Strata

into space inside the ship’s Elsewhere field …
    In free fall Kin’s natural genius felt somewhat cramped. She swam and bounced her way to the control room, where Marco was hunched over the main consol like a spider, and screamed in his ear.
    He grabbed her out of the air and turned her to face the big screen at the far side of the cabin.
    She stared, open mouthed.
    After a while she fetched Silver, who was treating a slight headwound in the medical roomand cursing in several languages, and made her watch.
    When the film was finished they ran it through again.
    ‘I put Jalo’s reel in the navigator,’ said Marco finally. ‘It included this.’
    ‘Run it again,’ said Kin. ‘I want to have another look at one or two bits.’
    ‘The picture quality is exceptionally good,’ said Marco.
    ‘It had to be. They were meant to be transmitted over tens of parsecs—’
    ‘If I may interrupt for a few seconds,’ said Silver. She reached up to her tusks, and began to twist them. Kin watched in fascinated horror as the fangs unscrewed and were stowed away in a small leather case. She had seen fangless shandi on Shand itself, but they were children or condemned criminals.
    ‘In order to be a good linguist one must be prepared to make sacrifices,’ said Silver in faultless allspeak. ‘Do you think I submitted to the operation without much secret shame and soul-searching? However, I have something to say. Do I strike you, Marco Farfarer, as a character of ill-humour and short temper?’
    ‘No. Why?’
    ‘If you try a stunt like you just did once more, I will kill you.’
    ‘I thought it was impossible anyway,’ said Kin, with hasty diplomacy.
    Marco looked from one to the other.
    ‘It’s not impossible, simply tricky and highly illegal,’ he said carefully. ‘Do it wrong, and you end up in the middle of the nearest sun. As for your, uh, statement, Silver – I have noted it.’
    They both nodded gravely.
    ‘Right,’ said Kin brightly. ‘Fine. Now show the film again.’
    Either the film was genuine or Jalo was an unsung special-effects genius.
    It might have been the polar regions of New Earth, or anywhere on Serendipity. Not Njal and Milkgaard, because those worlds had no birds and one picture showed a flock of birds in the distance – until Silver turned up the magnification. Whatever they were, they were not birds. Not with those horse heads, black scales and bat-black wings. But there was a word for them in human history, and the name Dragon unfolded in Kin’s mind.
    There was a seascape, and unless there was something very wrong with the size of the waves, the snake-headed beast looping through them was fully a kilometre long.
    There were distant views of what might have been cities. There were several sunsets, at least one taken from the air, and a number of night shots of starscapes.
    ‘Go back to the aerial sunset,’ said Kin. ‘Now what’s wrong?’
    ‘Horizon’s odd,’ said Marco.
    It was. The curve was oddly flattened. There was something else wrong too, something Kin couldn’t immediately spot.
    ‘Apart from that, it could be any human world,’ observed Silver.
    ‘Funny,’ said Kin. ‘Jalo talked about a flat Earth, not just a flat world.’
    ‘That does not surprise me. Humans have been the only race to entertain the primitive idea of a flat world,’ said Marco, running the film back to the starscapes. ‘If you don’t believe me, look it up. Kung always thought they lived on the inside of a sphere, and shandi always had big Twin hanging up there to teach them a basic lesson in cosmology.’
    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