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.
7
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.'
'I've got to go on. I can't describe it, I just haven't got a choice. Do you understand?'
'No, boss. Band, then? I've calibrated the matrix computer. It should work. '
'You'd better believe it.'
He hefted the memory sword. If someone else was waiting at Band...
Glowing walls. Ghostly, half-melting visions. The miniature stars and claustrophobic feel of a ship in interspace. And the visions.
'Chel, what was that?'
'It looked like a dinosaur, boss. Striped.'
He fingered the collar at his neck, and showed no anger. Anger clouded the faculties, and so he lived in a state of constant disassociation. But sometimes he thought, not angry thoughts, but little cold statements about what he would do if the collar was removed.
What he would do to Asman, in particular. And to the misguided genius who invented the collar circuitry.
The door opened.
Asman looked up, and froze. Behind him the long room became silent, just for a second. It usually happened like this. And Asman would point the gun...
Asman pointed the gun, and nodded towards the three dice in their cup. The gun was a stripper, with every safety device removed and a hair trigger. He knew that Asman would fire by reflex action if necessary.
He threw three sixes.
'Again.' He threw three sixes.
'Again?' he asked mildly. Asman smiled weakly, got up and shook his hand.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You know how it is.'
'One day I'll make a mistake. Have you thought of that?'
'Ways, the day you make a mistake like that you won't be Ways any more, and you know I'll fire, because you'll be an imposter.'
Asman rounded the table and clapped him on the shoulder.
'You've been doing well,' he said.
'How else?'
Ways had seen his own specification, just once. He had been halfway down an inspection shaft at the time, one that was flooded with chlorine gas when not in official use, and gaining illegal access to personnel files was not official. He had never bothered to remember the precise purpose of his visit - it was just one of the many assignments that filtered down to him via Asman's office - but while the little inspection screen was warming up his specification had appeared among the random images. He had memorized it instantly, even through the chlorine haze.
It was a standard requisition for a Class Five robot, with certain important modifications concerning concealed weapons, communicators, and appearance. Designing a completely humanoid robot was twice as complex as building even a high-grade Class Five. It involved intricate machinery for tear ducts and the growth of facial hair - and, if the robot was designed as a spy and might be faced with every eventuality, an intriguing range of other equipment also...
But most of Ways' specifications had been in probability math. It took him some time to realize why. Class Five robots were legally human. They had been designed to be everything a man could be, and Ways had been designed to be lucky.
Asman led him to the mural that occupied one long wall of the large, low-ceilinged room. The room itself was featureless, as were the men tending the machines. It could have been the security room of any Board-run world. But there was something about the quality of the air, even of the light, that suggested an underground vault - Ways in fact sensed the layer upon layer of shielding around him - and there was something in the confident, unthinking way that the Earthman Asman moved that suggested in which planetary crust the room was buried.
The mural was a brightly-lit tangle of coloured lines, circles and blocks of p-math, that shifted slightly as he watched.
'You've done well,' Asman said again. 'He's moved along the right equation.'
'As to that, how do I know? I just keep trying to kill him, just like the others. Do you want me to try on Band?'
'No, your next point of intervention should be...' he glanced along the rainbow lines '... oh, not till he visits those Creap. We've got contingency plans for that. It's all in the equation, anyway. We'll be hot on their heels then, if they have heels. The math says so. One more intervention
when he gets to Laoth and we'll be in the Joker universe.'
Ways blinked slowly. 'Is this information I need to know?'
Asman returned his gaze. 'What do you mean by that?'
'Look,' said Ways, sitting down, 'you made me. Not you, precisely, but someone on Laoth or Lunar. They made me. I'm a robot.'
'That's not held against you. If we were Creap we'd have simply bred up a Creap with the required characteristics, in some vat. But you can't wamp up a man, so you ...'
'Okay, but I'm a robot, even if I'm a special one. I've got everything from toenails to offensive underarm odours, but that's all faked. So what does it matter what a robot knows?'
'You've made your point. Now, are you interested?' Asman was growing impatient.
'Certainly. Why doesn't he die when I kill him?'
'The universe alters.'
Shoot a man from point-blank range, so that your beam dislodges every organic molecule from hair to feet. All the rules postulate an outcome of, say, a mono-molecular mist, a few zips and geegaws on the floor, and a faint smell of burning. But there is always the outside chance. The stripper goes imperceptibly out of sync. Or you hallucinated that you pressed the stud, and didn't. In a shifting universe there is no such thing as a rock-hard certainty, only a local eddy in the stream of total randomness. Just occasionally the coin comes down on its edge, or doesn't come down at all.
'Dom Sabalos is likely to discover Jokers World in ...' Asman glanced at the far end of the mural... 'twenty days, Standard. We can't stop him. He's our first failure out of, oh, it must be several thousand now.'
'Two thousand three hundred and nine,' said Ways, 'I killed them.'
'They all had the right life equations. Any one of them could have made the discovery. His father, for example.'
'And now it isn't working," said Ways. 'We've found some history we can't change. And we're suspected, you know. Look at young Sabalos. All those precautions, on such a harmless world. The Sabaloses are a popular family. After the death of his father they must have felt that he was in danger, too, and not from a Widdershine. I don't think he was even told about the Jokers until he was out of childhood. Another thing. We are driving him to Jokers World.'
Asman rubbed his hands thoughtfully.
'We have considered that,' he said.
'If we hadn't made the attempts he'd probably still be on Widdershins. Instead he's flying around with a robot and a Joker expert - quite a good one, too, from what I've heard.'
Asman nodded. 'Of course, one doesn't have to travel to discover,' he said. 'However, what you say is true. We have been working on a contingency plan. If all else fails we can follow him.'
There was a heavy silence. Ways said quietly: 'To the dark side of the sun?'
'If there is no alternative, yes. Wherever it may be. According to our latest equations, that is what we will do.'
'So you are preparing for it?'
'Oh yes. Sometimes, robot, I get the horrible feeling that we live in a big ever-repeating circle where we do things because it is predicted that we will do things - all effect and no cause. We'll go, anyway, and we will go armed.'
Ways looked at the man, and around the long low room. For a moment he considered the possibility of a universe caught in a circle of predict-and-effect, the ultimate closed circuit, and wondered if the inhabitants would realize what they had done.
'That's not enough,' he said. 'Why isn't he dying?'
Asman shrugged. 'Would you believe the Jokers alter the universe just so that he can remain alive? That's the current favourite. Maybe they want him to discover their world. Maybe - and this one is our prime hypothesis - they are waiting to be discovered. Perhaps this is all necessary to jog him through slightly differing alternate universes into the one where the Jokers exist. That's an outsider, but worth considering.'
Ways was silent.
'That gives you something to think about, eh?'
He nodded. Then he pulled aside his cloak and made a few passes over his chest. A partition slid back and he extracted a small cage, hastily soldered together from power wire. Inside, a small rat-like creature, six-legged and pink, gyrated and yowled, spitting at Asman.
'His pet,' said Asman.
'I expect you knew about this,' said the robot.
'It's on the board,' he admitted. 'We didn't bother to go into details. So this is Ig. Strange little thing, isn't he?'
'It's an it,' said Ways. 'Ask me to tell you how they breed, and I'll answer loudly and with gusto. They eat everything, even artificial epidermi as it turns out.' He held up a finger, bitten to the alloy. 'I'm the latest expert on them. Widdershine fishers say they're the souls of drowned men, to which they may bear some resemblance. They're the third largest air-breathing creature that the planet has produced. Phnobes think they're lucky, and the fishers say that if one makes a pet of you it means death will never be lethal. It could be they have a rudimentary psychic sense, like dogs or Third Eye dragons. It's difficult to see why, since they have no natural enemies and they're something of a planetary totem. The bomb should be planted inside the rib cage, I suggest.'
'Bomb?'
'You plan that Dom should be killed after we've discovered the position of Jokers World. You didn't tell me that, by the way. I suggest that this is what you have in mind. This thing sticks to him. I can see it gets back to him.'
Asman covered the cage. 'As a matter of fact, we have considered something like that. Fine,' he added, with just a hint of nervousness.
While an underling spirited the cage away he added: 'You enjoy food?'
'To some extent the calories are a useful power supplement, as you know.'
So they went to The Dark Side of The Sun, a low mock-phnobic building built on and merging with the sand hills between the Joker Institute and the Minnesota Sea. It was one of many. The Institute had attracted a sizeable town, based on the Joker Industry, a limited amount of tourism and alien visitors. Most of the Earth tourists came to see the aliens and feel cosmospolitan, and the management of the Dark Side tried to cater for this. The walls were decorated with imaginative hologram murals - Creapii sun rafts drifting across Lutyen 789-6, a drosk eight-unit at a funeral feast, grim-faced gardeners fighting a rogue tree on Eggplant, Spooners doing nothing very comprehensible on an unknown ice world.
There were sculptures, too. The phnobic display was unconvincing and probably a fake, although the snow sculpture by an unnamed Tka-peninsular drosk was almost certainly genuine, and so was the... thing, difficult to describe or even to comprehend, that spun slowly around the ceiling, occasionally bumping the walls. The floor covering was an alive and semi-sapient B owd l er, on the payroll, and the serving robots were genuine Laothans. The Dark Side was in fact well-patronized by the more adaptable aliens, who appreciated its cooking and prized its uniquely Earth ambience.
A copperplate motto on the menu read: 'We Serve Anything.'
'There's the story about the drosk chieftain who walked in here and demanded her grandmother's brains on toast,' began Asman, as they sat down.
'And they said sorry, we've run out of bread,' said Ways. 'That story gets around, I last heard it on 'Nova. I'll have what you have, if it's starchy.'
'We'll eat Pineal, I think. Fast-Luck Couscous.'
Behind Asman's head was another mural, and since it was a special one it made the table rather special too, which was why Asman had been shown there with a great deal of ceremony. The Director of the Institute was a big attraction.
The mural depicted a score or so of the more recognizable races grouped in an obviously subordinate position around a throne, on which sat a man. He was human, though attenuated like a Pineal, and wore a harlequin suit and a cap and bells. He was smiling. Behind him was a sun, one hemisphere in shadow and the other appearing from this angle only as a thin crescent.
'Any special reason why the Joker is human?' Ways asked. He took a handful from the steaming pot, kneaded it expertly and swallowed it whole.
'N
ot really. "Joker" is a purely human translation. If you are going to portray one in representational terms, he's got to be human or humanoid,' said Asman. He grinned sidelong at Ways. 'Do you agree with the rest of the symbology?'
'The Joker as Lord of Creation? It chimes in with the idea that they gave life a hand in these parts. There's something about the expression that suggests it wasn't from altruistic motives. Slave races?'
'Possibly. Humanity - and I mean real humanity, the sort that ends at Lunar - cannot afford to meet the Jokers whatever they may be. They've had at least five million years start on us. More important, they had the galaxy to themselves. They didn't have to learn how to get along. That's why we run the search. We can't afford to let them find us first.'
'You assume they're still alive, then?'
'What could have killed them? What sort of gods - or devils - have they become? I think they are hiding. And waiting.'
'What will happen to me?' asked Ways quietly. Asman looked startled, then assumed a blank expression just a moment too soon.
'You want to leave the Institute?'
'This,' Ways fingered the gold collar, 'is the only thing that binds me. Yes, I want to leave. I know how much I cost. That's the advantage of being a robot, there are no big unanswered questions. I know my worth, I know why I was created. I'll repay every pico-standard. But you can keep the humanoid trappings. I won't need them.'
He somersaulted backwards, smashing the chair and landing with his legs folding under him ready for the next leap. It took him across a table and towards a running man, who fell with Ways' alloy hands gripping his wrists just hard enough to agonize. A small sonic gun bounced on the carpet, which writhed.
The robot's arm flicked out in a quicksilver motion and a finger stabbed at the man's neck. He collapsed, neatly and without a sound. Ways bowed an apology to a diner from Whole Erse, who was gazing at his shattered meal, and strode back to Asman's table.
The Dark Side of the Sun Page 9
