M. Harrison - THE CENTAURI DEVICE

'I can think of a time when you'd have laughed at a few killings. It was you who licked the knife at Carter's Snort, not me. You might at least come to Earth to help me, if Earth is so bloody important.Tell me why you won't.'

Alarm bells filled the ship.

Himation whirled to the screens, snapping his fingers at the quarterdeck crew. 'Captain, I — later.' He glanced over his shoulder at Truck for a moment, shrugged eloquently. He conferred with his fire-control room.

'We have a strong trace in the one-fifty mile band, Himation. She's lifted from Centauri. Do we fight?'

'We leave.'

Atalanta in Calydon throbbed and moaned with the power buildup. Waxy blue light drowned the bridge. On the screens, the image of the graveyard quivered and broke up, those wretched hulks taking on for a precious instant the gaudy colors of the orchid, the forms of imaginary beasts. With this transfiguration, panic jumped out of a dark hole and shook him like a dog with a dead rat.

'Tell me why !' he shouted across the bridge. 'You owe me that!'

Heads turned toward him. Atalanta toppled over the thin edge of space and into the dyne-fields.

Himation relaxed. He crossed the bridge and said, 'All right, Captain. It's hard — I don't belong here any more — you can't imagine — ' He shook his head, made a dismissive gesture with one hand. 'All this — ' Finally, it tumbled out:

'Captain, I've been outside the Galaxy since we last met!'

'Listen, Captain, (he continued): you know how it was at the end of Pater's last fight -

Atalanta was lost under the Arab guns, running nice a fawn. I heard Pater cry 'Dyne out!' I could see him flaring along in my wake, trying to draw their fire. But my bridge was exploding with mad light, and long reaction guns had breached our hull. He came in time and again, sowing torpedoes, spouting fire 'Dyne out!' — but his forward batteries were shot away, The Green Carnation was ripped open down her length like a golden pike. He stormed past one last time, then I saw him flicker — 'Dyne out!' — and fade. Twice, three times, he wrestled with the dyne-fields. He was superb: no other man could have forced that wreck into the Impossible Medium. Rolling like a bitch, still shooting, she vanished.

'I tried to follow. Atalanta clawed with dreadful energy at the fabric of space, desperate to push herself clear. Her bridge trembled with ionization — metal ran with a fire that consumed nothing! I knew we were wedged like those pathetic hulks we had seen earlier in the battle, mere specters caught on the edge between two hypothetical eternities. Then I had her through — flip! — like a grape pip flicked across a darkened sickroom. I sweated. Captain, I swear I prayed with my relief. But when I noticed my bridge circuitry, I knew I was no longer in control: it had melted to slag! My crew were helpless -

Atalanta had taken over.

'None of our own equipment was operating; instead, the alien machinery shivered with an intense white light. The hull seemed to melt and withdraw — we swam in senselessness — all solid forms vanished in amazing twists and contortions: and when we looked at one another, aghast, we were no longer men! Space had somehow entered the ship, and was crawling through us in slow, luminous waves. We were steeped in it: we were birds of paradise, we wore the masks of gilded deep-sea fishes in some tideless ocean, we were glass effigies with infinitely thin, attenuated limbs -

I knew we would die, if we were not already dead (and trapped forever in some unimaginable posture of unreality). But even as the thought formed, space coughed us up -

And out into darkness!

Nothing moved beyond the hull. I rushed to the screens — they were dark; we restored our circuitry, but they remained dark. We pushed out sensors and probes — they recorded a terrifying distant trace; we regained power, we spun her like a compass needle to face it -

There before us lay the Galaxy, fault as an afterimage crawling across a dead man's eye!

We've seen it, Captain, from the outside. Aboard Atalanta , we've seen them all: Andromeda, M32, NGC205 for our first, hesitant, skeptical journey — and later to others so unbelievably far out that they have no names. There is a third level of Space, Captain; a Third Speed. I've spoken with its denizens, and learned the glory of the moth in the lamp-bowl — can you understand why I hate this rubbish heap, with its putty brains and feet of lead? I've been beyond!

Since that day, Atalanta in Calydon has flown herself: we simply navigate. We brought her in triumph back to Howell after that first wild flight — only to find Pater still and cold in his peacock room, yourself gone, no one knew where. That fastidious prince! His life was the purest fabrication of Art, the most gilded of lies — but I loved him. We outfitted the Driftwood of Decadence as his bier; we filled her with prints and porcelain and fans of the utmost sophistry; all Howell gathered to watch her final firework leap into the unknown. She went off on a sigh, on a whisper, like a dream of unaccustomed beauty.

She's traveling still, Captain, at the Third Speed; Pater may have reached the edge of the Universe itself by now. He deserved nothing less.

After that, all I could do was come in search of you -

I found a trace of you on Stomach, a memory in the eyes of an androgyne whore. But the trail was cold. I spent a week stalking the city of Intestinal Revelation, dressed in a stolen Opener cloak. From there, I tracked you to Avernus. Avernus! — the worst place in the universe! But I ceased to fear for you when I heard that some lunatic Opener novice with a gun had wiped out Chalice Veronica and his whole Paraphythium operation in a single night. And I was up there in the parking orbit — not alone — to watch you blow your hatches on not one body but two.

You would seem to have become something of a nemesis -

'One of them was Fix,' said Truck. He felt bitterly angry: for Pater, for himself, for what they had so nearly achieved on that last ride into death, with The Green Carnation , her heart burst, falling to bits around them; and for what he had in exchange — dead friends, and the Device like a yoke across his back.

'They've killed Fix and Tiny now. I haven't anybody left.' Himation had rescued something from the night, but Truck's boots were full of lead. He felt like crying, but, 'I still owe them for that,' he said, with as much defiance as he could muster. 'And if I did for ben Barka, I'm glad. I meant to.'

'But you didn't, Captain. That parking orbit was somewhat crowded, I'm afraid: and everyone in it there to watch you: Nasser , Solomon , Atalanta — oh, we made a fine procession later, following you to Centauri. Ben Barka was plucked out of the murder trajectory by his own flagship. He was in the fight that destroyed Nasser and the Ella Speed ; he was in the bunkers. Like the General, he is a survivor.'

Truck was aching in every bone, whether from weariness or misery or his untreated overdose he neither knew nor cared. He sat down on the deck. He put the Device down beside him, stretched out his legs, and examined his hands. What could he do? — all along, his gestures of defiance had been crude and fruitless. He stared desperately up at the anarchist.

'They'll hound me 'til I'm dead, Himation.'

No reply.

'What do you imagine I can achieve on Earth? I don't even know what this thing does.'

Himation shifted uncomfortably, looking at the hull above Truck's head. 'None of this means much to me since I went out there. Space is a habit.' His eyes clouded, probing out past the hull. 'Pater saw something in yon, some strength that neither he nor I possessed. He wanted you to take the Device and do with it as you chose. He thought that that action in itself, whatever the purpose of the thing, might be enough. You understand? Your importance has always lain in your skepticism.