The Dark Side of the Sun (7 page)

Dom backed away as she walked forward.

'But the first time I dived into the marsh and I turned up forty kilometres away. The second time something saved enough of me from that thing - someone's trying to save me, too! I want to find out who, and why.'

He took another step back and let the door slide across. Then he turned and ran.

'SADHIMISM: the pantheistic/conservation religion founded in cold blood by Arte Sadhim (q.v.), the ruler of Earth from 2001-12. Contemporary documents suggest that he devised the dogmas, beliefs and rituals of Sadhimism in a day and a night, incorporating gobbets wrenched wholesale from druidism, the marginally-surviving witchcraft practices, voodoo and the Survival Handbook for Spaceship Earth. As a religion it worked well and achieved its purpose, which was solely to impress environmental thinking deeply on human minds, and then developed a life of its own and became greater than its creator. Sadhim himself was ritually murdered by a breakaway sect called the Little Flowers of the Left-hand Path on the eve of Good Friday - the Night of the Long Athames
...'

Charles Sub-Lunar:
Religions of a Hundred Worlds.

Dom lay on his bed, reading a long rambling letter from Keja. She was glad to hear that he was better; life on Laoth was quite pleasant, and there would be a state visit to Earth soon, and she had seen snow for the first time – and enclosed a refrigerated cube in which several snowflakes were preserved - and dear Ptarmigan had built her a garden that Dom really ought to see ...

Isaac slipped in on well-oiled feet.

'Well?'

'There's guards all over the place, boss. I can't find that gecky frog anywh—'

'That's shape-hatred talk, Isaac.'

'Sorry, chief. The cook says he's left the domes and moved down to the
buruku.'

Dom buckled on his grav sandals. 'We're going to fetch him. He's the only one round here that knows more than three facts about the Jokers. And then I kind of think we're going to look for the Joker's World.'

The robot nodded impassively.

'Well? Aren't you going to ask why?'

'Up to you, boss.'

'It's just as well. It seems I've got to fulfil a prediction. I've been pretty bad at fulfilling them lately. I think I will find one or two answers on the way. You know about the third attempt to kill me?'

'Oh yes, and all the others.'

Dom froze. He looked up from stuffing clothing into a back-pouch and spoke slowly.

'How many others?'

Isaac hummed. 'A total of seven. There was the poisoned food in hospital, the meteorite that just missed the power plant, two attacks on the flyer that brought you here. And another artificial black hole. That turned up in the hospital. You were still in the tank then.'

'They all failed—'

'By luck only, chief. The hospital food - I think you didn't eat it, but one of the cooks did. The meteorite -'

'Odd attempts. Inefficient, too.' He thought for a moment, and then packed the memory sword that Korodore had given him. As he turned, his eye caught the pink cube resting on the cubecase. Hrsh-Hgn's Joker thesis. He packed it.

'I'm not safe here, that's for sure. We leave now, while it's still night.'

'If you try and fly you'll fry. Samhedi's got the force screens up around the walls. We could try walking out. You'll have to order me to use necessary force, though.'

'Right,'
said Dom.

'In full, please. If the fuzz get me afterwards, it'll all be down on my recorders. Can't disassemble a robot for obeying orders: Eleventh Law of Robotics, Clause C, As Amended,' said the robot firmly.

'Then get me out of here, using no more force than is necessary.'

The robot walked over to the door and called in the security man who was standing guard down the corridor. Then he pole-axed him.

'Not bad,' he said. 'Enough to stun but not enough to shatter. Let's split, boss.'

The
buruku
was built on the outskirts of the city, where the dry land sloped towards the marsh. It looked like a field of mushrooms under a grey dome. Each mushroom was a reed-woven rath, some of them several times larger than a human geodome. The grey dome was the low-degree force screen, just powerful enough to keep the atmosphere within damp and still. It was polarized too, so that the light that filtered through was dim and subterranean. Inside the air was warm, clammy and smelled of decay .Dom felt that if he breathed deeply horrible moulds would sprout in his lungs. It was what ten thousand phnobes called home.

Towards the centre of the colony the raths huddled together in a fungal township riddled with alleyways and sprouting several distressingly organic-looking towers and civic buildings. Shops were still open, though it was well past midnight; they mostly sold badly-dried fungi, fish or second-hand cubes. From some of the larger raths, bulbous as fermenting pumpkins, came snatches of haunting
chlong
music. And all around Dom phnobes filled the streets.

In a purely human environment a solitary phnobe looked either pathetic or disgusting, from its goggled eyes to the slap of its damp feet on the floor. In the rath they loomed like ghosts, self-assured and frightening. Most of the alpha-males carried long double-bladed daggers, and any visitor with a
concealed inclination towards shape-hatred ended up walking with his back pressed firmly against a comfortingly solid wall.

At one point they had to press into the crowd as a wicker-work delivery truck trundled by. It stank: it was powered by a ceramic engine fuelled with fish oil.

A
nd
the air was filled with hissing, a susurration like the wind, the sound of phnobic speech. Dom enjoyed the
buruku.
The phnobes had a way of life divorced entirely from the carefully stylized penury of a Sadhimist ruling family.

Dom found Hrsh-Hgn seated in a
communa
l
ja
s
c
a
, playing tstame. He glanced up at the two of them, and waved them into silence.

Dom sat down on the stone seat and waited patiently. Hrsh-Hgn's opponent was a young alpha-male, who looked at Dom disinterestedly before turning back to the board.

The tstame men were crude and badly co-ordinated, which was to be expected from a public set. Even so, they were being directed across the squares with a gawky grace.

Red's pawns had dug a defensive trench across one corner of the board. White had tried the same tactic, but had stopped work and the pawns were clustered around one of Red's knights, who was haranguing them. As Dom watched, Red's Sacerdote-Shaman brought his mitrepike down on the kill-button of White's Accountant, and in the ensuing melee managed to get several pawns through the crossfire from the Rooks. The King made a brave attempt to run for it but was brought down by a flying tackle from the leading pawn.

Hrsh-Hgn's opponent removed his helmet and made a grudgingly complimentary comment in phnobic before loping away. Dom's tutor turned.

'I want you to help me find Joker's World,' said Dom.

He explained.

The phnobe listened politely. At one point he said: 'I'd be interessted to know how you survived a black hole that removed Korodore.'

'Yes, and Ig.'

'But no, that is not sso
...'
He reached down beside him and picked up a wicker cage. Inside, Ig fizzled.

'I found him in the busshess at the edge of the lawn. He was badly sshaken. He must have left your sshoulder somehow.'

'And you looked after him - that's surprising, for you.'

Hrsh-Hgn shrugged. 'No one elsse would. The fisshermen are supersstitious of them. They ssay they are the ssouls of dead comrades.
'

The swamp creature looped itself around Dom's neck.

'Are you coming with me... us?'

'Yess, I think sso. I accept
bater.'

'I never did find out what that word meant.'

'It refers to the inexorable processesss of what you humans are pleased to call Fate. Where did you think of starting? Don't look so blank.'

'It's just that I expected a lecture on my duties as Chairman. As my tutor you were hot on the subject, I seem to remember.'

The phnobe smiled, switched his headset on and turned to the board. The tstame mannikins stood up, ranged themselves into two neat rows, and marched down a flight of steps that appeared in one of the neutral squares, carrying the temporarily disabled.

'The point doess not arise now,' he said, 'Ass a mere frog' - he looked sharply at Isaac - 'I suggesst you follow the path predicted. Bessides, ass a Joker student of ssome repute, and an amateur probability mathematician to boot, I feel intrigued. Tell me, are you embarking upon thiss because it hass been seen to happen in the future, or has it been seen to happen in the future because you are following the prediction now?'

'I don't know,' said Dom, 'But I know where there's a ship—'

'Mr Chairman!'

Impressions crowded in on him. The low-ceilinged room had gone quiet, suddenly, like the switching off of a music cube, leaving the sort of silence that is even louder and hangs in the air like fog. The players bent over the tstame tables did not move, but now they seemed tense.

The
chlong
trio stopped playing. Ig whined.

Samhedi stood in the doorway, flanked by two minor security men. And they were armed. Dom remembered Korodore's advice, one day when the dead man was feeling expansive, that only the foolhardy or unimaginative carried projectile weapons into a
buruku.
Korodore had in fact hefted a regulation double-bladed knife, and then diffidently, on the rare occasions he went in.

'We have come to escort you home, Mr Chairman.'

Dom strode towards him and said politely, too politely: 'You were number two on Terra Novae, weren't you?'

'I was.'

'Who told you to carry stunners into a
buruku
?'

Samhedi swallowed, and glanced sidelong at the guards. The room seemed to sprout ears.

'Your predecessor would not have done such a thing. You might just have precipitated an inter-racial incident. Now unbuckle those things and throw them on the floor.'

'I have orders to see you safely home—' began Samhedi.

'From my grandmother? She has no authority. What law am I breaking? But you're breaking phnobic custom—'

He had driven the man too far. Samhedi growled.

'What gecky customs do these frogs have, anyway?'

He said it in bad phnobic. One by one the phnobes stood up, tshuri knives glinting in the deep gloom.

The alpha-male that had played tstame with Hrsh-Hgn loped up to Samhedi and threw his knife into the floor between them. Samhedi looked at Dom.

'It's a challenge,' said Dom.

'Suits me.' The security man raised his stunner until it was level with the phnobe's face. The phnobe blinked impassively.

Samhedi fired. It was a low-intensity beam, just enough to stun. The phnobe fell backwards like a sapling.

'And that's my—'

Dom had disappeared. A knife took the stunner and two fingers from the man's hand. He gaped, and looked up at the ring of blank, large-eyed faces...

Isaac helped the two of them through a small rear window as the noise in the
jasca
rose suddenly. They darted across the road just ahead of two flatcars laden with security men.

'The stupid ge
c
k,' said Dom, 'Oh Chel, the stupid ge
c
k!'

'Intelligence is humanity's prime ssurvival trait, therefore it iss as well that those who don't sshow it be weeded out,' said Hrsh-Hgn, philosophically.

'Where to now, chief?' said Isaac, 'Round here it's beginning to look like Whole Erse on Slain Patrick's Eve.'

'Great-great-grandfather was occasionally less than honest in his business dealings. There's a private yacht at the spacefield. It's there for use if any high ranking Sabalos feels the need for a—a—'

'An impromptu vacation?' suggested Hrsh-Hgn.

The universe was divided into two parts, separated by a five centimetre shell of monomolecular steel. On the inner side was the interior of the luxury yacht
One Jump Ahead,
superbly outfitted for one passenger but badly cramped for three, one of whom was metal and another was smelling of swamp water.

On the other side was the rest of the universe, composed almost entirely of nothing with a trace of hydrogen. There were also the inhabited planets of Human-Creapii space.

There was Terra Novae, metal-rich and dynamically technological. Third Eye, forested from tundra to mangrove swamps, where the wind sang eerily in the trees and the humans were more alien even than phnobes, and talked with their minds and eyes. On Eggplant the vegetarians were ferocious, and had to be. On the drosk's world of Quaducquakucckuaquekekecqac visiting humans picked uneasily at the horribly familiar food and were thankful that drosks were too well mannered to do more than look hungrily at guests. There was Laoth, where the only living things were human beings - yet birds flew and the brooks were full of fish...

On every world hot enough to boil water one of the sub-races of Creapii clustered. In the deceptive emptiness of space swam the sundogs and the race called The Pod. And there was The First Sirian Bank...

'Sixteen,' said Isaac.

'This is a distrustful universe in which we live, certainly,' said Hrsh-Hgn.

Ig, with the ease of one who had lived in zero-g all his life, floated around a bulkhead with another struggling body in his mouth. It looked vaguely like a grasshopper, and had in fact quite a sophisticated copy of an insect brain - but rather better than insect ears.

Dom turned from the viewscreen. 'Old Korodore really had this ship bugged,' he said, 'Look for pinheads, too.'

From orbit Widdershins was grey-blue and big, studded with strips of cloud. The dawn terminator was nudging Tau City. A grey cloud hung over it.