Strata

do you know it’s Spindle?’
    Jalo reached over and took some snaggleroot.
    ‘It’s flat,’ he said.
    It was possible, Kin conceded.
    The Spindles had not been gods, but they would do until gods showed up. They had evolved on some light world … possibly. The surviving mummies certainly showed them to be three metres tall but weighing only ninety pounds. On worlds as heavy as Earth they wore marvellous exoskeletons to prevent themselves collapsing with multiple fractures. They had long snouts, and hands with two thumbs, legs banded alternately in orange and purple and feet bigenough for a circus clown. They had no brain or, to be more precise, their whole body could act like a brain. No one had ever been able to find a Spindle stomach, either.
    They didn’t look like gods.
    They had cheap transmutation but not FTL travel. Possibly they had sexes, but exobiologists had never found out where little Spindles came from.
    They sent messages by modulating a hydrogen line in the spectrum of the nearest star.
    They were all telepaths and acute claustro-phobes … They didn’t even build houses. Their spaceships were … unbelievable.
    They lived nearly for ever, and to while away the time they visited planets with a reducing atmosphere and played with them. They introduced mutated algae or oversized moons. They force-bred lifeforms. They took Venuses and made Earths, and the reason, once you accepted that Spindles were different, made sense at least to humans. They were spurred by a pressing population problem – pressing, that was, to Spindles.
    One day they had ripped up a planetary crust with a strata machine and found something dreadful – dreadful, that was, to Spindles. In the next two thousand years, as the news spread, they died of injured pride.
    That was 400 million years ago.
    A tug plunged down the Line, the brakingroar leaking through its sonic screen. The Line marshals were cutting the loads adrift a few thousand miles up and sending them on their way by strap-on rocket, to keep Line weight down.
    The tug swung through the switching system and hummed off towards the distant marshalling yards. Kin looked at Jalo with narrowed eyes.
    ‘Flat,’ she said, ‘like an Alderson disc?’
    ‘Maybe. What’s an Alderson disc?’
    ‘No one ever built one, but you hammer all the worlds in a system into a system-wide disc with a hole in the middle for the sun, and you plate the underside with neutronium for gravity, and—’
    ‘Good grief! You can work neutronium now?’
    Kin paused, then shook her head. ‘Like I said, no one’s ever built one. Or found one.’
    ‘This one is not much more than thirteen thousand miles across.’
    Their gazes met. She rolled out the word he was waiting for.
    ‘Where?’
    ‘You’ll never find it without me.’
    ‘And you think it’s a Spindle artefact?’ ‘It’s got things you’d never believe in a million years.’
    ‘You intrigue me. What is your price?’ For an answer Jalo fumbled in a belt pouch and brought out a wad of 10,000 Day bills. Companyscrip was harder than most world currencies. Any one of them represented almost twenty-eight years of extended life if cashed at a Company trading post. The Company’s credit was the best. It paid in extended futures.
    Without taking his gaze off Kin, Jalo summoned the nearest robot waiter and pushed a handful of bills into its disposal hopper. Every instinct cried out to Kin to leap up and grab them back, but even with science on your side one did not live past the first century by obeying instincts. The automatic incinerator would have burned her hand off.
    ‘How …’ she croaked. She cleared her throat. ‘How juvenile,’ she said. ‘Forgeries, of course.’
    He handed her a methuselah bill, the highest denomination issued by the Company.
    ‘Two hundred and seventy years,’ he said. ‘A gift.’
    Kin took the gold and white plastic. Her hands emphatically did not tremble.
    The design was simple, but then there were more than 200 other tests for the authenticity of Company scrip. Nobody forged it. It was widely advertised that any hypothetical forgers would spend all the years that had been fraudulently manufactured, in the Company vaults, passing them in novel and unpleasant ways.
    ‘In my day,’ said Jalo, ‘I would have been called rich, rich, rich.’
    ‘Or dead, dead, dead.’
    ‘You forget I was a Terminus pilot. None of us really believed in the inevitability of our death. Few people do. I have