THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  THE CENTAURI DEVICE

  M. John Harrison

  John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war. M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.

  M. John Harrison

  THE CENTAURI DEVICE

  And they, so perfect is their misery,

  Not once perceive their foul disfigurement…

  JOHN MILTON, Comus

  ONE

  Truck, Tiny, and Angina Seng

  It was St. Crispin's Eve on Sad al Bari IV when Captain John Truck, impelled by something he was forced to describe to himself as 'sentiment,' decided to visit The Spacer's Rave, on the corner of Proton Alley and Circuit (that chilly junction where the higher class of port lady goes to find her customers).

  'Don't accept any cargo,' he told his bos'n as he prepared to leave My Ella Speed, 'for at least two weeks. Especially don't accept any vegetable seeds. I will never haul pumpkins again, any shape or form.'

  'What's a pumpkin?' asked the bos'n, who was a Chromian dwarf called Fix. He was good with an axe — or so he said — but backward.

  'A pumpkin is what your head is,' explained John Truck smugly. 'Children wear them for the same reason you have filed your teeth. 'Don't forget, no vegetable seeds.'

  And with a jaunty wave, he quit the ship.

  He reached the Alley by way of Bread Street and East Thing, a damp wind tangling his long hair. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his head bent as if he were bored with it all (which he was, to the extent that anybody is), his tight snakeskin combat jacket and big leather hat straight out of the questionable past of the Galaxy.

  Spaceport hustlers and buskers worked the streets all the way from the port to the service areas, their peculiar instruments glimmering in the green street light They solicited him, but he ignored them. He had seen them before, shivering with cold and with fear of the long, incomprehensible future in the night winds of a hundred planets, waiting out their time in the bleak hinterlands of a thousand ports. They would go home later to the same greasy doorways and park benches and barren flops, or ride the pneumatique systems until dawn: threadbare losers for whom he could find no compassion because they so resembled himself. Their aimless, eccentric hearts, their odors of loss, demanded a response he was not yet prepared to give — because it would be an admission of kinship.

  This isn't to say they made him unhappy — or that he lacked charity; he was just hollow, nothing had ever filled him up.

  Since his demob from the Fleet, a year after all the hysteria of the Canes Venatici incident had come to nothing but the same kind of worn diplomacy that had begun it, he had worked all over the sky, traveling a slow Archimedean spiral in three dimensions, tracking in from Venatici through the Crow and the Heavy Stars. He had driven half-tracks on Gloam and Parrot, built roads on Jacqueline Kennedy Terminal; he had sung revolutionary songs and pushed meta-amphetamines to the all-night workers on Morpheus — not because he was in any way committed to the insurrection that finally blew the planet apart, but because he was stuck there and broke.

  After five years, he had ended up on Earth, where everybody ends, guarding heavy plant machinery for the Israeli World Government, where he was paid handsomely for every Arab he shot, but not enough — not enough for dirty work. He had found himself wetting his trousers every time somebody fired a gun (in fact, that had worn off after a time, but he still told it that way, against himself with a lot of gestures and funny voices — especially to port ladies), and tapping a streak of savagery he hadn't suspected in himself. He found no sense of purpose in that stupid half-war, either. Finally, it was too terrifying to find himself going through the psychological maneuvers necessary to continue without the accompanying commitment. He left it alone, but in his customary indecisive manner. He drifted away.

  Had he not saved his bounty money and bought with it My Ella Speed (then called Liberal Power, something which caused him to scratch his head), his seven-year trip from demob day to Sad al Bari IV might easily have ended at the periphery of the port; accomplished by means of his horny thumb, a cheap musical instrument, and his hat in the gutter the wrong way up to receive bread. Instead of on his head where it belonged.

  Even the purchase of the boat had, at the time, assumed the air of a fortunate accident. Unused to ethanol — still the sole legal euphoric of Earth — he had stumbled, smashed out of his head and laughing, into a breaker's yard somewhere in the temperate zones; then passed out cold when he realized what he'd spent his money on. John Truck was a loser, and losers, despite the evidence to the contrary, survive on luck. Not that he'd considered it luck then, lying on his back with the rusty, twisted towers of wrecks spinning through his brain (and thinking, Oh God, what am I going to do with it?).

  It was his personal disaster that he never learned to resist the flow of events; he never learned to make steerage way.

  Proton Alley is as cold as all the other streets; any warmth you think you might have found there always turns out to be an illusory side-product of the color of the vapor signs. All its denizens have digested their experience of life so well that nothing of it remains to them. They start fresh and naïve every day, but still regard you with empty eyes. No warmth: but John Truck basked in its familiarity, which is perhaps an acceptable substitute on any evening dedicated to a Saint.

  Outside The Spacer's Rave, an ancient fourth-generation Denebian with skin blackened and seamed, and eyelids perpetually lowered against the actinic glare of a star he hadn't seen for twenty years, was reciting lines from the second canto of The Fight At Finnsburg. His hat was at his feet. His boots were cracked, but his voice was passable, booming out over the heads of passing whores and stoned Fleet men:

  The Marty Lingham discovered a bleak

  orbit; hooked by a fuchsia dwarf,

  perihelion at the customary handful

  of millions: cometary, cemetery.

  He showed his nasty old teeth to Captain Truck, recognizing another loser, however well disguised. He screwed up his dreadful face, winked.

  'An intellectual, am I right, bos'n -?' he began his spiel, stepping craftily into Truck's bee-line.

  'If it hadn't been for that,' Truck swore later, 'I might have given him something.'

  Inside the Rave, it was a different matter: inside, Tiny Skeffern, the Galaxy's last great musician, was blowing his brains out through his instrument like the contents of a rare egg.

  John Truck knew him of old. He stood five foot three and slightly built in the Rave's confusion of spots and strobes and kaleidomats, tapping his right foot. His hair was sparse, curly, and blond — at twenty-two years, he already had a bald patch. When he wasn't playing, he was spring-heeled, he was a leaper; when he was, he stayed in one place for minutes on end, giving the ladies a reserved but cheeky smile. He was an enthusiastic loser from way back, and he nodded when Truck came in.

  He played a four-hundred-year-old Fender Stratocaster with all the switchgear jammed full on, through a stack of Luthos amps — each one with a guaranteed output of half a kilowatt — and a battery of Hydrogen Line thirty-inch speakers. He had a loose-limbed Denebian queen, all pink flares and slashed sleeves, on bass; his drummer was a local man, looking seedy and aggressive by turns like all good drummers. His sound:

  His sound was long-line and hairy, slow and grinding, full of inexplicable little runs and complications. He stalked the Denebian bass through the harmonies; he made sounds l
ike breaking glass and exploding quasars, like dead ships and orbital confrontations and eras of geological upheaval; he made sounds like God.

  'I'm a highway child,' he sang, 'so don't deny my name.'

  Which was all as it should be.

  John Truck licked his lips and bought himself a knickerbocker glory topped with little crystals of tetrahydrocannabinol; he had a look at the audience. They were mostly musicians from other bands, but there was a sprinkling of spacers, who, like John Truck, understood that music had died out in the year 2000 and that the New Music was the old music. Only the winners escape, Truck thought as the old Strat wailed (taking fours with a wholly imaginary wind which nevertheless sent tremors of intent down the backs of his calves and thighs: the port wind, the compass wind). The rest of us get carried by the music. Why not?

  There was only one woman in The Spacer's Rave that night. Her name was Angina Seng, and she was looking for John Truck. He wasn't to know it: he could only see her back. Her hair was long and coppery, she held herself with a certain dramatic tension. Her bottom looked nice. So while Tiny Skeffern screwed it out of his glossy, priceless antique for the disconnected, the discontented and the rudderless of the whole duty universe, John Truck fell precipitately in and out of love with her. It was an impartial, on-off passion, for every spaceport lady seen fleetingly in a crowd. He was prone to that sort of thing.

  In a hiatus between sets, Tiny brought the Fender over.

  'Hello, Truck.'

  He bobbed about for a moment, grinning sentimentally; sat down. Truck looked with affection at his bald spot, beaded with sweat.

  'Tiny, you play worse and worse. Who's the girl?'

  Tiny huffed, wiped his sleeve over the guitar's immaculate white polymer finish. He shrugged. Even when the Strat wasn't plugged in, the stubby, clubbed fingers of his left hand ran up and down the frets like small, undeveloped animals looking for a way out of the wind.

  'Oh, thanks. She's not regular. Can you believe it, I've been here three bloody weeks.'

  He rubbed his nose.

  'Three weeks. Can you imagine that?'

  He helped himself to some of Truck's unfinished treat.

  'I don't understand how I can have done it. Outside being arrested, which I wasn't. I've been careful since I had that finger broken on Barfield Eight. Three weeks in this dump!'

  'If you want to lift out of here,' offered Truck.

  'You've still got Ella Speed. What a name. I never could get over that.'

  He chuckled.

  'I'll be around when you finish this gig,' Truck told him. 'Or you could find her at the dock. I had her painted up about a year ago. Fix the bos'n is aboard, I hope.'

  Tiny got up. He did a little energetic shuffle, nodded, and went back to his band. He and Truck hadn't met much since his teenage prodigy days, when he'd been playing the circuits on Gloam. Between riots, that had been a lot of laughs, Truck recollected. He smiled to himself and worked some THC grit from between two of his teeth with his tongue. And he laughed out loud when Tiny leaned down from the poky Rave stage and whispered something to the girl with the coppery hair.

  He didn't understand how she could be so pleased to see him. How could he? He only knew that spaceport women sometimes have metaphysical hungers hard to describe riding tandem with their more common appetites. They represent a different function of space, a significance of loneliness lost on their male counterparts. They are the true aliens. So he regarded her with a certain wariness.

  'Mr. Truck, I have been searching the port for you.'

  'Go on,' said Truck. 'You say that to all the spacers. It's "Captain." Is there something I can do for you?'

  (He knew it was a mistake, even then. Tiny was driving his band through the first four bars of Where Was Tomorrow? He recognized it for an omen.)

  She told him her name. She was a big, bony girl, but her face was pinched a little round the eyes and mouth. It wasn't simply the mark of a port lady — although they too are tense and contained as if perpetually struggling to keep their substance from evaporating off into the void.

  Her clothes glittered and dissolved irregularly as the kaleidomat light found frequencies critical to the opacity of the material.

  'Captain Truck, how would you like a job?'

  He shook his head.

  'Come back in two weeks. I shall be stoned on Sad al Bari here for two weeks.' He demonstrated by waving his hands about like airplanes. 'Bombed out Unless Tiny gets desperate.'

  'It isn't a haulage job, Captain. You won't need to fly.'

  'They're the only kind I take. I've got a Chromian bos'n to support. Really, you should find someone else. Not that I'm not grateful for the offer.'

  He thought for a moment.

  'Besides which,' he said, 'you aren't hiring me.' For a loser, that was pretty acute.

  She leaned forward earnestly, put her elbows on the table. She toyed with the dregs of his knickerbocker glory, then clasped her hands.

  'That's true. But my sponsor will pay better for a few weeks of your time than any comparable haulage job, and you didn't make much on that last seed run.'

  He had to give her credit for that. 'You,' he said, 'have been talking to somebody. They were right. But I don't need money that badly. In two weeks, yes.'

  'Captain Track,' she said, drawing her chair closer to the table, 'what if I told you this was a chance to do something for the Galaxy?'

  He sighed.

  'I'd say you have picked a loser. If it's politics, Miss Seng, double screw it.' He beamed at her. 'I'm not very political, you see,' he explained.

  She got up without another word.

  'You're not a port lady at all,' he called after her as she threaded her way through the audience to the door. But he wasn't really talking to her.

  The evening went on, The Spacer's Rave got packed out. The management closed the doors in a suicidal move to suffocate the hands that fed it. 'I'm gonna rock and roll you baby,' sang Tiny Skeffern, 'rock and roll you all night long — ', an old sentiment, and enduring but Track had lost interest. About an hour after Angina Seng had squirmed her way out, he went off to look for somewhere quiet. She had soured it for him. He couldn't imagine who might want him for himself and not My Ella Speed.

  As he went out the door, Tiny and his drummer were exchanging strokes, playing with psychopathic detachment and gentleness.

  Outside, the same old wind. East Thing was a street without apparent function, a barrack thoroughfare for the shabby privates of the great commercial army — warehouses, and the occasional front-office. Packed by day with clerks and chandlers, it was a desert of vapor lamps by night; nobody walked it then except to get to the Spacer's Rave, and most of them were already there. Track loved it for itself. You had to.

  Coming abreast of a deep doorway in the high numbers, he noticed nothing: but a sneaky foot whipped out of it nonetheless, and tangled up his long legs. He kicked his own ankle painfully and fell on the floor.

  'Fuck,' he said. Somebody sniggered.

  A shadowy figure issued from the doorway — loomed over him as, rubbing one elbow, he got himself into a kneeling position. A quick cold flicker of vapor light reflected from wicked steel knuckles. His neck exploded, he thought that his windpipe had collapsed, but he fell carefully, knees drawn up into his stomach.

  'Up, son. I'm not carrying you. Get up.'

  An exploratory prod in the ribs. Truck concentrated on the pain in his neck.

  'Come on — ' Then, calling to the dim hole of the doorway: 'Give me a hand here, he's going to puke all over my feet.'

  Another one? Any more and they could crowd him to death, never mind anything else.

  They bent over him. He slapped both arms hard against the paving to give himself traction and, feet together, shoved the heels of his boots into the nearest mouth.

  Nice. Crouching and eager to maim, he chuckled. It might have been taken for a groan. He pretended to get up, sank his fingers into the second man's thigh instead, fee
ling for a pressure point. 'Your turn to fall down.'

  He was drawing back his foot, preparatory to putting it in, when something hit him in the kidneys. He grunted. He staggered forward flailing his arms and tripped over his original victim. He squirmed around trying to get a look at who was hitting him so hard, pulled his head in rapidly, and rolled onto the lee side of the knuckle man as a shoe caught him in the chest. It was a lace-up shoe with a thick sole and a weighted toecap: a fact which surprised him so much that he forgot to keep his head moving. All he could do after a little more of that was curl up into a ball and wrap his arms round his face while he thought about it.

  For a while, there was nothing but the quiet shuffle of feet and a ragged sound in his head which told him John Truck must be involved in it all somewhere — but not how many people were kicking him. Or indeed, why. He was beginning to feel frightened that they wouldn't stop.

  Eventually, though, two of them hauled him upright and began half walking, half dragging him toward a battered black vehicle parked across the street. From Truck's position it looked about the size of a Fleet battleship, but even with both of them working at it they had a job trying to fold him up enough to get him inside.

  'I think I'm going to be sick,' he told them plaintively, but they ignored him.

  While they were sorting it out, a late-model Lewis Phoenix with all eight headlamps on main beam hurled out of Bread Street and drifted to a stop endwise across East Thing. 'Better get a move on, lads,' said Truck. He spread his legs wide and went limp. He jabbed with his elbows, bit a hand that came too close to his eyes.

  Tap, tap, tap, went some heels.

  'Leave him alone,' said Angina Seng, her voice bright and tight.

  She was supporting an ugly Chambers reaction pistol with both hands. Did he detect a slight tremor in her big bony frame? He wasn't in a condition to detect anything. A dark cloak was thrown over her indoor clothes.