Strata Read online

  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 shand 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. ‘Okay, 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 fifteen-thousand mile wide world with a homemade 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 sun-warmed 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 nearby. 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 eight thousand miles from the equator at noon, it was eleven thousand 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 Ear
th 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.’