The Darkside Of The Sun

less.’
    His Furness CrAAgh 456°, Mediator, the Star Chamber, 2104. (See also Life: A Legal Definition by His Furness 456°.)
    Dom dodged into a booth and waited a minute before glancing out through the clear crystal panel of the door. There were two or three thousand people in the central hall, but none seemed to have noticed him.
    In front of him was a black crystal wall, studded with innumerable pinpoints of red light. They clustered thickly around a plain copper disc, set flush with the crystal. It hummed, said: ‘Please state your business.’
    Dom relaxed.
    ‘Are you the Bank?’ he asked.
    ‘No, sir. I am a Teller, merely a comparatively simple servo-mechanical subunit.’
    ‘Uh, okay. Then please transfer seventeen standards to the sundog racial account,’ he said, while invisible eyes tactfully examined his retinal patterns, voice inflections, DNA helix and teeth.
    ‘Transaction completed.’
    ‘And I wish to notify the Joker Institute that I have located a Joker building, description and position as noted.’
    He pressed a copy of the One Jump ’s log into a recess below the disc.
    ‘Bounty will be paid on verification.’
    Dom wondered if the assassin lurking at the tower had also registered discovery. He knew there had been an assassin. Somewhere in totality was a universe where Dom Sabalos was dead. But of course, there would be many such universes. According to p-math there was at least one universe for every probability, even the unthinkable ones.
    ‘Business completed?’ asked the disc.
    Dom frowned. It was his first visit to the Bank, although it was officially his godfather. The Bank sent him greetings on the appropriate ceremonies, like his minor twenty-eighth-year birthdays, and small, interesting presents like the gravity sandals he was still wearing. The gifts suggested a thoughtful personality. The greetings cards told nothing at all, except that they were generally signed in crescive High-Degree Creapii IV, a favourite script for multi-dextral amateur calligraphers. The problem now was making contact.
    ‘I am Dom Sabalos, the Bank’s godson. I would like to see him.’
    ‘You have only to look around, sir.’ The machine meant it seriously. Dom realized it was not equipped to handle figurative speech.
    ‘I meant that I wanted to confront him, converse with his, uh, seat of consciousness.’
    There was a pause. At last the disc said: ‘Very well, sir, I will see what can be arranged.’
    Dom hurried out of the booth. Hrsh-Hgn was lurking suspiciously behind a glittering germanian pillar that soared up half a mile above the paved cavern floor. The next essential was fresh clothing, and then a real meal – there was something curiously unsatisfying about the reconstituted molecules of the ship’s auto-chef. He pushed past a party of medium-degree Creapii and hailed a cab.
    The main cavern of the First Sirian Bank was big enough to need a sophisticated weather control system, to prevent the formation of thunderclouds. The cab looped up from the crowded floor and threaded its way at speed between coruscating pillars, each with its cluster of booths at the base. The red junction points glowed everywhere. Occasionally a ring of static electricity would flash up a pillar and burst vividly into an ozone-reeking haze. And the hot dry air hummed with a million voices, felt rather than heard, as money spoke to money across the light years.
    In fact, Dom considered, it looked like an early conception of Hell. With tourists. Certainly some of the tourists would have fitted the concept nicely.
    In one of the sub-caverns a robot tailor outfitted him with an anonymous grey ship suit, the sort worn on every earth-human world. He also bought a cuber, a cloak striped on the bias in purple, orange and yellow, and hoped that an observer would take him for what he appeared to be – a back-planet rube, a stock Whole Erse character of comedy sketches, the gawping rim-colonist with a nasal twang, unfortunate personal habits and a pocketful of rare earths.
    He turned and looked critically at Hrsh-Hgn, who stood watching in the old ceremonial garb of a beta-male.
    ‘Couldn’t you wear something a bit more colourful? Some phnobes do. I’d rather you didn’t look conspicuous.’
    Hrsh-Hgn took a nervous step backwards and clutched at his robe.
    ‘Is it against the law? I mean, will it offend some sexual more ? If so, of course, I—’
    ‘It’ss not exactly that. I do not think I could carry off