The Centauri Device (5 page)

'The narcotics police are getting ready to close Chalice Veronica's import operation. You're not involved with that are you?'

He plugged in. Nothing happened.

'I'd like to see Veronica,' said Truck. 'He has paid ears.'

Tiny kicked his amp. 'Look here, fuck you,
work
,' he said. He washed his hands of it. 'Let's go and get smashed,' he suggested, 'We could drop in on Veronica later.'

'I'd have to tell Ruth,' said Truck. But it was past dark before he made it back to the wrecking grounds.

Somewhere between Three Jump House and the Spastic Quasar he stole a great pink Vulpeculan fruit as a present for Ruth. He and Tiny ran through the rain on opposite sides of the street, tossing this obscene thing between them until it began to show signs of irreversible wear. They giggled. Tiny was falling down a lot

'Shush,' whispered Truck, as they sneaked up the stairs.

GO HOME TRUCK, said the walls.

He missed a step. Ruth's present ballooned away through the darkness like a stupid ghost, pink and glowing. 'Catch it, Tiny!'

He knocked on the door. 'Ruth?' No answer. Tiny chuckled. 'It went all the way down again.' He tried to balance the fruit on one finger. 'Not going to let you in, mate. Oops.'

'Ruth?'

No answer.

Truck lowered himself carefully down, sat with his back to the door. Faint sounds of someone weeping filtered through it. They came from far away, and made him infinitely upset. 'Oh, Ruth, I'm sorry.' He brightened up. 'Let us in and well give you something.'

Tiny dropped the fruit. 'Yes.'

'Just go away,' said Ruth from the other side of the door. 'Just go away, John.'

He left the fruit. He shrugged. Halfway down the stairs, he hung over the banister and vomited dismally. His eyes watered.

'Tiny,' he said, 'we're losers. What good is all this doing us?'

Ruth Berenici sat on her narrow bed, tall and gray and beautiful, tracing with her fingertips the scar that immobilized the right side of her head from beneath the eye down to that place where neck meets shoulder. It would be naïve to mistake John Truck's half of that ramshackle, enduring affair for pity.

It might well have been the other way round.

Chalice Veronica, the intellectual pusher-king, lived in a five-story converted warehouse, a grim and ancient monument behind the old rocket-mail pits of Renfield Street.

Beneath the pits, he plied his trade, in a chain of fuel cisterns abandoned during the domino recessions. There the myriad sensations of the Galaxy were cut, stored, packaged, and dispatched (it was rumored) by a hundred naked Denebian mainliners working out a mysterious debt to the King. For miles in every direction, the earth was honeycombed with traps and tunnels and boltholes.

Above ground, in twenty sumptuous rooms, the longest-running party in the history of the universe was still in progress. People were born, people died there; some were said to have lived entire lives there. It slowed, but it never stopped; the dope was benign, the cuts were appetizing — and, by agile bribery, the King kept even the least of his guests safe from harm and from all arrest.

It couldn't last for much longer.

Every six months, each room was redecorated in the style of the Important Moment: now, the moment was twentieth century. Captain John Truck (somewhat recovered from his recent malaise) and Tiny Skeffern entered the King's domain by a chromium plated vagina, passed into a plastic lobby where valuable objets d'art — the reheat pipe and aft fan assembly of a GEYj93, cut away to reveal V-gutters and low pressure turbine; original pressings of Bing Crosby and Johny Winter; a calf-bound set of Ethel M Dell firsts, signed and numbered by the author — strewed their path.

Beyond, in a room full of drifting colored smoke, where the strobes jumped and hopped from one wavelength to another and Tiny Skeffern's sound fell in solid blocks from original quadrophonic equipment, Chalice Veronica himself lounged on a sofa wearing crocheted culottes.

'Hello,' said Tiny Skeffern, bobbing around. 'I brought a friend.'

'That's so nice,' whispered the King. He pulled himself languidly to his feet and smiled at Truck. His hand was icy; his skin had the texture and color of distemper, damp and powdery; he was old, and his voice was fault, destroyed;
arcus senilis
, the yellow band of decay, disfigured his eyes. It was common knowledge that he knew everything but the date of his own death.

'I want some information,' said Truck.

The King laughed. 'He's very direct, isn't he?' he said to Tiny Skeffern. 'I do love a celebrity, though. So good of you both to come.'

He studied Truck, and it was like being measured by Death.

'I've been hearing so much about you. But you're safe here. Nobody will bother you here.'

He tilted his blunt, lizardlike head to one side. 'A lot of them would like to, though. What on Earth can you have done?'

Truck zipped his jacket up. 'Thanks. That's all I wanted to know. I'd better go. Tiny tells me you're expecting a raid.'

Chalice Veronica held his hand up in the ancient mainliner's gesture, forearm stiff from the elbow, palm open.

'There'll be no raid,' he murmured. 'The party won't stop. Stay. Circulate. Some of the finest minds in the Galaxy are here, Artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. Criminals. Do stay.'

Truck caught Tiny's eye. Tiny nodded dubiously.

'We'd love to,' he said. 'Only for a moment, though.'

Chalice Veronica smiled distantly. He began to roll up his sleeve. Someone brought him a tray of sweet cakes. 'For the Moment,' he mused, 'a fine sentiment Yes, always the Moment.'

As they walked into the next room, Tiny said: 'He's showing his age this last year. He can't face facts any more. But we should be all right for a while.'

'Ah, Hermann Goring! Now there was a true Romantic maligned by his own age. Always the fate of the innovator.' In the long gallery on the fifth floor, Horst-Sylvia, the biological sculptress, was demonstrating her latest animal, something small and multimorphic. 'Such excitement, such — ' Upset by the hubbub, it skittered over a waxwork tableau depicting Nixon and Brezhnev and the other great landowners of the twentieth century, gazing down benignly on their peasants and bondsmen. It squealed. 'Gaw hunting for him, I hear. Smoke?'

In rapid succession, it became an albino marmoset, a spider, a golden salamander. It vanished into the folds of Sylvia's robe.

'Tiny's music is so . . . well . . . I just can't describe. Only the music can say it, you see.

That's the beauty of the nonverbal.' Finally, it took the form of a black mongrel dog and sneaked round peeing on everyone's shoes. 'Harking back to the optimism — the Romance — of the Cold War, the promise of technology!' Someone found a piece of leather for a collar, but the dog had died. It was a great success.

'They don't last very long, of course,' said Horst-Sylvia.

John Truck, hanging about in a dim alcove beneath a blurred black-and-white photograph of an XB-70 ('so very characteristic of the imagination of the period'), picked sourly at his nose. Tiny had wandered off to be told what gave his music such an acute sense of aesthetic urgency.

'What did the old fool say about minds?' muttered Truck.

'You're in Carter's Snort, Captain' — a low, amused voice from somewhere in the alcove — 'it doesn't do to expect too much.'

Truck squinted into the gloom, positive that the recess had been empty when he entered it.

He jumped. A shadowy figure wrapped in a black cloak had detached itself from the wall, eyes hidden by the brim of an enormous soft hat.

'At least they aren't dressed like silly buggers.'

A hollow laugh. The mouth was obscured by a ridiculous stormcollar; beneath the cloak, bones seemed to stick out at peculiar angles.

'You have to play your part, Captain. Look here — '

A thin white hand slipped from beneath the cloak, palm upward; across it lay a single long-stemmed green carnation, uncrushed and delicately perfumed.

'Sinclair-Pater sent me. He wants to tell you this: he admires what you did on Morpheus; he wishes to help you now in any way he can.'

The carnation vanished. A conjurer's gesture. It reappeared.

'What does he want from me? I've got nothing to sell. I'm no more an anarchist than an Arab.'

Pater's messenger snapped his slim pale fingers. He was incredibly tall.

'An offer of help. No more. You may need it sooner than you think.'

Chalice Veronica's warehouse shuddered. The lights went out. A long, rolling explosion rocked the gallery. Feeble emergency flares spluttered into life. The King's guests moaned and groaned in a sick gray twilight, gazing into each other's ghastly faces.

The anarchist swung his cloak tighter about him and stalked away into the crowd, his long legs carrying him off at great speed. Almost out of sight in the crush, he turned and shouted,

'Narcotics, Captain. They'll have stopped all the boltholes. Try the roof.'

And he vanished.

The emergencies died.

Truck fought his way out into the sweating, heaving darkness. Someone elbowed him in the groin. He kicked out. 'Move, you — ' It was useless. A Chambers bolt flared out in front of him. 'They'll never take me alive!' A hysterical laugh.

'REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE,' said a calm, gigantic voice.

Aerosol anesthetics hissed into the gallery.

Something blew up silently in the back of Truck's skull and he slid down into a profound hole. His last thought was that everybody seemed to know more about him than he knew about himself.

Too Much Gravity

General Gaw, Dr Grishkin that peculiar priest, and Swinburne Sinclair-Pater the Interstellar.

Anarchist had each captured a piece of him.

General Gaw had the arms. 'Come off it, sonny!' she cried, waving her awful spoon. Dr Grishkin pulled his right leg off in an attempt to attract his attention. Sinclair-Pater, laughing madly, put his hands into Truck's head. 'I know you!' he said archly, waggling his skinny fingers. 'We all know you!'

There are mysterious troglodytic wreckers hobbling and hopping about in the gloom at the very base of the universe; for millennia, they have been searching for the one golden bolt that holds the whole surprising contraption together; Truck knew its whereabouts to the inch just before he woke up to all the vast sordid horror of a rubber restraining garment, in West Central Detention, Carter's Snort.

'I'll tell you!' he yelled, trying to thrash about. But they had all left by a back door in his head.

The only new construction in Carter's Snort since the depression: West Central Detention, thrown hastily up when the decline became apparent: conceived, built, doomed to be a slum, to deliver hinterland justice. Not that anyone inside it is interested in the latter (which is represented non-representationally in a mural above the unwelcome gate and has, apparently, to do with globes, balances, and lightning. Very inspiring, but all that can be said for sure is that it smells of disinfectant); no, they're deep down in all that concrete to earn a living. It bows their shoulders, as if they supported the whole steel-laced, flat faced pile on their necks.

If they have cells for souls, no one's to blame.

Outside, it's a reflection of the Snort it claims to serve: fans of rust where metal touches the walls; wet and dirty and down by the river.

Inside, John Truck. Well, he's been here before. Or in places very like it.

He was alone in a charge room with the echo of his own waking cry, the sole and total literacy of the hinterlands scratched and daubed on the pale green walls around him. This is where they write their only books: Picking Nick was here, busted for speed; Og, caught holding for a friend. All coppers do it with their mothers; if you get off, Angel, tell The Rat I didn't. Stuff and screw and stuff again. Novels of rage, futile exposed addressed to lawyers, relatives, and life; vomit and other things in corners; a cold steel door with rivets and only memories of paint through being kicked so often in silly resistance.

Truck was strapped on a bench, vertiginous from the anesthetic, already bleak and bored, wondering if the General had caught up with him at last. From beyond the door came a continual scrape of footsteps, a whole army of offenders filing past. Faint voices, the odd shout, some smashed loser who had or hadn't come down: the King's guests, paying their forfeits without the fun of the party. It was way past dawn.

He lay there for some time, silently fighting the crab lice in the restraining jacket and staring at the ceiling. People came to the door, changed their minds and went away again.

Angel and The Rat and Fast Harry passed on their advice in disconnected misspelled prose, but he'd read it all before. When the door scraped open, he was half asleep. Imagine his surprise, to find Doctor Grishkin, the flabby priest, bending solicitously over him.

Cooped up in Ruth's apartment with time to consider that meeting on Bread Street, he had begun to feel a metaphysical uneasiness, even alarm, whenever he thought of Grishkin. He would have been hard put to explain why. Nevertheless, it was amplified unreasonably by the actual apparition or avatar of the man. Endeavoring to dispel some of it, he stared up into the round, lunar face where he could almost see himself reflected in a faint cheesy film of perspiration and muttered:

'I thought I told you to sod off?'

It was hardly a body blow (One of these days, Truck, he told himself sadly, somebody is going to discover the real you under all this foulmouthed repartee — a foulmouthed teddy bear); and a mistake even to imply he might be continuing their previous exchange. The doctor had reversed his cloak, but not his stance. Black, with a thin gold stripe. Very fetching.

'Captain, it is a little more complex than that. If you could bring yourself — If you could co-operate — '

His little eyes gleamed extravagantly. Things, amorphous and juicy, shifted to and fro behind his windows like the slow stirrings of some core, some hub — something real, at any rate — which existed quite apart from his benign and greasy faith: inexplicable urgencies of the psyche mimicked in the motion of the gut, demands that perhaps only Grishkin could fully comprehend and Truck completely fulfill. Faced with such ambition — such enigma and compulsion — Truck's bravado slipped a little.