The Centauri Device (15 page)

He made an unconvincing Opener, being embarrassed to undo his cloak in private, let alone public; as a Novice, he was not allowed, nor would he have wanted, to take confession; and so his sole cover-activity was the distribution of sect literature (brown bundles of which, printed on that crude paper which always seems to smell of excrement, filled the hold of his ship) among the bars and leprotic brothels of the port. It was a threadbare deception and when, after about two weeks of it, he met an earlier acquaintance, it was put paid to entirely.

'He Doesn't Even Know What Year It Is'

Afternoon on Avernus, and a thin sour drizzle beading the plastic walls. Main Street, Egerton's Port was poached and muddy. Outside the Boogie Shuffle it was all AdAc habits, mainly one-time port ladies dreaming of the teen-age barbie dolls they had once wanted to be or the fine skinny corpses they would one day make — their eyes fixed on the underside of the lowbrow clouds and the rain falling into their open mouths. Truck went in, past the vapor sign that said GET HER SOME AND WATCH HER BITE YOUR FINGERS OFF, and found a party of engine-room mechanics from some visiting military vessel — haunted by the thought of explosive decompression a thousand light years from home and already three parts smashed — dancing apishly about to a hologram recording of Tiny Skeffern doing
Eight Star
Crawl
at the Palace.

He climbed onto a table.

'Open yourselves to the Universal Principle,' he whispered, hoping they wouldn't hear, 'my brothers.'

Vast appreciative catcalls.

'I have here — '

Openers aren't supposed to fight; so when Legiron Crab — a tube-reamer out from the Knuckle system and shortly to lose his left arm in the gallant wreck of the
Seventeeth Susan 
— decided to have a look under Truck's cloak, Truck went for a pressure point in the neck so as not to make it obvious.

'Oy,' said Legiron, quite unperturbed, 'get your fingers out of me throat. I haven't got no nerves anyway.' (Some weeks before, a bos'n's mate — driven past the point of dispassionate logic by Legiron's talent for messing up anything more complicated than deck-scrubbing, had beaten him repeatedly about the skull with one of the larger wrenches used in shackling down Dynaflow Drivers; and been dragged off ten minutes later by some quarterdeck officers still screaming 'Lie down, you pisshole, lie down,' to no avail, leaving Legiron to scratch the back of his neck reflectively, well on his way to becoming a myth.) 'I just want to see what you got.'

And he grabbed Truck's wrist, his hairy great forearm distending like one ultimate Universal Muscle. Truck, fearing a fracture, kneed him in the hurdies.

'Now you went too far, matey!' cried Legiorn, massaging his offended morals. 'Off you go.'

Suiting actions to words, Legiron flung Truck halfway across the bar and out on to Main Street, his Opener tracts fluttering expressively round his head. Which was how he came to find himself down among the lady losers of Avernus, a hard pelvic girdle making inroads into his kidneys, a small breast interfering with one ear, and face to face with Angina Seng, the girl spy from Sad al Bari IV.

'Captain,' she said, hands on bony hips and smiting curiously down on him (as if it really was a coincidental meeting), 'you must keep doing something nobody likes.'

Truck rubbed some rain into his face to get the circulation moving in his brain. He thought of going back into the Boogie Shuffle and killing Legiron Crab.

'I don't know you,' he said, 'and I'm not a Captain' — he accepted her strong hand without grace and added cunningly — 'my sister.'

But it was his turn for not fooling her. 'It won't wash, Captain Truck. I'd like to talk to you.'

She brushed his cloak down absently, wiped some mud from his cheek. Looking at his window: 'My, you haven't
actually
got religion, have you?' He fussed about with his cloak, clicked his tongue. 'Well, Captain?'

'Oh yes' — scathingly — 'at the Israeli Embassy, I suppose. We could have some nice talks with the General.'

'There's no IWG representation on Avernus,' she said, now becoming interested in the vapor sign outside the Boogie Shuffle. 'And I haven't worked for that cow since you and I last met' Her face was struggling with two expressions at once: the curled lip of disgust or disdain, certainly; but behind the eyes something else — that intimate understanding of vacuum only a port lady has, some remote pain he couldn't quite put a name to. She tugged her wet coppery hair back from her face, her body slumped sullenly over folded arms. 'I hope she — '

A shrug. 'Are you coming?' And she walked off down Main Street. He was fascinated.

She took him to a shack on the edge of the port and gat a rickety folding table strewn with twisted half-empty tubes and hard dried nubs of cosmetic while he mooched about looking for something to eat. They stalked one another in the rainy light. She brushed her hair, examined minutely her face (thin lines of an internal tension too secret to be politics or anything other than running-down clockwork of a port lady's life); looked his reversed image over covertly when he was occupied with the fridge.

'What have you got?' he asked round a mouthful of something local. 'Another sponsor, eh?

Jesus! What is this stuff?'

'It's off, I think. Here, let me taste it. How did you know, Captain?'

A weary little room. He stared oafishly round it at the cast-off underwear and open cupboards, the scuffed walls. How old was she? Was this all of it? Coming too close to her soul — continually in transit between such rooms and always arriving late — he shivered. He was fooling himself if he thought he knew the half of it.

'It was a joke. I don't want to hear anything about it. Last time was too painful.'

'Look, Captain, you obviously don't want to give it to General Gaw. I could put it in safer hands. I could arrange a meeting.'

His naïveté didn't extend that far; around that point, it degenerated into a sort of sly ferrety awareness. 'You don't even know what it is,' he told her. She pursed her lips (a hit, a hit!).

'No, wait. Ill meet him.' He paced up and down, munching. He could check one or two things at least.

'Good.' She dropped the hairbrush. 'I'll take you to him now.' Got up, smoothed her dress over her stomach, stood too close to him, smiled right at him. He was touched. But, 'No. Here. Tonight. Fetch him here at eight. I've got things to do.'

She frowned. 'You wouldn't be working for General Gaw yourself, Captain?'

'You're a bit behind the times, aren't you?' Deep down, something was warning him that losers should never, never make decisions. He ignored it, and it sniggered horribly at him.

'Just on my terms this time, that's all.' It was blatant hubris. At the door he asked, 'Don't you ever get tired of being used?' Thinking of poor old-animal Nodes, who also hadn't known what 'it' was — or wanted to.

She stared out into the rain after him, tapping her fingers against one of the Opener broadsheets ('Some Words of Plain Good Sense in a Time of Trouble'). After he'd vanished down the dreary street, she went out in another direction.

'I want a gun,' said Truck when he got in.

'Christ' Tiny had heard about the incident at the Boogie Shuffle, 'Truck, how can you shoot a bloke just because he chucked you out of a bar?'

He put his underpants on, hopping about on one foot; he was entertaining. The lady in the bed, her voice muffled by the blanket, said, 'Get that creep out of here. He gives me the willies.' She raised herself on one elbow, glaring at Truck. 'Tiny, how can he live with his breakfast like that? How can you live with him? You're an artist.' She shuddered.

Pointedly, Tiny showed Truck the door. 'Fix might have left something on the ship,' he suggested. He winked and jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. 'Eh?'

Fix hadn't. But in a locker on the bridge, Truck found a set of steel knuckles he'd bought long ago on Morpheus and never used. He put them on and went prancing around on his toes, feinting dangerously at the display panels. He got a couple of hours sleep in his old bunk then, when it was dark, stuck the steel knuckles in his right boot (under his foot where they'd be safe from a cursory search, if uncomfortable), and left for the edge of Egerton's Port. He had howling colic from Angina Seng's Avernus pasty.

Half past seven saw him shivering in a pool of shadow twenty yards from Angina's door.

The compass wind was blowing inside and out, wiping the eyes with rain, buffeting the losers on the port streets (down galleries of one repeated image — a hand to the shaking wall, head down, retching dejectedly from the very brain out), and plastering Truck's cloak to him like wet cement He wasn't sure why he was there: to hold, perhaps, for just this once, a small power over those who have the steerage way to set a course despite the wind; to get a look at Angina Seng's new sponsor before whoever it was got a look at him.

Given this, anyone can predict a disaster.

Twenty minutes later, the enigmatic Angina appeared head down into the weather from the direction of Junk City and let herself in, looking round circumspectly while she fumbled with her key. Off in the prehistoric darkness, Truck sniggered to himself. She was bundled up against rain or recognition, but unable to disguise the earthly slouch of the born port lady.

Lights came on. Both of them settled down to wait. She had a mysterious trick of turning up at the window moving from right to left then, a minute later, reappearing from the same direction, as if some personal topology applied to the room. Fifteen of these manifestations took place while Truck shivered and squirmed the sole of his right foot and tried to ignore his griping stomach.

The figure that finally shuffled up to Angina's door might just as well have been Hermann Goring. He discovered immediately that he'd stationed himself too far away to pick out any characteristic (other than, say, a wooden leg) he wasn't already familiar with. He moved idiotically out of his hiding place to get a better look, still saw nothing but waterproof clothing and a white blur of face. Disconcerted by this unexpected anonymity, he raced back into cover — just a shade too late to do anything about the unfriendly movements that suddenly filled the darkness about him.

One of the UASR death-commandos who had been following him since he left
Ella Speed
rapped him quickly in the biceps to immobilize his arms while the other lugged out a Chambers gun the size of a mortuary and poked it at his groin in awful warning. 'You put your hands on your head pretty fucking sharpish,' they advised him. Their lean pockmarked faces were wreathed with smiles as they searched him, and then stood back to let him reflect on his obvious future if he insisted on playing by the rules of winners.

'Got any good postcards, boys?' he insinuated nastily, because he felt the fool he was. The hashishin exchanged an unpleasant glance, clearly reinterpreting their orders, and advanced on him.

'We thought you'd never come in, Captain,' said someone from behind him, just in time.

'You didn't have to skulk about there in the rain, old chap — didn't Miss Seng make that clear to you? You must be frozen stiff.'

Gadaffi ben Barka: second Colonel or executive of the People's Army of Morocco — originally a chip off the old UNFP — and thus the nearest thing to General Gaw's opposite number in the UASR(N). He was tall and slimly built, with a back like a board and a neatly clipped mustache. He tapped Truck's hands with the tip of his little swagger cane. 'You could put them down now, I think.'

He affected the precise, slightly decayed English of original Arab stock unused to handling it since the cultural revolution of 2184 with its concomitant stress on the speaking of only Arab languages among the bureaucrats of the inner party. His name, which can be spelled some 400-odd ways in the English (from Quathafi to Khedaphey), was an illustrious one. His hair, shaved to within an inch of its life, had a tinge of gray to match his beautiful military suit. When he smiled he showed a lot of white teeth and one black one. He was a lot more engaging than the General, but that rotten enamel counted for a lot.

'You seem to have got caught up in my security operation. Sorry about that.' Quite the part, walking with his hands clasped behind his back, he knew exactly what had happened. 'But if you'd just come through the front entrance' — ushering Truck through that same door — 'as we expected, you'd have been quite safe. No harm done. These mix-ups happen.'

Angina Seng ignored him and stared out of the window. He hoped it was because she felt guilty. He limped ostentatiously past her and sat down on the bed. In fact, his foot did hurt like hell, and his queasy gut was generating long gray waves of nausea to break cold and sweaty over his bald scalp. He looked accusingly at the fridge. His cloak fell open. 'You've bloody poisoned me,' he told Angina's shoulders. She shrugged.

Like the commander of some desert terrain poring over his maps, ben Barka sat behind the camp table, scraping idly at its curious reliefs of dried cosmetic; planning, perhaps, fantastic miniature campaigns among its arid wadis and exposed ridges — the wind like emery on the eyeballs at sunset; the camels sore-footed and refractory; the Maxim-gun bogged to its hubs in sand again, or jamming just as the train arrived, never quite fulfilling the promises of the Austro-Greek munitions dealer (with his soft fat hands and celluloid collar) who'd smuggled it by motorized dhow from Constantinople: some grim expedition to redeem a heartland lost for centuries under the dust, its cisterns poisoned, its women under a punishment, ash interring its surviving sons. His eyes were full of some violent past — not his own in any sense of the personal, but having greater individual meaning than a mere heritage.

The hashishin, meanwhile, had disposed themselves by the door, where they seemed to fall into a state of feral languor, giving Truck insolent grins and winks, picking their noses with fanatical concentration. Ben Barka brought his last dawn sortie to its desperate conclusion under the cold desert rimwall and said, 'I see you've been on Stomach lately, Captain.