Free The Dark Side of the Sun by Terry Pratchett Page A

it.'
    Twenty minutes later the autochef digested the remains of the meal. Ig drifted towards the matrix room, chewing a fish head. A small, burned-out wreck of a star passed crosswise through the cabin and disappeared. Dom watched it go.
    'If the First Sirian Bank is the galaxy's leading Joker expert, why hasn't he found Jokers World?' he asked.
    'I assume you don't mean that he should have roved across the universe, Roche limits being what they are. A thing the ssize of the Bank would upset the balance of the average solar system, probably. As to exploration via the available data, he may well have disscovered Jokerss World. Why not? Why, then, sshould he tell uss, mere upstart civilissationss.'
    'We'd pay well.'
    'We?
We?
Phnobic
We?
Human
We?
Let uss assume the race who findss Jokerss World gains immeasurably. Why should he want that?'
    Dom frowned. 'But he runs himself as a Bank. He charges for his services, too.'
    'He choosess to. A creature musst do something to relieve the boredom of three billion years. He likes people around.'
    'You mean he wouldn't like to see anyone get hold of the World because they might put the Bank in jeopardy?'
    'Maybe. It iss all conjecture.'
    He started to talk about Jokers World.
     
    Three races walked like men. One of them was Man. Taller than men, but generally lighter, were the phnobes. Much smaller than men but built more on cuboid lines so that they looked like heavy-gravity chimpanzees on a steroid diet, were drosks.
    Phnobes came in three sexes. They had a secondary, vestigial brain. They evolved on a world with no readily-available metal. In cerebral matters they were supreme. A world where most of the higher animals were adapted to a tri-sexual system needed a race with brains.
    Drosks came in two sexes, eventually. It made sense on a harsh, bitter world. The young males evolved into mature, strong-rninded females after about the first third of their life. Their social system was intricate but was surpassed in complexity by their religion, a fiery edifice involving the double star and three large moons in their system. Drosks were cannibals, it was part of the religion. Drosks found it difficult to conceive of a number greater than seven. Drosks periodically built up a machine-age civilization then, for no well-understood reason, carefully dismantled it and reverted to barbarism.
    Compared to all the other fifty-two races known, drosks, phnobes and men were like brothers. To some races, like the Spooners who lived on little icy worlds, they were merely identical. Many others would be incapable of thinking of
    
    
    them as life at all - like say, the Tarquins, who lived in the upper layers of some proto-stars.
    A few races had a larger conception of life. The Creapii lived on small, hot worlds, in the deep layers of the larger gas giants and occasionally on the surface of very cool suns, but could discourse on philosophy with men as easily as they could discuss the untranslatable with Tarquins. Then there were the sundogs, who were merely raw life and derived their picture of the universe from the minds of their customers. The First Sirian Bank was in a class of his own, as always. A few races - The Pod, for one - were alien even to Spooners and Tarquins.
    But all the races had one thing in common. They were all less than five million years old, and all had originated within a sphere of stars less than two hundred light years across, centred on Wolf 429. The Creapii discovered that first, and so were the first to investigate the one planet that orbited the Wolf.
    They found a Joker Tower, a monomolecular spire frosted with frozen methane, standing dark and alone under the airless sky. They found the thing later known simply as the Centre of the Universe.
    The Creapii ranged far. They found more Towers, other Joker Artifacts like the Ring Stars, Band and the Internal Planets of Protostar V. As an incidental, they found Earth and sold a working matrix motor for homesteading rights on