for John Price This low-priced Bantam Book has been completely reset tn a type face designed for easy reading, and was printed from new plates. It contains the complete text of the original hard-cover edition. NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED. THE CBNTAUtI DEVICE A Bantam Book / published by arrangement wlfft Doubleday A Company, Inc. PRINTING HISTORY Doubleday edition published November 2974 Bantam edition / August 1980 Alt of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. AU rights reserved. Copyright © 1974 by M. John Harrtson. Cover art copyright © 1980 by Bantam Books, Inc. This book may not be reproduced tn whole or tn part, by mimeograph or any othe means, without permission. For information address; Doubleday & Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York. New York 10017, ISBN 0-553-13920-7 Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a bantam, is Registered tn US. Patent and Trademark Office and tn other countries. Marca Regtstrada. Bantam Books, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMBBC*. 0987654321 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 Ban 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 bosun as he prepared to leave My Ella Speed, "for at least two weeks. Especially don't accept any vegetable seeds. I pill never haul pumpkins again, any shape or form." "What's a pumpkin?" asked the bosun, who was a Chromian dwarf called Fix. He was good with an ax—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 2 The Centaur/ Device extent that anybody is), his tight snateskin 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-ampheta-mines 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. There 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 The Centaur; Device 3 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 4 - The Centaur/ Device them. They start fresh and naive 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, bosun—?" 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 spot§ and strobes and kaleidomats, tapping his right foot. IBs hah- 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. The Centauri Device 5 He played a four-hundred-year-old Fender Strato-caster 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, oa 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 like breaking glass and exploding quasars, like dead ships and orbital confrontations and eras of geological upheaval; he made sounds like God. Tin a highway chfld,** 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 te-trahydrocannabinol; 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 2,000 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 m 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 hah- 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 6 t The Centaur/ Device 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. * Tfl 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 bosun 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 teen-age 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 Trie Centaur? Device 7 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 then- 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 your' (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 Ban 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 8 The Centaur/ Device bosun 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. "Fd 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. The Centaur; Device 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 Acre. 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, feeling 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 10 Trie Centaur/ Device 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," saM 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 The Centauri Device 11 anything. A dark cloak was thrown over her indoor clothes. Silence. Truck spat some blood into the road. ^ "Don't shoot them yet," he muttered. The inside of his mouth had swollen, he kept biting his cheek by accident "I would just like a go with one of their knuckledusters first." With sulky looks, they left him alone. Plucky Angina patched them rat off down the street, heading for the dock. They were dressed almost like spacers. She put her Chambers away and helped him into the Phoenix. "Wen, Captain Truck," she saidV'You would think, wouldn't you, that they'd at least leave their own kind alone. Do you want the window down?" Truck said nothing. One of his lower canines was giving him trouble; and between tentative explorations of his mouth, he was listening to the wind. "Suit yourself then." She smiled encouragingly at TWO The Long, Uncomprehending Migration of "Spaceport Annie" Truck **Wbere have you brought me?" he asked suspiciously. It was all the same to him. He was a heartbreaking sight, slumped in the lift cage with his long chin on his chest, his hair all tangled and dirty. "Where's my hat? I can't go. anywhere without that hat.'* He was shivering with reaction. He had a puffy lip, an immense purple bruise stretching from under his left ear down to his shoulder., and swollen glands in his neck. Not that it was anything new. Morosely, he stuck a finger into the great rent in his snakeskin jacket. "There was nothing wrong with that hat. Christ, I hate being sick." Angina Seng smiled sympathetically at bun. He hoped it was sympathy. "I thought you might like to speak to my sponsor after what happened," she told bun. "Once you know all the facts, you might change your mind about that job." It was an affront. "Facts," he chuckled. "Sponsor. Ho ho." 12 The Centaur/ Device 13 He glared at the wall above her head. An uncomfortable silence descended. "How did you get this way?" she asked suddenly. Stuff you. "I don't know what you mean," he said. They didn't speak again, but she wasn't downhearted. Wagging her tail and already anticipating the plaudits of the shepherd, she sheepdogged him out of the lift and into a reception area. There, she vanished behind an unmarked door, leaving him stranded in a front-office landscape of fake-antique carpets like fine soft cellar mold, power-sculptures cunningly designed to achieve optimum blandness and the castration of the art of the time, and no chairs. He didn't care if he never saw her again. All the dispossessed and wayward have a fear of frontages. He discussed going back to the Spacer's Rave there and then, but he knew it was probably too late for that: gravitational tides had thrown him up here and, for the moment, he was marooned. He leered at a receptionist (who sat behind the keyboard of her input terminal as long-legged and unapproachable—by losers—as any ice-princess). She smiled back politely, because that year it was polite to be polite to the underprivileged. He scratched his head. Far away, somebody shouted, "Don't come to me! I told you I couldn't answer for the cluster sampling!" A door opened and shut. Clearly: "Run off and lick her boots then." "You may go in now, Captain Truck," said the receptionist. So far, nobody had offered any options. Suddenly remembering Angina Seng's big Chambers gun, he wondered just how much of her gravitational attraction it represented. What was really keeping him here? "I can see you're wearing a girdle," he said. "As a matter of interest, where am I?" Her smile curdled: it was polite that year for the underprivileged to be polite back. "The Israeli Con- 14 The Centaur/ Device sulate," she said, "and I don't think you ought to go round saying things like that to people." But he was already on his way through the unmarked door, shouting "You can just entirely forget about it, Miss Seng!" She wasn't there, of course. "Oh hell!" He went to leave, but some nosy treacherous element of his make-up had already slammed the door behind him and faced him up to the room's other occupant. General Alice Gaw, postmenopausal but hardly decayed at all: onetime vacuum-commando, late of the Fleet Police, now prime executive of IWG's military arm, with a roving commission and carte blanche in any matter of hemiglobal security. Decorated and feted, she had been one of the six enigmatic "wardens" of the discontinued Environmental Prison experiment—that nodal myth of the hinterlands, its seeping ducts peopled with ghouls, its vaults packed with lost souls in Gothic decaying orbits about the solar enormity of their own innocence, administered by Fungus Men with cattle prods for arms and ECT machines for heads; and closed-down eventually, so rumor had it, by the revulsion of the very elements of IWG politics that had demanded its institution. Rumor had it also that Alice Gaw was the only one of the Six ever to regret the move. She was short and heavily built. She wore the sleeves of her Women's Army uniform perpetually rolled up to display chapped muscular forearms, and affected the coarse jocularity of a male psychiatric nurse. Truck knew her by repute: her eyepatch was a Galactic curiosity, her hands were thick and square. She radiated a fiercely ambiguous sexual energy which was more disturbing for her consciousness of it than for its actual effect. Lineal descendant of that characteristic blossom of the twentieth century, the "National Security Manager," with a grasp of the art of ad hoc politics almost as breath-taking as the speed of her rise in the IWG hi- The Centaur/ Device 15 erarchy, she fixed Truck with an eye the color of concrete and said: "I want to talk to you, boyo, and I can't do that until you pack it hi and sit down." She grinned at him and flopped herself ungracefully into the nearest chair as if inviting him by example— throwing one leg over the other, quite aware of the great expanses of powerful thigh thus exposed. She had varicose veins. "Whatever it is," said Truck, "no. I had enough of this hi the Fleet. I've got my discharge papers here—" Then, recklessly, because he was fighting down an emotion rather like panic, "You don't look like a member of the Chosen Race to me, General.'* This, he managed to deliver with an insinuating snigger. The General, though, merely adjusted her eyepatch and sighed. Her bleached-out hair was chopped off all the way round her head at ear level; her nose had been broken during a police action on Weber II. "I don't like you either, sonny, but Fm keeping quiet about it. This baiting stuff doesn't work on me, so forget it. I'm simply an executive of the World Government, doing a job. If you've got any sense, you won't make it difficult for me. I wouldn't have had you within a yard of this office if it hadn't been absolutely necessary." She studied his clothing with distaste. "I can't believe we ever had you hi the Fleet," she said. "God, what a shambles it must have been." He had been rendered uncomfortable despite every resolution. "You own half a world, General, and it isn't this one. Half of Earth you neither govern nor own; and to the rest of the Galaxy you have no right whatever. That lays you open." "We govern the civilized world. We police the civilized colonies. Without the security we represent, scabs like you might have less freedom to speak. Would you 16 The Centaur; Device chop logic with a UASR representative sitting in my place? There are three hundred billion people in the Galaxy and we have only one per cent of them. We're outnumbered, and we have what they want. Everything that happens out here affects us.** Truck shrugged. Events would carry him; it was only left to him to discover in which direction. Abruptly, two separate images welled up from the back of his head— He recalled the Negev, the hot boredom broken only by brief violent engagements with infiltrators from the Union of Arab Socialist Republics, the dull report of a Chambers gun, the dreadful anger that welled up when he realized he had been, shot at. And he saw the packed corpse-boats orbiting Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici, their cold spectral avenues limned with a faint milky light, the plastic packing cases filled with dead children, the ranked carcasses of the adults without box of any kind, the wounds glittering at him like eyes; he smelled them. "Get on with it," he said. **Have you got anything good to smoke? Oh well." "You may have to pay a little more attention than that, laddie." She swung her leg, tapped the table. Truck locked his hands in his lap and played absently with them. It looked as if it might be a long session. "We don't know very much," began General Gaw, "about the old inhabitants of the Centauri system: they were the first of the so-called 'civilized* races too intercept the wave-front of human expansion; they were wiped out as a coherent group two centuries ago in what we've been taught to call since the *Centauri Genocide.' Shut up, Truck. You don't understand enough of anything for your opinion to be worth anything to me. That was what the intellectuals of the time called it. I'm in favor of intellectuals as a whole, but I have reservations. The Centauri Device 17 "However, it was a traumatic business for humanity, that can hardly be denied; and by the time we'd finished running round getting off on our guilt complexes, tile Centauri survivors had bolted off like rats and scattered themselves over the newly-colonized planets. They were absorbed fairly quickly—no drive, you see; they lacked cultural strength. "They were enough like us to suggest common ancestry fit had already been discovered that two miscegenations out of three were fruitful or some such revolting thing); they weren't at all native to the Centauri system, although nobody ever discovered traces of them anywhere else; there was even some speculation that they might have originated on Earth, which reaBy put the cat among the pigeons. "But the rubbish died down, and at least one decent piece of thinking came out of it Marsden's hypothesis of Niche Competition described the Galaxy as an ecological complex in which separate space-going races replace the separate species of a planetary ecosphere. The competition between species whose demands on the environment are identical is inevitable, natural, and harsh. "Yes, I do believe it, as a matter of fact. Never mind that. Keep your grubby little fingers out of my head. "Now. "The peculiar thing about that war is that the Cen-taurans needn't have lost it. They couldn't have won, but for fifteen years they stood us off; then, quite suddenly, they stopped intercepting the MIEVs and the atmospheric intruders. Within three days, Centauri VTI was rubbished. They did a good job of that sort of thing in those days. "But listen to this, Truck: we had an on-planet intelligence network down there, living as Centaurans, poor sods—it's in the records—and they were sending reports through right up until Centauri VTI chucked it in. So why did they commit suicide, laddie, when they'd just concluded R&D on a weapon they fully ex- 18 The Centaur/ Device pected to finish the whole shooting match in then- favor? "You think about that, while we talk about you. "You were born in the Pontisport hinterland on Parrot, in the rest room of a bakery. Your mother was a part-time port whore, one of the refugees who came down the Carling Line in refrigerators from Weber II. She was mainlining adrenochrome activators cut with the ribosomes of a local breed of bat. She asked for a cure, but the port authorities already had her scheduled for resettlement as a displaced person. No, I'm not asking you any of this, I'm telling you—because I know more about you than you know about yourself. "Spaceport Annie Truck was shipped to the Heavy Stars when you were six months old. AdAcs penetrate the placenta, of course, and you had to be weaned off the stuff. She left you behind. Do you ever dream about bats? "But what's more important about Annie is this: she was a full-blooded Centauran. "As far as we can decide statistically, there's a ninety-four per cent chance that she was the last true Centauran to exist in the Galaxy. That makes you,a half-breed, Truck. Finally, on this score at least: for some reason, Annie had the primogeniture. If you'd ever read a book, you might have recognized your bone-structure and general proportion as predominantly Centauran. Your father had weak genes, whoever he was. "You won't find that so amusing in a minute, chum-mie. "Let's go back to the Centauran War. Have it your own way, genocide; it honestly makes no difference to me. That weapon existed, you know. The MI reports worried us then, but we have our own reasons now. "We found it, Truck. "Some bloody lunatic of an archaeologist found it in a bunker cut three miles into the crust of Centauri VII, The Centaur/ Device 19 as nasty a little bolthole as ever I saw, and I've seen a lot. "We found it, but we don't know how to work it. We can't even get very close to it. We can't get any instrument readings off it. I've seen it myself, and it seems half sentient. Can you see that, Truckie—a sentient bomb? "We need your genes. They gave up and conceded Centauri without using the weapon all right; but they built its operating codes into the chromosomes of their unborn brats, because they wanted to be able to sneak back to it like dogs to sick, later. It won't go off without a Centauran. "Annie died twenty years ago, and you're the only one we could find." Truck mulled it over a little. He felt a wry sympathy for the port lady from Weber II. It was easy to see his own birth as a momentary lapse, a miscalculation. But again: had Annie Truck answered some unconscious •urge on Parrot? In dividing, to produce another vector, a small image of herself? As if by that multiplication of possibilities, the long uncomprehending migration might be expedited—something lost by her might be gained by him. This in the silence that followed General Gaw*s monologue, while her good eye impaled him and wouldn't let go. All spacers are incurably sentimental. Eventually, he got out of his chair and stood looking down at her. "How much good will your bomb do us when you drop it?" he asked. He wasn't sure on whose behalf he was asking. He fingered the tear in his jacket. "Who will you drop it on?" When she said, "I expected that, Truck, it's predictable from the way you dress. You can leave it out, because I don't need it," he turned his back on her. She went on: "We blew two UASR agents in the team that 20 The Centaur/ Device uncovered the Centauri Device. There was a third, but we didn't discover that until he'd shoved off. 'That's what it's about, duckie; it always is." Indistinctly, because he was thinking about something else: "Then get someone else to prime the thing, General." He reached the door, went as far as touching the handle, then faced her again. "I was on Morpheus," he said. "I stacked them up for the graveyard orbit at Cor Caroli. I've seen the library footage of Weber II. You understand, I don't care if you and the Arabs blow each other to junk. But I loaded people who'd never heard of you on to those boats." She was still lounging, undisturbed and negligent, her thighs powerful and ugly, her eye bright and compelling. He was growing terrified less of what she represented than of the woman herself. "That shanghai attempt," he said, "was it to persuade me that the Arabs want to talk to me too? That would have made it nice and easy to accept whatever deal you have in mind, wouldn't it? Don't do it again. I'll try and kill the next lot, so help me. The only people who wear lace-ups are Fleet Police. It only makes you look silly, you see. No spacer would be seen dead in lace-up shoes. At least the Arabs have the gumption to dress their men for the part." She laughed, breezy and fierce. **I told the stupid bitch it wouldn't work. Fm going to have to have a chat with her." She swung her lega out of the chair and leaned forward. "I can't say I didn't expect this. We need you, we were prepared to pay for you—but there won't be any offers now." Truck opened the door. "You've got yourself into my bad books, I don't mind telling you that. I'm giving you twenty-four hours to consider it, then I'll have you pulled in. Wherever you are. The charge will be trading in Fleet medical The Centauri Device 21 supplies when you were last on Earth, and I can prove it. "I'll be here if you should decide to behave yourself. Bye-bye, laddie." Truck closed the door quietly after him. He went back to the Spacer's Rave, feeling as if he had suddenly gained a dependent Why should Annie Truck and her AdAc habit be on fas conscience? It was a strange reversal, but under the hinterland lamps, all kinds of dependency are possible. It assumed a kind of reality: Annie flickered into life for him there, and he accepted her. Tiny Skeffern was winding up his gig in a desultory fashion: "Phencyclidine Dream," which he always used as his encore, was over; bass drums and most of the audience had packed up and gone home, but a cadaverous ectomorphic spacer was sitting smirking stupidly over the controls of the Rave's H-Line synthesizer, making attic, flutelike noises, while Tiny picked at the high notes with meditative fingers. Only the stoned and persistent remained to listen, wondering how they might find somewhere to go, something to do at four-thirty St. Crispin's Day morning on Sad al Ban IV. By the time the last of them had lurched out onto the street, dirty brown light was filtering between the buildings and the vapor lamps were ^wan. An occasional chandler, bleary and reluctant with sleep, crept past the door of the Rave on his way to another day. Tiny turned it all off and gently laid the Fender in its hardshell case. He slapped the shoulder of the guy on the synthesizer, yawned, did a weary shuffle. "Oh, man." There is a kind of cold particular to the dawn. All nightside losers know and revere it for its healing stimulant properties. Shivering and grinning at one another, Truck and Tiny hunched off toward the port and Truck's boat. The compass wind blew: it lay in wait for them at intersections, came whistling round the corners of warehouses to meet them. When that hap- 22 The Centaur/ Device pened, Tiny would run on ahead, swinging the Fender case and kicking out at bits of rubbish in the gutter. "Hey look," he said, "it's an Opener." Waddling down Bread Street toward them in the morning chill was an enormous splay-footed, wobbling man wearing a plum-colored cloak. His head was bald and round, his features streamlined into his facial tissue so that they were mere suggestions of a mouth, a nose, a chin. His eyes were swaddled deep and tight in flaps and swathes of flesh. His cloak was open at the front He was an Opener all right—one of that curious sect whose members believe that honesty of bodily function is the sole valid praise of God (the existence of whom they freely and frequently aver), that function being analogous, it only through cortical representation, to the very motions of the psyche. When the wind peeled back the cloak, he was naked. His body was shaved as hairless as his head, his skin was like a pink, shiny polymer. Let into his stomach, thorax, and belly were the thick plastic windows the Openers have surgically inserted to show off then- internal processes. They were surrounded by thick callused lips of flesh, and nothing altogether pleasant was going on behind them. He stared as he passed Truck and Tiny: His eyes were black and secretive. He had eaten a fairly light breakfast. He moved his small, indeterminate lips into a smile. Suddenly, a short thick arm whipped from under his cloak (as if the action were quite divorced from him, the arm belonging to some dwarf or ape hiding beneath the garments—his smile remained). His meaty hand clutched John Truck's shoulder. "Here," said Truck. "Get off." "Good morning, Captain," said the Opener. "I am Dr. Grisbkin. The Lord is kind." "What?" Truck, gazing through the windows on Dr. Grishkin's raw and convoluted soul, recalled that he The Centat/ri Device 23 hadn't eaten for some time. The Opener still had hold of his arm. His stomach rumbled. "I have just this moment come from your ship. Your bosun told me you were unavailable. Fm glad to find him wrong." "That's right," mumbled Truck, "not available. Sorry." Dr. Grishkin nodded slowly, once—until he was looking at Truck like a sad fat animal from the cave-mouth of his own brows. It was accomplished, it was dramatic. With his free hand, he spread his cloak wide. Truck began to feel ill. "Captain, I open myself to you. I appeal to you. Although I can see by your outfit you are not one of my scattered brothers, I know from here"—he tapped each of his windows in turn—"that you are a man of principle, even of charity. Captain, I beg of you the help only you can give." Truck shuddered. Dr. Grishkin's enigmatic eyes, full of the revelations of the organism, held his, unwavering. The grip on his arm was paternal, gentle; it was possessive. He experienced an overpowering sensation of dejd vu. Over Grishkin's rounded shoulder, he could see right along Bread Street, which was empty and indifferent. Having got him into this, it wasn't going to get him out. Screw all streets, he thought. He knew he had to break free: ulterior motive or mere charisma, Grishkin was too strong for him. He was fearful of discovering what the Opener wanted. A port lady saved him. Trudging sexually down the street with a stoned deck hand hanging on her arm, she swept her long beautiful hah1 out of her eyes and winked at him boldly. He watched her swaying back until it was a wriggling iota in the deadly perspective of the street. Then he said: "Grishkin, piss off." And he walked away, leaving Tiny Skeffern and the Opener staring after him. Tiny was puzzled, but there 24 The Centaur/ Device was a certain satisfaction in Grishkin's unconvincing eye. Truck sensed that he had not won the encounter, only postponed it Tiny caught up, swinging the Fender case. "I think I am going to be sick," he chuckled. "How can he live with his own breakfast like that?" Truck stopped and watched the Opener watching him. His neck ached, and the wind stung his tender lip. "Tiny," he said, "I'm going to Earth. There's no better place to be arrested." "What?" Out in space, other winds blew. While thoughtful Truck brooded round the exterior screens, gazing at the flying streamers of illusion produced by Ella's improbable progress through the impossible medium of the dyne fields, Fix the bosun prepared him meals he didn't eat. "You got to eat, boss." Tiny Skeffern patched his Fender into the communi* cations equipment. Broadcasting the "Dynaflow Blues" into the quaking, distorted universe outside—trailing slow ribbons of tachyon noise that might some day and in some unimaginably distant place be received and decoded as a stretched, alien music—the ship groped and crabbed and hurtled her way by turns a few light years closer to her captain's destiny. Nobody mentioned Earth until it became necessary for landing procedures. By that time, Truck had six of his twenty-four hours left THREE The Longest-running Party in the History of the Universe Earth: IWG and UASR, initially parasites of the political muscle-tissue, had eaten what remained of their twentieth-century hosts during the aftermath of the tragic and infamous "Rat Bomb" wars of 2003-15, when the satellite system, that uneasy and paternalistic compromise between autonomy and empire, fragmented and fell apart. A new Arabia swallowed the entire Sino-Soviet continent, engulfed the more fertile areas of Africa, but lost its original nerve center in Egypt IWG swelled to contain both Americas, the husk of the unsuccessful European Economic Community, and the Mediterranean shores. Between them, they devasted Australasia and, in a quarrel over the missile pits of Antarctica, set fire to the Pacific Ocean. Now, they faced one another along the crooked boundary lines of the Syrian Desert and the Taurus Mountains, the cratered wastes of the German Strip, the Bering Sea. Silos in the radio-glass puddle of the 25 26 The Centauri Device Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keetyards of Nubia. They disputed the Red Sea—warily, in gunboats—from the Israeli, causeway at Sinai to the fifty-lane Arabian road bridge at Al Shaab. Hydrofoil flotillas, spraying rainbow arcs of oil and semipolymers to calm the sea before them, patrolled the South Atlantic; above them, piloted missile interceptors hung in precarious fragmentary orbits; and off' the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, enigma and threat under its power dome, humped out of the Magellan Strait like a huge, stranded alien fish. There were many fronts, but few confrontations; they used the Galaxy for those. It would have been naive to consider the inheritors of the Earth as "Jews" and "Arabs": they had sold that birthright, and retained of it only the terminology. The millennial grievances that had motivated their wars prior to the last quarter of the nineteen hundreds had vanished; in consolidating their secondhand empires, they had merged a thousand nationalities and religions, only to lose their own. More important, perhaps: each of them had surrendered its self-determination in favor of the politico-social and economic principles of the dead powerblocs —so that they were caught in the inevitable conflict of ideologies already worn pitifully thin four hundred years before, when Tiny Skeffern's shiny antique had given its first performance. 2367: the Mohorovicic Discontinuity was mined on both sides of the Red Sea Fault. There were no more neutral zones. Truck decided to visit his wife. Cor Caroli was visible over the deserted inspection pits of Cartels Snort when, unaware of his position as an activator of entropy, he brought his boat down among them. He knew it for a murder-star, the killer in the houndpack of Venatici; but as yet he did not ex- The Centaur/ Device 27 pect that his own star would eventually outshine h on all scales of magnitude. He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bosun, who stood stubbornly on the loading ramp of My Ella Speed, coughing in the dirty winter air of Earth and saying: "I'll bring the chopper, boss." Truck shook his head. "You stay here, Fix. Tiny will ten you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again." Fix grinned with embarrassment His teeth were like a sawmill. "You need big protection out there, boss. HI just—" He made off toward the corner of the hold where he kept his stuff. "Leave that bloody thing where it is, Fix. You're not coming." "Stuff it." "Sorry." He was, too. He fastened his second-best jacket, a heavy brown leather thing lined with peculiar gray fur from some place he had never been. Some of his hair got stuck in the ornamental zip; zips were as fashionable in the hinterlands that year as Tiny Skeffern and for similar reasons. He shrugged at Fix. He left the ramp. Tiny was still in the ship. Hearing Truck's receding boot heels, he stuck his head out of the forward lock and, silhouetted against the cabin lights, puffed ectoplasm into the frosty night. "Fll be at the Boot Palace on Sauchihall if you need me," he called. "Thanks, Tiny." Gazing sentimentally back over his shoulder, Truck lost his footing among the clumps of couch-grass that had forced their way through the broken concrete of the landing field. "See you." 28 The Centaur/ Device He brushed himself down and trudged out into the empty, depressed streets of Carter's Snort. Most northerly of the five major zones of Albion Megaport (that 60,000 square mile complex of bunker-docks, keelyards, freight terminals, and warehouses that had once been called "Great Britain"), the Snort had been the first of them to succumb to the domino recessions of the post-colonial period, and the only one never to have recovered. Cargo was no longer handled there, and no ships were built—although a few keelyards still had tower cranes erected above them, as if to disguise their impotence. Only the breakers flourished, catering to the spares trade and melting down what they couldn't resell hi great pig-furnaces that turned the midnight concrete arcades of Carter's Snort into a dull red maze. Its original population dispersed in search of work, the zone had moved quickly through that process of cultural decay peculiar to ports, attracting the poor, the rootless, the ruthless—and finally the artistic and cheap intellectual elements not only of IWG but of the stars. The only music you heard in Carter's Snort was the New Music. Its feet were booted. It was the hinterland of aH hinterlands. Truck, who had once lived there long enough to make one of his more elementary errors, hunched his shoulders and walked east. He stopped for a moment to gaze at the broken spine of a refrigerator ship curving up out of its own corroding ribs, his face over-lighted by the savage glare of the plasma torches; their half-visors dark and numinous, the wreckers grinned at him, a race of amiable Vandals. FREE ANYWHERE, said the graffiti on the walls of the dim derelict warehouses; SUSQUEMADELION UVES, and IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH? Truck laughed; he liked them; he felt at home. He pulled his collar up and ignored the few bitter flakes of snow that stung his face when he turned into the wind. Ruth Berenici Truck lived in wrecker territory down The Centauri Device 29 by the river. He stood in the street looking up at her windows and wondering not so much why he had come as what part of him had suggested it. Silent explosions of light from the yards, then the tolling of a monstrous girder as it flexed and fell. The walls had been his manuscript when he still slept here: all the way up to her floor, they sent him messages from a youthful alien head. GO HOME TRUCK. He didn't remember doing that one. Ruth Berenici stood outside her open door, presenting out of nervousness her left profile only, perfect and still. She was tall and thin, she moved very slowly. Her eyes were gray (devoid, though, of ice), her hair was streaked with it; her jaw muscles were a little too strong. "Ruth." "I saw you in the street." Ruth Berenici had allowed the universe to wound her at every turn; because of this, she possessed nothing but a sad grace, a yielding internal calm. Truck reached out to touch her right cheek. She closed her eyes, and the left side of her mouth smiled. "It's still there, John." That hesitant turn of the head; the full face revealed; he bit the inside of his cheek in a kind of sexual shock. "Why are you shivering?" he asked. He experienced a brief memory of her ascending the cellar steps of the Boot Palace some years before, a sectional assumption in the weak wet light of the Carter's Snort dawn. He found one of her long hands, trapped ft. "There are times when"—she disengaged her hand, spread the fingers, pressed them flat against his chest—"I know you." She shook her head. Profound bruised areas about her eyes, mark of the eternal victim. "No, you're not coming in—w The hand moved away, leaving no bruises on his second-best hide, no marks of any kind. 30 The Centaur! Device "—unless you're staying this time." Ruth recognized the significance of moments. It was her only defense. "I am this time,** he lied. The room had changed, but he found one of his hats in a cupboard. "You did it up nicely. I thought you might have gone somewhere else." Later, placing one of his hands beneath her tiny breasts: "Here." Ruth worked in the front office of Bayley, the wrecker's on Lead Alley; at night, she brought him amusing presents ripped off from Bayley's stock. He stayed in the room all day because he knew it would hurt her to come back and find him out. He slept a tot He scratched at the frost patterns on the inside of the window—stared, mildly surprised to discover himself stffl free. They quarreled, crammed into her narrow hot bed. "Why did you go?" Abruptly moving her leg, watching him seriously. And: <(We ought to be able to talk about it now." *'I don't really know. Come on." "No, wait a minute, we ought to be able to talk about things like that." He grunted at the ceiling, rolled onto his stomach. "Oh well.** He got out of bed, scratching listlessly at the hair under his armpits. With nothing to do all day, he had become a glutton for sleep, perpetually dozy. He felt as if a layer of sponge separated him from objects, from the floor. *'I have to move. I have to meet new people. I like people." She followed him round the room, talking over his shoulder, picking things up and putting them down again. "In the abstract, in the abstract. Liking everybody keeps individuals at a distance. If you can feel respon- The Centaur/ Device 31 sible for some smashed port loser you never met, why not me?" "Oh, that's a bit simplif—M "Right." She pressed herself against him, all that amazing white flesh, tinted smoky blue in its declivities. "You'll go again. Ill be hurt, but I'll stffl be here. This will always be here waiting for you." She snatched his hand, forced him to touch her right cheek, her belly and thighs. He shrugged. "I don't believe it's like that at all." He picked his jacket up and began to go through the pockets. Back on the bed, Ruth snifiled. "I'm sorry." She faced the wall. "Stuff your bloody head with dope, then." Four days. , Nobody came. Nobody arrested him (except Ruth: the longer he stayed, the more frightened she became of his eventual departure—it was an ascending spiral of dependence). He was at the window constantly, watching the snow turn to sleet and then rain. Out in wrecker territory the plasma torches hissed; whole plantations of steel were pruned and lopped; the dark-visored gnomes bobbed and grinned. Caught between Ruth's inability to feel anything but pain and the uncertainty of his own position, Truck grew nervous and mean. He didn't understand how General Gaw and her police could have missed him. He needed information. He picked moody bones with Ruth when she came home from work—finally put on his jacket and left the house. Tiny Skeffern couldn't tell him anything. "Something is moving down there underneath it all,** he said, blowing on his fingers to warm them up. It was practice afternoon at the Boot Palace, but die rest of his band hadn't turned up. "But nobody's mentioning your name." 32 The Centaur? Device He was squatting on the dusty stage, up to his elbows in an amplifier. The Boot Palace was gloomy and cold, smelling of stale audience. Grimy swirls of fluorescent dye blinked dimly from its cavernous walls, echoes of the previous night's safari. "The narcotics police are getting ready to close Chalice Veronica's import operation. You're not in-. volved with that are you?" He plugged in. Nothing happened. "I'd like to see Veronica," said Truck. "He has paid ears." Tiny kicked his amp. "Look here, fuck you, work," he said. He washed his hands of it. "Le^'s go and get smashed," he suggested, "We could drop in on Veronica later." Td have to tell Ruth," said Truck. But it was past dark before he made it back to the wrecking grounds. Somewhere between Three Jump House and the Spastic Quasar he stole.a great pink Vulpeculan fruit as a present for Ruth. He and Tiny ran through the rain on opposite sides of the street, tossing this obscene thing between them until-it began to show signs of irreversible wear. They giggled. Tiny was falling down a lot "Shush," whispered Truck, as they sneaked up the stairs. GO HOME TRUCK, said the walls. He missed a step. Ruth's present ballooned away through the darkness Ske a stupid ghost, pink and glowing. "Catch it, Tiny!" He knocked on the door. "Ruth?" No answer. Tiny chuckled. "It went all the way down again." He tried to balance the fruit on one finger. "Not going to let you in, mate. Oops." "Ruth?" No answer. Truck lowered himself carefully down, sat with his back to the door. Faint sounds of someone weeping filtered through it. They came from far away, and made The Centaur/ Device 33 him infinitely upset. "Oh, Ruth, I'm sorry." He brightened up. "Let us in and well give you something." Tiny dropped the fruit. "Yes." "Just go away," said Ruth from the other side of the door. "Just go away, John." He left the fruit. He shrugged. Halfway down the stairs, he hung over the banister and vomited dismally. His eyes watered. "Tiny," he said, "we're losers. What good is all this doing us?" Ruth Berenici sat on her narrow bed, taH and gray and beautiful, tracing with her fingertips the scar that immobilized the right side of her head from beneath the eye down to that place where neck meets shoulder. It would be naive to mistake John Truck's half of that ramshackle, enduring affair for pity. It might well have been the other way round. Chalice Veronica, the intellectual pusher-king, lived in a five-story converted warehouse, a grim and ancient monument behind the old rocket-mail pits of Renfield Street. Beneath the pits, he plied his trade, in a chain of fuel cisterns abandoned during the domino recessions. There the myriad sensations of the Galaxy were cut, stored, packaged, and dispatched (it was rumored) by a hundred naked Denebian mainliners working out a mysterious debt to the King. For miles in every direction, the earth was honeycombed with traps and tunnels and boltholes. Above ground, in twenty sumptuous rooms, the longest-running party in the history of the universe was still in progress. People were born, people died there; some were said to have lived entire lives there. It slowed, but it never stopped; the dope was benign, the cuts were appetizing—and, by agile bribery, the King kept even the least of his guests safe from harm and from all arrest 34 The Centaur/ Device It couldn't last for much longer. Every six months, each room was redecorated in the style of the Important Moment: now, the moment was twentieth century. Captain John Truck (somewhat recovered from his recent malaise) and Tiny Skeffern entered the King's domain by a chromium plated vagina, passed into a plastic lobby where valuable objets