Strata

through its upper atmosphere – and there it was, a perceptible black disc. Kin smiled. Kung, living under permanent cloud cover, were mad enough to begin with. What sort of religion would they have developed if they had been able to see the sky?
    Three hours later she left the ship a few miles from Kung Line Top.
    The satellite was decorated in Kung style – grey and brown-purple predominated, with startling touches of heart-attack red. There was no immigration control. Kung welcomed smugglers. Smugglers were rich.
    Her suit’s jets wafted her gently into one of the airlocks, which cycled automatically.
    Line Top! The spaceward end of the mono-molecular wire that linked every civilized world with the greater galaxy! The gateway to the stars, where robots jostled with ten-eyed aliens, spies moved circumspectly, golden-bearded traders ofstrange and subtle wares sold curious powders that made men go mad and talk to God, and cripple boys busked strange electronic instruments that plucked emotions. Line Top! A hefty kick and you had escape velocity. Line Top! Threshold of the universe!
    Anyway, that was the idea. But this was reality, and Kung was in a poor time for the tourist trade. The kung that loped through the tethered satellite’s corridors were admittedly colourful, but familiar. There was an unipodal Ehft operating a sweeping machine in one corridor. If it was a spy for the Galactic Federation, it was a master of disguise.
    The big board on the main concourse said there was an hour to wait until the next downward shuttle. Kin found a bar with a window overlooking the shuttle hall. The bar was called The Broken Drum.
    ‘Why?’ she asked the kung behind the bar. Saucer-eyed he fixed her with the bland stare of barmen everywhere.
    ‘You can’t beat it,’ he said. ‘Your wish?’
    ‘I thought kung had no sense of humour.’
    ‘That is so.’ The bar-kung looked at her carefully. ‘From Earth?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes,’ said Kin.
    ‘Which one? I’ve got a brother-uncle on Real Ea—’
    ‘The genuine one,’ said Kin sharply. He looked at her thoughtfully again, then reached underthe counter and pulled out a filmy cassette that Kin recognized with a sinking heart.
    ‘I thought the face was familiar,’ said the barkung triumphantly. ‘Soon as you walked in, I thought, very familiar face – of course it’s a bad holo on the filmy, but still … Ha. Do you think you could do a voice print on it, Miss Arad?’ He grinned horribly.
    She smiled valiantly, and took the tape translation of
Continuous Creation
from his damp four-fingered hands.
    ‘Of course, it’s not for you, I understand, it’s for your nephew Sam,’ she murmured cruelly. The kung looked startled.
    ‘I have no nephew Sam,’ he said, ‘although I had intended it for my son-brother Brtkltc. How did you know?’
    ‘Magic,’ sighed Kin.
    She took her drink to the big window, and idly watched tugs shunting cargo shuttles across the marshalling wires while behind her she half-heard the bar-kung talking excitedly to someone on the intercom. Then a someone was standing by her chair. She looked round, and then up. A kung was standing beside her.
    Look at the kung. Seven feet tall, and then topped off with a red coxcomb that was made of something like hair. Two saucer eyes filled the face, and they were now two-thirds closed against the lights that had been turned up by the bar-kung out of deference to Kin. The body wasskeletal, with body-builder’s muscles strung like beads on a wire and a bulge between the shoulder blades for the third lung. The shipsuit it wore was a masterpiece of tailoring. It had to be. The kung had four arms.
    It grinned. A kung grin was a red crescent with harp strings of mucus.
    ‘My name is Marco Farfarer,’ he said, ‘and if it will help you to cease staring, I am a naturalized human being. You only think you’re seeing a kung. Don’t let a mere unfortunate accident of birth confuse you.’
    ‘My apologies,’ said Kin. ‘It was the second pair of arms.’
    ‘Quite so.’ He bent lower, and said in the voice laden with the breath of swamps: ‘A flat world?’
    Then he sat down, while they sought for clues in each other’s face.
    ‘How did you know?’ said Kin.
    ‘Magic,’ he said. ‘I recognized you, of course. I enjoyed your book. I know Kin Arad works for the Company. I see her sitting in Kung Line Top, a place one would not expect to find her. She looks ill at ease. I recall that about a month