Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

  Since that day, Atalanta in Calydon has flown herself: we simply navigate. We brought her in triumph back to Howell after that first wild flight — only to find Pater still and cold in his peacock room, yourself gone, no one knew where. That fastidious prince! His life was the purest fabrication of Art, the most gilded of lies — but I loved him. We outfitted the Driftwood of Decadence as his bier; we filled her with prints and porcelain and fans of the utmost sophistry; all Howell gathered to watch her final firework leap into the unknown. She went off on a sigh, on a whisper, like a dream of unaccustomed beauty.

  She's traveling still, Captain, at the Third Speed; Pater may have reached the edge of the Universe itself by now. He deserved nothing less.

  After that, all I could do was come in search of you —

  I found a trace of you on Stomach, a memory in the eyes of an androgyne whore. But the trail was cold. I spent a week stalking the city of Intestinal Revelation, dressed in a stolen Opener cloak. From there, I tracked you to Avernus. Avernus! — the worst place in the universe! But I ceased to fear for you when I heard that some lunatic Opener novice with a gun had wiped out Chalice Veronica and his whole Paraphythium operation in a single night.

  And I was up there in the parking orbit — not alone — to watch you blow your hatches on not one body but two.

  You would seem to have become something of a nemesis —

  'One of them was Fix,' said Truck. He felt bitterly angry: for Pater, for himself, for what they had so nearly achieved on that last ride into death, with The Green Carnation, her heart burst, falling to bits around them; and for what he had in exchange — dead friends, and the Device like a yoke across his back.

  'They've killed Fix and Tiny now. I haven't anybody left.' Himation had rescued something from the night, but Truck's boots were full of lead. He felt like crying, but, 'I still owe them for that,' he said, with as much defiance as he could muster. 'And if I did for ben Barka, I'm glad. I meant to.'

  'But you didn't, Captain. That parking orbit was somewhat crowded, I'm afraid: and everyone in it there to watch you: Nasser, Solomon, Atalanta — oh, we made a fine procession later, following you to Centauri. Ben Barka was plucked out of the murder trajectory by his own flagship. He was in the fight that destroyed Nasser and the Ella Speed; he was in the bunkers. Like the General, he is a survivor.'

  Truck was aching in every bone, whether from weariness or misery or his untreated overdose he neither knew nor cared. He sat down on the deck. He put the Device down beside him, stretched out his legs, and examined his hands. What could he do? — all along, his gestures of defiance had been crude and fruitless. He stared desperately up at the anarchist.

  'They'll hound me 'til I'm dead, Himation.'

  No reply.

  'What do you imagine I can achieve on Earth? I don't even know what this thing does.'

  Himation shifted uncomfortably, looking at the hull above Truck's head. 'None of this means much to me since I went out there. Space is a habit.' His eyes clouded, probing out past the hull. 'Pater saw something in yon, some strength that neither he nor I possessed. He wanted you to take the Device and do with it as you chose. He thought that that action in itself, whatever the purpose of the thing, might be enough. You understand? Your importance has always lain in your skepticism.

  'And he intended you to take it to Earth. That's the only reason I came back at all. I hate this place after what I've seen outside.'

  'What have you seen?' said Truck angrily. 'Tell me that' But he wouldn't explain, and for a while each man was absorbed in himself — Truck rubbing his hands nervously, full of self-pity, while the anarchist gazed at the flying streamers of illusion on Atalanta's screens, at his crew — at anything but Truck's face.

  Finally, Truck said: 'You don't know that Pater was right. You don't even know what he meant. Neither of us do. I'm not even sure he did.'

  Himation shrugged. 'No,' he admitted.

  Truck shivered. He couldn't control his hands: independent, they moved gently over the Device, taking its thready, secret pulse. 'Himation, I want to go with you,' he whispered almost in audibly. He jumped to his feet. 'Please. You owe me that. You're using me, Pater was using me, just like the rest of them — !'

  But Himation had turned away, and pretended not to hear; whether out of consideration or embarrassment, Truck couldn't decide.

  Midnight on the German Strip. All real life had fled this place with the Rat Bomb wars. Hard frost and a lunar desperation lay on the land from Lubeck south to Plauen. Coburg and Marburg, Dresden and Magdeburg — white ruins under a cold sky; Hanover and Hamburg, names on acres of rust and concrete, old weapon pads, interconnecting pits and craters.

  Somewhere through it ran an old, lost frontier.

  Beneath a bright acidic moon, John Truck stood with Himation the anarchist on the lower slopes of the Brocken. In the shadow of the mountain — confirmation of an old despair — lay Atalanta in Calydon. The north-east wind, full of ice particles and the smell of the cold gray Baltic brine, whipped Himation's cloak out like a flag.

  'This is as close as I can get you to Gottingen.' The wind boomed over the bare rock above, stole his voice, and howled off with it to the frozen nightmare of Thuringen.

  'What the hell am I supposed to do there?'

  'There are people, at least. You couldn't have expected me to put her down at Albion.'

  Truck blew on his cupped hands. 'No.' He set his back to the wind — he would let it blow him along: when had he ever done anything else? — and hunched his shoulders, looking along the valley. 'I'd better go before I freeze to death.' Nothing moved down there in the wind. Boulders or buildings, everything was covered with verglas and frozen snow.

  'Look,' said Himation, holding out his hand, 'I'm sorry if this seems hard — '

  Truck laughed bitterly. 'It's hard,' he said. 'And it's no good me saying that I don't blame you, because I do. But' — he grinned — 'I'd do the same myself.' He touched the anarchist's hand briefly and walked quickly away, before he was tempted to say anything more. He'd gone about ten paces when Himation called 'Wait!'

  He went back.

  Himation had taken off his cloak and hat. He was thin and hollow-chested, younger than Truck had imagined, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His great shock of red hair and dead white face made an astonishing contact with his bright blue eyes. Shivering and jogging from one foot to the other, he bundled the clothes up and held them out.

  'It's bloody bitter out here — and I shan't need them any more.'

  He looked suddenly diffident and boyish.

  Truck took them from him. 'You don't look much like your father,' he said.

  Himation smiled uncertainly. 'My father? Oh, Pater. ' He laughed, 'Did he tell you he was my father?'

  Truck shrugged.

  'It doesn't matter.' He held up the bundle. 'Will these do tricks for me?'

  'Who knows?'

  Himation smiled shyly. He reached out and plucked a green carnation from behind Truck's ear. 'I'd better have this back. Goodbye, Captain.'

  He made off toward his ship: stooped, lean, full of energy, as if he'd been newly released from some prison. A flurry of snow whirled round him, like the prop to an illusion.

  'Tell them to look for me in Andromeda,' he called.

  He raised his hand. A flower fell from it and was snatched away by the wind.

  Truck slung the cloak around him, buttoned its collar, and pulled down his hat. He retrieved the Centauri Device from a small puddle it had melted for itself in the snow, and went into the darkness of the valley, alone. Behind him, he heard Atalanta in Calydon lift into the air.

  ' "The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies." '

  He didn't dare look back.

  Perhaps four hours later, exhausted and covered with snow, he blundered into an IWG early warning post somewhere in the derelict suburbs of Gottingen. 'I've come to give myself up,' he said, and peered bemusedly into the twilight of the operations room, the skin of h
is face smarting in the sudden warmth.

  Thin, unnatural faces squinted back at him through a haze of tobacco smoke, underlit by the backwash of green light from plotboard and ultrasonic map: red-eyed, eerie and frightened, like underground animals blinking up from burrows —

  After a month in one of those places, waiting for the war-to start an operator begins to see things up on the empty slopes of the Vogelsburg, where nothing has stirred for over three centuries; he imagines massive troop movements among the drowned storm-cellars of Braunshweig and Salgitzer; he discovers an intruder in every silent fall of powdered mortar in a vacant city. He wears five keys chained to his neck — used in a proper sequence, they will kill the world.

  After two months, he can hardly remember in which order to avoid using them —

  Halfway through the graveyard shift, tired and sick among a litter of disposable plastic cups, all they saw was a faceless, threatening figure in a dark cloak, snow swirling behind it; and under its left arm an indistinct, shifty object that somehow chafed at their irritated eyes.

  All they heard it declare, in a muffled, deadly voice, was: 'I've come — '

  A Chambers gun spluttered in the gloom.

  Shadows hurled themselves over the walls, jerky and panic-stricken.

  'You bastards!' screamed John Truck, and clutched at himself in astonishment. He snatched his own gun from his boot and dived behind a radar module.

  It was a short exchange. At twenty-five or less, photophobic and with the ulcers of a sour responsibility eating at their insides, they were already old men. He killed them all, lay for a minute behind the console, whimpering. When he came out, he saw that some of them were clutching their keys, while others simply stared relieved at the low ceiling, blood on their rolled-up shirtsleeves — each one thankful, perhaps, that it was only his own death and not the world's.

  Truck moaned. He was seeing in half-tones. 'You should have given me a chance,' he murmured, supporting himself against the door-jamb.

  Outside, the wind was gusting up to Force Eight. There was a small VTOL pad behind the building. Halfway to it, he collapsed; lay there surprised under the sickening slow sweep of the ultrasound antennae and examined his wound. The bolt had eaten its way into his ribs, low down on the right side. The fire had gone out, but something was leaking from a fist-sized hole.

  'Oh God,' he prayed. 'Oh, Christ'

  He leaned on one elbow in the frozen slush and retched with fear. He couldn't feel anything down there, no pain, nothing. He wiped his mouth, looked up. A single aircraft was on the pad. He hauled himself laboriously toward it, hissing and gasping every time his right side touched the ground, out of horror that he'd get something in the wound.

  He hadn't once let go of the thing under his armpit was warm enough now to give him comfort in the wild night.

  FIFTEEN

  The Last Anarchist

  It was 6 a.m. Christmas morning in Carter's Snort when John Truck brought the stolen VTOL into the abandoned rocket-mail field at Renfield Street. Snow was on the ground, Sauchihall was full of crêpe paper streaming in the wind; in warm entrances and fuggy hallways, the port ladies were singing carols to their customers.

  He came in hard, failing to kill all the vehicle's forward momentum. It slewed drunkenly over the concrete, falling apart, to fetch up finally with a surprised grunt against the base of an old launching gantry. For a minute or two it pushed itself in a grinding, obsessive circle round the obstacle, like a blind and dying crab on an empty beach. Then the engine gave up, and there was only a thin hiss of low-pressure air escaping from a fractured puff-pipe in the wing.

  Off in the dark, undercarriage wheels rolled toward the edge of the field, bouncing and spinning like tossed coins.

  Truck let his forehead rest against the landing-computer display. He was delirious, full of morphine and amphetamines from the VTOL's survival kit; his lower chest was an awkward, pulpy bag of pain; visions came and went like minutes of wakefulness in a week of sleep. 'We made it, Pater,' he muttered.

  After a while, he raised his head, feeling a pressure, a radiation on the back of his neck. He couldn't see Cor Caroli, but he knew it was up there somewhere, one bad eye winking sardonically down on all murder and death. Cor Caroli, dog into wolf. He pondered his own transmigration, accomplished somewhere between Sad al Bari and Centauri VII. Where had his old body gone? He was sick now, but he was all wolf.

  The Device whispered urgently to him. He ignored it as much as he could, occasionally waving one preoccupied, impatient hand in front of his face as if to dispel the persistent fevers that hovered round his skull. It showed him movies of Omega Shaft. He was gray-faced, he was burning up. It cost a century of effort to drag himself out of the cockpit.

  Civilizations rose and fell while he blundered up and down Renfield Street, trying to remember who he was.

  'I'm coming,' he said petulantly. 'Don't rush me.'

  The Snort hid coyly from him in a maze of side streets, then jumped out with no warning at all: Truck closed his doors to it — neon, mercury vapor, a piddle of sleet coming from somewhere up above the buildings to light up in the glow from the barfront windows — but it got to him somehow, warm and alive in the teeth of the compass wind, and guided him through the murk along thoroughfares that led only to places he didn't want to go. He staggered on, blue-lipped and anoxic; and at every corner, at every landmark, he picked up passengers to ride the lower decks of his skull —

  The Boot Palace on Sauchihall: echoing and sour, haunted by a feeble echo of music. Its walls glimmered at him. Tiny Skeffern stood in the shadows there, kicking an amplifier in ghostly pique, shrugged; climbed aboard, as if Truck were some biological Ella Speed to lift him out and away from that place. Fix the bos'n stumped after him. 'Well need big protection, boss.' And settled down inside to keep watch through Truck's runny eyes —

  West Central Detention: damp and dirty and down by the river. Out on the street among the rubble — maybe even hoping to be arrested and taken in to where he felt comfortable.

  Singing and weaving: 'You look like I feel, Cap'n.' He turned away in that classic 6 a.m. pose, one hand flat against the wall to steady himself, head down crucified to vomit emptily. 'Give us a lift, bos'n, eh?' And he climbed on, too, winking and nodding. Behind him came Picking Nick and Angel and Og — caught holding for a friend, vagrant and eccentric — judged, sentenced, and condemned to become graffiti on a wall —

  Bayley the Wrecker's: wind moved among the broken spines, chains clanked, but the specters there were tender enough to hurt him in regions beneath his delirium. Angina Seng smiled and winced — 'I could have gone for you.' Out among the giant metal, Annie Truck, port lady from way back, waddled toward him with dignity, massively up the stick with his own self, materializing from the scattered ribs of a refrigerator ship. Wherever he looked, sheep's eyes full of regret met his own —

  They came to him whether he'd known them or not, until he thought his skin would burst from the pressure of their essence: every loser, every spacer who had ever lifted from a planet; every tired mute refugee who ever came down the Carling Line; the confused, the accused, the misused — the spiritual, moral, and metaphysical basket cases of fully two hundred years. They crowded — their odors of loss, all their heart-luggage, all their badges of despair — into the space behind his eyes, to stare out passive and inarticulate at the hinterland of all hinterlands: the displaced, the disgraced, the arrested, the outcast and unarmed, all his longtime dependents coming home to that inevitable junction after who knew what long uncomprehending trudge across the years and light years —

  The new Centaurans.

  Down by the prison he leaned over the parapet of a bridge. The river disappeared beneath him, oily and magical, constantly renewed. He owed them nothing, he owed them everything, and they were still pouring in. He knew he'd been drained, turned into an empty and purified vessel to receive precisely this draught, this visitation — 'What do you want?' But they simply sta
red on. What could he give them? How long could he hold together? He could only drag himself away from the bridge and take to the streets again, going — where?

  Four hours later, Ruth Berenici Truck, rising late after a lonely night — turning the other, unscarred cheek to face the world as she opened the door — found him on her doorstep.

  Where else should he be, now? He was curled up tight round his wound or the Centauri Device, and snow was in the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

  He looked up at her with a pain so intense as to wake every echo of her own and said distinctly, 'No more. I'm full up. I'm hurt, Ruth. Can we come in?'

  'All you have to do is be born,' he said later, trying to explain himself. And when she showed no sign of understanding (because you have to be crazy to live in the general rather than the particular). 'I can feel them in me. All us losers are Centaurans.'

  Ruth Berenici sighed. She took away the chlorhexidene aerosol, the sulfanilamide powder, and the fouled dressings. 'What do I have to do to get in there?' she called from the kitchen.

  Reappearing in the connecting doorway, slightly stooped, arms folded across her stomach: 'Die?' She went and frowned over the Centauri Device, continued almost absently, 'Is there a place for the living in your cosy little colony?'

  'Ruth.'

  'I'm sorry. Truck, what is this thing?'

  'Whatever you see.' He laughed, coughed. 'It's an operator of entropy.'

  Outside, it was afternoon: gray. Clouds raced through the sky. He was propped up on his side on the bed, where he'd been since she manhandled him in (floppy and apologetic, nothing new).

  The cough went on and on, like a paper-shredder working in his chest cavity. She had plugged the hole, but the bolt was still in there: deflected downward by a rib, it had passed through the bottom of one lung and lodged in the upper part of his abdomen, where it could be seen pressing up against the scarred plastic of his Opener window (looking at which for the first time, Ruth had merely compressed her lips and shaken her head — just another funny hat). As the last of the morphine wore off, the pain was becoming unbearable. He wondered idly if the ghosts in his head could feel it, too.