The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,12

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 bugged, 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