go, anyway, and we will go armed.’
Ways looked at the man, and around the long low room. For a moment he considered the possibility of a universe caught in a circle of predict-and-effect, the ultimate closed circuit, and wondered if the inhabitants would realize what they had done.
‘That’s not enough,’ he said. ‘Why isn’t he dying?’
Asman shrugged. ‘Would you believe the Jokers alter the universe just so that he can remain alive? That’s the current favourite. Maybe they want him to discover their world. Maybe – and this one is our prime hypothesis – they are waiting to be discovered. Perhaps this is all necessary to jog him through slightly differing alternate universes into the one where the Jokers exist. That’s an outsider, but worth considering.’
Ways was silent.
‘That gives you something to think about, eh?’
He nodded. Then he pulled aside his cloak and made a few passes over his chest. A partition slid back and he extracted a small cage, hastily soldered together from power wire. Inside, a small rat-like creature, six-legged and pink, gyrated and yowled, spitting at Asman.
‘His pet,’ said Asman.
‘I expect you knew about this,’ said the robot.
‘It’s on the board,’ he admitted. ‘We didn’t bother to go into details. So this is Ig. Strange little thing, isn’t he?’
‘It’s an it,’ said Ways. ‘Ask me to tell you how they breed, and I’ll answer loudly and with gusto. They eat everything, even artificial epidermi as it turns out.’ He held up a finger, bitten to the alloy. ‘I’m the latest expert on them. Widdershine fishers say they’re the souls of drowned men, to which they may bear some resemblance. They’re the third largest air-breathing creature that the planet has produced. Phnobes think they’re lucky, and the fishers say that if one makes a pet of you it means death will never be lethal. It could be they have a rudimentary psychic sense, like dogs or Third Eye dragons. It’s difficult to see why, since they have no natural enemies and they’re something of a planetary totem. The bomb should be planted inside the ribcage, I suggest.’
‘Bomb?’
‘You plan that Dom should be killed after we’ve discovered the position of Jokers World. You didn’t tell me that, by the way. I suggest that this is what you have in mind. This thing sticks to him. I can see it gets back to him.’
Asman covered the cage. ‘As a matter of fact, we have considered something like that. Fine,’ he added, with just a hint of nervousness.
While an underling spirited the cage away he added: ‘You enjoy food?’
‘To some extent the calories are a useful power supplement, as you know.’
So they went to The Dark Side of The Sun, a low mock-phnobic building built on and merging with the sand hills between the Joker Institute and the Minnesota Sea. It was one of many. The Institute had attracted a sizeable town, based on the Joker Industry, a limited amount of tourism and alien visitors. Most of the Earth tourists came to see the aliens and feel cosmospolitan, and the management of the Dark Side tried to cater for this. The walls were decorated with imaginative hologram murals – Creapii sun rafts drifting across Lutyen 789–6, a drosk eight-unit at a funeral feast, grim-faced gardeners fighting a rogue tree on Eggplant, Spooners doing nothing very comprehensible on an unknown ice world.
There were sculptures, too. The phnobic display was unconvincing and probably a fake, although the snow sculpture by an unnamed Tka-peninsular drosk was almost certainly genuine, and so was the … thing, difficult to describe or even to comprehend, that spun slowly around the ceiling, occasionally bumping the walls. The floor covering was an alive and semi-sapient Bowdler, on the payroll, and the serving robots were genuine Laothans. The Dark Side was in fact well patronized by the more adaptable aliens, who appreciated its cooking and prized its uniquely Earth ambience.
A copperplate motto on the menu read: ‘We Serve Anything.’
‘There’s the story about the drosk chieftain who walked in here and demanded her grandmother’s brains on toast,’ began Asman, as they sat down.
‘And they said sorry, we’ve run out of bread,’ said Ways. ‘That story gets around, I last heard it on ‘Nova. I’ll have what you have, if it’s starchy.’
‘We’ll eat Pineal, I think. Fast-Luck Couscous.’
Behind Asman’s head was another mural, and since it was a special one it made the table rather special too, which was why Asman had been shown there with a great deal of ceremony. The