The Centauri Device (9 page)

'Whistle's gone, Tiny!' yelled Truck. He leaped into the air and landed on the astonished copper's back, locking his legs round the waist, left hand cupping the occipital bulge and pushing forward while the right forearm came across the windpipe and hauled back. The subject of the assault attempted to shoot one of Truck's feet off. Truck bent his head and bit an ear. The gun fell without going off.

Meanwhile, Tiny Skeffern had nipped in from the other side of the ship in a hasty ambush and kicked the legs from under the second policeman. He leaped around him, putting the boot in and jumping away again, yelping enthusiastically. He hadn't bargained, however, on the Fleet arsenal . . .

Truck gave a final wrench, dropped off his host like a dead tick and punched him in the kidneys twice. Suffering cruelly, the Fleet man staggered round to face his tormentor — took the hard vee between Truck's stiffened, separated thumb and forefinger directly in his larynx.

His eyes rolled up. Truck hung over him, panting.

'Jesus!' bawled Tiny, looking down the muzzle of a Chambers gun.

Alice Gaw's law was on its feet; Tiny was rigid. Truck took a pace toward them, winced.

The first and only shell fired in the encounter was still boring its way mindlessly into the mud of the field; its fading glare lighted a quick, fishlike flicker of movement; and with a long knife sticking in his neck, the remaining policeman choked at Tiny, dropped his weapon.

'Ooh,' he said, kneeling down. He subsided slowly and was still.

Himation picked himself up carefully. 'That was "a dirty chance well taken",' he said, brushing down his cloak and inspecting his gritty palms.

Truck swallowed, looked at him aggressively. 'lf you can do that sort of stuff, why the hell did we have to go through this charade at all?' he demanded. 'You could have picked them both off from a mile away with that thing.' He ran his tongue over his swelling lower lip. He knew he was going to think about what he'd just done and then be ill.

Himation retrieved his knife. He licked it deliberately, his blue eyes glittering at Truck over eight inches of stainless steel. 'There's an art to murder,' he explained. 'And a spontaneity to Art, though Pater wouldn't agree.' They confronted silently for a moment (Tiny was trying not to notice them, hands thrust into his pockets, studying some rivet-heads on
Ella Speed
's hull); then, acknowledging Truck's sneer with a curt nod, he went over to the man who had tried to shoot him. He was limping slightly. 'This one's just as dead. Captain. You'd better find it in your heart to approve.'

'I don't understand what you're talking about,' said Truck, but he did.

A light blazed out from the boat. The loading ramp descended, humming, to reveal the misshapen silhouette of Fix the bos'n, stout legs set firmly apart, humping his ugly chopper.

'You move into the light,' he said, snapping his sawmill mouth. 'Where I can see you. She's my boat since you took the Captain.'

But they managed to pacify him and urged him to put the thing away, which he did with care, wrapping it in some filthy rags he had carried with him for the purpose since the day he fled the squirearchy in Chrome. Ten minutes later, the cubical geometry of Carter's Snort flared briefly green as the
Ella Speed
fired up and shook Earth from under her.

'I left my bloody guitar!' cried Tiny Skeffern, beating his forehead with the heel of his hand.

Himation the anarchist glanced anxiously at the exterior screens. 'I hope you're skilled at evasion, Captain.'

'Well have to go back. Well have to go back and fetch it!'

'Look, I'm sorry about all that on the field,' apologized Truck, scratching the back of his neck.

They weren't followed (the General's imagination was focused elsewhere, and a violent old junkie occupied her only eye): but they violated the operational envelope of a solitary missile interceptor on the way up, and it broke its long parabola through the upper reaches of the air to look them over.

Precarious and hungry, hovering on the edge of the time when its prey might come into season, like a huge fragile insect against the gloomy bulk of the Earth, it spun and darted — extruding its armament and making playful threatening passes — then looped away on a complicated rising curve, trailing anhedral detector vanes, satisfied that
Ella Speed
was creeping out of its sphere of concern.

They watched it with wistful admiration. A precise, composed hesitation roll through fifty miles of airspace, then it climbed away like a roman candle; to vanish — flip! — as if amazed by its own dexterity. 'Arrogant sod,' said Truck. A thin-skinned predator in a rarified region, it could have vaporized a city. 'Will you just look at that, Tiny!'

'You mean there's a bloke in there?'

Himation shook his head. 'A boy,' he murmured absently. 'Only a boy has the reflexes. I flew one of those things until I was thirteen. They give you amphetamines for your reactions; you get addicted fairly quickly. Nothing's the same when you come down.' He gazed out at the failing atmosphere with a kind of angry yearning on his face. 'A lot of them are lost from dexedrine euphoria — they try to take them where the air is thicker, they try to land them but the hulls burn out.'

He took the controls soon after that. The ship shuddered fit to break its back and began its tortuous clawing progress through the dyne-fields to his secret destination. It was a wholly ungraceful journey, but short, haunted by the beautiful burning boys of the anarchist's youth.

He was still morose and withdrawn when
My Ella Speed
's Dynaflow drivers cut out with a thump and she spat herself back into reality like a grub from a mouthful of fruit. Her frame groaned and flexed; her exterior screens, confused by tachyon interference, hallucinated bizarre fish, sea horses plated with brass, unheard music from a questionable dimension.

'We're out!' said Truck with relief: another time, she wasn't going to make it.

'Hey — !' as the screens cleared.

Hung out in the interminable void before them was a spherical asteroid perhaps two miles in diameter at its equator. A pretty, self-willed rock, speedwell blue and flecked with gold, it was orbiting no detectable primary body. The rest of the Galaxy seemed oddly remote, as if this fragment of jetsam had attained some absolute topological direction and was describing an intricate, metaphysical course from which everything else in the universe was equally distant. Hung out there alone, then, like a semiprecious moon, implausible.

'We are between the stars here, weaving along the gravity interface of Sol and Centauri,'

said Himation. 'Pater found this place. He first named it "Howell," because it's a rogue — '

He laughed at their bewilderment, and refused to explain the joke. 'Lately though he's begun to call it "Versailles". '

He pointed at the forward screen, black shrouded arm, white finger. 'Look! Watch the golden areas — '

Two bright flecks drifted out of the blue eye, expanded dizzily, and quite suddenly became two ships — two facing golden cruisers fully a quarter of a mile long, with lean flanks, raked and curved fins and curious dorsal bulges. White, gemlike flames burned at their sterns; turquoise enamelwork made flowing ideographs over their hulls, a language of delicious, tangled flower stems. They were like nothing Truck had ever seen. They bracketed
Ella
Speed
; he shivered at the enticing curvature of their bellies; they were spires from a forgotten planet, they were awesome and perplexing.

'
Fastidious
and
La Vie de Boheme
' announced Himation proudly. 'Two among forty-nine.

But never as dangerous as my own; she's the
Atalanta in Calydon
,

"The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies."

She's over the horizon from here. But they'll do to shepherd us down.'

Good humor spilled over into his hands again. They discovered a tiny live lizard behind Fix the bos'n's ear. It sat in the cup of his palms, distending its scarlet throat, and blinked studiously up at him.

'I wouldn't have believed it,' declared Fix, 'if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.'

Later, after Himation had nudged
My Ella Speed
into a pit in the cyanic rock and grounded her gently, he refused to leave the ship. 'I got work to do, boss,' he insisted. 'She's coming out of the Dyne like a pregnant duck. I can't have that, not if we're going back to hauling cargo when all this' — he nodded pointedly at the anarchist — 'is done with. I
suppose
they'll have tool shops for those fairy great ships out there.' He stood stubbornly by the command panels, daring with folded arms Himation, General Gaw, UASR, politics, and prisons. 'We got to have maintenance.'

'Never argue with your bos'n, Captain,' advised Himation, and with flourishes made Fix a present of the lizard.

'I'm sure I don't know what to do with it,' grumbled the Chromian, but you could see he was pleased.

The asteroid was hollow.

Himation let Truck and Tiny through an outer shell, a
primum mobile
, of workshops, where pandemonium reigned among powerful lifting rigs and ships components to which Truck could put no name; where masked relatives of the wreckers at Carter's Snort waved their plasma torches like hayforks and seemed to take altogether as much pleasure in putting things together as their cousins did in taking them apart. After this demonic leaping and cutting and commotion of shadows, they passed through a sphere of armories — deserted and still, racked with dyne-torpedoes and the barrels of reaction cannon like organ pipes in the chill of an ancient church. 'Pater comes here often. Aren't they fine?' And finally a living area, where the air was heavy with an enigma of luxury: passages tapestried with hunting scenes by long dead artists from Oudry to Desportes, full of strangely clothed anarchists who nodded to Himation or halted their errands to attend to cheval glasses of crystal and adjust an item of dress.

They glimpsed through half-open doors a room whose tall, latticed windows seemed to look out over a pale lake among oaks where the great wet leaves of hemlock hung melancholic and inviting; another with a huge mantel on which ticked a clock shaped like a gilded elephant; a third empty but for one
fauteuil
— a woman wearing a white dress oddly spotted with crimson reclined there, slowly passing the rings on the fingers of her left hand to those of her right as she listened with immobile expression to the voice of a man they could not see. Himation smiled. 'A hologram,' he said. 'The Hotel Pimodan, 1849. Maryx, who inspired the
Mignon
of Ary Scheffer. She is listening to Baudelaire. They are waiting for Gautier and the snake-woman and the rest of the salon' He entered the room and pressed his hand through the languorous, mask-like face. 'See? Isn't it beautiful?'

'Are you a history professor or something?' asked Tiny politely. Truck sniggered, impressed against his will.

But Himation only shrugged laconically and, further on, rapped lightly twice at an elegant double door. The room he ushered them into was a spacious airy studio, lighted as if by a northlight as precious and passing as the Art it imitated. On a dais at the end of the chamber were easel and canvas; at the other sat a little sallow-faced girl with grave eyes and tiny breasts. Her clothes hung over a lacquered screen, and beside her was a basket of crochet work and a volume of poems; and, as she worked, she thoughtfully sang a song about artists and the way they loved:

Ils aiment si artistement

Ils sont des artistes gens.

Her eyes rested briefly on the intruders, calm, uninvolved. Around her on the eggshell-tinted walls hung Hokusai prints of uncanny refinement, arranged with harmonious aloofness; ethereal porcelain ginger jars adorned with the flowers of prunus and hawthorn rested on their shelves in rapturously exact alignment; there were silken fans decorated with dim balletic shapes. It was a fabrication of Art in itself, exquisite, ephemeral.

But it was not the room, despite its dreamy invitation; nor was it the girl. It was the man before the easel, with his tube of white lead and hog-hair bristle.

He was small and dapper, with tidy brown hands. He wore a white linen suit, a green carnation in the buttonhole of the left lapel. His eyes were dark and sharp, yet bubbling — as if a constant rediscovery of their use were being made behind them. His hair was black and curly, with a strange white streak. His palette was a nocturne of grays and midnight blue. He addressed the canvas with deft, quick motions, but somehow contrived to suggest by them an air of eloquent idleness. He was a thief and a rebel, he was a man of discrimination, he was ageless. He was Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, aesthete extraordinary and Interstellar Anarchist; and he prowled the Galaxy like a brilliant tiger, stalked the self-respect of IWG and UASR; and — snap! Bright teeth.

'Ah, le petit Manteau, au chapeau bizarre!' he cried, waving at Himation. 'Come in, dear boy! (Heloise, we are finished for today. Come tomorrow at the same time.) Captain Truck' — he dropped his brush and sprang down from the dais, extending his hand — 'how wistful of you to come in fancy dress!' Truck looked down at himself resentfully. 'Do you like my studio? The porcelain is K'ang, wonderful in its brittleness, hm? (Come, Heloise: out! Out!)'

And he gestured extravagantly toward the door. The girl thinned her lips at him, shrugged, indolently put down her crochet hook and took up her clothes.

He forgot her and harried Himation instead. 'An unimaginative time with the Queen of Cups, eh, Manteau? Still living in the Paltry Century? But you gave him my message. Look, well go into my living room shall we?'

By contrast, the suite of rooms adjoining the studio was frugal and austere, with little chintz curtains, stained floorboards bordering Turkish carpets, and an atmosphere of cherished isolation. In the sitting room, which was achieved by way of a low passage and a Gothic doorway, there were a few short shelves of old books, a scrubbed deal table, and some stiff but charming high-backed chairs. For ornament, a bowl of dried rose petals stood in the precise center of the table. On the walls of this prim apartment were hung two pictures: one a head of some wine-god, unfathomable and sensually cruel; the other a rough sketch of a morose, stooping young man — thin, heavy-jawed, with deep, close-set eyes, dressed in the garments of a defunct High Church order.