Strata

precious,’ he said. ‘Tell him we wouldn’t exchange them even for his aircraft. Tell him we need to get to the coast quickly.’
    ‘He’ll never fall for that,’ said Kin. ‘Anyway, there’s hardly any juice left in the belts.’
    ‘That’s his worry,’ said Marco. ‘I have a plan. But first of all I’d like to see how he operates thatflying rug. Tell him it is too hot to negotiate out here – it’s true, anyway.’
    There followed a long exchange of cracked phrases and words repeated at varying levels of exasperation. Finally the man nodded and stood up, motioning towards the servant with a hand.
    The big man stepped forward and reached into his pouch, handing his master the – call it the—
    Hell, thought Kin, it
is
a flying carpet. Only we don’t like to say it because it sounds crazy.
    It was about two metres by three, and patterned with an intricate geometrical design in blue, green and red. Spread out on the ground it hugged the bumps and hollows limply.
    The man said a word. Some dust was blown up as the carpet straightened, stiffened, and hovered a few inches above the sand; Kin thought she could hear a faint hum.
    It didn’t rock even when Silver stepped aboard. The man with the sword sat behind them. The old man said another word. The ground fell away noiselessly.
    ‘One could coat a surface with flexible lifting units,’ said Marco after a while, with a brave little quiver in his voice, ‘but what about power? How could you get batteries this thin?’
    Similar thoughts had been passing through Kin’s mind, since she was staring intently at the carpet between her knees so that her eyes didn’tstray over the edge. She was aware that Marco was sliding gingerly towards her.
    ‘You nervous too?’ she said.
    ‘I am conscious of mere millimetres of unknown and unproven flying machine underneath me,’ he said.
    ‘You weren’t nervous in the lift belts.’
    ‘But they were under an unconditional hundred-year guarantee. If one belt failed, how long would the manufacturer stay in business?’
    ‘I do not think one could fall off this if one tried,’ said Silver. She hit the air beside her with a paw and it made a noise, as though someone had punched a jelly.
    ‘Safety field,’ she said. ‘Try it.’
    Kin waved a hand gingerly over the carpet’s edge. It was like moving through treacle and, as she pushed, like leaning on rock. Ali Baba turned round, grinned at her and spoke a sentence.
    When the carpet was finally flying level again there was silence. Finally Marco said flatly: ‘Tell the lunatic if he attempts that again I will kill him.’
    Kin released her numb fingers from their grip on the patterned pile.
    ‘Be diplomatic,’ she added. ‘Be tactful. Say that if he does it again I will maim him.’
    Two loops and a triple roll!
    On the disc-generated gravity, shaped fields and direct vocal control came wrapped up in one neat carpet-shaped vehicle.
    She wondered how Marco intended to steal it.
    They skimmed low over the flat roofs of the city. Kin saw people in the narrow crowded streets look up, then turn back and go about their business. Magic carpets, apparently, were familiar objects.
    They homed in on a minor palace, a squat white affair with a central dome and two ornate towers. There was a garden behind decorative trellises – now, that was odd …
    ‘It must have its own source of water,’ she said aloud.
    ‘Why?’ said Marco.
    ‘Everything else round here is parched. That’s the one green spot we’ve seen today.’
    ‘That would not be surprising, if he is a disc builder,’ said Marco. ‘A fact which I doubt.’
    ‘And I also,’ rumbled Silver, ‘yet he handles the carpet well enough and our flying belts evinced only cautious greed, not awe. I am thinking now in terms of some hermetic order, maybe, handing down disc builder machines and relics with no proper understanding of their internal workings – like a savage may competently drive a groundcar while believing it to be powered by little horses under the engine cowling.’
    Ali Baba brought them down perfectly, the carpet drifting slowly across a balcony and through an arch into a high-ceilinged room. It hovered a few inches above the intricately-tiled floor, then settled.
    He leapt up and clapped his hands. By the time the others had untwisted their limbs and, in Marco’s case, eased the steel grip his hands had been maintaining, a posse of servants had entered the room. They carried towels,