He turned back to the guests. Here and there a big gold egg now showed in the crowd – the Creapii ambassadors. Experience suggested that there was no risk in them. They seldom meddled in the affairs of worlds where water liquefied.
One was holding a dish of silicate-salt hors d’oeuvres in a single armoured tentacle. Occasionally it held on to the complicated airlock on its circumference. It was chatting to Joan I, who stood majestic in the black memory velvet and purple tabard of a Sadhimist Dame-Priestess in the negative aspect of Nocticula-Hecate. Lady of Night and Death, thought Korodore. It was not a tactful choice.
She smiled at the Creapii and turned to face the hidden camera, raising one hand. Korodore reached out and tipped a switch.
‘How goes it?’ Joan asked. Korodore watched fascinated – she had a remarkable talent for sub-vocalizing.
‘He is breakfasting. We have treble-checked the food and everything else.’
‘Has he shown any effects from yesterday?’
Korodore paused. ‘No. While he slept I used a brain scrubber on him. I—’
‘How dare you!’
‘It will keep yesterday’s memories in a state of flux for a few hours. Would you prefer him to learn the truth? He would, had I not done so – even if he had to brow-beat it out of Hrsh-Hgn.’
‘You should have asked me!’
Korodore sighed, and picked up a memory cube on the console. ‘I’m sorry, madam, but you have a security rating now of only 99.087 per cent. I checked. Probably it’s only deep Freudian impulses – but from now on I am afraid I must run this show.
‘Like I said, madam, I’m not inclined to accept probability math. You may, if you like.’
He switched off. She stood rigid for a moment, trying to contact him, then turned and began to talk brightly to a tall diplomat from the Board of Earth.
Korodore turned his attention to the main hall. Dom wasn’t there. His heart stopped until he realized that the boy had also moved out of one camera’s range to look at his presents.
Dom opened the first package and drew out a pair of gravity sandals, glistening under their thin coat of oil. The tag said: ‘From your Godfather. Come up and orbit me some time. It gets damn lonely.’
Dom grinned and buckled them on. For a hectic few minutes he bobbed and swooped among the struts of the dome, gliding to an unsteady halt six inches above the floor. He felt that the sandals would probably be the climax – most of the other presents would be much less interesting.
From Hrsh-Hgn came a fat rectangle. Dom unwrapped a memory cube and ran his finger over the index face. The cube lit up, the title page standing out in white letters a few centimetres above the surface and revealing: ‘The Glass Castles: A History of Joker Studies, by Dr Hrsh-Hgn. Dedicated to Chairman Dominickdaniel Sabalos of Widdershins.’
In smaller letters Dom read: ‘Number One in a limited edition of one (1) imprinted on Third Eye saffron-silica.’
‘A high honour, indeed,’ said Isaac. Dom nodded, and thumbed the cube at random to read: ‘… mystery of the galaxy. As Sub-Lunar has said, to the imaginative mind they form part of galactic mythology: the Glass Castles at the back of the Galactic North Wind. These towers, built before the oldest of the official Human races had discovered the uses of stone, are memorials to a race which—’
Dom laid the cube down slowly and opened the present from Korodore.
‘That looks dangerous,’ said Isaac.
Dom wielded the memory sword carefully, staring up at the almost invisible blur as it changed under his touch from sword to knife, from knife to gun.
‘Hm,’ said Dom. ‘They use swords on Earth and Terra Novae, don’t they? And on Laoth, too?’
‘Yes, with metal blades. They’re more ceremonial and satisfying than guns. But that thing is made to kill people with. Not that I’m putting it down, boss.’
Dom grinned. ‘You’re mighty uppity for a robot, aren’t you? In the old days you’d have been dismantled by the mob.’
‘In the old days robots were considered to be non-living, chief.’
Joan’s present was a simple black Sadhimist athame against the time when he should be admitted to membership of a ceremonial klatch, while from his mother he received the deeds of one of her personal estates on Earth. It was far too generous, and typical of Lady Vian on those occasions when she remembered Dom.
There were other presents from the minor directors and heads of subcommittees, most of them expensive – far too expensive to be allowed to keep, even if Joan would permit it. But Dom looked wistfully at the deeds of a robot horse, presented by Hugagan of Planetary Relations. Isaac peered over his shoulder and sneered audibly.
‘Lunar manufacture,’ he said. ‘All right, I suppose, but not a patch on the ones we make on Laoth. They live.’
Dom glanced at him.
‘I shall have to visit Laoth,’ he said.
‘The jewel of the universe, take it from me.’
Dom laughed and made sure that Ig had a good purchase on his shoulder. Then he thumbed the control ring and the sandals lifted him up, through the dust-laden beams that filled the dome, and out over the sea.
He spiralled low over the lagoon, where Lady Vian’s little tame windshells grazed, and felt Ig scramble around his neck. He glanced backwards and saw the little animal was riding him comfortably, pointed snout sniffing the wind.
Below him he watched the shells cease their grazing and swing into a pattern so that, prow to stern, they formed a circle. Vian spent hours drumming simple tricks into their microscopic minds.
Something stirred restlessly at the back of his memory, but he dismissed it carelessly and sought altitude.
He burst through the balloon trees ringing the lawn, bursting the fruits recklessly, and braked a bare inch above the grass.
Joan I strode across the lawn to meet him, and kissed him with rather more tenderness than usual. He looked into her grey eyes.
‘Well, grandson, and how do you feel this day?’
‘I feel on top of the world, madam, thank you. But I must say you look rather tired.’ She’s acting like a cool-head, he thought – why is she so worried?
She smiled wanly. ‘It is always hard when one’s descendants make their way out into the world. Now you must come and meet people.’
Lady Vian had walked slowly up, her face hidden in a heavy grey veil. She extended a white hand. Dom knelt and kissed it.
‘So,’ she said, ‘enter the master of the world. Who is your ferrous friend?’
‘Isaac, my lady,’ said Dom. ‘An uppity robot who doesn’t want his freedom.’
‘But of course,’ said Vian, ‘we are all of us in chains, even if they be only of chance and entropy. Have not the Jokers put even the stars in chains?’
‘You have a fine grasp of essentials,’ said Isaac, bowing.
‘And you are presumptuous, robot. But I thank you. Dom, I wish you would donate that swamp creature to a museum or a zoo or something. It is so animal.’
Ig scratched himself and sniffed – then gave a long drawn-out hiss. Dom looked over his mother’s shoulder and caught the eye of a tall man in a long blue cloak, who wore a heavy gold collar at his neck. The man’s face was creased with laughter lines, and he winked at Dom and gestured upward with his glass. Dom followed his gaze and saw a flock of flamingoes wheeling high over the domes. For a moment they formed a circle. Then, with long slow wingbeats, they flew out to sea.
Korodore sat back and breathed deeply. Short of poisoning the air – and a filter haze surrounded the lawn – the only way someone could attack Dom now was with bare hand or tentacle. At least, they could try, before concealed strippers separated them from their component molecules.
There remained the official progress through Tau City. Dom would walk while the others rode, and would wear nothing but the lead and iron chain of office and seven invisible shields of various types, incorporated in the links. Most of the human worlds and one or two alien ones would have the route bugge
d, of course, and several had bribed Korodore. He …
… leant forward. Someone had walked into the field of one pinhead and was looking at him. Korodore had an uneasy certainty that the man was laughing. He looked like a man who had laughed all his life.
Korodore thumbed through the guest list. Blue cloak, tall … the man was a minor official at the Board of Earth’s agency in Tau City, newly appointed …
The man in the screen had lifted one foot so that he was balancing on his right leg.
‘Madern, get a focus on the guy in the blue cloak. No, better – Gralle, can you get a beam on him?’
‘Got it, Ko. Shall I take him out?’
Korodore considered. Earth was still powerful. Standing on one leg wasn’t a killing matter per se.
‘Hold it.’
The figure had extended its left arm, pointing the first and fourth fingers directly towards, it appeared, the security room. He had closed one eye and was sighting along the extended arm like a weapon.
Let’s see how you look without an optic nerve, thought Korodore.
The explosion knocked him sideways. He landed at the crouch, stripper levelled in a reflex action, and dived again as a second explosion and the beginning of a scream marked the weapon control console’s transformation into a plume of incandescence.
The guests applauded politely. Dom, at his grandmother’s nod, rose a few metres above the ground and said: ‘I thank you all. And I ask that the spirit of holy Sadhim and the small gods of all races give me – give me—’ He stopped.
A low boom echoed from the home domes.
Dom stared, and heard again in his inner ear the thin crack of a stripper shot in the transparent air around Jokers Tower. Images flooded into his mind, with fragments of speech that joined and became coherent, and the memory of the hot pain and the cool green relief of the swamp water …
A dot in the air grew rapidly. He heard his mother cry out, a long way off.
Korodore dived with his clothes smouldering. Raw blisters were his hands, blood was his face.
He landed heavily by Dom and shouted incoherently at him. Dom nodded, lost in a dream.
The man in the blue robe stepped lightly towards them, and took his theatrical stance. Ig shrilled.
Korodore lurched forward, raised the stripper in both hands, and gave a growl and dropped its smoking butt. In the same motion he flung himself towards the outstretched arm.
The ball of non-light spun up above the blackened lawn and the landscape twisted. See-Why was a bright sun. In the painfully light sky it showed now as a darker speck.
3
‘Understanding is the first step towards control. We now understand probability.
‘If we control it every man will be a magician. Let us then hope that this will not come to pass. For our universe is a fragile house of atoms, held together by the weak mortar of cause and effect. One magician would be two too many.’
Charles Sub-Lunar, Cry Continuum
‘The fish swims – vsss!
The bird flies – rsss!
The fungi-squirrel run – gsrss!
The wheel turns and
All is one.
‘I must scream yet I have no mouth.
I must run yet I have no feet.
I must die yet I have no life.
The wheel turns and
All is one.’
Funeral song of the Deep Rocky region,
Five Islands, Phnobis.
The sound of the sea. Breathe? But he could not breathe.
It came and went like the surf. It was only a sound, but it carried strange harmonies – warmth, and softness.
Dom floated somewhere on the breathing sea.
A man appeared, dressed in the old brown robes of a Sadhimist adept garbed for the ceremonies of Hogswatchnight. The face was familiar. It was his own.
‘Don’t be so damn silly. I am your father.’
‘Hullo, Dad. Is it really you?’
John Sabalos gestured aimlessly. ‘No, I am an extension of your own deep mind. Hasn’t Hrsh-Hgn taught you anything? Chel! Down all the stars, boy, you should be dead. So much for probability math, therefore.’
‘Dad, what’s happening to me?’
The familiar face faded. ‘I don’t know – it’s your dream,’ was left hanging in the air.
Hrsh-Hgn appeared, standing in front of the familiar faxboard.
‘In an infinite universe all things are possible, including the possibility that the universe does not exisssst,’ he purred. ‘Expand this theory, with diagramsss—’
Dom heard himself say: ‘That is not a theory. That is a mere hypothesis.’
‘Ahh, beware of paradox!’ The phnobe shook a finger. ‘For once you have a paradox let loose in
the universe you have a poiyt.’
‘Poiyt?’
‘And let uss consider …’
Isaac appeared, doing a soft-shoe shuffle through the mists.
‘Goodness, are robots allowed in this dream? Or do they have to sit in the second-class dream at the back? Now here’s the plot, boss, see, really you are the hereditary chairman of Earth itself but because of a palace coup you were sent here—’
‘No,’ said Dom firmly. That wasn’t right.
‘No, you have this wild talent which is the result of generations of careful breeding and all you have to do is give the word and hordes will—’
‘Not me. Try the Infinity next door.’
‘No, well, the universe doesn’t really exist – we can’t hide this from you – except in your imagination, and so this secret organization called the Knights of Infinity, they—’
‘Try some other universe, robot.’
‘Well, okay, if you want it straight from the shoulder, you are not important at all but you happen to have this magic bracelet which was made by the God of the Universe and He wants it back and you have got to get together a few trusted friends, such as me, and travel many a weary light year to the searing fires of Rigel and—’
‘Uhuh.’
‘I was only trying to cheer you up, chief.’ The robot shed a tear of mercury. ‘We Freudian extensions of personality have feelings too, you know!’
Dom.
‘Who are you?’
Dom, can you hear me?
‘I can hear you. What are you?’
Dom, if you can’t hear me, what can you see?
See?
He sensed a light above, tinted with green.
Good, Dom, you are in psuedodeath. You do not know what that means. We need your earnest cooperation. We need access to your self-memory. Will you perform these exercises? Good. Now we want you to form a mental picture of yourself. We will show you how...
A long time passed. Before Dom’s mind swam himself, a perfect copy. It danced, and sang, and flexed embarrassing muscles. Then the voice made him go through it all again. And again.
Understanding was allowed into his mind. The voice was that of a googoo tank operator. Or, rather, a series of them.
He had seen the men of the hospital rafts after a hard night with the dagons, grinning foolishly under the pallid nutrient bath as they flexed the muscles of their new green-grown limbs. Googoo was one invention Widdershins hugged to itself. The surgeons said that if no more of a body was left than that tiny sliver of brain they called the mommet, a new body could be …
No!
Dom thought it again. He could sense the tank man’s panic. Dom started to think questions. Darkness fell swiftly, and was replaced by the green light and no desire to ask questions at all. A new voice said:
Think coherently. You must breathe. We have some more building to do. Think of something, say it in your mind, now.
Unbidden, the Green Paternoster floated up through Dom’s consciousness, the last words he would say before climbing into his cot as a child, after ending the night prayer with ‘God bless the household robots’.
He galloped through it. It was senseless gibberish now, the centuries had twiste
d the words, but it still had power.
‘Green Paternoster, Sadhim was my foster, He saved me under the poisoned tree, He was made of flesh and blood to send me my right food, mine right food and air, too …’
Good.
‘… that I might be a FOE, and stop at two, To read in that sweet book which the great gods shoop ...’
Good.
Dom plunged on recklessly, tasting the words: ‘… open, open, save me, Dead, Dead Chel Sea, Halve the population roster and say the Green prayer PATER NOSTER!’
In the silence the tank man said: ‘Dom, you now have vocal cords. You are breathing. You have built yourself a mouth. There is something you must want to do.’
Dom screamed.
He examined himself in the full-length mirror. Everything was there, and in full working order. The tank, working from his body memory, had duplicated nails, teeth, DNA patterns and even healed the scar on his chest. Dom rubbed the place bitterly, remembering the flight in the marsh.
Isaac creaked across the room and handed him his clothes. He dressed himself slowly.
There was one alteration. Before he had been jet black and decently hairless, the result both of See-Why’s healthy ultra-violet and the tannin injections. Now he had hair to the waist and, like the rest of him, it had a greenish tint.
The bouncy little Creapii doctor in charge of the hospital tanks had explained it carefully, with a rare grasp of colloquial Janglic. But then Creapii could so easily assume the mannerisms of other races.
‘It’s called googoo. Of course, I needn’t tell you that. I used to go out on the hospital rafts once, but we’ve come a long way from those primitive limb replacement tanks.
‘Anyway, Mr Chairman, it is alive in its own right. It is in fact a highly complex organism under your control. I can guarantee that it matches your body almost on the atomic level. It will have certain advantages, of course – your heat tolerance, for example ...ah, yes, at your age I’m not surprised you should ask. Yes, your children will be human in every respect—’ and the doctor made a surprisingly apt dirty joke. ‘But be careful of misunderstandings. It is now you, not some alien slime. The colour? The state of the art, I’m afraid … come back in, oh, ten years and I guarantee that we can turn out a body with not even a trace of green. As for the hair, well, absence of hair is not yet a generic characteristic of a Widdershins. I’m sorry, at the moment it’s a warts-and-all process.
The Darkside Of The Sun Page 4