Strata

dining with him,’ said Marco levelly. ‘He thought he could get to me first, you see? It didn’t work. So they put out humanity paperson me and found me a home with an old couple down in Mexico, and then they left Earth. End of story. How come you’re bald?’
    Kin’s hand flew to her wig.
    ‘Uh. Age. Hair can’t take it.’
    Marco was watching the horizon intently. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I wondered. I always think one shouldn’t be shy about this sort of thing, don’t you?’
    The boat chattered through half-drowned groves and flotillas of villages until it was brought to a dead halt by weeds brushing against the hull. Marco swore, and kicked the power changeover.
    ‘It’s the tide,’ said Marco. Hull out of water, they whirred on through streaming vegetation. A few late fish, abandoned by the water, were hopping awkwardly after the departing sea. On Kung only amphibians survived for long.
    Presently the vegetation and the gradient suggested country that was seldom inundated for more than one hour in twenty. Under the boatkung’s direction they picked up a track that wound up into permanently dry grassland. If Kung had been a human world it would have been cultivated to within an inch of its life. The kung shunned it as a desert.
    The boat jolted over a ridge.
    There was a round valley, with the inevitable lake at the bottom, and a spaceship bobbing at its centre.
    ‘It’s a General Motors Neutrino, ground-to-ground ring-rim fusion motor, Spindle unibrake, thirty-four staterooms, choice of extras,’ said Marco, lighting his pipe. ‘The insystem systems are a bugger. I flew one once. They were built to meet a demand which wasn’t.’
    It looked like a fat doughnut.
    ‘Has it got any armaments?’ asked Kin weakly.
    ‘Jalo!’ screamed the raven.
    ‘Wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of the fusion flame.’
    The boatkung was looking at Marco’s pipe in terror. ‘Apart from that – there’s a roomy hold. Name your own horrors.’
    As they stepped into the ship’s open hatch the boatkung gunned his craft and headed back across the lake.
    ‘Looks like the only way off is up,’ said Kin. ‘I wonder what frightened him?’
    ‘Me,’ said Marco, and walked aboard soundlessly – then hissed and crouched into a fighting stance.
    A shape lurched towards them. Racial memories told Kin to run and climb a tree. The
thing
bearing down on them could only be intent on clawing gashes in soft membranes, and gouging with those fangs. Racial memories were behind the times, as usual. Kin grinned politely.
    The shand could just about stand in the high corridor without its tiny ears touching the ceiling, which meant it was almost three metreshigh. It was, though, holding the knee-sagging, self-effacing posture that shandi always adopted inside the artefacts of smaller races, as if in terror lest they accidentally eat someone.
    Typically, it – she – was as broad as she was high, with wide arms ending in calloused knuckles that could double as another pair of feet. There was an intelligent bear’s face, but it was a bear with binocular vision and a domed skull and several walruses in its ancestry. It had two tusks said to have been used originally for scraping molluscs from the beds of freezing oceans, now as useless as the vermiform appendix, and carved into status-denoting shapes. Its snout—
    ‘If you have klite fliniffed?’ she lisped reproachfully.
    There was something altogether familiar about some of those tusk carvings. Kin stuck her fingers in the corners of her mouth for tuscal effects and tried her Shandi.
    ‘I am Relative/Almost-Parched-And-Dry and the kung is – Small-stain-go-far,’ she spat. ‘I greet you in all grease, O shand of the Lower Conwexi Delta Moraine Region, unless I am very much mistaken.’
    ‘I congratulate you on your mastery of the Speech,’ said the shand graciously. ‘My name is fifty-six syllables long, but you may call me Silver. Are you coming to the flat world? Is the kung dangerous? He looks uneasy.’
    ‘I think it’s because he can’t understandShandi. On the other hand, all kung look uneasy. It’s probably something to do with the flash tides. This one’s human, by the way, don’t press the point.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ Marco asked suspiciously.
    By the time Silver had led them into the ship’s observation cabin they had reached a compromise. Kin and Marco spoke to Silver in allspeak, which the shand understood but, because of