The Darkside Of The Sun

able to play the thumb-flute. And one or two would be mad.
    The ground underneath him was warm.
    Dom lay in the tepid water for some time before he realized it. He was spreadeagled in a large, steaming puddle. Beyond it the snowdrifts started.
    He heard the distant air scream. Something hurled across the stars, trailing a sonic boom. It turned in a tight, gravity-squeezing circle, returned slowly and slammed neatly to a halt on the edge of the puddle. Except that it didn’t work. The water was freezing again. The ship danced drunkenly between the drifts and returned, a few minutes later, under very low power.
    Isaac opened the hatch.
    ‘Now, are we getting out of this place or aren’t we?’ he cried.
    ‘Mint soda, chief?’
    Dom took the glass. Ice tinkled. Frost was forming on the sides. It tasted like a dive into a snowbank.
    There was fresh green skin on his arms and legs and the back of his neck, where the googoo had reformed itself to his body memory.
    Isaac pressed the memory button on the ship’s workshop and slid the soles back on the sandals. He tossed them across to Dom.
    ‘Short-circuited in the heat,’ he said. ‘They should be okay now.’
    Dom stared out at the starlit surface of the Bank. The warm pool had already frozen over. It made a glittering circle in the snow. He had been lucky, at that. On the sunny side of the Bank water boiled in the shade. He raised the Bank on the ship’s radio.
    Hrsh-Hgn had been taken aboard the Drunk , destination unknown. The Bank knew nothing about the man with the gold collar, or the whereabouts of Ig. It had warmed the surface and sent Isaac out because – because deaths on the Bank were rare and he disliked the subsequent investigations.
    Dom switched off, and drummed his fingers on the console. His face was reflected in the empty screen.
    It was dark green, mottled with leaf-green, because body memory took no account of tanning. He was naked in the stable ship temperature. The memory of recent pain still showed in his eyes, but he was thinking of a man in a gold collar, a smiling man who had haunted his dreams.
    ‘No one notices him,’ he said out loud. ‘He’s just a face in the crowd. He’s trying to kill me.’
    Idly he picked up Korodore’s gift. He’d already experimented with it, putting the memory sword through its repertoire, and now he watched as the atoms reprogrammed themselves. A twitch, and it was a needles word ... a short knife ... a gun, that froze bullets out of atmospheric water and could fire them through steel hull metal … another gun, a sonic …
    ‘I don’t know how Grandmother chased me here,’ he said. ‘Though it is the logical place. But I know where the Drunk is heading now.’
    ‘Widdershins?’ asked Isaac.
    ‘Band. She’ll get the information out of Hrsh. I imagine she’ll threaten him with repatriation to Phnobis.’
    ‘That doesn’t sound like a threat, chief.’
    ‘To a phnobe it is. If he goes back to Phnobis he’ll be in swift conjunction with a ceremonial tshuri whatever happens. No, he’ll talk.’
    Isaac slipped into the pilot seat.
    ‘You could go back to Widdershins. Your grandmother has your best interests at heart.’
    ‘I’ve got to go on. I can’t describe it, I just haven’t got a choice. Do you understand?’
    ‘No, boss. Band, then? I’ve calibrated the matrix computer. It should work.’
    ‘You’d better believe it.’
    He hefted the memory sword. If someone else was waiting at Band …
    Glowing walls. Ghostly, half-melting visions. The miniature stars and claustrophobic feel of a ship in interspace. And the visions.
    ‘Chel, what was that?’
    ‘It looked like a dinosaur, boss. Striped.’
    He fingered the collar at his neck, and showed no anger. Anger clouded the faculties, and so he lived in a state of constant disassociation. But sometimes he thought, not angry thoughts, but little cold statements about what he would do if the collar was removed.
    What he would do to Asman, in particular. And to the misguided genius who invented the collar circuitry.
    The door opened.
    Asman looked up, and froze. Behind him the long room became silent, just for a second. It usually happened like this. And Asman would point the gun …
    Asman pointed the gun, and nodded towards the three dice in their cup. The gun was a stripper, with every safety device removed and a hair trigger. He knew that Asman would fire by reflex action if necessary.
    He threw three sixes.
    ‘Again.’ He threw