The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,44

But the streamlining puzzled him.

Until he realized. Even suns have atmospheres.

The glowing, linked rings grew rapidly in the screen, until the outer edges slipped away. It was no comfort to know the image was just that, an image darkened and screened down until it was merely bright. Instinct said they were plunging into the heart of a star.

‘Born of the sun, we travel a little way towards the sun,’ misquoted Isaac, tactlessly. Dom relaxed, and laughed. He thought he could hear a muted thunder, not unlike the roar of star flames. It was impossible, of course. It was just that he thought he could hear it. Of course, it was impossible.

Finally all definition was lost, and the screen became a painfully white rectangle. Hrsh-Hgn was trembling with a phnobe’s instinctive fear of naked sunlight. Dom pictured the ship coasting over a glowing sea, one with no horizon, and stopped his imagination resolutely when he thought of all the little mechanical things that could go wrong.

Something was drastically wrong with the raft when it appeared.

Artists and the eye of imagination portrayed a raft only a few steps removed from the log platforms that dagon fishers used, with perhaps a few Creapii slithering nonchalantly across the deck, and it was open to the sky, with a class of a yellow ocean a long way beneath. But even High-Degrees could not survive in the open except on near-cinders stars, and the Chains Raft was one of the first on a hot star. It was just a blank hemisphere, hovering flat side down in what appeared on the screen as a thin mist.

The shuttle docked gently, and a section of wall slid back to reveal a circular grey tunnel. A friendly mechanical voice invited them to follow it. Dom led the way, warily.

The sound he heard hit him like a club. He ran forward, unbelieving.

It was the sea.

His Furness CReegE + 690° rolled down to the beach on bright caterpillar tracks. He was big, much bigger than the low-degree Creapii that lived on Widdershins. His egg-shaped suit was golden. A fawn pranced by his side, and a small blue singing bird was perched on his tentacle. His Furness stopped at the surf line and waited patiently.

Dom felt his toes touch the sand and waded through the waves. Some of the strangeness of the Creap was gone now. He knew that he was looking at a creature who was the leader of the most advanced subspecies of a race ten times as old as men. Was the featureless ovoid looking at him? What did it see?

An armoured tentacle handed him a towel. It was rough and smelled of lemons.

‘A pleasant swim?’ The light tenor voice materialized without visible means of support.

‘Thank you, yes,’ said Dom. He opened his hand, and showed the Creap a small purple shell.

‘Trivia monarcha sinistrale,’ said the Creap. ‘The Widdershine ink cowrie. Beautiful in its simplicity. How did you find my ocean?’

Dom looked back at the waves. The surf was faked. The horizon was a masterpiece of illusion, and was a hundred metres from the shore. An artificial sun set in a splendour that was real. An evening star hung in the crimson glow.

‘Convincing,’ he said.

The Creap laughed pleasantly, and led him slowly up the beach.

There was more land than sea in the sanctuary. Again, the Creapii had only erred on the side of generosity. On one side a plain of golden grass rippled all the way to distant mountains, crystal clear. Gods might live on those towering peaks. On the other side the forest began. A respectable stream gushed from an outcrop and meandered between root-buttressed banks; a dragonfly, one of the large Terra Novaean aeschans, skimmed over the water. Short turf grew between the trees, studded with gentians. Rabbits had left signs of their passing. There was a stand of fragrant fennel, and a vine twisted itself among the nearest trees. In the far distance was a volcano.

‘Shall I speak to you of back projection, hidden devices, artificial irrigation?’ asked His Furness innocently. Dom sniffed the air. It smelled of rain.

‘I won’t quite believe you,’ he said. ‘If I dug in the soil here, what would I find?’

‘Topsoil, a fossil or two, carefully selected.’

‘And?’

‘Oh, rock. Limestone to a depth of three metres.’

‘And then?’

‘Alas for illusion: in this order, the machine level, a metre of monomolecular copper, a mere film of oxidized iron, a suspicion of a matrix field. Shall I go deeper?’

‘That’s deep enough, Your Furness.’

‘Shall we continue our