Strata

her tusks, could not speak, Silver spoke in shandi, which she could pronounce and Marco could not understand, and Kin translated into allspeak for Marco. Eventually it was established by careful retranslation that Silver was a sociologist, comparative historian, linguist and meat-animal herder.
    ‘All of them?’ asked Marco.
    ‘I once knew a shand who was a lift-attendant, biochemist and seal hunter,’ said Kin.
    ‘I got here yesterday,’ said Silver. ‘I was working on Prediquac when this man—’
    ‘We know him,’ said Kin. ‘What did he offer you?’
    ‘I do not understand,’ said Silver blankly.
    ‘Bait,’ said Kin. ‘To go with him to the flat world.’
    ‘Oh, I see. Nothing. Should he have done?’
    Kin translated. Marco stared at the shand in astonishment, then snorted and wandered off into the depths of the ship.
    ‘There is something familiar about your name,’ said Silver to Kin.
    ‘I wrote a book called
Continuous Creation.
’
    Silver smiled politely. ‘Did you?’
    Marco had disappeared. The two females took a stroll through the doughnut hull. With every step Kin became more uneasy. This was a
strange
ship.
    It had been converted to a freighter. There were four staterooms. The rest of the torus was fuel tank.
    The ship had been designed to be a rich idiot’s toy. Only rich men and spies used ships that could stagger out of a gravity well under their own power.
    Consider: there was a Line on every useful world, and once up the Line all that was needed was a pressurized box with altitude jets and an Elsewhere matrix to get you to the top of any other Line. A few specialized trades and the tourist industry used ships capable of traversing a solar system. There were even some ships that could fly ground-to-orbit in an emergency.
No one
needed a ship that could reach orbit
and
fly across a system
and
jump via the Elsewhere.
    This one could. Kin’s unease began to be tinted with excitement. The Line and the Matrix had chopped space into mere pauses between identical Line Top arrival lounges. This ship was something else.
    There was a dumbwaiter, a big model programmed to produce anything from lobster thermidor to sawdust. It could even reproduce shand proteins.
    There was a medical room that would not have disgraced a city. There was also a deep freeze, a fact so unusual that Kin lifted the lid.
    ‘Now here’s a thing,’ she murmured. Silver peered in, and rooted around among the frosted packages.
    ‘Nothing remarkable,’ she said. ‘Meat, fish, fowl, leaves, swollen tubers – human food.’
    Kin pointed at the dumbwaiter, humming seductively to itself.
    ‘Ever known one of those to fail?’ she said.
    ‘They don’t,’ said Silver. ‘If they did, you humans would never have allowed us into space.’
    ‘Then why waste space and weight hauling this junk? If he was nervous, he’d bring shandi food – uh. Of course. I forget he’s old .’
    ‘Old?’
    ‘Old enough to be fussy about machine-made food. This lot here must have cost him a fortune.’
    ‘Please explain about “old”,’ said Silver insistently.
    Kin told the shand about the Terminus probe. When she finished she was aware that the giant was looking at her oddly.
    ‘You humans must have been mad for space,’ she said.
    They turned as Marco strode silently into the room, trembling with rage.
    ‘What is this ship?’ he bawled. ‘There’s enough weaponry in the hold to blow a hole through a planet.’
    ‘And small-arms,’ murmured Kin. Marco stared at her, while she felt her mind beginning to think very fast indeed.
    ‘Precisely. But how did you guess?’
    ‘No guess, I think I’ve seen enough. Silver, was there a message from Jalo when you got here?’
    ‘The kung in the ferry said I was to wait. Why?’
    Kin shook her head urgently. ‘Marco, there must be spacesuits around. If we got into them, could you evacuate the ship?’
    ‘Down here? It’d implode. I’d have to take her up, and that—’
    ‘This is a .0003 Clipe automatic. If you all leapt at me the chances are I would not get you all, but who could I shoot first?’
    Jalo was standing by the door, the pistol dangling nonchalantly from one hand. Kin thought about what a stream of Clipe needles could do, and decided to stand very still. She glanced at Silver.
    The shand wasn’t looking at Jalo. She was staring at Marco.
    He had dropped into a curious bowlegged stance, arms held out from his body like an ancient gunfighter, and he was