The dark side of the sun - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,51
She clapped her hands. A moment later he felt a presence by his elbow.
A giant was standing behind his chair. A pair of eye-slits surveyed him dispassionately from a small head atop a body as broad as it was high, which was almost two metres. It wore a jerkin of leather, covered with familiar angular designs in red and blue. A variety of hand weapons were stuck into the belt. It was a drosk – an old one – so of course it was a female. If there had been any males in the place they were probably in her deep-freeze right now.
The girl sang a glissando of bell-like note. The red eyes blinked.
‘Empress say what you say?’
‘I was just trying to be sociable,’ said Dom. ‘Who are you?’
The giant held a brief interchange with the girl, and said, ‘I her bodyguard and lady-of-the-bedchamber.’
‘That must be economical.’
‘Lady Sharli say you come for a ride?’
Without waiting for his answer the drosk lifted him out of his chair with one hand. Ig woke up and bared his teeth, then whined as the giant picked him up gently in another great paw and crooned to him. The swamp ig blinked, then ran up one iron-muscled arm and perched on the drosk’s head.
Sharli was already walking across the broad patio outside the hall. She looked sympathetically at Dom as he was dumped at her feet like a parcel, and stamped her foot – to Dom’s amazement, for even his mother had never resorted to that in her expert tantrums – and waved one tiny finger at the giant, who bowed to her. She helped Dom to his feet.
A robot was standing holding the reins of two creatures. Dom hadn’t seen horses before, except the pair that had been regretfully sent back on his birthday. But these were Laothian horses. Therefore they were robots.
Sharli was helped onto one with a coat of anodized aluminium. The reins were some woven metal, hung with jewels and bells.
Dom’s mount was copper coloured. As he climbed into the control saddle it turned and looked at him through multifaceted eyes, and said: ‘Can you ride, buster?’
‘I don’t know, I’ve never tried.’
‘Okay, then let me to the work, huh?’ said the horse, pawing the ground.
‘What did they put a Class Five brain in a horse for?’ Dom asked as they walked away from the palace, with the drosk trotting behind.
‘I’m kept for guests. You gotta be intelligent with some of them,’ said the horse conversationally. ‘You the guy who’s going to discover this great El-Ay in the sky?’
‘Yes. Have you ever met a Class Five, registration TR-3B4-5?’ asked Dom.
‘Oh, him. We were programmed together. He went off to serve some backplanet king, and I got landed with this.’
‘I thought you might have known my Isaac. You’ve got the same conversational style,’ he said.
‘Being a horse isn’t too bad,’ said the horse, tossing its head. ‘They gotta treat me well, on account of us Class Fives being officially Human. You get regular overhauls and three jolts a day ...Did you say something?’
‘I’m thinking,’ said Dom. He bit his lip and stared at the scenery.
Nothing grew on Laoth. The planet was sterile. Incoming ships went through a rigorous decontamination and visitors were stripped of everything except necessary colonic bacteria. Laoth’s atmosphere had been imported. A world with an economy based on the manufacture of electronic miracles couldn’t afford one tiny virus in the wrong place.
But a bare world was inhuman. So, around his palace, another Emperor Ptarmigan, the first of the dynasty, started to build a garden …
Rooted in barren dust, powered by sunlight, the robot acres were deader than a corpse but, like a corpse, roared with tiny life.
Electronic men were a fact of life. A fifth of the Human population was metal. Electronic nature was something else again.
The stately copper trees were nevertheless squat and gnarled like oaks to support their selenium-cell leaves, which tinkled in the breeze. Hummingbirds – an electronic hum – whirred among the spun-silver flowers, where small golden bees tapped the currents into their tiny batteries and flew back to their secret, dark storage cells. In a little mineral-rich brook that wound through the garden the reeds sucked up the metals and threw forth brittle sulphur flowers. In the depths, zinc trout churned. And in the cool pools aluminium water lilies opened like hands.
The horses trotted between the trees and along gravel paths lined with nodding flowers. Sharli led him to a small hill where a steamlet