Strata (11 page)

‘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 on to 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 some-body 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, hand-beaten. 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 Remem 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.