Terry Pratchett - The Dark Side of the Sun

They ate in silence, broken only by the hum of a large, antique Standard clock.

Finally he steeled himself. 'Can you speak Janglic? Linaka Comerks diwac? How about drosk? - upaquaduc, uh, lapidiquac nunquackuqc quipaduckua-dicquakak?'

She poured herself a tiny cup of coffee and smiled at him. Dom groaned inwardly. Drosk was bad enough, but he could handle it. He prepared his epiglottis and sinuses for the supreme test.

'Ffnbasshs sFFshs - frs Sfghn Gss?'

Her second smile struck him as unnecessarily prim. She clapped her hands. A moment later he felt a presence by his elbow.

A giant was standing behind his chair. A pair of eye-slits surveyed him dispassionately from a small head atop a body as broad as it was high, which was almost two metres. It wore a jerkin of leather, covered with familiar angular designs in red and blue. A variety of hand weapons were stuck into the belt. It was a drosk - an old one - so of course it was a female. If there had been any males in the place they were probably in her deep-freeze right now.

The girl sang a glissando of bell-like note. The red eyes blinked.

'Empress say what you say?'

'I was just trying to be sociable,' said Dom. 'Who are you?'

The giant held a brief interchange with the girl, and said, 'I her bodyguard and lady-of-the-bedchamber.'

'That must be economical.'

'Lady Sharli say you come for a ride?'

Without waiting for his answer the drosk lifted him out of his chair with one hand. Ig woke up and bared his teeth, then whined as the giant picked him up gently in another great paw and crooned to him. The swamp ig blinked, then ran up one iron-muscled arm and perched on the drosk's head.

Sharli was already walking across the broad patio outside the hall. She looked sympathetically at Dom as he was dumped at her feet like a parcel, and stamped her foot - to Dom's amazement, for even his mother had never resorted to that in her expert tantrums - and waved one tiny finger at the giant, who bowed to her. She helped Dom to his feet.

A robot was standing holding the reins of two creatures. Dom hadn't seen horses before, except the pair that had been regretfully sent back on his birthday. But these were Laothian horses. Therefore they were robots.

Sharli was helped on to one with a coat of anodized aluminium. The reins were some woven metal, hung with jewels and bells.

Dom's mount was copper-coloured. As he climbed into the control saddle it turned and looked at him through multi-faceted eyes, and said: 'Can you ride, buster?'

'I don't know, I've never tried.'

'Okay, then let me do 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 . ...id 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 that 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. Humming birds - 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 streamlet 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.

Sharlie 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 overlapping pattern. He removed his fearsome helmet, wiped his forehead with his gauntlet, and smiled brightly at Dom.

'Greetings, step-uncle. I thought you might be here. I hope you have not been overly bored?'

'Not at all,' said Dom airily. 'Er, your costume . . . '

Tarli raised his eyebrows. 'I have been Sham fighting. You do not fight Sham on Widdershins?'

Dom thought of one or two fights he had seen on the jetties, when four-foot long dagon-knives were used. 'It's usually for real on Widdershins,' he said. 'Sham?'

Tarli unslung a long bundle from his horse and drew out a sword as tall as he was. The handle was leather-bound, with no superfluous decoration. The blade was invisible, except when it caught the light, when it showed up momentarily as a thin green sliver.

'Shamsword,' he explained. 'The blade is, of course, only a few microns thick, forged as a molecule in the special sword-light of dawn. Strong, too. Perhaps you are a good swordsman?'