The Dark Side of the Sun Read Online Free PDF

memory.
    A pile of presents - he was, after all, half a whole Widdershins year old - were heaped around the long table. Two robots-in-waiting stood on either side of the single place setting.
    Dom had planned the meal time and again. In the end he had chosen the menu that had been eaten by every Chairman of Widdershins. It was a famous meal. According to the Newer Testament, it was the same meal that Sadhim Himself ate when he became Lord of Earth - a quarter-loaf of brown bread, a strip of salt dried fish, an apple and a glass of water.
    There were some slight differences. The flour for Dom's loaf had been freighted in from Third Eye. The fish was truly Widdershin, but the salt had been mined on Terra Novae. The apple was from the Earth's Avalon, the water melted from a particle of comet. In all, the meal cost about two thousand standards. Some kinds of simplicity cost more than others.
    Korodore, a true-born Terra Novaean, which meant food concentrates, watched Dom eat with a slight feeling of nausea. The camera was in a metal mosquito, high in the dome. He thumbed a switch, and the screen faded in a view from a mechanical shrew in the branches of a tree on the edge of the west lawn. Most of the guests had already arrived, and were mingled around the long buffet table.
    At least half of them were phnobes, many of them from the
buruku
colonies around Tau City. Korodore recognized the diplomats - they were tall, dark alpha-males, carrying sunshades. The less exalted, who were more acclimatized to the light, stood in small, silent groups around the lawn. Korodore switched from pinhead to pinhead until he located Hrsh-Hgn, reading a memory cube in the shade of a balloon tree. The Stoics, probably.
    Behind Korodore the darkness of the big security room glowed here and there as the other security officers watched. Only Korodore knew that under the horticultural dome by the north lawn was another, smaller security room checking on this one. And occasionally he switched to his own private circuit and watched the officers there. And, hidden by him in a place the exact location of which he had scrubbed from his mind, was a small biocomputer. He had programmed it carefully. It watched him.
    He turned back to the guests. Here and there a big gold egg now showed in the crowd - the Creapii ambassadors. Experience suggested that there was no risk in them. They seldom meddled in the affairs of worlds where water liquefied.
    One was holding a dish of silicate-salt hors d'oeuvres in a single armoured tentacle. Occasionally it held one to the complicated airlock on its circumference. It was chatting to Joan I, who stood majestic in the black memory velvet and purple tabard of a Sadhimist Dame-Priestess in the negative aspect of Nocticula-Hecate. Lady of Night and Death, thought Korodore. It was not a tactful choice.
    She smiled at the Creapii and turned to face the hidden camera, raising one hand. Korodore reached out and tipped a switch.
    'How goes it?' Joan asked. Korodore watched fascinated - she had a remarkable talent for sub-vocalizing.
    'He is breakfasting. We have treble-checked the food and everything else.'
    'Has he shown any effects from yesterday?'
    Korodore paused. 'No. While he slept I used a brain scrubber on him. I—'
    'How dare you
!
'
    'It will keep yesterday's memories in a state of flux for a few hours. Would you prefer him to learn the truth? He would, had I not done so - even if he had to brow-beat it out of Hrsh-Hgn.'
    'You should have asked me!'
    Korodore sighed, and picked up a memory cube on the console. 'I'm sorry, madam, but you have a security rating now of only 99.087 per cent. I checked. Probably it's only deep Freudian impulses - but from now on I am afraid I must run this show.
    'Like I said, madam, I'm not inclined to accept probability maths. You may, if you like.'
    He switched off. She stood rigid for a moment, trying to contact him, then turned and began to talk brightly to a tall diplomat from the Board