The Dark Side of the Sun (9 page)

The Creapii ranged far. They found more Towers, other Joker Artifacts like the Ring Stars, Band and the Internal Planets of Protostar V. As an incidental, they found Earth and sold a working matrix motor for homesteading rights on Mercury. The Creapii were beginning to feel in the grip of a galactic mystery, and had long before decided that they needed extra insights.

Seventy standard years later a joint Man-Phnobe team deciphered Joker Curiform C, the only one of the five Joker scripts translatable. There were hints of a great civilization, although the word was only an approximation, and there was probably the first poem in the universe.

Geological evidence suggested that the towers were all between eight and five million years old. They were ranged more or less equally across the light years, accepting all energies, radiating none.

The Creapii knew that they had recognizably evolved from the mildly-intelligent salamanders about four million years before, to judge from the desiccated aluminium-polysilicate remains on their planet around 70 Ophiuchis A. They knew of no race older.

They were long-lived. They had travelled up the Tentacle - Creapii mythology saw the galaxy as a giant Creap, with a glittering carcase of stars - to the sparse stars at the rim. They had sailed down the Tentacle to the cathedral of stars at the hub. The stars were barren. There were one or two freak accidents. But generally, life was still merely some slightly more complex chemical changes. Only in the bubble of stars behind them did worlds teem.

Impetuous races would have reached a definite conclusion
hastily
, maybe in two or three hundred years. The Creap minds, of which each individual had three, did not jump so readily to conclusions
...

'And what conclusion did they reach?' asked Dom.

'The Creapii are powerful, and slow, and thorough. They have as yet reached no conclusion. They are seeking the meaning of life. Why sshould they hurry?'

'Chel! Isn't the theory that the Jokers seeded our stars before they - uh - moved away? Come on, you know it is.'

The phnobe nodded slowly. 'That is certainly the hypothesis that the Joker Institute appears to work on.'

Dom bit his lip, and opened his mouth to speak. Hrsh-Hgn raised a hand.

'You are about to assk why. Boy, remember that of fifty-two races in the life-stars you, an Earthman—'

'A
Widdershine!'

'True, a Widdershine of Earth stock - can only vaguely understand the mental workings of perhaps three or four races. Why should we hope to understand the Jokers?'

'But the Institute did understand Joker Curiform C. It was one of their languages.'

'Yes, but a written language is merely a machine to convey information, and once we had the key it was remarkably easy to translate.'

'How was it broken?'

'They used a poet, and
a mad computer.'

Hrsh-Hgn picked up the cube of pink silica that had been his present to Dom, thumbed the reference face and set it to project. The words of the Joker Testament hung in the air, glowing.

You who stand before us
We have held the stars in the hollow
of our hands, and the stars
Burn. Pray be careful now
As to how you handle them.
We have gone to wait on our new world
There is but one
It lies at the dark side of the sun.

'Pretty derivative stuff,' said Isaac. 'That last couplet is really a singlet.'

'I must admit it is better in phnobic,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'As for the rest, well, you musst know most of it. On a purely practical level, hotheads have searched every sizeable body in the bubble and many out of it.'

'Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty,' said Isaac. 'You'd have had to include suns, of course, and the deeps themselves. Although it sounds more likely that the Jokers originated on-planet somewhere.'

'The popular belief is that Jokers World is laden with wonders beyond belief,' said Hrsh-Hgn.

'Sitting in here it's hard to get some idea of the deeps, but they must be big enough to hide a world in. The Jokers might have had a world with no sun,' said Dom.

'It's just conceivable,' agreed Hrsh-Hgn, politely.

'It's been thought of, huh?'

'About once every five years,'

'How about it being invisible?' said Isaac. Dom laughed.

'Maybe,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'You'd heard of Ghost Stars, Dom?'

'Uhuh. So dense that not even gravity escapes from them.'

'Now this is just an idea to kick about, I'm just dropping it on the plate to see if anyone pours mayonnaise on it, but you could outfit an entire solar system with matrix engines and drop it into interspace,' said Isaac. Dom was about to laugh, but looked sidelong at Hrsh-Hgn.

'That's the legend of the Prodigal Sun,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'A low-temperature Creapii story. Yes, you could do it in about fifty years time, at our present rate of technological expanssion. The catalytic power would not have to be too great. But the practical application of the matrix equation makes it impossible.' He caught Dom's blank expression. 'You see, you do not need a great deal of power to drop even a large mass in and out of interspace.'

Hrsh-Hgn used more technical language to explain that it was the on-board computer that really counted. Since a body in interspace was theoretically everywhere at the same time and would if randomly dropped out almost certainly materialize in the centre of the nearest solar body, the navigational matrix computer was very necessary. It had to be big - 'everywhere' was a large volume to be quantified. The bigger the body, the greater chance of error, so the bigger the computer.

'The sundog carrying us now registered a current drain in microamps to achieve interspace. 'It's little more than a mental discipline. Four fifths of its body iss a hind-brain designed to locate it accurately with regard to the datum universse, with fortunately just enough sspare capacity to allow for the extra mass of a medium-ssized sship.

'To get a medium-range star successfully through interspace you'd have to have a computer about one hundred times its mass.'

'How about one planet?'
asked Dom.

'The graphs meet at planets like Phnobis or Widdershins, small and dense. You could just about do it if you hollowed out the world and filled it with computers. But this is a fruitless line of sspeculation. Personally I believe that the Jokers—'

Illusion.

Ig was keening. Dom opened his eyes and blinked. He was soaked in sweat. One arm ached.

At the far end of the cabin Hrsh-Hgn had been thrown like a doll across the gear locker.

'Isaac?'

The robot let go of the handrail that ringed
One Jump's
cabin.

'Rough, huh?' he asked.

'I feel like someone just hit me with something large, like a planet,' said Dom. 'Or a large asteroid. What's happened?'

'We're between stars. It looks as though the sundog dropped out rather clumsily.'

Dom floated up, trying to quieten his stomach. It appeared to be knotted. His head ached.

Hrsh-Hgn groaned and woke. 'Frghsss—' he swore.

'Sundog?' said Dom to the empty air.

Isaac was glued to the deep radar.

'It's still several million kilometres away - it must be throwing one hell of an interspace shadow. It's taking its time. It's a cone - oh, my, will you look at that!'

They stared into the screen. On maximum magnification it showed a pyramid tumbling deceptively slowly through space, flashing faintly as starlight caught its polished faces. There was no mistaking the outline of a Joker tower.

Dom swam into the pilot seat and asked the sundog to take them in closer. In a few minutes they were a few kilometres away. The tower hung steady against a starfield that spun like a mad planetarium.

'The Institute of Joker Studies pays a million standards bounty for details of new towers,' said Dom, 'I want to catch it.'

'In a pig's eye,' said Isaac. 'That mass at that speed? It's
a job for twenty sundogs.'

'Well, we can plot its course. There's a reduced bounty for that sort of information. We could split it three ways.'

'Okay, four—'

Dom struggled for breath. Something had caught him in a vice, and was squeezing hard.

He sensed the ship. He was acutely aware of the convoluted atomic structure of the hull. The little deuterium pile in the matrix computer sparkled like a witch ball left over from Hogswatchnight. Isaac was a coruscation of currents flowing over coiled alloy wire, suffused with the sickening feel of metallic hydrogen. The sundog brain throbbed dull purple with vague semi-thoughts.

Beyond the ship, beyond the tumbling Tower, he felt the other ship. It was waiting for him. Someone had known that he would pass under this area. He felt metallic hydrogen again - the feel of a robot mind.

He felt inside the sundog's mind. There was a jolt as its field polarized and the Tower receded instantly against the stars. For a moment he felt the rage of the mind in the other ship. Then it was gone, lost in the static as the dog sank gratefully into interspace.

And something withdrew from his mind, gently. He had time for a very brief feeling of loss, of the unfair restriction of a mere five senses
... then the reaction hit him.

He didn't fall, because there was no 'down'. But he hung bewildered, listening to the puzzled protests from the dog. Hrsh-Hgn and Isaac were staring at him. Then the phnobe took him gently in one bony hand and hauled him down to the bunk.

'I saw everything,' muttered Dom, 'Something was
looking
through me, there was an assassin waiting at that tower, you know...'

'Ssure,' murmured Hrsh-Hgn. 'Ssure.'

'Believe me!'

'Ssure.'

'He had a molecule stripper!' shouted Dom.

'Something made the sundog get the hell out of there,' admitted Isaac. 'Was it you?'

Dom nodded violently, and then added slowly: 'I think so. But—but just before, I saw... Would you believe I saw probabilities? I saw us powdered by that stripper. But that was in another universe. We escaped, in this one. Chel, I can't describe it. We haven't got the right words!'

'We have given this case a great deal of thought. We do, of course, find nothing to argue with in the purely geophysical reports put before us. We note that this world known as the First Sirian Bank is a planet with a diameter of seven thousand miles and a crust consisting almost entirely of crytalline silicon and some associated elements. We have also heard some delightful evidence from Dr Al Putachique of Earth, its import being that over the billenia earthquakes and so forth have caused the formation of billions of transistor junctions within that crust, forming by natural means the largest computer in the galaxy. We are of course aware that the Bank has for many years been used as the accounting-house and general information repository of most of the Human and near-Human races, and is officially Treasurer of the Star Chamber of Commerce.

'The appellant has asked for the legal status of Human. He wishes to be accorded the status of living creature. Is the Bank alive? By every definition he is not. That, at least, is what we have been told.

'But we disagree. It has been impossible for the Bank to be physically present here today, Roche limits being what they are, but this Chamber has spoken with him at length. Towards the end of this unusual interlude my colleague from Earth made a reference, I understand it to be from some kind of theatrical entertainment, to the fact that it seemed unfair that the merest virus should have Life while the Bank had none at all.

'We find it nowhere stated that an entire world may not be accorded the status of a living creature, or even of Human. It may be a trifle unusual, a little irregular. Nevertheless, let it be recorded that we find the First Sirian Bank not only alive, but possessed of a universe-view sufficiently advanced to call him Human. And may his orbit never grow less.'

His Furness CrAAgh 456°, Mediator, the Star Chamber, 2104. (See also
Life: A Legal Definition
by His Furness 456°.)

Dom dodged into a booth and waited a minute before glancing out through the clear crystal panel of the door. There were two or three thousand people in the central hall, but none seemed to have noticed him.

In front of him was a black crystal wall, studded with innumerable pinpoints of red light. They clustered thickly around a plain copper disc, set flush with the crystal. It hummed, said: 'Please state your business.'

Dom relaxed.

'Are you the Bank?' he asked.

'No, sir. I am a Teller, merely a comparatively simple servo-mechanical sub-unit.'

'Uh, okay. Then please transfer seventeen standards to the sundog racial account,' he said, while invisible eyes tactfully examined his retinal patterns, voice inflections, DNA helix and teeth.

'Transaction completed.'

'And I wish to notify the Joker Institute that I have located a Joker building, description and position as noted.'

He pressed a copy of the
One Jump's
log into a recess below the disc.

'Bounty will be paid on verification.'

Dom wondered if the assassin lurking at the tower had also registered discovery. He
kne
w there had been an assassin. Somewhere in totality was a universe where Dom Sabalos was dead. But of course, there would be many such universes. According to p-math there was at least one universe for every probability, even the unthinkable ones.

'Business completed?' asked the disc.

Dom frowned. It was his first visit to the Bank, although it was officially his Godfather. The Bank sent him greetings on the appropriate ceremonies, like his minor 28th-year birthdays, and small, interesting presents like the gravity-sandals he was still wearing. The gifts suggested a thoughtful personality. The greetings cards told nothing at all, except that they were generally signed in crescive High-Degree Creapii IV, a favourite script for multi-dextral amateur calligraphers. The problem now was making contact.