Strata (14 page)

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 astonomers. 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 a 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 room, 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’ll 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.