The Dark Side of the Sun (4 page)

She tiptoed to the door and returned with a servant robot, which carried a small box.

'He's a Class Five. One of our best,' she said proudly.

'A robot?' said Dom, who had been looking expectantly at the box.

'Strictly speaking, he's a humanoid. Completely alive, merely mechanical. Do you like him?'

'Very much!' Dom walked up to the tall metallic figure and prodded the broad chest. The robot glanced down at him.

'I wonder what makes us build inefficiently-shaped human robots instead of nice streamlined machines?'

'Pride, sir,' said the robot.

'Hey, that's not bad. What's your name?'

'I understand it is Isaac, sir.'

Dom scratched his head. The home domes swarmed with robots, mostly kind but stupid Class Threes whom Dom remembered from earliest childhood as sad, boring voices with firm, child-minding hands. His mother, who seldom left her own dome, disliked them generally and did her own cooking. She said they were morons, and not a bit like the real things from Laoth. He was at a loss.

'Uh, can you be a bit more informal, Isaac?'

'Sure thing, boss.'

'I can see you two are going to get along fine, trying to out-think each other,' said Keja. 'Now I've got to go. And Grandmother says you've got to go down to the main dome, Dom. For the Working Breakfast.'

Dom sighed. 'I've had about twenty lectures about it from Hrsh-Hgn in the last few days.'

Keja stopped dead.

'What's that thing?' she cried, pointing to the basin.

Dom lifted the damp creature out by the scruff of its neck.

'It's a swamp ig. I
call
him
I
g. I
was—I
found—I,
er
...' he blinked nervously. 'I
think
I found him in the marshes yesterday. I—er—things seem a little confused.'

She looked at him, and Dom saw the concern in her eyes.

'It's all right,' he mumbled,
'It's
just
the excitement.'

'I guess so,' Keja said, and looked down at Ig.

'Anyway, he's so ugly!'

'Excuse me, madam, sir, but he is an it,' boomed the robot. 'Hermaphrodite. Oviparous. Semi-poikothermic. I have been supplied with a complete program on Widdershins life forms, sir. Chief. Right on.'

'Well, don't blame me if you catch a
zoonose,' said Keja, and flounced out of the dome. Dom looked at Isaac.

'Zoonose?'

'Disease communicable to humans. No chance, buster.' Isaac strode up to Dom and held out the box. The boy dropped his pet, who began to sniff at the robot's foot, and opened it.

'It's the certificate of warranty, workshop manual and deed of property,' said Isaac. Dom looked at them blankly.

'Do you mean I have to ow
n
you?'

'Body and hypothetical supernatural appendage, boss,' said the robot hurriedly, stepping backwards when Dom held the box towards him.

'Oh no, chief. You've got to. I don't approve of self-ownership.'

'Chel, that's what most humans fought for for three thousand years!'

'But we robots know exactly why we were created, boss. No striving to find the innermost secrets of our creation. No problem.'

'Don't you want to be free?'

'What? And have God blame the Universe on me? Shouldn't you go down to the main dome now?'

Dom whistled, and Ig scrambled up and went to sleep round his neck. He glared up at the robot and strode out of the dome.

Tradition decreed the Working Breakfast be taken alone by the Chairman on the day of his investiture. As he walked along the deserted corridors Dom had the comfortably familiar feeling he was being watched. Old Korodore had the place seeded with pinheads and robot insects - it was dome gossip that he even ran security checks on himself.

The main dome was half clear plastic, facing out across the orchards, the lagoon and marshes and finally, a thin line on the horizon, the Joker's Tower with a wisp of white cloud streaming from its tip like a banner. Dom stared at it for a few seconds, trying to hold an elusive memory.

A pile of presents - he was, after all, half a whole Widdershins year old - were heaped around the long table. Two robots-in-waiting stood on either side of the single place setting.

Dom had planned the meal time and again. In the end he had chosen the menu that had been eaten by every Chairman of Widdershins. It was a famous meal. According to the Newer Testament, it was the same meal that Sadhim Himself ate when he became Lord of Earth - a quarter-loaf of brown bread, a strip of salt dried fish, an apple and a glass of water.

There were some slight differences. The flour for Dom's loaf had been freighted in from Third Eye. The fish was truly Widdershin, but the salt had been mined on Terra Novae. The apple was from the Earth's Avalon, the water melted from a particle of comet. In all, the meal cost about two thousand standards. Some kinds of simplicity cost more than others.

Korodore, a true-born Terra Novaean, which meant food concentrates, watched Dom eat with a slight feeling of nausea. The camera was in a metal mosquito, high in the dome. He thumbed a switch, and the screen faded in a view from a mechanical shrew in the branches of a tree on the edge of the west lawn. Most of the guests had already arrived, and were mingled around the long buffet table.

At least half of them were phnobes, many of them from the
buruku
colonies around Tau City. Korodore recognized the diplomats - they were tall, dark alpha-males, carrying sunshades. The less exalted, who were more acclimatized to the light, stood in small, silent groups around the lawn. Korodore switched from pinhead to pinhead until he located Hrsh-Hgn, reading a memory cube in the shade of a balloon tree. The Stoics, probably.

Behind Korodore the darkness of the big security room glowed here and there as the other security officers watched. Only Korodore knew that under the horticultural dome by the north lawn was another, smaller security room checking on this one. And occasionally he switched to his own private circuit and watched the officers there. And, hidden by him in a place the exact location of which he had scrubbed from his mind, was a small biocomputer. He had programmed it carefully. It watched him.

He turned back to the guests. Here and there a big gold egg now showed in the crowd - the Creapii ambassadors. Experience suggested that there was no risk in them. They seldom meddled in the affairs of worlds where water liquefied.

One was holding a dish of silicate-salt hors d'oeuvres in a single armoured tentacle. Occasionally it held one to the complicated airlock on its circumference. It was chatting to Joan I, who stood majestic in the black memory velvet and purple tabard of a Sadhimist Dame-Priestess in the negative aspect of Nocticula-Hecate. Lady of Night and Death, thought Korodore. It was not a tactful choice.

She smiled at the Creapii and turned to face the hidden camera, raising one hand. Korodore reached out and tipped a switch.

'How goes it?' Joan asked. Korodore watched fascinated - she had a remarkable talent for sub-vocalizing.

'He is breakfasting. We have treble-checked the food and everything else.'

'Has he shown any effects from yesterday?'

Korodore paused. 'No. While he slept I used a brain scrubber on him. I—'

'It will keep yesterday's memories in a state of flux for a few hours. Would you prefer him to learn the truth? He would, had I not done so - even if he had to brow-beat it out of Hrsh-Hgn.'

'You should have asked me!'

Korodore sighed, and picked up a memory cube on the console. 'I'm sorry, madam, but you have a security rating now of only 99.087 per cent. I checked. Probably it's only deep Freudian impulses - but from now on I am afraid I must run this show.

'Like I said, madam, I'm not inclined to accept probability maths. You may, if you like.'

He switched off. She stood rigid for a moment, trying to contact him, then turned and began to talk brightly to a tall diplomat from the Board of Earth.

Korodore turned his attention to the main hall. Dom wasn't there. His heart stopped until he realized that the boy had also moved out of one camera's range to look at his presents.

Dom opened the first package and drew out a pair of gravity sandals, glistening under their thin coat of oil. The tag said: 'From your Godfather. Come up and orbit me some time. It gets damn lonely.'

Dom grinned and buckled them on. For a hectic few minutes he bobbed and swooped among the struts of the dome, gliding to an unsteady halt six inches above the floor. He felt that the sandals would probably be the climax - most of the other presents would be much less interesting.

From Hrsh-Hgn came a fat rectangle. Dom unwrapped a memory cube and ran his finger over the index face. The cube lit up, the title page standing out in white letters a few centimetres above the surface and revealing: The Glass Castles: A History of Joker Studies, by Dr Hrsh-Hgn. Dedicated to Chairman Dominickdaniel Sabalos of Widdershins.'

In smaller letters Dom read: 'Number One in a limited edition of one (1) imprinted on Third Eye saffron-silica.'

'A high honour, indeed,' said Isaac. Dom nodded, and thumbed the cube at random to read:
'... mystery of the galaxy. As Sub-Lunar has said, to the imaginative mind they form part of galactic mythology: the Glass Castles at the back of the Galactic North Wind. These towers, built before the oldest of the official Human races had discovered the uses of stone, are memorials to a race which—'

Dom laid the cube down slowly and opened the present from Korodore.

'That looks dangerous,' said Isaac.

Dom wielded the memory sword carefully, staring up at the almost invisible blur as it changed under his touch from sword to knife, from knife to gun.

'Hm,' said Dom, 'They use swords on Earth and Terra Novae, don't they? And on Laoth, too?'

'Yes, with metal blades. They're more ceremonial and satisfying than guns. But that thing is made to kill people with. Not that I'm putting it down, boss.'

Dom grinned. 'You're mighty uppity for a robot, aren't you? In the old days you'd have been dismantled by the mob.'

'In the old days robots were considered to be non-living, chief.'

Joan's present was a simple black Sadhimist athame against the time when he should be admitted to membership of a ceremonial klatch, while from his mother he received the deeds of one of her personal estates on Earth. It was far too generous, and typical of Lady Vian on those occasions when she remembered Dom.

There were other presents from the minor directors and heads of sub-committees, most of them expensive - far
too expensive to be allowed to keep, even if Joan would permit it. But Dom looked wistfully at the deeds of a robot horse, presented by Hugagan of Planetary Relations. Isaac peered over his shoulder and sneered audibly.

'Lunar manufacture,' he said, 'All right, I suppose, but not a patch on the ones we make on Laoth. They
li
v
e
.'

Dom glanced at him.

'I shall have to visit Laoth,' he said.

'The jewel of the universe, take it from me.'

Dom laughed and made sure that Ig had a good purchase on his shoulder. Then he thumbed the control ring and the sandals lifted him up, through the dust-laden beams that filled the dome, and out over the sea.

He spiralled low over the lagoon, where Lady Vian's little tame windshells grazed, and felt Ig scramble around his neck. He glanced backwards and saw the little animal was riding him comfortably, pointed snout sniffing the wind.

Below him he watched the shells cease their grazing and swing into a pattern so that, prow to stern, they formed a circle. Vian spent hours drumming simple tricks into their microscopic minds.

Something stirred restlessly at the back of his memory, but he dismissed it carelessly and sought altitude.

He burst through the balloon trees ringing the lawn, bursting the fruits recklessly, and braked a bare inch above the grass.

Joan I strode across the lawn to meet him, and kissed him with rather more tenderness than usual. He looked into her grey eyes.

'Well, grandson, and how do you feel this day?'

'I feel on top of the world, madam, thank you. But I must say you look rather tired.' She's acting like a cool-head, he thought - why is she so worried?

She smiled wanly. 'It is always hard when one's descendants make their way out into the world. Now you must come and meet people.'

Lady Vian had walked slowly up, her face hidden in a heavy grey veil. She extended a white hand. Dom knelt and kissed it.

'So,' she said, 'Enter the master of the world. Who is your ferrous friend?'

'Isaac, my lady,' said Dom, 'An uppity robot who doesn't want his freedom.'

'But of course,' said Vian, 'We are all of us in chains, even if they be only of chance and entropy. Have not the Jokers put even the stars in chains?'

'You have a fine grasp of essentials,' said Isaac, bowing.

'And you are presumptuous, robot. But I thank you. Dom, I wish you would donate that swamp creature to a museum or a zoo or something. It is so
animal.
'

Ig scratched himself and sniffed - then gave a long drawn out hiss. Dom looked over his mother's shoulder and caught the eye of a tall man in a long blue cloak, who wore a heavy gold collar at his neck. The man's face was creased with laughter lines, and he winked at Dom and gestured upward with his glass. Dom followed his gaze and saw a flock of flamingoes wheeling high over the domes. For a moment they formed a circle. Then, with long slow wingbeats, they flew out to sea.

Korodore sat back and breathed deeply. Short of poisoning the air - and a filter haze surrounded the lawn - the only way someone could attack Dom now was with bare hand or tentacle. At least, they could try, before concealed strippers separated them from their component molecules.