Strata

and made certain amendments. Then, contented, She let Herself forget …
    Kin remembered. The memories were there,cold, hard, real, like shards of ice in the mind. She recalled the Disc.
    ‘The Disc’, she said, her voice flat in the shock of it, ‘is the boot in the coal measure, the coin in the crystal. The filling in the tooth of the tricera-tops. The secret mark that reveals the maker. They couldn’t resist it. They built a perfect universe to specifications, but they couldn’t resist adding the Disc out here, hard to find, but a clue. How do I know ?’ she shouted.
    The screen stayed blank.
    ‘I know it. They weren’t just the Disc builders. They built the lot – the real Earth, kung, all the stars. They laid down our fossils. We thought maybe the Great Spindle Kings had done that, but the Spindle Kings never existed. They were all part of the false strata of the new universe. We wondered if we’d evolved with the help of the Kings. We never evolved! We were created, just like we recreate whales and elephants for our colony worlds.
    ‘We’re a colony universe. The Builders just moved in and built it, and because everyone needs a history, they gave us a history. Just as we do with the new worlds. Ancient bones. Fabulous monsters. Great Spindle Kings, Wheelers. And we never realized it. We did it ourselves, and we never tumbled to it.
    ‘Then one of them built the Disc. Almost as a joke, maybe? Certainly for no important reason. An exercise in ingenuity. It must have been anafterthought, a collection of neat ideas, put together after the main work was done.
    ‘Seventy thousand years! That’s the age of the universe – it’s hardly got its paint scratched! We thought it was four billion years old. The evidence said that it was, and we believed in the evidence.’
    She leaned back. She could still feel the memories there, like old facts forgotten until now. She probed them gingerly, as a tongue explores a hollow tooth.
    ‘Old. Intelligent. Divorced from matter. That’s how I remember the Builders. Each one bigger than we can imagine, or maybe smaller, because – because there would be nothing to measure, except the ego. I said old? Even their age couldn’t be measured, because until they built the universe there was no time. Am I right?’
    WE CANNOT ANSWER THAT QUESTION BRIEFLY. WE KNOW NOTHING OF THEM OTHER THAN THAT WHICH THEY TOLD US .
    ‘What do you know of them, then?’
    BEFORE THEM, THERE WAS ONLY PROBABILITY. THEY IMPOSED A PATTERN ON THAT PROBABILITY .
    ‘Why?’
    YOUR COMPANY BUILDS WORLDS. THERE IS NO REAL NEED. YOUR NATAL WORLD IS NOT OVER-POPULATED. WHY ?
    ‘Once we were overpopulated. And we found that the more people there were, the more they were the same. It was the only way we couldsurvive. People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer one. It wasn’t. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost accountancy, but it didn’t mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no one remembered how to dive for pearls.
    ‘Then the Mindquakes got us. That would have been – yes, a couple of years after the Terminus probes. People just died. Died in their billions, too, their minds just kind of folded in on themselves.
    ‘Afterwards, we had to start over. At least we had all the toys of the Spindle Kings to play with, and we could spread out – we had to spread out, after the Quakes. They made us look hard for mental elbow room, new worlds where we could flee and learn the forgotten ways. We had built robots to remember some of them for us!
    ‘We thought it was natural, a trodden path. You see, we had the example of the Spindle Kings. We thought that any intelligent species filled its home world until the sheer mind pressure started killing them off, and then the survivors embarked on interstellar colonization; whatever way they rationalized it, the real reason would be a fierce desire to escape from other people. And then, since usable worlds aren’t that common, they’d start to learnplanetary engineering. Oh, we had it all carefully calculated. Race after race, fruiting and bursting across the evolving galaxy, creating new worlds before they died and in the process making new seed beds for new races. I wrote a book about it, called Continuous Creation , haha.’
    NOW YOU CAN WRITE THE SECOND EDITION .
    ‘It’ll be a bit short, I’m damn sure about that. What can I