Mathematics. There was something about mathematics he should remember. Well, it'd come. He washed and struggled into the thick grey suit, and selected a short wig of golden fibres.

There was a polite knock at the door.

'All right,' said Dom.

The door burst open and Keja ran into the room and hugged him. She was laughing and crying at the same time. For an embarrassing moment he was suffocated by the silks of her dress, and then his sister stood back and looked at him.

'Well, Mr Chairman,' she said. Then she kissed him. He disentangled himself as tactfully as he could.

'I'm not actually Chairman yet,' he began.

'Oh fie! What's a few hours? You don't seem very pleased to see me, Dom,' she added, reproachfully.

'Honestly I am, Ke. Things have just been a bit hectic lately.'

'I heard. Smugglers and so forth. Exciting?'

Dom thought about it. 'No,' he said, 'More, well, strange in a way.'

Keja swept the dome with her eyes. It was cluttered with Dom's things: an old Brendikin analyser, a bench littered with shells, a hologram of the Joker's Tower, and memory cubes on every flat surface.

'How the old place has changed,' she said, wrinkling her nose. She pirouetted in front of the tall mirror. 'Do I look like a married woman, Dom?'

'I don't know. What's Ptarmigan like?' He remembered the contractual ceremony two months before, and a vague impression of a very large fierce old man.

'He's kind,' said Keja. 'And rich, of course. Not so rich as us, but he sort of flaunts it more. His children haven't really taken to me yet. You should come on an official visit, Dom - Laoth's so hot and dry. That reminds me, I've brought you a present.'

She tiptoed to the door and returned with a servant robot, which carried a small box.

'He's a Class Five. One of our best,' she said proudly.

'A robot?' said Dom, who had been looking expectantly at the box.

'Strictly speaking, he's a humanoid. Completely alive, merely mechanical. Do you like him?'

'Very much!' Dom walked up to the tall metallic figure and prodded the broad chest. The robot glanced down at him.

'I wonder what makes us build inefficiently-shaped human robots instead of nice streamlined machines?'

'Pride, sir,' said the robot.

'Hey, that's not bad. What's your name?'

'I understand it is Isaac, sir.'

Dom scratched his head. The home domes swarmed with robots, mostly kind but stupid Class Threes whom Dom remembered from earliest childhood as sad, boring voices with firm, child-minding hands. His mother, who seldom left her own dome, disliked them generally and did her own cooking. She said they were morons, and not a bit like the real things from Laoth. He was at a loss.

'Uh, can you be a bit more informal, Isaac?'

'Sure thing, boss.'

'I can see you two are going to get along fine, trying to out-think each other,' said Keja. 'Now I've got to go. And Grandmother says you've got to go down to the main dome, Dom. For the Working Breakfast.'

Dom sighed. 'I've had about twenty lectures about it from Hrsh-Hgn in the last few days.'

Keja stopped dead.

'What's that thing?' she cried, pointing to the basin.

Dom lifted the damp creature out by the scruff of its neck.

'It's a swamp ig. I call him I g. I was—I found—I, er ...' he blinked nervously. 'I think I found him in the marshes yesterday. I—er—things seem a little confused.'

She looked at him, and Dom saw the concern in her eyes.

'It's all right,' he mumbled, 'It's just the excitement.'

'I guess so,' Keja said, and looked down at Ig.

'Anyway, he's so ugly!'

'Excuse me, madam, sir, but he is an it,' boomed the robot. 'Hermaphrodite. Oviparous. Semi-poikothermic. I have been supplied with a complete program on Widdershins life forms, sir. Chief. Right on.'

'Well, don't blame me if you catch a zoonose,' said Keja, and flounced out of the dome. Dom looked at Isaac.

'Zoonose?'

'Disease communicable to humans. No chance, buster.' Isaac strode up to Dom and held out the box. The boy dropped his pet, who began to sniff at the robot's foot, and opened it.

'It's the certificate of warranty, workshop manual and deed of property,' said Isaac. Dom looked at them blankly.

'Do you mean I have to own you?'

'Body and hypothetical supernatural appendage, boss,' said the robot hurriedly, stepping backwards when Dom held the box towards him.

'Oh no, chief. You've got to. I don't approve of self-ownership.'

'Chel, that's what most humans fought for for three thousand years!'

'But we robots know exactly why we were created, boss. No striving to find the innermost secrets of our creation. No problem.'

'Don't you want to be free?'

'What? And have God blame the Universe on me? Shouldn't you go down to the main dome now?'

Dom whistled, and Ig scrambled up and went to sleep round his neck. He glared up at the robot and strode out of the dome.

Tradition decreed the Working Breakfast be taken alone by the Chairman on the day of his investiture. As he walked along the deserted corridors Dom had the comfortably familiar feeling he was being watched. Old Korodore had the place seeded with pinheads and robot insects - it was dome gossip that he even ran security checks on himself.

The main dome was half clear plastic, facing out across the orchards, the lagoon and marshes and finally, a thin line on the horizon, the Joker's Tower with a wisp of white cloud streaming from its tip like a banner. Dom stared at it for a few seconds, trying to hold an elusive 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.