Strata

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 woodencartwheel. 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. Itwould 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