Strata by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online Page A

the bad old days before the Revolution, high-caste kung had used mitogenetic techniques to influence the growing embryo. Four-arms meant warrior caste. Kin decided to try tact.
    ‘How come,’ she asked, ‘how come you have to have shirts specially made?’
    He didn’t look round. ‘Family tradition,’ he said. ‘My family always sent one male into the warriors, and they operated on my mother, but – you remember the Line Break of ’58?’
    ‘Sure. Earth was cut off for a month. Some lunatic bombed both termini simultaneously.’
    ‘Yes. My parents were on the embassy staff at New Stavanger. By the time the Line was replaced my mother was in labour.’
    And the kung believed that when a child was born its receptive mind was taken over by the nearest available discarnate soul …
    ‘As a matter of fact my father was prevented from killing himself by the Shad cultural attaché, who was dining with him,’ said Marco levelly. ‘He thought he could get to me first, you see? It didn’t work. So they put out humanity paperson me and found me a home with an old couple down in Mexico, and then they left Earth. End of story. How come you’re bald?’
    Kin’s hand flew to her wig.
    ‘Uh. Age. Hair can’t take it.’
    Marco was watching the horizon intently. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I wondered. I always think one shouldn’t be shy about this sort of thing, don’t you?’
    The boat chattered through half-drowned groves and flotillas of villages until it was brought to a dead halt by weeds brushing against the hull. Marco swore, and kicked the power changeover.
    ‘It’s the tide,’ said Marco. Hull out of water, they whirred on through streaming vegetation. A few late fish, abandoned by the water, were hopping awkwardly after the departing sea. On Kung only amphibians survived for long.
    Presently the vegetation and the gradient suggested country that was seldom inundated for more than one hour in twenty. Under the boatkung’s direction they picked up a track that wound up into permanently dry grassland. If Kung had been a human world it would have been cultivated to within an inch of its life. The kung shunned it as a desert.
    The boat jolted over a ridge.
    There was a round valley, with the inevitable lake at the bottom, and a spaceship bobbing at its centre.
    ‘It’s a General Motors Neutrino, ground-to-ground ring-rim fusion motor, Spindle unibrake, thirty-four staterooms, choice of extras,’ said Marco, lighting his pipe. ‘The insystem systems are a bugger. I flew one once. They were built to meet a demand which wasn’t.’
    It looked like a fat doughnut.
    ‘Has it got any armaments?’ asked Kin weakly.
    ‘Jalo!’ screamed the raven.
    ‘Wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of the fusion flame.’
    The boatkung was looking at Marco’s pipe in terror. ‘Apart from that – there’s a roomy hold. Name your own horrors.’
    As they stepped into the ship’s open hatch the boatkung gunned his craft and headed back across the lake.
    ‘Looks like the only way off is up,’ said Kin. ‘I wonder what frightened him?’
    ‘Me,’ said Marco, and walked aboard soundlessly – then hissed and crouched into a fighting stance.
    A shape lurched towards them. Racial memories told Kin to run and climb a tree. The
thing
bearing down on them could only be intent on clawing gashes in soft membranes, and gouging with those fangs. Racial memories were behind the times, as usual. Kin grinned politely.
    The shand could just about stand in the high corridor without its tiny ears touching the ceiling, which meant it was almost three metreshigh. It was, though, holding the knee-sagging, self-effacing posture that shandi always adopted inside the artefacts of smaller races, as if in terror lest they accidentally eat someone.
    Typically, it – she – was as broad as she was high, with wide arms ending in calloused knuckles that could double as another pair of feet. There was an intelligent bear’s face, but it was a bear