'The stomach says not,' she said. Kin smiled. Shandi had different ideas about the seat of the emotions.

She flew out in a suit lift belt shorn of the bubble suit, dragging one end of the cable by a wide loop.

'I consider this foolhardy in the extreme,' said Marco's voice in her earpiece.

'Maybe,' said Kin. 'Just remember it was me that went out to the crashed boat.'

There was a pause, with just the hissing of the wind in one ear and the carrier wave in the other. Finally Marco said, 'Point your belt camera at the boat.'

The rowers had seen her. Most of them were hanging transfixed on their oars.

The boat was perhaps twenty-five metres long, built like a pod. Silver had been too critical. Whoever had built it had a keen knowledge of hydrodynamics. There was one mast, amidships, with a furled sail. What space there was among the rowers appeared to be filled with jars and bundles.

Kin aimed at the red-haired man in the prow and dived, skimmed the wavetops and braked on a level with his astonished face, dropping the cable loop over the ornate prow and yelling to Silver. Spray drenched her as the cable sprang out of the water.

'Get them rowing,' said Kin, making desperate arm movements. 'To the island,' she insisted, pointing dramatically.

Redhair stared at her, at the island, at the taut cable and the curving wake of the ship as Silver took the strain. Then he vaulted down the length of the boat, screaming at the bewildered men. One stood up and started to argue. Redhair picked up a spar from the deck and hit him hard, then hauled him from his place and took his oar.

Kin barrelled skyward, looking down on a ship that was already leaving a wake like a powerboat. Then she levelled out and headed back to the island.

Its wooded shores passed far below her and she began searching in the misty blue sky beyond the falls.

She found what she was looking for. There was a tiny white speck, drifting outwards. She swooped, hearing the slight whump as the belt's field took up a new protective shape around her.

Silver's belt motor was whining. Suit belts could lift their owners against ten gravities, and Silver probably weighed 500 pounds. It added up to a lot of pulling power at the end of the cable.

As Kin waved and turned back for the disc, Silver's voice grunted in her ear. 'There have been several jerks on the cable.'

Kin looked down. There was a swathe of felled timber across the island. The tree they'd used as an anchor hadn't been tough enough after all. Now the cable was bent round the crag itself.

'Everything's fine,' she said. 'We've got the edge on the current. The cable cut through some trees, that's all.'

The boat was broadside on to the falls, but bouncing across the already whitening water.

'Fine, Silver,' she said. 'Fine. Marco wanted to meet the natives and he's going to get a basinful in a minute. Steady. Steady. Stop. Stop!'

The boat crunched onto the beach and bounded up into the trees, oars snapping. Several men fell overboard.

'We've beached it!' said Kin, dropping towards the wood.

'If they've got any imagination they're kissing that ground,' said Silver.

'Right. Let's hope Marco has the sense to stay out of sight.'

Her earpiece crackled. 'I heard that. I wish to disassociate myself from this entire undertaking...'

Kin swooped. She remembered being told that, ultimately, and whatever the science-fiction blats may say, no-one ever learned a language by eavesdropping on a culture's communications.

It always came down to face to face confrontations. To pointing. To drawing circles in the sand.

Circles in the sand?

Well -- it came down to pointing.

Much later she found Silver and Marco in their clearing higher up the slope. Silver was sitting beside the dumbwaiter, scooping handfuls of grey and red goo out of a bowl. Marco was lying full length, peering through the leaves at the men on the beach.

They had lit a fire, and were cooking something.

Silver nodded at her and did something to the dumbwaiter's controls.

'I already ate,' sighed Kin. 'Some sort of grain meal and dried fish. Didn't you see?'

'I was, in fact, programming for an emetic.'

Marco turned over. 'You ate food without even a rudimentary analysis! Do you wish to die so soon?'

'We need their trust,' said Kin. She tossed a sliver of fish to Silver. 'I'll take your damn potion, but hold that under the 'waiter's nose. You know 'waiter food always tastes like somebody already ate it. While we're here we might as well have full stomachs.'

She took a bowl of pink fluid from Silver's paw and retired to the other side of the clearing, where she was briefly and noisily sick. Silver reached up and dialled the 'waiter for coffee.

Presently the machine extruded a tongue of green plastic. She tore it out and read it.

'High on usable protein and vitamins,' she said. 'There is a hydrocarbon content from the drying process which may be carcinogenic in the long term, but it appears to pose no great risk.'

'Great,' said Kin, helping herself to coffee. 'Suddenly I feel I could never look another dried fish in the face. Now, are you ready for the big answers? As far as I can understand it, the small red-haired man calls himself Leiv Eiriksson.'

Silver flicked the green printout neatly into the machine's intake hopper.

'That is a remarkable coincidence or something else; she said calmly.

'You're not kidding.'

Marco turned back from his surveillance. 'What is coincidental?' he said. 'Did you observe their weaponry?'

'They have swords made out of, uh, bog-iron, handbeaten. Easily blunted,' said Kin thoughtfully. 'Their greatest weapon is their boat. Are you familiar with the term clinker-built?'

He nodded.

'Good, it means nothing to me. They're fast. These people rule a large part of the sea with those boats and those swords. Sometimes they are pirates, but they've got a sophisticated system of law. They're brave. A thousand-mile journey in a boat like that is commonplace.'

Marco stared at her. 'You learned all that?'

'No, all I understood was his name, and only because I've heard it before. It's all from memory.' She looked at Silver for confirmation. The shand nodded.

" 'In the year three hundred and twenty-two"; she intoned, " 'Eiriksson sailed the ocean blue"!' 'Very poetic,' said Marco levelly. 'Now, will you please explain?' ''If you were raised in Mexico you wouldn't have heard about this,' said Kin. 'They're snobbish about their history down there. Leiv Eiriksson...' she began to outline Earth's history... 'discovered Vinland, more than three hundred years after the Battle of Haelcor had ended the third and last Remen Empire.'

The big migration followed automatically. The Turks were again pushing west and north. Leiv's father, Eirik, was a shrewd salesman. His Greenland had turned out nowhere like as green as it had been in his imagination, but from Vinland Leiv had thoughtfully brought rich berries and wild grains. The Northmen went west again.

They leap-frogged colony after colony down the eastern seaboard, up into the base rugged lands around Tyker's Sea and down the Long Fjord into the Middle Seas. It was the landscape of their dreams. They called it Valhalla.

There were natives. But the newcomers were only half-hearted farmers -- underneath the agricultural veneer they thought bloody. Those tribes they couldn't out fight they out-thought. When they met the Objibwa Confederacy they made treaties. And they spread, and merged.

By all the theories it should have ended there. Neither the natives nor the invaders had the textbook kind of social dynamic that builds Remes. The Northmen should have become just another tribe, with blue eyes and fair hair.

The theories were wrong. Something latent in both races was sparked into fire. It was a big continent, and it was rich.