The Centauri Device Part 15

child?" He complained. "If you'd leveled with me just once-"

She stopped, swung on him, her eyes blaring and alive for the first time in his experience of her.

"Because you know nothing! Because you understand nothing! Because people like you are always too puzzled and decent to shoot people like me. Because that's what you ore, Captain."

She shrugged.

"Oh, what's the use? Truck, you're a baby: there's always someone s.h.i.+elding you and all the other odd little people like you-if you want me to apologize for your naivete", then b.l.o.o.d.y well forget it!"

Off she went again, and this time all he got from her when he caught up was, "Shouldn't you be running away? They've got half the Arabs in Junk City out looking for you.**

"I was rather hoping you'd help me," he said diffidently. "You keep getting me into these things. You've conned me twice and I think you owe me for that."

She looked weary and compa.s.sionate. "You see?** she said. Then: "Why should I, Captain, why should I owe you anything?" She looked him up and down, shook her head. "I see no reason to help you, Captain, no reason at all."

On the other hand, she did nothing to discourage him; so, despite his armory, he simply followed her. She was familiar, and he couldn't think of anything else to do. Walking at a fair clip, she got about ten yards ahead of him. He could always, he reasoned, shoot her in the back if she turned out to be bait in an ambush. Somehow, he didn't think he'd ever be able to shoot her in the front.

The floor took on a downward slope. Patches of congealed plastic ridged the metal underfoot, trapping Httle runnels of bitter condensation. Up ahead, there was a ninety-degree bend in the main. He let her go round it, stopped, put his ear to the wall. He was close 140 enough to the reactor to feel its soul in the steel and hear the distant moan of convection currents-but other than that, only moisture dripping from the lighting cable with a sound like tapped porcelain. Angina had stopped moving.

She coughed, and shuffled her feet.

Truck checked his pistols, sucked his split lip indecisively. "Oh s.h.i.+t," he murmured, and went around the corner like an armored train. There was nothing up there he feared more than what lay behind.

He was in a shadowy alcove where cold stale air licked his face like a sick animal. The conduit terminated a few feet away in a screen of thick wire mesh, into which was set a wicket-gate of the same material. A vague brightness lay beyond it. In the alcove nothing moved but Angina's sharp black silhouette.

She was standing with her face pressed up against the mesh, as if trying to see through it Truck crouched there sweating and ready to kill something, then relaxed. "What do we do now, then?" he asked brightly.

"We do nothing, Captain," staring through the mesh.

"Sorry I spoke."He investigated the alcove, rubbing his chin with the end of one of his weapons. "You might be wrong about me not being able to shoot you," he said.

*Tm not saying you are-" There didn't seem to be any other way out. "If you'll just stand aside," he said, "I'D open it for you"-sighting up on the wicket-gate- "with no trouble at all."

She gasped, turned away from the grille, an odd complex of fear and yearning in her eyes.

"Don'tl"

She stared over his shoulder. Her lips moved, but it wasn't she who whispered eerily into the gloom: "You dont want to go any further, Captain Truck."

141.

He was there suddenly, but with a look of permanence, as if he'd been waiting just beyond the periphery of Truck's vision ever since the debacle beneath Carter's Snort. As if once acknowledged, he , would never go away again. His emaciated and reptilian body was hung with a pale fawn suit cut in that good twentieth-century fas.h.i.+on; his shoes were of the finest alligator, on his head was a straw Panama, bent and grimy at the brim from being pulled down over his eyes. At a glance you -could see he belonged to the streets of Egerton's Port, that he'd get you anything you needed: with the end of the longest-running party in the history of the universe, it seemed he'd found his level.

"You aren't a king any more Veronica," said Truck; narrowing his eyes. "Don*t try and stop me."

He felt something that might have been sympathy. Chalice Veronica had fallen from grace. He was fading away. What gray cheesy junk flesh he'd once possessed had melted off the bone, which shone through like a lamp behind waxed paper; he was all eyes and resentment, all paranoid jaw and gray stubble; he smelled like an old, old pusher who'd had his hand in the stock cupboard just once too often.

"You're a little fool, Truck," he hissed, "and I wish Td never seen you. It's still a supplier's Galaxy. The King, even in exile, knows things, sees all-Timelines whip the Moment across the Universe like broken hawsers-Intimations input spinal sensors-H signals flicker like heliographs across the s.p.a.ces of the dyne-I -see-" He shuddered.

"Ben Barka or General Gaw, what difference can it make to you who owns your callow little brain?" He chuckled. "I see one of my little dogs has found you again-"

He swung his blunt, shapeless head and-as if using some other sense than sight, some slow junk radar-located Angina Seng, up there rigid by the wicket-gate. Since his appearance, she had developed little muscle 142.

The Centaurf Device The Centaur/ Devfoe 143.

tremors; her face was drawn and white, her eyes were fixed on him.

"I want my stuff, Veronica," she said. "I want it.**

Veronica smiled at Truck. "Pardon an old man's sentimentality, Captain. I say 'my* little dogs, but of course I really only feed them. Angina liked what I gave her so much that she came with me when the General withdrew her patronage. It was quite lucky for Angina that we both--left-the General at the same time. The same Moment, eh, Angina?" And he rolled his lizard's eyes to show a thin rim of white veined like hairline cracks in ancient china.

"I want my stuff, Veronica, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d,** said Angina, and her voice was perfectly empty.

"Oh, my dear, we all want our stuff. But we have to be patient, don't we?*1 He took a pace backward *into the gloom. Only a ghost, only a thin spirit hanging on, an echo of habits past and a withered kings.h.i.+p under the earth.

Truck shot out a hand and grasped the loose wattled skin of his throat. It was like touching a dead, damp leaf. "What are you doing on Avernus, Veronica?" Hefelt sick. His fingers trembled with the effort of gripping that awful flesh.

Only a ghost: but even in eclipse those old junk pores still oozed some stink of mold and darkness. Yellow teeth snapped at him. Veronica's breath rattled, but his head was already dead.

*Tm the paymaster, Captain. Ben Barfca needs me as much as the old cow ever did. They all need what I sell, to keep their agents enthusiastic and faithful Sometimes, ideology isn't enough. The law, the administrators on both sides, why, they're some of my best customers (I'd say 'most regular,* but all my customers are that)-**

"What sort of rubbish is this? What's behind that door?** Truck released his grip, flung the eroded bag of bones away from him. It chuckled.

"You're finished, Veronica."

"Don't knock it until you can do it, my boy.*

He wasn't even trying to get away. He took out a small pewter pillbox and slipped something into his mouth-the merest delicate nicker of a black, saurian tongue. "The General cut off Angina's supply the day after you refused your services on Sad al Ban, Captain. She's an impatient woman. What could poor Angina do?"

Trutk looked at the girl. She had slumped against the mesh, mechanically repeating. "I want my stuff, I want my stuff." She hooked her fingers behind the wire and pulled herself upright. Her facial musculature was cracking up, a.s.sembling grotesquely inappropriate expressions-a sentimental smile, a port lady's breezy come-on-but her eyes were calm.

*There, Truck: n.o.body's protecting you now. I go where the junk leads. Can you say you honestly didn't know? It's a rotten Galaxy, and it doesn't belong to you or I. That b.a.s.t.a.r.d"-nodding and grinning and gasping at Veronica-"and the General and ben Barka have it cut up between them. What sc.r.a.ps they leave go to Dr. Grishkin in return for absolution. Politics, religion, and dope: they keep us happy with h.e.l.l.

"Veronica, I love you, come in the dark with me and well- Oh, Christl"

She dashed forward and, before Truck could move, grabbed one of his Chambers guns. She held it hi both hands, whimpered, and blew the wicket-gate to pieces.

There was a writhing motion hi the gloom. Chalice Veronica cackled madly.

"Down, girl!" He produced something small and black and shot her between the shoulder blades with it. She screamed and fell over, still scrabbling toward the twisted, melting mesh.

Veronica scuttled triumphantly after her. John Truck stepped between them and put a single bolt into Veronica's wet black mouth. The back of the King's head flew off like sh.e.l.l from a rotten egg, but his eyes knew that it's always a pusher's market. Truck stirred the heap of dry reptilian bones with one foot, then 144.

knelt beside Angina Seng. There was a hideous, smoking hole, but she was trying to say something.

He turned her over.

She looked up at him, quite lucid, blinked. "I could have gone for you," she said. She touched his hand. "That little guitarist hi the s.p.a.cer's Rave said you'd eat me. I wonder if you would have?" Blood came out of her mouth. She moaned. Faintly: "Grow up, Captain. It's time someone helped us all. Get rid of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Stop avoiding the issue. They've no right to do the things they do to us-**

He thought she was dead. He was crying. About a minute later, she said: "If you go hi there, don't breathe too hard, and don't get close. It's Paraphyth-hun D-20."

She didn't say anything after that. She'd given him everything she could'. It was an act of faith. For some reason, he kept thinking of Ruth Berenki.

He kicked his way calmly through the wreckage of the wicket-gate.

Behind it lay a cylindrical filter tank about thirty feet high. It was chillyand dun. Years of scalding reactor winds had formed the dull laminae on its walls.

There, he discovered about hah! a dozen people squatting in a semicircle around what appeared to be a bundle of old sacks and wool.

Every so often, one of them would stand up unsteadily, go over and take a deep long sniff at it, then sit down again. He leaned on a wall to watch. None of them took any notice of him. He recognized them from streetcoraers and the concrete ap.r.o.ns of s.p.a.ceports on familiar planets-faces you knew without ever having seen them before.

The membranes of his nose itched.

After a while, moving like an automaton (no more capable of feeling, or so it seemed, than one of Pater's holographic images), he went closer to see what they were sniffing. On went the rite: up, shuffle a few paces,

145.

sniff, hold the breath, shuffle back; up, shuffle, sniff, as if Truck wasn't there. In a way, he wasn't.

It was a dying sheep.

The fleece had fallen away from its hindquarters in great lumps, like stuffing from an armchair left to rot in the rain; small red blisters connected by thin raised threads of poisoned epidermal nerves covered the exposed hide where the Paraphythium infection had got to it. It s.h.i.+fted about restlessly, trying to find a comfortable position for its scabby legs, nuzzling its sores. It looked sadly up at him, dull brown eyes running and pained, and he stared dispa.s.sionately back. He studied the rapt, revelatory faces of the users, searching for some human distinguis.h.i.+ng mark, but they all looked like animals, too.

Starting at the nearest end of the semicircle, he went around and shot them, one by one. They never made a sound. It was like being underwater-quiet, removed.

He went back to the sheep.

It tried to get up and run off, but the tune was long past for that.

"Hush," he sad absently, "hush."

He tangled his fingers in the fleece at the back of its neck and gazed for some time into its eyes, its sweet, strange breath warming his cheek. When he stood up and put the gun to its head, light from the burning corpses sent his shadow flickering and huge over the sides of the tank. He regarded the carca.s.s, numb and unthinking. Then he turned his face to the invisible stars and roared wordlessly until the tank rang like the inside of a bell-tike the inside of his head-with all his horror and rage.

He pulled the third gun from his boot and ran out of that place, blubbering ...

... Paraphythium images of flight and pursuit, fire and steel, ran together like water color in his brain. He'd breathed too deeply of that air, he hardly knew what was happening to him ...

146.

The Centauri Device Warrens and runways led him inevitably too close to the reactor, pumping and howling and sucking in Ihe night with a rage as diffuse and frustrated as his own. He staggered away from it, whimpering and covering his eyes against the elemental blast . . . With his cloak on fire, he fluttered through the deep rusting canyons of the city, like a moth in an unbearable cyanic dream. He reasoned desperately with himself, "It was only a sheep," but he knew he was just as culpable as the Pusher King. (On Morpheus, hadn't he worn the alligator shoes and given the customers their stuff?) He hoped the death-commando would kill him. Twice, they ran him down, spilling like maggots from the great carca.s.ses of the foundries when he was least expecting them, calling to one another in harsh, mechanical voices. The first time, he hid in a culvert like a rat up a drainpipe, promising obscene things to the ghost of Angina Seng if only they would pa.s.s him by ... The second time, at bay in ashadowy maze of turbin jigs, from head to foot in a black cerement (writhing up like a genie, like smoke from the stacks of the city); it came to his aid with a strange gun. "Who are you?" he called, dazzled by the splashback. Its head towered above him. Had he shrunk? "Leave this city," it advised him, and laughed most sepulchrally. "Leave this place," and swept its weapon in a withering arc .. . But he was lost. He came upon the reactor from another angle. "No more!" (Trying to cover eyes and ears, blind and deaf.) He braced himself in the teeth of the fifty-knot wind howling into its maw and fired both his guns at it until they were empty. The magnetic bottle ran with spectral colors for a moment, the plasma heaved and raved, but nothing else happened ... He decided that if he couldn't kill Junk City, he'd kill ben Barka; went to find him; stalked three or four people who resembled him up and down blind alleys and among swarf heaps; sprang out on each one like a praying mantis, hands hooked. But, "You're not himl The Centaur? Device 147 You're not him!" every time. He killed them anyway ... He reeled drunkenly through the city, alone. "Let me out!" he cried, and shook his fist at the blank uncaring face it showed him...

149.

TWELVE.

The Bunkers on Centauri VII Two hours after dawn in Egerton's Port. At 4 A.M., the bottom had dropped out of the thermometer, and the street details were still pulling the night's crop of defunct and hypothermia losers off the sidewalks. There were plastic syringes frozen into the gutters and skeins of rime on the windows when John Truck stumbled over the threshold of the place he shared with Tiny Skeffern and fell on his face, making instinctive running motions and trying to brandish his guns.

He was covered in blood and soot. The Paraphyth-ium was wearing off-and with it, mercifully, the accurate memory of that horrible night-leaving him with a runny nose and only the slightest notion of where he'd been, where he was, or how he'd managed to make it there. He heaved himself up as far as his knees, explored his raw, flayed face with one hand, and mumbled, **Oh G.o.d, Tiny, I have to get out of here." n.o.body answered, so he slipped down again onto his belly and went to sleep, the room silent and unrelenting around him.

When he woke up it was getting dark, and stffl no sign of Tiny. His head ached ferociously. He propped 148.

himself up against a door frame and drank a pint of something he'd found in the fridge. Then he fumbled about, cooking eggs and eating them while he tried to read two messages that had come for him. The first one went: DERE BOSS I COM IN FRUM ERTH ON A FREYTER WURE THE UDE ENT GUDD WEN I SEEN TH.

OLD ELA SPID ON THE APRIN I MSIDED TO COM BAKC THERS NO HARD FEELINS.

FXX.

That, hand printed in Fix the bosun's mephitic script on the back of a crumpled, furry old spare-part invoice from a well-known Dynaflow subsidiary, caused him to grin. His face felt stiff and numb. With Fix's chopper back in its rightful corner of the hold, he could at least fly the old tub without fear of its engines falling out all over the sky. That was what he told himself; really, he just missed the little guy.

As for the other: "The time is ripe, Captain,** it said, mad and plummy and familiar. "Come with all haste. G.o.d speaks to us from the bunkers, you and I."

And it gave a fifteen-figure reference for a planetary touchdown. He didn't think he'd have to check the almanacs to locate the planet in question, either. It was signed "Grishkin." It appeared he'd been activated as the mad priest's agent.

He sat on the floor among the piles of sleazy bedclothes and Opener literature, trying to formulate some sort of policy. Angina Seng had finally convinced him that when the landed gentry cuts up a seedcake for tea it makesno difference to the cake which of them holds the knife: whoever "won" Earth's war, it would be the same old crew who stepped up afterwards to hold out then- plates; the squabble over Truck and the Device was nothing more than a polite difference between friends as to who should have the largest slice.

150.

Ben Barka and Gaw would survive; Veronica would be replaced; Grishkin would come waddling on behind. Whole again, the triumvirate of Drugs Actual, Political, and Spiritual would dance and trample its way over the corpses of s.p.a.cers in hopeless hinterland streets (blinked out like cooling suns, their precious fire gone); caper on the hulls of s.h.i.+ps in cometary orbits, each one stuffed ripe and full with dead young men; and tread gleeful measures over the husks of planets circling two hundred suns.

The Ruled never suspect what is being 4one to them in their own name; how would they dare?

But Truck knew. He'd seen the eyepatch on the face of the ghoul, and the reptile's black quick tongue; he'd seen a burned-out dream of deserts, and shuddered at the entrails of madness. He'd witnessed the death of a sheep in a blasphemous cloister under the ground, and tried to understand the message of its holy breath.

Grishkin had found a way to break the Centauri blockade, confront the Device with the man who could operate it: but wherever Truck went, Gaw and ben Barka could never be very far behind. They were locked onto him and to each other in the excesses of their dance, compelled to lift their legs and laugh and sweat.

He wouldn't have a hope if he answered the priesfs summons, they'd be after him like dogs; yet he owed Grishkin for his humiliation on Stomach-he owed ben Barka for his scorched face-be owed someone for the deaths of Angina Seng and Sinclair Pater and every single s.p.a.cer whose flesh had been frozen to the streets of Avernus.

He got up and paced about. It was completely dark, but he didn't dare put the lights on in case the place was being observed.

He shrugged.

He decided to go to Centauri anyway.