The Centauri Device (18 page)

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 I'd 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 spaces 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 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 bastard,' 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?'

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 kingship 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?' He felt 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.

'I'm the paymaster, Captain. Ben Barka 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 flicker of a black, saurian tongue. 'The General cut off Angina's supply the day after you refused your services on Sad al Bari, Captain. She's an impatient woman. What could poor Angina do?'

Truck 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, assembling grotesquely inappropriate expressions — a sentimental smile, a port lady's breezy come-on — but her eyes were calm.

'There, Truck: nobody'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 bastard' —

nodding and grinning and gasping at Veronica — 'and the General and ben Barka have it cut up between them. What scraps they leave go to Doctor Grishkin in return for absolution.

Politics, religion, and dope: they keep us happy with Hell.

'Veronica, I love you, come in the dark with me and well — Oh,
Christ
!'

She dashed forward and, before Truck could move, grabbed one of his Chambers guns.

She held it in both hands, whimpered, and blew the wicket-gate to pieces.

There was a writhing motion in 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 shell 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 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 in the Spacer'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 bastards. 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 in there, don't breathe too hard, and don't get close. It's Paraphythium 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 Berenici.

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 chilly and dun. Years of scalding reactor winds had formed the dull
laminae
on its walls.

There, he discovered about half 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 streetcorners and the concrete aprons of spaceports 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, 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 shifted 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 dispassionately back. He studied the rapt, revelatory faces of the users, searching for some human distinguishing 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 time 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 carcass, 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 — like 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 . . .

Warrens and runways led him inevitably too close to the reactor, pumping and howling and sucking in the 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 carcasses 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 pass him by . . . 

The second time, at bay in a shadowy maze of turbine 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 him! 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 . . .

The Bunkers on Centauri VII

Two hours after dawn in Egerton's Port. At four 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 Paraphythium 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 God, Tiny, I have to get out of here.' Nobody 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 still no sign of Tiny. His head ached ferociously.

He propped 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.

DERE BOSS (the first one went)

 I COM IN FRUM ERTH ON A FREYTER WURE THE

UDE ENT GUDD WEN I SEEN TH OLD ELA SPID ON THE APRIN I DISIDED TO

COM BAKC THERS NO HARD FEELINS

FXX.

That, hand printed in Fix the bos'n'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. God 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 makes no 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 their 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.

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 spacers in hopeless hinterland streets (blinked out like cooling suns, their precious fire gone); caper on the hulls of ships 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 done 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.