Strata

by Terry Pratchett

  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.

  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, three hundred 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 two hundred 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. Okay, 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 grasp
ing 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 off 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.’