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Dom Salabos had a lot of advantages. As heir to a huge fortune, he had an excellent robot servant (with Man-Friday subcircuitry), a planet (the First Syrian Bank) as godfather, a security chief who even ran checks on himself, and on Dom's home world even death was not always fatal. Why, then, in an age when prediction was a science, was his future in doubt?
Dominickdaniel Sabalos is the son of the inventor of probability math, a science able to predict anything apart from anything to do with the Jokers, and the first person to have had his life fully quantified using p-math. Before being mysteriously assassinated, his father predicted that Dom too would be killed, on the day of his investiture as Chairman of his wealthy home planet of Widdershins.
However, not having been told of his father's prediction, and against incalculably distant odds, Dom survives the assassination attempt. When the recording of his father's prediction is played back, a time delay added specifically for this unlikely eventuality plays a little more of the recording, in which his father makes a further prediction - that Dom will discover the Jokers' homeworld.
Dom sets out, with Hrsh-Hgn (his tutor, a swamp-dwelling phnobe), Isaac (his robot Man Friday) and Ig (his pet swamp ig) in tow, on a picaresque adventure to find the Jokers' world. He visits many corners of the "life-bubble", encountering Joker artifacts, his god-father, who is a sentient planet, and the sexless, octopoid Creapii, among many other weird and diverse aliens and planets. At the same time he finds himself surviving - at increasingly improbable odds - numerous assassination attempts by a mysterious conspiracy which has long worked to prevent anybody from locating the Jokers, by assassinating anybody p-math predicted had a chance of doing so.
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