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 Jokers 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 cube-case. 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 10,000 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 wickerwork delivery truck trundled by. It stank: it was powered by a ceramic engine fuelled with fish oil.
And 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 communal jasca, 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 coordinated, 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 mêlée 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 Jokers 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 be
nt 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 interracial 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 geck,’ said Dom. ‘Oh Chel, the stupid geck!’
‘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.
5
The universe was divided into two parts, separated by a five centimetre shell of monomolecular steel. On the inner side was the interior of the luxury yacht One Jump Ahead, superbly outfitted for one passenger but badly cramped for three, one of whom was metal and another was smelling of swamp water.
On the other side was the rest of the universe, composed almost entirely of nothing with a trace of hydrogen. There were also the inhabited planets of Human-Creapii space.
There was Terra Novae, metal-rich and dynamically technological. Third Eye, forested from tundra to mangrove swamps, where the wind sang eerily in the trees and the humans were more alien even than phnobes, and talked with their minds and eyes. On Eggplant the vegetarians were ferocious, and had to be. On the drosk’s world of Quaducquakucckuaquekekecqac visiting humans picked uneasily at the horribly familiar food and were thankful that drosks were too well mannered to do more than look hungrily at guests. There was Laoth, where the only living things were human beings – yet birds flew and the brooks were full of fish …
On every world hot enough to boil water one of the sub-races of Creapii clustered. In the deceptive emptiness of space swam the sundogs and the race called The Pod. And there was The First Sirian Bank …
‘Sixteen,’ said Isaac.
‘This is a distrustful universe in which we live, certainly,’ said Hrsh-Hgn.
Ig, with the ease of one who had lived in zero-g all his life, floated around a bulkhead with another struggling body in his mouth. It looked vaguely like a grasshopper, and had in fact quite a sophisticated copy of an insect brain – but rather better than insect ears.
Dom turned from the viewscreen. ‘Old Korodore really had this ship bugged,’ he said. ‘Look for pinheads, too.’
From orbit Widdershins was grey-blue and big, studded with strips of cloud. The dawn terminator was nudging Tau City. A grey cloud hung over it.
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 Jokers 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 bururu 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 I
saac 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-Enobarbous-McMirmidom,’ he said. ‘He’s okay. He does haulage work for us.’
A thought stole unbidden into his head.
Hullo, spaceman. You wish to travel, maybe?
‘Please take us to the First Sirian Bank.’
Price for journey: seventeen standards.
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.’
To be ready.
‘Would you rather Grandmother caught us, in her present mood?’
To be steady.
‘Frssh!’
‘Come on, now, face it like a cosmopolitan.’
Go.
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.
The Darkside Of The Sun Page 6