Strata Read online

  And young Kin Arad had decided then that people should not become extinct.

  It had been a near thing. Without the robots, it would have been a certainty.

  While the stamping figures rocked darkly against the red sunset sky, she made up her mind to join the Company …

  The first of the big gliders swept over the trees and touched down heavily on the grass. It slammed into a tree, spun around and stopped.

  After a few minutes a hatch slid back and a man stepped out. He fell over.

  Kin watched him haul himself up and lean back into the hatch. Two other men came out, followed by three women. Then they saw her.

  She had taken pains. Now her skin was silver and her hair black, shot with neon threads. She had chosen a red cloak. In the absence of wind, electrostatic charges kept it floating about her in a sufficiently impressive way. No sense in skimping details. These people were coming to a new world. They had probably already drawn up a proud constitution writ in gold and freedom. They ought to be welcomed with dignity. There would be too much time later for reality.

  More gliders were drifting down, and the man who had been the first to step out climbed up to Kin on her knoll. She noticed his pioneering beard, his chalk-white face. But most of all she noticed the silver disc on his forehead, glinting in the first rays of sunlight.

  He topped the rise still breathing evenly, pacing himself with the effortless self-control of most centenarians. He grinned, exposing teeth filed to points.

  ‘Kin Arad?’

  ‘Bjorne Chang?’

  ‘Well, we’re here. Ten thousand of us today. You make some good air – what’s the smell?’

  ‘Jungle,’ Kin said. ‘Fungi. Decaying pumas. Purple scents from the flowers of hidden orchids.’

  ‘You don’t say. Well, we shall have to see about that,’ he replied evenly.

  She laughed. ‘I’m frankly surprised,’ she said. ‘I had expected some jut-jawed young fellow with a plough in one hand …’

  ‘… and a model constitution in the other. I know, I know. Someone like that headed up the colony on Landsheer. Did you hear about Land-sheer?’

  ‘I saw pictures.’

  ‘Did you know they spent a week arguing about forms of government? And the first thing they built was a church. And then the winter hit them. And I’ve been up there in the northern continent in the winter. You make your winters cruel.’

  Kin started to stroll down, Chang loping along beside her.

  ‘We did not want them to die,’ she said at last. ‘We told them about weather patterns.’

  ‘You didn’t tell them that the universe is unfair. They were too young to be properly paranoid.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me? I think even I’m out to get me. That’s why these people have hired me. I’m going on 190. I don’t want to die, so I will watch the weather like a hawk, and only swim in shallow water, and eat nothing until I’ve seen a complete laboratory analysis. I’ll even duck in case of meteorites. I’ve got a five-year contract down here, and I intend to survive it.’

  Kin nodded. His self-confidence reassured even her.

  But she also knew it wasn’t quite so simple. In theory, the older you grew the more careful you were to stay near a gene surgery and the local Company store, where your Days could be cashed for carefully-calculated longevity treatment – at the guaranteed rate of twenty-four standard hours extra life per Day. Only the Company paid in Days, and only the Company gave the treatment. Textbook economics followed that the Company owned everywhere and everybody.

  But textbook economics also spoke of the law of diminishing returns. At twenty you acted circumspectly, taking no risks, because if you worked for the Company you had centuries ahead of you. A shame to throw them away by fast driving or high living.

  At 200, who cared? You’d been everywhere, done everything. All new experiences were just old experiences, rearranged. By 300 you were probably dead. Not quite by suicide, however – not quite. You just climbed higher and higher mountains, or free-fell higher and longer, or back-packed across Mercury the difficult way, and sooner or later the odds ran out.

  Boredom drove you frenetic. Death was Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.

  That’s why Chang led a party of green-hand colonists to a new world. There was really nothing to lose except a life stretched thin by endless living.

  ‘We don’t build pleasure planets,’ said Kin. ‘You’ll have to win this one.’

  A glider drifted overhead and was lost among the treetops.

  ‘They’ll hate it first,’ said Chang. ‘That thing’s got all the supplies in it, the blankets and the dumbwaiters. I told control to land it ten miles away. It’s a nice day. A walk will do us good, and we can see who is the type to tread on poisonous spiders.’

  ‘What will you do when the five years is up?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, probably stay and become the Grand Old Man for a while. Anyway, by then I’ll have this place too civilized for my own comfort.’

  ‘Hmm? Reme wasn’t built in a day.’

  ‘I wasn’t a foreman on that job.’

  The colonists were watching her silently. No gene surgery, no treatment, no Company store – yet they had volunteered. Not one in ten of them would see a century.

  They would have the immortality granted to simple people. There would be children. There were few enough children now, even on Earth. Genes would survive, while conditions on this world worked their own surgery on them. Hammered on the anvil of a different sun and moon, in a thousand years the people here would be different. Just different enough, according to the Plan.

  ‘Here’s where we say goodbye,’ said Kin, reaching for the pouch at her belt. ‘Here’s the Deed, the conveyance and a 5,000 year warranty against faulty construction.’

  Chang pushed the documents into his shirt.

  ‘Have you thought of a name?’ Kin asked.

  ‘The vote went in favour of Kingdom.’

  Kin nodded. ‘I like it. Simple, but not jokey. Maybe one day I’ll be back to see how well you work, Mr Chang.’

  The last glider down was a Company carrier, in contrast to the cheap vermifoam of the disposable pioneer machines. As Kin walked towards it the hatch opened and a Company robot let down the steps.

  ‘When did you last have the treatment?’ said Chang suddenly. Kin stared at him.

  ‘Eight years ago. Should it matter?’

  He paused, and moved closer so that the crowd couldn’t hear.

  ‘The Company’s in trouble. Perhaps our Days are numbered?’

  ‘Trouble?’

  The robot pilot registered that Kin was aboard, counted three seconds, and slid the door. The last the pioneers saw of Kin was her perplexed face in the big rear port as the machine drifted away and up.

  Chang watched until it was high enough to use the ramjets. Then he reached into the hatch of his own glider, and lifted out a megaphone.

  The crowd became a smudge, a dot, and lost itself in the jungle. Kin sat back. The Company owned sixty per cent of infinity. What trouble?

  Soon the glider overtook the sun, which set in a reverse dawn. Later they landed on a small sandy island, white in the starlight surrounded by phosphorescent seas.

  The Line was black against the sky. At its base was one small capsule, and a man leaning against it.

  ‘Joel!’

  He grinned his Neanderthaler grin. ‘Hi, Kin.’ ‘I thought you’d gone to be a Sector Master on Cifrador.’

  He shrugged. ‘I was offered it. Didn’t suit me. Come aboard. Robot!’

  ‘SAH!’

  ‘Hook the glider on tow.’ ‘SHO NUFF, SAH!’

  ‘And knock off the slave talk, will you?’

  They climbed up to the Linesman’s cabin and sat down on either side of the central traction tube. Joel Chenge sighed and flicked a switch. There was a jolt, and Line started to flow hypnotically past them as the capsule climbed.

  ‘I’m the new Watcher he
re,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, Joel! Surely not?’ Kin had a sudden feeling that the bottom was dropping out of the universe.

  ‘Surely yes. Just between ourselves, I’m rather looking forward to it. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But I can’t see you—’ Kin stopped.

  —you, she meant, spending centuries in a deep-freeze cabinet on a high-orbit satellite of this world. Never growing older. She could picture it, and it was horrible.

  Robot waldoes hovering eternally with syringes held a few inches from the ice-hard skin, while other robots watched the world below. Looking for certain signs. Fission. Fusion. Space flight. High power use.

  Some worlds made space flight a prime target, hoping to achieve early interstellar recognition. It never worked. Even sub-orbital machines were the apex of a pyramid, huge and old, resting on things like subsistence agriculture. It was no good trying to fly before you could eat.

  Joel leaned over and punched up a meal on the console dumbwaiter, which extruded a laden table. He caught Kin’s eye and grinned again. Joel often grinned. Palaeolithic genes had somehow met again at his conception, and a slab face like Joel’s had to smile frequently lest it frighten small children. When his face brightened it was like the dawn of Man. They spoke, and not merely with words. Between them they were four hundred years old. Now words were mere flatcars on which towered cargoes of nuance and expression.

  Kin looked down at the table again.

  ‘It’s familiar,’ she said. ‘Uh, I’m trying to remember—’

  ‘One hundred and thirty years ago. We got married, remember? On Tynewalde. There was that mad religion—’

  ‘Icarus Risen,’ said Kin suddenly. ‘Hell, I’m sorry. And you even remembered the menu. How romantic.’

  ‘Actually I had to look it up in my diary,’ he said, pouring the wine. ‘Were you my fifth wife? I neglected to make a note.’

  ‘Third, wasn’t it? You were my fifth husband.’

  They looked at one another and burst out laughing.

  ‘Good times, Kin, good times. Three happy years.’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘All right, two. Good grief! That time on Plershoorr, wasn’t it, when we—’

  ‘Don’t dodge. Why a Watcher?’

  The temperature fell like collapsium. Beyond the cabin windows Kingdom was turning from a landscape to a disc, sunlight driving the terminator ahead of it.

  ‘Uh. Life gets a bit stale. On treatment alone I’d never live as long as a Watcher: nice to see a new world grow; see what the future holds; it’ll be as good as visiting a new universe—’

  ‘You’re gabbling, Joel. I know you, remember? I’ve never known you bored. I recall you spending two years learning how to make a wooden cartwheel. You said you’d never rest till you had mastered every skill. You said you’d never learned to spear a seal, or cast copper. You said you were going to write the definitive work on robot pornography. You haven’t, yet.’

  ‘Okay. I’m ducking out because I’m a coward. Is that good enough? Things are going to happen soon, best place’ll be in a freeze box.’

  ‘Things?’

  ‘Trouble.’

  ‘Tro—’ She paused. ‘Chang said that.’

  ‘The big pioneer? I talked to him yesterday, when they were all in orbit. He’s getting out before the storm breaks too.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He told her. Kin had reported the visit of Jalo. She had also reported his ability to produce high-denomination Day notes.

  ‘The Company examined that methuselah bill you sent in, Kin.’

  ‘A forgery.’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Wish it had been. It was – sort of genuine. Only we didn’t print it. The numbers were all wrong. All the codes were wrong. Not inaccurate, you understand. It was just that they aren’t our numbers. We haven’t issued those numbers yet.

  ‘Now think about it. There’s a process for duplicating Company currency. Think what that means, Kin.’

  She thought about it.

  Company scrip was subject to so many hidden checks and codes that any forgery would have to be a duplication. And you couldn’t duplicate a Day bill even by running it through the works of a strata machine, because the Company owned all the machines and one hidden key in every thick plastic note would fuse the whole thing. No one could duplicate Company currency. But if they could—

  Multiple-centenarians would be the first to suffer. Company scrip was so reliable it was a wealth in its own right. But if Day bills were just bits of plastic, if the market was flooded with ten or twenty times the real amount – the Company wouldn’t exist. Its wealth was its credibility, and its credibility was the hardness of its currency.

  Gene surgery merely stopped you dying. You could go on living without the additional treatments that Days would buy, but you would grow old. Immortal, but senile.

  No wonder they were hiding out. Joel was grabbing a sort of immortality, Chang was at least escaping the crash. Probably the less levelheaded were doing things like taking a space walk without a suit.

  There must be millions of us, Kin thought. We complain about never eating a dish we haven’t eaten before and the colours slowly draining out of life. We wonder if the short-lifers live more vividly, and dread learning that they do, because we gave up the chance of children. It would be so unfair. As if a man has only a certain allocation of things like elation and delight and contentment, and the longer he lives the more they must be diluted.

  But life is still sweet and death is just mystery. It is age we dread. Oh hell.

  ‘Did they look for him?’ she said.

  ‘Everywhere. We know he’s been to Earth, because all the Terminus probe records in the Spaceflight Museum have been wiped clean.’

  ‘Then we know nothing about him at all?’

  ‘Right. Find a bolthole, Kin.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘At least Company policy was right. Our worlds will last.’

  ‘One man can’t bring down a civilization,’ said Kin.

  ‘Show me where it says that’s a universal rule,’ he snapped, and then relaxed. ‘This cloak … really invisible?’

  ‘We-ell, if you looked directly, I remember things behind it being just slightly blurred. But you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t expecting it.’

  ‘Useful for old-fashioned espionage, maybe,’ mused Joel. ‘Very odd, though. I don’t think we would make one. You have to have a pretty high technology for that sort of thing, and in a high technology invisibility wouldn’t be a very great asset. So many other things would detect you.’

  ‘I wondered about that,’ said Kin.

  ‘Then all this about matter transmission – all the theories say it isn’t quite possible. The Wasbile double effect almost does it, the same way you can always build an almost-perpetual motion machine.’

  The satellite at the Line’s end was a bright star ahead. Joel glanced down the controls.

  ‘I’d have liked to have met him,’ he said. ‘I read about the Terminus probes when I was a wee lad. Then once when I was on New Earth I went to see Rip Van LeVine’s farm. He was the one who landed on the planet and found—’

  ‘I know about him,’ said Kin.

  If Joel had noted the tone in her voice – and surely he must have done – he didn’t show it. He went on cheerfully. ‘Couple years ago I saw this film they made of the T4 and T6. They’re the ones who are still travelling. There’s a charity on New Earth, every ten years or so they put a couple of ships on a flick-orbit to build up acceleration and—’

  ‘I know about that, too,’ said Kin.

  The ships built up acceleration by diving into New Earth’s sun, then making an Elsewhere jump back a few million miles, then diving, then jumping … and finally popping out of nowhere a few hundred light years away at a light-squashing speed and a few miles from the probes.

  Terminus Four hadn’t decelerated at turnover point, and a fault in Six’s primitive computer had guided it precisely to a star that
wasn’t there. In the normal course of events the pilots would have decomposed centuries ago. Suspended animation had been pretty primitive then, too. But the ailing machinery had long ago been piecemeal replaced, and the visiting crews added refinements every decade or so.

  It wasn’t cheap. It would have been a lot easier to thaw out the pilots and bring them back to a life of luxury. But Rip Van LeVine, the death-and-glory Terminus pilot who after a thousand-year voyage landed on a world settled by Elsewhere-driven ships three hundred years previously, had been a rich man when he suicided. Rich enough to employ good lawyers, and to insist that his trust do everything that could be done for the last two pilots – except wake them.

  ‘The LeVine Trust has us tied in knots,’ said Joel. ‘The first thing the Company thought of was to wake the T4 pilot and ask her about Jalo. They all trained together, so she might know something. But apparently the whole of New Earth would raise hell if we tried it.’

  ‘Joel, what do you think of that idea?’ said Kin.

  He met her gaze. ‘I think it’s despicable, what else?’

  ‘So do I.’

  She stayed at the satellite until Joel had finished setting the system, and watched while he activated the circuit that broke the long-chain artificial molecule that was the Line. Now Kingdom was on its own.

  She didn’t stay to watch him ready the freeze room.

  Her private boat had been left in orbit near Up. Technically she was on leave until she joined the rest of the team at Trenchert, where the advance parties had already cleaned the atmosphere and strengthened the crust. Months ago she had planned to stop off at Momremonn-Spitz for a look at the new Spindle excavations there. There had been rumours of another working strata machine.

  Right now it seemed less than important. She slammed the airlock’s inner door shut behind her.

  ‘Salutations, lady,’ said the ship. ‘The sheets are aired. We are fully fuelled. Shall we run you a bath?’

  ‘Uhuh.’

  ‘We have the course computed. Do you wish a countdown?’

  ‘I think we can dispense with all that excitement,’ said Kin wearily. ‘Just run that bath.’