Centauri Device

by John H. Harrison

  Truck hung about indecisively for a while, human silt drying and flaking off his coverall.

  The gates (and indeed the whole complex) seemed to be deserted. The Fleet police weren't in evidence, and neither could he detect any sign of military activity. He turned to the dim, snouted little figure by his side, and pantomimed an advance.

  'I'm not going down there, mate — '

  'Yes, you bloody are.'

  Tiny dragged his feet. In silence and moving slowly, like the performers of some decadent choreography rehearsing without audience, they made it to the checkpoint. No one greeted them.

  Two dead Fleet men lay face up in the mud by the gates, their respirators torn off. Their goggles had been shattered by the same explosion that had torn down the fence, but they were otherwise undamaged. Their eyes were fixed on Centauri's unforgiving sty, and it was hard to dispel the impression that something had issued from the shifting streams of silt and finished them off without a sound.

  THIRTEEN

  In the Transit Lanes

  Thoughtfully, Truck stole their guns.

  The shafthead itself was littered with bodies in IWG uniforms, flung radially away from the center of a second explosion in postures stark and raw and strange. Has someone been here already, thought Truck. He stared around at the deserted sheds, doors banging in the wind, all those machines operating away unattended. It was coming on to rain again, trim gray curtains blowing between the buildings like wraiths. Truck attempted to scratch his head through his helmet.

  'They've all had it,' reported Tiny Skeffern, trotting doggily from corpse to corpse, feeling his amphetamines and elated at not getting into a fight, 'I think.' His voice, filtering out through the capillaries of the respirator, was flat and ghoulish.

  'Come on, Tiny.'

  Truck left him to it and went to find the elevator mechanisms. The shafthead throbbed around him like a plucked string. Rain smoked at him unexpectedly round blind corners.

  Smears of rust on the walls. He found the lift cage, wiped absently at a film of moisture on the control panel.

  DISENGAGE SECTION 5 AND PRESS FOR DOWN.

  Under the earth again, he thought, under the earth again. He felt divorced, disinterested.

  None of the murder at the shafthead seemed to have affected him: perhaps he was preparing himself for his encounter with the Device, tying off unproductive sensory channels, shutting out all irrelevant stimuli.

  'Come on, Tiny.'

  They sealed the pressure doors of the lift cage, removed their respirators, and began their descent into the crust of Centauri VII.

  Truck had no more sense of homecoming. The lift was slow, there was nothing to look at but Tiny. He was suspended between realities, he was powered down. Two miles deep, and he checked his dosimeter to see if he'd picked up any of the active caesium floating about on the surface. Two and a half, and he imagined desultorily the earth groaning and shifting beyond Omega Shaft, swallowing him up. It didn't happen. He breathed on the wall of the cage and wrote his name in the condensation.

  'Oh, wow,' said Tiny, snapping his fingers. 'Under the earth, what a blast'

  The cage grounded gently. Truck worked the doors.

  Shaft Zero: they entered the bunker-chain ('Stay here and stop anyone who tries to come down,' Truck told Tiny. 'Not on your life,' said Tiny, shuffling his feet and looking paranoically over his shoulder) and almost immediately became lost in a labyrinth of filter passages, transit lanes, and every conceivable sort of dead end.

  Plate movements during the later stages of the MIEV bombardment had tilted the whole system, giving the tunnels a general easterly slope of five or six degrees; some terminated abruptly at fault-lines, others were waterlogged and impassable. In the rest, power failure had left natural convection as the sole medium of ventilation, and the air in them was hot, humid, and heavy. Curious white clumps of mold, fat and glutinous, clung to the walls, giving the place a musty, evil odor. And while Grishkin's team had introduced fluorescent lighting to the major bunkers and some of the corridors, most were lighted only by the wan phosphorescence of the algae that dripped from the outputs of the ventilation plant like listless hanging gardens.

  Despite the faulting, it was still a considerable warren. Truck and Tiny were quickly reduced to choosing their direction at random, wading half a mile at a time through eight inches of filthy water past alcoves full of enigmatic, corroding equipment, broached refrigerator units foul with partly decayed food, and doors that wouldn't open. The water trended east, chuckling around their feet to speed with mysterious echoes into the darkness ahead: they found a stream stronger than the rest and got some idea of following the direction of the current — but it only led deeper in, to pour finally over the lip of a fault into the absolute blackness beneath.

  'Christ,' whispered Truck, staring at the jagged, tumbled blocks of concrete, the great rock dome the Centaurans had never planned, the long fall. After that, they tried three of the major bunkers: found only rusting consoles and heaps of bones covered in a damp green deposit, each pelvis or femur labeled with a neat white tag — 'female,' 'pre-pubescent male,' 'female adolescent' — by Grishkin's archaeologists. By pure force of will, they rediscovered the bright fluorescent walkways, but none of them seemed to lead back to the bottom of Omega Shaft.

  It was Tiny who first noticed that they weren't alone in the maze.

  The transit lanes were full of pathetic alien junk abandoned by the survivors in the aftermath of the war: personal effects, robbed of place and purpose and cultural definition, hard to identify in terms of human equivalence as the belt-buckles, bookends, or athletic trophies they undoubtedly were. Tiny, with the brain of a jackdaw and all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery, had been pocketing the shinier bits as he went along, exclaiming 'Look at that, Truck!' and 'Hey, someone's kicking himself for losing this.'

  When he found the Chambers gun, however, he didn't say a thing: just hurried up and stuck it under Truck's nose. Truck, sodding and blinding with frustration and expecting each new bit of loot to turn out to be a pocket nuclear weapon, tried to ignore him. He waved it urgently about 'Truck? Truck?'

  'Look, what the hell are you saying at, Tiny?' — pushing-the barrel aside. 'If we don't get out of here soon, there'll be murder done — '

  'I found it on the floor.' '

  Truck grabbed it, in a spirit of self-defense, and had a look.

  'You dropped it.'

  'Did I hell drop it. Look. Look. You can't tell me that's been down this bloody hole for two hundred years.'

  It hadn't.

  Five yards further on, they stumbled over its owner.

  He was stone-cold dead on the ground, a strand-wolf from one of ben Barka's howling personal deserts, clutching a double handful of mud and grinning savagely into the haunted water that flowed past his head.

  Silence.

  Truck and Tiny looked down at him, appalled.

  Then footsteps, quick and muffled, like murder in an alley, skittered down a parallel tunnel: something was keeping pace with them, stalking them out of the phosphorescent dark.

  'Christ, Tiny, he's still here!'

  A junction loomed ahead.

  'Move!'

  Truck threw up his pistol, sent a bolt flaring and sizzling down the passage, shadows bickering along behind it. He couldn't see anything, but someone was out there. He dragged Tiny along after him, stumbling and swearing. 'If he gets behind us — run, Tiny, run!'

  They reached the junction and hauled up gasping — just in time to see the hem of a plum-colored cloak, violently agitated, vanishing into yet a third branch of the maze —

  Neither of them felt very much like following it Suddenly, the labyrinth was full of disturbing echoes. And plum is the color of Openerism.

  But Openerism wasn't the end of it

  Fifteen minutes later, they came upon an entire unit of General Gaw's elite police, tumbled about the corridor like burst sacks. A Chambers bolt was still fizzing in
the gloom, picking out slaughterhouse expressions on upturned faces, limning an indescribable mess of blood, scorch, and tangled limbs.

  'Oh Jesus.'

  Tiny cocked his head. 'Truck — '

  Muffled Arabic whispered all around them on the complex acoustical fronts of the maze, a new ambush being set up at their very elbows. Distant but clear came the thump of grenade exchanges conducted through rock and concrete, faint shouts and cries. Ruin was loose beneath Centauri, and the bunkers were full of lost men blundering into invisible, desperate engagements.

  Suddenly, and close: 'There's a whole nest of the buggers in here! Look alive, lads! — Let's have their trousers down! Where's that napalm!'

  Truck shuddered. Bitter smoke had begun to drift down the empty corridor, nuzzling the corpses at his feet. He knew that voice, that awful gusto: he stood once more at the fulcrum, with the Galaxy shaking itself to pieces in a mad struggle for balance around him. 'Come on, Tiny.' He gazed warily round the abbattoir. The dead police stared back, their polarized contact lenses grim and gray and unblinking. 'I've got to find that bloody thing before they find me.'

  General Caw's voice faded in the teeth of an Arab counterattack. Truck and Tiny, hermetic and apart, waded off hopelessly, deeper into the labyrinth, their shoulders hunched, the bunkers vibrant around them with the careless enthusiasm of the dance — Opener, Arab, Israeli, celebrating the abandoned figures and extravagant rituals of violence.

  Tiny Skeffern dawdled once too often, and they missed each other in the dark. Truck ran wildly up and down the transit lanes bawling 'Tiny! Tiny! ' not caring who heard. Only echoes answered him. He stumbled about firing off one of his Chambers guns at shadows until the click-clack of the empty mechanism brought him to his senses. Groaning, he leaned on a wall, put his forehead to the cold damp rock. Another dependent astray in the absolute broil of Circumstance.

  Thereafter, he wandered with the gradient like a thin jackal, avoiding the larger concentrations of military and trying to surprise smaller ones by leaping out at junctions with bared teeth and oaths. He came to an area of seemingly endless geological disturbance, picking his way through a great choke of rubble and collapsed ceilings to the fault-line lip, where he watched the water spill over and down into the planetary chasm, not quite sure what he was seeing.

  By that time, the Device itself was exercising control over the bunker maze; Grishkin, who'd mapped the system for IWG less than a year previously, was roaming it in a mad daze; Arab and Israeli alike were hopelessly confused. Truck was being cut out and guided toward an initiation he'd feared all along. He blundered along the fault-line, not thinking about much.

  Twenty minutes walking brought him to the central redoubt, Grishkin's markers and lights, and an anteroom where luminous fungi cloaked the pipes and cables, and the wind hissed up out of Centauri like a voice.

  From the anteroom the bunker doors, jammed open for about a quarter of their travel, made a tall rectangle of light, peculiar and leaping, as if some sort of fire was burning inside.

  Byes narrowed, he advanced.

  He preferred light to darkness. If that seems trite, then remember that it was a decision made long before he stepped over the threshold of that bunker, and he meant it literally. Though he loved the streets after nightfall — the cold blind littered alleys of the docklands — he found his true environment out among the weird spectral particle displays of the dyne fields, and he had indulged himself under the kaleidomats of a hundred different Spacer's Raves on as many planets until his brain jumped and resonated to the beat of their strobes and their unpredictable shift of wavelength. None of that, however, prepared him for the Centauri Device.

  It hit him, the moment he walked in, with a hammer of light and sound designed to crack his head open like a walnut, and the complex antenna of his central nervous system became abruptly a receptor for everything from a 30 c.p.s. epileptic flicker to the ultrasonics of nonspecific anxiety. It was like walking into a brick wall — lights, noise, radiation. Wild bursts of sound set fire to the contents of his skull; white light raped his eyes; pulsed infrared attacked his epidermal nerve endings —

  The inhibitory neuron blocks of the CNS depolarized. Synapse points and potassium-sodium exchanges across the axon membranes flared up wildly, went into frantic activity then locked up solid; gate levels disordered, swooped, dropped to zero. Masses of irrelevant information stormed the sensory-motor cortex, smashing up through the thalamus and hypothalamus, howled triumphantly round the reverberatory pathways of the association cortex; nerve ignition reached a frenzy as something bypassed the damping effect of sodium ion supply deficiency and total constant excitation was achieved; all three cortices blew out like candles in the wind —

  Somesthesis became nothing but a memory. Truck was deaf, dumb, and blind, without feeling, without volition. His nervous system had been captured and enslaved —

  In the sub-millisecond period following this onslaught, while membrane potentials were bedding back down into the millivolt range (after measuring in actual volts and attaining terminal impulse propagation speeds of more than four hundred miles an hour), the Device got to work on his biology —

  In the limited sense, Captain John Truck was no longer there, conscious or otherwise: he could sense nothing; he could not order his limbs, nor was he aware of any limbs to order or any essential 'Truck' to order them — he existed solely as a metaphysic and a problem of philosophy. In that, he was lucky. Pain scorched up every nerve in his body, got in among the cells and began to unwind the dextro-rotatory helix — he didn't feel it; fingernails scraped samples from the marrow of his bones, broached the canal of his backbone, and dabbled in his cerebrospinal fluid — he didn't know; unbelievable methods of genetic exploration were loose in his skull and gnawing like the larvae of some parasitic wasp — he couldn't tell.

  He couldn't tell. The Device, having research into his mere chemical credentials well in hand, had turned to psychometry — of a sort. Off in some debatable realm where thoughts drag themselves around without benefit of a single brain cell between them, Truck was looking at pictures. Pictures — ?

  — Everything he most desired: the secret of a new propulsion fitted to the Ella Speed (which was now somehow longer and slimmer, chased and inlaid, with a white fire flaring at its stern) — immense brass wheels, concentric and eccentric, which might enable him to shoot through into unmapped Galaxies; a girl he had never seen, Ruth Berenici's scar transfiguring her face; the studio of Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, a poem in porcelain; a drug; Fix the bos'n alive and well and baring his filed teeth, his stomach all neatly sewed up; finally, and very briefly, a scene at the Spacer's Rave —

  Tiny Skeffern, immobile under the lights, a quirky smile on his lips — and a new music to replace the old, boiling from the H-line cabinets in a tidal wave fit to inundate the Galaxy —

  Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From that first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.

  His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest: but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. />
  Standing where John Truck now stood (smashed and overwhelmed by the Device), Doctor Grishkin, Gadaffi ben Barka and, later, General Gaw — all paid-up members of what they liked to call the human race — had seen what they wanted most, grasped, and in grasping proved beyond doubt their genealogy. They would never see anything else.

  While Truck, that mongrel of highly suspect lineage and scruffy demeanor, simply gazed a bit stupidly at what was offered and couldn't make up his mind. When he failed to grab at something with both hands (or even to show any exclusive preference — possibly because of his Centauran heritage, possibly because being a spacer and a loser he desired all and none of it), the Device pulled out its probes and let go. He was a borderline case, but blood will out, and old Annie's genes had done their work.

  Truck measured his length on the concrete, twitching and whimpering. After a while, he crawled up to the thing and had a look. It had tested him and passed him, he saw it as its makers had seen it, and he knew he could operate it

  He still didn't know what it did — but then, he had his father's eyes, too.

  He fell asleep out of pure physiological relief, and was woken he didn't know how much later by the sound of Chambers fire echoing down the transit lanes outside. He put the Centauri Device under his arm and left the bunker at a run.

  He went through the antechamber blind and panicking, careening off the walls and trying to arm his remaining pistol one-handed. The last thing he needed was to be caught with the Device. His mouth tasted filthy, sweat crawled between his plastic suit and his skin. When he got to the outer door he slowed up and listened, stuck his head around hoping no one would blow it off. Pitch black in the transit lane. The fluorescents were dead. Nothing was moving out there.