The Dark Side of the Sun

'Only predict.' Charles Sub-Lunar, from
The Lights In The Sky Are Photofloods

In the false dawn a warm wind blew out of the east, shaking the dry reed cases.

The marsh mist broke into ribbons and curled away. Small night creatures burrowed hastily into the slime. In the distance, hidden by the baroque mist curls, a night bird screeched in the floating reed beds.

In one of the big lakes near the open sea three delicate white windshells hoisted their papery sails and tacked slowly towards the incoming surf.

Dom waited just beyond the breakers, two metres below the dancing surface, a thin stream of bubbles rising from his gill pack. He heard the shells long before he saw them. They sounded like skates on distant ice.

He grinned to himself. There would only be one chance. Some of those pretty trailing tendrils were lethal. There might never be another chance, ever. He tensed.

And knifed upwards.

The shell bucked violently as he grabbed the blunt prow, and he swung his legs hard over to avoid hitting the dangling green fronds. The world dissolved into a salt-tasting, cold white bubble of foam. Small silver fish slipped desperately past him, and then he was lying across the upper hull.

The shell had gone berserk, flailing with the bony mast in great slow sweeps. Dom watched it, getting his breath back, and then half-leapt, half-scrambled to the big white bulge near the base of the mast.

A shadow passed over him, and he rolled to one side as the mast nicked a furrow in the hull. As it passed he followed it, grabbed at the nerve knot, and pulled himself forward.

His fingers sought for the right spot. He found it.

The shell stopped its frenzied rush through the wavetops, hitting the water again with a slap that jarred Dom's teeth. The sail wavered uncertainly.

Dom continued stroking until the creature was soothed and then stood up.

It didn't count unless you stood up. The best dagon fishers could ride a shell with their toes. How he had envied them - and how carefully he had watched from the family barge on feast days, when the fishermen came in two or three hundred abreast on their half-tame shells with See-Why setting, a bright purple star, into the sea. Some of the younger men danced on their shells, spinning and leaping and juggling torches and all the time keeping the shell under perfect control.

Kneeling in front of the nerve knot he guided the big semi-vegetable back through the twisting waterways of the marsh, through acres of sea lilies and past floating reed islands. On several of them blue flamingoes hissed at him and stalked imperiously away.

Occasionally he glanced up and northwards, searching for tell-tale specks in the air. Korodore would find him eventually, but Dom was pretty certain that he wouldn't pick him up straight away. He'd probably keep him under benevolent observation for a few hours because, after all, Korodore had been young once. Even Korodore. Whereas Grandmother gave the impression that she had been born aged eighty.

Besides, Korodore would bear in mind that tomorrow Dom would be Chairman and legally his boss. Dom doubted if that would influence him one jot. Old Korodore relished duty if it came sternly...

He smiled proudly as the shell cut smoothly through the quiet water. At least the fishermen would not be able to call him a blackhand, even if he wasn't quite a fully-fledged greenhand. That last initiation of the dagon fishermen could only be got out in the deeps, on a moonlit night, when the dagons rose out of the deep with their razor-sharp shells agape.

The shell bumped against the reed bed and Dom leapt lightly ashore, leaving it drifting in the little lagoon.

Joker's Tower, which had been dominating the western sky, loomed up before him. He hurried forward.

See-Why had risen and bathed the slim pyramid in pink light. The mist had left the reed beds round the base but the apex, five miles above the sea, was lost in perpetual cloud. Dom pushed his way through the dry reeds until he was within half a metre of the smooth, milk-white wall.

He reached out gingerly.

Hrsh-Hgn had once, realizing vaguely that interminable lectures on planetary economics might not be palatable fare for a boy, smiled and switched off the faxboard. He had fetched his copy of Sub-Lunar's
Galactic Chronicles
and told Dom about the Jokers.

'Name the races classed as Human under the Humanity Act,' he began.

'Phnobes, men, drosks and the First Sirian Bank,' Dom rattled off. 'Also Class Five robots by Sub-Clause One may apply for Human Status.'

'Yess. And the other racess?'

Dom ticked them off on his fingers. 'Creapii are Super-Human. Class Four robots are sub-human, sundogs are unclassified.'

'Yess?'

'The other races I'm not sure about,' admitted Dom. 'The Jovians and the rest. You never taught me anything about them.'

'It iss not necessary. They are so alien, you undersstand. We share no common ground. Things humanity considers universal among self-aware races - a sense of identity, for example - are merely products of a temperate bipedal evolution. But all the fifty-two races so far discovered arose in the last five million standard years.'

'You told me about that yesterday,' said Dom, 'Sub-Lunar's Theory of Galactic Sapience.'

Then the phnobe had told him about the jokers. The creapii had found the first joker tower and, all else having failed to open it, had dropped a live nigrocavernal matrix on it. The tower was later found to be intact. Three neighbouring stellar systems had been wrecked, however.

The phnobes never discovered a joker tower: they had always known of one. The tower of Phnobis, rising from the sea into the perpetual cloud cover, was the cause and basis of the planet-wide Frss-Gnhs religion - literally, Pillar of the Universe.

Earth-human colonists had found seven, one of them floating in the asteroid belt of the Old Sol system. That was when the Joker Institute was set up.

The young races of men, creapii, phnobe and drosk found themselves watching one another in awe across a galaxy littered with the memories of a race that had died before human time began. And out of that awe arose the legends of Jokers' World, the glittering goal that was to taunt adventurers and fools and treasure hunters across the light years...

Dom touched the tower. There was the faintest tingle, a sudden stab of pain. He leapt back, frantically rubbing life back into his frozen fingers. The coldness of the towers was always greatest at noon, when they drank in heat, yet grew icy.

Dom set off round the tower, feeling the cold reaching out towards him. Looking up he thought he saw the air within a foot of the smooth walls darken, as if light was just a gas and was being sucked in by the spire. It wasn't logical, but the idea had a certain artistic appeal.

Towards noon a security flyer glittered briefly on the western horizon, heading south. Dom stepped sideways into a clump of reeds... And wondered what he was doing in the marsh. Freedom, that was it. The last day of real freedom. His last chance to see Widdershins without a security guard standing on either side of him and a score of more subtle protections all round. He had planned it, down to squashing Korodore's ubiquitous robot insects that spied on him - always for his own protection - in his bedroom.

And now he'd have to go home and face Grandmother. He was beginning to feel just a little foolish. He wondered what he had expected from the tower: some feeling of cosmic awe, probably, a sense of the deeps of Time. Certainly not this sinister, insidious sensation of being watched. It was just like being at home.

He turned back.

There was a hiss of superheated air as something passed his face and struck the tower. Where it hit the frozen wall the heat blossomed into a flower of ice crystals.

Dom dived instinctively, rolled over and over and was up and running. A second blast passed him and a dry seed head in front of him exploded into a shower of sparks.

He stifled the urge to look round. Korodore had schooled him unmercifully in assassination drill. Knowing who was the assassin was small reward for being assassinated. Korodore said, 'The price of curiosity is a terminal experience.
'

At the edge of the lagoon Dom gathered himself and dived. As he hit the water the third blast seared across his chest.

Great bells rang, far out to sea or maybe in his head. The cool greenness was soothing, and the bubbles...

Dom awoke. With an inculcated instinct he kept his eyes closed and tentatively explored his environment.

He was lying on the mixture of sand, ooze, dry reed stems and snail shells that passed for soil on most of Widdershins. He was in shade, and the thunder of surf was very near. And the soil rocked, gently, to the beat of the waves. The air smelled and tasted of salt, mingled with marsh ooze, reed pollen and... something else. It was dank and musty, and very familiar.

Something was sitting a few inches away. Dom opened one eye a fraction and saw a small creature watching him intently. Its dumpy body was covered in pink hair which sprouted from a scaly hide. A snout was a bad compromise between a beak and a prehensile nose. It had three pairs of legs, no two exactly alike. It was almost a Widdershins legend.

Behind Dom someone lit a fire. He tried to sit up and it felt as though a red-hot bar had been laid across his chest.

'O juvindo may psutivi,' said a gentle voice.

A face out of a nightmare appeared above him. The skin was grey and hung in folds under eyes four times the proper size in which small irises stared out like beads in milk. Great flat ears were turned towards Dom. The musty smell was overpowering. The face was set off by a pair of large sungoggles.

The phnobe was trying to speak Janglic. Dom summoned his resources and answered him in jaw-breaking phnobic.

'A sscholar,' said the phnobe
,
dryly. 'My name is Fff-Shs. And you are Chairman Sabalos.'

'Not till tomorrow,' moaned Dom. He winced as the pain came again.

'Ah. Yess. Do not on any account make ssudden movementss. I have treated the burn. It iss superficial.'

The phnobe stood up and walked out of Dom's vision. The small creature still watched him intently.

Dom turned his head slowly. He was lying in a small clearing in the centre of one of the floating islands that thronged the marsh rhines. It was moving slowly and, remarkably, against the wind. From somewhere below the reed mat came the occasional deep pulse of an antique deuterium motor.

A coarse woven net was slung across the clearing, hiding it effectively from airborne eyes. With the motor and the ancillary mechanisms that must be hidden under the thick reed mat the little island would not hold its secret long against even unsophisticated search equipment. But there were several hundred thousand islands in the marsh. Who could search them all?

A conclusion began to form in Dom's mind.

The phnobe passed in front of him and he saw he was holding a double-bladed tshuri knife lightly, tossing it thoughtfully from hand to hand. Dom was mother-naked, except where dry salt rimed his black skin.

The phnobe was embarrassed by his presence. Occasionally he stopped juggling with the knife and stared at him intently.

They both heard the distant swish-swish of a flyer. The phnobe dived sideways, flipped back a section of reed and killed the island's speed, then on the rebound flung himself down by Dom with the knife pressed against his throat.

'Not to utter a sound,' he said.

They lay still until the flyer had faded into the distance.

The phnobe was a pilac smuggler. The dagon fishermen under licence from the Board of Widdershins rode out by the hundred when the big bivalves rose up from the deep, to snatch the pearls of nacreous pilac by the light of the moon. They used lifelines, leather body armour and elaborate back-up procedures - like the factory float which included a hospital where a missing hand was merely a minor mishap and even death not always fatal.

There were other fishers. They traded safety for an odd conception of excitement and accepted as the price of an illegal fortune the complete lack of any opportunity to spend it. By nature they worked alone and were highly-skilled. What they snatched from the sea was theirs alone, including death. Occasionally the Board launched a campaign against them and made half-hearted attempts to stop the pilac being smuggled offworld. Captured smugglers were not killed now - that would certainly be against the One Commandment - but it occurred to Dom that to those of their nature the alternative punishment was far worse than the death they courted nightly. So the smuggler would kill him.