Strata

struck fire. According to reports the book had even been the basis for a couple of fringe religions.
    She looked sideways at her passenger. She was unable to trace his accent – he spoke meticulously, like someone who had just taken a learning tape but hadn’t had any practice. His clothes could have been bought out of a machine on a dozen worlds. He didn’t look mad, but they never did.
    ‘So you’ve read my book,’ she said conversationally.
    ‘Hasn’t everyone?’
    ‘Sometimes it seems so.’
    He turned red-rimmed eyes to her.
    ‘It was okay,’ he said. ‘I read it on the ship coming here. Don’t expect any compliments. I’ve read better.’
    To her disgust Kin felt herself reddening.
    ‘No doubt you’ve read plenty,’ she murmured.
    ‘Several thousand,’ said Jalo. Kin kicked the flyer on to automatic and spun round in her seat.
    ‘I know there aren’t even hundreds of books; all the old libraries are lost!’
    He cringed. ‘I did not mean to offend.’
    ‘Who do—’
    ‘It isn’t necessary for an author to make the paper,’ said Jalo. ‘In the old days there were publishers. Like filmy factors. All the author did was write the words.’
    ‘Old days? How old are you? ’
    The man shifted in his seat. ‘I can’t be precise,’ he said. ‘You’ve changed the calendar around a few times. But as near as I can make out, about eleven hundred years. Give or take ten.’
    ‘They didn’t have gene surgery in those days,’ said Kin. ‘No one is that old.’
    ‘They had the Terminus probes,’ said Jalo quietly.
    The flyer passed over a volcanic island, the central cone fuming gently as a tech squad tested it out. Kin stared at it unseeing, her lips moving.
    ‘Jalo,’ she said. ‘Jalo! I thought the name was familiar! Hey … the big thing about the Terminus ships was that they would never come back …’
    He grinned at her, and there was no humour in it. ‘Quite correct,’ he said. ‘I was a volunteer. We all were, of course. And quite mad. The ships were not equipped to return.’
    ‘I know,’ said Kin, ‘I read a filmy. Ugh.’
    ‘Well, you’ve got to see it against the background of the times. It made a kind of sense, then. And, of course, my ship didn’t come back.’
    He leaned forward.
    ‘But I did.’
    The Ritz was in the unofficial city that had grown up around what had been the first and was now the last Line. Now even the city was breaking up, being towed back up the wire tothe big freighters in orbit. In another month the last Company employee would follow it. The last snowfield would have been laid. The last humming-birds would have been released.
    Their conversation on the roof garden of the restaurant was punctuated by the slap and rattle of yellow tugs climbing the Line two kilometres away, towing strings of redundant warehouses like beads on a wire. They were soon lost in the cirrus, bound for Line Top.
    Kin had ordered framush, saddleback of loom and breasens. Jalo had read the menu intently and had ordered, in frank disbelief, a dodo omelette. He looked now as though he regretted it.
    Kin watched him pick at it, but her mind persisted in showing her pictures. She remembered the bell-shaped bulk of a Terminus probe, the pilot’s life-system a tiny sphere at the tip. She remembered the frightening logic that had led to the building of the monsters. It went like this:
    It was far better to send a man into space than a machine. In the complete unknown, a man could still evaluate and decide. Machines were fine for routine, but they flipped when presented with the unforeseen.
    It was cheap to send a machine because it did not breathe and it sent its information back alone.
    Whereas a man breathed, all the time. This was expensive.
    But it was very cheap to send a man if you did not arrange to bring him back.
    ‘Is that celery in the jug?’ said Jalo.
    ‘It’s snaggleroot shoots,’ said Kin. ‘Don’t eat the yellow bits, they’re poisonous. Now, do I have to sit here waiting? Speak to me’, she murmured, ‘of the Great Spindle Kings.’
    ‘I only know what I read,’ said Jago. ‘And most of what I read, you wrote. Can I eat these blue things?’
    ‘You’ve found a Spindle site?’ Only nine Spindle sites had been found. Ten, if you included the derelict ship. The prototype strata machine had been found on one. So had the details of gene surgery. No wonder more people studied paleontology than engineering.
    ‘I found a Spindle world.’
    ‘How