The Centauri Device (10 page)

Here, they sat down. Himation disappeared into the depths of the suite, returning shortly to flourish his cloak over the table top (rose petals stirred like leaves of another year, and a remote scent filled the room) and manifest a bottle of wine. He held up his hand — prolonged the moment — four glasses appeared, their stems between his fingers. A faint musical tone.

Pater smiled on indulgently.

John Truck, like most spacers, was strictly contemporary. He preferred the latest things. He had no particular use for history, little knowledge of it except where it coincided with fashion, and no desire whatever to live in it. He regarded Pater's rose bowl with suspicion, feeling that he might be the butt of some rare intellectual joke, and Pater himself with a faint hostility. He couldn't understand the dualism of character suggested by the rich studio on one hand and this monkish living room on the other; he couldn't discover a reason for any of it.

So when Pater, eyeing Himation's hands with severe appreciation as they passed the glasses round the table, said, 'I admired your effort on Morpheus, Captain,' he didn't quite know how to respond. After a moment:

'I only did it for the money,' he said curtly. He sensed an opening gambit and was determined not to be enlisted. 'It was a long time ago, and on another world; I don't remember much about it; it was the last time I ever pushed dope. I didn't even realize your lot were organizing a revolution until quite late on. I probablv wouldn't have done it if I had.'

This last wasn't wholly true. He had enjoyed the last days on Morpheus when it became plain through the smoke and the smarting eyes that the putsch had succeeded. Living among the ruins had made no demand on him; and, like Himation, the anarchists who had used his peddling operation as a cover had been self-contained, amiable, demanding little. But he had been used, nonetheless. He scowled at himself, opened his mouth; but before he could make it plain that he wouldn't be used again, Himation had interrupted.

'Come on, Pater,' he reproved. 'Your studio's a proverb in porcelain; Chalice Veronica is quite without taste among plastic furniture; and Captain Truck's a hero on Morpheus' — his eyes glittered ironically at Truck from underneath his hatbrim — 'whether he likes it or not.

But he's also come all the way from Earth on your invitation; at least tell him why you asked him here.' He winked broadly. Truck looked away.

'In these days of rapid and convenient travel,' said Pater thoughtfully, 'to come from Earth does not necessarily denote any great strength of character. Honesty does, however, despite its determination to undress all over my living room — do you imagine that I care in the least what the artist's motives are, Captain?' He showed his white teeth at Himation across the table. 'As for
why
, you Philistine, you conjuror: out of courtesy. What else? Since we're going to steal the Captain's birthright from General Gaw the Bearded Lady, I feel we ought at least to tell him first.'

Tiny Skeffern understood even less of his surroundings than Truck, and found even less to say. He groaned and drank his thin astringent wine. He was wondering where he could steal a decent guitar. 'Take it easy, Truck,' he said.

John Truck got to his feet and gripped the edge of the table. He stared at the head of Bacchus on the wall, then at Himation the anarchist. 'You brought me here,' he said bitterly. 'You can take me back to my ship.' His gaze passed on to Pater, (but could only see filmy images of Alice Gaw's eyepatch and the eager gray face of the hermaphrodite pusher king). 'I'm sick of saying it,' he whispered. 'You can stuff your bloody Centauri Device. You can
stuff
it!' He walked back along the narrow corridor and stood in Pater's studio, resting his forehead on a cool wall. He heard Tiny hurrying after him, determinedly gave his attention to a print that seemed to depict an old man standing under a tree by a chasm. Tiny went away.

After a while, though, Pater came in.

He mounted the dais and considered the easel. He took up a fine bristling hog-hair and dabbed it at his canvas. The result of this he considered lengthily. 'Captain, I don't want the Device,' he said, his voice echoing slightly in the tall room. 'All I want to do, dear boy, is take it from General Gaw. You understand? If she wants it, if UASR want it, badly enough for them to fight openly in the street for the man who can make it work — if they are prepared to do that, then I don't care for either of them to have it. You see?' He sighed. 'You don't.'

Truck ignored him, but he had abandoned the print despite himself and was staring at the busy shoulders of the white linen suit. Painting unconcernedly, Pater went on:

'I certainly don't want
you
. I may have gathered my following from "rag pickers, knife grinders and tinkers," but at least they're decently dressed; you, on the other hand, look like one of Veronica's tramps. You have no aesthetics and less education. You fail even in your responsibility for this thing dug up on a dead planet by a lunatic. Ah! So far, you have saved the Galaxy immense pain solely by your own selfishness! If Gaw gets her hands on it, and if it's what she thinks it is, some vast new atrocity will eclipse Centauri itself; yet you've made no attempt to ensure it won't happen — all you've done so far is to run away from people you don't much like.'

He swung round from his palette, an awful contempt distorting his face (for an instant, Truck glimpsed the brilliant carnivore beneath the skin and understood that, against all odds, it was a moral animal); caught Truck staring at him; laughed.

'What could you and I
possibly
have in common?'

He frowned.

'I sense in you something I'll never possess. A strength, a vast and implacable iconoclasm.

We live in a sick charade of political polarities; of death, bad art, and wasted time — all in the cause of ideologies that were a century out of date in their heyday. I sense that you of all people have it in you to end that, and make me as obsolete as Earth (for I'll be redundant if IWG and UASR give up their corpse's grip). Ridiculous, isn't it?'

He left the easel.

'So: a deal then, Captain, after all! If I take the tiling from the Bitch of All the Galaxy and give it to you instead, will you accept your responsibility for its final disposition? Take it, dear boy. You
are
the last Centauran, and I'll only lose it somewhere if you don't.'

And he held out his hand.

They returned to the sitting room, where Pater poured more wine. Himation left them soon after that. He glittered at Truck from under his hat and said: 'Well be moving out soon, so I'd better go and arm the
Atalanta
. But well meet again, Captain, I hope. If not, good luck. Bore him, Pater, and I'll make you vanish in filthy smoke.' He swept out, cloak billowing; and as his long legs carried away down the corridor, they heard him intone,

' "Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers, Maiden most perfect, lady of light . . . " '

'He's good at that conjuring stuff,' said Tiny Skeffern, belching reminiscently. 'I'll give him that.'

The Interstellar Anarchist smiled. 'He's my son,' he told Tiny quietly, 'but despite that the best cruiser captain I've ever had.'

'Christ,' said Truck, rolling some wine round his mouth. 'This ethanol's some rough old stuff.'

Pater winced.

The Interstellar Anarchist, an Aesthetic Adventure — Part Two

'She's transferring the Device to Earth, Captain — a decision taken against the advice of her staff nearly three days ago, when she thought she had you safe in Albion Megaport. She is most anxious to effect an introduction between the two of you.'

It was some hours after the conversation in the studio. Truck had bathed, eaten, even slept a bit, and was now nearing the end of Pater's guided tour of Howell (which he did in fact insist on calling 'Versailles').

'But it seems the Device will not abide the dyne fields for more than a second or two at a time, so a journey that should have taken hours is still in progress. They send the transporter into Dynaflow drive and — pop! — out it comes again, for no reason that can be discovered.

They have gained a few light days. In it goes again — and so it goes on. A comic process with a real attraction for us.'

Pater stood, ridiculously neat and dapper, beneath the great ventral curve of a ship named
Driftwood of Decadence
, which had squeezed itself into one of the massive repair silos of the asteroid like a wasp in an apple. To his white suit and green carnation he had added a fantastic low-crowned hat of cream straw. Here at the rim of Howell, away from the generators at the core, the artificial gravity was a little feeble: Pater bounced in it as if perpetually embarking on an
entrechat
, thumbs stuck into his waistcoat pockets.

'To keep pace with its charge, the Fleet escort must spend a lot of time out of Dyne. If we catch the convoy there, they can be embarrassed — we are lightly armed, but these vessels are quicker in ordinary space, and more maneuverable, than anything IWG or UASR has ever been able to field against us.'

Truck squinted the bright length of the
Driftwood of Decadence
. Turquoise arabesques glimmered mysteriously down her side; the smell of hot metal drifted about her like musk of a sleeping, barbaric priestess; the light of plasma torches exploded soundlessly off her hull to fill the silo with a ceremonial aurora. Pater — whom he had grown to like despite his incomprehensible humors and affectations — regarded him with a quizzical smile. He scratched his head. He was on the stony verge of some revelation.

'Who designed them for you?' he murmured. 'Who built them?' He reached out to touch one of the great anhedral tail-surfaces; she was warm and vibrant. Suddenly, he was at the very edge of it all.
'Where did they come from, Pater?'
and — tumbling down the steep scarp of understanding — 'Where?' This almost a sigh, because for spacers there is one ritual enigma, and he was within sight of something unbelievable.

Pater laughed and took his arm. 'You could say I found them,' he suggested, 'or again, that they were given to me.' He examined these ideas for a time; neither seemed to satisfy him.

'Shall we walk back? I'll tell you something of it as we go.' But he said nothing more until they had reached the sphere of armories, the sphere of stillness. There, head tilted as if to catch the ghost of ecclesiastical music, he gazed at a bank of long black torpedoes and began abruptly, 'Imagine it, Captain!

'My ship was experimental. Some discontinuity, some lapse of topology — a woman nervously twisting a lilac stalk — had torn her out of the dyne fields. She was spiraling along the vacant rim of the Galaxy, her Dynaflow drivers gone. Imagine the horror with which I stared at the place they had occupied, watching a few thin-film control circuits drift about the engine room. Nothing more remained, just those few flakes of technology — as if
lunaria
annua
had shed its seeds in free fall!

'I rushed to the exterior screens, despairing. But there — ! A clinker, a cinder, the merest of dim, dead suns! It took me two years to reach that place, Captain. I knew it was useless to me, I saw ahead only the cemetery orbit; but what else was I to do?

'I became irresolute, drifting for a month round that slagheap sun, the ship like a wounded arum lily. Can you see me? Then, a point-source on screens, a collision alarm! And there they were, seven times seven of them, slipping past like a train of comets approaching aphelion. I signaled them on all frequencies — they ignored me; I expended the last of my sub-Dyne fuel to overhaul them — they were undeviating; I boarded them — they were deserted.

'I boarded all of them — how bright their interiors were, how complicated and alien! —and all were empty but one; on the last, I discovered him.

'He came from nowhere you or I will ever see, Captain. He was heraldic. His exoskeleton glowed dark green like oiled metal, his wings were shot with bizarre gold veins, and his eye-clusters caught the light like globes of rough obsidian. Complex chrome-yellow symbols covered his carapace!

'He was dying, he had been dying out there for fifty years, adrift alone with his magnificent fleet. Ocher fluids leaked from his joints, strange burns cross-hatched his thorax.

'Imagine us! For months we strive to communicate. His weak forelimbs scrabble against the floor, creating pointless, agonized patterns! But he understood me long before I him. He came from outside, Captain; his ships had crossed the cruel gap between the Galaxies. He could not tell me where. He spoke of his race's millennia-long search for the metaphysical nature of space; of a disease or madness that had led his crews at last to blow their hatches and beat their wings deliriously against the vacuum, like the hawk moth against the attic lamp!

'I sent him to join them out there the day he died. In his ultimate throes he stung himself repeatedly, his long abdomen thrashing. He was desperate to explain the InterGalactic drive— he was desperate that someone should continue the search. But I could not grasp its principles, save perhaps to dimly comprehend this: the continuum has emotions — and the golden shins are the culmination of an Art addressed to Space itself!'

For some time, Pater brooded quietly over his dyne-torpedoes as if exhausted by his queer eloquence, even his gestures limp as they continued to sketch or imitate the feeble scratching limbs of the dead alien commander. When Truck prompted, 'But you learned to fly the ships in Dyne?' he snapped his fingers impatiently and muttered, 'Yes, of course. What does that matter? It was easy: their drivers are quite similar to our own; but what use are such engines when — ?' He contemplated that wasted opportunity.

'None,' agreed Truck, and walked on through the corridors of Howell — speechless, as spacers are when they consider that pillar of enigma at the closed gates of the Galaxy: the unattainable, the post-Galactic drive.

But five minutes later, Howell was shuddering to the clangor of alarms: In the 'Hotel Pimodan, 1849,' the laser holograms of Maryx and Baudelaire faded like specters, caught between a whisper and a significant smile, as the asteroid drew power for the launch of Pater's raiders;