Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

  For a while, there was nothing but the quiet shuffle of feet and a ragged sound in his head which told him John Truck must be involved in it all somewhere — but not how many people were kicking him. Or indeed, why. He was beginning to feel frightened that they wouldn't stop.

  Eventually, though, two of them hauled him upright and began half walking, half dragging him toward a battered black vehicle parked across the street. From Truck's position it looked about the size of a Fleet battleship, but even with both of them working at it they had a job trying to fold him up enough to get him inside.

  'I think I'm going to be sick,' he told them plaintively, but they ignored him.

  While they were sorting it out, a late-model Lewis Phoenix with all eight headlamps on main beam hurled out of Bread Street and drifted to a stop endwise across East Thing. 'Better get a move on, lads,' said Truck. He spread his legs wide and went limp. He jabbed with his elbows, bit a hand that came too close to his eyes.

  Tap, tap, tap, went some heels.

  'Leave him alone,' said Angina Seng, her voice bright and tight.

  She was supporting an ugly Chambers reaction pistol with both hands. Did he detect a slight tremor in her big bony frame? He wasn't in a condition to detect anything. A dark cloak was thrown over her indoor clothes.

  Silence.

  Truck spat some blood into the road.

  'Don't shoot them yet,' he muttered. The inside of his mouth had swollen, he kept biting his cheek by accident 'I would just like a go with one of their knuckledusters first.'

  With sulky looks, they left him alone. Plucky Angina patched them rat off down the street, heading for the dock. They were dressed almost like spacers. She put her Chambers away and helped him into the Phoenix.

  'Well, Captain Truck,' she said. 'You would think, wouldn't you, that they'd at least leave their own kind alone. Do you want the window down?'

  Truck said nothing. One of his lower canines was giving him trouble; and between tentative explorations of his mouth, he was listening to the wind.

  'Suit yourself then.' She smiled encouragingly at him.

  TWO

  The Long, Uncomprehending Migration of 'Spaceport Annie' Truck

  'Where have you brought me?' he asked suspiciously. It was all the same to him. He was a heartbreaking sight, slumped in the lift cage with his long chin on his chest, his hair all tangled and dirty.

  'Where's my hat? I can't go anywhere without that hat.'

  He was shivering with reaction. He had a puffy lip, an immense purple bruise stretching from under his left ear down to his shoulder, and swollen glands in his neck. Not that it was anything new. Morosely, he stuck a finger into the great rent in his snakeskin jacket.

  'There was nothing wrong with that hat. Christ, I hate being sick.'

  Angina Seng smiled sympathetically at him. He hoped it was sympathy.

  'I thought you might like to speak to my sponsor after what happened,' she told him. 'Once you know all the facts, you might change your mind about that job.' It was an affront.

  'Facts,' he chuckled. 'Sponsor. Ho ho.'

  He glared at the wall above her head. An uncomfortable silence descended.

  'How did you get this way?' she asked suddenly.

  Stuff you.

  'I don't know what you mean,' he said.

  They didn't speak again, but she wasn't downhearted. Wagging her tail and already anticipating the plaudits of the shepherd, she sheepdogged him out of the lift and into a reception area. There, she vanished behind an unmarked door, leaving him stranded in a front-office landscape of fake-antique carpets like fine soft cellar mold, power-sculptures cunningly designed to achieve optimum blandness and the castration of the art of the time, and no chairs. He didn't care if he never saw her again.

  All the dispossessed and wayward have a fear of frontages. He discussed going back to The Spacer's Rave there and then, but he knew it was probably too late for that: gravitational tides had thrown him up here and, for the moment, he was marooned. He leered at a receptionist (who sat behind the keyboard of her input terminal as long-legged and unapproachable — by losers — as any ice-princess). She smiled back politely, because that year it was polite to be polite to the underprivileged. He scratched his head.

  Far away, somebody shouted, 'Don't come to me! I told you I couldn't answer for the cluster sampling!' A door opened and shut. Clearly: ' Run off and lick her boots then.'

  'You may go in now, Captain Truck,' said the receptionist.

  So far, nobody had offered any options. Suddenly remembering Angina Seng's big Chambers gun, he wondered just how much of her gravitational attraction it represented.

  What was really keeping him here?

  'I can see you're wearing a girdle,' he said. 'As a matter of interest, where am I?'

  Her smile curdled: it was polite that year for the underprivileged to be polite back. 'The Israeli Consulate,' she said, 'and I don't think you ought to go round saying things like that to people.'

  But he was already on his way through the unmarked door, shouting 'You can just entirely forget about it, Miss Seng!' She wasn't there, of course. 'Oh hell!' He went to leave, but some nosy treacherous element of his make-up had already slammed the door behind him and faced him up to the room's other occupant.

  General Alice Gaw, postmenopausal but hardly decayed at all: onetime vacuum-commando, late of the Fleet Police, now prime executive of IWG's military arm, with a roving commission and carte blanche in any matter of hemiglobal security. Decorated and fêted, she had been one of the six enigmatic 'wardens' of the discontinued Environmental Prison experiment — that nodal myth of the hinterlands, its seeping ducts peopled with ghouls, its vaults packed with lost souls in Gothic decaying orbits about the solar enormity of their own innocence, administered by Fungus Men with cattle prods for arms and ECT machines for heads; and closed-down eventually, so rumor had it, by the revulsion of the very elements of IWG politics that had demanded its institution. Rumor had it also that Alice Gaw was the only one of the Six ever to regret the move.

  She was short and heavily built. She wore the sleeves of her Women's Army uniform perpetually rolled up to display chapped muscular forearms, and affected the coarse jocularity of a male psychiatric nurse. Truck knew her by repute: her eyepatch was a Galactic curiosity, her hands were thick and square. She radiated a fiercely ambiguous sexual energy which was more disturbing for her consciousness of it than for its actual effect.

  Lineal descendant of that characteristic blossom of the twentieth century, the 'National Security Manager,' with a grasp of the art of ad hoc politics almost as breath-taking as the speed of her rise in the IWG hierarchy, she fixed Truck with an eye the color of concrete and said:

  'I want to talk to you, boyo, and I can't do that until you pack it in and sit down.'

  She grinned at him and flopped herself ungracefully into the nearest chair as if inviting him by example — throwing one leg over the other, quite aware of the great expanses of powerful thigh thus exposed. She had varicose veins.

  'Whatever it is,' said Truck, 'no. I had enough of this in the Fleet. I've got my discharge papers here — ' Then, recklessly, because he was fighting down an emotion rather like panic:

  'You don't look like a member of the Chosen Race to me, General.'

  This, he managed to deliver with an insinuating snigger. The General, though, merely adjusted her eyepatch and sighed. Her bleached-out hair was chopped off all the way round her head at ear level; her nose had been broken during a police action on Weber II.

  'I don't like you either, sonny, but I'm keeping quiet about it. This baiting stuff doesn't work on me, so forget it. I'm simply an executive of the World Government, doing a job. If you've got any sense, you won't make it difficult for me. I wouldn't have had you within a yard of this office if it hadn't been absolutely necessary.'

  She studied his clothing with distaste. 'I can't believe we ever had you in the Fleet,' she said. 'God, what a shambles it must hav
e been.'

  He had been rendered uncomfortable despite every resolution.

  'You own half a world, General, and it isn't this one. Half of Earth you neither govern nor own; and to the rest of the Galaxy you have no right whatever. That lays you open.'

  'We govern the civilized world. We police the civilized colonies. Without the security we represent, scabs like you might have less freedom to speak. Would you chop logic with a UASR representative sitting in my place? There are three hundred billion people in the Galaxy and we have only one per cent of them. We're outnumbered, and we have what they want. Everything that happens out here affects us.'

  Truck shrugged. Events would carry him; it was only left to him to discover in which direction. Abruptly, two separate images welled up from the back of his head —

  He recalled the Negev, the hot boredom broken only by brief violent engagements with infiltrators from the Union of Arab Socialist Republics, the dull report of a Chambers gun, the dreadful anger that welled up when he realized he had been shot at. And he saw the packed corpse-boats orbiting Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici, their cold spectral avenues limned with a faint milky light, the plastic packing cases filled with dead children, the ranked carcasses of the adults without box of any kind, the wounds glittering at him like eyes; he smelt them.

  'Get on with it,' he said. 'Have you got anything good to smoke? — Oh well.'

  'You may have to pay a little more attention than that, laddie.'

  She swung her leg, tapped the table. Truck locked his hands in his lap and played absently with them. It looked as if it might be a long session.

  'We don't know very much (began General Gaw) about the old inhabitants of the Centauri system: they were the first of the so-called 'civilized' races too intercept the wave-front of human expansion; they were wiped out as a coherent group two centuries ago in what we've been taught to call since the 'Centauri Genocide.' Shut up, Truck. You don't understand enough of anything for your opinion to be worth anything to me. That was what the intellectuals of the time called it. I'm in favor of intellectuals as a whole, but I have reservations.

  However, it was a traumatic business for humanity, that can hardly be denied; and by the time we'd finished running round getting off on our guilt complexes, tile Centauri survivors had bolted off like rats and scattered themselves over the newly-colonized planets. They were absorbed fairly quickly — no drive, you see; they lacked cultural strength.

  They were enough like us to suggest common ancestry (it had already been discovered that two miscegenations out of three were fruitful or some such revolting thing); they weren't at all native to the Centauri system, although nobody ever discovered traces of them anywhere else; there was even some speculation that they might have originated on Earth, which really put the cat among the pigeons.

  But the rubbish died down, and at least one decent piece of thinking came out of it.

  Marsden's hypothesis of Niche Competition described the Galaxy as an ecological complex in which separate space-going races replace the separate species of a planetary ecosphere. The competition between species whose demands on the environment are identical is inevitable, natural, and harsh.

  Yes, I do believe it, as a matter of fact. Never mind that. Keep your grubby little fingers out of my head.

  Now.

  The peculiar thing about that war is that the Centaurans needn't have lost it. They couldn't have won, but for fifteen years they stood us off; then, quite suddenly, they stopped intercepting the MIEVs and the atmospheric intruders. Within three days, Centauri VII was rubbished. They did a good job of that sort of thing in those days.

  But listen to this, Truck: we had an on-planet intelligence network down there, living as Centaurans, poor sods — it's in the records — and they were sending reports through right up until Centauri VII chucked it in. So why did they commit suicide, laddie, when they'd just concluded R&D on a weapon they fully expected to finish the whole shooting match in then-favor?

  You think about that, while we talk about you.

  You were born in the Pontisport hinterland on Parrot, in the rest room of a bakery. Your mother was a part-time port whore, one of the refugees who came down the Carling Line in refrigerators from Weber II. She was mainlining adrenochrome activators cut with the ribosomes of a local breed of bat. She asked for a cure, but the port authorities already had her scheduled for resettlement as a displaced person. No, I'm not asking you any of this, I'm telling you — because I know more about you than you know about yourself.

  Spaceport Annie Truck was shipped to the Heavy Stars when you were six months old.

  AdAcs penetrate the placenta, of course, and you had to be weaned off the stuff. She left you behind. Do you ever dream about bats?

  But what's more important about Annie is this: she was a full-blooded Centauran.

  As far as we can decide statistically, there's a ninety-four per cent chance that she was the last true Centauran to exist in the Galaxy. That makes you a half-breed, Truck. Finally, on this score at least: for some reason, Annie had the primogeniture. If you'd ever read a book, you might have recognized your bone-structure and general proportion as predominantly Centauran. Your father had weak genes, whoever he was.

  You won't find that so amusing in a minute, chummie.

  'Let's go back to the Centauran War. Have it your own way, genocide; it honestly makes no difference to me. That weapon existed, you know. The MI reports worried us then, but we have our own reasons now.

  We found it, Truck.

  Some bloody lunatic of an archaeologist found it in a bunker cut three miles into the crust of Centauri VII, as nasty a little bolthole as ever I saw, and I've seen a lot.

  We found it, but we don't know how to work it. We can't even get very close to it. We can't get any instrument readings off it. I've seen it myself, and it seems half sentient. Can you see that, Truckie — a sentient bomb?

  We need your genes. They gave up and conceded Centauri without using the weapon all right; but they built its operating codes into the chromosomes of their unborn brats, because they wanted to be able to sneak back to it like dogs to sick, later. It won't go off without a Centauran.

  Annie died twenty years ago, and you're the only one we could find.

  Truck mulled it over a little. He felt a wry sympathy for the port lady from Weber II. It was easy to see his own birth as a momentary lapse, a miscalculation. But again: had Annie Truck answered some unconscious urge on Parrot? In dividing, to produce another vector, a small image of herself — as if by that multiplication of possibilities, the long uncomprehending migration might be expedited; something lost by her might be gained by him.

  This in the silence that followed General Gaw's monologue, while her good eye impaled him and wouldn't let go. All spacers are incurably sentimental. Eventually, he got out of his chair and stood looking down at her.

  'How much good will your bomb do us when you drop it?' he asked. He wasn't sure on whose behalf he was asking. He fingered the tear in his jacket. 'Who will you drop it on?'

  When she said, 'I expected that, Truck, it's predictable from the way you dress. You can leave it out, because I don't need it,' he turned his back on her. She went on: 'We blew two UASR agents in the team that uncovered the Centauri Device. There was a third, but we didn't discover that until he'd shoved off.

  'That's what it's about, duckie; it always is.'

  Indistinctly, because he was thinking about something else: 'Then get someone else to prime the thing, General.'

  He reached the door, went as far as touching the handle, then faced her again.

  'I was on Morpheus,' he said. 'I stacked them up for the graveyard orbit at Cor Caroli. I've seen the library footage of Weber II. You understand, I don't care if you and the Arabs blow each other to junk. But I loaded people who'd never heard of you on to those boats.'

  She was still lounging, undisturbed and negligent, her thighs powerful and ugly, her eye bright and compelling. He was growing
terrified less of what she represented than of the woman herself.

  'That shanghai attempt,' he said, 'was it to persuade me that the Arabs want to talk to me too? That would have made it nice and easy to accept whatever deal you have in mind, wouldn't it? Don't do it again. I'll try and kill the next lot, so help me. The only people who wear lace-ups are Fleet Police. It only makes you look silly, you see. No spacer would be seen dead in lace-up shoes. At least the Arabs have the gumption to dress their men for the part.'

  She laughed, breezy and fierce.

  'I told the stupid bitch it wouldn't work. I'm going to have to have a chat with her.' She swung her legs out of the chair and leaned forward. 'I can't say I didn't expect this. We need you, we were prepared to pay for you — but there won't be any offers now.'

  Truck opened the door.

  'You've got yourself into my bad books, I don't mind telling you that. I'm giving you twenty-four hours to consider it, then I'll have you pulled in. Wherever you are. The charge will be trading in Fleet medical supplies when you were last on Earth, and I can prove it.

  'I'll be here if you should decide to behave yourself. Bye-bye, laddie.'

  Truck closed the door quietly after him.

  He went back to The Spacer's Rave, feeling as if he had suddenly gained a dependent. Why should Annie Truck and her AdAc habit be on his conscience? It was a strange reversal: but under the hinterland lamps, all kinds of dependency are possible. It assumed a kind of reality, Annie flickered into life for him there, and he accepted her.

  Tiny Skeffern was winding up his gig in a desultory fashion: Phencyclidine Dream, which he always used as his encore, was over; bass drums and most of the audience had packed up and gone home, but a cadaverous ectomorphic spacer was sitting smirking stupidly over the controls of the Rave's H-Line synthesizer, making attic, flutelike noises, while Tiny picked at the high notes with meditative fingers. Only the stoned and persistent remained to listen, wondering how they might find somewhere to go, something to do at four-thirty St. Crispin's Day morning on Sad al Bari IV.