching the build-up of power in the ship’s fusion driver, out there in the centre of the toroids ring field, and wondered about the bird. Then he dismissed the thought, and wondered instead if either of the others had noticed him hide the magic money purse after Jalo’s death. Just a matter of prudence …

Silver turned over in the snow hole in her environmentally frozen cabin, and wondered if either of the others had seen her remove the magic purse from Marco’s hideaway and secrete it in one of her own. For later evaluation …

Kin lay watching the blinking red light that indicated vacuum in the corridor outside her cabin, and felt a vague sympathy for the raven. Then she wondered if either of the others had seen her take the magic purse from the place Silver had hidden it and drop it out of a disposal chute during an Elsewhere jump. By now the purse was barrelling on towards the edge of Universe, propelled by the steady ejection of Day bills from its open mouth.

Spaced at four arbitrary compass points around the ship were quick-air chambers, installed during its construction to conform with Board of Trade regulations. They meant that, if caught during sudden decompression, a crewman could duck into a chamber instead of having to struggle with a suit. They were a good idea.