The Darkside Of The Sun

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 gushed out of the ground and fell over a rock outcrop into a deep blue pool. A small pagoda had been built amid beds of golden lilies, shot with copper.
    She sat down and patted the seat beside her, then spoke to the giant.
    ‘Lady Sharli say to tell about yourself,’ the drosk said. She was throwing a two-foot knife in the air and catching it by the blade.
    He did. There were long pauses when the giant translated, and he had plenty of time to watch a little brass spider which scuttled out of a cranny a few feet above his head and, taking up a position on a steel twig, swung purposely outward.
    Sharli was a good audience, and possibly the giant was a good interpreter. The girl gasped at the account of the fight in the Bank, and laughed and clapped her hands, weaving a golden haze in the air, when he told her about the escape by sunpuppy.
    The spider climbed another twig and swung again.
    ‘Empress say, were you not scared?’
    Dom tried to explain the predictions while the spider completed several more jumps. He hadn’t finished before the spider had completed a web of fine copper wire and retired to a twig, paying out two tiny power cables behind it.
    Dom told himself that he was being too expansive, too sure of himself. But Sharli was gazing at him wide-eyed. It was too much to resist. Besides, her perfume was going to his head. He was acutely aware of the giant lady’s maid behind him, and the horse, too, had sniggered once or twice.
    While he was demonstrating his grav sandals by flying a figure-of-eight above her head a small mechanical fly blundered into the spider web. There was a minute blue flash.
    Prowess in catching and steering windshells was being explained while the spider slowly dismantled the protesting fly with two spanner-like legs.
    Another horse galloped between the trees. At the controls was Tarli, almost hidden in an armour made of leather slabs in a complex