M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

'I'm a highway child,' he sang, 'so don't deny my name.'

Which was all as it should be.

John Truck licked his lips and bought himself a knickerbocker glory topped with little crystals of tetrahydrocannabinol; he had a look at the audience. They were mostly musicians from other bands, but there was a sprinkling of spacers, who, like John Truck, understood that music had died out in the year 2000 and that the New Music was the old music. Only the winners escape, Truck thought as the old Strat wailed (taking fours with a wholly imaginary wind which nevertheless sent tremors of intent down the backs of his calves and thighs: the port wind, the compass wind). The rest of us get carried by the music. Why not?

There was only one woman in The Spacer's Rave that night. Her name was Angina Seng, and she was looking for John Truck. He wasn't to know it: he could only see her back. Her hair was long and coppery, she held herself with a certain dramatic tension. Her bottom looked nice. So while Tiny Skeffern screwed it out of his glossy, priceless antique for the disconnected, the discontented and the rudderless of the whole duty universe, John Truck fell precipitately in and out of love with her. It was an impartial, on-off passion, for every spaceport lady seen fleetingly in a crowd. He was prone to that sort of thing.

In a hiatus between sets, Tiny brought the Fender over.

'Hello, Truck.'

He bobbed about for a moment, grinning sentimentally; sat down. Truck looked with affection at his bald spot, beaded with sweat.

'Tiny, you play worse and worse. Who's the girl?'

Tiny huffed, wiped his sleeve over the guitar's immaculate white polymer finish. He shrugged. Even when the Strat wasn't plugged in, the stubby, clubbed fingers of his left hand ran up and down the frets like small, undeveloped animals looking for a way out of the wind.

'Oh, thanks. She's not regular. Can you believe it, I've been here three bloody weeks.'

He rubbed his nose.

'Three weeks. Can you imagine that?'

He helped himself to some of Truck's unfinished treat.

'I don't understand how I can have done it. Outside being arrested, which I wasn't. I've been careful since I had that finger broken on Barfield Eight. Three weeks in this dump!'

'If you want to lift out of here,' offered Truck.

'You've still got Ella Speed . What a name. I never could get over that.'

He chuckled.

'I'll be around when you finish this gig,' Truck told him. 'Or you could find her at the dock. I had her painted up about a year ago. Fix the bos'n is aboard, I hope.'

Tiny got up. He did a little energetic shuffle, nodded, and went back to his band. He and Truck hadn't met much since his teenage prodigy days, when he'd been playing the circuits on Gloam. Between riots, that had been a lot of laughs, Truck recollected. He smiled to himself and worked some THC grit from between two of his teeth with his tongue. And he laughed out loud when Tiny leaned down from the poky Rave stage and whispered something to the girl with the coppery hair.

He didn't understand how she could be so pleased to see him. How could he? He only knew that spaceport women sometimes have metaphysical hungers hard to describe riding tandem with their more common appetites. They represent a different function of space, a significance of loneliness lost on their male counterparts. They are the true aliens. So he regarded her with a certain wariness.

'Mr. Truck, I have been searching the port for you.'

'Go on,' said Truck. 'You say that to all the spacers. It's "Captain." Is there something I can do for you?'

(He knew it was a mistake, even then. Tiny was driving his band through the first four bars of Where Was Tomorrow? He recognized it for an omen.)

She told him her name. She was a big, bony girl, but her face was pinched a little round the eyes and mouth. It wasn't simply the mark of a port lady — although they too are tense and contained as if perpetually struggling to keep their substance from evaporating off into the void.

Her clothes glittered and dissolved irregularly as the kaleidomat light found frequencies critical to the opacity of the material.

'Captain Truck, how would you like a job?'

He shook his head.

'Come back in two weeks. I shall be stoned on Sad al Bari here for two weeks.' He demonstrated by waving his hands about like airplanes. 'Bombed out Unless Tiny gets desperate.'

'It isn't a haulage job, Captain. You won't need to fly.'

'They're the only kind I take. I've got a Chromian bos'n to support. Really, you should find someone else. Not that I'm not grateful for the offer.'

He thought for a moment.

'Besides which,' he said, 'you aren't hiring me.' For a loser, that was pretty acute.

She leaned forward earnestly, put her elbows on the table. She toyed with the dregs of his knickerbocker glory, then clasped her hands.

'That's true. But my sponsor will pay better for a few weeks of your time than any comparable haulage job, and you didn't make much on that last seed run.'

He had to give her credit for that. 'You,' he said, 'have been talking to somebody. They were right. But I don't need money that badly. In two weeks, yes.'

'Captain Track,' she said, drawing her chair closer to the table, 'what if I told you this was a chance to do something for the Galaxy?'

He sighed.

'I'd say you have picked a loser. If it's politics, Miss Seng, double screw it.' He beamed at her. 'I'm not very political, you see,' he explained.

She got up without another word.

'You're not a port lady at all,' he called after her as she threaded her way through the audience to the door. But he wasn't really talking to her.

The evening went on, The Spacer's Rave got packed out. The management closed the doors in a suicidal move to suffocate the hands that fed it. 'I'm gonna rock and roll you baby,' sang Tiny Skeffern, 'rock and roll you all night long — ', an old sentiment, and enduring but Track had lost interest. About an hour after Angina Seng had squirmed her way out, he went off to look for somewhere quiet. She had soured it for him. He couldn't imagine who might want him for himself and not My Ella Speed .

As he went out the door, Tiny and his drummer were exchanging strokes, playing with psychopathic detachment and gentleness.

Outside, the same old wind. East Thing was a street without apparent function, a barrack thoroughfare for the shabby privates of the great commercial army — warehouses, and the occasional front-office. Packed by day with clerks and chandlers, it was a desert of vapor lamps by night; nobody walked it then except to get to the Spacer's Rave, and most of them were already there. Track loved it for itself. You had to.

Coming abreast of a deep doorway in the high numbers, he noticed nothing: but a sneaky foot whipped out of it nonetheless, and tangled up his long legs. He kicked his own ankle painfully and fell on the floor.

'Fuck,' he said. Somebody sniggered.

A shadowy figure issued from the doorway — loomed over him as, rubbing one elbow, he got himself into a kneeling position. A quick cold flicker of vapor light reflected from wicked steel knuckles. His neck exploded, he thought that his windpipe had collapsed, but he fell carefully, knees drawn up into his stomach.

'Up, son. I'm not carrying you. Get up.'

An exploratory prod in the ribs. Truck concentrated on the pain in his neck.

'Come on — ' Then, calling to the dim hole of the doorway: 'Give me a hand here, he's going to puke all over my feet.'

Another one? Any more and they could crowd him to death, never mind anything else.

They bent over him. He slapped both arms hard against the paving to give himself traction and, feet together, shoved the heels of his boots into the nearest mouth.