Free Strata by Terry Pratchett

had a few hundred metres of fossil strata under them, like they couldn’t feel happy if there was another Spindle within fifty miles. But I think they did it because it was their art. They didn’t know anyone would see it, but they went ahead and did it.’)
    Kin found a quiet moment to explore the weapons hold. If Marco had flown the ship to a world with a shaky government, there wasenough stuff on board to equip a rebel army. There was what looked like a complete missile system, and several racks of small arms that Jalo must have had made to ancient patterns. One handgun
fired
sharp wooden bullets. Why?
    The ship – they never did get round to naming it – dropped into real space. Marco’s hands hovered over the controls as he waited for a welcoming barrage.
    There was nothing. There wasn’t even a star near the ship.
    ‘We’re still on the edge of explored space,’ said Marco. ‘That blue giant there is Dagda Secundus. It’s about half a light year away.’
    ‘Well, here we are and where are we?’ asked Kin. ‘A star like that shouldn’t have planets, especially nice sunny ones.’
    ‘The computer is searching,’ said Marco gloomily. ‘Needle. Haystack. Perhaps we’ll find some iceball whipping along at maybe twenty knots orbital velocity.’
    ‘Meanwhile, we could eat,’ suggested Silver.
    They each dialled their meal from the dumbwaiter and wandered back into the control room.
    ‘Give it an hour,’ said Kin. ‘This area of space has been explored. What the hell can it find that the survey teams missed?’
    ‘I doubt if they looked out here,’ said Silver. There was a brief moment of nausea as the computer flicked the ship a few million miles for a parallax measurement.
    ‘We followed Jalo’s course tape,’ said Marco. ‘I’d hate to have to—’
    The computer chimed. Marco vaulted into the control chair and juggled the screen controls.
    At the limit of magnification there was a small fuzzy hemisphere. They looked at it blankly.
    ‘Just a planet,’ said Kin.
    ‘Rather brightly lit for this distance out,’ agreed Marco. ‘Highly polished ice?’
    Silver coughed apologetically. ‘I am no astronomer,’ she said, ‘but surely it is wrong?’
    ‘Not ice?’ said Marco. ‘Could be Helium IV, I suppose.’
    ‘You misunderstand me,’ said the shand. ‘Surely the light hemisphere should be pointed
towards
the star?’
    They stared at it. Finally Marco exclaimed, ‘Bleeding hell, she’s right!’ He glanced down at the shouter screens. ‘It’s half a billion miles away,’ he said. ‘I should be able to make a straight-line jump. Uh …’
    For a moment four hands hovered like a flight of hawks over the controls.
    And dropped.
    The sky was falling in on them. Then Marco, almost in hypnosis, turned the ship and there, spread out below like a bowl of jewels, was the flat Earth.
    It was like a plate full of continents. A coin tossed into the air by an indecisive god.
    The ship had come out perhaps twenty thousand miles above it, and out of vertical. Kin looked out at a hazy map of black land and silver seas fuzzed with moonlit cloud. There was what, for want of a better term – how many people had mapped flat planets? – a polar cap, hugging one side of the disc.
    Moonlit? There was a moon, apparently a few thousand miles above the disc, and it
shone
. It couldn’t be reflected light. There was nothing to reflect. And there were stars – between the ship and the disc, there were stars.
    The shadowy oval lay inside a hazy globe. Marco translated what the machines were emotionlessly telling him. The disc was inside a transparent sphere sixteen thousand miles across, and the stars were – ‘that’s what I said, Kin’ – were fixed to this.
    One edge of the disc glowed brighter. It flashed green fire, which ran around the rim until they were looking at a hole in space surrounded by green and silver flames. Then the ring grew a gem, and died as suddenly as it had come. The sun had