The Darkside Of The Sun

by Terry Pratchet

  A coarse woven net was slung across the clearing, hiding it effectively from airborne eyes. With the motor and the ancillary mechanisms that must be hidden under the thick reed mat, the little island would not hold its secret long against even unsophisticated search equipment. But there were several hundred thousand islands in the marsh. Who could search them all?

  A conclusion began to form in Dom’s mind.

  The phnobe passed in front of him and he saw he was holding a double-bladed tshuri knife lightly, tossing it thoughtfully from hand to hand. Dom was mother-naked, except where dry salt rimed his black skin.

  The phnobe was embarrassed by his presence. Occasionally he stopped juggling with the knife and stared at him intently.

  They both heard the distant swish-swish of a flyer. The phnobe dived sideways, flipped back a section of reed and killed the island’s speed, then on the rebound flung himself down by Dom with the knife pressed against his throat.

  ‘Not to utter a sound,’ he said.

  They lay still until the flyer had faded into the distance.

  The phnobe was a pilac smuggler. The dagon fishermen under licence from the Board of Widdershins rode out by the hundred when the big bivalves rose up from the deep, to snatch the pearls of nacreous pilac by the light of the moon. They used lifelines, leather body armour and elaborate back-up procedures – like the factory float which included a hospital where a missing hand was merely a minor mishap and even death not always fatal.

  There were other fishers. They traded safety for an odd conception of excitement and accepted as the price of an illegal fortune the complete lack of any opportunity to spend it. By nature they worked alone and were highly skilled. What they snatched from the sea was theirs alone, including death. Occasionally the Board launched a campaign against them and made half-hearted attempts to stop the pilac being smuggled offworld. Captured smugglers were not killed now – that would certainly be against the One Commandment – but it occured to Dom that to those of their nature the alternative punishment was far worse than the death they courted nightly. So the smuggler would kill him.

  The phnobe stood up, still holding the knife by the heavier, forward-facing blade.

  ‘Why am I here?’ asked Dom, meekly. ‘The last I remember ...’

  ‘You were floating among the lilies sso peacefully, with a stripper burn across your chest. The ssecurity has been out ssince dawn. It seemed they were searching, for a criminal maybe, so I am jusst a little curiouss and pick you up.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dom, easing himself into a sitting position.

  The smuggler shrugged, a strangely expressive gesture in a high-shouldered bony body.

  ‘How far are we from the Tower?’

  ‘I found you forty kilometres from the Sky Pillar. We have travelled maybe two kilometres ssince.’

  ‘Forty! But someone shot at me at the Tower.’

  ‘Maybe you swim well for a drowned man.’

  Dom lifted himself gradually to his feet, his eyes on the twisting knife. ‘Do you gather much pilac?’

  ‘Eighteen kilos in the last twenty-eight years,’ said the phnobe, watching the sky absently. Despite himself, Dom did a quick calculation.

  ‘You must be very skilful.’

  ‘Many times I die. On other time lines. Maybe this universe is my chance in a million and the other thousands of selves are dead. What is skill then?’

  The knife continued its brief flights from hand to hand. Overhead the sun shone like a gong. Dom felt dizzy and was briefly sick but managed to stay upright, waiting for his chance.

  The phnobe blinked.

  ‘I seek an omen,’ he said.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To see, you understand, if I am to kill you.’

  A flock of blue flamingoes flapped slowly overhead. Dom gasped for air and readied himself.

  The knife was thrown faster than he could follow it. It flashed once, high in the air. A flamingo dipped out of the flock as if coming in to land, and crashed heavily among the reeds. The tension in the air snapped like a finely drawn wire.

  Ignoring Dom, the smuggler loped across to it, drew his knife from its breast and began to pluck it. He paused after a minute and glanced up sharply, pointing with the knife.

  ‘A word of advice. Do not ever again even think of a heroic leap at any person holding a tshuri knife. You have about you the air of one with many lives to wasste. Maybe therefore you rissk your life easily. But foolish gestures towards a knife end sadly.’

  Dom let the tension flow out of him, aware that a fraught moment had passed and gone.

  ‘Besides,’ the smuggler went on, ‘doesn’t gratitude count for anything? Soon we will eat. Then we will talk, maybe.’

  ‘There’s a lot I want to know,’ said Dom. ‘Who shot at …’

  ‘Tssh! Questions that can’t be answered, why ask them? But do not rule out bater.’

  ‘Bater?’

  The phnobe looked up.

  ‘You haven’t heard of probability math? You, and tomorrow you become Chairman of the Board of Widdershinss and heir to riches untold? Then first we will talk, and then we will eat.’

  See-Why hung in the mists that had crept out of the marsh. The island sailed dripping through the clammy curtain, leaving a mist-wake that writhed fantastically over the suddenly sinister marsh.

  Fff-Shs came out of the woven hut at one end of the island and pointed into the whiteness.

  ‘The radar says your flyer iss hardly more than a hundred metres thataway. Sso I leave you here.’

  They shook hands solemnly. Dom turned and walked down to the water’s edge, then turned again as the phnobe hurried after him. He held the little rat-creature, which had spent most of the journey asleep round his neck.

  ‘Tomorrow, maybe, there will be great ceremoniess?’

  Dom sighed. ‘Yes, I’m afraid there will.’

  ‘And giftss, maybe? That iss the procedure?’

  ‘Yes. But Grandmother says that most will be from those who seek favours. Anyway, they’ll be returned.’

  ‘I sseek no favours, nor will you return thiss small gift,’ said the phnobe, holding out the struggling creature. ‘Take him. You know what he iss?’

  ‘A swamp ig,’ nodded Dom. ‘He’s one of the bearers on our planetary crest, along with the blue flamingo. But the zoo says there’s only about three hundred on the planet, I can’t …’

  ‘This little one has dogged my footsteps these last four months. He’ll come with you. I feel he will desert me soon anyway.’

  The ig jumped from the phnobe’s arm and settled around Dom’s neck, where it re-placed its tail in its mouth and began to snore. Dom smiled, and the smuggler answered with a brief mucus grimace.

  ‘I call him my luck,’ said the phnobe. ‘It’s an indulgence, maybe.’ He glanced up at Widdershins’s one bloated moon, rising in the south.

  ‘Tonight will be a good night for hunting,’ he said, and in two strides had disappeared into the thickening mists.

  Dom opened his mouth to speak, then stood silent for a moment.

  He turned and dived into the warm evening sea.

  The heavy hull of a security flyer rocked in the swell beside his own craft. A figure appeared on the flat deck as he hauled himself aboard.

  Dom found himself looking first at the crosswires of a molecule stripper and then at the embarrassed face of a young security man.

  ‘Chel! I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realize …’

  ‘You’ve found me. Good for you,’ said Dom coldly. ‘Now I’m going home.’

  ‘I’ve got orders, er, to take you back,’ said the guard. Dom ignored him and stepped aboard his own craft. The guard swallowed, glanced at the stripper and then at Dom, and hurried into the control bubble. By the time he had reached the radio, Dom’s flyer was a hundred metres away, bouncing lightly from wavetop to wavetop before gliding up and over the sea.

  Extract from 2001 and All That: an Anecdotal History of Space-Travelling Ma
n, by Charles Sub-Lunar (Fghs-Hrs & Calligna, Terra Novae)

  ‘Mention should be made of Widdershins and of the Sabalos family, since the two are practically synonymous. Widdershins, a mild world consisting largely of water and very little else, is one of the two planets of CY Aquirii. Its climate is pleasant though damp, its food a monotonous variation on the theme of fish, its people intelligent, hardy and – due to the high ultraviolet content of the sunlight – universally black and bald.

  ‘The planet was settled in the Year of the Questing Monkey (A.S. 675) by a small party of earth-humans and a smaller colony of phnobes and there, perhaps, pan-Human relations are better than on any other world.

  ‘John Sabalos – the first of his dynasty – built himself a house by the Wiggly River, looking over the sea towards Great Creaking Marsh. His only skill was luck. He discovered in the giant floating bivalves that dwelt in the deep waters a metre-wide pearl made up largely of crude pilac, which turned out to be one of the growing number of death-immunity drugs. But pilac was found to be without many of the unfortunate drawbacks of many of the other twenty-six. It became the foundation of the family fortunes. John I extended his house, planted an orchard of cherry trees, became the first Chairman when Widdershins adopted Rule by Board of Directors, and died aged 301.

  ‘His son, John, is considered a wastrel. One example of his wastefulness suffices: he bought a shipload of rare fruits from Third Eye. Most were rotten on arrival. One mould was a strange green slime. By an unlikely combination of circumstances it was found to have curious regenerative properties. Within a year, just when dagon fishing was becoming almost impossible because of the high injury rate among the fishermen, it became a mark of manhood to have at least one limb with the peculiar greenish tint of the cell-duplicating googoo.

  ‘John II bought the Cheops pyramid from the Tsion subcommittee of the Board of Earth and had it lifted in one piece at an area of waste ground north of his home domes. When he made an offer for Luna, to replace Widdershins’ smaller but still serviceable moon, his young daughter Joan I packed him off to a mansion on the other side of the planet and took over as Managing Director. In her the Sabalos fortunes, hitherto dependent on a smiling fate, found a champion. They doubled within a year. A strict Sadhimist, she executed many reforms including the passage of the Humanity Laws.

  ‘Her son – she found time for a brief contract with a cousin – was John III, who became a brilliant probability mathematician in those early, exciting days of the art. It has been suggested that this was a peaceful escape from his mother and his wife Vian, a well-connected Earth noblewoman to whom he had been contracted in order to strengthen ties with Earth. He disappeared in strange circumstances just prior to the birth of his second child, the Dom Sabalos of legend. It is understood that he met with some kind of accident in the planet-wide marshes.

  ‘A body of myth surrounds the young Dom. Many stories relating to him are obviously apocryphal. For example, it is said that on the very date of his investiture as Chairman of the Planetary Board, he …’

  The stars were out as Dom reached the jetty which stretched from the home domes far out into the artificial harbour where the feral wind-shells were kept.

  Lamps were burning. Some of the early-duty fishermen were already preparing the shells for the night’s fishing; one old woman was deep-frying King cockles on a charcoal stove, and a tinny radio lying on the boards was playing, quite unheeded, an old Earth tune with the refrain, ‘Your Feet’s too Big’.

  Dom tied up at the jetty alongside the great silent bulk of a hospital float, and scrambled up the ladder.

  As he walked towards the domes he was aware of the silence. It spread out from him like a wake, from man to man. Heads rose in the lamplight and froze, watching him intently. Even the old woman lifted the pan from the stove and glanced up. There was something acute about the look in her eyes.

  Dom heard one sound as he slowly climbed the steps towards the main Sabalos dome. Someone started to say: ‘Not like his father, then, whatever they—’ and was nudged into silence.

  A Class Three robot stood by the door, armed with an antiquated sonic. It whirred into life as he approached and assumed a defiant stance.

  ‘Halt – who goes there? Enemy or Friend of Earth?’ it croaked, its somewhat corroded voice-box slurring the edges of the traditional Sadhimist challenge.

  ‘FOE, of course,’ said Dom, resisting the urge to give the wrong answer. He had done it once to see what would happen. The blast had left him temporarily deaf and the resonance had demolished a warehouse. Grandmother, who seldom smiled, had laughed quite a lot and then tanned his hide to make sure the lesson was doubly learned.

  ‘Pass, FOE,’ said the guard. As he passed, the communicator on its chest glowed into life.

  ‘Okay,’ said Korodore, ‘Dom, one day you will tell me how you got out without tripping an alarm.’

  ‘It took some studying.’

  ‘Step closer to the scanner. I see. That scar is new.’

  ‘Someone shot at me out in the marsh. I’m all right.’

  Korodore’s reply came slowly, under admirable control.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Chel, how should I know? Anyway, it was hours ago. I … uh …’

  ‘You will come inside, and in ten minutes you will come to my office and you will tell me the events of today in detail so minute you will be amazed. Do you understand?’

  Dom looked up defiantly, and bit his lip.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Okay. And just maybe I will not get sent to scrape barnacles off a raft with my teeth and you will not get confined to dome for a month.’ Korodore’s voice softened marginally. ‘What’s that thing round your neck? It looks familiar.’

  ‘It’s a swamp ig.’

  ‘Rare, aren’t they?’

  Dom glanced up at the planetary coat of arms over the door, where a blue flamingo and a bad representation of a swamp ig supported a Sadhimist logo on an azure field. Under it, incised deeply into the stone – far more deeply in fact than was necessary – was the One Commandment.

  ‘I used to know a smuggler who had one of those,’ Korodore went on. ‘There are one or two odd legends about them. I expect you know, of course. I guess it’s okay to bring it in.’

  The communicator darkened. The robot stood aside.

  Dom skirted the main living quarters. There was an uproar coming from the kitchens where preparations were being made for tomorrow’s banquet. He slipped in quietly, snatched a plate of kelp entrées from the table nearest the door, and ducked back into the corridor. A phnobic curseword followed him, but that was all, and he wandered on down to the corridor until it petered out in a maze of storerooms and pantries.

  A small courtyard had been roofed over with smoked plastic that made it gloomy even under a See-Why noon, and the plastic itself was set with thin pipes that sprayed a constant fine mist.

  In the middle of the yard a rath had been built of reeds. An attempt to grow fungi had been made on the patch of ground surrounding it. Dom pulled aside the drenched door-curtain and stooped inside.

  Hrsh-Hgn was sitting in a shallow bath of tepid water, reading a cube by the light of a fish-oil lamp. He waved one double-jointed hand at Dom and swivelled one eye towards him.

  ‘Glad you’re here. Lissten to thiss: “A rock outcrop twenty kilometres south of Rampa, Third Eye, appearss to reveal fossil strata relating not to the passt but to the future, which …” ‘

  The phnobe stopped reading and carefully placed the cube on the floor. He looked first at Dom’s expression, then at the scar, and finally at the ig which was still twined round his neck.

  ‘You’re acting,’ said Dom. ‘You are doing it very well, but you are acting. You’re certainly acting better than Korodore and the men on the jetty.’

  ‘We are naturally glad to see you ssafely back.’

  ‘You all look as though I’ve returned from the dead.’

  The phnobe blinked.

>   ‘Hrsh, tomorrow I shall be Chairman of the Board. It doesn’t mean much—’

  ‘It iss a very honourable position.’

  ‘—It doesn’t mean much because all the power, the real power, belongs to Grandmother. But I think the Chairman is entitled to know one or two things. Like, for example, why haven’t you ever told me about probability math? And what happened to – how did my father die? I’ve heard fishermen say it was out there on Old Creaky.’

  In the silence that followed the ig awoke and began scratching itself violently.

  ‘Come on,’ said Dom, ‘you’re my tutor.’

  ‘I will tell you after the ceremony tomorrow, it iss late now. Then all will be explained.’

  Dom stood up. ‘Will I ever trust you again, though? Chel, Hrsh, it’s important. And you’re still acting.’

  ‘Oh, yess? And what emotion am I trying to conceal?’

  Dom stared at him. ‘Uh … terror, I think. And – uh – pity. Yes. Pity. And you’re terrified.’

  The curtain swung to behind him. Hrsh-Hgn waited until his footsteps had died away, and reached out to the communicator. Korodore answered.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He hass been to ssee me. I almosst told him! My lord, he wass reading me! How can we let thiss thing happen?’

  ‘We don’t. We will try and prevent it, of course. With all our power. But it will happen, or seventy years of probability math go down the hole.’

  Hrsh-Hgn said, ‘Someone hass been telling him about probability math, and he assked me about his father. If he assks again, I warn you, for pity’s ssake I will tell him.’

  ‘Will you?’

  The phnobe looked down and fell silent.

  Out to sea the dagon rose by the score, in response to their ancient instincts. The catch was unusually large, which the fishermen decided was an omen, if only they could decide which way fate’s finger pointed. They found, too – when the last ripple had died away towards dawn – a small reed island, empty, half swamped, drifting aimlessly over the deeps.