The Centauri Device (24 page)

Truck moaned. He was seeing in half-tones. 'You should have given me a chance,' he murmured, supporting himself against the door-jamb.

Outside, the wind was gusting up to Force Eight. There was a small VTOL pad behind the building. Halfway to it, he collapsed; lay there surprised under the sickening slow sweep of the ultrasound antennae and examined his wound. The bolt had eaten its way into his ribs, low down on the right side. The fire had gone out, but something was leaking from a fist-sized hole.

'Oh God,' he prayed. 'Oh, Christ'

He leaned on one elbow in the frozen slush and retched with fear. He couldn't feel anything down there, no pain, nothing. He wiped his mouth, looked up. A single aircraft was on the pad. He hauled himself laboriously toward it, hissing and gasping every time his right side touched the ground, out of horror that he'd get something in the wound.

He hadn't once let go of the thing under his armpit was warm enough now to give him comfort in the wild night.

The Last Anarchist

It was 6 a.m. Christmas morning in Carter's Snort when John Truck brought the stolen VTOL into the abandoned rocket-mail field at Renfield Street. Snow was on the ground, Sauchihall was full of crêpe paper streaming in the wind; in warm entrances and fuggy hallways, the port ladies were singing carols to their customers.

He came in hard, failing to kill all the vehicle's forward momentum. It slewed drunkenly over the concrete, falling apart, to fetch up finally with a surprised grunt against the base of an old launching gantry. For a minute or two it pushed itself in a grinding, obsessive circle round the obstacle, like a blind and dying crab on an empty beach. Then the engine gave up, and there was only a thin hiss of low-pressure air escaping from a fractured puff-pipe in the wing.

Off in the dark, undercarriage wheels rolled toward the edge of the field, bouncing and spinning like tossed coins.

Truck let his forehead rest against the landing-computer display. He was delirious, full of morphine and amphetamines from the VTOL's survival kit; his lower chest was an awkward, pulpy bag of pain; visions came and went like minutes of wakefulness in a week of sleep. 'We made it, Pater,' he muttered.

After a while, he raised his head, feeling a pressure, a radiation on the back of his neck. He couldn't see Cor Caroli, but he knew it was up there somewhere, one bad eye winking sardonically down on all murder and death. Cor Caroli, dog into wolf. He pondered his own transmigration, accomplished somewhere between Sad al Bari and Centauri VII. Where had his old body gone? He was sick now, but he was all wolf.

The Device whispered urgently to him. He ignored it as much as he could, occasionally waving one preoccupied, impatient hand in front of his face as if to dispel the persistent fevers that hovered round his skull. It showed him movies of Omega Shaft. He was gray-faced, he was burning up. It cost a century of effort to drag himself out of the cockpit.

Civilizations rose and fell while he blundered up and down Renfield Street, trying to remember who he was.

'I'm coming,' he said petulantly. 'Don't rush me.'

The Snort hid coyly from him in a maze of side streets, then jumped out with no warning at all: Truck closed his doors to it — neon, mercury vapor, a piddle of sleet coming from somewhere up above the buildings to light up in the glow from the barfront windows — but it got to him somehow, warm and alive in the teeth of the compass wind, and guided him through the murk along thoroughfares that led only to places he didn't want to go. He staggered on, blue-lipped and anoxic; and at every corner, at every landmark, he picked up passengers to ride the lower decks of his skull —

The Boot Palace on Sauchihall: echoing and sour, haunted by a feeble echo of music. Its walls glimmered at him. Tiny Skeffern stood in the shadows there, kicking an amplifier in ghostly pique, shrugged; climbed aboard, as if Truck were some biological
Ella Speed
to lift him out and away from that place. Fix the bos'n stumped after him. 'Well need big protection, boss.' And settled down inside to keep watch through Truck's runny eyes —

West Central Detention: damp and dirty and down by the river. Out on the street among the rubble — maybe even hoping to be arrested and taken in to where he felt comfortable.

Singing and weaving: 'You look like I feel, Cap'n.' He turned away in that classic 6 a.m. pose, one hand flat against the wall to steady himself, head down crucified to vomit emptily. 'Give us a lift, bos'n, eh?' And he climbed on, too, winking and nodding. Behind him came Picking Nick and Angel and Og — caught holding for a friend, vagrant and eccentric — judged, sentenced, and condemned to become graffiti on a wall —

Bayley the Wrecker's: wind moved among the broken spines, chains clanked, but the specters there were tender enough to hurt him in regions beneath his delirium. Angina Seng smiled and winced — 'I could have gone for you.' Out among the giant metal, Annie Truck, port lady from way back, waddled toward him with dignity, massively up the stick with his own self, materializing from the scattered ribs of a refrigerator ship. Wherever he looked, sheep's eyes full of regret met his own —

They came to him whether he'd known them or not, until he thought his skin would burst from the pressure of their essence: every loser, every spacer who had ever lifted from a planet; every tired mute refugee who ever came down the Carling Line; the confused, the accused, the misused — the spiritual, moral, and metaphysical basket cases of fully two hundred years. They crowded — their odors of loss, all their heart-luggage, all their badges of despair — into the space behind his eyes, to stare out passive and inarticulate at the hinterland of all hinterlands: the displaced, the disgraced, the arrested, the outcast and unarmed, all his longtime dependents coming home to that inevitable junction after who knew what long uncomprehending trudge across the years and light years —

The new Centaurans.

Down by the prison he leaned over the parapet of a bridge. The river disappeared beneath him, oily and magical, constantly renewed. He owed them nothing, he owed them everything, and they were still pouring in. He knew he'd been drained, turned into an empty and purified vessel to receive precisely this draught, this visitation — 'What do you want?' But they simply stared on. What could he give them? How long could he hold together? He could only drag himself away from the bridge and take to the streets again, going — where?

Four hours later, Ruth Berenici Truck, rising late after a lonely night — turning the other, unscarred cheek to face the world as she opened the door — found him on her doorstep.

Where else should he be, now? He was curled up tight round his wound or the Centauri Device, and snow was in the hollows beneath his cheekbones.

He looked up at her with a pain so intense as to wake every echo of her own and said distinctly, 'No more. I'm full up. I'm hurt, Ruth. Can we come in?'

'All you have to do is be born,' he said later, trying to explain himself. And when she showed no sign of understanding (because you have to be crazy to live in the general rather than the particular). 'I can feel them in me. All us losers are Centaurans.'

Ruth Berenici sighed. She took away the chlorhexidene aerosol, the sulfanilamide powder, and the fouled dressings. 'What do I have to do to get in there?' she called from the kitchen.

Reappearing in the connecting doorway, slightly stooped, arms folded across her stomach: 'Die?' She went and frowned over the Centauri Device, continued almost absently, 'Is there a place for the living in your cosy little colony?'

'Ruth.'

'I'm sorry. Truck, what is this thing?'

'Whatever you see.' He laughed, coughed. 'It's an operator of entropy.'

Outside, it was afternoon: gray. Clouds raced through the sky. He was propped up on his side on the bed, where he'd been since she manhandled him in (floppy and apologetic, nothing new).

The cough went on and on, like a paper-shredder working in his chest cavity. She had plugged the hole, but the bolt was still in there: deflected downward by a rib, it had passed through the bottom of one lung and lodged in the upper part of his abdomen, where it could be seen pressing up against the scarred plastic of his Opener window (looking at which for the first time, Ruth had merely compressed her lips and shaken her head — just another funny hat). As the last of the morphine wore off, the pain was becoming unbearable. He wondered idly if the ghosts in his head could feel it, too.

'They're late,' he said presently, watching the twilight creep out of the high corners of the room.

He waited the afternoon away, immobile, his sunken eyes following Ruth Berenici as she moved restlessly round the room. He was trying to find ways of apologizing to her for being himself — even now, when they both so desperately needed him to be something else.

He slept a little. When he raved, she held him down; when he woke moaning, 'You could go to a hospital,' she begged. 'They're all using me!' he screamed. Use and owe: was it the only language? 'Don't cry, Ruth.' He rolled onto his back, stared fearfully at the ceiling; dropped off again, to relive Pater's fatal flight, the Cowper furnace, the Central Bunker — to enumerate all the coffins he had already occupied.

'John!'

Pigs squealed in some dream, wriggling in comical flabby fear from under the knife, like mad Grishkin in a bunker: but the squeal he woke to was of brakes, and in the street outside.

Half a dozen armored vehicles had arrived beneath Ruth Berenices window — doors slammed, turbines raced up and down their power curves then died abruptly.

'John!'

Both ends of the street were sealed off. From down in the hallway came a curious muffled thud as a small explosive charge knocked the outside door off its hinges. The stairwell rang with falling debris, then footsteps. A two-hundred-watt amplifier truck began to broadcast garbled Martian commands into the night

'John!'

At first, he didn't realize what was happening. He struggled up out of the abattoir with his mouth hot and gummy. Worked his tongue round it, blinking at the ceiling, where streetlight made an asymmetric screen. Ruth's dark figure bent over him, caught at his shoulders. 

'
John!
'

He shook his head. It wouldn't clear. Then, on the second flight of stairs, someone manufactured an illusion of resistance from the shadows — fired off his Chambers gun.

'IWG!' yelled Truck. 'Christ!'

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

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

He bit his lips.

The door caved in.

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

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

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

'I see they made a bit of a mess of you in Gottingen.' She shook her head. 'Was it worth it?

You might have started a real war this time. If it hurts, I'll get a quack in as soon as we've got tills little business over with.'

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

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

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

And she smiled over at Ruth Berenici.

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

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

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

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

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

'You know, that really is nasty,' she mused. 'Look duckie,' she murmured confidentially,

'I'll tell you what: I'm fifty-six years old, and I've been on my feet all bloody night long. Just you keep on the right side of me, and I'll keep on the right side of you. Hm?'

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