The Darkside Of The Sun

receiving your full report.’
    Asman was suddenly alone among the dunes.
    Dom awoke. For a while he floated, piecing his thoughts together. Then he pushed himself forward with his toe and drifted across the cabin.
    Day had come to this side of the Band, although the evening terminator was visibly racing across the planet, and the Band-on-Band was fully visible.
    It was a 3,000-mile-wide equatorial strip of land that girdled the fat world like a corset. Even up here Band appeared to revolve so fast for a planet that an imaginative observer half-expected to hear a background hum. It bulged. The Band was a grey-brown strip of mountain, one continuous 25,000-mile range, edged by two ribbons of blue-green grassland. They were bounded by two strips of darker sea, which reached up to the squashed poles and the white ice.
    ‘It’s explainable in terms of continental drift, high rotation and ancient vulcanism, boss,’ said Isaac, looking up from the autochef. ‘Or didn’t you want to know?’
    ‘It must be a hell of a place to live on,’ said Dom, ‘what with the sun scooting across the sky and all.’
    ‘The sundogs like it.’
    Dom nodded. It was their world. They had evolved on Eggplant, but 600 years ago had accepted a cash grant and the deeds of Band in exchange for vacant possession. Sundogs were nice, but dangerous to live with in the laying season. So far Dom’s telescopic survey had revealed nothing but herds of sundog pups which could be seen from space as large dots at one end of thousand-mile-long swathes grazed through Band’s ubiquitous sweetgrass.
    There were two narrow strips of marshland, and rivers in the mountains. There was one small lake. There was absolutely no sign of any habitation.
    Dom had checked on the world. The Creapii-backed Wildlife Preservation Fund ran a small robotic observation station on the planet, as part of a treaty which also forbade unauthorized landings. The Fund headquarters said that there had been suggestions that a being known as Chatogaster was a pre-Sundog inhabitant, although the planet had a meagre selection of vegetation and no animal life at all. No, no signs of sapience had been exhibited by the vegetation. Band had no higher life of its own, which was why the sundogs selected it. Chatogaster was considered to be a sundog legend, or a planetary spirit. No, there had been no recent landings. Very rarely a ship had to put in under the emergency clause, but the robot station was equipped to handle that. Thank you for your enquiry.
    Such sundogs as Dom had been able to raise had refused to discuss the subject. There were a lot of them orbiting the planet.
    As Band spun below the ship they came yet again into radio range of Drunk With Infinity . The set crackled and Joan spoke.
    ‘Still not coming down, Dom? Be reasonable. I don’t think you are being astute about this at all.’
    Her voice made a background as Dom unshipped the telescope again and peered down at the planet.
    Seen from several thousand miles up the Drunk was a squat blob at one end of a long shadow which, Dom swore, shortened as he watched it. It stood in the middle of the rolling continental plain of grass, midway between mountains and sea and only ten miles or so from the solitary lake. Here and there around the ship the yellow light glinted off metal. Robots.
    ‘Anyway, you’ve been up there for hours. You will have to land soon for air, and I happen to know that by now you can’t have enough fuel to take off again. Be reasonable. I am not your enemy. Please come back to Widdershins: you don’t know the danger you’re in.’
    Dom looked across at the fuel tell-tale for the hundredth time. She was quite right.
    In desperation he turned to the One Jump ’s planetary guide, which he had found in its library among some suggestive books on economics.
    ‘It is a sparsely furnished world, though beautiful from space,’ he read. ‘It is the nearest thing a rock world can become to looking like a gas giant. Band was discovered and claimed by the Creapii in B.S. 5,356, but is leased by the sundogs for the purpose of raising their pups. Unauthorized landing is banned – the planet’s name is hence very apt – except in cases of emergency. Even then, for obvious reasons, landings should not be made in the late orbital spring.’
    Obvious reasons, thought Dom. He was prepared to bet that it was late spring down there. But Hrsh-Hgn was down there too, and so was a non-existent being called