Strata

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 touse 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.’
    ‘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