Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

'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 go?'

  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.

  'What the hell are we doing here? ' asked Tiny incredulously.

  Truck had harried himself to a standstill over the same question. But it remained that Pater had furnished him with an end (a purpose, fresh and raw, something he was so unused to that he couldn't keep his fingers out of it) and no means. It was the only place he could think of coming. People muddle through, he told himself, and that has to be sufficient.

  The port hinterland at Golgotha stands on the periphery of an ash desert called Wisdom in the middle latitudes of Stomach (named for its discoverer, some way out in the poorly populated Ephesus-Ariadne sector, beyond the billowing CH30H clouds of 'Meth Alley').

  Openers built Golgotha, before their sect became prominent. They had no history of persecution on Earth, but they came anyway, in 2143, and somehow (although it had nothing to do with any obvious exploitation, any crude process of blanket, bible, and Earth-syph) the pretty androgynes of Stomach lost their innocence, and many of them left the uplands for the port.

  Its streets are wide. Elsewhere, the natives distill a perfume from the wings of insects; here, they have made themselves fetishes: objects of pleasure. The limestone hills at the far edge of Wisdom are strange, no one really knows what happens among them; here, day and night, dust and ash blow into the houses and the wet openings of the body on a sulky, changeable wind.

  A double ghost breathes down the avenues of Golgotha in the wind: the thin twin spirit of religion and inhuman innocence — ash in the air. The delicate quick movements of the natives, who are only mirrors of your desire (who knows what they see in it, what it has replaced for them: their language has two hundred thousand separate and distinct words; they will speak it, if you ask them, at whatever climax you demand); and the Openers, in their cloaks of plum and scarlet, black and gold — they always seem to have their backs turned, to be striding away. Ash swirls round them all at dawn and dusk, when the wind thrusts little exploratory fingers beneath the door.

  'Everyone comes here once,' said Truck.

  But no one ever went there twice. In a time when decadence was all Earth's and anything else was imitation, there was something about that place: something to remind you of what you had voluntarily relinquished (and winked as you lost it) in other hinterlands to other more human beings. Port ladies took their lives on Stomach, and still do, slipping away in a langor of AdAcs, twisting a handkerchief — they have a crueler perception of vacuum.

  An odd thing happened during the first few hours on Stomach. John Truck was later to regard it as symbolical (to the extent that he could regard anything in so abstract a way — it came in the end to little more than an itch down among the sordid experiential and intellectual gleanings of a spacer's skull), but at the time it filled him with a peculiar horror.

  He had come to Stomach, obviously, to find the priest Grishkin; but since he had last seen that mysterious man on Earth, he had no idea of how he might be found. Tiny and Fix were surly, having hoped for dope in some familiar stamping-ground — so, with no better idea than that of wandering about the place until he met someone who could put him in touch with the Opener, he shrugged and left them to their own devices — took the high wire gate that leads from the landing field to Golgotha, Wisdom rolling away on his left hand in dove-gray dunes down a fifteen-hundred-mile front — the winds of Stomach already flour-papering his cheek.

  Outside the gate, the androgynous whores of Golgotha crowded about him as he went, like subtly depraved children: all chemise and mutated orchids and their heads bobbing no higher than his waist, calling to him in soft, empty voices. Their minute hands plucked at his legs as he passed; some made offers of muted obscenity, others sang or raised their arms to be picked up, many simply clutched his hand and stared with ultimate cryptic promise. They flowed like a grey stream down the boulevards of the native quarter, sometimes leading him, sometimes following, all the while smiling seriously as though reflecting all acute desires.

  It was impossible to think of her as 'it.'

  She put her hands up to him; her voice was a rustle of unbelievable fabrics in a remote, passionate room. He lifted her gently by the armpits, feeling no weight but a special heat. She locked her legs round his hips and looked into his face. Disappointed, the others melted away, uttering sad, regretful cries.

  ' "The cranes call / As they cross to the reeds. / Faint and helpless, / Now I lie alone",' she murmured. She wore an insect perfume, the crushed wings of the desert hawk moth prepared in the hills beyond Wisdom. When he stared back at her, uncomprehending, her tiny, heart-shaped face shifted and changed.

  'Then perhaps we might consider mirrors,' she teased, and secret languages surfaced in her eyes. 'I can see you are from Earth.' Her little legs tightened until they hurt. Her body became an icon, or a clue — a cool object, a revelation or alchemical tool.

  'What?' said Truck, his mouth dry. He stopped there in the middle of the windy street.

  'Oh hell,' she muttered, uncurling her legs. 'You fuck-fucky alonga me now bigfella starman?' She got down. 'Why do I always get the uneducated ones?'

  But he was already lost

  She led him for miles round the city, as if to tire him out. Confusing precincts and alleys of native architecture. The wind turned cold, and he was forced further and further into her sphere of heat. When he complained, she said, 'It is part of it, you must see us as part of it.'

  And he did, looking down at her then up at the precarious limestone buildings. At twilight it began to rain, the ash fell plush and damp, the narrower streets became dark and inviting. She tugged him along more urgently as the lights came on; she was now a tightness in the muscles at the back of the neck. 'Not far now,' she whispered. Did she understand a word she was saying?

  Her house was warm and bizarre. Censers swung, moths fluttered and burned amid the incense fumes. His bemusement was completed there, among mirrors. He never remembered anything of what took place there: except that he would never allow it to happen to him a
gain.

  He woke in the early hours in a bed too small for him. His throat was sore and dry, the roof of his mouth itched. 'Where can I get some water?' he asked, trying to lubricate his tongue with saliva. She — it — wasn't there. He could hear footsteps in the alley outside. He went to the door; cold air seeped over his feet. Someone was in the alley, tall and obese, pacing to and fro. The ash from Wisdom had turned leprous, filling the alley with a wan illumination, patching the figure in its voluminous Opener cloak. 'What are you doing?' he called. A hood was pulled over the face. Ash eddied about it, feathery.

  'I was looking for — ' The figure turned and pulled back its hood. It was Dr Grishkin.

  Truck got hold of the door post. His throat locked up solid. ' — You,' he croaked.

  'I can see that your circumstances have changed somewhat, Captain Truck,' said Grishkin — his was a fine memory for unfinished conversations. He made no move to enter the house, stood there in the ash-storm, smiling his streamlined smile. 'It would seem to be time for a review of prices — '

  Truck shivered in the wind. That meeting begun in another wind on Sad al Bari IV had finally run its course. He had only postponed the preliminaries.

  A stupid thing to do, he thought (thirty minutes after dawn, in an aeroplane: somewhere in front of him, chronologically speaking at least, lay the transparent heart of Openerism — the city of Intestinal Revelation beyond the limestone hills). It was too late for that. Earth's vortex had sucked him in. Stomach turned beneath him like a rotting apple, 'Too long in an attic.'

  'Mm?' said Grishkin, sprawled over two seats, his cloak open, his vast body smooth and perspiring where there was no plastic. He wasn't even half asleep. He was watching Truck out of the corner of one eye.

  Truck shrugged. He pointed out of the window. 'That. Look, Grishkin,' he said, 'I'm only doing this on certain conditions. There is a price.' The muscles above Grishkin's left eye flexed briefly. 'I want to disappear, hide. If Gaw or ben Barka find me now — '

  'I can understand that, my son,' said Grishkin ironically.

  'Secondly, I want to know why you're interested in the Device. I'll have to know in the end anyway. On those terms, I'll agree to operate it for you — supposing you can get hold of it.

  As long as you don't use it for anything connected with this war. I'll cut my own throat first.'

  Grishkin smiled, shook his head gently. 'Ah, Captain, Captain.' He hauled himself up, faced Truck properly. 'The war,' he murmured. 'Alice Gaw always wanted a proper war. One could hardly expect her to see things in their proper perspective. To listen to her description of — '

  ' — Cut it out, Grishkin. Do we have a deal?'

  'Oh yes, Captain, we have that. Ad interim, I'll consider your disappearance. Quite.'

  He seemed to go to sleep, and Truck had to be content with that. Down below, Stomach crawled on. After a while the cockpit door opened and out came the pilot, yawning. He grinned at Truck, grimaced rudely at the inert priest. 'All well in here?'

  'Who's flying the bloody aeroplane while you're asking stupid questions?' said Truck. He hated atmosphere vehicles. There was so much to run into.

  'What aeroplane?' Suddenly, he slapped his forehead and stared wildly about. 'Oh Christ, this aeroplane!'

  'Ha ha,' said Truck. 'Very comical.'

  Beyond the limestone hills there was only more desert — but uglier than Wisdom, with an air of acceptance and failure. He tripped leaving the aircraft, came up gazing at the gloomy sky with his hands coated in putrefying soil. 'What a hole, Grishkin. Can't you do better than this?' In the distance over the hopeless rock flowed rivers of abrasive dust; thick and brown, miles wide. Elsewhere small furtive birds eyed their surroundings sadly, ruffling their feathers as they hopped among the fallen, decaying trees.

  Finally, that revelatory city — a handful of ball-bearings embedded in black sand — it closed on Truck like a trap.

  'An early failure in climatic control,' admitted Grishkin. 'We were primitive if energetic when we came to Stomach, Captain.' He spoke as if he'd been there in 2143, which wouldn't have surprised Truck in the least. 'It will be rectified, like all things, with time.'

  He hurried Truck into a silent place with clean cool white walls. An odd smell of ozone and antiseptic pervaded it. There were static dust-collectors and ventilators everywhere, humming faintly. If you looked closely at the walls, you could see countersunk rivets. People who might or might not have been Openers moved down the passageways dressed in pale green gowns and plastic gloves, their footsteps echoing with queer calm urgency.

  'Are you sick?' asked Truck suspiciously. Hospitals made him uneasy. He thought of running back to the aircraft, but the pilot had gone off somewhere to get his breakfast.

  'This anxiety, Captain — it isn't necessary. All your problems end here.'

  'That's what I'm afraid of.'

  He bit his fingernails, swallowed accidentally, coughed. He lagged behind, but Grishkin took his arm possessively.

  'What are you going to do with me?'

  'Come now, Captain, before we tend to the first part of our bargain, you must see something of our work here.' His diabolic or malefic avatar lurked just beneath his eyelids, peeping out but endeavoring to remain unobserved. 'You'll find the Memorial Theater very interesting. But we mustn't be late.' Things were fermenting, dissolving behind his windows.

  Every time they came to a fire door in the corridor, he glanced up at the clock above it. His grip tightened. He was actually pulling Truck along.

  Suppose the Memorial Theater to commemorate a single genius of the movement (rather than, say, some murky instance or episode of its past) and he'd have to be a fable — a Minotaur of medicine and religion, some accidental connection between the brain of a mad vivisectionist and the bands of an inappropriate rector. Something any decent man would put a boot to without thought. On Stomach, no one had, and his spirit presided.

  It was a huge room.

  Normally, Truck sensed, it would be full of a seedy, vinegar-colored gloom strained through the thirty-foot stained glass windows (depicting what? Openerism is an eclectic, a catholic faith; there was a bit of everything, from Lazarus rising to Moses descending: but surely Lazarus hadn't died from a Caesarean incision?). Now it was lighted up starkly by thousands of watts of white light. Electrocorticogram operators and organists sat over their instruments while choirboys draped in thick plum felt paced slowly between the massive multifoil arches, their eyes fixed on the groined roof. The operating table, inviolate on the center of the flagged floor, was a limestone altar. The eerie modes of some plainsong chant echoed long and hollow and far away, as if from bare masonry.

  Snip, pick, went the hands of the surgeons, slim and dextrous.

  '+& — , +& — , +& — ,' sang the electrical gear as, masked and gowned, Truck and Dr Grishkin slipped into the inner circle of light and odor.

  'This is one of the most impressive events in our history,' whispered Grishkin. The patient lay under a local analgesic. A tent of surgical drape covered his body. Above him, spotlights and sheaves of cable hung from chrome bars. Thin bright laser beams crossed and danced.

  Grishkin bowed to the surgeons, moved nimbly forward — keeping hold of Truck's wrist — and whipped back the surgical tent. 'Look — ' he breathed.

  At first sight, it was a flayed corpse: a mass of yellowish adipose tissue, great ropy blood-vessels, red and blue; all ligament and muscle, wet and sticky-looking and held together by a sac of cling-plastic. John Truck felt his throat fill up with something. He was back among the orbital hospitals and corpse-boats of Canes Venatici, packing them in their boxes. He tried to pull away, but Grishkin held on.

  'For the first time, a Grand Master of the Movement is attaining total transparency — ' It was glass. The thing under the tent would never move again. It had a glass skin. 'His reverence is fully aware. Would you like to speak to him? Ask him something?' Grishkin radiated an ebullience, a vast energy. 'If you find this amazing, you s
hould see what we're doing with the head Captain!'

  Truck backed off, waving his free arm violently, dislodging a strand of hair from under his hygienic cap. Doctor Grishkin tucked it back for him, hissing with pleasure. The chant of the choir fell into the minor, over a pattern of unresolved chords from the organ: 'Hallelujah!' they cried, and Grishkin said, 'A crystal skull, Captain! The Brain Revealed!'

  It poked through the back of the surgical tent, maggot-colored, patched with distended areas of cochineal, veined blue-black. It was covered with tiny squares of white paper, each bearing a number. It opened an eye and looked at him.

  'Something's gone wrong!' he shouted. 'Oh, kill it — can't you see!'

  'We've had some trouble with the allografting, I admit,' said Grishkin. 'But foreign-body reaction is well below the acceptable minimum. Don't carp, Captain. Ask!'

  Truck swallowed. 'Why — ' Mild, swimming blue eyes, like bird's eggs in that wreckage. It was trying to smile at him. 'Why would you need a sentient bomb?' he managed. He was frantic; anything so Grishkin would be satisfied and take him away from there.

  A faint chuckle. 'You,' whispered the Grand Master of the Openers. 'You — '

  Grishkin began to laugh. He threw back his head and roared. 'Oh, Captain! You've been listening to poor, violent Alice Gaw. She has a mind like a howling desert. She's mad, my son — there's no bomb on Centauri. I was there first, I dug my way into the final bunker bare-handed. What she saw lies in her own head, not there. Didn't you realize that?'

  His laughter died away. He wiped his mouth. 'But I — what I saw was something quite different. It filled that place, it — ' He shuddered. Condensation formed behind his windows.

  Anguish clouded his eyes. 'There is a Mystery at the foot of Shaft Ten: a receptacle of the Spirit — and God spoke to me from it — ' He swayed like a sick man, pawed his forehead.

  'He asked for you, Captain, he asked me to bring him a Centauran.' His lips peeled back off his teeth, he seemed to be fighting the muscles of his own face for an instant, some actual battle — then he relaxed. His fingers left a red mark on Truck's wrist 'Now, Captain, the rest of our bargain.'