The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,18

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 Jokers 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 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