THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  He stayed there, on his hands and knees, gulping.

  'The General has installed half the Fleet over Centauri VII, Captain. It will take time to breach her security. We can only wait a suitable opportunity. In the meantime, don't you see, you can take up a probationary ministry, like any other Novice of the order. You will be invisible. It's what you asked. I have provided not only security for you, but a means whereby you can remember our bargain.'

  'You didn't have to do it this way, Grishkin.'

  His cloak had fallen open. He looked up. In front of him stood the pilot of the atmosphere vehicle, a puzzled expression on his decent flier's face. 'What are you staring at, you bastard?' But he could no longer avoid his reflection. It was in the man's eyes: the plum-colored cloak; the horrible naked scrawny body, shaven and goosefleshed in the wind; the bald head -

  And the little plastic panel implanted in his abdominal wall. He stared at it and began to weep.

  It was disgusting.

  It hurt.

  'Here,' said the pilot, helping him up. 'Take it easy.'

  But that wasn't the end of it, either, although he soon found that he could keep the cloak discreetly wrapped round him and ignore what lay beneath it — so that when he got back to Golgotha some of his composure, such as it was, had returned. It was precarious. He'd take Pater's injunction to heart and he could no longer guess what might become of him.

  It was dark by then. My Ella Speed was blacked out. She seemed deserted, but up in the control room he stumbled over Tiny Skeffern, snoring on the floor, a ripped-off bottle of Pater's ethanol under his hand. He kicked the body gently. 'Tiny? Fix, why aren't there any lights on?' He found the switches himself, worked them petulantly. 'Fix, where are you?' There was something scrawled on a bulkhead in tremulous yellow crayon:

  DERE BOS

  IVE GOTTA JBO ONA FRATER OUT FRUM ERTH AN IF WEER TAUKGNI ABOT

  PAY WEL I HAVENT BIN PAYD FRO 6 MNUTHS

  FIXX

  All Chromians are dyslexic from birth. It may be why their culture is still feudal. Truck sat down in one of the command chairs and shrugged at the inscription. 'Fix, Fix.' It was no more than he deserved. He felt unutterably weary.

  Tiny, meanwhile, had stirred, rubbed his eyes, and sucked the empty bottle. 'Fix left,' he said, helping himself up with the edge of the chart computer. 'Christ that stuff stinks.' He staggered round the cabin looking for water, tripping repeatedly over the bottle, intent only on his own pain. 'Took his chopper and everything.'

  'It's happened before. Hell be back. We're always falling out.' It was true, but it didn't make him feel any better: it was always his fault.

  Finally, Tiny got his sight back.

  'Hey, Truck,' he sniggered, 'did you get converted?' He squinted across the control room, a big, silly grin spreading across his face as he took in Truck's new clothes. 'Jesus, what — '

  Truck, inspired by a dreadful rage, had leaped to his feet and was making determined grabs for Tiny's throat. He skipped smartly back. 'Truck, I — '

  Truck got hold of him. Laugh, and I'll kick your head in, Skeffern,' he said earnestly. 'Come on then — ' He wanted to hurt somebody. He was being driven further and further out on his own, away from even the minimal decencies of the hinterlands. He shoved Tiny up against the bulkhead until his thin blond hair was rubbing out Fix's illiterate plea for fair treatment. 'Come on' — Inviting with steely fingers — 'say one word.'

  And then, from all the sick misery of his awakening in Grishkin's ghoulish city; 'Oh sod it, sod it. Help me, Tiny.'

  Tiny gaped and snuffled.

  Truck slumped back in his seat and set his eyes sorrowfully on the bos'n's stupid half-erased note (he wasn't fit to be out on his own: he only got into fights with people bigger than himself, or pawned his chopper). 'What am I doing, Tiny? I made a deal with Grishkin. It was the only way I could see to get hold of the bloody Device. Now I'm not sure he didn't suspect that all along. He expects me to try and doublecross him. He cut me open as a warning. What am I doing?'

  'It was only a joke, Truck, I didn't — '

  Truck shivered and stared at the bulkhead.

  Bleak steel.

  NINE

  Under the Lamplight at Avernus

  2367: without Truck to operate it, the Centauri Device (bomb or Totem, perhaps both) remained in its bunker, quiescent but maybe reviewing in solitude memories of an earlier war. Or even — sensing that Truck was now gravitating toward it, spiraling in from his own choice rather than General Gaw's or ben Barka's or Grishkin's — stirring a little in its two-century sleep.

  2367: above, on the fringes of Centauri's rubbished atmosphere, hung evidence of the new war — blind black battleships, slipping constantly into new patterns of defense, casting mechanically about like beasts that will tear each other if there is no scent of quarry.

  2367: the Galaxy had begun a horrible gavotte to Earth's tune. On Sad al Bari IV, adolescent shock-troops with doomed delinquent faces wore their IWG uniforms through weekend leave in the hinterland, shyly testing their new boots in the alleys off Bread Street; from the factories of Parrot issued the graveyard shift, rubbing its hands to stir a sluggish, sleep-deprived constitution and congratulating itself on overproduction of long reaction guns for the mutual succor treaty with UASR (the notorious 'Salisbury' pact); while everywhere else young girls with clear winsome eyes were lifting their feet to Earth's popular songs and their skirts to dashing young Earth-liaison officers with the colonial squadrons.

  2367: a brief hush out there among the stars, as it all hit a pinnacle of awed preparation. Then — lips parted in wonder and a calm dewy smile — the long graceful pratfall into Earth's mucky business.

  2367: Intestinal Revelation (lately the Ella Speed, out of RV Tauri II — Stomach — with a cargo of nothing) lay at Egerton's Port. Avernus, that infamous planet at the edge of the Ariadne arm. Out there, the war seemed remote but plausible.

  Egerton's Port went down the drain before it was ever a finished proposition. It never experienced that state of spiritual pioneering — during which the local Women's Institute will hang a spacer whose hair falls a centimeter below his collar (and even specify the type of collar) — through which ports on newly-colonized planets inevitably pass; but moved from raw incompletion to the decadence of an established hinterland while the earth-movers were still mapping it out of the ground. Thus, while its streets were cinders and its buildings sour corrugated plastic, its heart was as rotten as Earth's; and while its considerable warehouse facilities were still in process of development, so was the sore that came to be called 'Junk City.'

  Before the civil engineers left there was a pusher for every street corner and every possible sensation, from AdAcs to Ziapaprothixene. By the time John Truck got there, there were ten (and the reputation of the place, had been going anywhere but in circles round Beta-X-ligo XVII, would have preceded it at every stop along the way). They fought one another in vicious obscurity through the confines of Junk City, and those who survived went out like rats into the port-proper; they were the red-eyed end, they were the continually-replaced rodent teeth and alligator shoes of the Galaxy — they were so eroded in the skull that they'd ask you one minute if scruples were shot or snorted and wonder the next if you could get them a kilo or two at the right price,

  But it was their clients that made the place an agony.

  They sat or slumped in groups with their backs against the shaking walls, caught like depraved family snapshots — the spike still hanging from the arm, the tiny trickle of blood from the nose — Denebian, Gygnian, Chromian, Earthman, they had given up all pretense of being spacers or whores or anything they had started out to be, and become cyphers with creased open palms, evil clothes, soft bleached voices. The whites of their eyes were gray and somehow crystalline: and whatever it is that the eyes are attached to had gone that way too. Every day just before dawn an irregular detail drawn from their own ranks would clear the streets of those who had died in the night.
It kept them in dope.

  It was there that Truck began to incubate the vision that was to influence his final deployment of the Centauri Device. Day after day he had to ignore the beseeching hands or listen to the alligator shoes (licking, licking the filthy untreated concrete floors) or pick his way between the O/D cases of the streets. He felt sympathy for someone other than himself, which was unusual — and more: he came to realize that it was Earth money that had built the shacks of Avernus and Earth speculators who owned them.

  Further, he remembered Sad al Bari, where he had looked at the losers and, in effect, congratulated himself on escaping all that. But was it any more than a matter of degree? From a terminal H habit on Avernus to a streetsinger's pitch on Sad al Bari to My Ella Speed was an upward progress, maybe — but he'd consumed with the best of them, and he was no stranger to alligator shoes, either. Somehow, he'd never seen himself as quite so much a part of it — would he begin to regret his THC sundaes and his adventures on Morpheus?

  People take what scraps of personal memory they want to believe in and erect a house of experiential straw. Pater had set light to his, and Avernus was fanning the flames.

  He shared with Tiny Skeffern a one-room plastic shed and left it once a day to preserve his fictional Openerism. His window hurt at the edges, where the flesh was inflamed, and it still terrified him to look at it; but he hung on grimly, waiting for a word from Grishkin and thinking up ways to double-cross him when it came.

  He made an unconvincing Opener, being embarrassed to undo his cloak in private, let alone public; as a Novice, he was not allowed, nor would he have wanted, to take confession; and so his sole cover-activity was the distribution of sect literature (brown bundles of which, printed on that crude paper which always seems to smell of excrement, filled the hold of his ship) among the bars and leprotic brothels of the port. It was a threadbare deception and when, after about two weeks of it, he met an earlier acquaintance, it was put paid to entirely.

  TEN

  'He Doesn't Even Know What Year It Is'

  Afternoon on Avernus, and a thin sour drizzle beading the plastic walls. Main Street, Egerton's Port was poached and muddy. Outside the Boogie Shuffle it was all AdAc habits, mainly one-time port ladies dreaming of the teen-age barbie dolls they had once wanted to be or the fine skinny corpses they would one day make — their eyes fixed on the underside of the lowbrow clouds and the rain falling into their open mouths. Truck went in, past the vapor sign that said GET HER SOME AND WATCH HER BITE YOUR FINGERS OFF, and found a party of engine-room mechanics from some visiting military vessel — haunted by the thought of explosive decompression a thousand light years from home and already three parts smashed — dancing apishly about to a hologram recording of Tiny Skeffern doing Eight Star Crawl at the Palace.

  He climbed onto a table.

  'Open yourselves to the Universal Principle,' he whispered, hoping they wouldn't hear, 'my brothers.'

  Vast appreciative catcalls.

  'I have here — '

  Openers aren't supposed to fight; so when Legiron Crab — a tube-reamer out from the Knuckle system and shortly to lose his left arm in the gallant wreck of the Seventeeth Susan — decided to have a look under Truck's cloak, Truck went for a pressure point in the neck so as not to make it obvious.

  'Oy,' said Legiron, quite unperturbed, 'get your fingers out of me throat. I haven't got no nerves anyway.' (Some weeks before, a bos'n's mate — driven past the point of dispassionate logic by Legiron's talent for messing up anything more complicated than deck-scrubbing, had beaten him repeatedly about the skull with one of the larger wrenches used in shackling down Dynaflow Drivers; and been dragged off ten minutes later by some quarterdeck officers still screaming 'Lie down, you pisshole, lie down,' to no avail, leaving Legiron to scratch the back of his neck reflectively, well on his way to becoming a myth.) 'I just want to see what you got.'

  And he grabbed Truck's wrist, his hairy great forearm distending like one ultimate Universal Muscle. Truck, fearing a fracture, kneed him in the hurdies.

  'Now you went too far, matey!' cried Legiorn, massaging his offended morals. 'Off you go.'

  Suiting actions to words, Legiron flung Truck halfway across the bar and out on to Main Street, his Opener tracts fluttering expressively round his head. Which was how he came to find himself down among the lady losers of Avernus, a hard pelvic girdle making inroads into his kidneys, a small breast interfering with one ear, and face to face with Angina Seng, the girl spy from Sad al Bari IV.

  'Captain,' she said, hands on bony hips and smiting curiously down on him (as if it really was a coincidental meeting), 'you must keep doing something nobody likes.'

  Truck rubbed some rain into his face to get the circulation moving in his brain. He thought of going back into the Boogie Shuffle and killing Legiron Crab.

  'I don't know you,' he said, 'and I'm not a Captain' — he accepted her strong hand without grace and added cunningly — 'my sister.'

  But it was his turn for not fooling her. 'It won't wash, Captain Truck. I'd like to talk to you.' She brushed his cloak down absently, wiped some mud from his cheek. Looking at his window: 'My, you haven't actually got religion, have you?' He fussed about with his cloak, clicked his tongue. 'Well, Captain?'

  'Oh yes' — scathingly — 'at the Israeli Embassy, I suppose. We could have some nice talks with the General.'

  'There's no IWG representation on Avernus,' she said, now becoming interested in the vapor sign outside the Boogie Shuffle. 'And I haven't worked for that cow since you and I last met' Her face was struggling with two expressions at once: the curled lip of disgust or disdain, certainly; but behind the eyes something else — that intimate understanding of vacuum only a port lady has, some remote pain he couldn't quite put a name to. She tugged her wet coppery hair back from her face, her body slumped sullenly over folded arms. 'I hope she — '

  A shrug. 'Are you coming?' And she walked off down Main Street. He was fascinated.

  She took him to a shack on the edge of the port and gat a rickety folding table strewn with twisted half-empty tubes and hard dried nubs of cosmetic while he mooched about looking for something to eat. They stalked one another in the rainy light. She brushed her hair, examined minutely her face (thin lines of an internal tension too secret to be politics or anything other than running-down clockwork of a port lady's life); looked his reversed image over covertly when he was occupied with the fridge.

  'What have you got?' he asked round a mouthful of something local. 'Another sponsor, eh? Jesus! What is this stuff?'

  'It's off, I think. Here, let me taste it. How did you know, Captain?'

  A weary little room. He stared oafishly round it at the cast-off underwear and open cupboards, the scuffed walls. How old was she? Was this all of it? Coming too close to her soul — continually in transit between such rooms and always arriving late — he shivered. He was fooling himself if he thought he knew the half of it.

  'It was a joke. I don't want to hear anything about it. Last time was too painful.'

  'Look, Captain, you obviously don't want to give it to General Gaw. I could put it in safer hands. I could arrange a meeting.'

  His naïveté didn't extend that far; around that point, it degenerated into a sort of sly ferrety awareness. 'You don't even know what it is,' he told her. She pursed her lips (a hit, a hit!). 'No, wait. Ill meet him.' He paced up and down, munching. He could check one or two things at least.

  'Good.' She dropped the hairbrush. 'I'll take you to him now.' Got up, smoothed her dress over her stomach, stood too close to him, smiled right at him. He was touched. But,

  'No. Here. Tonight. Fetch him here at eight. I've got things to do.'

  She frowned. 'You wouldn't be working for General Gaw yourself, Captain?'

  'You're a bit behind the times, aren't you?' Deep down, something was warning him that losers should never, never make decisions. He ignored it, and it sniggered horribly at him. 'Just on my terms this time, that's all.'
It was blatant hubris. At the door he asked, 'Don't you ever get tired of being used?' Thinking of poor old-animal Nodes, who also hadn't known what 'it' was — or wanted to.

  She stared out into the rain after him, tapping her fingers against one of the Opener broadsheets ('Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble'). After he'd vanished down the dreary street, she went out in another direction.

  'I want a gun,' said Truck when he got in.

  'Christ' Tiny had heard about the incident at the Boogie Shuffle, 'Truck, how can you shoot a bloke just because he chucked you out of a bar?'

  He put his underpants on, hopping about on one foot; he was entertaining. The lady in the bed, her voice muffled by the blanket, said, 'Get that creep out of here. He gives me the willies.' She raised herself on one elbow, glaring at Truck. 'Tiny, how can he live with his breakfast like that? How can you live with him? You're an artist.' She shuddered.

  Pointedly, Tiny showed Truck the door. 'Fix might have left something on the ship,' he suggested. He winked and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. 'Eh?'

  Fix hadn't. But in a locker on the bridge, Truck found a set of steel knuckles he'd bought long ago on Morpheus and never used. He put them on and went prancing around on his toes, feinting dangerously at the display panels. He got a couple of hours sleep in his old bunk then, when it was dark, stuck the steel knuckles in his right boot (under his foot where they'd be safe from a cursory search, if uncomfortable), and left for the edge of Egerton's Port. He had howling colic from Angina Seng's Avernus pasty.