The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,34

had been designed to be lucky.

Asman led him to the mural that occupied one long wall of the large, low-ceilinged room. The room itself was featureless, as were the men tending the machines. It could have been the security room of any Board-run world. But there was something about the quality of the air, even of the light, that suggested an underground vault – Ways in fact sensed the layer upon layer of shielding around him – and there was something in the confident, unthinking way that the Earthman Asman moved that suggested in which planetary crust the room was buried.

The mural was a brightly lit tangle of coloured lines, circles and blocks of p-math, that shifted slightly as he watched.

‘You’ve done well,’ Asman said again. ‘He’s moved along the right equation.’

‘As to that, how do I know? I just keep trying to kill him, just like the others. Do you want me to try on Band?’

‘No, your next point of intervention should be …’ he glanced along the rainbow lines ‘… oh, not till he visits those Creap. We’ve got contingency plans for that. It’s all in the equation, anyway. We’ll be hot on their heels then, if they have heels. The math says so. One more intervention when he gets to Laoth and we’ll be in the Joker universe.’

Ways blinked slowly. ‘Is this information I need to know?’

Asman returned his gaze. ‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Look,’ said Ways, sitting down, ‘you made me. Not you, precisely, but someone on Laoth or Lunar. They made me. I’m a robot.’

‘That’s not held against you. If we were Creap we’d have simply bred up a Creap with the required characteristics, in some vat. But you can’t wamp up a man, so you …’

‘Okay, but I’m a robot, even if I’m a special one. I’ve got everything from toenails to offensive underarm odours, but that’s all faked. So what does it matter what a robot knows?’

‘You’ve made your point. Now, are you interested?’ Asman was growing impatient.

‘Certainly. Why doesn’t he die when I kill him?’

‘The universe alters.’

Shoot a man from point-blank range, so that your beam dislodges every organic molecule from hair to feet. All the rules postulate an outcome of, say, a monomolecular mist, a few zips and geegaws on the floor, and a faint smell of burning. But there is always the outside chance. The stripper goes imperceptibly out of sync. Or you hallucinated that you pressed the stud, and didn’t. In a shifting universe there is no such thing as a rock-hard certainty, only a local eddy in the stream of total randomness. Just occasionally the coin comes down on its edge, or doesn’t come down at all.

‘Dom Sabalos is likely to discover Jokers World in …’ Asman glanced at the far end of the mural … ‘twenty days, Standard. We can’t stop him. He’s our first failure out of, oh, it must be several thousand now.’

‘Two thousand three hundred and nine,’ said Ways. ‘I killed them.’

‘They all had the right life equations. Any one of them could have made the discovery. His father, for example.’

‘And now it isn’t working,’ said Ways. ‘We’ve found some history we can’t change. And we’re suspected, you know. Look at young Sabalos. All those precautions, on such a harmless world. The Sabaloses are a popular family. After the death of his father they must have felt that he was in danger, too, and not from a Widdershine. I don’t think he was even told about the Jokers until he was out of childhood. Another thing. We are driving him to Jokers World.’

Asman rubbed his hands thoughtfully.

‘We have considered that,’ he said.

‘If we hadn’t made the attempts he’d probably still be on Widdershins. Instead he’s flying around with a robot and a Joker expert – quite a good one, too, from what I’ve heard.’

Asman nodded. ‘Of course, one doesn’t have to travel to discover,’ he said. ‘However, what you say is true. We have been working on a contingency plan. If all else fails we can follow him.’

There was a heavy silence. Ways said quietly: ‘To the dark side of the sun?’

‘If there is no alternative, yes. Wherever it may be. According to our latest equations, that is what we will do.’

‘So you are preparing for it?’

‘Oh yes. Sometimes, robot, I get the horrible feeling that we live in a big ever-repeating circle where we do things because it is predicted that we will do things – all effect and no cause. We’ll