The Dark Side of the Sun (11 page)

'But Band is unoccupied except by sundogs - it's been proved it could never develop a higher lifeform.'

'I HAVE SAID TOO MUCH.'

'Well, will you work on the problem of my assassin?'

The Bank paused. 'yes.'

'Charge it to my personal account.'

'I WILL DO SO. IT IS A PITY YOU WERE NOT HERE EARLIER. THE GREATEST AUTHORITY ON THE JOKERS, AND CERTAINLY THE MOST INCISIVE MIND IN THE GALAXY, WAS HERE.'

The atmosphere was perceptibly warmer. Dom relaxed. The Bank was hiding something, though.

'I thought you were the most incisive mind in the galaxy,' he said.

'A COMMON MISTAKE. ALAS, I AM NO MORE INTELLIGENT THAN THE AVERAGE CREAP, OR HUMAN GENIUS. MY BULK ALLOWS, SHALL WE SAY, FOR BREADTH OF INTELLIGENCE RATHER THAN HEIGHT. I WAS REFERRING TO CHARLES SUBLUNAR.'

' "Poet, polymath, soldier of fortune",' quoted Dom, 'Was he the man I saw in the hotel? Scarred, he was, with an early Class One robot?'

'HE DOES NOT ALLOW HIS LIKENESS TO BE PUBLISHED,' said the Bank, and there was a hint of laughter in the voice.

'Uhuh. I'm getting the hang of things. I don't think seeing him was an accident. I thought he recognized me. He looked rather self-satisfied, so...'

'DOM, BECAUSE YOU ARE MY GODSON I WILL RETAIL TO YOU A CERTAIN FACT. YOUR GRANDMOTHER IS AT THIS MOMENT IN ORBIT ABOVE US, REQUESTING CLEARANCE TO LAND.'

A screen by the robot's arm flashed into life and Dom saw the familiar shape of his grandmother's personal MFTL barge
Drunk With Infinity
drifting against the stars.

'SHE HAS JUST REFERRED TO ME AS, I QUOTE, A "DISEASED BALL OF ROCK".'

'I'm not certain I want to meet her,' said Dom. 'Mysself neither, my word!'

'this could be exciting.'
A panel in the rock wall ground back. 'this
is
an inspection shaft. leave this
WAY. WHERE WILL YOU GO WHEN YOU LEAVE ME?'

'To Band, then, to see this person who is old.'

'as old as the hills, as OLD
...' the Bank paused. There was no sound, but Dom got the distinct impression it was laughing,
'... as the sea. move! '

Take the Creapii.

Take them as the Jokers. It was an old theory.

They were an ancient race, and they were adaptable. Literally so.

Once there had only been one kind of Creap, the silicon-oxygen Creaps of low degree, living in barbarism and molten phosphorous sulphides on a small world hugging close to the fires of one of the 70 Ophiuchis. Seventeen light-years away, a brighter than average ape was seeing real possibilities in banging two stones together.

The Creapii were kindly, patient, and intensely curious. They were also pathologically humble. When they spread into space, they changed the Creap to fit the situation.

Half a million years of gene-manipulation and radical molecular restructuring produced the middle-degree Creaps, based on a silicon-carbon bond, a dynamic species that lived happily enough at 500°. Soon afterwards the vats stabilized the intricate aluminium silicon polymers of the High-Degrees, the ones that occasionally floated their rafts on cool stars.

There were others, including even a boron sub-species. Wherever a star warmed a rock beyond the melting point of tin, there was a Creap to bask in its beneficence.

The Creapii had a long history. They sought knowledge as other, cooler animals sought game. They were polite, and gentlemanly in their dealings. They mixed well. They lived in heat, but had no sexes.

Dom had liked Hrsh-Hgn's theory.

There are many binaries in the galaxy. And often they are an ill-matched pair, one small, dense and actinic, the other huge and red. There is day on the red stars, just occasionally. And there is night on the hemisphere where the bright star does not shine. Dark? There can only be darkness on a sun by contrast.

On this sun the Jokers lived. They
... would have to be like Creapii, with an armoured integument. Certainly the huge rafts, poised on a heat-contour, would have to be protected. Before the Creapii discovered matrix-power their rafts floated on a downdraft of oxidized iron, but the Jokers must have been more inventive .
.
. a race that twisted the Chain Stars would have to be inventive.

Power would be no problem. Power enough would be very close indeed... but it was only a theory...

Take men. The Jokers had ceased to build their strange artifacts long before man arose, brother to the apes, but who knew where men had come from? And men were adaptable, or could adapt themselves. There had been a thousand years of colonization. Now the sinistrals of Widdershins had night-black skin, no body hair, a resistance to skin cancers and UV-tolerant eyes. By mere chance, too, half of them were left-handed. On Terra Novae men were stocky and had two hearts. Pineals had more in common with phnobes than other men. The men of Whole Erse lived in a permanent war. Eggplanters were simply strange, and edgy, and vegetarians green in tooth and thorn. And men, it was admitted, were the sort to glory in planet-sized memorials. Weren't the leading Joker experts men?

Spooners could have been Jokers. As many artifacts were found on cold worlds as hot ones, and the dark side of the sun took on a new meaning in the far orbits. Sidewinders, Tarquins, The Pod, the two Evolutions of Seard... they all could have been the Jokers.

Somewhere was the Jokers World. It had been a legend so long that it was not open to doubt. There, waiting, were the secrets of the Towers, the machines that made the Chain Stars, the frictionless bearing, the meaning of the universe.

The pinpoint junctions cast a pale light along the tunnel. Dom hurried forward, darting around a small wheeled robot that was inspecting a junction box.

They broke into a cavern, and Hrsh-Hgn stared up at the shadowy machine that loomed above them. He nudged Dom and pointed upwards.

'Do you know what that iss?' he hissed.

'It's a matrix engine,' said Dom, 'Warship size. The Bank's got his own ships, hasn't he?'

'I believe not.'

A wheeled robot braked in front of them. It extended a padded arm and pushed at them, ineffectually. They hurried on.

The tunnel led into a cavern off the main hall. It was thronged, as usual. The entrance to the ship park was on the far side.

They split up. Dom dodged among the groups, keeping an eye open for Widdershins robots. Hrsh-Hgn loped stiffly in what passed on Phnobis for a conspiratorial walk.

Dom was halfway across the glittering floor when he glimpsed Joan entering the hall, with three security robots on either side of her. She seemed to dwarf them. She looked determined.

He ducked back and a hand gripped his shoulder. He spun round.

The man was smiling. The smile looked awkward on that face.

He saw the blue robe and the heavy gold band around the neck, and Dom remembered. He tried to back away, but the hand followed him. It was the man at the party.

'Please don't be afraid.' Dom squirmed under the grip. There was a flurry and the hand flew off his shoulder, Ig's needle-sharp teeth buried in a finger. But the man did not scream, although his faced paled. Dom stepped back into the embrace of a robot.

He took off. Strictly speaking, flying within the bounds of the Bank was illegal. He just hoped the Bank would not interfere.

The sandals were built for one, though they could operate in strong gravity fields. Below them two other robots were staring vacantly upwards, and across the floor two more had Hrsh-Hgn cornered.

There was an eerie calmness about the vertical flight. The roar of the crowd dropped away, leaving only the underlying thunder of the Bank. He looked into the robot's multi-faceted eyes, which mirrored the corona effects on the surrounding pillars.

'You're a Class Two, aren't you?' he asked.

'That is so, sir,' said the robot.

'Are you equipped with any motivation towards personal safety?'

'No, sir.' The robot glanced down. 'Unfortunately.'

Dom kicked his heels together and went into a dive. Thirty yards above the floor he twisted and felt his shirt tear as the robot lost its grip. It continued to fall in a long arc which ended abruptly in a glistening pillar of germanium. There was a flash and a rain of hot droplets.

Two other robots were rising from the floor on lift belts. Dom shot upwards, giddily, watching the distant roof grow. It was specked with black dots. It was only when he drew nearer he saw that they were caves.

It was hot near the roof. The air roared into the caves and Dom flew with it, because there was nothing else to do. He swam in a torrent of warm air, which buffeted him as it thundered along a tunnel.

And over hell.

He was able to look down for a few seconds before the hell-wind caught him.

He had been carried out into a mile-wide ventilation shaft. Between his feet the walls narrowed down, mile after mile, lit at the end by a white-hot eye. Thunder rolled around the shaft. It sounded like the churning of distant mighty engines. And the heat was palpable, tangible, like a hammer. It caught him like a leaf and fired him like a bullet.

Dom tumbled out of the shaft and towards the stars, balanced on a gout of super-heated air. Night was all around him. In one direction - up and down had lost their usual positions - was the web of cold stars. In the other there was just one, a hungry red eye with a white pupil.

It seemed to drift away. Smoke from the grav sandals streamed around him. Something else had caught him, something which was always waiting, beyond the light. He wondered, dimly, through layers of pain, what it was touched him almost pleasantly, freezing his breath in his throat and making a pattern of crystals across his blistered skin.

Widdershine are agile. Among the fishers the awkward, the clumsy soon lost all their lives, and something of this rubbed off among the Board families. And so Dom landed on his feet, hard, and fell forward into the snow.

He knew what snow was. Keja had sent him a preserved snowflake from one of the colder regions of Laoth, and it looked something like the thin frost that briefly mantled the polar swamps of his own world, in the coldest winters. But Keja had not said that there could be so many of them.

On Widdershins it was Hogswatchnight, which coincided with Small Gods in the greater Sadhimist calendar. It usually meant a larger klatch meeting, or a number of klatches would join together in celebration, but by midnight every group would be split so that each member watched the dawn alone. But as the older Sadhimist averred darkly, one was never fully alone at Hogswatch. By dawn, perhaps, some men would be poets or prophets or even be possessed of a new minor talent, like being able to play the thumb-flute. And one or two would be mad.

The ground underneath him was warm.

Dom lay in the tepid water for some time before he realized it. He was spreadeagled in a large, steaming puddle. Beyond it the snowdrifts started.

He heard the distant air scream. Something hurled across the stars, trailing a sonic boom. It turned in a tight, gravity-squeezing circle, returned slowly and slammed neatly to a halt on the edge of the puddle. Except that it didn't work. The water was freezing again. The ship danced drunkenly between the drifts and returned, a few minutes later, under very low power.

Isaac opened the hatch.

'Now, are we getting out of this place or aren't we?' he cried.

'Mint soda, chief?'

Dom took the glass. Ice tinkled. Frost was forming on the sides. It tasted like a dive into a snowbank.

There was fresh green skin on his arms and legs and the back of his neck, where the googoo had reformed itself to his body memory.

Isaac pressed the memory button on the ship's workshop and slid the soles back on the sandals. He tossed them across to Dom.

'Short-circuited in the heat,' he said. 'They should be okay now.'

Dom stared out at the starlit surface of the Bank. The warm pool had already frozen over. It made a glittering circle in the snow. He had been lucky, at that. On the sunny side of the Bank water boiled in the shade. He raised the Bank on the ship's radio.

Hrsh-Hgn had been taken aboard the
Drunk,
destination unknown. The Bank knew nothing about the man with the gold collar, or the whereabouts of Ig. It had warmed the surface and sent Isaac out because—because deaths on the Bank were rare and he disliked the subsequent investigations.

Dom switched off, and drummed his fingers on the console. His face was reflected in the empty screen.

It was dark green, mottled with leaf-green, because body memory took no account of tanning. He was naked in the stable ship temperature. The memory of recent pain still showed in his eyes, but he was thinking of a man in a gold collar, a smiling man who had haunted his dreams.

'No one notices him,' he said out loud. 'He's just a face in the crowd. He's trying to kill me.'

Idly he picked up Korodore's gift. He'd already experimented with it, putting the memory-sword through its repertoire, and now he watched as the atoms reprogrammed themselves. A twitch, and it was a needle sword
...
a short knife .
.
. a gun, that froze bullets out of atmospheric water and could fire them through steel hullmetal... another gun, a sonic .
.
.

'I don't know how Grandmother chased me here,' he said. 'Though it is the logical place. But I know where the
Drunk
is heading now.'

'Widdershins?' asked Isaac.

'Band. She'll get the information out of Hrsh. I imagine she'll threaten him with repatriation to Phnobis.'

'That doesn't sound like a threat, chief.'

'To a phnobe it is. If he goes back to Phnobis he'll be in swift conjunction with a ceremonial tshuri whatever happens. No, he'll talk.'

Isaac slipped into the pilot seat.

'You could go back to Widdershins. Your grandmother has your best interests at heart.'