The Dark Side of the Sun (15 page)

Untranslatable, but images of a mind rather than a force; an idea formed in water rather than a creature; a certainty that the lake was speaking - not the truth, because that suggested it could lie, and Chatogaster could not lie
.
.
.

'I may be overruled by the Board but,' he opened the little bottle that had been in his carryall, 'step right in.' An air bubble escaped from the bottle.

A kick carried Dom easily to the surface. He broke water and struck out for the shore.

Crackdown appeared to have ended. One or two eggs spiralled down as he scrambled up the slope, but they exploded a long way off in the south. A few damp pups, no bigger than a man, were taking their first shaky steps.

Here and there older pups were baying at the sky, long snouts pointing trembling at the clouds. The reddish hair on their cone-shaped bodies was sleeked down. One near to the lake was shuddering.

'Pssst!'

Hrsh-Hgn and a robot with a large Three on its chestplate leapt out of the grass. Without pausing in their stride they each grabbed him by an elbow and the three of them tumbled back towards the lake.

The air began to smell of methane, a fruity foul smell that caught in Dom's throat.

'Hrsh! Isaac got you, then? What's happened to Isaac?
You're
Isaac? What happened?'

The robot was half covered in soot, and there were superficial metal runs down one arm. The phnobe nodded absently and peered back across the plain. The nearest pup was trembling now, violently, and a thin plume of vapour was coming from three swollen glands around its broad rump.

'The robot was bitten by a dog,' murmured Hrsh-Hgn, 'It'ss been ssomewhat exciting up here. Cave Canem!'

They hit the grass. An explosion dug a crater in front of them. A hot wind whipped over the sweetgrass, driving a boiling cloud of greasy black smoke. In an instant a false night fell.

Above it the sunpup wobbled into the air on three blinding blue flames. Slowly, following the route its ancestors had taken a million years before to escape a hostile world, it rose above the plains.

It gained speed and height, blew a smoke ring, and was

still accelerating when Dom lost it in the distant cirrus.

Calculations:

Hrsh-Hgn manipulated a small slideball.

'I'm relieved to ssay it could not work,' he said.

'There are two suits in the
One Jump,'
said Dom. 'One ought to fit you.'

Two miles away a sunpuppy rose baying on a spreading cone of smoke.

'Look at it this way,' began Isaac persuasively, 'If we attack Madam with whirling memory-swords she'll stop playing and start blasting. I daresay she won't see Dom hurt but
.
.
. what do you rate your chances?'

'Better a boiled lamb than a roasst sheep.'

'There's no fuel in the
One Jump,'
said Dom.

'Not a drop,' added Isaac.

'It's the only way.'

Another puppy thundered upwards on a vast ventral explosion of gas. Hrsh-Hgn watched it go, his big rheumy eyes betraying a storm of mixed emotions.

'But I am no good with animalsss!' he wailed.

It was defeat. Dom and Isaac looked at each other and nodded.

Fifteen minutes later the
Drunk
sank into the grass by the empty yacht. Joan surveyed her bodyguard impatiently.

'Twenty of you and they got away!'

'The Class Five robot precipitated an illogical series of events,' explained Twelve.

'He was a Class Five mind. He told us to count to three,' added Nineteen helpfully.

'Then he hit us,' said Twelve.

'When we get back to civilization I'll see to it that the robot is lobotomized,' said Joan grimly. 'Why did we ever start building human robots?'

'The Class Fives were constructed because of their...' began Twelve, and was intelligent enough to stop when Joan looked at him.

Four more robots trudged in, carrying the prone bodies of Three and Eight.

'I feel sad,'
said Twelve.

'May they rust in peace,' echoed Nineteen.

'When they're recalibrated I'll make sure they go down a class,' muttered Joan. 'Right. The rest of you spread out. We won't leave till they're found.'

Ten miles eastward three sunpuppies blasted upwards. They wobbled a little, trying to stabilize the extra weight, then soared towards the stars.

Hrsh-Hgn wailed that he appeared to be in a fast-decaying orbit, but you couldn't hurry negotiations with a sundog.

She hung above them, and her name was Gully-Triode-stroke-Pledge-Hudsons-Bay-Preferred.

'The pups did reach orbit safely,' said Dom patiently.

Dom thought very quickly.

'I carry the seed of Chatogaster,' he intoned.

'Dom
Sabalos.'

'The robot can take it. My friend and I have our suits. My friend is nearing re-entry,' said Dom, adopting the sun-dog's clipped style.

It was a long, long time in Interspace.

Dom told himself that he knew that they were safe inside the sundog's field; but that didn't stop him from holding on to the beast's hide until his hands ached. The suit provided a strong depressive that made the naked images merely unpleasant. Hrsh-Hgn had passed out. Isaac had shut down most of his circuits.

It was a
long
time.

'They should not exist. They are theoretically possible, but so is balancing a needle on the end of a hair. Faced with something like the Chain Stars a man must either bow the knee, or else get good and worried.'

Charles Sub-Lunar,
Galactic Excursions

Dom wondered what was so impressive. That was when the Chain was still twenty AUs away, and side on.

Then the Creapii shuttle came in closer.

Imagine a doughnut, three million miles across. Imagine another. Link them.

The Chain Stars. And tumbling around them, Minos - a planet formed from thousands of asteroids, dragged across the light years and fused into a world. That was another Joker achievement, the Maze on Minos.

The cabin was empty except for shape-adaptable seats and the screen. From outside it had appeared gigantic, several times bigger than an average cargo ship and surprisingly streamlined. Dom knew that most of the bulk must be shielding, plus an engine big enough to lift the ship up against the crushing pull of a sun. But the streamlining puzzled him.

Until he realized. Even suns have atmospheres.

The glowing, linked rings grew rapidly in the screen, until the outer edges slipped away. It was no comfort to know the image was just that, an image darkened and screened down until it was merely bright. Instinct said they were plunging into the heart of a star.

'Born of the sun, we travel a little way towards the sun,' misquoted Isaac, tactlessly. Dom relaxed, and laughed. He thought he could hear a muted thunder, not unlike the roar of star flames. It was impossible, of course. It was just that he thought he could hear it. Of course, it was impossible.

Finally all definition was lost, and the screen became a painfully white rectangle. Hrsh-Hgn was trembling with a phnobe's instinctive fear of naked sunlight. Dom pictured the ship coasting over a glowing sea, one with no horizon, and stopped his imagination resolutely when he thought of all the little mechanical things that could go wrong.

Something was drastically wrong with the raft when it appeared.

Artists and the eye of imagination portrayed a raft only a few steps removed from the log platforms that dagon fishers used, with perhaps a few Creapii slithering nonchalantly across the deck, and it was open to the - sky, with a class of a yellow ocean a long way beneath. But even High-Degrees could not survive in the open except on near-cinders stars, and the Chains Raft was one of the first on a hot star. It was just a blank hemisphere, hovering flat side down in what appeared on the screen as a thin mist.

The shuttle docked gently, and a section of wall slid back to reveal a circular grey tunnel. A friendly mechanical voice invited them to follow it. Dom led the way, warily.

The sound he heard hit him like a club. He ran forward, unbelieving.

It was the sea.

His Furness CReegE + 690° rolled down to the beach on bright caterpillar tracks. He was big, much bigger than the low-degree Creapii that lived on Widdershins. His egg-shaped suit was golden. A fawn pranced by his side, and a small blue singing bird was perched on his tentacle. His Furness stopped at the surf line and waited patiently.

Dom felt his toes touch the sand and waded through the waves. Some of the strangeness of the Creap was gone now. He knew that he was looking at a creature who was the leader of the most advanced sub-species of a race ten times as old as men. Was the featureless ovoid looking at him? What did it see?

An armoured tentacle handed him a towel. It was rough and smelled of lemons.

'A pleasant swim?' The light tenor voice materialized without visible means of support.

'Thank you, yes,' said Dom. He opened his hand, and showed the Creap a small purple shell.

'Trivia monarcha sinistrale,'
said the Creap. 'The Widdershine ink cowrie. Beautiful in its simplicity. How did you find my ocean?'

Dom looked back at the waves. The surf was faked. The horizon was a masterpiece of illusion, and was a hundred metres from the shore. An artificial sun set in a splendour that was real. An evening star hung in the crimson glow.

'Convincing,'
he said.

The Creap laughed pleasantly, and led him slowly up the beach.

There was more land than sea in the sanctuary. Again, the Creapii had only erred on the side of generosity. On one side a plain of golden grass rippled all the way to distant mountains, crystal clear. Gods might live on those towering peaks. On the other side the forest began. A respectable stream gushed from an outcrop and meandered between root-buttressed banks; a dragonfly, one of the large Terra Novaean
aeschans,
skimmed over the water. Short turf grew between the trees, studded with gentians. Rabbits had left signs of their passing. There was a stand of fragrant fennel, and a vine twisted itself among the nearest trees. In the far distance was a volcano.

'Shall I speak to you of back projection, hidden devices, artificial irrigation?' asked His Furness innocently. Do
m
sniffed the air. It smelled of rain.

'I won't quite believe you,' he said. 'If I dug in the soil here, what would I find?'

'Topsoil, a fossil or two, carefully selected.'

'And?'

'Oh, rock. Limestone to a depth of three metres.'

'And then?'

'Alas for illusion: in this order, the machine level, a metre of monomolecular copper, a mere film of oxidized iron, a suspicion of a matrix field. Shall I go deeper?'

'That's deep enough, your Furness.'

'Shall we continue our walk, then? I must feed the carp.'

Later, when the golden fish had flocked to the ringing of a little brass bell, he said: 'Must there be a reason? Then let it be that I study humanity. Earth humanity in particular. Although in saying that, I am aware of a misapprehension. Let it be said, instead, that in applying myself to the study of Totality I endeavour to do so from the human viewpoint, do you understand? It is a truism that the environment moulds the mind, and so...' he waved a tentacle to include the sea, the forest, the distant mountains. 'Of course, it would be easier to move on to a human world, but not so convenient.'

Dom reminded himself, forcibly, that beneath his feet burned a natural furnace. But the Creapii also studied the Chain Stars, from real close up, and His Furness had hinted that there were a number of other experiments taking place on the raft.

'The Jokers?' said the Creap. 'Certainly I will help if I can. You are our first non-Creap visitors. Do you know of any prophecies in your culture concerning a green man with the sea in a bottle?'

'No,' said Dom, suddenly alarmed. 'Are there any?'

'Not that I know of. It sounds the very meat and drink of prophecy, however.

'You must realize that we are in no position to offer much advice, we need several tens of thousands of years of study. Have you any specific questions?'

'The Creapii were not the Jokers.'

'True. But that was a statement.'

'Very well. You are the oldest race, as a race. You can't count Chatogaster or the Bank, they're individual organisms. So it should follow that you are the most like the Jokers. Mentally, I mean. No, not even that. I mean in outlook.'

The Creap laughed. 'And what is our outlook?'

'You study other lifeforms. Man the Hunter, Creap the Information-Gatherer. May I be personal?'

'Please do,' said the great golden egg, and Dom blushed.

'Well, I've met Creapii before. Do you know what has always struck me as odd about them? And about you, your Furness. You're so human.

'Hrsh-Hgn is my friend, but he is a phnobe. He gives himself away all the time, and he's lived on Widdershins, among Earth-stock humanity, for most of his life. Little things - ways of looking at life, like when we both look at the same thing and I know he's seeing it from an entirely different racial viewpoint. But all the Creapii I have met don't give that impression.'