Strata

the bird. Then he dismissed the thought, and wondered instead if either of the others had noticed him hide the magic money purse after Jalo’s death. Just a matter of prudence …
    Silver turned over in the snow hole in her environmentally frozen cabin, and wondered if either of the others had seen her remove the magic purse from Marco’s hideaway and secrete it in one of her own. For later evaluation …
    Kin lay watching the blinking red light that indicated vacuum in the corridor outside her cabin, and felt a vague sympathy for the raven. Then she wondered if either of the others had seen her take the magic purse from the place Silver had hidden it and drop it out of a disposal chute during an Elsewhere jump. By now the purse was barrelling on towards the edge of Universe, propelled by the steady ejection of Day bills from its open mouth.
    Spaced at four arbitrary compass points around the ship were quick-air chambers, installed during its construction to conform with Board of Trade regulations. They meant that, if caught during sudden decompression, a crewman could duck into a chamber instead of having to struggle with a suit. They were a good idea.
    The big red light on each one was supposed to flash so that later rescuers could see it. There was no one to see it now, but one was flashing.
    Inside, both claws gripping the pressuring lever, the raven leaned with its beak pressed against the air vent, and thought about survival.
    During a dull moment, of which any voyage had plenty, Silver once asked the ship’s library to provide her with a copy of Continuous Creation . It couldn’t, but it did furnish this extract from the relevant Ten Worlds Literary Digest – after 167 lines on the book’s contribution towards the rediscovery of paper making.
    ‘The book’s achievement was that it drew together a few dozen strands of research on archeological, paleontological and astronomical fronts, and wove the Theory out of them. It is easy now to say that, of course, the Theory was obvious. Obvious it was, but it was so obvious that it was almost hidden – except to a planetary designer who was used to thinking in terms of secondary creation, and who was also a voracious reader.’ This was the Theory:
    There were the Spindles; telepaths, so telepathic that no more than a thousand of them could occupy a world at a time, because of the mental static. And we humans thought we had a population problem. They left libraries and scientific devices, and it was already known that they could reshape planets more to their liking. They needed room to think. They were proud. When they discovered, on Bery, the remains of a Wheeler strata machine under half a mile of granite, their pride was shattered. Spindles were not, as they had believed, the first lords of Creation – the Wheelers had beaten them to it, half a billion years before. The shock led them to cease reproduction.
    One ship, conveniently stocked with library tapes, had eventually tumbled slowly enough across Earth’s system to be stopped. Inside its meteor-ripped skins were three mummies. They had been the crew. Three crew.
    The ship had been over a hundred milesacross. Most of it had been empty balloon. Room to think …
    The Wheelers were silicon hemispheres, propelling themselves on three natural wheels. Nothing except shell and wheels had survived, but there were, under the granite, the compressed remains of Wheeler cities. Other Wheeler remains began to be discovered.
    Wheelers had recorded traces of an earlier race, the paleotechs. Paleotechs were said to have created the Type II stars and their planets. One of their specialities had been the triggering of novas as a crucible for heavy metal creation. Why? Why not? Paleotechs weren’t easily understandable. (Once, Kin Arad answered to her own satisfaction at least the question of why the paleotechs had created stars. ‘Because they could,’ she said.)
    In one interstellar gulf a ship dropping out of Elsewhere for repairs had discovered a paleotech – dead, at least by human terms (though Kin Arad has pointed out that paleotechs probably lived by a different time scale and that this apparently lifeless hulk may have been very much alive if considered by slow, metagalactic Time). It was a thin-walled tube half a million miles long.
    Wheeler legends spoke of a polished smooth world where paleotechs had inscribed their history, which included the legend of the prepaleotech ChThones, who spun giant stars