Strata

out ofgalactic matter, and the RIME, who produced hydrogen as part of their biological processes …
    This was the Theory: that races arose, and changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And then other races arose in the ruins, changed the universe to suit themselves, and died. And other races arose in the ruins – and arose, and arose, all the way back to the pre-Totalic nothingness. Continuously creating. There had never been any such thing as a natural universe.
    (Kin once heard a speaker refer disparagingly to the Spindles because they had manipulated worlds. She stood up and said: ‘So what? If they hadn’t, Earth would still be a mess of hot rocks and heavy clouds. They changed all this and they brought in a big moon, but do you know the best of all? They gave us a past. They jiggered their strata machines to give us fossils of things that had never existed. Icthyosaurs and crinoids and chalk and ancient seas. Maybe they didn’t feel at home unless they had a few hundred metres of fossil strata under them, like they couldn’t feel happy if there was another Spindle within fifty miles. But I think they did it because it was their art. They didn’t know anyone would see it, but they went ahead and did it.’)
    Kin found a quiet moment to explore the weapons hold. If Marco had flown the ship to a world with a shaky government, there wasenough stuff on board to equip a rebel army. There was what looked like a complete missile system, and several racks of small arms that Jalo must have had made to ancient patterns. One handgun
fired
sharp wooden bullets. Why?
    The ship – they never did get round to naming it – dropped into real space. Marco’s hands hovered over the controls as he waited for a welcoming barrage.
    There was nothing. There wasn’t even a star near the ship.
    ‘We’re still on the edge of explored space,’ said Marco. ‘That blue giant there is Dagda Secundus. It’s about half a light year away.’
    ‘Well, here we are and where are we?’ asked Kin. ‘A star like that shouldn’t have planets, especially nice sunny ones.’
    ‘The computer is searching,’ said Marco gloomily. ‘Needle. Haystack. Perhaps we’ll find some iceball whipping along at maybe twenty knots orbital velocity.’
    ‘Meanwhile, we could eat,’ suggested Silver.
    They each dialled their meal from the dumbwaiter and wandered back into the control room.
    ‘Give it an hour,’ said Kin. ‘This area of space has been explored. What the hell can it find that the survey teams missed?’
    ‘I doubt if they looked out here,’ said Silver. There was a brief moment of nausea as the computer flicked the ship a few million miles for a parallax measurement.
    ‘We followed Jalo’s course tape,’ said Marco. ‘I’d hate to have to—’
    The computer chimed. Marco vaulted into the control chair and juggled the screen controls.
    At the limit of magnification there was a small fuzzy hemisphere. They looked at it blankly.
    ‘Just a planet,’ said Kin.
    ‘Rather brightly lit for this distance out,’ agreed Marco. ‘Highly polished ice?’
    Silver coughed apologetically. ‘I am no astronomer,’ she said, ‘but surely it is wrong?’
    ‘Not ice?’ said Marco. ‘Could be Helium IV, I suppose.’
    ‘You misunderstand me,’ said the shand. ‘Surely the light hemisphere should be pointed
towards
the star?’
    They stared at it. Finally Marco exclaimed, ‘Bleeding hell, she’s right!’ He glanced down at the shouter screens. ‘It’s half a billion miles away,’ he said. ‘I should be able to make a straight-line jump. Uh …’
    For a moment four hands hovered like a flight of hawks over the controls.
    And dropped.
    The sky was falling in on them. Then Marco, almost in hypnosis, turned the ship and there, spread out below like a bowl of jewels, was the flat Earth.
    It was like a plate full of continents. A coin tossed into the air by an indecisive god.
    The ship had come out perhaps twenty thousand miles above it, and out of vertical. Kin looked out at a hazy map of black land and silver seas fuzzed with moonlit cloud. There was what, for want of a better term – how many people had mapped flat planets? – a polar cap, hugging one side of the disc.
    Moonlit? There was a moon, apparently a few thousand miles above the disc, and it
shone
. It couldn’t be reflected light. There was nothing to reflect. And there were stars – between the ship and the disc, there were stars.
    The shadowy oval