THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  When the wind peeled back the cloak, he was naked. His body was shaved as hairless as his head, his skin was like a pink, shiny polymer. Let into his stomach, thorax, and belly were the thick plastic windows the Openers have surgically inserted to show off their internal processes. They were surrounded by thick callused lips of flesh, and nothing altogether pleasant was going on behind them.

  He stared as he passed Truck and Tiny: His eyes were black and secretive. He had eaten a fairly light breakfast. He moved his small, indeterminate lips into a smile. Suddenly, a short thick arm whipped from under his cloak (as if the action were quite divorced from him, the arm belonging to some dwarf or ape hiding beneath the garments: his smile remained). His meaty hand clutched John Truck's shoulder.

  'Here,' said Truck. 'Get off.'

  'Good morning, Captain,' said the Opener. 'I am Dr Grishkin. The Lord is kind.'

  'What?'

  Truck, gazing through the windows on Dr Grishkin's raw and convoluted soul, recalled that he hadn't eaten for some time. The Opener still had hold of his arm. His stomach rumbled.

  'I have just this moment come from your ship. Your bos'n told me you were unavailable. I'm glad to find him wrong.'

  'That's right,' mumbled Truck, 'not available. Sorry.'

  Dr Grishkin nodded slowly, once — until he was looking at Truck like a sad fat animal from the cave-mouth of his own brows. It was accomplished, it was dramatic. With his free hand, he spread his cloak wide. Truck began to feel ill.

  'Captain, I open myself to you. I appeal to you. Although I can see by your outfit you are not one of my scattered brothers, I know from here — ' He tapped each of his windows in turn ' — that you are a man of principle, even of charity. Captain, I beg of you the help only you can give.'

  Truck shuddered. Dr Grishkin's enigmatic eyes, full of the revelations of the organism, held his, unwavering. The grip on his arm was paternal, gentle; it was possessive. He experienced an overpowering sensation of déjà vu. Over Grishkin's rounded shoulder, he could see right along Bread Street, which was empty and indifferent. Having got him into this, it wasn't going to get him out. Screw all streets, he thought. He knew he had to break free: ulterior motive or mere charisma, Grishkin was too strong for him. He was fearful of discovering what the Opener wanted.

  A port lady saved him. Trudging sexually down the street with a stoned deck hand hanging on her arm, she swept her long beautiful hair out of her eyes and winked at him boldly. He watched her swaying back until it was a wriggling iota in the deadly perspective of the street. Then he said:

  'Grishkin, piss off.'

  And he walked away, leaving Tiny Skeffern and the Opener staring after him. Tiny was puzzled, but there was a certain satisfaction in Grishkin's unconvincing eye. Truck sensed that he had not won the encounter, only postponed it

  Tiny caught up, swinging the Fender case. 'I think I am going to be sick,' he chuckled. 'How can he live with his own breakfast like that?'

  Truck stopped and watched the Opener watching him. His neck ached, and the wind stung his tender lip. 'Tiny,' he said, 'I'm going to Earth. There's no better place to be arrested.'

  'What?'

  Out in space, other winds blew. While thoughtful Truck brooded round the exterior screens, gazing at the flying streamers of illusion produced by Ella's improbable progress through the impossible medium of the dyne fields, Fix the bos'n prepared him meals he didn't eat.

  'You got to eat, boss.'

  Tiny Skeffern patched his Fender into the communications equipment. Broadcasting the Dynaflow Blues into the quaking, distorted universe outside — trailing slow ribbons of tachyon noise that might some day and in some unimaginably distant place be received and decoded as a stretched, alien music, the ship groped and crabbed and hurtled her way by turns a few light years closer to her captain's destiny.

  Nobody mentioned Earth until it became necessary for landing procedures.

  By that time, Truck had six of his twenty-four hours left.

  THREE

  The Longest-running Party in the History of the Universe

  Earth:

  IWG and UASR, initially parasites of the political muscle-tissue, had eaten what remained of their twentieth-century hosts during the aftermath of the tragic and infamous 'Rat Bomb' wars of 2003-45, when the client-state system, that uneasy and paternalistic compromise between autonomy and empire, fragmented and fell apart.

  A new Arabia swallowed the entire Sino-Soviet continent, engulfed the more fertile areas of Africa, but lost its original nerve center in Egypt. IWG swelled to contain both Americas, the husk of the unsuccessful European Economic Community, and the Mediterranean shores.

  Between them, they devasted Australasia and, in a quarrel over the missile pits of Antarctica, set fire to the Pacific Ocean.

  Now, they faced one another along the crooked boundary lines of the Syrian Desert and the Taurus Mountains, the cratered wastes of the German Strip, the Bering Sea. Silos in the radio-glass puddle of the Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keelyards of Nubia. They disputed the Red Sea warily, in gunboats — from the Israeli, causeway at Sinai to the fifty-lane Arabian road bridge at Al Shaab.

  Hydrofoil flotillas, spraying rainbow arcs of oil and semipolymers to calm the sea before them, patrolled the South Atlantic; above them, piloted missile interceptors hung in precarious fragmentary orbits; and off' the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, enigma and threat under its power dome, humped out of the Magellan Strait like a huge, stranded alien fish.

  There were many fronts, but few confrontations; they used the Galaxy for those.

  It would have been naïve to consider the inheritors of the Earth as 'Jews' and 'Arabs': they had sold that birthright, and retained of it only the terminology. The millennial grievances that had motivated their wars prior to the last quarter of the nineteen hundreds had vanished; in consolidating their secondhand empires, they had merged a thousand nationalities and religions, only to lose their own.

  More important, perhaps: each of them had surrendered its self-determination in favor of the politico-social and economic principles of the dead powerblocs — so that they were caught in the inevitable conflict of ideologies already worn pitifully thin four hundred years before, when Tiny Skeffern's shiny antique had given its first performance.

  2367:

  The Mohorovicic Discontinuity was mined on both sides of the Red Sea Fault.

  There were no more neutral zones.

  Truck decided to visit his wife.

  Cor Caroli was visible over the deserted inspection pits of Carter's Snort when, unaware of his position as an activator of entropy, he brought his boat down among them. He knew it for a murder-star, the killer in the houndpack of Venatici; but as yet he did not expect that his own star would eventually outshine it on all scales of magnitude.

  He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bos'n, who stood stubbornly on the loading ramp of My Ella Speed, coughing in the dirty winter air of Earth and saying: 'I'll bring the chopper, boss.'

  Truck shook his head.

  'You stay here, Fix. Tiny will tell you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again.'

  Fix grinned with embarrassment His teeth were like a sawmill. 'You need big protection out there, boss. I'll just — ' He made off toward the corner of the hold where he kept his stuff.

  'Leave that bloody thing where it is, Fix. You're not coming.'

  'Stuff it.'

  'Sorry.'

  He was, too. He fastened his second-best jacket, a heavy brown leather thing lined with peculiar gray fur from some place he had never been. Some of his hair got stuck in the ornamental zip; zips were as fashionable in the hinterlands that year as Tiny Skeffern and for similar reasons. He shrugged at Fix. He left the ramp.

  Tiny was still in the ship. Hearing Truck's receding boot heels, he stuck his head out of the forward lock and, silhouetted against the cabin lights, puffed ectoplasm into the frosty night.

  'I'll be a
t the Boot Palace on Sauchihall if you need me,' he called.

  'Thanks, Tiny.'

  Gazing sentimentally back over his shoulder, Truck lost his footing among the clumps of couch-grass that had forced their way through the broken concrete of the landing field.

  'See you.'

  He brushed himself down and trudged out into the empty, depressed streets of Carter's Snort.

  Most northerly of the five major zones of Albion Megaport (that 60,000 square mile complex of bunker-docks, keelyards, freight terminals, and warehouses that had once been called 'Great Britain'), the Snort had been the first of them to succumb to the domino recessions of the post-colonial period, and the only one never to have recovered.

  Cargo was no longer handled there, and no ships were built — although a few keelyards still had tower cranes erected above them, as if to disguise their impotence. Only the breakers flourished, catering to the spares trade and melting down what they couldn't resell in great pig-furnaces that turned the midnight concrete arcades of Carter's Snort into a dull red maze.

  Its original population dispersed in search of work, the zone had moved quickly through that process of cultural decay peculiar to ports, attracting the poor, the rootless, the ruthless — and finally the artistic and cheap intellectual elements not only of IWG but of the stars. The only music you heard in Carter's Snort was the New Music. Its feet were booted. It was the hinterland of all hinterlands.

  Truck, who had once lived there long enough to make one of his more elementary errors, hunched his shoulders and walked east. He stopped for a moment to gaze at the broken spine of a refrigerator ship curving up out of its own corroding ribs, his face over-lighted by the savage glare of the plasma torches; their half-visors dark and numinous, the wreckers grinned at him, a race of amiable Vandals.

  FREE ANYWHERE, said the graffiti on the walls of the dim derelict warehouses; SUSQUEMADELION LIVES, and IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH? Truck laughed; he liked them; he felt at home. He pulled his collar up and ignored the few bitter flakes of snow that stung his face when he turned into the wind.

  Ruth Berenici Truck lived in wrecker territory down by the river. He stood in the street looking up at her windows and wondering not so much why he had come as what part of him had suggested it. Silent explosions of light from the yards, then the tolling of a monstrous girder as it flexed and fell.

  The walls had been his manuscript when he still slept here: all the way up to her floor, they sent him messages from a youthful alien head.

  GO HOME TRUCK.

  He didn't remember doing that one.

  Ruth Berenici stood outside her open door, presenting out of nervousness her left profile only, perfect and still. She was tall and thin, she moved very slowly. Her eyes were gray (devoid, though, of ice), her hair was streaked with it; her jaw muscles were a little too strong.

  'Ruth.'

  'I saw you in the street.'

  Ruth Berenici had allowed the universe to wound her at every turn; because of this, she possessed nothing but a sad grace, a yielding internal calm. Truck reached out to touch her right cheek. She closed her eyes, and the left side of her mouth smiled.

  'It's still there, John.'

  That hesitant turn of the head; the full face revealed; he bit the inside of his cheek in a kind of sexual shock.

  'Why are you shivering?' he asked. He experienced a brief memory of her ascending the cellar steps of the Boot Palace some years before, a sectional assumption in the weak wet light of the Carter's Snort dawn. He found one of her long hands, trapped it.

  'There are times when' — she disengaged her hand, spread the fingers, pressed them flat against his chest — 'I know you.' She shook her head. Profound bruised areas about her eyes, mark of the eternal victim. 'No, you're not coming in — '

  The hand moved away, leaving no bruises on his second-best hide, no marks of any kind.

  ' — unless you're staying this time.'

  Ruth recognized the significance of moments. It was her only defense.

  'I am this time,' he lied. The room had changed, but he found one of his hats in a cupboard. 'You did it up nicely. I thought you might have gone somewhere else.'

  Later, placing one of his hands beneath her tiny breasts:

  'Here.'

  Ruth worked in the front office of Bayley, the wrecker's on Lead Alley; at night, she brought him amusing presents ripped off from Bayley's stock. He stayed in the room all day because he knew it would hurt her to come back and find him out. He slept a lot. He scratched at the frost patterns on the inside of the window; stared, mildly surprised to discover himself still free.

  They quarreled, crammed into her narrow hot bed.

  'Why did you go?' Abruptly moving her leg, watching him seriously. And: 'We ought to be able to talk about it now.'

  ''I don't really know. Come on.'

  'No, wait a minute, we ought to be able to talk about things like that.'

  He grunted at the ceiling, rolled onto his stomach. 'Oh well.' He got out of bed, scratching listlessly at the hair under his armpits. With nothing to do all day, he had become a glutton for sleep, perpetually dozy. He felt as if a layer of sponge separated him from objects, from the floor.

  'I have to move. I have to meet new people. I like people.'

  She followed him round the room, talking over his shoulder, picking things up and putting them down again.

  'In the abstract, in the abstract. Liking everybody keeps individuals at a distance. If you can feel responsible for some smashed port loser you never met, why not me?'

  'Oh, that's a bit simplif — '

  'Right.' She pressed herself against him, all that amazing white flesh, tinted smoky blue in its declivities. 'You'll go again. Ill be hurt, but I'll still be here. This will always be here waiting for you.'

  She snatched his hand, forced him to touch her right cheek, her belly and thighs.

  He shrugged. 'I don't believe it's like that at all.' He picked his jacket up and began to go through the pockets.

  Back on the bed, Ruth sniffled. 'I'm sorry.' She faced the wall. 'Stuff your bloody head with dope, then.'

  Four days.

  Nobody came.

  Nobody arrested him (except Ruth: the longer he stayed, the more frightened she became of his eventual departure — it was an ascending spiral of dependence). He was at the window constantly, watching the snow turn to sleet and then rain. Out in wrecker territory the plasma torches hissed; whole plantations of steel were pruned and lopped; the dark-visored gnomes bobbed and grinned.

  Caught between Ruth's inability to feel anything but pain and the uncertainty of his own position, Truck grew nervous and mean. He didn't understand how General Gaw and her police could have missed him. He needed information. He picked moody bones with Ruth when she came home from work — finally put on his jacket and left the house.

  Tiny Skeffern couldn't tell him anything.

  'Something is moving down there underneath it all,' he said, blowing on his fingers to warm them up. It was practice afternoon at the Boot Palace, but the rest of his band hadn't turned up. 'But nobody's mentioning your name.'

  He was squatting on the dusty stage, up to his elbows in an amplifier. The Boot Palace was gloomy and cold, smelling of stale audience. Grimy swirls of fluorescent dye blinked dimly from its cavernous walls, echoes of the previous night's sartori.

  'The narcotics police are getting ready to close Chalice Veronica's import operation. You're not involved with that are you?'

  He plugged in. Nothing happened.

  'I'd like to see Veronica,' said Truck. 'He has paid ears.'

  Tiny kicked his amp. 'Look here, fuck you, work,' he said. He washed his hands of it. 'Let's go and get smashed,' he suggested, 'We could drop in on Veronica later.'

  'I'd have to tell Ruth,' said Truck. But it was past dark before he made it back to the wrecking grounds.

  Somewhere between Three Jump House and the Spastic Quasar he stole a great pink Vulpeculan fruit as a
present for Ruth. He and Tiny ran through the rain on opposite sides of the street, tossing this obscene thing between them until it began to show signs of irreversible wear. They giggled. Tiny was falling down a lot

  'Shush,' whispered Truck, as they sneaked up the stairs.

  GO HOME TRUCK, said the walls.

  He missed a step. Ruth's present ballooned away through the darkness like a stupid ghost, pink and glowing. 'Catch it, Tiny!'

  He knocked on the door. 'Ruth?' No answer. Tiny chuckled. 'It went all the way down again.' He tried to balance the fruit on one finger. 'Not going to let you in, mate. Oops.'

  'Ruth?'

  No answer.

  Truck lowered himself carefully down, sat with his back to the door. Faint sounds of someone weeping filtered through it. They came from far away, and made him infinitely upset. 'Oh, Ruth, I'm sorry.' He brightened up. 'Let us in and well give you something.'

  Tiny dropped the fruit. 'Yes.'

  'Just go away,' said Ruth from the other side of the door. 'Just go away, John.'

  He left the fruit. He shrugged. Halfway down the stairs, he hung over the banister and vomited dismally. His eyes watered.

  'Tiny,' he said, 'we're losers. What good is all this doing us?'

  Ruth Berenici sat on her narrow bed, tall and gray and beautiful, tracing with her fingertips the scar that immobilized the right side of her head from beneath the eye down to that place where neck meets shoulder. It would be naïve to mistake John Truck's half of that ramshackle, enduring affair for pity.

  It might well have been the other way round.

  Chalice Veronica, the intellectual pusher-king, lived in a five-story converted warehouse, a grim and ancient monument behind the old rocket-mail pits of Renfield Street.

  Beneath the pits, he plied his trade, in a chain of fuel cisterns abandoned during the domino recessions. There the myriad sensations of the Galaxy were cut, stored, packaged, and dispatched (it was rumored) by a hundred naked Denebian mainliners working out a mysterious debt to the King. For miles in every direction, the earth was honeycombed with traps and tunnels and boltholes.