The Dark Side of the Sun

4

Dom entered. His grandmother glanced up, and nodded towards a chair. The air was musty with incense.

The large white-painted room was completely empty except for the small desk and two chairs and the little standard thurible and altar in one corner, though Joan had a way of filling up empty spaces with her presence.

In foot-high letters along the facing wall the ubiquitous One Commandment glared down on them.

Joan closed her account book and began to play with a white-hi lt ed knife.

'In a few days it'll be Soul Cake Friday, and also the Eve of Small Gods,' she said. 'Have you given much thought to joining a klatch?'

'Not much,' said Dom, who hadn't thought at all about his religious future.

'Scares you, eh?'

'Since you put it like that, yes,' said Dom. 'It's a rather final choice. Sometimes I'm not sure Sadhimism has all the answers, you see. '

'You're right, of course. But it does ask the right questions.' She paused for an instant, as if listening to a voice that Dom could not hear.

'Is it necessary?' prompted Dom.

'The klatch? No. But a bit of ritual never did anyone any harm, and of course it is expected of you.'

'There is one thing I'd like to get clear,' said Dom.

'Go ahead.'

'Grandmother, why are you so nervous?'

She laid down the knife and sighed.

'There are times, Dom, when you raise in me the overwhelming desire to bust you one on the snoot. Of course I'm nervous. What do you expect?' She sat back. 'Well, shall I explain, or will you ask questions?'

'I'd like to know the story. I think I've got some kind of right. A lot has been happening to me lately, and I kind of get the impression that everyone knows all about it except me.'

Joan stood up, and walked over to the altar. She hoisted herself on to it and sat swinging her legs in an oddly girlish way.

'Your father - my son - was one of the two best probability mathematicians the galaxy has ever seen. You have found out about probability maths, I gather. It's been around for about five hundred years. John refined it. He postulated the Pothole Effect, and when that was proved, p-math went from a toy to a tool. We could take a minute section of the continuum - a human being, for example - and predict its future in this universe.

'John did this for you. You were the first person ever quantified in this way. It took him seven months, and how we wish we knew how he managed it, because even the Bank can't quantify a person in less than a year with any degree of accuracy. Your father had genius, at least when it came to p-math. He ... wasn't quite so good at human relationships, though.

She shot an interrogative glance at Dom, but he did not rise to the bait. She went on: 'He was killed in the marshes, you know.'

'I know.'

John Sabalos looked out over the sparkling marshes, towards the distant tower. It was a fine day. He surveyed his emotions analytically, and realized he felt content. He smiled to himself, and drew another memory cube towards him and slotted it in the recorder.

'And therefore,' he said, 'I will make this final prediction concerning my future son. He will die on his half-year birthday, as the long year is measured on Widdershins, which will be the day he is invested as Planetary Chairman. The means: some form of energy discharge.'

He switched off for a few seconds while he collected his thoughts, and then began: 'The assassin: I cannot tell. Don't think I haven't tried to find out. All I can see is a gap in the flow of the equations, a gap, maybe, in the shape of a man. If so, he is a man around whom the continuum flows like water round a rock. I know that he will escape. I can sense him outlined by your actions like - damn, another simile - a vacuum made of shadow. I think he works for the Joker Institute, and they are making a desperate attempt to kill my son.'

He paused, and glanced down at his equation. It was polished, perfect, like a slab of agate. It had an intrinsic beauty.

The distant glint of the Tower drew his gaze again. He glanced up. Not the right time, not yet. Another hour ...

'And now, Dom, as you stand there torn between shock and astonishment, what do you see? Does your grandmother have that tight-lipped, determined look she wears at times of stress? How was the party, anyway?

'Dom, you are my son, but as you are perhaps learning, I have many sons - untold millions. Have, I say, but "had" I mean. For in those billions of universes that hedge us about on every side, they are dead as I predicted. You, who are flesh and blood, are also that one chance that lies a long trek behind the decimal point. That chance that I am wrong. But a student of probability soon realizes that by its nature the billion-to-one chance crops up nine times out of ten, and that the greatest odds boil down to a double-sided statement: it will happen, or it will not.

'I have studied you, and the billion-to-one universe in which you now stand. It left the main-sequence universe at the point of your non-death. Universes are like the stars which some of them contain. Most follow the well-beaten path. But some, by the twist of a photon, career down strange histories which end in super-novae or impossible holes in space. Rogue universes now, crack under the stress of paradox or - what?

'I will try to give you some help, because you will need it. Your assassin came from your present universe, can you understand that? He wanted to prevent you discovering something that will make your chance-in-a-billion universe the greatest in all the alternate creations. But I've an inkling that whatever saved you from death came from your universe, too. I've seen a lot in your universe but how can I tell you because, believe me, Dom, if I did the paradox burden would split your universe at the seams.'

He laid down the recorder and wandered idly into his outer office. The secretary robot clicked into life.

'If anyone calls I am going out to the Tower. I, uh, shouldn't be long.'

'Yes, Mr Chairman.'

'You'll find a cube on my desk. Please send it to Her Managing Directorship.'

'Certainly.'

John Sabalos closed the door and went back to his desk. He was still wearing his black and brown robes from the Hogswatch celebrations of the night before. He hadn't slept, but he felt exhilarated. It was false, of course. Knowing the future wasn't the same thing as controlling it. It just felt like it. He picked up the recorder.

'This I can say, however. Three things. You will discover the Jokers World, if you look in the right directions. Your life will be in danger. And, thirdly... look up in the corner of the room! Run for your life!'

He switched off, and laid the cube on his desk.

Somewhere outside, over towards the east lawn, someone was playing the phnobic chlong zither, badly. John stepped outside. The clatter of Joan's old electric computer floated up from the kitchen domes, which meant she was processing the eighth-year household accounts.

He breathed deeply. Something was adding a third dimension to his senses, etching the external world in high relief. With a probability adept's skill he located the cause. The world was like wine, because this was his last day in the world. The last of the wine. And, they would kill him before he discovered Joker's World. Dom should be luckier.

His personal flyer bobbed in the swell, down by the long jetty.

The door slid to. With a light tread, he set off, quelling the wild elation that ran through him, because death was a serious matter.

His father's voice stopped and the cube projection stopped. Dom shot a glance upwards.

Something small glittered in the air, like a mote of metallic dust. He heard Joan's voice, every word as crisp as frosty air.

'Samhedi, there's another one in here. Be ready .'

'What is it?' asked Dom. The fleck appeared to have grown.

'A collapsed proton. Does that help you?'

'Sure. Like in a matrix engine.'

'Something like that. By the look of it it's already ingested its own atom. What you can see is angular light effect. It's being controlled.'

The first thing that Dom realized was that both of them were standing like statues. The second was...

'I have seen that before.'

'It was the gravity whirlpool that got you before, though. Take one step now and it'll be a bullet with teeth. Ever been sucked through a hole one micron across?'

'Uhuh.'

'I'm sorry, that was tactless. If Samhedi doesn't get here soon you won't have to bother about that, though.'

'Asphyxiation? It'll suck the air out of the room.' She nodded.

'Samhedi's voice came from the wall grille.

'When I say so, please to lie flat on the floor, keeping away from the approximate centre of the room... now!'

Dom caught a glimpse of a flying silver ball the size of a grape before he hit the floor.

When he rolled over it was floating a metre above his head. There was an odd sensation of heat along his spine. They had caught it in a matrix field. It was still sucking up air like a miniature tornado. Presently it drifted out through the wall, leaving a hole with its edges twisted into high-stress shapes. He could hear shouts outside, and the whine of the matrix generator.

He helped Joan to her feet.

'You seem to have it all figured out,' he said.

'It was a sensible precaution. After your - your party, it was days before we figured out how to get rid of the damn thing. It was your robot who came up with the answer.'

'You couldn't put it on a ship because it would eat its way through the floor... Isaac? What did he suggest?'

They watched through the hole. On the lawn outside Samhedi's equipment was clustered around the baby black hole. The silvery sheen had disappeared now. It appeared as a point in space that wrenched at the optic nerves, and the men working around it had to hang on against the wind that was driving into nowhere.

Three of them manhandled a tall cylinder until it was standing upright under the thing. The cylinder was thick with matrix coils.

'This should be quite impressive,' said Joan.

'I'm getting the idea, I think,' said Dom. 'The bottom of the tube is sealed, the matrix field stops it touching the edges, the air rushes in at the top...'

Samhedi bellowed an order against the gale. The thing - it looked like an eye now, a malevolent one staring straight at Dom - dipped into the cylinder.

There was an explosion.

It was the cylinder, reaching Mach One a mile overhead. It sucked itself on towards the stars.

'Neat,' said Dom. 'Suppose it hits the sun? No, you'd have a ship up there. Then what?'

'Seal it up and dump it in deep space. Isaac suggested finding a genuine black hole and dumping it there. That sounds like an invitation to blow up the universe, though, so Hrsh-Hgn suggested accelerating it to about half as light as it was. It'd accelerate, he believes, on interstellar hydrogen.'

'And end up drilling a hole in someone's planet on the other side of creation,' said Dom. He was trying to smile.

His grandmother reached out and took his shoulder.

'You're not doing badly at all, Dom.'

'You neither, grandmother.'

'Just because I am reasonably adept at Disassociation. You won't see me when I choose to turn off.'

Dom shuddered despite himself. He had been with friends when they turned off after DA trips. It was a discipline only taught within the Sadhimist klatches. A man could go for days, weeks, without being affected by his emotions. One or two had told him it was a great sensation - there was a feeling of icy intellectual power, an ability to face problems shorn of the deceptive roccoco of feelings. Cool-heads, they were called. And then you turned off, and the backlash hit you, and you were glad to have an emotional friend around to unroll you with a crowbar and put you to bed - preferably with a bullet.

'How long have you been cool?' he asked.

'Since dinner. And for most of the last four months. But that doesn't matter. You seem to have mastered the technique, anyway. Without drugs, too.'

'Don't you believe it.'

'One thing I'll ask you to believe is that I never heard that second part of that cube before. He was talking to you. He did it—'

'He did it for the million-to-one chance. Oh, there's lots of ways. If he'd foreseen all this, he could have put a simple time delay into the cube. Lots of ways,' he said reassuringly.

'And what will you do now?' Dom tensed at the undertone in her voice.

'It seems I've got to discover the Joker's World. Half the history cubes say it never could have existed.'

'I can't let you,' said Joan.

'I'll be safe until I discover it. You heard the prediction.'

'Your father could have made another mistake. There might be a million-to-one chance, another one. Dom, someone is trying to kill you! That was the third attempt!'

Dom backed away as she walked forward.

'But the first time I dived into the marsh and I turned up forty kilometres away. The second time something saved enough of me from that thing - someone's trying to save me, too! I want to find out who, and why.'

He took another step back and let the door slide across. Then he turned and ran.

'SADHIMISM: the pantheistic/conservation religion founded in cold blood by Arte Sadhim (q.v.), the ruler of Earth from 2001-12. Contemporary documents suggest that he devised the dogmas, beliefs and rituals of Sadhimism in a day and a night, incorporating gobbets wrenched wholesale from druidism, the marginally-surviving witchcraft practices, voodoo and the Survival Handbook for Spaceship Earth. As a religion it worked well and achieved its purpose, which was solely to impress environmental thinking deeply on human minds, and then developed a life of its own and became greater than its creator. Sadhim himself was ritually murdered by a breakaway sect called the Little Flowers of the Left-hand Path on the eve of Good Friday - the Night of the Long Athames ...'

Charles Sub-Lunar: Religions of a Hundred Worlds.

Dom lay on his bed, reading a long rambling letter from Keja. She was glad to hear that he was better; life on Laoth was quite pleasant, and there would be a state visit to Earth soon, and she had seen snow for the first time – and enclosed a refrigerated cube in which several snowflakes were preserved - and dear Ptarmigan had built her a garden that Dom really ought to see ...

Isaac slipped in on well-oiled feet.

'Well?'

'There's guards all over the place, boss. I can't find that gecky frog anywh—'

'That's shape-hatred talk, Isaac.'

'Sorry, chief. The cook says he's left the domes and moved down to the buruku.'

Dom buckled on his grav sandals. 'We're going to fetch him. He's the only one round here that knows more than three facts about the Jokers. And then I kind of think we're going to look for the Joker's World.'

The robot nodded impassively.

'Well? Aren't you going to ask why?'

'Up to you, boss.'

'It's just as well. It seems I've got to fulfil a prediction. I've been pretty bad at fulfilling them lately. I think I will find one or two answers on the way. You know about the third attempt to kill me?'

'Oh yes, and all the others.'

Dom froze. He looked up from stuffing clothing into a back-pouch and spoke slowly.

'How many others?'

Isaac hummed. 'A total of seven. There was the poisoned food in hospital, the meteorite that just missed the power plant, two attacks on the flyer that brought you here. And another artificial black hole. That turned up in the hospital. You were still in the tank then.'

'They all failed—'

'By luck only, chief. The hospital food - I think you didn't eat it, but one of the cooks did. The meteorite -'

'Odd attempts. Inefficient, too.' He thought for a moment, and then packed the memory sword that Korodore had given him. As he turned, his eye caught the pink cube resting on the cubecase. Hrsh-Hgn's Joker thesis. He packed it.

'I'm not safe here, that's for sure. We leave now, while it's still night.'

'If you try and fly you'll fry. Samhedi's got the force screens up around the walls. We could try walking out. You'll have to order me to use necessary force, though.'

'Right,' said Dom.

'In full, please. If the fuzz get me afterwards, it'll all be down on my recorders. Can't disassemble a robot for obeying orders: Eleventh Law of Robotics, Clause C, As Amended,' said the robot firmly.

'Then get me out of here, using no more force than is necessary.'

The robot walked over to the door and called in the security man who was standing guard down the corridor. Then he pole-axed him.

'Not bad,' he said. 'Enough to stun but not enough to shatter. Let's split, boss.'

The buruku was built on the outskirts of the city, where the dry land sloped towards the marsh. It looked like a field of mushrooms under a grey dome. Each mushroom was a reed-woven rath, some of them several times larger than a human geodome. The grey dome was the low-degree force screen, just powerful enough to keep the atmosphere within damp and still. It was polarized too, so that the light that filtered through was dim and subterranean. Inside the air was warm, clammy and smelled of decay .Dom felt that if he breathed deeply horrible moulds would sprout in his lungs. It was what ten thousand phnobes called home.

Towards the centre of the colony the raths huddled together in a fungal township riddled with alleyways and sprouting several distressingly organic-looking towers and civic buildings. Shops were still open, though it was well past midnight; they mostly sold badly-dried fungi, fish or second-hand cubes. From some of the larger raths, bulbous as fermenting pumpkins, came snatches of haunting chlong music. And all around Dom phnobes filled the streets.

In a purely human environment a solitary phnobe looked either pathetic or disgusting, from its goggled eyes to the slap of its damp feet on the floor. In the rath they loomed like ghosts, self-assured and frightening. Most of the alpha-males carried long double-bladed daggers, and any visitor with a concealed inclination towards shape-hatred ended up walking with his back pressed firmly against a comfortingly solid wall.

At one point they had to press into the crowd as a wicker-work delivery truck trundled by. It stank: it was powered by a ceramic engine fuelled with fish oil.

A nd the air was filled with hissing, a susurration like the wind, the sound of phnobic speech. Dom enjoyed the buruku. The phnobes had a way of life divorced entirely from the carefully stylized penury of a Sadhimist ruling family.

Dom found Hrsh-Hgn seated in a communa l ja s ca, playing tstame. He glanced up at the two of them, and waved them into silence.

Dom sat down on the stone seat and waited patiently. Hrsh-Hgn's opponent was a young alpha-male, who looked at Dom disinterestedly before turning back to the board.

The tstame men were crude and badly co-ordinated, which was to be expected from a public set. Even so, they were being directed across the squares with a gawky grace.

Red's pawns had dug a defensive trench across one corner of the board. White had tried the same tactic, but had stopped work and the pawns were clustered around one of Red's knights, who was haranguing them. As Dom watched, Red's Sacerdote-Shaman brought his mitrepike down on the kill-button of White's Accountant, and in the ensuing melee managed to get several pawns through the crossfire from the Rooks. The King made a brave attempt to run for it but was brought down by a flying tackle from the leading pawn.

Hrsh-Hgn's opponent removed his helmet and made a grudgingly complimentary comment in phnobic before loping away. Dom's tutor turned.

'I want you to help me find Joker's World,' said Dom.

He explained.

The phnobe listened politely. At one point he said: 'I'd be interessted to know how you survived a black hole that removed Korodore.'

'Yes, and Ig.'

'But no, that is not sso ...' He reached down beside him and picked up a wicker cage. Inside, Ig fizzled.

'I found him in the busshess at the edge of the lawn. He was badly sshaken. He must have left your sshoulder somehow.'

'And you looked after him - that's surprising, for you.'

Hrsh-Hgn shrugged. 'No one elsse would. The fisshermen are supersstitious of them. They ssay they are the ssouls of dead comrades. '

The swamp creature looped itself around Dom's neck.

'Are you coming with me... us?'

'Yess, I think sso. I accept bater.'

'I never did find out what that word meant.'

'It refers to the inexorable processesss of what you humans are pleased to call Fate. Where did you think of starting? Don't look so blank.'

'It's just that I expected a lecture on my duties as Chairman. As my tutor you were hot on the subject, I seem to remember.'

The phnobe smiled, switched his headset on and turned to the board. The tstame mannikins stood up, ranged themselves into two neat rows, and marched down a flight of steps that appeared in one of the neutral squares, carrying the temporarily disabled.

'The point doess not arise now,' he said, 'Ass a mere frog' - he looked sharply at Isaac - 'I suggesst you follow the path predicted. Bessides, ass a Joker student of ssome repute, and an amateur probability mathematician to boot, I feel intrigued. Tell me, are you embarking upon thiss because it hass been seen to happen in the future, or has it been seen to happen in the future because you are following the prediction now?'

'I don't know,' said Dom, 'But I know where there's a ship—'

'Mr Chairman!'

Impressions crowded in on him. The low-ceilinged room had gone quiet, suddenly, like the switching off of a music cube, leaving the sort of silence that is even louder and hangs in the air like fog. The players bent over the tstame tables did not move, but now they seemed tense.

The chlong trio stopped playing. Ig whined.

Samhedi stood in the doorway, flanked by two minor security men. And they were armed. Dom remembered Korodore's advice, one day when the dead man was feeling expansive, that only the foolhardy or unimaginative carried projectile weapons into a buruku. Korodore had in fact hefted a regulation double-bladed knife, and then diffidently, on the rare occasions he went in.

'We have come to escort you home, Mr Chairman.'

Dom strode towards him and said politely, too politely: 'You were number two on Terra Novae, weren't you?'

'I was.'

'Who told you to carry stunners into a buruku ?'

Samhedi swallowed, and glanced sidelong at the guards. The room seemed to sprout ears.

'Your predecessor would not have done such a thing. You might just have precipitated an inter-racial incident. Now unbuckle those things and throw them on the floor.'

'I have orders to see you safely home—' began Samhedi.

'From my grandmother? She has no authority. What law am I breaking? But you're breaking phnobic custom—'

He had driven the man too far. Samhedi growled.

'What gecky customs do these frogs have, anyway?'

He said it in bad phnobic. One by one the phnobes stood up, tshuri knives glinting in the deep gloom.

The alpha-male that had played tstame with Hrsh-Hgn loped up to Samhedi and threw his knife into the floor between them. Samhedi looked at Dom.

'It's a challenge,' said Dom.

'Suits me.' The security man raised his stunner until it was level with the phnobe's face. The phnobe blinked impassively.

Samhedi fired. It was a low-intensity beam, just enough to stun. The phnobe fell backwards like a sapling.

'And that's my—'

Dom had disappeared. A knife took the stunner and two fingers from the man's hand. He gaped, and looked up at the ring of blank, large-eyed faces...

Isaac helped the two of them through a small rear window as the noise in the jasca rose suddenly. They darted across the road just ahead of two flatcars laden with security men.

'The stupid ge c k,' said Dom, 'Oh Chel, the stupid ge c k!'

'Intelligence is humanity's prime ssurvival trait, therefore it iss as well that those who don't sshow it be weeded out,' said Hrsh-Hgn, philosophically.

'Where to now, chief?' said Isaac, 'Round here it's beginning to look like Whole Erse on Slain Patrick's Eve.'

'Great-great-grandfather was occasionally less than honest in his business dealings. There's a private yacht at the spacefield. It's there for use if any high ranking Sabalos feels the need for a—a—'

'An impromptu vacation?' suggested Hrsh-Hgn.