Strata

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.'

'You don't say. Well, we shall have to see about that,' he replied evenly.

She laughed. 'I'm frankly surprised,' she said. 'I had expected some jut-jawed young fellow with a plough in one hand...'

'... and a model constitution in the other. I know, I know. Someone like that headed up the colony on Landsheer. Did you hear about Landsheer?'

'I saw pictures.'

'Did you know they spent a week arguing about forms of government? And the first thing they built was a church. And then the winter hit them. And I've been up there in the northern continent in the winter. You make your winters cruel.'

Kin started to stroll down, Chang loping along beside her.

'We did not want them to die,' she said at last. 'We told them about weather patterns.'

'You didn't tell them that the universe is unfair. They were too young to be properly paranoid.'

'And you?'

'Me? I think even I'm out to get me. That's why these people have hired me. I'm going on one hundred and ninety. I don't want to die, so I will watch the weather like a hawk, and only swim in shallow water, and eat nothing until I've seen a complete laboratory analysis. I'll even duck in case of meteorites. I've got a five-year contract down here, and I intend to survive it.'

Kin nodded. His self-confidence reassured even her.

But she also knew it wasn't quite so simple. In theory, the older you grew the more careful you were to stay near a gene surgery and the local Company store, where your Days could be cashed for carefully calculated longevity treatment -- at the guaranteed rate of twenty-four standard hours extra life per Day. Only the Company paid in Days, and only the Company gave the treatment. Textbook economics followed that the Company owned everywhere and everybody.

But textbook economics also spoke of the law of diminishing returns. At twenty you acted circumspectly, taking no risks, because if you worked for the Company you had centuries ahead of you. A shame to throw them away by fast driving or high living.

At 200, who cared? You'd been everywhere, done everything. All new experiences were just old experiences, rearranged. By 300 you were probably dead. Not quite by suicide, however -- not quite. You just climbed higher and higher mountains, or free-fell higher and longer, or back-packed across Mercury the difficult way, and sooner or later the odds ran out.

Boredom drove you frenetic. Death was Nature's way of telling you to slow down.

That's why Chang led a party of greenhand colonists to a new world. There was really nothing to lose except a life stretched thin by endless living.

'We don't build pleasure planets,' said Kin. 'You'll have to win this one.'

A glider drifted overhead and was lost among the treetops.

'They'll hate it first,' said Chang. 'That thing's got all the supplies in it, the blankets and the dumbwaiters. I told control to land it ten miles away. It's a nice day. A walk will do us good, and we can see who is the type to tread on poisonous spiders.'

'What will you do when the five years is up?'

'Oh, I don't know, probably stay and become the Grand Old Man for a while. Anyway, by then I'll have this place too civilized for my own comfort.'

'Hmm? Reme wasn't built in a day.'

'I wasn't a foreman on that job.'

The colonists were watching her silently. No gene surgery, no treatment, no Company store -- yet they had volunteered. Not one in ten of them would see a century.

They would have the immortality granted to simple people. There would be children. There were few enough children now, even on Earth. Genes would survive, while conditions on this world worked their own surgery on them. Hammered on the anvil of a different sun and moon, in a thousand years the people here would be different. Just different enough, according to the Plan.

'Here's where we say goodbye,' said Kin, reaching for the pouch at her belt. 'Here's the Deed, the conveyance and a five thousand year warranty against faulty construction.'

Chang pushed the documents into his shirt.

'Have you thought of a name?' Kin asked.

'The vote went in favour of Kingdom.'

Kin nodded. 'I like it. Simple, but not jokey. Maybe one day I'll be back to see how well you work, Mr Chang.'

The last glider down was a Company carrier, in contrast to the cheap vermifoam of the disposable pioneer machines. As Kin walked towards it the hatch opened and a Company robot let down the steps.

'When did you last have the treatment?' said Chang suddenly. Kin stared at him.

'Eight years ago. Should it matter?'

He paused, and moved closer so that the crowd couldn't hear.

'The Company's in trouble. Perhaps our Days are numbered?'

'Trouble?'

The robot pilot registered that Kin was aboard, counted three seconds, and slid the door. The last the pioneers saw of Kin was her perplexed face in the big rear port as the machine drifted away and up.

Chang watched until it was high enough to use the ramjets. Then he reached into the hatch of his own glider, and lifted out a megaphone.

The crowd became a smudge, a dot, and lost itself in the jungle. Kin sat back. The Company owned 6o per cent of infinity. What trouble?

Soon the glider overtook the sun, which set in a reverse dawn. Later they landed on a small sandy island, white in the starlight, surrounded by phosphorescent seas.

The Line was black against the sky. At its base was one small capsule, and a man leaning against it.

'Joel!'

He grinned his Neanderthaler grin. 'Hi, Kin.'

'I thought you'd gone to be a Sector Master on Cifrador.'

He shrugged. 'I was offered it. Didn't suit me. Come aboard. Robot!'

'SAH!'

'Hook the glider on tow.'

'SHO NUFF, SAH!'

'And knock off the slave talk, will you?'

They climbed up to the Linesman's cabin and sat down on either side of the central traction tube. Joel Chenge sighed and flicked a switch. There was a jolt, and Line started to flow hypnotically past them as the capsule climbed.

'I'm the new Watcher here,' he said.

'Oh, Joel! Surely not?' Kin had a sudden feeling that the bottom was dropping out of the universe.

'Surely yes. Just between ourselves, I'm rather looking forward to it. Wouldn't you?'

'But I can't see you--' Kin stopped.

--you, she meant, spending centuries in a deep-freeze cabinet on a high-orbit satellite of this world. Never growing older. She could picture it, and it was horrible.

Robot waldoes hovering eternally with syringes held a few inches from the ice-hard skin, while other robots watched the world below. Looking for certain signs. Fission. Fusion. Space flight. High power use.

Some worlds made space flight a prime target, hoping to achieve early interstellar recognition. It never worked. Even sub-orbital machines were the apex of a pyramid, huge and old, resting on things like subsistence agriculture. It was no good trying to fly before you could eat.

Joel leaned over and punched up a meal on the console dumbwaiter, which extruded a laden table. He caught Kin's eye and grinned again. Joel often grinned. Palaeolithic genes had somehow met again at his conception, and a slab face like Joel's had to smile frequently lest it frighten small children. When his face brightened it was like the dawn of Man. They spoke, and not merely with words. Between them they were 400 years old. Now words were mere flatcars on which towered cargoes of nuance and expression.

Kin looked down at the table again.

'It's familiar,' she said. 'Uh, I'm trying to remember--' 'One hundred and thirty years ago. We got married, remember? On Tynewalde. There was that mad religion--'

'Icarus Risen,' said Kin suddenly. 'Hell, I'm sorry. And you even remembered the menu. How romantic.'

'Actually I had to look it up in my diary,' he said, pouring the wine. 'Were you my fifth wife? I neglected to make a note.'

'Third, wasn't it? You were my fifth husband.'

They looked at one another and burst out laughing.

'Good times, Kin, good times. Three happy years.'

'Two.'

'All right, two. Good grief! That time on Plershoorr, wasn't it, when we--'

'Don't dodge. Why a Watcher?'

The temperature fell like collapsium. Beyond the cabin windows Kingdom was turning from a landscape to a disc, sunlight driving the terminator ahead of it.

'Uh. Life gets a bit stale. On treatment alone I'd never live as long as a Watcher: nice to see a new world grow; see what the future holds; it'll be as good as visiting a new universe--'

'You're gabbling, Joel. I know you, remember? I've never known you bored. I recall you spending two years learning how to make a wooden cartwheel. You said you'd never rest till you had mastered every skill. You said you'd never learned to spear a seal, or cast copper. You said you were going to write the definitive work on robot pornography. You haven't, yet.'

'OK. I'm ducking out because I'm a coward. Is that good enough? Things are going to happen soon, best place'll be in a freeze box.'

'Things?'

'Trouble.'

'Tro--' She paused. 'Chang said that.'

'The big pioneer? I talked to him yesterday, when they were all in orbit. He's getting out before the storm breaks too.'

'What are you talking about?'

He told her. Kin had reported the visit of Jalo. She had also reported his ability to produce high-denomination Day notes.

'The Company examined that methuselah bill you sent in, Kin.'

'A forgery.'

He shook his head slowly. 'Wish it had been. It was -- sort of genuine. Only we didn't print it. The numbers were all wrong. All the codes were wrong. Not inaccurate, you understand. It was just that they aren't our numbers. We haven't issued those numbers yet.

'Now think about it. There's a process for duplicating Company currency. Think what that means, Kin.'

She thought about it.

Company scrip was subject to so many hidden checks and codes that any forgery would have to be a duplication. And you couldn't duplicate a Day bill even by running it through the works of a strata machine, because the Company owned all the machines and one hidden key in every thick plastic note would fuse the whole thing. No-one could duplicate Company currency. But if they could--

Multiple-centenarians would be the first to suffer. Company scrip was so reliable it was a wealth in its own right. But if Day bills were just bits of plastic, if the market was flooded with ten or twenty times the real amount -- the Company wouldn't exist. Its wealth was its credibility, and its credibility was the hardness of its currency.

Gene surgery merely stopped you dying. You could go on living without the additional treatments that Days would buy, but you would grow old. Immortal, but senile.

No wonder they were hiding out. Joel was grabbing a sort of immortality, Chang was at least escaping the crash. Probably the less level-headed were doing things like taking a space walk without a suit.

There must be millions of us, Kin thought. We complain about never eating a dish we haven't eaten before and the colours slowly draining out of life. We wonder if the short-lifers live more vividly, and dread learning that they do, because we gave up the chance of children. It would be so unfair. As if a man has only a certain allocation of things like elation and delight and contentment, and the longer he lives the more they must be diluted.

But life is still sweet and death is just mystery. It is age we dread. Oh hell.

'Did they look for him?' she said.

'Everywhere. We know he's been to Earth, because all the Terminus probe records in the Spaceflight Museum have been wiped clean.'

'Then we know nothing about him at all?'

'Right. Find a bolthole, Kin.' He gave a short laugh. 'At least Company policy was right. Our worlds will last.'

'One man can't bring down a civilization,' said Kin.

'Show me where it says that's a universal rule,' he snapped, and then relaxed. 'This cloak... really invisible ?'

'We-ell, if you looked directly, I remember things behind it being just slightly blurred. But you wouldn't notice if you weren't expecting it.'

'Useful for old-fashioned espionage, maybe,' mused Joel. 'Very odd, though. I don't think we would make one. You have to have a pretty high technology for that sort of thing, and in a high technology invisibility wouldn't be a very great asset. So many other things would detect you.'

'I wondered about that,' said Kin.

'Then all this about matter transmission -- all the theories say it isn't quite possible. The Wasbile double effect almost does it, the same way you can always build an almost-perpetual motion machine.'

The satellite at the Line's end was a bright star ahead. Joel glanced down the controls.

'I'd have liked to have met him,' he said. 'I read about the Terminus probes when I was a wee lad. Then once when I was on New Earth I went to see Rip Van LeVine's farm. He was the one who landed on the planet and found--'

'I know about him,' said Kin.

If Joel had noted the tone in her voice -- and surely he must have done -- he didn't show it. He went on cheerfully. 'Couple years ago I saw this film they made of the T4 and T6. They're the ones who are still travelling. There's a charity on New Earth, every ten years or so they put a couple of ships on a flick-orbit to build up acceleration and--'

'I know about that, too,' said Kin.

The ships built up acceleration by diving into New Earth's sun, then making an Elsewhere jump back a few million miles, then diving, then jumping... and finally popping out of nowhere a few hundred lightyears away at a light-squashing speed and a few miles from the probes.

Terminus Four hadn't decelerated at turnover point, and a fault in Six's primitive computer had guided it precisely to a star that wasn't there. In the normal course of events the pilots would have decomposed centuries ago. Suspended animation had been pretty primitive then, too. But the ailing machinery had long ago been piecemeal replaced, and the visiting crews added refinements every decade or so.

It wasn't cheap. It would have been a lot easier to thaw out the pilots and bring them back to a life of luxury. But Rip Van LeVine, the death-and-glory Terminus pilot who after a 1,000-year voyage landed on a world settled by Elsewhere-driven ships 300 years previously, had been a rich man when he suicided. Rich enough to employ good lawyers, and to insist that his trust do everything that could be done for the last two pilots -- except wake them.

'The LeVine Trust has us tied in knots,' said Joel. 'The first thing the Company thought of was to wake the T4 pilot and ask her about Jalo. They all trained together, so she might know something. But apparently the whole of New Earth would raise hell if we tried it.'

'Joel, what do you think of that idea?' said Kin.

He met her gaze. 'I think it's despicable, what else?'

'So do I.'

She stayed at the satellite until Joel had finished setting the system, and watched while he activated the circuit that broke the long-chain artificial molecule that was the Line. Now Kingdom was on its own.

She didn't stay to watch him ready the freeze room.

Her private boat had been left in orbit near Up. Technically she was on leave until she joined the rest of the team at Trenchert, where the advance parties had already cleaned the atmosphere and strengthened the crust. Months ago she had planned to stop off at Momremonn-Spitz for a look at the new Spindle excavations there. There had been rumours of another working strata machine.

Right now it seemed less than important. She slammed the airlock's inner door shut behind her.

'Salutations, lady,' said the ship. 'The sheets are aired. We are fully fuelled. Shall we run you a bath?'

'Uhuh.'

'We have the course computed. Do you wish a countdown?'

'I think we can dispense with all that excitement,' said Kin wearily. 'Just run that bath.'

When the ship boosted the bath water slopped gently against the edge of the tub, but did not spill. Kin, who had been brought up to be polite to machines, said:

'Neat.'

'Thank you. Five hours and three minutes to flickover.'

Kin soaped an arm thoughtfully. After a few minutes she said: 'Ship?'

'Yes, lady?'

'Where the hell are we going? I don't recall giving you any instructions.'

'To Kung, lady, as per your esteemed order of three hundred and thirty eight hours ago.'

Kin rose like a well-soaped Venus Anadyomene and ran through the ship until she dropped into the pilot chair.

'That order,' she said softly, 'repeat it.' She watched the screen intently, one hand poised over the panel that would open a line back to Kingdom Up. Joel wouldn't have frozen himself yet, the process took hours. Anyway, a machine could just unfreeze him. The important thing was that the station had a big enough transmitter to punch a message through to the Company. She recognized the touch of Jago.

The transmitted order had been simple enough, prefaced by the ship's call sign and Kin's own code. It had come over the normal ground-to-orbit channels. It could have come from a dozen transmitters while work on Kingdom was being completed.

It had ended: 'A flat world. You, Kin Arad, are a very curious person. Cheat me and you will forever wonder what sights you missed.'

Kin's hand dropped -- and didn't touch the message switch.

You couldn't build a flat world.

But then, you couldn't come back if you were a Terminus pilot.

And you couldn't duplicate Company scrip.

'Ship?'

'Lady?'

'Continue to Kung. Oh, and open a channel to the screen in my study.'

'Done, lady.'

It was wrong. It was probably foolish. It would certainly get her fired.

Be there or forever wonder.

She filled the hours by relearning Primary Ekung and reading the supplements to the planetary digest. It appeared the kung now had a Line, but no-one had got around to banning ship landings on the world itself. Nothing much was banned on Kung, even murder. She checked and found it was now the only world in local space that actually allowed ships to land under power. Was that relevant?

Kung was hungry for alien currency. There wasn't a great deal Kung could produce that humans could use, except a whole variety of pneumonia-type illnesses, but there was a lot Kung wanted. It was trying to start a tourist industry...

Kin had been there. She recalled rain. The kung had forty-two different words for rain, but that just wasn't enough words to encompass the great symphony of water that fell for fifty-five minutes in every hour. There were no mountains. The light gravity had allowed plenty to rise, but it allowed lots of ocean spray into the wind to wash them down. The nubs that remained had a dispirited, back-turned look.

Of course, sometimes they became islands. Kin remembered about the tides.

An over-large moon and a cool, close sun meant nightmare tides. Vegetation was either fungal, able to spring up and fruit hurriedly at low tides, or it was resigned to a semi-submerged life.

And tourists came. Even though they had to wear float-jackets most of the time in case of flash tides, the tourists came. They were fishermen and mist enthusiasts, micophiles and wanderjahr biology students. As for the kung themselves...

She switched off and sat back.

'You should have told the Company,' she said silently. 'There's still time.'

She answered: 'You know what will happen. He might be mad, but he's no fool. He'll be prepared for any trap. Besides, Kung isn't a human world. Company writ runs thin down there. He'll duck and weave and we'll lose him.'

She said: 'You have a duty. You can't let a menace like him run around loose just to satisfy your curiosity.'

She answered: 'Why not?'

How rich is Kin Arad, daughter of the genuine Earth and author of Continuous Creation (q.v.)? The Company paid its servants in Days, but since they could earn far more than a Day in a day, they often sold surplus time for more traditional currencies. Temporally, then, her account showed that she had another 368 years, 5 weeks and 2 days in hand, plus 180,000 credits -- and a credit is worth a credit these days.

In any case, credits were backed by Days. The galaxy had rare elements in plenty. The transmuter at the heart of every strata machine or dumbwaiter could make anything. What else but longevity itself could back a currency? Kin could buy life. Could Solomon have done it? Could Cloritty have done it? Could Hughes have done it?

She was rich.

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 countdown 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 4 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 monomolecular 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 crippled 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. Saucereyed 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 bar-kung 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.

'Voila! 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 on to 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 voicebox. '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.

Marco splashed up, dragging a small and terrified kung behind him.

'This says it's been hired to pick us up. Not very dramatic, is it?'

Prodded by Marco, the boatkung led them over the gaggle of boats moored around the platform to a human-built tourist speedster, its four balloon tyres now doubling as flotation bags. Kin settled into the back seat. The rain was warm, and she was already sodden. Maybe there was something particularly penetrative about kung water.

Marco shoved the boatkung into the front passenger seat and fumbled with the controls. The mooring rope groaned and parted as the boat bucketed forward between wings of spray.

He drove with three arms draped nonchalantly over the seat.

Four arms. Four-arms were rare. In the bad old days before the Revolution, high-caste kung had used mitogenetic techniques to influence the growing embryo. Four-arms meant warrior caste. Kin decided to try tact.

'How come,' she asked, 'how come you have to have shirts specially made?'

He didn't look round. 'Family tradition,' he said. 'My family always sent one male into the warriors, and they operated on my mother, but -- you remember the Line Break of 'fifty-eight?'

'Sure. Earth was cut off for a month. Some lunatic bombed both termini simultaneously.'

'Yes. My parents were on the embassy staff at New Stavanger. By the time the Line was replaced my mother was in labour.'

And the kung believed that when a child was born its receptive mind was taken over by the nearest available discarnate soul...

'As a matter of fact my father was prevented from killing himself by the Shand cultural attache, who was dining with him,' said Marco levelly. 'He thought he could get to me first, you see? It didn't work. So they put out humanity papers on me and found me a home with an old couple down in Mexico, and then they left Earth. End of story. How come you're bald?'

Kin's hand flew to her wig.

'Uh. Age. Hair can't take it.'

Marco was watching the horizon intently. 'Oh,' he said. 'I wondered. I always think one shouldn't be shy about this sort of thing, don't you?'

The boat chattered through half-drowned groves and flotillas of villages until it was brought to a dead halt by weeds brushing against the hull. Marco swore, and kicked the power changeover.

'It's the tide,' said Marco. Hull out of water, they whirred on through streaming vegetation. A few late fish, abandoned by the water, were hopping awkwardly after the departing sea. On Kung only amphibians survived for long.

Presently the vegetation and the gradient suggested country that was seldom inundated for more than one hour in twenty. Under the boatkung's direction they picked up a track that wound up into permanently dry grassland. If Kung had been a human world it would have been cultivated to within an inch of its life. The kung shunned it as a desert.

The boat jolted over a ridge.

There was a round valley, with the inevitable lake at the bottom, and a spaceship bobbing at its centre.

'It's a General Motors Neutrino, ground-to-ground ring-rim fusion motor, Spindle unibrake, thirty-four staterooms, choice of extras,' said Marco, lighting his pipe. 'The insystem systems are a bugger. I flew one once. They were built to meet a demand which wasn't.'

It looked like a fat doughnut.

'Has it got any armaments?' asked Kin weakly.

Jalo!' screamed the raven.

'Wouldn't like to be on the wrong side of the fusion flame.'

The boatkung was looking at Marco's pipe in terror.

'Apart from that -- there's a roomy hold. Name your own horrors.'

As they stepped into the ship's open hatch the boatkung gunned his craft and headed back across the lake.

'Looks like the only way off is up,' said Kin. 'I wonder what frightened him?'

'Me,' said Marco, and walked aboard soundlessly then hissed and crouched into a fighting stance.

A shape lurched towards them. Racial memories told Kin to run and climb a tree. The thing bearing down on them could only be intent on clawing gashes in soft membranes, and gouging with those fangs. Racial memories were behind the times, as usual. Kin grinned politely.

The shand could just about stand in the high corridor without its tiny ears touching the ceiling, which meant it was almost three metres high. It was, though, holding the knee-sagging, self-effacing posture that shandi always adopted inside the artefacts of smaller races, as if in terror lest they accidentally eat someone.

Typically, it -- she -- was as broad as she was high, with wide arms ending in calloused knuckles that could double as another pair of feet. There was an intelligent bear's face, but it was a bear with binocular vision and a domed skull and several walruses in its ancestry. It had two tusks, said to have been used originally for scraping molluscs from the beds of freezing oceans, now as useless as the vermiform appendix, and carved into status-denoting shapes. Its snout--

'If you have klite fliniffed?' she lisped reproachfully.

There was something altogether familiar about some of those tusk carvings. Kin stuck her fingers in the corners of her mouth for tuscal effects and tried her Shandi.

'I am Relative/Almost-Parched-And-Dry and the kung is -- Small-stain-go-far,' she spat. 'I greet you in all grease, O shand of the Lower Conwexi Delta Moraine Region, unless I am very much mistaken.'

'I congratulate you on your mastery of the Speech,' said the shand graciously. 'My name is fifty-six syllables long but you may call me Silver. Are you coming to the flat world? Is the kung dangerous? He looks uneasy.'

'I think it's because he can't understand Shandi. On the other hand, all kung look uneasy. It's probably something to do with the flash tides. This one's human, by the way, don't press the point.'

'What are you talking about?' Marco asked suspiciously.

By the time Silver had led them into the ship's observation cabin they had reached a compromise. Kin and Marco spoke to Silver in allspeak, which the shand understood but, because of her tusks, could not speak, Silver spoke in shandi, which she could pronounce and Marco could not understand, and Kin translated into allspeak for Marco. Eventually it was established by careful retranslation that Silver was a sociologist, comparative historian, linguist and meat-animal herder.

'All of them?' asked Marco.

'I once knew a shand who was a lift-attendant, biochemist and seal-hunter,' said Kin.

'I got here yesterday,' said Silver. 'I was working on Prediquac when this man--'

'We know him,' said Kin. 'What did he offer you?'

'I do not understand,' said Silver blankly.

'Bait,' said Kin. 'To go with him to the flat world.'

'Oh, I see. Nothing. Should he have done?'

Kin translated. Marco stared at the shand in astonishment, then snorted and wandered off into the depths of the ship.

'There is something familiar about your name,' said Silver to Kin.

'I wrote a book called Continuous Creation.'

Silver smiled politely. 'Did you?'

Marco had disappeared. The two females took a stroll through the doughnut hull. With every step Kin became more uneasy. This was a strange ship.

It had been converted to a freighter. There were four staterooms. The rest of the torus was fuel tank.

The ship had been designed to be a rich idiot's toy. Only rich men and spies used ships that could stagger out of a gravity well under their own power.

Consider: there was a Line on every useful world, and once up the Line all that was needed was a pressurized box with altitude jets and an Elsewhere matrix to get you to the top of any other Line. A few specialized trades and the tourist industry used ships capable of traversing a solar system. There were even some ships that could fly ground-to-orbit in an emergency. No-one needed a ship that could reach orbit and fly across a system and jump via the Elsewhere.

This one could. Kin's unease began to be tinted with excitement. The Line and the Matrix had chopped space into mere pauses between identical Line Top arrival lounges. This ship was something else.

There was a dumbwaiter, a big model programmed to produce anything from lobster thermidor to sawdust. It could even reproduce shand proteins.

There was a medical room that would not have disgraced a city. There was also a deep-freeze, a fact so unusual that Kin lifted the lid.

'Now here's a thing,' she murmured. Silver peered in, and rooted around among the frosted packages.

'Nothing remarkable,' she said. 'Meat, fish, fowl, leaves, swollen tubers -- human food.'

Kin pointed at the dumbwaiter, humming seductively to itself.

'Ever known one of those to fail?' she said.

'They don't,' said Silver. 'If they did, you humans would never have allowed us into space.'

'Then why waste space and weight hauling this junk? If he was nervous, he'd bring shandi food -- uh. Of course. I forget he's old.'

'Old?'

'Old enough to be fussy about machine-made food. This lot here must have cost him a fortune.'

'Please explain about "old",' said Silver insistently.

Kin told the shand about the Terminus probe. When she finished she was aware that the giant was looking at her oddly.

'You humans must have been mad for space,' she said.

They turned as Marco strode silently into the room, trembling with rage.

'What is this ship?' he bawled. 'There's enough weaponry in the hold to blow a hole through a planet.'

'And small-arms,' murmured Kin. Marco stared at her, while she felt her mind beginning to think very fast indeed.

'Precisely. But how did you guess?'

'No guess, I think I've seen enough. Silver, was there a message from Jalo when you got here?'

'The kung in the ferry said I was to wait. Why?'

Kin shook her head urgently. 'Marco, there must be spacesuits around. If we got into them, could you evacuate the ship?'

'Down here? It'd implode. I'd have to take her up, and that--'

'This is a .0003 Clipe automatic. If you all leapt at me the chances are I would not get you all, but who could I shoot first?'

Jalo was standing by the door, the pistol dangling nonchalantly from one hand. Kin thought about what a stream of Clipe needles could do, and decided to stand very still. She glanced at Silver.

The shand wasn't looking at Jalo. She was staring at Marco.

He had dropped into a curious bowlegged stance, arms held out from his body like an ancient gunfighter, and he was hissing softly.

'Tell it if it attacks, I will shoot,' said Jalo. 'Tell it!'

'You know he can understand you,' said Kin coldly. She heard Silver say in shandi: 'In a minute there's going to be an almighty fight, Kin. No-one threatens a kung and lives.'

'Marco is legally human,' said Kin in allspeak.

'Yes, that fooled me,' said Jalo. 'I should have known better. I told that agency computer on Real Earth to pick three people that fitted my specifications, and it gave me three names. The damn thing never bothered to say two of them were BEMs.'

Only Silver, student of history, understood the term. She growled.

'It surely mentioned planets of origin,' said Kin.

'The big frog was born on Earth, though, and the bear born in a ship orbiting Shand,' said Jalo. 'Doesn't anyone ever mention species these days? Legally human! Ye gods! Do not move.'

'I was wondering where you were,' said Kin. 'I should have been looking for a patch of fuzzy air -- looter.'

He grinned lopsidedly. 'The word is, uh, nasty but true. Just like the Company looted strata machines and the Line monomolecular technique.'

'Not true. The Company administers them for the general good.'

'Fine, so on this trip the profits will be for my general good. I figure I'm owed something. I knew LeVine and the rest. I trained with them. I'm taking my reward now. I've got the jackpot.'

Something small and black hopped around the curve of the corridor behind him. Kin recalled that Marco, determinedly human, had been trying to make a pet of the raven. It was feeding time.

'I shall need assistance,' Jalo said.

'You've got the self-filling purse,' said Kin. 'That sounds like a jackpot to me.'

'Nah. With what's here we can start our own Company where we're going.' He reached into a side-pocket and pulled out a navigation reel. 'It's all here.'

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

The raven flew up on to 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--'

'Iff 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 batblack 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. 'OK,' 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, blood-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 a 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.

The big red light on each one was supposed to flash so that later rescuers could see it. There was no-one to see it now, but one was flashing.

Inside, both claws gripping the pressuring lever, the raven leaned with its beak pressed against the air vent, and thought about survival.

During a dull moment, of which any voyage had plenty, Silver once asked the ship's library to provide her with a copy of Continuous Creation. It couldn't, but it did furnish this extract from the relevant Ten Worlds Literary Digest -- after 167 lines on the book's contribution towards the rediscovery of paper-making.

'The book's achievement was that it drew together a few dozen strands of research on archaeological, palaeontological and astronomical fronts, and wove the Theory out of them. It is easy now to say that, of course, the Theory was obvious. Obvious it was, but it was so obvious that it was almost hidden -- except to a planetary designer who was used to thinking in terms of secondary creation, and who was also a voracious reader.' This was the Theory:

There were the Spindles: telepaths, so telepathic that no more than a thousand of them could occupy a world at a time, because of the mental static. And we humans thought we had a population problem. They left libraries and scientific devices, and it was already known that they could reshape planets more to their liking. They needed room to think. They were proud. When they discovered, on Bery, the remains of a Wheeler strata machine under half a mile of granite, their pride was shattered. Spindles were not, as they had believed, the first lords of Creation -- the Wheelers had beaten them to it, half a billion years before. The shock led them to cease reproduction.

One ship, conveniently stocked with library tapes, had eventually tumbled slowly enough across Earth's system to be stopped. Inside its meteor-ripped skins were three mummies. They had been the crew. Three crew.

The ship had been over a hundred miles across. Most of it had been empty balloon. Room to think...

The Wheelers were silicon hemispheres, propelling themselves on three natural wheels. Nothing except shell and wheels had survived, but there were, under the granite, the compressed remains of Wheeler cities. Other Wheeler remains began to be discovered.

Wheelers had recorded traces of an earlier race, the palaeotechs. Palaeotechs were said to have created theType II stars and their planets. One of their specialities had been the triggering of novas as a crucible for heavy metal creation. Why? Why not? Palaeotechs weren't easily understandable. (Once, Kin Arad answered to her own satisfaction at least the question of why the palaeotechs had created stars. 'Because they could,' she said.)

In one interstellar gulf a ship dropping out of Elsewhere for repairs had discovered a palaeotech -- dead, at least by human terms (though Kin Arad has pointed out that palaeotechs probably lived by a different time-scale and that this apparently lifeless hulk may have been very much alive if considered by slow, metagalactic Time). It was a thin-walled tube half a million miles long.

Wheeler legends spoke of a polished smooth world where palaeotechs had inscribed their history, which included the legend of the pre-palaeotech ChThones, who spun giant stars out of galactic matter, and the RIME, who produced hydrogen as part of their biological processes...

This was the Theory: that races arose, and changed themselves, and died. And then other races arose in the ruins, changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And other races arose in the ruins -- and arose, and arose, all the way back to the pre-Totalic nothingness. Continuously creating. There had never been any such thing as a natural universe.

(Kin once heard a speaker refer disparagingly to the Spindles because they had manipulated worlds. She stood up and said: 'So what? If they hadn't, Earth would still be a mess of hot rocks and heavy clouds. They changed all this and they brought in a big moon, but do you know the best of all? They gave us a past. They jiggered their strata machines to give us fossils of things that had never existed. Icthyosaurs and crinoids and chalk and ancient seas. Maybe they didn't feel at home unless they had a few hundred metres of fossil strata under them, like they couldn't feel happy if there was another Spindle within fifty miles. But I think they did it because it was their art. They didn't know anyone would see it, but they went ahead and did it.')

Kin found a quiet moment to explore the weapons hold. If Marco had flown the ship to a world with a shaky government, there was enough stuff on board to equip a rebel army. There was what looked like a complete missile system, and several racks of small arms that Jalo must have had made to ancient patterns. One handgun fired sharp wooden bullets. Why?

The ship -- they never did get round to naming it -- dropped into real space. Marco's hands hovered over the controls as he waited for a welcoming barrage.

There was nothing. There wasn't even a star near the ship.

'We're still on the edge of explored space,' said Marco. 'That blue giant there is Dagda Secundus. It's about half a light-year away.'

'Well, here we are and where are we?' asked Kin. 'A star like that shouldn't have planets, especially nice sunny ones.'

'The computer is searching,' said Marco gloomily. 'Needle. Haystack. Perhaps we'll find some iceball whipping along at maybe twenty knots orbital velocity.'

'Meanwhile, we could eat,' suggested Silver.

They each dialled their meal from the dumbwaiter and wandered back into the control room.

'Give it an hour,' said Kin. 'This area of space has been explored. What the hell can it find that the survey teams missed ?'

'I doubt if they looked out here,' said Silver. There was a brief moment of nausea as the computer flicked the ship a few million miles for a parallax measurement.

'We followed Jalo's course tape,' said Marco. 'I'd hate to have to--'

The computer chimed. Marco vaulted into the control chair and juggled the screen controls.

At the limit of magnification there was a small fuzzy hemisphere. They looked at it blankly.

'Just a planet,' said Kin.

'Rather brightly lit for this distance out,' agreed Marco. 'Highly polished ice?'

Silver coughed apologetically. 'I am no astronomer,' she said, 'but surely it is wrong?'

'Not ice?' said Marco. 'Could be Helium IV, I suppose.'

'You misunderstand me,' said the shand. 'Surely the light hemisphere should be pointed towards the star?'

They stared at it. Finally Marco exclaimed, 'Bleeding hell, she's right!' He glanced down at the shouter screens. 'It's half a billion miles away,' he said. 'I should be able to make a straight-line jump. Uh...'

For a moment four hands hovered like a flight of hawks over the controls.

And dropped.

The sky was falling in on them. Then Marco, almost in hypnosis, turned the ship and there, spread out below like a bowl of jewels, was the flat Earth.

It was like a plate full of continents. A coin tossed into the air by an indecisive god.

The ship had come out perhaps 20,000 miles above it and out of vertical. Kin looked out at a hazy map of black land and silver seas fuzzed with moonlit cloud. There was what, for want of a better term -- how many people had mapped flat planets? -- a polar cap, hugging one side of the disc.

Moonlit? There was a moon, apparently a few thousand miles above the disc, and it shone. It couldn't be reflected light. There was nothing to reflect. And there were stars -- between the ship and the disc, there were stars. The shadowy oval lay inside a hazy globe. Marco translated what the machines were emotionlessly telling him. The disc was inside a transparent sphere 16,000 miles across, and the stars were -- 'that's what I said, Kin,' -- were fixed to this.

One edge of the disc glowed brighter. It flashed green fire, which ran around the rim until they were looking at a hole in space surrounded by green and silver flames. Then the ring grew a gem, and died as suddenly as it had come. The sun had risen. A tiny sun.

One machine said it was an external fusion reactor. It looked like a sun.

This is what I'll remember, thought Kin. The green fire at sunrise, because all around the disc there's a sea, and it flows over the edge in a waterfall 35,000 miles long and the sun shines through the falling water -- no wonder Jalo was mad.

Dawn rushed across the disc. Silver was the first to react. She giggled.

'He did call it a flat Earth, didn't he?' she asked. 'It was the truth, wasn't it?'

Kin looked. The continents had moved, it was true, and there didn't appear to be a New World at all. It was Earth down there -- she recognized Europe. Earth. And it was flat.

Marco put them into a fast orbit, and no-one left the cabin for three hours. Even Silver let a mealtime go past, and fed on curiosity instead.

They watched the waterfall slide past under high magnification. There were rocky islands, some tree-lined, overhanging the drop. It was a long drop -- 500 miles into a turmoil of steam. But the disc itself was only five miles thick. As the ship passed under the disc there was nothing but a space-black plain on the underside.

'Some humans used to believe the world was flat and rested on the backs of four elephants,' said Silver.

'Yeah?' said Kin. 'What did the elephants stand on?'

'A giant turtle, swimming endlessly through space.'

Kin tasted the idea. 'Stupid,' she said. 'What did the turtle breathe?'

'Search me. It's your racial myth.'

'I'd give a lot to know how the seas can keep on spilling over the edge.'

'Probably a molecule sieve, down there in the steam,' said Marco without looking up from the shouter screens. 'The plumbing is a minor matter, however. Where are the inhabitants? This thing is obviously an artefact, a created thing.'

'No-one's trying to contact us?'

'Just listen to my excitement.'

'I suppose you mean no. Perhaps it's as well. I keep thinking of all those weapons in the hold.'

'The thought seldom leaves my mind. Perhaps Jalo meant to hunt sea-serpents, but I think not. I cannot help thinking that anyone capable of building the artefact would hardly be bothered by any weaponry this ship could carry.'

'Perhaps the inhabitants are dead,' suggested Silver. Kin and Marco looked at each other blankly.

'Unlikely,' said Marco. 'More likely they've passed beyond the stage of gross physical existence. Maybe even at this moment they are screwing the inscrutable.'

'They're due for a big shock one of these days, then,' said Kin. 'This set-up must take vast amounts of power just to keep it going. The sun's orbit is all wrong. What keeps the seas from emptying? Why have they got their own private stars when there's real ones out here--'

'I can answer that one; said Marco. 'It looks as though the big sphere is only transparent from the outside. We can see in, they can't see out. Don't ask me why.'

'Do we land?' said Silver.

'How could we get in?' said Kin. Marco grimaced.

'That is easy,' he said. 'There's an eighty-metre hole in the shell. We passed it last orbit.'

'What?'

'You were busy looking at the waterfall and in any case it did not seem particularly important. No doubt the disc-dwellers have space travel.'

They hovered over the hole twenty minutes later. It was slightly elliptical, and the edges seemed to have been melted. It could have been made by careful jockeying of a ship with a fusion drive, thought Kin. Or a geological laser. Would a Terminus probe have carried one? Probably.

'We're still way above atmosphere,' said Marco. 'I hope the disc-dwellers aren't sore about people making holes in the sky.'

'We could offer to pay for repairs,' said Silver.

Kin wondered if that was a joke. Why would anyone shut themselves away from the universe like this? It didn't make sense, unless they were completely paranoid. If they weren't to start with they would be now.

'No,' she said out loud. 'They couldn't have built something like this if they were mad.'

'It looks like Earth, and Earthmen are mad,' Silver pointed out. 'I suppose humans haven't been doing a little secret world building?'

'No...' began Kin, and saw they were both looking at her slyly. 'I don't know,' she finished lamely. 'It certainly looks like it, I'll admit.'

'It certainly does,' said Marco.

'It does too,' agreed Silver.

'Don't breathe,' said Marco. 'There's just enough room. We're going in.'

The ship dropped through with a few metres to spare, and the proximity detectors shrilling. They were still going mad when Kin looked up and saw a ship speeding towards them.

It hit in one of the holds, buckling the hull and sending the sky wheeling crazily. Damage doors crashed into place and then the control room lurched again as it fell away from the ship under its own power, a self-contained emergency craft.

The damage to the ship was nothing to what happened to the attacker. It disintegrated.

Blue-green shards were spreading across the sky and, as Kin pulled herself up from the cabin floor, the screens were sparkling like glitter dust.

The inner door of the emergency airlock opened and Marco loped in, tugging at his helmet with two hands. Another one held a laser rifle, salvaged from the other half of the ship. The fourth held a long sliver of glass, gingerly.

'Looks like someone threw a bottle at us,' said Kin.

'Their aim was remarkable,' said Marco coldly. 'I can take us back to the rest of the ship, but it is hardly worth it. We've got no Elsewhere capability. I can't build a pinch field. Most of the contents of the hold are floating out there somewhere, and they were our weapons. The auxiliary systems are all working. I could probably fly us home on the ringrim motor alone.'

'Then all is not lost,' rumbled Silver.

'No, except that it would take about two thousand years. Even this bloody gun is useless. Someone thought it a safe idea to pack the main coil in a separate box.'

'So we land on the disc,' said Kin flatly.

'I was wondering when someone was going to say that,' said Marco. 'It'll be a one-way trip. This craft won't lift off again.'

'What hit us?' said Silver. 'I thought I saw a ball about ten metres across...'

'I've got a horrible feeling I know what it was,' murmured Kin.

'Yes. It was a weapon,' said Marco. 'I admit I find its complete destruction difficult to understand, but the fact remains that we had a stargoing ship. Now we have not. I intend to make one orbit before landing.'

Silver coughed gently. 'What,' she said, 'will we eat?'

It took several hours to ferry the dumbwaiter across from the lazily spinning ship. At Kin's insistence they also brought the sargo with Jalo in it, and linked it into the emergency system. The waiter had its own internal power supply -- as laid down by regulations. No-one wanted to spend their last hours in a blacked-out ship with any hungry shandi that might be aboard.

The new orbit took them past the disc's moon, no longer shining and obviously invisible in the disc's day sky. They saw that one hemisphere was black.

'Phases,' said Kin. 'Wobble the moon on its axis and you get phases.'

'Who does the wobbling?' asked Marco.

'I don't know. Whoever wanted this thing to look like Earth, from the surface. And don't look at me like that -- I'll swear this wasn't built by humans.'

She spoke to them about artificial worlds -- rings, discs, Dyson spheres and solar tunnels.

'They don't work,' she said. 'That is, they're vulnerable. Too dependent on civilization. And there's too many things to go wrong. Why do you think the Company terraforms worlds when there are cheaper alternatives? Because planets last, that's why. Through anything.

'And I'm certain this wasn't built by Spindles. Planets were important to them. They had to feel the strata below and the unlimited space above. Somehow they could sense it. Living on something like this could drive them out of their skulls. Anyway, they died out four million years ago at least, and I'm positive that this thing isn't that old. It must be all machinery just to keep going, and machines wear out.'

'There's cities down there,' said Marco, 'in the right place, too. If this was Earth.' He looked up. 'OK, Kin, you've been dying to tell us. What did hit us back there ?'

'Was the hole on the ecliptic?'

Marco leaned over and played with the computer terminal for a few seconds. 'Yes,' he said. 'Is it important? The sun was well below us.'

'We were pretty unlucky. I think we were hit by a planet.'

'That was my thought too,' said Silver gravely, 'but I did not like to say anything in case I was thought a fool.'

'Planet?' asked Marco. 'A planet landed on the ship?'

'I know it's usually the other way around, but I think I'm beginning to grasp the workings of this system,' replied Kin. 'There's a fake sky, so there's got to be fake planets. Their orbits must be something to see. If it's really supposed to look like an Earth sky they'd have to be retrograde sometimes.'

'I was wrong,' said Marco. 'We should have started for home. We could have rigged up the sargo and taken turns to wake up. Two thousand years isn't all that long. I don't know what agency told Jalo I was the man for the job, but he's owed his money back.'

'Still, the view's good,' said Kin.

The ship was passing under the disc again. And again there was the flash of green fire as, for a few seconds, the sun shone through the waterfall around the disc.

Something hit them -- again.

It wasn't a planet. It was a ship, and most of it was still hanging in the rearward aerial array when Marco had fought the spin it gave them.

Kin went out this time, and she steadied herself on an aerial stump as she looked at the frosted wreckage.

'Marco?'

'I hear you.'

'It's made one hell of a mess of the antennae.'

'I have already deduced that. We are also losing air. Can you see the leak?'

'There's fog damn near everywhere: I'm going to take a look.'

They heard her boots clump around the hull, and then there was a silence so long that Marco shouted into the radio. When Kin spoke, she spoke slowly.

'It is a ship, Marco. No, wrong word. A boat. A sailing boat. You know, like on seas.'

She looked across at the fire-rimmed disc.

A waterfall pouring over the edge of the world.

The mast was broken and most of the planking had been whirled away by the force of the impact, but enough rope had held together to make it obvious the boat had a passenger.

'Marco?'

'Kin?'

'It had a passenger.'

'Humanoid?'

Kin growled. 'Look, it went over the waterfall and then into vacuum and then hit the ship! What sort of description do you want? It looks like an explosion in a morgue!'

Kin was used to violent death. Oldsters died that way -- freefall diving without a backpack on, deliberately wandering near when they released the cloned elephants on a new world, banjaxing the safeties and stepping into the hopper of a strata machine -- but then ambulance crews took over. There had never been anything to see, except in the strata machine case. And that was only a strange pattern in a freshly laid coal measure.

She knelt like a robot. Wet cloth had frozen in vacuum, but it had been good cloth, well woven. Inside...

Silver later analysed tissue samples, and announced that the passenger had been human enough to call Kin cousin. She would have been surprised at any other result, without being able to say quite why.

He had sailed over the edge of the world. The thought made her go cold. Everyone knew the world was flat, everyone had always known the world was flat: it was obvious. But there was always someone who would laugh at the old men and voyage into the terrifying seas to prove a different theory. And he had been horribly wrong.

Kin was glad about the argument over the suits.

There were five, two of which were shand size. One of the others seemed to be faulty, and the trio were all sufficiently space-cautious not to trust a suspect suit.

'We must take the dumbwaiter,' said Silver. 'Maybe you and Kin will be able to eat what is down there, but I will be poisoned.'

'Get the machine to dish out a sack of dried food concentrates then,' ordered Marco. 'We need that fourth suit.'

Silver grunted. 'Not as much as we need the machine. It can analyse food. It can supply clothing. If necessary we can live off it.'

'I'm inclined to agree,' said Kin.

'It'll take the lifting power of the entire suit!'

'Would you rather take a laser rifle that won't fire?' said Silver. They glared at each other.

'Let's take it for Silver's sake,' said Kin hurriedly. 'Hunger can be a big problem for shandi.'

Marco shrugged twice. 'Take it then,' he said, and snatched the tool kit from a wall locker. While they manhandled the big machine into the space suit and padded it around with thermoblankets, he took the control chair apart and ended up with a strip of metal trim sharpened to a killing edge and with a plastic handle at one end. Kin watched him weigh it thoughtfully in his hand. Ready to take on the makers of a 15,000 mile wide world with a home-made sword. Was that commendable human spirit or stupid kung bravado?

He turned and saw her watching him.

'This is not to put fear into them,' he said, 'but to take fear out of me. Are we ready?'

He programmed the autopilot to hover for ten minutes a few hundred miles from the waterfall. They took off on the suits' lift belts, Silver towing the spare suit on a length of monofilament Line.

Kin glanced over her shoulder as the ship sped away on a spear of flame and climbed towards a high orbit. Then she turned back to the great wall of water, and the little islands on the very edge. Way around the disc the orbiting sun was sinking.

There were no city lights, anywhere.

In a ragged line they flew towards the tumbling water and the thunder at the edge of the world.

No-one had seen, just before the ship soared away, the now perfectly workable fifth suit tumble from the airlock. It inflated instantly, like an empty balloon.

In the big bubble helmet the raven surveyed the emergency controls carefully. The suits were designed for anything -- they could fly across a star system and land on a world. There were tongue controls.

The raven reached out, pecked gently. The suit surged forward. The raven watched intently, then tried another control...

The dawn came wetly. Kin awoke soaked with dew. So much for thermoblankets.

It had been a long night. The island, at the very lip of the rimfall, was hardly big enough to support a dangerous carnivore, unless it was semi-aquatic. But Marco had pointed out that the disc might abound with semi-aquatic carnivores, and had insisted on mounting guard. Kung could do without sleep for weeks at a time.

Kin wondered whether to tell him about her personal stunner, now carefully hidden in a suit pocket. Feeling like a heel, she decided not to. She had a long struggle with her conscience but she won, she won.

Marco had evidently slept with the coming of the sun. He lay curled bonelessly under a dripping bush. Through the mists, Kin saw Silver sitting on the rock outcrop on the fall side of the island.

Kin scrambled up towards her. The shand grinned and made room for her on the sunwarmed stone.

The view was as though from the point of a wedge. The rocky peak rose out of what looked suspiciously like a small wood of ash and maple. Beyond, the sun glinted off silver-green sea. To either side the fall was a white line of foam seen dimly through mist clouds. Behind...

Silver grabbed her in time.

When Kin regained her balance she moved carefully down the slope to a seat that did not hang so obviously over a drop, and asked, 'Can you really sit there and not worry?'

'What's to worry? You did not fret in the ship when there was only a metre of hull between you and eternity,' said the shand.

'That's different. That's a real drop behind you.'

Silver raised her muzzle and sniffed the air.

'Ice,' she exclaimed. 'I smell ice. Kin, may I give you a lecture on sunshine?'

Kin automatically squinted at the sun. Her memory told her it was asteroid size. But it looked right for Earth. It felt right on her skin.

'Go ahead. Tell me something I don't know.'

'I have noticed pack ice going over the fall. Why should this be? We know the disc has polar islands. Yet there are green lands near by. Consider the distance between the equator and the polar islands. Why are not the north and south extremities frozen solid and the equatorial regions burning?'

Kin leaned her chin on her hands. The shand was talking about the inverse square law. If the sun was 5,000 miles from the equator at noon, it was 11,000 miles from what had to be called the poles.

Well, the path that sun followed couldn't be called an orbit. It moved like a guided spaceship. But that didn't explain the warm air around her. Consider: on most worlds the poles were but a few thousand miles further from the primary than was the equator, yet the temperature was wildly different. On the disc, if one thought of the temperate zone as being effectively Earth-distant from the sun, then the poles were out around Wotan and the equator broiled like Venus.

'Some sort of force lens?' she hazarded. 'I could believe anything. Certainly the sun's path must be changed regularly.'

'I do not understand.'

'To get seasons.'

'Ah... seasons. Yes, humans would require seasons.'

'Silver--'

The shand sniffed again. 'This is good air,' she said.

'Silver, stop dodging. You think we built this.'

'Ah -- the kung and I have discussed the topic, it is true.'

'The hell you have! We'd better get this clear. Humans may be mad, but we're not stupid. As a work of celestial mechanics this disc is about as efficient as a rubber spanner. It must drink power to keep going. For crying out loud, you don't want to hang your descendants' lives on the efficiency of dinky little orbiting suns and fake stars! Why didn't the disc builders orbit it around a real sun? They must have had the power. Instead they came out here to nowhere and built a world according to the ideas of some kind of medieval monk. That's not human.'

'The man on the ship was human.'

Kin had been thinking hard and long about him. Sometimes he came into her thoughts unbidden, in the long sleep hours. She hesitated before replying.

'I... don't know. Maybe the disc builders kidnapped a bunch of humans back in prehistory. Or perhaps there was parallel evolution somewhere...'

She felt angry at herself for her ignorance, and even angrier at the shand for diplomatically not picking at the big holes in her argument. If someone had offered Kin an instant return to the comforts of Earth at that moment, she would have spat. There were too many questions to be answered first.

Out loud: 'Jalo talked about matter transmission. I wonder how they get the water up from the bottom of the fall back into the ocean?'

Marco scrambled up the rocks towards them. A change had come over him since the landing on the disc. On the ship Kin remembered him as being moody, cynical -- now he seemed to vibrate with undirected enthusiasm.

'We must make plans,' he said.

'You have a plan,' Kin corrected.

'It is imperative we contact the masters of the disc,' said Marco, nodding and not appearing to notice her sarcasm.

'You have changed your mind, then.' Silver's voice floated down from the heights. She was standing up, sniffing the air again.

'I face facts, however distasteful. We cannot repair the ship. They will have the capacity to do so, or spacecraft we may hire. jalo got back. Or do you wish to spend your life here?'

'I do not think the disc people can help us,' said Silver. 'We detected no power sources, no energy transmission. We landed unaccosted. These are my secondary reasons for suspecting a lapse into barbarianism.'

'Secondary?' said Kin.

Silver grunted. 'There is a ship approaching,' she said. 'By its lines I do not suspect it is a sports plaything of an advanced race.'

They stared at her, then raced up the crag. Marco beat Kin to the top by a series of long leaps and peered out across the water.

'Where? Where?'

Kin saw a speck on the edge of sight.

'It is a rowing ship, twelve oars to a side,' said Silver, squinting slightly. 'There is a mast and a furled sail. It stinks. The crew stink. On their present course they will pass a mile to the north.'

'Over the falls?' said Kin.

'Surely the disc people have mastered the art of dealing with the waterfall,' said Marco. 'The current does not appear to be strong. There is a weir effect.'

Kin thought of the man in the fallen boat.

'They know they're heading for the falls but they don't know what the falls are,' she said. Silver nodded.

'They stink because they are afraid,' she said. 'They are changing course for this island. There is a man standing in the forward end, looking towards the falls.'

Marco became a blur of action.

'We must prepare,' he hissed. 'Follow me down.' Rocks crashed behind him as he bounded back towards the trees where they had spent the night.

Kin glanced from the shand, standing like a statue, to the boat. Even she could see the figures now. Water gleamed as it cascaded off whirling oars. She even thought she could hear shouts.

'I don't think they will make it,' she said quietly.

'That is so,' said Silver. 'See how the current swings them round.'

'It may be a test,' said Kin. 'I mean, the very day we're here and all.'

Silver sniffed. 'My nose says not.'

They looked at each other. Kin certainly was not going to argue with 350 million smell cells. She could see the men in the boat clearly. There was one, a small, bearded man, racing between the bent rowers and urging them on. At best the boat was standing still.

'Ahem,' suggested Silver.

Kin squinted up at the sun.

'You recall that Line we're using to tow the spare suit?' she said. 'How long is it?'

'Standard monofilament length, fifteen hundred metres,' said Silver, adding, 'It could tether a world.'

'Of course, we could be making a big mistake; said Kin, starting to run down the slope. Silver lumbered after her.

'The stomach says not,' she said. Kin smiled. Shandi had different ideas about the seat of the emotions.

She flew out in a suit lift belt shorn of the bubble suit, dragging one end of the cable by a wide loop.

'I consider this foolhardy in the extreme,' said Marco's voice in her earpiece.

'Maybe,' said Kin. 'Just remember it was me that went out to the crashed boat.'

There was a pause, with just the hissing of the wind in one ear and the carrier wave in the other. Finally Marco said, 'Point your belt camera at the boat.'

The rowers had seen her. Most of them were hanging transfixed on their oars.

The boat was perhaps twenty-five metres long, built like a pod. Silver had been too critical. Whoever had built it had a keen knowledge of hydrodynamics. There was one mast, amidships, with a furled sail. What space there was among the rowers appeared to be filled with jars and bundles.

Kin aimed at the red-haired man in the prow and dived, skimmed the wavetops and braked on a level with his astonished face, dropping the cable loop over the ornate prow and yelling to Silver. Spray drenched her as the cable sprang out of the water.

'Get them rowing,' said Kin, making desperate arm movements. 'To the island,' she insisted, pointing dramatically.

Redhair stared at her, at the island, at the taut cable and the curving wake of the ship as Silver took the strain. Then he vaulted down the length of the boat, screaming at the bewildered men. One stood up and started to argue. Redhair picked up a spar from the deck and hit him hard, then hauled him from his place and took his oar.

Kin barrelled skyward, looking down on a ship that was already leaving a wake like a powerboat. Then she levelled out and headed back to the island.

Its wooded shores passed far below her and she began searching in the misty blue sky beyond the falls.

She found what she was looking for. There was a tiny white speck, drifting outwards. She swooped, hearing the slight whump as the belt's field took up a new protective shape around her.

Silver's belt motor was whining. Suit belts could lift their owners against ten gravities, and Silver probably weighed 500 pounds. It added up to a lot of pulling power at the end of the cable.

As Kin waved and turned back for the disc, Silver's voice grunted in her ear. 'There have been several jerks on the cable.'

Kin looked down. There was a swathe of felled timber across the island. The tree they'd used as an anchor hadn't been tough enough after all. Now the cable was bent round the crag itself.

'Everything's fine,' she said. 'We've got the edge on the current. The cable cut through some trees, that's all.'

The boat was broadside on to the falls, but bouncing across the already whitening water.

'Fine, Silver,' she said. 'Fine. Marco wanted to meet the natives and he's going to get a basinful in a minute. Steady. Steady. Stop. Stop!'

The boat crunched onto the beach and bounded up into the trees, oars snapping. Several men fell overboard.

'We've beached it!' said Kin, dropping towards the wood.

'If they've got any imagination they're kissing that ground,' said Silver.

'Right. Let's hope Marco has the sense to stay out of sight.'

Her earpiece crackled. 'I heard that. I wish to disassociate myself from this entire undertaking...'

Kin swooped. She remembered being told that, ultimately, and whatever the science-fiction blats may say, no-one ever learned a language by eavesdropping on a culture's communications.

It always came down to face to face confrontations. To pointing. To drawing circles in the sand.

Circles in the sand?

Well -- it came down to pointing.

Much later she found Silver and Marco in their clearing higher up the slope. Silver was sitting beside the dumbwaiter, scooping handfuls of grey and red goo out of a bowl. Marco was lying full length, peering through the leaves at the men on the beach.

They had lit a fire, and were cooking something.

Silver nodded at her and did something to the dumbwaiter's controls.

'I already ate,' sighed Kin. 'Some sort of grain meal and dried fish. Didn't you see?'

'I was, in fact, programming for an emetic.'

Marco turned over. 'You ate food without even a rudimentary analysis! Do you wish to die so soon?'

'We need their trust,' said Kin. She tossed a sliver of fish to Silver. 'I'll take your damn potion, but hold that under the 'waiter's nose. You know 'waiter food always tastes like somebody already ate it. While we're here we might as well have full stomachs.'

She took a bowl of pink fluid from Silver's paw and retired to the other side of the clearing, where she was briefly and noisily sick. Silver reached up and dialled the 'waiter for coffee.

Presently the machine extruded a tongue of green plastic. She tore it out and read it.

'High on usable protein and vitamins,' she said. 'There is a hydrocarbon content from the drying process which may be carcinogenic in the long term, but it appears to pose no great risk.'

'Great,' said Kin, helping herself to coffee. 'Suddenly I feel I could never look another dried fish in the face. Now, are you ready for the big answers? As far as I can understand it, the small red-haired man calls himself Leiv Eiriksson.'

Silver flicked the green printout neatly into the machine's intake hopper.

'That is a remarkable coincidence or something else; she said calmly.

'You're not kidding.'

Marco turned back from his surveillance. 'What is coincidental?' he said. 'Did you observe their weaponry?'

'They have swords made out of, uh, bog-iron, handbeaten. Easily blunted,' said Kin thoughtfully. 'Their greatest weapon is their boat. Are you familiar with the term clinker-built?'

He nodded.

'Good, it means nothing to me. They're fast. These people rule a large part of the sea with those boats and those swords. Sometimes they are pirates, but they've got a sophisticated system of law. They're brave. A thousand-mile journey in a boat like that is commonplace.'

Marco stared at her. 'You learned all that?'

'No, all I understood was his name, and only because I've heard it before. It's all from memory.' She looked at Silver for confirmation. The shand nodded.

" 'In the year three hundred and twenty-two"; she intoned, " 'Eiriksson sailed the ocean blue"!' 'Very poetic,' said Marco levelly. 'Now, will you please explain?' ''If you were raised in Mexico you wouldn't have heard about this,' said Kin. 'They're snobbish about their history down there. Leiv Eiriksson...' she began to outline Earth's history... 'discovered Vinland, more than three hundred years after the Battle of Haelcor had ended the third and last Remen Empire.'

The big migration followed automatically. The Turks were again pushing west and north. Leiv's father, Eirik, was a shrewd salesman. His Greenland had turned out nowhere like as green as it had been in his imagination, but from Vinland Leiv had thoughtfully brought rich berries and wild grains. The Northmen went west again.

They leap-frogged colony after colony down the eastern seaboard, up into the base rugged lands around Tyker's Sea and down the Long Fjord into the Middle Seas. It was the landscape of their dreams. They called it Valhalla.

There were natives. But the newcomers were only half-hearted farmers -- underneath the agricultural veneer they thought bloody. Those tribes they couldn't out fight they out-thought. When they met the Objibwa Confederacy they made treaties. And they spread, and merged.

By all the theories it should have ended there. Neither the natives nor the invaders had the textbook kind of social dynamic that builds Remes. The Northmen should have become just another tribe, with blue eyes and fair hair.

The theories were wrong. Something latent in both races was sparked into fire. It was a big continent, and it was rich.

In short, 300 years after Leiv, a fleet arrived at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Most of the vessels were under sail although there were one or two, small, fast and inclined to blow up, that could move into the wind. The sails of the big ships bore the Great Eagle of Valhalla on a striped background alternating the colours of the sky, the snow and blood.

The Battle of Gibraltar was short. Europe had been through 200 years of stagnation.

There was no answer to cannon.

'I take the point,' said Marco. 'This Leiv is an important figure in Earth history. This is not, however, Earth.'

'It looks like Earth,' said Kin. 'An Earth that was only imagined, but Earth.'

'Are you seriously suggesting--'

'I'll tell you what I'm suggesting. I think you and Silver are right. I think humans built this place. I can't think why.'

Silver grunted. 'Surely there would be records--'

'Not if the Company suppressed them!'

It was the logical answer. The Company had built this artefact in secret. 'Jalo' had been a plant, sent to bring them here. Why would the Company build the disc? Kin thought she knew the answer, and she didn't like it. But she couldn't figure out why there had been such a performance to bring them here.

But at least it was all logical. What other answer was there? Mysterious aliens? They would have to be very mysterious. If it was the Company, Kin hated it.

'We are in danger from every quarter,' said Marco enthusiastically. 'We must wear our lift belts at all times. I suggest we move towards a centre of civilization. We might find some clues as to the disc's origins.'

'Then there's our transport,' said Kin, pointing. 'I don't know how long suit power lasts against gravity, but if there's any sea to cross I'd like to do it in a boat.'

'They may yet turn out to be hostile,' said Marco, watching the men.

'When they see you and Silver?'

In fact introducing the aliens presented a problem. Kin solved it by walking down to the encampment naked. After her earlier appearance as the goddess of mercy, she was confident that the men would sooner rape an alligator.

Leiv rushed towards her and sank to his knees. She looked down at him with an expression she hoped was benevolent.

He was smaller than most of the crew. She wondered how he exerted his authority -- until she saw the shrewd glint in his eye, even now, that said here was the master of the unsporting kick and the kidney punch. She felt glad of the stunner, now concealed in her palm.

'You're about to have an amazing opportunity to make new friends,' she said sweetly. 'This is one saga they'll never believe. OK, Silver, come on out.'

The shand appeared at the decent distance, pushing through the bushes further along the beach. As she plodded nearer several men hurried off in the other direction. When they saw her tusks several others followed them.

Grinning fit to burst, Kin walked across to the shand and put a hand in one huge, leather-palmed paw.

'Stop smiling,' she said through clenched teeth.

'I fought it would put them at eafe?'

'On you it looks hungry.'

Leiv was still standing rooted to the sand as Kin led the shand up to him. She took the man's hand in hers.

'Kneel and grovel,' she murmured.

Silver folded up obediently. Leiv looked at her and then at Kin. Finally he reached out and prodded Silver's arm.

'Good boy,' said Kin, beaming. He jumped back.

To introduce phase two Kin began to whistle the old robot-Morris tune Mrs Widgery's Lodger.

Silver danced mournfully on the sand, gazing heavenward with an expression of acute distaste. But she held the rhythm. She also moved awkwardly. Kin, who had seen her move like oiled water, admired that last touch. Anything sufficiently ungainly was funny. Funny wasn't dangerous.

The men began to trickle back. Silver danced on, kicking up little sandstorms and shuffling from one foot to the other. Kin stopped whistling.

'You've passed,' she said. 'They're practically about to feed you lumps of sugar. Have a rest. Try to avoid yawning. Marco?'

Marco hissed. He stepped out of the bushes.

In his grey ship-suit and a cloak hastily made out of a thermoblanket he looked passably human, if emaciated. His eyes were too big and his nose was too long. His face was grey as the suit.

But he had masses of flame-red hair. It wasn't really hair but it was red. Perhaps it made up for the eyes.

The men watched him warily, but no-one fled this time.

One of them stepped up to Leiv and growled something, drawing a short sword. That led to a moment of confusion that ended with Marco crouched to spring and the man lying on the sand with his sword ten feet away. Then Leiv stopped twisting his arm and took a running kick. The man screamed.

'Now we launch the boat,' said Kin firmly.

Silver padded towards the beached vessel and braced herself with a shoulder against the prow. Nothing happened for a moment, and then the boat slid down the beach, only stopping when the stern was moving urgently in the current.

Kin took Leiv's arm and led him firmly towards it. He was quick on the uptake. Within five minutes the men were on board, the dumbwaiter was humming to itself by the mast, and all eyes were on Silver, hovering out to sea on the end of the cable.

There was an area of dead water where the sea parted round the island before dropping into nothingness. By the time the current tugged feebly at it the boat was flying over the waves.

Two incidents enlivened the journey. Marco was handed a horn of some sweet substance by a nervous Leiv.

He sniffed it suspiciously and poured some into the 'waiter. 'It appears to be some kind of glucose drink,' he said. 'What do you think, Kin?'

'Did you try it on the 'waiter?'

'It gave a green light. Could it be some form of strengthening potion?'

He drank half the horn, and smacked what passed for lips. Then he laughed vaguely and drank the other half.

Later he programmed the dumbwaiter to duplicate it, and when the men had got over their amazement at the disposable plastic cups they were passed back as fast as they could be filled. Spasmodic singing broke out, and there was an occasional clattering of oars as rowers missed their stroke. Finally Kin, after Leiv's unspoken plea, switched off the machine.

Later Silver tried her hand at rowing. Sitting amidships and grasping two oars, she followed the stroke easily. One by one the rowers stopped to watch her. The boat didn't slow until her oars snapped.

Marco found Kin sitting in the skin shelter behind the mast, drinking martinis and thinking.

'I wish a private word,' he said.

'Fine,' said Kin, patting the rug beside her. 'How is the head now?'

'Better. That drink obviously contains dangerous impurities. I don't think I will try any more for an hour or so.' He fished in his belt pouch and pulled out a roll of plastic. It opened out into an aerial photograph of the disc.

'I got the computer to prepare it before we left the ship,' he said.

'Why didn't you show it to me before?'

'I did not wish to encourage any foolhardy explorations. However, now that we are penetrating the disc... Look at the photo. What is missing?'

Kin took the sheet. 'A lot,' she said. 'You know that. No Valhalla. That's why Leiv found the waterfall. No Brasil. The Peaceful Ocean is tiny, look, round here on the back of Asia--'

'Any additions?'

Kin peered at the map. 'I don't know,' she said. Marco used a double-jointed thumb to point to the centre of the disc.

'The cloud cover makes it a bit indistinct, but that shouldn't be there. That island in the Arabian Sea. You notice it's perfectly circular? It is the geographical hub of the disc.'

'What about it?'

'Don't you see? It is an anomaly. We'll find the disc civilization there if anywhere. These people are barbarians. Intelligent, yes -- but space-going?'

He looked at her.

'Are you afraid this may turn out to be a Company artefact?' he said carefully. She nodded.

'There is an old kung story,' said Marco softly, his voice like the currents in a quicksand, 'concerning a lord who had a high tower built. Then he called various wise kung together and said, "I will give my finest oyster farm and the famed kelp beds of Tchp-pch to the kung who can determine the height of that tower using nothing but a barometer. Those who fail will be exiled to the dry lands because that's the way it goes for the not-wise-enough."

So the wise kung tried and, although they could find the height to within a few chetds, this was not considered accurate enough and they were sent to the dry lands.'

'I like folk tales,' said Kin, 'but do you think this is--'

'Then one day,' said Marco loudly, 'the wisest kung, who hadn't hazarded an answer yet, took his barometer to the home of the lord's master builder, and said, "I will give you this beautiful barometer if you will be so good as to tell me the height of the tower."

'

A shadow loomed over them as Silver thrust her fangs over the deck awning.

'Forry to interrupt,' she said, 'but you might be interefted in thif...'

They looked past her. Most of the men had stopped rowing and were staring up into the sky.

Kin stared with them. There were three specks moving across the haze like high-altitude jets.

'Vapour trails,' said Marco. 'Obviously They have come looking for us. We won't have to go and offer them our barometer.'

'What can you see, Silver?' Kin asked. The shand twanged a fang.

'They appear to be flying lizards,' she said. 'The method of propulsion seems mysterious, but we may learn more, since they are losing height fast.'

Leiv tugged at Kin's arm. Around them men were methodically tossing oars and bundles into the water and diving over the side after them. The little man seemed to be desperately searching for words. Finally he remembered one.

'Fire?' he suggested, and tumbled her backward into the sea. The coldness numbed her, but she knew enough to twist and kick out convulsively. Treading water and gripping a handy oar she watched the sky. The specks had made a wide turn and the distant double thump of a sonic boom rolled across the sea. Marco and Silver had stayed on the boat, staring.

Soon three lizard-shapes with theatrically bat-like wings glided over the wave tops to circle the boat in perfect formation, treading the air with two sets of cruel talons. Wisps of smoke trailed from their dilated nostrils.

Then they drifted towards the north, becoming specks again as they made another turn. They also gained height. If they were aircraft, thought Kin, I'd say this was going to be a bombing run.

As the first dragon plummeted towards the ship, Leiv put one hand firmly on her head and pushed her underwater.

She bobbed up furious, her ears ringing. The water was steaming. Smoke was rising from the boat.

There was a sudden mound in the water beside her and Marco surfaced, gasping and cursing. A bigger splash further along marked Silver's return from the depths.

'What happened? What happened?' gasped Kin.

'It hovered and breathed fire,' said Silver.

'And no bloody lizard does that to me!' screamed Marco. He struck out for the charred hull, rocking it violently in his attempt to get aboard.

Another beast drifted down. There was a quiet splash as Silver somersaulted and kicked away for the green depths.

There was also a groan from the water-treading men as they saw Marco uncloaked for the first time, grasping an oar with all four hands. As the dragon homed in it was bright enough to tread air just out of reach of Marco's impromptu weapon, wingbeats making spray patterns on the sea while it gathered its breath.

Something white shot through the water like a cork and gripped a pair of hovering claws. For a second Silver and the startled creature hung there. Then the wings met with a clap as they shot down into the sea, and Kin heard a distinct hiss.

The third dragon must have been the brightest, thought Kin. The brightest always fought last. It was too late for it to stop its flight. Instead it passed over the boat with its wings spread like parachutes, and, as it thundered by above his head, Marco screamed and leapt.

He was wearing his lift belt. The dragon tried to twist in mid air, tumbled, regained its balance and tried to flee for height and safety. It didn't work.

On the other side of the boat the water foamed and a wingtip beat the surface listlessly. Then the hull canted sharply. Silver was climbing aboard.

The men around Kin shouted and struck out, laughing as they heaved themselves up the side.

High above the dogfight the surviving dragon screamed and disappeared speedily into the east, giving Kin a short and tantalizing glimpse of its high-speed propulsion. Those horror-story wings were too clumsy for anything except ponderous flight. To travel fast, the dragon folded them along its side, bent its head back under its body, and exhaled. By the time it was too far away for Kin to see details its breath was yellow-hot.

She followed something else down the sky as it tumbled lazily. It was a dragon head. Shortly afterwards, although to the silent crowd on the boat it seemed much longer, the body followed, wings still spread wide, spiralling slowly with Marco climbing to its back and still hacking with the knife. When he hit the water a cheer went up.

It turned to anger when they saw that Silver was dragging her dragon aboard, still alive. When the men moved hurriedly aside they gave Kin a good view.

The beast flopped mournfully on the deck, water streaming from its wings. It raised its dripping head towards her and sneezed, violently.

Two jets of warm water hit Kin on the legs.

Marco was helped aboard by all four arms. His comb blazed blood-red and, as he stood up amid the admiring crowd, he raised his black-stained knife over his head and yodelled:

'Refteg! Ymal refteg PELC!'

Kin looked across at Silver, who was unscrewing her fangs. The shand grimaced.

'Tell me again about his being officially human,' she said. 'I keep forgetting.'

'What,' asked Kin, 'do you intend to do with that?' One of the men beside her had drawn his sword and was offering it proudly to the shand, hilt first. Silver ignored him.

'It's dead,' she said, 'but we have the body. I would very much like to know how an organic creature can breathe fire.' She grabbed the corpse by neck and tail and dragged it aft.

Marco swaggered over to Kin.

'I triumph!' he shouted.

'Yes, Marco.'

'They declare war on us! They sent dragons! But They reckoned without me!'

'Yes, Marco.'

'Together They conspire against me yet I overcome!' he screamed, eyes glazed. Then his expression faded.

'You just think I'm a paranoid kung, don't you,' he said sulkily.

'Since you mention it...'

'I'm proud to be human. Make no mistake! As for the other,' he said, turning, 'just because you're paranoid doesn't mean They aren't out to get you.'

She watched him stride back to the men, who clustered around him. Frightened of everything except immediate physical danger. And as human as a tiger.

Silver was gazing ruefully at the dumbwaiter. It was not damaged, but the plastic panelling would never be the same again.

When the men were at the oars again Kin took out her suit toolkit and arranged the dragon corpse as best she could on the tiny foredeck. The kit was small but comprehensive. A marooned spaceman could use it to survive on an alien world for years. Some had. Kin selected a medical scalpel.

Later she opened the kit fully and found a multichisel.

A minute later she reached in and assembled the vibro-saw. The screeee as it skidded and juddered over scales set her teeth on edge, but she didn't switch off until the blade broke.

She went to find Marco and Silver, who were taking a turn at the oars, and hunkered down between them.

'Those dragons are jet-powered,' she said. 'I could open the neck -- it's lined with some sort of light spongy substance. It cut like jelly. When I tried the welding laser on it it didn't even warm up.'

'How about the body?' said Marco.

'Those scales are tough. You will note I am holding the remains of a vibro-saw. They say a saw like this will cut hull metal.'

Silver grinned. 'One finds oneself thinking in terms of creatures that drink kerosene.'

The kung snorted. 'No doubt you neglected to run a geiger over it?' he said.

'No. I tested it all right. Nothing.'

'I am surprised.'

'Want to hear what happened when I cut the neck off and dropped the geiger head into the body cavity?'

'I am agog.'

'It's as hot as hell in there. That creature is a living atomic furnace. And you can't tell me it evolved, not on an Earth-type world. It's a construct! That's where you'll find the disc builders -- wherever that thing came from.'

'The centre of the disc,' said Silver thoughtfully. Kin gawped, and the shand nodded casually as she leaned on the oar.

'I have some facility with languages, as you know,' she said. 'I have been talking to some of these men. We've got to the say-and-point stage. They see these things sometimes. In these parts they come from the east, but when the boats sail down south the dragons pass over from the north-east. Therefore I deduce they come from the central regions. Why are you staring?'

'Marco already wants to go to the centre,' said Kin. 'He wants to offer them a barometer -- I think.'

The next dawn saw them sailing through an increasingly choppy sea into a fjord between white mountains. There was a colony of turf-roofed stone huts, and some sparse meadows. People hurried down to the shingle, then shied back noisily as, with the crew in their seats smirking like demons, Silver dropped over the side and ran the boat up the beach by herself.

There was a glassy-eyed dragon head roped to the prow.

Leiv led them into a long high-roofed hut that made Kin wonder whatever happened to Grendel. But of course, Grendel was slinking alongside her, swinging his too-many arms and eyeing the crowds for possible assassins.

When her eyes grew accustomed to the gloom inside she saw an open fire in a pit and, beside it, a man sitting on a rough stool. One leg was stretched out in front of him. He was red-headed, and bearded.

He rose unsteadily from his stool and embraced Leiv, both men holding themselves as if there was just the faintest possibility that the other might attempt a stabbing. Then the younger man spoke.

It was a lengthy saga. After a while the older man was taken outside and shown what remained of the dead dragon. He was introduced to Silver, and hobbled several times round Marco, who looked at him sidelong.

He grinned at Kin in a way that expressed horizontal desires.

Encouraged by this display, other inhabitants turned up. Kin's attention was drawn to two men in black robes. One of them was looking at Marco fearfully and reciting some sort of incantation.

Silver's head swivelled round.

She spoke a sentence in the same language.

From then on Silver did the translating.

'The tongue is Latin, the Remen tongue. Except that these men refer to Rome not Reme.'

Kin considered it. 'Romulus and Remus,' she said at last. 'The founders of Reme. Ever hear the legend?'

'I think I recall it in a folklore anthology.'

'So on the disc Remus won the naming privilege. What else did they say?'

'Oh, quite a lot of gibberish about demons, the usual primitive world stuff. Ever heard the word troll? They keep looking at Marco and saying it. There's also a lot about gods, I think.'

Kin looked around. These people were either primitive or superb actors. Perhaps the gods were the disc builders.

'Ask about them,' she said. A long conversation followed. Sometimes the older of the men would point to the sky. Leiv and his father watched carefully.

Finally Silver nodded and turned to Kin. 'Let's see if I get this right, now,' she said. 'There's a whole lot of gods about, but the top god is called Christos. The high priest lives at Rome. There was also another kind of god who created this world in six days. Anticipating your questions,' she said, raising a paw to interrupt Kin, 'I asked for more details. This creator-god has a lot of minor assistant gods with wings, and there's another lesser being called Saitan who sounds like an agitator. There's a lot of other usual religious stuff too.'

'Six days is too fast,' said Kin. 'It'd take the Company six years even with prefabricated parts. Frankly, I'd put it all down as a myth.'

'It's unusually straightforward,' Silver pointed out. 'In most myths the world is usually made from the supreme being's step-father's pancreas or the blood of the sacred beetle or something.'

Kin frowned. Earth had plenty of religions, and had exported as many as she had imported. For every sect of humans engaged in complicated Ehftnic time rituals there was a group of saffron-dyed shandi drumming and chanting through the frozen Shandi streets. Generally Company people, being in the creation business, didn't bother with religion or went along with something basic and non-controversial, like Wicca or Buddhism.

Kin had drunk of many cups in her time, just out of curiosity. Stand up, kneel down, climb a mountain, chant, go naked, whirl, dance, fast, abhor, gorge, pray -- sometimes it was enjoyable, but it was always introverted, unreal.

Leiv's father spoke at length to one of the priests, who spoke to Silver. Silver laughed and replied.

'He wants to buy the Valhalla oven,' she translated.

'The what?'

'The dumbwaiter. He says that he knows that in Valhalla all men eat and drink endlessly and now he knows it is because they have these ovens that grind out food and drink.'

'Tell him it's not for sale.' She looked directly at Eirick Raude. Red Eric. Back on Earth there was a worn mound in the heart of Valhalla where the water from the five inland seas spilled over into the Long Fjord. Eirick's Beard, they called the water. Red Eric had been buried in the mound. It was a big tourist attraction.

Silver took a deep breath.

'He also wants us to adjust the sun,' she said. The man, seeing Kin's face, began to speak slowly in Latin.

'There has been spring in winter, he says. The sun has sometimes dimmed. On several nights the stars have flickered. And, uh, something happened to one of the planets.'

Kin stared. Then she walked into the hall where Silver had deposited the dumbwaiter and dialled for a big cup of the sweet ale. She brought it back and put it in Eirick's scarred hands.

'Tell him that was our fault. Tell him that if only we can learn the secrets of the world, we will replace the planet and do what we can about the sun. Did he say the stars flickered?'

'Apparently this is expected. The aforesaid Christos was born almost a thousand years ago, and it is widely believed that he will come again around about now. Take a look at the sea, will you?'

Kin turned. The waves were lashing at the beach, even here. She could hear the thunder of the storm out in the open sea. But the sky was blue, windless...

'I said the disc wasn't a reliable artefact,' she said. 'It sounds like its governing systems are going wrong. Eirick doesn't seem all that worried, Silver.'

'He says he's seen and heard of a lot of gods. He can take gods or leave them alone. If we can repair the weather, he will give us much timber.'

'Timber?'

Silver turned to look at the village. 'It seems to be a scarce commodity here,' she said. 'Notice the lack of trees.'

This should be the Climatic Optimum, Kin told herself. On Earth it had been. The Northern expansion had taken place during a long warm spell, when even a strip of coastal Greenland was reasonably habitable...

Here, on some nights, the stars flickered out.

Marco and Kin spent the night in the hall, although Silver opted for the chill air of the boat. No-one had attempted to bundle Kin off with the women. Goddesses were different.

She lay looking at the glow of the fire. The boom of the surf was still loud. Tides, she thought. That half-pint moon couldn't cause them. There must be some sort of regulated rise and fall of the sea, and it's going haywire.

She longed for a sleepset. They left your mouth tasting like an ape's urinal, but they were quick.

You didn't suffer from insomnia with a zizz, or get bothered by rocks sticking in your back. A short, deep, dreamless sleep.

Finally she gave up, got up and walked through the darkened hall. The man at the door moved aside hastily to let her pass.

The sky was ablaze with fake stars. Kin shivered, but couldn't help but admire the ersatz universe that blazed over the dark, sea-noisy fjord.

This wasn't Earth. It was a disc about fifteen thousand miles across, massing around 5.67 x 10^21 tons. That meant it either had generated gravity or neutronium veneer as a bedrock. It spun very slowly, like a tossed coin in treacle, dragging with it a fake sun and a fake moon and a family of fake planets. She knew all that, but sitting here it was hard to believe.

She shivered as the frost clawed at her. Frozen starlight.

A clockwork world. A world without astronomy. Maybe there was astronomy, but it was a horrible joke on the astronomers. A world where the venturesome dropped into the abyss. Dragons. Trolls. A myth-mash.

She found a planet, near what for want of a better word had to be called the disc's horizon. No, it was moving too fast for a planet.

And then it was suddenly a pennant of fire in the sky.

It hit the disc somewhere to the east. Kin told herself she could feel the impact.

She ran towards the line of beached ships to where a broad shape glittered with frost.

'Silver?'

Foolish, foolish. How many shandi on the disc?

'Ah, Kin. No doubt you saw it.'

'What was it?'

'Most of the main part of our ship. It was only a matter of time. Marco should have exploded it rather than just leave it, and we can only hope it landed in the sea or a desert. I was hoping it would impact on the underside of the disc.'

'It's certainly a good way of saying "We're here" to any disc lords. First we take out a planet, then we drop our ship on them,' said Kin.

'I noticed something before I saw the ship,' said Silver. 'See that planet, right down there? What would that be ?'

'If this was Earth, that'd be Venus in that posi -- no, it--'

'Quite so. It is moonless.'

Kin felt a tingle of excitement. The disc builders had forgotten something. How could they? Venus and Adonis, a moon almost as big as Lunar, had always dominated Earth's dawn or sunset sky. Why leave out the moon in the disc universe? A mystery.

'One could write a filmy on astronomy and sociology,' said Silver. 'For example, I have always felt that humans were the first into space because of the continual reminder that in our universe everything orbits something.

'You always had that other double world system in your sky to hint that not everything revolves around the Earth. Whereas we had the Twin, and the kung couldn't see the sky at all. Had your sister world not had her moon, I doubt if your history would have been quite so uncomplicated.'

Together they sat and watched the moonless world sink in solitude in the faintly glowing sky. Kin snuggled against Silver's fur, and wondered whether the dumbwaiter would be safe. Probably. The men had a healthy respect for Marco.

Silver was thinking about the same thing, because she said, 'Kin? Are you awake?'

'Unk.'

'If the dumbwaiter misfunctions, you must promise me you will stun me and allow Marco to put me to death.'

Kin sat up, grimacing in the darkness. 'Certainly not. Anyway, how could we stun you ?'

'You have a palm stunner on you at this moment. I have noticed it on several occasions,' said Silver. 'I was taught to observe. You will kill me, for fear of what I will become. My fear.'

Kin grunted non-committally and lay back, thinking about shandi.

They couldn't take kung or human proteins. Before the dumbwaiters were common, it meant that shandi could only go offworld with a personal deep-freeze.

There had been a time when a human ship had been ferrying four shandi ambassadors to Greater Earth and the freezer malfunctioned. The ambassadors were civilized. Usually, when a shand was deprived of food, it turned into a ravening animal within two days. A million years of evolution was drowned in a wash of saliva.

With the ambassadors, it took fifty-six hours.

None survived. The last one took her life after awakening from a bloated sleep and seeing what lay around her in the cabin. The average shand wouldn't have done so, but the average shand was not an ambassador trained to think in cosmospolitan ways.

The plain truth was that the shandi liked eating shand. Can you fit ritual cannibalism into a civilization? They did.

There was the Game. The rules were ancient, venerated and simple. Two shandi would enter, from opposite sides, a stretch of tundra or forest set aside for the purpose. There were special rules about weapons. The winner ate well.

Curiosity overwhelmed Kin.

'Did you ever play the Game, Silver?' she asked softly.

'Why, yes. Three times, when the urge was strong in my mouth,' said the shand. 'Twice at home, and once illegally elsewhere. My opponent in the latter case was the Regius Professor of Linguistics at the University of Gelt. Much of her stocks my freezer at home even now. I grieve that her death may largely have been in vain.'

'But you've got dumbwaiters now. There's no need for the Game.'

Silver shrugged. 'Now it is a tradition,' she said. 'What we did out of need we do for... sport, I think it would be called, although there are elements of bravado, identification with our ancient past, the affirming of our shandness. You think this is barbaric.'

It was a statement, not a question. Kin shook her head anyway.

'Some humans have taken part in the Game,' said Silver. 'They pay highly for the chance to prove their... what? Machismo? If they win, all they get is the head of their victim to hang on the wall. That is barbaric.'

'Uh, what happens if the shand wins?'

'She gets two convicted criminals.'

Kin thought: this is what shandi do on their home world, and none of your business. You can't apply humans' values to aliens. But you keep trying.

The train of thought was derailed by a scream from the big hall. A man burst out into the starlight and tumbled over on the grass, clutching at his side.

Kin landed running, snatching the stunner from her belt. She heard the heavy crash on the shingle as Silver landed behind her.

The hall was full of dark fighting shapes. Kin jerked aside as a leather-clad man ran out, followed by a tall man hefting an axe. She pointed the stunner and fired.

The effect was not immediate. The two kept on running. Then their legs collapsed under them in slow motion, and they hit the ground asleep.

Kin entered the hall with the stunner turned to minimum power maximum beam, swinging it like a scythe. A fighter staggered towards her with a raised sword and began to dream on his feet, sending her sprawling as fifteen stone of Norseman cannoned into her. For a moment she suffocated in a reek of stale sweat and badly tanned hides, then managed to roll away. The stunner was gone, dropped in the collision. She was in time to see a teetering giant pick it up curiously and look down the barrel. In the middle of the tumult, a look of perfect peace passed over his face. He fell like a tree.

Another man rushed at Kin. She kicked out and upwards, and was rewarded with seeing his eyes cross before he rolled over, screaming and clutching his groin.

There wasn't a fight going on, it was a brawl. Most of the men were simply hacking blindly at everything.

She managed to get to her feet, almost slipping on the curiously muddy floor. Through a gap in the figures she saw Marco dodging like a demon in the torchlight, a sword in all four hands. The dumbwaiter hummed behind him, a sticky, sweet smell in the air.

There was a bellow from the door and Eirick hobbled in, his face contorted with rage. He was flailing about with his crutch.

Then the roof fell in. One of the fighters backed into Kin, and she felled him with a backhanded chop as dawn-pale light flooded the hall. Part of the nearest wall bowed inward and crumbled away. There was a brief glimpse of a wide, white-haired foot.

Silver appeared at the roof hole, black against the gold sky. There was silence, broken only by the whimpers of the wounded and a background trickle.

Silver roared again. There was a brief moment of pandemonium as those who could rushed for the doorway.

Kin looked down. She was standing ankle deep in a sticky, frothy puddle.

She looked at the dumbwaiter. A yellow-brown waterfall was spilling out of the food hatch, filling a deepening puddle. Marco looked at her, trying to focus. Then he sighed contentedly, and fell backwards.

Resignedly, knowing what to expect, Kin held her cupped hand under the stream and tasted it. It was sweet and potent, a super-beer. Here and there in the pool, darker stains were spreading from the wounded and dying.

Kin stopped the flow and set the machine to producing an antidote. When it delivered a bowl of foul blue liquid she dragged the kung up by his comb, tipped the bowl into his mouth in one motion, and let him fall back into the mire.

After Silver dropped through the ruined roof she and Kin toured the hall. The 'waiter was instructed to produce the various seal-and-heal ointments in its repertoire, and after some thought Kin dialled for limb-replacement stimulants. Usually such sophisticated medicine was frowned on for its cultural shock effects, but hell, the disc was one big cultural shock. With some of the wounded she plastered the stuff on like mud, and hoped.

After a while Marco groaned and sat up. He looked at them hazily. Kin ignored him.

'Leiv's men told them about the 'waiter producing alcohol,' he said thickly. 'Then when I gave them a demonstration they began acting irrationally and demanding more. And then they started fighting.'

'A fucking Valhalla machine,' muttered Kin, and turned back to her work.

There was a hoarse chuckle from the darkness under the roof, and a black feather floated down.

They left at noon. The colony gathered to see them off.

Many of the men had new white scars. Some displayed tiny limbs already growing from healed stumps. But several had died in the hall; the Valhalla machine had been too efficient.

Eirick made a long speech in Latin and produced rare furs and two white hunting birds as farewell gifts.

'Say we can't accept,' said Kin. "Say anything. We can't afford to carry the weight. Say we can't go and repair the sun if we carry too much weight. It's almost true.'

Eirick listened to Silver's careful reply, and nodded graciously.

'I'd like to give him something, though,' said Kin.

'Why?' snapped Marco.

'Because she's still afraid the Company might be behind the disc, and she wants to apologize. Isn't that right?' said Silver. Kin ignored her.

'Ask him for some timber,' she said. 'Scraps. And grass or hay. Old bones. Anything that was living. What I have in mind'lI mean the 'waiter will want feeding.'

They set the dumbwaiter up as a timber mill. After the first metre of fragrant, smooth plank had been extruded from the hatch the colony worked like robots. Great drifts of seaweed, washed up by the pounding sea, helped swell the heap by the input hopper. Today the sea moved like liquid mountains.

Kin took the others aside while the colony was carting planks.

'We fly,' she said. 'Over land as much as possible, but we fly. If the belt power looks like running out before we get to the hub, then we'll charge up one belt from the others and Marco or I will go on alone. That means Silver can stay with the 'waiter.'

'I am inclined to agree,' said Silver. There can be nothing to lose. Marco should be the one to go on, of course. I am big enough to scare predators, and you can survive by engaging any male humans in sexual congress if necessary. Marco is best equipped to reach the hub.'

It was an elephantine attempt at diplomacy, but Marco turned his head away.

'I am equipped for nothing,' he said distantly. 'I allowed myself to be provoked by humans. I am shamed.'

'The blame is not wholly yours,' said Silver generously.

'But Silver, I outnumbered them one to thirty!'

Spray flew like sleet over the village. A respectable pile of planks had grown round the dumbwaiter. Kin switched it off and adjusted its lift belt.

The two Christos priests were standing apart from the crowd, chanting in Latin.

'What're they saying?' said Kin.

Silver listened for a moment. 'It's an invitation to Christos to allow us to repair his planets and sun or alternately to strike us down if, as they suspect, we're servants of Saitan.'

'Nice of them. Say goodbye for us, will you?'

They rose quickly. The huts and then the beach were lost against the background of snow and foam-topped sea.

The sea had gone mad. Waves piled on top of one another and burst and roared, sending spray almost as high as the flyers.

On the disc east couldn't be a direction, it had to be a point of the circumference. There were four directions on the disc: circle right, circle left, in, out. They headed in.

They circled the thing in the water carefully: was it alive, Kin wondered, or was it just that the waves made it appear so? Once, a flipper broke water and slapped down again.

She decided to go lower. She waited for warnings from Marco, but he had been subdued all day. Silver said nothing, but took advantage of the mid-air stop to reel in the 'waiter on its towline.

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 200 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 OK,' 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 hub-wards, 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 air force?'

'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 rams-horn 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 arrowheads, 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 say 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 on to 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.

A group of three men were standing around the dumbwaiter. Two of them wore heavy grey robes and the third, a youth, wore clothes that were bright and obviously impractical. All three pulled back guiltily as she approached.

Then the youth said something and reached inside his shirt, pulling out an amulet which he held in front of him as he advanced stiff-legged towards her. He held it like a weapon. Kin noticed that his eyes were glazed. Sweat glistened on his forehead.

He stopped in front of her, staring straight ahead. She sensed that everyone was expecting something of her.

She reached out gingerly and took the amulet.

There was a gasp from the robed pair. Behind her Brickface doubled up with sudden laughter. The young man stared, lips moving on soundless words. Kin peered politely at the thing in her hands. It was a wooden cross, with what she at first thought was the figure of an acrobat; she handed it back as graciously as she could manage.

The young man grabbed it, looked frantically around the clearing, and scurried away up the slope to the track.

As the robed men started to follow him Kin could see what they had been doing. They had run a sword into the dumbwaiter's output slot.

'They're breaking up the 'waiter!' she hissed.

'OK, Kin. When I say duck, duck. DUCK!'

Something whirred past her head and struck one of the men between the eyes. He gave a sigh and toppled backwards.

'Cape illud, fracturor,' said a satisfied voice in her ear. Brickface gripped her wrist firmly and stalked towards the slope, the archers following him as closely. They glanced fearfully at the forest.