THE CENTAURI DEVICE

by M. John Harrison

  'IWG!' yelled Truck. 'Christ!'

  He clawed at Ruth's hands and flung her away from him. He threw himself off the bed and rolled across the floor, scooping the Centauri Device up as he went Ruth was sobbing softly somewhere off by the window, and all around him the hinterland seemed to be full of sirens: faint, distant, of impersonal intent; rising and falling on the compass wind like an anxiety on the edge of reflection.

  With sweat pouring into his eyes and his teeth chattering, he dragged himself to where he could set his back against a wall and face the door. Ruth looked desperately down into the street. 'Truck?' she pleaded. He was on the edge of a dark hole. 'Ruth, I — ' They were on the landing outside, kicking lumps out of the wall while they waited for an order. 'Ruth — ' It was too late for any of that.

  He bit his lips.

  The door caved in.

  'I promised we'd meet again, sonny,' said Alice Gaw complacently.

  She stood in the doorway, squat and brutal, dust and fumes from the explosion downstairs drifting up the stairwell to settle on the landing behind her. She seemed preoccupied. 'God, what a leprotic hole this place is.' She was back in the black short skirt of her WA uniform, stomach sagging over the leather belt that held her holster up.

  She studied the room amusedly for a moment, then sauntered in and stepped aside: Fleet policemen hurried past her and began to go methodically through it, breaking up the furniture with careful efficiency. Truck coughed dismally, the paper-shredder at work in his lung again. Now it had happened, he felt curiously remote. The General looked him over, chuckled.

  'I see they made a bit of a mess of you in Gottingen.' She shook her head. 'Was it worth it? You might have started a real war this time. If it hurts, I'll get a quack in as soon as we've got tills little business over with.'

  'Don't bother, General. Ill survive.'

  She ignored him, absently watching the Fleet men as they tore up some loose boards. 'Look sharp, you lot,' she chided them, 'or I'll do it myself. You haven't got all day.' Her features went lax. Still looking away from him: 'I'm not sure you will, Truck. And I don't have all that much time here myself,' Her one eye focused on him suddenly. 'Frankly, you've made it a shade difficult for me with the people I answer to. They're sending me over to the Strip to sort out the cock-up you caused there — '

  She ran a hand through her hair. Her attention wandered. 'Truck, my love, why haven't you introduced us?'

  And she smiled over at Ruth Berenici.

  — who, emerging from whatever personal nightmare found its expression in the street below only to find herself in a more public one, cried, 'Who are you? How can you just burst in here like this -! Animal!'

  Alice Gaw cocked her head to one side like a small deformed bird. 'My, my,' she said. She planted herself, feet apart, in front of Ruth and stared up at her with an expression of chilly intimacy. 'Look, lovie,' she began evenly, 'I like you. I liked you on sight. If I hadn't, I might have resented that.'

  She reached out lazily and captured Ruth's lower jaw in one hard hand. She tutted sympathetically.

  'That's a nasty scar. No, don't be shy. Let's have a look at it.'

  And, with the muscles of her forearm trembling slightly, she forced Ruth's marred profile into the light.

  'You know, that really is nasty,' she mused. 'Look duckie,' she murmured confidentially, 'I'll tell you what: I'm fifty-six years old, and I've been on my feet all bloody night long. Just you keep on the right side of me, and I'll keep on the right side of you. Hm?'

  'Leave her alone, General,' said Truck quietly.

  Since his trip across the long floor, it cost him pain to breathe, to speak — even to concentrate. A warm brown fog had crept up while he was unaware and filled the room: events filtered through it to him only after a peculiar delay. There was a salty taste in his mouth.

  'You can leave her alone, now.'

  The General relaxed her grip. Rum Berenici twisted out of it and fled whimpering toward the door, her long body ungainly with fear. One of the Fleet men caught hold of her. 'Just see she doesn't do herself any harm, lad,' said Alice Gaw. Tiredly, gazing out of the window: 'All right then Truck — where is it?'

  Keeping his eyes open had become difficult — some kind of grit had worked up under the lids. He got the Centauri Device out from under his cloak, painstakingly stripped the charred and blood-stained rags of that other garment off it, and set it on his lap. It didn't look much.

  'What do you see, General?' he asked. He shrugged painfully. 'I don't think I really want to know. No — I'd stay put if I were you. You're talking to a Centauran.'

  And she was.

  His eyes closed. In twos and threes, driven across airless spaces by a wind no one can name, coming the long way round from the gutter-edge outposts of the Galaxy, they were still drifting into his head, pressing up against the shuttered windows to await a glimpse of that crucial room — a direct, inevitable link between the Centauri Genocide and the deaths of all his friends.

  All us losers are Centaurans — and that conceit established his ancestry more effectively than any biochemistry. Eyes open again he discovered General Gaw squinting across the room at him.

  'You'll regret that, sonny,' she promised. And: 'It doesn't look like the thing I saw in the bunker.'

  'I think it armed itself when I picked it up. You only saw its dormant phase.'

  Something caught at his throat: he swallowed, coughed, tasted blood again — and this time the contraction of his diaphragm muscles triggered off a quick, uncontainable spasm of his lower intestine — he'd dislodged the spent Chambers bolt and it had fetched up somewhere in the mess behind his window. 'Oh,' he whispered. 'Oh, shit.'

  Then, hearing a sharp intake of breath, a scrape of feet, 'I can set it off at any time, General!' He raised his head slowly from where it had slumped on his chest. She had moved in a couple of yards and stood before him in a relaxed professional crouch. 'What made you think you'd be any closer to owning it when you found your Centauran?'

  She showed her teeth.

  'Come off it, Truck. I'm your only chance. From the stink in here, I'd say somebody stuck one right in your guts. What's to stop me waiting? You're going to die, Truck.'

  'I promise you I'll fire it off if that looks like happening, General. I've got nothing much left to lose.'

  Confounded, she withdrew; and through the thickening fog he watched her confer with one of her policemen, who presently nodded and left the room.

  'Ruth?' said Truck, but she didn't hear him. He wiped his hand across his mouth, and it came away wet and shocking. Successive storms of fear and pain and vertigo swept through him, each crisis leaving him weaker — while the Centauri Device, a high, electrical voice, vibrated in every cell of his brain.

  There wasn't much left of him up there — a thread of memory, the odd little bit of personal stuff. It came down to streets and faces in the end, scraps that still defined nun, a fading signal from the hinterland. He was a proxy, he was a junction-box -

  'I'll tell you what I think, Trackie.'

  He had almost fallen asleep. He peered about the room. He was deadly tired.

  'I think you're waiting for your gyppo friends to pull you out of this. If you are: forget it Bring him through, lads!'

  When 'he' came through, under the watchful eye of the Fleet, he was much changed. Occupying the same space as he occupied, coextensive yet divorced, breathing — if it could be said to breathe — the same air as he breathed, came his long-time spectre.

  The flat and watchful planes of his face were simple implications of the bleached and jawless skull beneath, pouring fine sand from the sockets of its eyes, generator and epicenter of all deserts; resident in the marrow of his spine were other vertebrae — scattered beneath a dead tree, polished, mourning; as he moved, he shed brittle echoes of past deserts and intimations of the Desert to Come. And, far off in his liquid brown eyes — broken white columns, like reflections in a failing cistern -

  Ben Bark
a. The ghost encompassed him It wore his uniform without pity.

  'General — ' The promptings of a parched wing. 'I am a prisoner of war. This is a charade. I object to taking part in it'

  'Cut it out, Gadaffi,' advised General Gaw. 'I know you.' And she gave him a breezy grin. He shrugged infinitesimally and seemed to forget her. 'What I don't know, Truck,' she went on, 'is what deal you two scabs cooked up in the Avernus parking-orbit — '

  Ben Barka chuckled sourly. 'General — '

  'Speak when you're spoken to, ben Barka. Truck, you aren't denying that you shipped him up to a rendezvous with Nasser in that sardine can of yours?'

  'There was no deal, General; there was no rendezvous. He killed a friend of mine.' Truck couldn't understand what she was getting at. 'You must be mad.'

  But it was hardly worth it Her voice rose and fell, endless, accusing, endlessly beside the point; ben Barka's deserted husk replied with the dry song of the locust; above them both, electrical, crystalline, angelic — the voice of the Centauri Device reminded how certain things might be done, ushered him, a particle of human silt down the long slow watercourses of Centauri VII.

  Where at last he might be initiated into that queer half-life beneath the ooze, the purgatorial suspension of his mother's race -

  He woke up abruptly, in a panic because he thought the Fleet men were ushering ben Barka from the room.

  'Wait!' he cried. 'General, make me a bid!'

  She had crept closer while he dozed, hands tense and outstretched. Now she looked wonderingly down at him. 'It's you who's out of his mind, duckie. 'We've got you now, unless you do something quickly — ' She sounded almost sympathetic. 'I wonder if you'll have the guts to work that ruddy thing?'

  Truck groaned impatiently.

  'General,' he whispered, 'now's the time! You want the Device, and me to operate it for you. Nothing's changed. Tell me why. Tell me how it — Look, just tell me who will benefit!'

  This time, he knew for whom he was asking: they waited — as they've always waited, at rocketports, pneumatique stations, in delousing sheds and hand-out queues; in the greasy front offices of courts and refugee camps and detention bureaus — tired and grimy and stoned: he was asking for a dwarf, a musician, and a dead Centauran whore, for everyone who had nowhere to sleep at night, the new incumbents of his brain -

  She opened her mouth.

  Three quick explosions shook the street outside.

  The whole room was flooded briefly with an intense, ominous red glow. Ruth Berenici moaned and flung herself toward Truck: one of her guards reached out and carefully hooked the feet from under her. The building shook and shuddered, plaster drifted down from the ceiling. A Fleet noncom, his face bloody and convulsed, appeared in the doorway.

  'On the roof!' he shouted, eyes wild. 'General! Two detachments, and another in the street!'

  'Christ, ben Barka, you're going to regret this,' said Alice Gaw calmly. She rounded on the noncom. 'Hold them. I need five minutes here. Get some support in. How the fucking hell were they allowed to get this far in the first place?'

  'They're jamming everything, General; we cant raise Fleet — '

  Alice Gaw whipped her Chambers gun out of its holster and rammed its barrel up into the soft place under ben Barka's chin. 'Hold them!' she screamed at the noncom. 'Chummie, I'm going to blow your head off the moment any of that filth gets down here — ' She pulled his head back with her free hand.

  He overbalanced, plucked at her arm, eyes wide and empty; and for some seconds they tottered about in a circle, locked in the excesses of the Dance. Harsh, mechanical grunts and sobs, an eerie, obsessive shuffle of feet.

  She pushed him away and raised the pistol, breathing in great noisy gasps. Her eye patch bad come adrift, and raw pulpy horror stared out of the hole in her head.

  'I think I'll do it now — '

  The window exploded inwards, and a stray shot from the street buried itself in the opposite wall, fizzing and spitting like an angry cat. A spatter of glass, a sudden stillness. Into which John Truck said:

  'It's now or never, General. Quick! — Make us a bid!'

  The pit in her face gaped above Mm. Her chin was wet.

  'Growth,' she croaked, and he hardly recognized her voice. She swallowed. 'A free market economy. Law and progress. Peace with honor. You know all that.' She thrust her face up very close to his. Cosmetics were caked in her pores. He wondered how old she really was. 'Truck? We must stop them! They're a threat to every worthwhile human value!' she said.

  'Freedom and dignity, Truck, how much are they worth?' she demanded, her single eye blazing. 'You've had them all your life because we kept watch -!'

  From the windy concrete plains of Anywhere, the bleak industrial complexes of Parrot and the radio-deserts of Weber II, from the filthy vapor-lit alleys of the Snort, the new Centaurans — disenfranchised by poverty, barred from action by law, a pusher's market — crowded into that junction box between past and present atrocities that was John Truck's skull.

  They were silent

  'Well, Truck?' She bent over him anxiously, as if sensing a little of what he represented at that moment. He knew she didn't.

  'Let ben Barka make his bid,' was all he said.

  She threw up her hands in disgust

  'Laddie, I was hoping for a minute there you weren't completely out of your head -

  Fighting had broken out on the stairs as ben Barka's death-commando pushed its way off the roof. Dust and smoke billowed into the room; a dispute over the third turning of the fourth flight became an action, a battle, a siege; screams, burning meat, and bellows from the amplifier truck outside. Somebody in the street had brought up a small rocket launcher and was busily pounding the top floors of the building to rubble with it

  Truck could see nothing now unless it was within a couple of feet of his eyes. He felt his substance boiling off into the void with the effort of holding himself together against the twin pressures of the Device and its inheritors.

  'Let him speak!' he hissed.

  In the event, ben Barka came up of his own accord, The General's police vanished to back up a holding action on the stairs, but he made no move to escape. He studied Truck's white and sunken face impassively. He brushed at something that might have been fine sand, lodged in a crease of his uniform.

  'What precisely are you offering me, Captain?' he inquired. He raised his hand. 'No, General Gaw. Consider: what have either of us to lose? Our footing' — a thin smile — 'would now seem to be equal.' The muzzle of the pistol wavered, dropped. 'Captain?'

  'A chance to speak, ben Barka.'

  'Very well, then.' He looked to Alice Gaw for confirmation. She nodded, shrugged, pursed her lips. 'It'll get you nowhere, duckie. Mark my words.'

  Ben Barka clasped his hands behind his back.

  'Captain: IWG rapes and plunders, exploits criminally the labor force of the Galaxy. Used in the service of a genuinely Socialist revolution, the Device will bring about redress, stability, peace — and a just share in the profit and the adventure by the labor force.'

  He glanced toward the door, speculating on the state of the conflict. 'Social forces work like natural ones, Captain — blindly, forcibly, erosively. I know what you want. If we are to be a viable alternative to the corruption of IWG, we must be a hot, corroding wind — stripping off the topsoil where we must, reshaping — '

  Truck closed his eyes.

  'You haven't any conception of what I want. Either of you. The odd thing is that you both actually seem to believe all this stuff. We've heard enough.'

  A quick, frightened movement in the fog: Ruth Berenici, bruised and dirty, unable to understand. She pushed between Alice Gaw and the Colonel and, kneeling, touched one of Truck's hands.

  'John, this is mad! You're dying! What does it matter which of them you give it to, when either of them could get you a doctor?'

  He regarded her in silence. There simply wasn't enough of him left now to tell her anything.

 
'Don't I get a chance to bid?' she pleaded. 'What use are you to either of us dead?'

  'I'm sorry, Ruth.'

  'Sorry? John, it's me in here!' Then, quietly: 'Damn you. Damn you for a loser.'

  They were leaving him the way they had come, through some back door of his brain; evaporating into fields and fluxes more subtle than any Dynaflow can create. Dogma means nothing to them. Personal relationships they take where they can, and always lose them somewhere between the Right and the Left, somewhere in the scorched field, in the urinal smell of the transit camp or the subway station.

  It comes down to scars and empty bellies in the end. It comes to numb brains and the long trudge.

  When they had gone — refugees from life and death, shuffling back down the light years and the centuries, hunched up against that eternal bitter Compass Wind — he smiled over his bitter disappointment. He saw quite clearly again. He saw what the hat and the cloak meant. How much better Himation or Pater would have been able to say it.

  'It isn't enough,' he decided. 'So I am left with this thing after all.

  'Listen, General. The Centauri genes have been scattering themselves over the Galaxy for two hundred years. There's a survivor of the Genocide in every drifter who ever lifted from a planet.

  'But more: all of us down here are survivors of some personal atrocity, even if it's only birth.

  'We breathe the dust of tragedy, and you offer us politics.

  'Colonel — both of you — we're sick of ideology. It doesn't seem to work for us, only for you. You watch us crawl round the world — because there's nothing else for us to do — and see in us the reflection of a dream that was never worth the words you use to describe it; everywhere, you discover the symbols of your own obsession, codified but unreal — just as you discovered them in the bunker on Centauri.'

  He touched the thing on his lap. It seemed to swell beneath his hand.

  'This is the only thing that has ever belonged to us. When we hurt, you sell us something to ease the pain. This is the power to say, we aren't buying any more, and to mean that we're not buying it from either of you.