Strata (4 page)

He vanished like a demon king. When Kin lunged across the table her hands met empty air.

Later she ordered a check on all shuttles going up the Line. Not even an invisible man could have got past the telltales secreted in the gangways. He’d hardly attempt to board a freight shuttle – most were not even pressurized.

He didn’t. Kin realized later that he had bought a ticket under an assumed name and just walked past the security net, flaunting his visibility like a cloak.

The message came twenty-five days later, along with the first wave of colonists.

The main Line had long since gone, winched up into its synchronous-orbit satellite and loaded aboard a freighter. There were still a few cosmetic teams just finishing work at the antipodes.

Around Kin, as she stood on a knoll in the midst of the tangled jungle, the steaming, scent-encrusted land was bare of any obvious human mark. Eight thousand miles under her feet, she knew, men, robots and machines were converging on and boiling up the antipodal wire; soaring into the last of the freighters, a twelve-mile skeleton with one big fusion motor, and leaving the world to the newcomers.

Despite appearances, it would be a planned withdrawal. Last off would be the sweepers, carefully scuffling over the ruts. A Company publicity film had once shown the last man off being winched up a few feet on the Line, then bending back to brush out his footprints. Not true, of course – but it missed the truth by mere inches.

It was a good world. Better than Earth, but they said now that Earth was improving – population up to nearly three-quarters of a billion now, and that didn’t include too many robots.

Better than her childhood. Kin had long ago dispensed with most of her early memories in a periodic editing, but she had kept one or two. She winced as she recalled the oldest.

A hill like this one, overlooking a darkening countryside wreathed in ragged mists, and the sun sinking. Her mother had taken her there, and they stood in the small crowd that was the total population of almost half of a country. Most of them were robots. One of them, a Class Eight, hide criss-crossed with repair welds, lifted her onto its shoulders for a better view.

The dancers were all robots, although the fiddler was human.

Thump, thump went the metal feet on the dark turf, while early bats hunted for insects overhead.

The steps were perfect. How could they be otherwise? There were no men to hesitate or stumble. The world was too full of things for the few humans to do that they should concern themselves with this. Yet they knew that such things must be continued against the day men could once again pick up the reins. Back and forth, crossing and leaping, the robots danced their caretaker Morris.

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 here,’ 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.’