The Darkside Of The Sun

Joker tower.
    Dom swam into the pilot seat and asked the sundog to take them in closer. In a few minutes they were a few kilometres away. The tower hung steady against a starfield that spun like a mad planetarium.
    ‘The Institute of Joker Studies pays a million standards bounty for details of new towers,’ said Dom. ‘I want to catch it.’
    ‘In a pig’s eye,’ said Isaac. ‘That mass at that speed? It’s a job for twenty sundogs.’
    Right .
    ‘Well, we can plot its course. There’s a reduced bounty for that sort of information. We could split it three ways.’
    Four ways .
    ‘Okay, four—’
    Dom struggled for breath. Something had caught him in a vice, and was squeezing hard.
    He sensed the ship. He was acutely aware of the convoluted atomic structure of the hull. The little deuterium pile in the matrix computer sparkled like a witch ball left over from Hogswatchnight. Isaac was a coruscation of currents flowing over coiled alloy wire, suffused with the sickening feel of metallic hydrogen. The sundog brain throbbed dull purple with vague semi-thoughts.
    Beyond the ship, beyond the tumbling tower, he felt the other ship. It was waiting for him. Someone had known that he would pass under this area. He felt metallic hydrogen again – the feel of a robot mind.
    He felt inside the sundog’s mind. There was a jolt as its field polarized and the tower receded instantly against the stars. For a moment he felt the rage of the mind in the other ship. Then it was gone, lost in the static as the sundog sank gratefully into interspace.
    And something withdrew from his mind, gently. He had time for a very brief feeling of loss, of the unfair restriction of a mere five senses … then the reaction hit him.
    He didn’t fall, because there was no ‘down’. But he hung bewildered, listening to the puzzled protests from the sundog. Hrsh-Hgn and Isaac were staring at him. Then the phnobe took him gently in one bony hand and hauled him down to the bunk.
    ‘I saw everything,’ muttered Dom. ‘Something was looking through me, there was an assassin waiting at that tower, you know …’
    ‘Ssure,’ murmured Hrsh-Hgn. ‘Ssure.’
    ‘Believe me!’
    ‘Ssure.’
    ‘He had a molecule stripper!’ shouted Dom.
    ‘Something made the sundog get the hell out of there,’ admitted Isaac. ‘Was it you?’
    Dom nodded violently, and then added slowly: ‘I think so. But – but just before, I saw … Would you believe I saw probabilities? I saw us powdered by that stripper. But that was in another universe. We escaped, in this one. Chel, I can’t describe it. We haven’t got the right words!’

6
    ‘We have given this case a great deal of thought. We do, of course, find nothing to argue with in the purely geophysical reports put before us. We note that this world known as the First Sirian Bank is a planet with a diameter of seven thousand miles and a crust consisting almost entirely of crystalline silicon and some associated elements. We have also heard some delightful evidence from Dr Al Putachique of Earth, its import being that over the billennia earthquakes and so forth have caused the formation of billions of transistor junctions within that crust, forming by natural means the largest computer in the galaxy. We are of course aware that the Bank has for many years been used as the accounting-house and general information repository of most of the Human and near-Human races, and is officially Treasurer of the Star Chamber of Commerce.
    ‘The appellant has asked for the legal status of Human. He wishes to be accorded the status of living creature. Is the Bank alive? By every definition he is not. That, at least, is what we have been told.
    ‘But we disagree. It has been impossible for the Bank to be physically present here today, Roche limits being what they are, but this Chamber has spoken with him at length. Towards the end of this unusual interlude my colleague from Earth made a reference, I understand it to be from some kind of theatrical entertainment, to the fact that it seemed unfair that the merest virus should have life while the Bank had none at all.
    ‘We find it nowhere stated that an entire world may not be accorded the status of a living creature, or even of Human. It may be a trifle unusual, a little irregular. Nevertheless, let it be recorded that we find the First Sirian Bank not only alive, but possessed of a universe-view sufficiently advanced to call him Human. And may his orbit never grow