Strata

all she noticed the silver disc on his forehead, glinting in the first rays of sunlight.
    He topped the rise still breathing evenly, pacing himself with the effortless self-control of most centenarians. He grinned, exposing teeth filed to points.
    ‘Kin Arad?’
    ‘Bjorne Chang?’
    ‘Well, we’re here. Ten thousand of us today. You make some good air – what’s the smell?’
    ‘Jungle,’ Kin said. ‘Fungi. Decaying pumas. Purple scents from the flowers of hidden orchids.’
    ‘You don’t say. Well, we shall have to see about that,’ he replied evenly.
    She laughed. ‘I’m frankly surprised,’ she said. ‘I had expected some jut-jawed young fellow with a plough in one hand …’
    ‘… and a model constitution in the other. I know, I know. Someone like that headed up the colony on Landsheer. Did you hear about Land-sheer?’
    ‘I saw pictures.’
    ‘Did you know they spent a week arguing about forms of government? And the first thing they built was a church. And then the winter hit them. And I’ve been up there in the northern continent in the winter. You make your winters cruel.’
    Kin started to stroll down, Chang loping along beside her.
    ‘We did not want them to die,’ she said at last. ‘We told them about weather patterns.’
    ‘You didn’t tell them that the universe is unfair . They were too young to be properly paranoid.’
    ‘And you?’
    ‘Me? I think even I’m out to get me. That’s why these people have hired me. I’m going on 190. I don’t want to die, so I will watch the weather like a hawk, and only swim in shallow water, and eat nothing until I’ve seen a complete laboratory analysis. I’ll even duck in case of meteorites. I’ve got a five-year contract down here, and I intend to survive it.’
    Kin nodded. His self-confidence reassured even her.
    But she also knew it wasn’t quite so simple. In theory, the older you grew the more careful you were to stay near a gene surgery and the local Company store, where your Days could be cashed for carefully-calculated longevity treatment – at the guaranteed rate of twenty-four standard hours extra life per Day. Only the Company paid in Days, and only the Company gave the treatment. Textbook economics followed that the Company owned everywhere and everybody.
    But textbook economics also spoke of the law of diminishing returns. At twenty you acted circumspectly, taking no risks, because if you worked for the Company you had centuries ahead of you. A shame to throw them away by fast driving or high living.
    At 200, who cared? You’d been everywhere, done everything. All new experiences were just old experiences, rearranged. By 300 you were probably dead. Not quite by suicide, however – not quite. You just climbed higher and higher mountains, or free-fell higher and longer, or back-packed across Mercury the difficult way, and sooner or later the odds ran out.
    Boredom drove you frenetic. Death was Nature’s way of telling you to slow down.
    That’s
why Chang led a party of green-hand colonists to a new world. There was reallynothing to lose except a life stretched thin by endless living.
    ‘We don’t build pleasure planets,’ said Kin. ‘You’ll have to win this one.’
    A glider drifted overhead and was lost among the treetops.
    ‘They’ll hate it first,’ said Chang. ‘That thing’s got all the supplies in it, the blankets and the dumbwaiters. I told control to land it ten miles away. It’s a nice day. A walk will do us good, and we can see who is the type to tread on poisonous spiders.’
    ‘What will you do when the five years is up?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t know, probably stay and become the Grand Old Man for a while. Anyway, by then I’ll have this place too civilized for my own comfort.’
    ‘Hmm? Reme wasn’t built in a day.’
    ‘I wasn’t a foreman on that job.’
    The colonists were watching her silently. No gene surgery, no treatment, no Company store – yet they had volunteered. Not one in ten of them would see a century.
    They would have the immortality granted to simple people. There would be children. There were few enough children now, even on Earth. Genes would survive, while conditions on this world worked their own surgery on them. Hammered on the anvil of a different sun and moon, in a thousand years the peoplehere would be different . Just different enough, according to the Plan.
    ‘Here’s where we say goodbye,’ said Kin, reaching for the pouch at her belt. ‘Here’s the Deed,