Strata

We’re too near the sea!’
    The grim pantomime started again two hundred metres up. With Silver holding Kin by the shoulders and Marco arranging the suit, they managed to slot her into the lower section, then forced her freezing arms into the sleeves. The inner thermal suit clicked on; by the time Kin was fit to talk the inside of the suit was a turkish bath.
    ‘Thanks, Marco,’ she said. ‘You know, I never would have had the intelligence to switch—’
    ‘Look below,’ said the kung.
    They looked.
    A shadow moved under the sunlit waves, a big turtle, island sized, with four paddle legs and a head the size of a small house. As they watched it flapped lazily into the depths.
    ‘I saw it wake,’ said Marco. ‘I had been pondering the regularity of the legs, wondering if they were shoals, and then one moved. No doubt it makes a practice of this and feeds on the unfortunates who light fires on its shell.’
    ‘A carapace length of a hundred metres,’ mused Silver. ‘Remarkable. Do such exist on Earth, Kin?’
    ‘No,’ said Kin, through chattering teeth.
    ‘Enough of this scientific chit-chat,’ said Marco. ‘We must make speed for the nearest land mass. Silver, will you look yonder? About out-by-right, middle heaven. I only see a dot.’
    Silver turned her suit.
    ‘It’s a bird,’ she said. ‘Black. Possibly a raven.’
    ‘Then at least we cannot be far from land,’ said Marco. ‘I was afraid it was a dragon.’
    They switched the belts to maximum horizontal motion and headed on. Imperceptibly Marco pulled ahead, so that they travelled in delta formation. Kin assisted by slowing her suit fractionally, and noticed that Silver had done the same. Marco the kung was in command.
    After a while he started to climb, the others following obediently. Below …
    … the disc unfolded. At their old height Kin could have believed they were on a globe, but now the disc spread out below them for what it was – a lunatic map, a madman’s Great Circle projection.
    Cloud and the opacity of the air were the only barriers to vision. Kin could see the far rim of the disc, a darker line against the sky, and from that distant confusion of earth and sky two white horns grew and spread outward. The waterfall. The oceanfall, encircling the disc like a snake.
    There was a hurricane building up, off the coast of Africa. As Kin climbed she watched the frozen spiral of cloud, fascinated.
    She had seen worlds from space, but the disc was
different.
And it was big. She was used to thinking in terms of millions and the disc, spinning through space inside its own private universe, had sounded small. Seen from a few hundred miles up it was huge, real. It was the light-years of nothingness that were small and meaningless. It was enough now just to stare …
    ‘Note the circles of disturbance in the ocean,’ said Marco.
    ‘Kin suggests there is something the matter with the mechanism that recirculates the sea water,’ said Silver.
    ‘Logical. Certainly I feel increased admiration for a people who face all this in small boats, with no air support.’
    Silver said, ‘Seeing the disc like this, one feelsone would be nervous of setting foot on it again. It is too thin, too artificial. We do not as a rule suffer from vertigo, but seeing the disc like this I begin to comprehend what it means.’
    Marco nodded. ‘Quite so. It gives one an uneasy feeling around the ankles, akin to standing on a ledge a hundred storeys up – a wide ledge perhaps, but a high one.’
    ‘I begin to see what Kin meant when she wrote about the Spindles’ insistence on having a few thousand miles of planet beneath their feet,’ said Silver. ‘It is a mental anchor. The subconscious fears the endless drop towards the bottom of the Universe. Could our vague feeling be a shadow of the Spindle imperative?’
    ‘It is said that they helped us evolve, so that is always possible. What do you think, Kin? Kin ?’
    ‘Hunh? Wassat?’
    ‘Were you listening?’
    ‘Sorry, I was looking at the scenery. Silver, what’s that smudge down there? In what would be Central Europe.’
    ‘I see it. That, I suspect, is where our ship crashed.’
    They all looked. The smoke was a mere wisp at this distance.
    ‘It looks like a pretty lifeless region,’ said Silver, in tones of comfort.
    ‘It is now,’ said Kin bitterly.
    Invisible a few miles below, its wings a blur ofspeed, the raven focused on the smoke. Behind its eyes, something went click.
    The moon rose,