The Centauri Device Part 11

Then they were somewhere else.

EIGHT.

An End to Art and the Beginning of Artifice The anarchists of Howell watched her final firework 1 arc. She burst out of the dyne fields like a morbid comet, rolling belly-up and launching volleys of torpedoes at nothing they could see, her stern consuming itself in pale feverish radiance. Great rents had opened along her length, her bow was an agonized mouth; her golden fins were bent and charred, her turrets melted stubs. She plummeted down on them in a fog of blind murder, braking savagely; slowed, showed a queer blunt profile. Something tore, deep down inside. She broke in half. The entire northern quadrant blazed up soundlessly, drenching their appalled faces with corpse-light The Green Carnation had come home.

Four hours later, they recovered her quarterdeck section from the aphelion of a long elliptic orbit. It was intact, and under survival pressure. VR units leached on to it, opened it up with plasma torches, and went in with respirators, Earth-morphine, and a sort of dumb awe. They brought out thirty bodies and ten survivors, all of them blue with anoxia, some suffering from in-

95.

% duction burns. Most of the deaths were from subsonic rupturing of the great organs.Two or three of them were still on their feet, staring inertly round a dark filthy trap full of carbon dioxide and cooked flesh as if they had come the long and significant way round from h.e.l.l. They had. Swinburne Sinclair-Pater was there, a hole the size of two fists in the back of his white suit; but he wouldn't let the VR crew give him morphine until they had checked that disgusting oubliette for a small bald musician and a transit-cla.s.s haulage pilot in funny clothes. They were glad to avoid his bright, somehow elated eyes.

He hung on for twelve hours, in his bedroom at the heart of Howell. Its walls were dim and glorious with blue and gold peac.o.c.ks he had painted himself. They couldn't cut the suit off him, because of the induction burns, but they pulled five petal-shaped fragments of some alien machinery out of his lungs, where they had embedded themselves as he wrestled mysteriously in the supernal places of the Dyne to keep his s.h.i.+p from falling apart He woke up only rarely.

When he did, his eyes were sunken but amused.

John Truck and Tiny Skeffera stood awkwardly by his bed for the last few minutes, their burns dressed and their faces pallid. Truck remembered little of Pater's ride out of the night. For a while, he knew, the huh1 of the flags.h.i.+p had seemed to melt or withdraw; all of them, the asphyxiated and the dying, had worn colored gla.s.s masks, or swum in senselessness, fish of the impossible Medium; he had felt his interface with s.p.a.ce diminish, felt it crawl through him in slow, luminous ecstasies. He knew what he'd felt, and it had seemed important at the time; but now all he saw was the stinking dark canister of the bridge, and all he found in his head was a strange embarra.s.sed compa.s.sion for the withered figure beneath the printed silk coverlet.

Pater stirred painfully.

The Centaur} Device

97.

"Captain?'* A terrible, disfigured whisper, but gaining strength: "War. The one-eyed b.i.t.c.h has her war at last." One of his ruined hands escaped the coverlet, touched his cheek-a short hissing breath. "For decades they've drained the Galaxy; now they'll rip it apart h'ke beasts hi an alley. Stop it, Captain. They mustn't find you."

He drew himself up, shaking fitfully; gazed without recognition at the gorgeous room.

"Did I-?" Irritated, he moved his hand feebly in search of a memory. "All pleasure devours-Captain!-Dyne out!" He tried to wet his lips, choked.

Quieter: "I could never find it in me. There was too much I loved." Spurred, perhaps, by this lapse into sentiment, the old Pater returned briefly* full of gentle malice. "But you have a rich, vulgar iconoclasm, Captain. Let it speed you."

' He sank back, watching the peac.o.c.ks. Then, after a long time: "You were there when she bled into the dyne fields, you saw the substance of her flaring out like ritual evidence of the future. I believe she was near to her proper purpose, then. That's our heritage. Take her. We don't belong in the murk that nurtures Earth. Take her and remember that when your times comes. You've seen s.p.a.ce."

He frowned. "Where's Monteou?" he asked puz-zledly. Then: "I flung her out there for a while, Captain, against the dirty chance of dying." His voice tailed off.

Truck bent close over the savaged face. **She blew up, Pater. What can I do now? You can't give her to me, she blew up." Pater was asleep, but the room smellcd just like death. He said nothing more until the end, when he pulfed himself upright in the bed, winced, shuddered with horror at something beyond the painted walls. "More laudanum, Symons!" he shouted. He sighed, and a perilous calm iced his eyes. " 'Destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all bad drawings,'" he 98 The Centauri Device breathed. He looked straight at Truck and winked broadly. " 'By all that is holy all obscene drawings-'" It was 2367. On Sad al Ban IV military bandsplayed "Salute the Fleet!" while youths who had never seen Earth fortified the moons of Gloam and Parrot The green carnation withered on its stem. Howefl shrank to a rock. Its animating spirit had fled.

**Poor old sod," said Tiny Skeffera, out in the studio. He wandered round scratching nervously at his bandages, picking up Pater's Chinese pots and tapping them to hear their clear fragile voices. "Are you going to stare at that picture all day? Truck, honestly, it isn't even finished." He screwed his face up over a hawthorn blossom. "Do you know, that's the second guitar I've lost since Tuesday?"

"Shut up," Truck told him roughly. "He was a decent bloke." A familiar la.s.situde had come over him: he hung like a wrecked boat in his own skull, drawn slowly down the gravity-well of sentiment. He couldn't define his relations.h.i.+p with Pater, but he knew that he owed some emotion, some regret or responsibility. Something had vanished from the Galaxy forever. "Let's get out of here," yet he hung about, hoping to hear from the anarchists drifting listlessly in and out of Pater's suite that Himation the conjurer had made it back.

He hung about, but Himation never came.

"Come on, Tiny. There's nothing here for us any more."

Tiny folded up a small silk fan and put it in his pocket. It was an alley gesture, without decency, but of respect.

"Where wfll we go?"

The corridors were deserted: most of Howell was elsewhere, scanning the hard black sky for a destroyed fleet, shaking its head. Even the workshops were dazed and silent The Centauri Device

99.

They boarded Ella Speed and found Fix the bosun J feeding Himation's lizard from a lengthy if shallow incision in his own arm, "There's no need to go that far, ;; Fix." Truck stood over the chart-computer, observing his fineers as they busied themselves independently about. He had an original idea for the first time in his life. It tasted like rust for all that.

"There was nothing in that transporter," he said bitterly. "She knew Pater would try for it. She even knew from Veronica that Pater had taken me off Earth." He punched the navigation display board gently. "And there she was, waiting for us. It's still on b.l.o.o.d.y Centauri, under the ground."

Pater.

He had fought both sides indiscriminately all his life, and gained nothing at the end. Out of what? A sense of responsibility? "He was just a loser like the rest of us, Tiny. The Device was never there at all."

Pater. Pater.

"What's this place we're going to, boss?" asked Fix the bosun. "Will the dope be good?"

Ella Speed left her pit and nosed gingerly through a belt of vaporized gold.

Hull-plates yawned over her; miles of cable caressed her, arabesque. In pa.s.sage through night-s.p.a.ce was full of floating ribs.

"Shut your mouth and fly the bleeding thing, Fix. Don't I pay you enough?"

Which was quite unfair. Truck spent the rest of the journey gawping out at the dvne fields, fiddling about with the screen adjustment, and wondering if he'd died out there during Pater's last flight "i"

- "What the h.e.l.l are we doing hereF* asked Tiny incred- 5 nlously, ; Truck had harried himself to a standstill over the same question. But it remained that Pater had fur- nished him with an end (a purpose, fresh and raw, I something he was so unused to that he couldn't keep :*-:.

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his fingers out of it) and no means. It was the only place he could think of coming. People muddle through, he told himself, and that has to be sufficient.

The port hinterland at Golgotha stands on the periphery of an ash desert called Wisdom in the middle lat.i.tudes of Stomach (named for its discoverer) some way out in the poorly populated Ephesus-Ariadne sector, beyond the billowing CH30H clouds of "Meth Alley." Openers built Golgotha, before their sect became prominent. They had no history of persecution on Earth, but they came anyway, in 2143, and somehow (although it had nothing to do with any obvious exploitation, any crude process of blanket, bible, and Earthsyph) the pretty androgynes of Stomach lost their innocence, and many of them left the uplands for the port.

Its streets are wide. Elsewhere, the natives distill a perfume from the wings of insects; here, they have made themselves fetishes-objects of pleasure. The limestone hills at the far edge of Wisdom are strange, no one really knows what happens among them; here, day and night, dust and ash blow into the houses and the wet openings of the body on a sulky, changeable wind.

A double ghost breathes down the avenues of Golgotha in the wind: the thin twin spirit of religion and inhuman innocence-ash in the air. The delicate quick movements of the natives, who are only mirrors of your desire (who knows what they see in it, what it has replaced for them: their language has two hundred thousand separate and jlistinct words; they will speak it, if you ask them, at whatever climax you demand); and the Openers, in their cloaks of plum and scarlet, black and gold-they always seem to have their backs turned, to be striding away. Ash swirls round them all at dawn and dusk, when the wind thrusts little exploratory fingers beneath the door.

"Everyone comes here once," said Truck.

But no one ever went there twice. In a time when 101 decadence was all Earth's and anything else was imitation, there was something about that place: something to remind you of what you had voluntarily relinquished (and winked as you lost it) in other hinterlands to other more human beings. Port ladies took their lives on Stomach, and still do, slipping away in a langor of AdAcs, twisting a handkerchief-they have a crueler perception of vacuum.

An odd thing happened during the first few hours on Stomach. John Truck was later to regard it as symbolical (to the extent that he could regard anything in so abstract a way-it came in the end to little more than an itch down among the sordid experiential and intellectual gleanings of a s.p.a.cer's skull), but at the time it filled him with a peculiar horror.

He had come to Stomach, obviously, to find the priest Grishkin; but since he had last seen that mysterious man on Earth, he had no idea of how he might be found. Tiny and Fix were surly, having hoped for dope in some familiar stamping-ground-so, with no better idea than that of wandering about the place until he met someone who could put him in touch with the Opener, he shrugged and left them to their own devices -took the high wire gate that leads from the landing field to Golgotha, Wisdom rolling away on his left hand in dove-gray dunes down a fifteen-hundred-mile front -the winds of Stomach already flour-papering his cheek.

Outside the gate, the androgynous wh.o.r.es of Golgotha crowded about him as he went, like subtly depraved children: all chemise and mutated orchids and then- heads bobbing no higher than his waist, calling to him in soft, empty voices.

Their minute hands plucked at his legs as he pa.s.sed; some made offers of muted obscenity, others sang or raised their arms to be picked up, many simply clutched his hand and stared with ultimate cryptic promise. They flowed like a gray stream down the boulevards of the native quarter, sometimes "*5ft.

102.

The Centaur; Device 103 leading him, sometimes following, all the while smiling seriously as though reflecting all acute desires.

It was impossible to think of her as "it."

She put her hands up to him; her voice was a rustle of unbelievable fabrics in a remote, pa.s.sionate room. He lifted her gently by the armpits, feeling no weight but a special heat. She locked her legs round his hips and looked into his face. Disappointed, the others melted away, uttering sad, regretful cries.

" The cranes call as they cross to the reeds. Faint and helpless. Now I lie alone,'" she murmured. She wore an insect perfume, the crushed wings of the desert hawk moth prepared in the hills beyond Wisdom. When he stared back at her, uncomprehending, her tiny, heart-shaped face s.h.i.+fted and changed.

"Then perhaps we might consider mirrors,** she teased, and secret languages surfaced in her eyes. "I can see you are from Earth." Her little legs tightened until they hurt. Her body became an icon, or a clue-a cool object, a revelation or alchemical tool.

"What?" said Truck, his mouth dry. He stopped there in the middle of the windy street.

"Oh h.e.l.l," she muttered, uncurling her legs. "You f.u.c.k-f.u.c.ky alonga me now bigfella starmanT" She got down. "Why do I always get the uneducated ones?"

But he was already lost She led him for miles round the city, as if to tire him out-confusing precincts and alleys of native architecture. The wind turned cold, and he was forced further and further into her sphere of heat. When he complained, she said, "It is part of it, you must see us as part of it.** And he did, looking down at her then up at the precarious limestone buildings. At twilight it began to rain, the ash fell plush and damp, the narrower streets became dark and inviting. She tugged him along more urgently as the lightKme on; she was now a tiehtness in the muscles at Attack of the neck. "Not far now,*' she whispered. Did she understand a word she was saying?

Her house was warm and bizarre. Censers swung, moths fluttered and burned amid the incense fumes. His bemus.e.m.e.nt was completed there, among mirrors. He never remembered anything of what took place there-except that he would never allow it to happen to him again.

He woke in the early hours in a bed too small for him. His throat was sore and dry, the roof of his mouth itched. **Where can I get some water?" he asked, trying to lubricate his tongue with saliva. She-it-wasn't there. He could hear footsteps in the alley outside. He went to the door; cold air seeped over his feet. Someone was hi the alley, tall and obese, pacing to and fro. The ash from Wisdom had turned leprous, filling the alley with a wan illumination, patching the figure in its voluminous Opener cloak. "What are you doing?" he called. A hood was pulled over the face. Ash eddied about it, feathery.

"I was looking for-* The figure turned and pulled back its hood. It was Dr.

Grishkin.

Truck got hold of the door post. IBs throat locked up solid. "You," he croaked.

**I can see that your circ.u.mstances have changed somewhat, Captain Truck,**

said Grishkin-his was a fine memory for unfinished conversations. He made no move to enter the house, stood there in the ash-storm, smiling his streamlined smile. "It would seem to be time for a review of prices-"

Truck s.h.i.+vered in the wind That meeting begun in another wind on Sad al Ban IV had finally run its course. He had only postponed the preliminaries.

A stupid thing to do, he thought (thirty minutes after dawn, in an aircraft; somewhere hi front of him, chronologically speaking at least, lay the transparent heart of Openerism-the city of Intestinal Revelation beyond the milestone hills). It was too late for that. Earth's vortex had sucked him in.

Stomach turned 104.

The Centauri Device beneath him like a rotting apple, "Too long in an attic.""Mm?" said Grishkin, sprawled over two seats, his cloak open, his vast body smooth and perspiring where there was no plastic. He wasn't even half asleep.

He was watching Truck out of the corner of one eye.

Truck shrugged. He pointed out of the window. "That. Look, Grishkin," he said, *Tm only doing this on certain conditions. There is a price." The muscles above Grishkin's left eye flexed briefly. "I want to disappear, hide. If Gaw or ben Barka find me now-"

"I can understand that, my son," said Grishkin ironically.

"Secondly, I want to know why you're interested in the Device. I'll have to know in the end anyway. On those terms, Til agree to operate it for you-supposing you can get hold of it. As long as you don't use it for anything connected with this war. I'll cut my own throat first.'*

Grishkin smiled, shook his head gently. "Ah, Captain, Captain." He hauled himself up, faced Truck properly. "The war," he murmured. "Alice Gaw always wanted a proper war. One could hardly expect her to see things in their proper perspective. To listen to her description of-"

"Cut it out, Grishkin. Do we have a deal?"

"Oh yes, Captain, we have that. Ad interim, m consider your disappearance.

Quite."

He seemed to go to sleep, and Truck had to be content with that. Down below, Stomach crawled on. After a while the c.o.c.kpit door opened and out came the pilot, yawning. He grinned at Truck, grimaced rudely at the inert priest. "All well hi here?"

"Who's flying the b.l.o.o.d.y aircraft while you're asking stupid questions?" said Truck. He hated atmosphere vehicles. There was so much to run into.

"What aircraft?" Suddenly, he slapped his forehead and stared wildly about.

"Oh Christ, this aircraft!"

"Ha ha," said Truck. "Very comical."

105.

Beyond the limestone hiUs there was only more desert-but uglier than Wisdom, with an ah- of acceptance and faflure. He tripped leaving the aircraft, came up gazing at the gloomy sky with his hands coated hi putrefying soil. "What a hole, Grishkin. Can't you do better than this?" In the distance over the hopeless rock flowed rivers of abrasive dust-thick and brown, miles wide.