THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  'Captain?'

  A huge, dun apparition with a bulbous, snouted head stepped out of one of the equipment bays that lined the corridor.

  Grishkin the mad priest had come to collect, diabolical in his plum-colored cloak and black radiation suit, his whole vast bulk heaving with the after-effects of some mysterious exertion or compulsion. He stood staring at John Truck, his eyes enigmatic behind the smoky panes of his goggles. His respirator hissed evenly. Had Stomach been only another postponement?

  'I kept coining back to the same place,' he confided suddenly.

  His voice was thick and clotted. 'You know, I surveyed this place. I was never lost in it before.' He advanced a few paces, still gazing hard at Truck. His arm whipped out, he clutched one of Truck's wrists with the energy of an ambition near-fulfilled. 'I knew you wouldn't fail me, my son. The Ark has a special gravity, a — ' He put his other arm around Truck's shoulders. 'You must help me. There are ' — his grip tightened — 'others in the bunker.'

  He saw the Centauri Device.

  He rubbed his fingers, clumps of raw white sausage, over his goggles: they left faint beads of perspiration on the blank lenses. Then, quivering and collapsing like a pig in a midden, he knelt before it. One fat hand fumbled at the neck of his coverall, pulled, unzipped it to expose his plastic windows. Things swam there, ferocious and triumphant. Head bowed, he revealed the processes of his soul.

  Truck laughed nervously. 'You're off your head, Grishkin,' Then he remembered something. 'Oh my God,' he whispered:

  ' "Cloak!" '

  He pivoted on one foot and with every ounce of force he could muster drove the toe of the other into Grishkin's neck.

  'You foul old bastard!' he raged. 'Why'd you kill him?'

  Grishkin keeled over, still in a votive crouch; he swayed about, struggling to get up, but Truck was on him like a snake, full of poison and death, and had one hand fastened in the soft flesh at the nape of his neck. They fought for a moment in the echoing dark. Truck won — lugged him bodily over to Tiny's corpse. He was absurdly heavy. 'You disgusting sod! Open your dirty head to him! Go on, look at him!' And he gave the Opener's right arm a savage twist.

  Grishkin squealed and tore himself loose. He knelt over the Device again. 'No,' he said. 'Forgive me,' he begged it. 'I didn't know what I was doing.' He looked furtively over his shoulder at Truck, advancing with steely hooked fingers.

  A grotesque ballet ensued, danced out in the depths of a dead planet to the accompaniment of animal grunts and howls: time and again, Truck forced Grishkin to face the dead musician, while on his part the priest, squealing and groaning with fervor, flailed his way back to the Device. His respirator fell off. He tried to pray, but Truck kept kicking him in the side of the head, shouting, 'Pray to him!' and 'You're not God!' Soon, both of them were covered in blood and filth, panting and incoherent. Neither could get the upper hand: and Tiny Skeffern stared indifferently up at both.

  'We made a bargain, Captain! We made a bargain!'

  Finally, Grishkin's cloak came off; he lay there, fat and dripping, his radiation suit in tatters. Truck saw only a great white slug, full of something neither human nor animal. He choked disgustedly and gave up.

  'I should kill you, Grishkin.'

  Grishkin chuckled. 'Too late for that, Captain.' He came up off the ground with a Chambers pistol aimed at Truck's head.

  Truck, abruptly calm, almost disinterested (understanding that Stomach had been a postponement, that all along there had only been one way to end the dialogue begun on Bread Street, Sad al Bari), shot him in the window of his belly.

  'Captain,' said Grishkin.

  Truck pulled the Device from beneath the body while the sound of the shot was still echoing through the bunkers and wiped the stinking fluids off it with a corner of the Opener's cloak. He stared down at Tiny, shook his head. There was nothing to do then but make his way back to the bottom of Omega Shaft: for him, at least, the confusion or curse had been lifted, and he found it easily. He got into the lift and returned to the surface of Centauri, his mind such a howling waste that even Gadaffi ben Barka might have felt uncomfortable in it.

  Halfway up, his dosimeter reported a mild overexposure.

  It was a long journey back to My Ella Speed. He pushed one foot doggedly before the other through the ooze, rain slashing into his face, the whole desolate landscape a gray-green vagueness shifting and mutating as the water ran off the lenses of his goggles. He stumbled into streams and buried his elbows in stuff he didn't dare look at. He'd been out in it ten minutes before he remembered to put his respirator back on. He coughed miserably.

  It was a long journey, and worth nothing in the end. When he got back to his boat, he found the command-cabin blown off it in a tangle of cable and melted girder, the rest leaning and blackened like a dead tree.

  Two other ships were squatting on the mudbank, enormous and silent. The UASR(N) Nasser, its fifteen million tons half-submerged in the silt, never built to touch the surface of a planet — it was on its side, nose down, all its locks opened up by demolition charges and its cavernous insides gutted; and the IWG Solomon like a red and black moon embedded after some inconceivable collision with the planet, her gun ports gaping. She had done the dirty business on the other, it was plain: but she seemed deserted, too. They loomed a hundred feet, two hundred feet, into the dead wet air, heaps of dead commandos scattered in great pools of shadow under their hulls.

  Truck stared numbly at it all. It was beyond him. He went over and put his back against the ruin of his Ella; slid down into a peasant crouch, and wrapped his ragged cloak around him against the rain. He shivered. He was trapped. Whoever came up out of the furtive slaughter in the bunkers would have him, and the Device. He closed his eyes and waited. Ella groaned and leaned a few degrees more, settling into the mud. He had nothing left.

  Presently, he heard shooting.

  He got up wearily. Off in the direction of Omega Shaft, uncertain in the rainy distance, small ominous figures boiled toward him, spread out across the flood-plain and fighting as they came. Nothing was solved, then. He set off to meet them. What else could he do?

  'Captain,' said a cold, lively voice from behind him, 'did Pater pull you out of the Snort for nothing -?

  FOURTEEN

  The Third Speed

  Down there in the bunker, the Centauri Device had killed him as surely as a Chambers bolt: his reflexes were gone. He spun round desperately, reaching for his gun but knowing he'd never have the time to use it

  No blow fell.

  Instead, a long pale hand danced momentarily like a mirage an inch from his face. He stepped back instinctively, blinked. In that fleeting instant of blindness, something was altered; and when he opened his eyes again, the hand belonged to someone he knew, all the menace had drained from the toiling figures on the flood-plain, and even dim Centauri had brightened around him.

  Across the palm of that quick hand there lay a single green carnation, long-stemmed and full of grace, beads of moisture clustered in its every fresh, intricate fold.

  'We assumed you were dead,' was all he could think of to say.

  'I may have been,' said Himation the anarchist. 'Who knows?' And he laughed. The storm collar of his long black cloak was turned up, his wide-brimmed hat was pulled well down: all that could be seen of his face was a glitter of eyes. There was distant amusement in them, and some new thing besides, as if since Pater's death he had pursued in austere and derisive splendor a destiny quite different from any laid down for him. His hands, though, were still full of deft mischief and dishonesty, and discovered a small frog behind Truck's ear.

  'Do you always travel with that, Captain? There, you laughed: I saw it distinctly.' He looked down at the Centauri Device, sneered, and clasped Truck's free hand between both of his own. 'I'm glad to see you.'

  'It doesn't affect you,' said Truck. He wished he could see into the gap between collar and hat. 'What do you see me carrying, Himation?'

  'Why should
I tell you?' He winked. 'Other things have "affected" me since we last met — '

  For a moment, it seemed as if he might add something to that; but when he spoke again, it was to say:

  'Come on, we have to get you out of here before' — shading his eyes against an imaginary sun and peering at the line of advancing men, who had come close enough for their hoarse metallic cries to be heard flapping over the intervening silt-flats like mechanical birds — 'this lot catches hold of you.' The line was thinner now, broken in places; a short, stumpy female figure trotted tirelessly at the head of it, strung with bandoleers of vomit-gas grenades and brandishing a pistol in each hand.

  Himation grabbed Truck's arm. 'Run, Captain!'

  'Where to?'

  But Truck already knew. They breasted a rise, Himation in the lead, his cloak billowing out behind him. A vast estuary spread itself before them, gray and calm, its far banks lost in a haze of rain. On it, some fifty yards from the shore, there floated a great golden ship. She was fully a quarter of a mile long; her raked and curved fins shone tike sails in some exotic Byzantine wind; enamel work writhed deliciously over her lean hull, words in a lost language of rose stems.

  ' "The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies",' whispered John Truck.

  'Look' — black shrouded arm, long white finger, an extravagant swirl of cloak — 'they've sent a boat out for us!'

  Himation flung up his arms. Playing cards showered from the mirthless air of Centauri, colored ribbons burst like fireworks from his fingertips; when he bowed right and left, small animals could be seen scuttling round the crown of his hat, while unruly red hair escaped its brim. Awed by his own genius, he shouted with laughter — in a kind of possessive joy, a laugh that went on and on.

  When General Gaw struggled over the rise, she found only the echo of that laughter to comfort her, as Atalanta in Calydon, the last raider, shook off the water of the bay like a gilded hound and raced up into the sky on a blaze of white light.

  'Where are we going?'

  Centauri displayed its scars like Ruth Berenici in a Carter's Snort dawn. Atalanta in Calydon hung a thousand miles above that wan face, a cobalt blue light washing her exquisite alien metalwork, dead men bobbing round her hull in thankless, eccentric orbits. Himation drew himself up and turned from a long contemplation of the wretched embers of the battle. What he saw out there was anybody's guess, but it made him tense and withdrawn.

  'A hundred thousand men died out there,' he said, ignoring Truck's question. He fidgeted with a pack of cards. 'I hate this place.' He sighed with a kind of fierce, impatient compassion. 'Why do they do it?' Then, in a low voice:

  'You're going to Earth, Captain, I've only got one thing to do before — ' He hesitated, then shrugged. 'I'll drop you off there first'

  'But — '

  Truck guttered into silence. He'd expected more: if not a conjuring trick — a spiriting away — then at least some lessening of his responsibility. The anarchist's appearance had lifted his spirits; now they fell again, and he felt betrayed. He shrugged helplessly. 'You aren't even coming with me? What can I do with it on my own?'

  The Device was wrapped in the remains of his old Opener cloak in case it affected Himation's crew; it was heavy, and lately, it had become slightly warm to the touch; a faint resonance, a distant thready pulse of vibration, crawled beneath its skin. Did it arm automatically on the identification of Centauran genes? He was alone with it again, and without hope.

  'We should dump it, Himation. Right over the edge, where nobody'll ever find it again.'

  'It must end on Earth, where everything ends up. Otherwise there'll be more of this — ' He nodded at the orbital graveyard outside, the corpses floating like wet cardboard on dark water.

  'I can think of a time when you'd have laughed at a few killings. It was you who licked the knife at Carter's Snort, not me. You might at least come to Earth to help me, if Earth is so bloody important.Tell me why you won't.'

  Alarm bells filled the ship.

  Himation whirled to the screens, snapping his fingers at the quarterdeck crew. 'Captain, I — later.' He glanced over his shoulder at Truck for a moment, shrugged eloquently. He conferred with his fire-control room.

  'We have a strong trace in the one-fifty mile band, Himation. She's lifted from Centauri. Do we fight?'

  'We leave.'

  Atalanta in Calydon throbbed and moaned with the power buildup. Waxy blue light drowned the bridge. On the screens, the image of the graveyard quivered and broke up, those wretched hulks taking on for a precious instant the gaudy colors of the orchid, the forms of imaginary beasts. With this transfiguration, panic jumped out of a dark hole and shook him like a dog with a dead rat.

  'Tell me why!' he shouted across the bridge. 'You owe me that!'

  Heads turned toward him. Atalanta toppled over the thin edge of space and into the dyne-fields.

  Himation relaxed. He crossed the bridge and said, 'All right, Captain. It's hard — I don't belong here any more — you can't imagine — ' He shook his head, made a dismissive gesture with one hand. 'All this — ' Finally, it tumbled out:

  'Captain, I've been outside the Galaxy since we last met!'

  'Listen, Captain, (he continued): you know how it was at the end of Pater's last fight -

  Atalanta was lost under the Arab guns, running nice a fawn. I heard Pater cry 'Dyne out!' I could see him flaring along in my wake, trying to draw their fire. But my bridge was exploding with mad light, and long reaction guns had breached our hull. He came in time and again, sowing torpedoes, spouting fire 'Dyne out!' — but his forward batteries were shot away, The Green Carnation was ripped open down her length like a golden pike. He stormed past one last time, then I saw him flicker — 'Dyne out!' — and fade. Twice, three times, he wrestled with the dyne-fields. He was superb: no other man could have forced that wreck into the Impossible Medium. Rolling like a bitch, still shooting, she vanished.

  'I tried to follow. Atalanta clawed with dreadful energy at the fabric of space, desperate to push herself clear. Her bridge trembled with ionization — metal ran with a fire that consumed nothing! I knew we were wedged like those pathetic hulks we had seen earlier in the battle, mere specters caught on the edge between two hypothetical eternities. Then I had her through — flip! — like a grape pip flicked across a darkened sickroom. I sweated. Captain, I swear I prayed with my relief. But when I noticed my bridge circuitry, I knew I was no longer in control: it had melted to slag! My crew were helpless -

  Atalanta had taken over.

  'None of our own equipment was operating; instead, the alien machinery shivered with an intense white light. The hull seemed to melt and withdraw — we swam in senselessness — all solid forms vanished in amazing twists and contortions: and when we looked at one another, aghast, we were no longer men! Space had somehow entered the ship, and was crawling through us in slow, luminous waves. We were steeped in it: we were birds of paradise, we wore the masks of gilded deep-sea fishes in some tideless ocean, we were glass effigies with infinitely thin, attenuated limbs -

  I knew we would die, if we were not already dead (and trapped forever in some unimaginable posture of unreality). But even as the thought formed, space coughed us up -

  And out into darkness!

  Nothing moved beyond the hull. I rushed to the screens — they were dark; we restored our circuitry, but they remained dark. We pushed out sensors and probes — they recorded a terrifying distant trace; we regained power, we spun her like a compass needle to face it -

  There before us lay the Galaxy, fault as an afterimage crawling across a dead man's eye!

  We've seen it, Captain, from the outside. Aboard Atalanta, we've seen them all: Andromeda, M32, NGC205 for our first, hesitant, skeptical journey — and later to others so unbelievably far out that they have no names. There is a third level of Space, Captain; a Third Speed. I've spoken with its denizens, and learned the glory of the moth in the lamp-bowl — can you understand why I hate this rubbish heap
, with its putty brains and feet of lead? I've been beyond!

  Since that day, Atalanta in Calydon has flown herself: we simply navigate. We brought her in triumph back to Howell after that first wild flight — only to find Pater still and cold in his peacock room, yourself gone, no one knew where. That fastidious prince! His life was the purest fabrication of Art, the most gilded of lies — but I loved him. We outfitted the Driftwood of Decadence as his bier; we filled her with prints and porcelain and fans of the utmost sophistry; all Howell gathered to watch her final firework leap into the unknown. She went off on a sigh, on a whisper, like a dream of unaccustomed beauty.

  She's traveling still, Captain, at the Third Speed; Pater may have reached the edge of the Universe itself by now. He deserved nothing less.

  After that, all I could do was come in search of you -

  I found a trace of you on Stomach, a memory in the eyes of an androgyne whore. But the trail was cold. I spent a week stalking the city of Intestinal Revelation, dressed in a stolen Opener cloak. From there, I tracked you to Avernus. Avernus! — the worst place in the universe! But I ceased to fear for you when I heard that some lunatic Opener novice with a gun had wiped out Chalice Veronica and his whole Paraphythium operation in a single night. And I was up there in the parking orbit — not alone — to watch you blow your hatches on not one body but two.

  You would seem to have become something of a nemesis -

  'One of them was Fix,' said Truck. He felt bitterly angry: for Pater, for himself, for what they had so nearly achieved on that last ride into death, with The Green Carnation, her heart burst, falling to bits around them; and for what he had in exchange — dead friends, and the Device like a yoke across his back.

  'They've killed Fix and Tiny now. I haven't anybody left.' Himation had rescued something from the night, but Truck's boots were full of lead. He felt like crying, but, 'I still owe them for that,' he said, with as much defiance as he could muster. 'And if I did for ben Barka, I'm glad. I meant to.'