Strata

by Terry Pratchett

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

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

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

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

  ‘Where are we now?’

  ‘Half a million kilometres from Kung.’

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

  ‘What plans had you, then?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘You’re mad – the pair of you!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Marco?’

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

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

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

  Marco turned the shapeless mass over, then shrugged.

  ‘Well? Are these birds intelligent?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘But you’d kill it,’ said Kin.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

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

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

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

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

  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 archeological, paleontological 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, th
e 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 paleotechs. Paleotechs were said to have created the Type 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? Paleotechs weren’t easily understandable. (Once, Kin Arad answered to her own satisfaction at least the question of why the paleotechs had created stars. ‘Because they could,’ she said.)

  In one interstellar gulf a ship dropping out of Elsewhere for repairs had discovered a paleotech – dead, at least by human terms (though Kin Arad has pointed out that paleotechs 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 paleotechs had inscribed their history, which included the legend of the prepaleotech 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 the universe to suit 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 twenty thousand 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 sixteen thousand 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 thirty-five thousand 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 – five hundred 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?’
r />   ‘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.’