THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  Little Tiny Skeffern had suffered the entire circus with his eyes shut and his hands clamped round the neck of his guitar. 'Truck, I'm not cut out for this stuff,' he said. He sat down on the floor, drew up his legs, and jerked a thumb at Pater. 'He's off his head, that bloke.' He raised a feeble smile. 'Next time I see you coming, remind me of this — even three weeks on Sad al Bari is beginning to look bearable.'

  The exterior screens caught fire for a moment as some thin-lipped gunner blew an IWG Dynaflow to pieces. Truck stared out at the drifting wreckage.

  'We've got it now, Tiny. If Pater keeps his word, we can take the thing somewhere quiet and chuck it out of an airlock. Sigma-End's a nice place: we could go there and get smashed for a year — go back to being losers,'

  Tiny watched his fingers stalking up and down the fretboard. 'We don't have to go there to do that,' he observed astutely.

  Pater relinquished the flagship to his pilot, who grinned ruefully, made an aerobatical gesture with one hand, and murmured, 'Nice time, Pater.' Pater bowed and laughed. 'Dock it now,' he suggested, 'and be careful with the artwork.' The command-bridge relaxed, its peculiar voices diminished. The severed hold section of the hauler crept back into view, toppling end over end on a heading for M41 in Orion, a target it was unlikely to reach in the near future.

  'Prepare to board, Manteau,' said Pater over the ship-to-ship.

  There was a long pause, full of the croaking whisper of the stars. Someone adjusted the gain of the receiver, shrugged.

  'Manteau?'

  Himation came on. 'Pater,' he reported thoughtfully, 'we aren't boarding anything just at this precise moment. Have a look out there. The bloody Fleet's arrived.'

  'Oh Jesus,' whispered Tiny Skeffern, and closed his eyes again.

  IWG came out of the dyne-fields in three waves, fifty at a time, each spherical dreadnought half a mile in diameter and mounting enough fire power to pulverize Jupiter. Their fire ports were already open, sowing torpedoes like showers of steel needles. Syringa and The Melancholia that Transcends All Wit vaporized in the first second of the engagement, trapped among the slagged embers of the ambushed convoy. The New English Art Club ran helplessly through the resulting plasma-front and came out limned with a fire of her own; looping and twisting, plowed into the last of the escort ships (which was still trying to vanish) and joined it half in and half out of dyne, ectoplasmic and doomed -

  Aboard the flagship, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater rubbed his jaw and saw that it was impossible to disengage. The command-bridge howled and wept, the crew leaped and gyrated among their alien machinery like salmon in white water -

  'I'm going to ram, bugger it,' reported the Liverpool Medici, driving sideways across Pater's bows at a group of three Fleet vessels, and was never heard from again. Down in her belly, gunners threw up disgustingly and cheered the moment of impact -

  'Get out of the way and let the ferret see the rabbit!' screamed White Jonquil to the Gold Scab. She took a hit on the bridge and, her turrets spouting erratically, cartwheeled twenty thousand miles in a halo of tangled struts and hull-plates. 'Now look what you've done! — '

  ' — and there's a core-melt on Number Five,' whispered a faint, injured voice. 'Can anybody help — ' He died away without identifying himself, merged with the sea of interference -

  It was murder.

  They winked out one by one, The Forsaken Garden, Les Fleurs Du Mal, the Whistler, and the Fastidious. Running on to the guns, Imaginary Portraits embedded herself in her assailant: they spun together disconsolately, drifting toward far Centauri. Trilby and the Strange Great Sins collided, embraced, tore through IWG like an impromptu scythe.

  A distant bubbling moan, as the ship with the core-melt came back on, pleading. Himation's voice cut across him as Atalanta in Calydon cut across the top of Pater's screen, trying to outrun a coven of shimmering torpedoes. 'We've been suckered, Pater. The jig's up. I count fifteen of us left, and I'm getting damage reports from my own crew.'

  ' — if someone could just get a party aboard. We've lost steerage — '

  In half an hour, it was all up with them. Fifteen had dwindled to five after an attempt to break out of the IWG englobement: then to two. Tiny Skeffern shook his head and stared glumly at Truck as Pater and Himation skulked through the tragic debris, powered down and on communications silence to avoid detection. Corpses with frosty eyes knocked gently on the bull of The Green Carnation, and anarchist ships like filleted golden carp floated across her screens; while out beyond the eddy of wreckage IWG depended — a colony of fat spiders — from invisible threads.

  Parties of pressure-suited commandos began combing the outer derelicts for survivors. The pilot with the core-melt let them on board, then gave up trying to keep it in check — he was gone in a twinkling, the last flicker of the candle. Off the port bow of the flagship hung a great black and orange moon, peeled to the honeycomb decks and still spilling power conduit into the void like mile-long cilia; to starboard, Atalanta in Calydon prowled, her hull blackened and scarred, more wolf than fawn.

  The command-bridge was silent, full of white, listless faces, its illumination desperate and spectral. When he closed his eyes, Truck could still see frozen after-images of the battle, the thin bodies of anarchists wrapped in white light, aspects of devotion. Beside him, Tiny Skeffern shifted uncomfortably. 'Truck, why aren't we just sneaking off into the dyne?' He was used to the hinterland alleys, the boot, the hasty retreat.

  The quarterdeck crew chuckled morosely at this, looking to Pater. He turned from the forward screens, from some reverie of destruction and lost opportunity. 'We have become wreckage,' he mused, as if discovering something behind the words. 'There's a risk in operating any equipment at all now,' he explained. 'If we were to power up, they'd have us triangulated before we could compute a course.' His face was haggard. 'We can't do it, Mr. Skeffern. Even the screens are a risk.'

  He appeared to lose interest. After a while he went on, 'While we remain wreckage we are safe. It seems as though they have retained the Device, Captain. I'm sorry about that.'

  Truck shrugged.

  'I don't suppose I'd have known what to do with it anyway.'

  'You miss the point.'

  'There's something going on out there,' said Tiny. In the distance, IWG was maneuvering indecisively, individual ships pulling out of the rubbish heap on pulses of green flame — while others seemed to be hastily retrieving their commando units. Wings and squadrons formed, grew, inclined toward Centauri. This obscure performance lasted for some minutes. Wreckage drifted and toppled, raising and lowering the curtain on it. Pater opened a channel on Fleet Frequency, but no one on the bridge could separate the urgent babble from its concomitant of interference.

  Atalanta in Calydon broke silence suddenly. 'Pater!' shouted Himation. 'Something's up — I can see — Christ!' And he began to laugh. 'Pater, it's the Arabs! It's the Arabs! They've had it done all over them — ' His ship woke up, quivered, took fire at its stern. It drove away through the graveyard, trailing mirth. 'I'm going to try and get a better — '

  Massive jamming overwhelmed his signal.

  'Power up!' snapped Pater. Oscillating pulses of blue and violet light washed their faces, decaying echoes clattered around the bridge. 'That fool!' A Fleet dreadnought careened past under full thrust, firing madly at something behind it the way a man stares unbelievingly over his shoulder at a pursuer in the dark. It erupted into curious boils and ran into the wreck of the Forsaken Garden.

  The flagship groaned with mysterious voices (and Truck, wrenched out of his head by mounting alien energies, hallucinated briefly a Roman sundial isolated by a single watery ray of light in a sunken garden, smelling mint, glycol, horsehair) as Pater hurled her up and out. They shot into clear space -

  To discover imprudent Himation running under the guns of both IWG and UASR (Navy), with his ammunition spent and big dorsal holes.

  Perhaps a hundred Arabs had arrived, cylindrical ships resembling mammoth nuts and bolts
(they were, in fact, complete with threads, down which the command and power sections could be screwed at will) and carrying red and yellow insignia. Their ambush had telegraphed itself — unlike IWG's — and broken into small fragmented skirmishes across fifty million cubic miles or so of space.

  'Dyne out!' pleaded Pater. 'Dyne out, Manteau!'

  The Green Carnation lurched. Choking smoke began to pour into the bridge. Pater got her broadside on to his Arab and pounded it to junk. A cloud of dyne-torpedoes, released like breath from a terminal bubonic — the forward anti-missile batteries coughed once or twice. Something ripped them off, and the sweating gunners with them. 'We're losing pressure!' reported one of the quarterdeck crew. The ship lurched again, bellowing and creaking. Pater braced himself and bored in after Himation, drawing fire, yelling 'Dyne out!'

  'I'm trying to,' said Himation coolly. 'Don't think I'm not, Pater old chap.'

  Truck and Tiny groveled on the deck.

  An enormous hand slapped the ship about.

  'I can't hold her, Manteau!' cried Pater despairingly. 'Rendezvous at Howell! Dyne out!'

  The Green Carnation was withering away.

  Sardonic jungle-noises squawked and twittered from her circuitry as it melted to slag, inflicting terrible burns on the dazed crew. Pater slapped a bank of rocker switches grafted on to the alien controls. She slid into dyne, but it spat her out again, twice. Her spine cracked and flexed. As they went under for the third time, Truck clutching Tiny Skeffern's shoulders and praying with horrified self-disgust that Himation would get it and not them, IWG broke into their communication channels -

  IT'S WAR NOW, LADDIE! CAN YOU HEAR ME, TRUCK? HOW D'YOU LIKE THAT?

  I WANT TO SEE YOU AFTER I'VE FINISHED WITH THESE SNOTTY JACKALS. YOU HEAR ME, PATER? HE'S MINE, AND YOU'RE FINISHED.

  TRUCK? IT'S WAR -

  Then they were somewhere else.

  EIGHT

  An End to Art and the Beginning of Artifice

  The anarchists of Howell watched her final firework arc. She burst out of the dyne-fields like a morbid comet, rolling belly-up and launching volleys of torpedoes at nothing they could see, her stern consuming itself in pale feverish radiance. Great rents had opened along her length, her bow was an agonized mouth; her golden fins were bent and charred, her turrets melted stubs. She plummeted down on them in a fog of blind murder, braking savagely: slewed, showed a queer blunt profile. Something tore, deep down inside. She broke in half. The entire northern quadrant blazed up soundlessly, drenching their appalled faces with corpse-light.

  The Green Carnation had come home.

  Four hours later, they recovered her quarterdeck section from the aphelion of a long elliptic orbit. It was intact, and under survival pressure. VR units leached on to it, opened it up with plasma torches, and went in with respirators, Earth-morphine, and a sort of dumb awe. They brought out thirty bodies and ten survivors, all of them blue with anoxia, some suffering from induction burns. Most of the deaths were from subsonic rupturing of the great organs.

  Two or three of them were still on their feet, staring inertly round a dark filthy trap full of carbon dioxide and cooked flesh as if they had come the long and significant way round from Hell. They had. Swinburne Sinclair-Pater was there, a hole the size of two fists in the back of his white suit; but he wouldn't let the VR crew give him morphine until they had checked that disgusting oubliette for a small bald musician and a transit-class haulage pilot in funny clothes. They were glad to avoid his bright, somehow elated eyes.

  He hung on for twelve hours, in his bedroom at the heart of Howell. Its walls were dim and glorious with blue and gold peacocks he had painted himself. They couldn't cut the suit off him, because of the induction burns, but they pulled five petal-shaped fragments of some alien machinery out of his lungs, where they had embedded themselves as he wrestled mysteriously in the supernal places of the Dyne to keep his ship from falling apart. He woke up only rarely. When he did, his eyes were sunken but amused.

  John Truck and Tiny Skeffern stood awkwardly by his bed for the last few minutes, their burns dressed and their faces pallid. Truck remembered little of Pater's ride out of the night. For a while, he knew, the hul1 of the flagship had seemed to melt or withdraw; all of them, the asphyxiated and the dying, had worn colored glass masks, or swum in senselessness, fish of the Impossible Medium; all solid forms had vanished in amazing twists and contortions, and he felt his interface with space diminish, felt it crawl through him in slow, luminous ecstasies. He knew what he'd felt, and it had seemed important at the time; but now all he saw was the stinking dark canister of the bridge, and all he found in his head was a strange embarrassed compassion for the withered figure beneath the printed silk coverlet.

  Pater stirred painfully.

  'Captain?' A terrible, disfigured whisper, but gaining strength: 'War. The one-eyed bitch has her war at last.' One of his ruined hands escaped the coverlet, touched his cheek — a short hissing breath. 'For decades they've drained the Galaxy; now they'll rip it apart like beasts in an alley. Stop it, Captain. They mustn't find you.'

  He drew himself up, shaking fitfully; gazed without recognition at the gorgeous room.

  'Did I -?' Irritated, he moved his hand feebly in search of a memory. 'All pleasure devours — Captain! — Dyne out!' He tried to wet his lips, choked. Quieter: 'I could never find it in me. There was too much I loved.' Spurred, perhaps, by this lapse into sentiment, the old Pater returned briefly, full of gentle malice. 'But you have a rich, vulgar iconoclasm, Captain. Let it speed you.'

  'He sank back, watching the peacocks. Then, after a long time:

  'You were there when she bled into the dyne-fields, you saw the substance of her flaring out like ritual evidence of the future. I believe she was near to her proper purpose, then. That's our heritage. Take her. We don't belong in the murk that nurtures Earth. Take her and remember that when your times comes. You've seen Space.'

  He frowned. 'Where's Manteou?' he asked puzzledly. Then: 'I flung her out there for a while, Captain, against the dirty chance of dying.' His voice tailed off.

  Truck bent close over the savaged face. 'She blew up, Pater. What can I do now? You can't give her to me, she blew up.' Pater was asleep, but the room smelled just like death. He said nothing more until the end, when he pulled himself upright in the bed, winced, shuddered with horror at something beyond the painted walls. 'More laudanum, Symons!' he shouted. He sighed, and a perilous calm iced his eyes. ' "Destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all bad drawings,'' ' he breathed. He looked straight at Truck and winked broadly. ' "By all that is holy all obscene drawings — '' '

  It was 2367. On Sad al Bari IV military bands played 'Salute the Fleet!' while youths who had never seen Earth fortified the moons of Gloam and Parrot. The green carnation withered on its stem. Howell shrank to a rock. Its animating spirit had fled.

  'Poor old sod,' said Tiny Skeffern, out in the studio. He wandered round scratching nervously at his bandages, picking up Pater's Chinese pots and tapping them to hear their clear fragile voices. 'Are you going to stare at that picture all day? Truck, honestly, it isn't even finished.' He screwed his face up over a hawthorn blossom. 'Do you know, that's the second guitar I've lost since Tuesday?'

  'Shut up,' Truck told him roughly. 'He was a decent bloke.' A familiar lassitude had come over him: he hung like a wrecked boat in his own skull, drawn slowly down the gravity-well of sentiment. He couldn't define his relationship with Pater, but he knew that he owed some emotion, some regret or responsibility. Something had vanished from the Galaxy forever. 'Let's get out of here,' yet he hung about, hoping to hear from the anarchists drifting listlessly in and out of Pater's suite that Himation the conjurer had made it back.

  He hung about, but Himation never came.

  'Come on, Tiny. There's nothing here for us any more.'

  Tiny folded up a small silk fan and put it in his pocket. It was an alley gesture, without decency, but of respect.

  'Where will we g
o?'

  The corridors were deserted: most of Howell was elsewhere, scanning the hard black sky for a destroyed fleet, shaking its head. Even the workshops were dazed and silent.

  They boarded Ella Speed and found Fix the bos'n feeding Himation's lizard from a lengthy if shallow incision in his own arm, 'There's no need to go that far, Fix.' Truck stood over the chart-computer, observing his fingers as they busied themselves independently about. He had an original idea for the first time in his life. It tasted like rust for all that.

  'There was nothing in that transporter,' he said bitterly. 'She knew Pater would try for it. She even knew from Veronica that Pater had taken me off Earth.' He punched the navigation display board gently. 'And there she was, waiting for us. It's still on bloody Centauri, under the ground.'

  Pater.

  He had fought both sides indiscriminately all his life, and gained nothing at the end. Out of what? A sense of responsibility? 'He was just a loser like the rest of us, Tiny. The Device was never there at all.'

  Pater. Pater.

  'What's this place we're going to, boss?' asked Fix the bos'n. 'Will the dope be good?'

  Ella Speed left her pit and nosed gingerly through a belt of vaporized gold. Hull-plates yawned over her; miles of cable caressed her, arabesque. In passage through night: space was full of floating ribs.

  'Shut your mouth and fly the bleeding thing, Fix. Don't I pay you enough?' Which was quite unfair. Truck spent the rest of the journey gawping out at the dyne fields, fiddling about with the screen adjustment, and wondering if he'd died out there during Pater's last flight.