Strata

and the time,’ said Marco. ‘The man will come to no harm in the sargo. If we hesitate we will have to explain, and probably the Company will want to know why you weren’t frank with it in the first place.’
    Kin looked at Silver for support, but the shand just nodded heavily. ‘I would not like to lose this opportunity,’ she said.
    ‘Look,’ said Kin. ‘Taking this trip with Jalo seemed a good idea, right? But now we don’t know the half of what we’re embarking on. I’m just using a bit of intelligent caution, is all.’
    ‘So much for the vaunted monkey curiosity,’ said Marco to Silver. ‘So much for the dynamic manifest destiny we hear so much—’
    ‘You’re mad – the pair of you!’
    Marco shrugged, a particularly effective gesture with two sets of shoulders, and unfolded his bony frame from the pilot chair. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You fly us back.’
    Kin flumped into the seat and pulled the wraparound screen down to her level. She looked at the three-quarter consol. There were several dials that looked vaguely familiar. That black panel might control air and temperature;the rest was gibberish. Kin was used to ships with big brains.
    ‘I can’t fly this!’ she said. ‘And you know it!’
    ‘Glad to have you with us, then,’ said Marco, looking at his watch. ‘Why don’t you two get some sleep?’
    Kin lay in her bunk, thinking. She thought of how attitudes to aliens got stereotyped. Kung were paranoid, blood-thirsty and superstitious. Shandi were calm, bloody-thirsty and sometimes ate people. Shandi and kung thought humans were blood-thirsty, foolhardy and proud. Everyone thought Ehfts were funny, and no one knew what Ehfts thought about anyone.
    It
was
true that, once, four kung had boarded a grounded human ship during the bad old days and killed thirty-five crew before the last kung went down under the weight of Clipe needles. It was true that on certain diplomatically-forgotten occasions shandi had, with great ceremony, eaten people. So what? How could you evaluate this unless you could think like an alien?
    We dismiss each other with a few clichés, she thought. It’s the only way we can live with one another. We have to think of aliens as humans in a different skin, even though we’ve all been hammered by different gravities on the anvils of strange worlds …
    She sat up in the darkness, listening. The ship hummed to itself.
    She padded naked down the equatorial corridor. Something that had been nagging at the back of her mind had surfaced, and she had to find out …
    Ten minutes later she entered the control room, where Marco was still sitting under the screen.
    ‘Marco?’
    He ducked his head, then pushed the screen up and grinned.
    ‘Everything’s going fine. What’s that you’re holding? It looks like a melted plastic sculpture.’
    ‘This was the box the raven was in. Bioplastic. It doesn’t melt below one thousand degrees. I found it in the airlock,’ snapped Kin, tossing it onto his lap.
    Marco turned the shapeless mass over, then shrugged.
    ‘Well? Are these birds intelligent?’
    ‘Sure, but they don’t tote cutting torches around.’
    There was a pause while they both gazed at the melted box.
    ‘Jalo could have done it,’ said Marco uncertainly. ‘No, that doesn’t work – he was surprised to see the bird.’
    ‘To put it mildly, yes. I don’t like this sort of mystery, Marco. Have you seen the raven?’
    ‘Not since Jalo did. Hmm.’ He reached out one lank arm and punched the ship’s panic button.
    Bells and sirens echoed through the ship. Within forty seconds Silver thundered in, crushedsnow from her sleeping pit still sticking to her fur. She braked when she saw them watching her, and growled.
    ‘A human joke?’ she said. They told her.
    ‘It is odd,’ she agreed. ‘Shall we search the ship?’
    Marco spoke at length about the number of small spaces in a spaceship. He added details about what happened if something small and feathered crawled into a vital duct, or blundered into the wrong cable.
    ‘All right,’ said Kin. ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘You two go back to your rooms,’ said Marco. ‘Seal them off, and search for the bird. I will evacuate the rest of the ship. This is standard anti-vermin drill anyway.’
    ‘But you’d kill it,’ said Kin.
    ‘I don’t mind.’
    Later Marco sat watching the build-up of power in the ship’s fusion driver, out there in the centre of the toroids ring field, and wondered about