Strata

transmitters while work on Kingdom was being completed.
    It had ended: ‘A flat world. You, Kin Arad, are a very curious person. Cheat me and you will forever wonder what sights you missed.’
    Kin’s hand dropped – and didn’t touch the message switch.
    You
couldn’t
build a flat world.
    But then, you couldn’t come back if you were a Terminus pilot.
    And you couldn’t duplicate Company scrip.
    ‘Ship?’
    ‘Lady?’
    ‘Continue to Kung. Oh, and open a channel to the screen in my study.’
    ‘Done, lady.’
    It was wrong. It was probably foolish. It would certainly get her fired.
    Be there or forever wonder.
    She filled the hours by relearning Primary Ekung and reading the supplements to the planetary digest. It appeared the kung now had a Line, but no one had got around to banning ship landings on the world itself. Nothing much was banned on Kung, even murder. She checked and found it was now the only world in local space that actually allowed ships to land under power. Was that relevant?
    Kung was hungry for alien currency. There wasn’t a great deal Kung could produce that humans could use, except a whole variety of pneumonia-type illnesses, but there was a lot Kung wanted. It was trying to start a tourist industry …
    Kin had been there. She recalled rain. The kung had forty-two different words for rain, but that just wasn’t enough words to encompass the great symphony of water that fell for fifty-fiveminutes in every hour. There were no mountains. The light gravity had allowed plenty to rise, but it allowed lots of ocean spray into the wind to wash them down. The nubs that remained had a dispirited, back-turned look.
    Of course, sometimes they became islands. Kin remembered about the tides.
    An over-large moon and a cool, close sun meant nightmare tides. Vegetation was either fungal, able to spring up and fruit hurriedly at low tides, or it was resigned to a semi-submerged life.
    And tourists came. Even though they had to wear float-jackets most of the time in case of flash tides, the tourists came. They were fishermen and mist enthusiasts, microphiles and
wanderjahr
biology students. As for the kung themselves …
    She switched off and sat back.
    ‘You should have told the Company,’ she said silently. ‘There’s still time.’
    She answered: ‘You know what will happen. He might be mad, but he’s no fool. He’ll be prepared for any trap. Besides, Kung isn’t a human world. Company writ runs thin down there. He’ll duck and weave and we’ll lose him.’
    She said: ‘You have a duty. You can’t let a menace like him run around loose just to satisfy your curiosity.’
    She answered: ‘Why not?’
    * * *
    How rich is Kin Arad, daughter of the genuine Earth and author of Continuous Creation (q.v.) ? The Company paid its servants in Days, but since they could earn far more than a Day in a day, they often sold surplus time for more traditional currencies. Temporally, then, her account showed that she had another three hundred and sixty-eight years, five weeks and two days in hand, plus one hundred and eighty thousand credits – and a credit is worth a credit these days.
    In any case, credits were backed by Days. The galaxy had rare elements in plenty. The transmuter at the heart of every strata machine or dumbwaiter could make anything. What else but longevity itself could back a currency? Kin could buy life. Could Solomon have done it? Could Cloritty have done it? Could Hughes have done it?
    She was rich.
    An alarm bleeped. Kingdom’s sun bulked in the forward screen as a fire-rim black disc, the sensors having long ago been appalled by its brightness.
    Kin switched off the ship’s voice, because she hated the count-down to an Elsewhere jump. It was like waiting for death. If the computer was right, and it was never wrong, the ship would jump just as soon as it was at an acceptable orbital speed with regard to— (a few seconds of vertigo, a brief agony of despair.Soullag, it was called on little evidence. Certainly something in the human mind refused to travel faster than – it had been experimentally verified – 0.7 light years per second, so that after even a short jump through Elsewhere-space there was a hollow black time before the rushing mental upwellllll—)
    —the destination world. Kin caught her balance, and looked out. The Kung sun was a cool red dwarf. Statistics said it was small. They lied. From four million miles away it was a giant. Kung practically rolled