M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device

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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.
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PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OP AMBBC*.
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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
2The 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
6t 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
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