'What would happen if the pilot made a mistake and the beam missed the bowl?'

Kin considered this. 'I don't know,' she said. 'We'd certainly never find the pilot.'

The flyer skimmed over some more islands. Vatbred dolphins, still frisky after their journey in the megatanker, looped through the waves alongside its shadow. Blast Continuous Creation!

But at the time it had seemed a good idea. Besides, she had done just about everything else but write a book. The actual writing hadn't been difficult. The real problem had been learning how to make paper, then hiring a staff of robots and setting them to building a printing press. It had been the first book printed in 400 years. It had caused quite a stir.

So had the words inside the expensively produced card covers. They said nothing new, but somehow she had managed to assemble current developments in geology in such a way that they had struck fire. According to reports the book had even been the basis for a couple of fringe religions.

She looked sideways at her passenger. She was unable to trace his accent -- he spoke meticulously, like someone who had just taken a learning tape but hadn't had any practice. His clothes could have been bought out of a machine on a dozen worlds. He didn't look mad, but they never did.

'So you've read my book,' she said conversationally.

'Hasn't everyone?'

'Sometimes it seems so.'

He turned red-rimmed eyes to her.

'It was OK,' he said. 'I read it on the ship coming here. Don't expect any compliments. I've read better.'

To her disgust Kin felt herself reddening.

'No doubt you've read plenty,' she murmured.

'Several thousand,' said Jalo. Kin kicked the flyer on to automatic and spun round in her seat.

'I know there aren't even hundreds of books; all the old libraries are lost!'

He cringed. 'I did not mean to offend.'

'Who do--'

'It isn't necessary for an author to make the paper,' said Jalo. 'In the old days there were publishers. Like filmy factors. All the author did was write the words.'

'Old days? How old are you?'

The man shifted in his seat. 'I can't be precise,' he said. 'You've changed the calendar around a few times. But as near as I can make out, about eleven hundred years. Give or take ten.'

'They didn't have gene surgery in those days,' said Kin. 'No-one is that old.'

'They had the Terminus probes,' said Jalo quietly.

The flyer passed over a volcanic island, the central cone fuming gently as a tech squad tested it out. Kin stared at it unseeing, her lips moving.

'Jalo,' she said. 'Jalo! I thought the name was familiar! Hey... the big thing about the Terminus ships was that they would never come back...'

He grinned at her, and there was no humour in it. 'Quite correct,' he said. 'I was a volunteer. We all were, of course. And quite mad. The ships were not equipped to return.'

'I know,' said Kin, 'I read a filmy. Ugh.'

'Well, you've got to see it against the background of the times. It made a kind of sense, then. And of course, my ship didn't come back.'

He leaned forward.

'But I did.'

The Ritz was in the unofficial city that had grown up around what had been the first and was now the last Line. Now even the city was breaking up, being towed back up the wire to the big freighters in orbit. In another month the last Company employee would follow it. The last snowfield would have been laid. The last humming-birds would have been released.

Their conversation on the roof garden of the restaurant was punctuated by the slap and rattle of yellow tugs climbing the Line two kilometres away, towing strings of redundant warehouses like beads on a wire. They were soon lost in the cirrus, bound for Line Top.

Kin had ordered framush, saddleback of loom and breasens. Jalo had read the menu intently and had ordered, in frank disbelief, a dodo omelette. He looked now as though he regretted it.

Kin watched him pick at it, but her mind persisted in showing her pictures. She remembered the bell-shaped bulk of a Terminus probe, the pilot's life-system a tiny sphere at the tip. She remembered the frightening logic that had led to the building of the monsters. It went like this

It was far better to send a man into space than a machine. In the complete unknown, a man could still evaluate and decide. Machines were fine for routine, but they flipped when presented with the unforeseen.

It was cheap to send a machine because it did not breathe and it sent its information back alone.

Whereas a man breathed, all the time. This was expensive.

But it was very cheap to send a man if you did not arrange to bring him back.

'Is that celery in the jug?' said Jalo.

'It's snaggleroot shoots,' said Kin. 'Don't eat the yellow bits, they're poisonous. Now, do I have to sit here waiting? Speak to me,' she murmured, 'of the Great Spindle Kings.'

'I only know what I read,' said Jago. 'And most of what I read, you wrote. Can I eat these blue things?'

'You've found a Spindle site?' Only nine Spindle sites had been found. Ten, if you included the derelict ship. The prototype strata machine had been found on one. So had the details of gene surgery. No wonder more people studied palaeontology than engineering.

'I found a Spindle world.'

'How 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 big enough 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 claustrophobes... 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 2,000 years, as the news spread, they died of injured pride.

That was 400 million years ago.

A tug plunged down the Line, the braking roar 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.'