Strata (29 page)

‘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 an afterthought, 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 could survive. 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 learn planetary 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 say? “The lights in the sky are scenery”?’

WHY
NOT
?

‘You haven’t told me why the – Builders built.’

The words flashed on to the screen immediately, as if the Computers had been preparing them.

HUMANS
ARE
INQUISITIVE.
THAT
IS
A
FUNCTION OF
THEIR
HUMANITY.
THE
BEINGS
THAT
BUILT
THIS UNIVERSE
DID
SO
BECAUSE
IT
WAS
UNTHINKABLE THAT
THEY
SHOULD
NOT.
CREATION
IS
NOT
A THING
THAT
GODS
DO,
IT
IS
SOMETHING
THAT THEY
ARE
.

‘And afterwards? What did they do next?’

There was white water around the ship. Kin could see a little tree-shrouded island beyond one port, a humped black shape in the twilight, and could feel the hull bouncing over the water.

The sky wheeled. There was no jolt, it was simply that now the floor was just a wall. Foam covered the ports for a moment, and then Kin could look – down.

The Rimfall hung before them, looking exactly like a luminous white road. Marco in the pilot’s seat was outlined against it, and Kin could see that he had instinctively braced himself with his feet scrabbling for a hold.

Down, way down, there was a ball of fire in the sky. The Disc was in darkness now, but the little orbiting sun was giving a brief day to the face of the waterfall. While Kin watched, it climbed above her and disappeared as the ship overtook it.

Later there was a cloud at the limit of vision. It stayed there for a while, then raced up the glittering stream at a speed that made Kin flinch. There was the faintest of lurches and a second’s darkness as the ship left the water behind at the molecule sieve, and then there were stars.

There was a long hiss from Marco. It may have been a sigh of relief.

Silver said, ‘I would have felt happier if the Computers had been able to arrange a more conventional launching, but I must admit that it had style.’

‘From their point of view that was the most efficient way,’ said Kin. The sky spun again as Marco turned the ship so that ‘down’ was where long tradition had always put it, in the region of the feet.

Silver unfastened her couch straps, then looked across at Kin. ‘We built the universe, didn’t we,’ she said.

‘Not
us
precisely, these lumps of bone and brain, but the thing in us that makes us what we are. The thing that dreams while the rest of us is asleep.’

Kin smiled. ‘The Computers wouldn’t tell,’ she said. ‘But yes, you’re right. I think the Computers had a certain extra function, they could suppress all the mental static so the – oh hell, why avoid the word? – so that the god inside could surface just for a while and perform. That’s why practically anyone could be the Disc master. If Jago Jalo had tried the helmet, he’d be there still.’

‘No one will believe you,’ said Marco, without turning his head.

‘I’m not sure that would be a tragedy,’ said Kin. ‘The Disc was put there as a hoax, or a hint. No one has to believe it. We’ll build a planet for the Disc people and transfer them, and that is the thing that needs to be done.’

The challenge warmed her. The building of a new Earth; so carefully done that the Disc people could be transferred and not know it. There’d have to be new continents designed, and the Disc people would have to be put into a freeze-sleep until some of their number had bred enough to populate them. It could take a thousand years. There’d be a whole solar system to drag into place, great planets around far stars to be ringed in some vast fields and flipped across light years.

Buffaloes to be designed. Life wouldn’t be boring.

Would what the Computers could tell them pay for it? It would.

They slept and they ate, while the ship dipped under the monstrous shadow in the sky. The little toiling sun shed no light on the blackness as it swung across it.

Presently the far edge of the Rimfall began to grow larger. Marco slid back into his seat and spoke to the ship’s little brain.

‘Okay,’ he reported, ‘major burn coming up. This is where we say goodbye, so get into those couches. The Committee are timing this one for us.’

It took ten minutes of slight discomfort, listening to the faint roar from the outrigger jets. Kin heard a sigh from Marco’s couch as the engines shut off.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Now we hit the hole, or we miss the hole. I never thought I’d have to worry about running into the wall of the universe.’

The Rimfall raced past a few thousand miles away, phosphorescent in the light of the full moon. Even Marco took a deep breath as the ship rose above the edge of the Disc and plunged towards the sky.

The Disc was a design of white and black, a silver and ebony coin floating under a sky wild with stars.

The stars were getting nearer. The moon became a pearl hovering over the Disc, and the stars were
definitely
getting nearer.

The hole that Jago Jalo had cut in the Vault of Heaven had been big enough for the ring ship to go through, and this one was much smaller. But it would be approaching it at a low angle.

The Computers had told Marco that the hole would be wide enough. They had told Kin the same, but had added their estimate of the distance to spare. Kin hadn’t dared pass it on to Marco. The minimum clearance was a little less than a metre.

She found she was staring ahead, searching the sky. The other two were doing the same. Stars were drifting overhead. While Kin watched, their silent, snowflake movement became a brisk race.

Then they were a blur. There was the briefest impression of something around the ship as a star swelled, blazed and disappeared. A slight shudder marked the demise of one of the outrigger jets, knocked off against the edge of the sky.

Then there were stars again, deceptively similar, and the ship was dropping into the gulf.

She could hear Marco breathing noisily. Silver was humming a tune in a rolling baritone.

Kin watched the stars she knew were only seventy thousand years old, marginally older than their cousins hanging from the Vault of Heaven. Stars were just lights in the sky, but bigger skies demanded bigger stars.

Kin thought about the second edition. The ship fell onwards, into the scenery.

THE
END

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