Kin Arad

For two hundred and ten years she thought she was a loyal Company woman. Then she met Jago Jalo and things started to change.

She works for the Company as a Sec-Exec, overseeing not so much the terraforming (that's primary school stuff) as the creation of planets. Completed planets are then ceremonially turned over to colonists to facilitate the expansion of the human race throughout known space.

She is also responsible for the best-selling filmy Continuous Creation, which is also available as a book, now that the human race has re-learnt the secret of making paper and binding it between hard covers. (again re-introduced by Arad)

In her wilder days, she once built a mountain range in the shape of her initials and nearly got fired, which makes her sympathetic to young Strata-machine operators and their mixers who are tempted to add unofficial little touches, like fossilized plesiosaur skeletons clutching placards that read End Nuclear testing Now!.

In appearance she is barely out of her twenties with very dark skin, but wears the golden badge on her forehead which announces she is a double-centenarian. (single-centenarian wear silver) That's a wig, by the way: hair is the one thing that doesn't survive rejuvenation treatment.

She is older than twenty-nine worlds, fourteen of which she helped to build. Like all bicetenarians who have got to the point where they've done nearly everything and eaten every known dinner at least once, she is a little bit bored with her job and receptive to a new challenge, one that might even carry a real danger of death, just to spice it up. When Jalo turns up with what appears to be a forged Dayscrip which are so good that they threaten to undermine the economic security of the Company, a new challenge presents itself...