The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,20

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 bent 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