The Centauri Device (26 page)

BOOK: The Centauri Device

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'Colonel — both of you — we're sick of ideology. It doesn't seem to work for us, only for you. You watch us crawl round the world — because there's nothing else for us to do — and see in us the reflection of a dream that was never worth the words you use to describe it; everywhere, you discover the symbols of your own obsession, codified but unreal — just as you discovered them in the bunker on Centauri.'

He touched the thing on his lap. It seemed to swell beneath his hand.

'This is the only thing that has ever belonged to us. When we hurt, you sell us something to ease the pain. This is the power to say, we aren't buying any more,
and to mean that we're not
buying it from either of you
.

'Let's see what it does, shall we?'

Outside, the street erupts in silent flame. The Snort is burning. What does it matter, now? It was never worth anything, anyway.

Earth's old diplomatic grin splits wide open, to reveal a scaffolding of bone.

The room spins like a top and whirls away. Ruth Berenici, unattainable warm declivity, wounded, fading, falls away. Behind her Arab and Israeli, plucked away insensate, topple from the bloody stair.

'Christ, Gadaffi, stop him!' screams the General.

— They might hurl themselves forward forever, open-handed, gripped by eternal preternatural fear —

To hang, a dying-insect-hum on the moving air, while John Truck transliterated, last of the Old Centaurans and first of the New, allows that other voice, electric, to flood his inner ear.

His hands move: precise, elegant.

The thing on his lap like an animal stirs to meet them, Nothing is lost, something twists the world away

EPILOGUE

So little comes down to us.

While the above is not solely fiction — being, as the reader will have realized, a dramatized account of some of the events leading to the Sol-Centauri Hypernova of 2367, and the formation of what is still known in hinterland argot as 'Truck's Gap' — sources are few and scattered: a handful of secret files relating to the mysterious Centauri Device recovered from IWG and UASR embassies on Sad al Bari IV, Avernus, and, oddly enough, considering its backwater position, Gloam; records of coded tachyon transmissions by the cruisers
Solomon
and
Nasser
prior to the battle of Centauri VII, and of Earth-Fleet communications right up to the moment of occlusion; and, perhaps less bare but no less tantalizing, evidence gathered over some years — and in difficult conditions — from spacers who had known or talked with Captain John Truck.

We have no record of the mode of operation of the Centauri Device — here we follow (somewhat inaccurately, we fear, to the end of a more satisfying drama) the most popular of the current 'psychic' theories. And nothing, not even the unstrictured imagination, can explain that curious spatial discontinuity which engulfed everything within a radius of ten light years from Earth in the winter of that, Earth's most urgent year: Sol was destroyed, along with Centauri, to produce the power for this vast sleight of hand; the chains of Terran politics were broken; no more can be said. Further, we have no clue whatever to the appearance of the Device in its armed phase — the sole descriptions extant refer to what was seen in the Omega Shaft bunker by Dr Grishkin's archaeological team, General Gaw and two of her police force, and the UASR agent Colonel ben Barka. It was never our intention to produce original research, or shed new light on these matters, but to concern ourselves with what is more relevant in human terms.

Of the golden ship
Atalanta in Calydon
, there has been no sign since. She called at Pater's secret base shortly before the engulfment of Earth, and evacuated those of its complement who wished to leave. Many of these anarchists chose to remain in the Galaxy. About eighty of them were put off on the night side of Avernus some hours before the hypernova took place, and it is from them that we have our accounts of the 'Third Speed,' of the asteroid Howell and its fastidious prince, and of Himation's last words to Captain Truck. Whether
Atalanta in Calydon
's stopover on Avernus was in any way connected with the reactor accident which finally destroyed the warren known as 'Junk City' will never be proved. The events, however, were undeniably coincident.

But our greatest concern must undoubtedly be with the greatest mystery: the character of Captain Truck himself.

Say what you like of him: that his friendships were shallow and callous; that his morals were those of a cretin or a small animal; that his interests were tawdry. Say that he had sold drugs on nine planets and abused them on ninety more; that he had fought in dishonor and squalor in every back alley of the Galaxy, displaying only the courage of desperation. Say that he was young and unformed and uneducated, and of a depth of naïveté matched only by his premature bitterness —

But admit also that while he found life unpleasant, he found death worse. He loathed killing and conscious hurt, hypocrisy and cant, and the glib lip-service solution of human misery provided by ideology — but could find no means to articulate that loathing. This most honest of dishonesties could only find its expression in surliness, in bravado, in a constant search for impermanent oblivion. He had in fact, despite it all, innocence. Only that innocence or Grace made his gesture possible: only innocence can ever make such gestures possible, or acceptable.

Did he see his action as a belated revenge for the Centauri atrocity? Was he simply disgusted by the irrelevance to reality of the politics of his time? He has been cast in both these roles in previous accounts, and both are forceful human activators. Again, though: a more simple, direct revenge for the killings he had seen or taken part in during the last few weeks of his life may have motivated him — or he may simply have triggered the Device accidentally, while delirious from the injuries he received in the Gottingen early-warning station.

There are even grounds for that peculiar and poetic myth of the spaceport subculture — the belief that John Truck destroyed Earth as a proxy of the 'new Centaurans,' those fabulous underground denizens of the dockland slums and the dyne fields, who will someday emerge as the true inheritors of the Galaxy. The reader must judge for himself.

About the Author

M. John Harrison was born in 1945. His first story appeared in 1966, and he subsequently became closely involved in the magazine New Worlds during the late sixties, when it was under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. As well as writing stories he also wrote criticism for the magazine , and spent some time as it literary editor. He first published novel was The Committed Men (1971).

The Pastel City was the first of his books about Virconium, and he revisited the city several times during the eighties. His fifth book, In Virconium, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and his sixth, Climbers, won the Boardman Tasker Award in 1989. In 1999 he received the Richard Evans Award. He has written for several periodicals including the Spectator, and currently reviews new fiction for the TLS.

PRAISE

'He writes with a cool and disciplined hand. His prose is always elegant, but never vain . . . unerringly he seeks the underside of things.'
Times Literary

Supplement

'A witty and truly imaginative writer.'
Literary Review

'Enjoyably rancid imagination . . . extraordinary, lively and moving.'
Sunday

Times

'Harrison's two principal strengths are his ability to depict violent action in convincing detail, and his facility for alternating that with moody descriptions of landscapes of entropy.'

David Pringle,
Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels

Also by M. John Harrison

NOVELS