The Dark Side of the Sun (8 page)

The drive cabin was small and apparently full of elbows. Isaac sat hunched up in the pilot couch. He looked up.

'I have your grandmother on the line, chief. Are you in?'

'Does she sound angry?'

'No, very cool.'

'Chel, that's even worse.' He switched on the intercom.

'I have got very little to say to you, Dom, except to remind you of your duty to the planet. Doesn't it mean anything to you? You may be killed.'

Dom took a deep breath. 'I may be killed anyway. At least there's no false sense of security here.'

'Fool! You are just seizing the chance to jaunt off on an idiot quest. And incidentally, there's a shape-war brewing down here. Half a squad of guards have been slaughtered in the
buruku.
The one at Tau City is on fire—'

'Samhedi took his men in with stunners. You know guns are against all phnobic law.'

There was a pause. Dom glanced at the screen. The pall over Tau City had grown. As he watched, a point well to the west of the City suddenly flashed into a streak of blinding light. The sunlight had reached the Joker Tower.

'That was
... foolish,'
said Joan slowly,
'Nevertheless, officers of the Board are entitled to some respect. I'm declaring a State of Emergency. A ship will pick you up within the hour.'

Dom cut the connection and spun round to Hrsh-Hgn.

'Can you get through to the leader of all the
burukus
?
The Servant of the Pillar, isn't it?

'You know not what you assk. However—'

In three minutes Dom was looking at a screen holding the image of a small, lightly built phnobe, wearing a silver collar. A female? Phnobes were generally reticent about their sex.

'On behalf of the Board,' he said, 'What may we do to repair this grievous hurt?'

The Servant hissed. 'The soil of the
buruku
has been disgraced.' Dom nodded. The
buruku
was covered to a depth of several inches with Phnobic soil, specially transported.

'We could replace it,' he said.

They haggled. Finally Dom concluded the conversation with a suitable expression of regard and said: 'It'll cost us several hundred thousand standards in haulage charges alone.'

'Can you authorize Board expenditure?'

'Board expenditure nothing. It'll come out of the Sabalos personal account.' He sat back, suddenly tired.

'There is another problem,' said Isaac from his seat. 'Like, where are we going? And how are we going to get there?'

'Hrsh?'

The phnobe pinched his nose. 'The First Sirian Bank would make a good starting point. According to legend he was created by the Jokers.'

'Oh. I hadn't heard that. And he's my Godfather.'

'Well, it issn't true. He iss at least three billion yearss old, ass far as he knows.'

Isaac whistled. There was something on the deep radar, drifting purposely towards the ship.

'It's a sundog, touting for business,' said Dom. 'There's our passage to Sirius.'

'Count me out!' shrieked the phnobe, 'I'm not travelling on one of thosse animalss! I thought this sship had an interspace matrix!'

'It had,' said Isaac calmly, 'It probably worked real good in Dom's great-great-grandfather's day but now the settings are all anyhow. Fancy ending up inside a star? Think of the loss to letters.'

'Very well then. But under sstrong protesst.'

Twenty minutes later a shadow eclipsed the stars. The sundog stopped a few hundred metres from the ship, a fat lozenge flashing like a beacon as it turned slowly in the sunlight.

Isaac peered into the scope.

'It has orange, purple and yellow markings, boss, with a black band across the yellow.'

Dom sighed with relief. Not all sundogs were friendly, or bright enough to realize what would follow if they forgot themselves and engulfed a small spaceship.

'That will be the one who calls itself Abramelin-lincoln-stroke-Enobarbous-stroke-50.3-Eno-barbous-McMirmidom,' he said. 'He's okay. He does haulage work for us.'

A thought stole unbidden into his head.

'Please take us to the First Sirian Bank.'

The ship bucked slightly as the sundog reached out and enveloped it in a pseudofield. The giant semi-animal rotated slowly to face the actinic blue star, inasmuch as a sundog had a face.

'This is undignified,' moaned Hrsh-Hgn, 'Carried by a dog like so much freight.'

'Would you rather grandmother caught us, in her present mood?'

'Frssh!'

'Come on, now, face it like a cosmospolitan.'

An invisible hand wrenched See-Why out of the sky and hurled it at them. They were falling into the sun. Then they were falling around the sun. They skimmed over a blurred sea of blue-white fire that broke on the reefs of space, its roaring a dim thunder inside the pseudofield, towards a glowing horizon that had no curve.

And the star dopplered behind them. Sundog soared up into the interstellar dark, singing.

Silence filled the cabin.

'Wow,'
said
Dom.

'Urghss!'

Isaac peered at the matrix panel, and dimmed the ship lights. In the darkness there were only the stars ahead, and they began to flare blue.

'Prepare yourselves to become a relativistic impossibility...' sang
Isaac.

Illusion.

Dom knew about the things seen in interspace. The larger ships usually had screening around most of the hull, and perhaps an unscreened lounge for the incurably curious...

A white stag galloped through the cabin wall, which glowed under an orange light. It bore a gold crown between its horns. Dom sensed its fear, smelled the rankness, saw the sweat-matted hair on its flanks - but its hooves merged with the floor, and floor and skin merged and flowed continuously. It reared, and leapt through the autochef.

Dom saw the huntsman on his black horse when he brushed through the wall of the drive cabin like bracken. He wore white, except for a red cloak hung with silver bells, and his face beneath yellow hair that billowed in an intangible wind was pale and set. For a moment he looked at Dom, who saw his eyes gleam momentarily like mirrors and a hand go up protectively. Then horse and rider were gone.

'Chel! He almost seemed real!'

Isaac grinned. 'He almost certainly is, somewhere.'

'Uhuh. They say interspace is where all possibilities intersect. I got the feeling he sensed us.'

'A spirit on the wind, no more.'

Dom stood up unsteadily. The walls still looked as if they had been made of second-hand moonlight.

'Now there's an illusion I've heard about.'

A red globe the size of a fist drifted easily through the shielded windows. He watched fascinated as it passed through the autochef, part of the main cable conduit, and the floating figure of Ig, who stirred uneasily in his sleep. It disappeared in the general direction of the matrix computer.

It was an interspace interpretation of a star, probably BD + 6793°. They were harmless enough, though a red giant or a spitting white dwarf could be unnerving to watch as it passed through your body.

Dom looked round after hearing a scuffle. Hrsh-Hgn was wedged under the autochef, in the foetal position. It was almost an hour before he was persuaded to emerge, blinking with embarrassment.

'We phnobess are not perhapss so ressilient ass you—' he began, 'Intersspace sscares uss. It is a region of uncertainty. Who knowss that we may not ceasse to exist?'

'You appear to be all here, physically and mentally.'

The phnobe nodded sheepishly.

Isaac closed the maintenance panel on the autochef.

'It's a '706 model, a quality job,' he said. 'I can't find a print-out for the menu, anywhere.'

Dom nodded. 'I think great-great-grandfather intended the
One Jump
as a one-man ship. I should imagine the menu is programmed into it.'

'Quite. He'd be so busy fleeing from his creditors he'd have no time—sorry, chief, I think maybe I stepped out of line a little there.'

'It's okay. He was a bit of a pirate. But according to the family history he was a strict Sadhimist, too. Simplicity was a virtue. I shouldn't expect it to run to anything more appetizing than bread and maybe fish.'

The autochef used simple molecule-breeding techniques to duplicate dishes stored as probability equations in its menu. The one aboard
One Jump Ahead
gurgled after it was switched on, broke into a low buzz for several minutes, and extruded a table from a base slot. Another, larger slot opened and the meal slid out.

They stared at it for several seconds. Dom reached out and picked up a crystallized fruit, gingerly.

Hrsh-Hgn coughed. 'The intricate bird with the honey glaze I recognize,' he murmured. 'It's a Croupier swan. I think the blobss are cream.'

Dom took the lid off a silver dish.

'Some class of a shellfish baked in—well, it tastes of eggs.'

Isaac picked up a cut-glass goblet and downed the contents in one swallow.

'Old Overcoat,' he said. 'The genuine stuff. Two glasses and you lift off on a pillar of flame.'

They stared at him. He put down the glass.

'Haven't you seen a robot drink before?' he asked.

'We were wondering
...' Dom stopped, embarrassed.

'...
where
it
goesss?'

'We new model class Fives can derive power from the calorific content of organic substances.' He reached for his chest panel. 'If you like I can—'

'We believe you,' said Dom. He looked down at the table again. 'Did I say something about the virtues of simplicity? I think it may be against Sadhimist laws to eat this.'

' "You will not waste",' quoted Hrsh-Hgn. 'There are timess when it iss a pleassure as well ass a duty to follow the One Commandment.

Ten minutes later Dom said: 'Hrsh-Hgn, this damn black jam tastes of fish.'

'It's caviar.'

'Caviar? I'd always wondered. On Widdershins only poor people are allowed to eat it. I suppose they get used to it.'

Twenty minutes later the autochef digested the remains of the meal. Ig drifted towards the matrix room, chewing a fish head. A small, burned-out wreck of a star passed crosswise through the cabin and disappeared. Dom watched it go.

'If the First Sirian Bank is the galaxy's leading Joker expert, why hasn't he found Jokers World?' he asked.

'I assume you don't mean that he should have roved across the universe, Roche limits being what they are. A thing the ssize of the Bank would upset the balance of the average solar system, probably. As to exploration via the available data, he may well have disscovered Jokerss World. Why not? Why, then, sshould he tell uss, mere upstart civilissationss.'

'We'd pay well.'

'We?
We?
Phnobic
We?
Human
We?
Let uss assume the race who findss Jokerss World gains immeasurably. Why should he want that?'

Dom frowned. 'But he runs himself as a Bank. He charges for his services, too.'

'He choosess to. A creature musst do something to relieve the boredom of three billion years. He likes people around.'

'You mean he wouldn't like to see anyone get hold of the World because they might put the Bank in jeopardy?'

'Maybe. It iss all conjecture.'

He started to talk about Jokers World.

Three races walked like men. One of them was Man. Taller than men, but generally lighter, were the phnobes. Much smaller than men but built more on cuboid lines so that they looked like heavy-gravity chimpanzees on a steroid diet, were drosks.

Phnobes came in three sexes. They had a secondary, vestigial brain. They evolved on a world with no readily-available metal. In cerebral matters they were supreme. A world where most of the higher animals were adapted to a tri-sexual system needed a race with brains.

Drosks came in two sexes, eventually. It made sense on a harsh, bitter world. The young males evolved into mature, strong-rninded females after about the first third of their life. Their social system was intricate but was surpassed in complexity by their religion, a fiery edifice involving the double star and three large moons in their system. Drosks were cannibals, it was part of the religion. Drosks found it difficult to conceive of a number greater than seven. Drosks periodically built up a machine-age civilization then, for no well-understood reason, carefully dismantled it and reverted to barbarism.

Compared to all the other fifty-two races known, drosks, phnobes and men were like brothers. To some races, like the Spooners who lived on little icy worlds, they were merely identical. Many others would be incapable of thinking of
them as life at all - like say, the Tarquins, who lived in the upper layers of some proto-stars.

A few races had a larger conception of life. The Creapii lived on small, hot worlds, in the deep layers of the larger gas giants and occasionally on the surface of very cool suns, but could discourse on philosophy with men as easily as they could discuss the untranslatable with Tarquins. Then there were the sundogs, who were merely raw life and derived their picture of the universe from the minds of their customers. The First Sirian Bank was in a class of his own, as always. A few races - The Pod, for one - were alien even to Spooners and Tarquins.

But all the races had one thing in common. They were all less than five million years old, and all had originated within a sphere of stars less than two hundred light years across, centred on Wolf 429. The Creapii discovered that first, and so were the first to investigate the one planet that orbited the Wolf.

They found a Joker Tower, a monomolecular spire frosted with frozen methane, standing dark and alone under the airless sky. They found the thing later known simply as the Centre of the Universe.