M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

There wasn't much left of him up there — a thread of memory, the odd little bit of personal stuff. It came down to streets and faces in the end, scraps that still defined nun, a fading signal from the hinterland. He was a proxy, he was a junction-box -

'I'll tell you what I think, Trackie.'

He had almost fallen asleep. He peered about the room. He was deadly tired.

'I think you're waiting for your gyppo friends to pull you out of this. If you are: forget it Bring him through, lads!'

When 'he' came through, under the watchful eye of the Fleet, he was much changed. Occupying the same space as he occupied, coextensive yet divorced, breathing — if it could be said to breathe — the same air as he breathed, came his long-time spectre.

The flat and watchful planes of his face were simple implications of the bleached and jawless skull beneath, pouring fine sand from the sockets of its eyes, generator and epicenter of all deserts; resident in the marrow of his spine were other vertebrae — scattered beneath a dead tree, polished, mourning; as he moved, he shed brittle echoes of past deserts and intimations of the Desert to Come. And, far off in his liquid brown eyes — broken white columns, like reflections in a failing cistern -

Ben Barka. The ghost encompassed him It wore his uniform without pity.

'General — ' The promptings of a parched wing. 'I am a prisoner of war. This is a charade. I object to taking part in it'

'Cut it out, Gadaffi,' advised General Gaw. 'I know you.' And she gave him a breezy grin. He shrugged infinitesimally and seemed to forget her. 'What I don't know, Truck,' she went on, 'is what deal you two scabs cooked up in the Avernus parking-orbit — '

Ben Barka chuckled sourly. 'General — '

'Speak when you're spoken to, ben Barka. Truck, you aren't denying that you shipped him up to a rendezvous with Nasser in that sardine can of yours?'

'There was no deal, General; there was no rendezvous. He killed a friend of mine.' Truck couldn't understand what she was getting at. 'You must be mad.'

But it was hardly worth it Her voice rose and fell, endless, accusing, endlessly beside the point; ben Barka's deserted husk replied with the dry song of the locust; above them both, electrical, crystalline, angelic — the voice of the Centauri Device reminded how certain things might be done, ushered him, a particle of human silt down the long slow watercourses of Centauri VII.

Where at last he might be initiated into that queer half-life beneath the ooze, the purgatorial suspension of his mother's race -

He woke up abruptly, in a panic because he thought the Fleet men were ushering ben Barka from the room.

'Wait!' he cried. 'General, make me a bid!'

She had crept closer while he dozed, hands tense and outstretched. Now she looked wonderingly down at him. 'It's you who's out of his mind, duckie. 'We've got you now, unless you do something quickly — ' She sounded almost sympathetic. 'I wonder if you'll have the guts to work that ruddy thing?'

Truck groaned impatiently.

'General,' he whispered, 'now's the time! You want the Device, and me to operate it for you. Nothing's changed. Tell me why. Tell me how it — Look, just tell me who will benefit!'

This time, he knew for whom he was asking: they waited — as they've always waited, at rocketports, pneumatique stations, in delousing sheds and hand-out queues; in the greasy front offices of courts and refugee camps and detention bureaus — tired and grimy and stoned: he was asking for a dwarf, a musician, and a dead Centauran whore, for everyone who had nowhere to sleep at night, the new incumbents of his brain -

She opened her mouth.

Three quick explosions shook the street outside.

The whole room was flooded briefly with an intense, ominous red glow. Ruth Berenici moaned and flung herself toward Truck: one of her guards reached out and carefully hooked the feet from under her. The building shook and shuddered, plaster drifted down from the ceiling. A Fleet noncom, his face bloody and convulsed, appeared in the doorway.

'On the roof!' he shouted, eyes wild. 'General! Two detachments, and another in the street!'

'Christ, ben Barka, you're going to regret this,' said Alice Gaw calmly. She rounded on the noncom. 'Hold them. I need five minutes here. Get some support in. How the fucking hell were they allowed to get this far in the first place?'

'They're jamming everything, General; we cant raise Fleet — '

Alice Gaw whipped her Chambers gun out of its holster and rammed its barrel up into the soft place under ben Barka's chin. 'Hold them!' she screamed at the noncom. 'Chummie, I'm going to blow your head off the moment any of that filth gets down here — ' She pulled his head back with her free hand.

He overbalanced, plucked at her arm, eyes wide and empty; and for some seconds they tottered about in a circle, locked in the excesses of the Dance. Harsh, mechanical grunts and sobs, an eerie, obsessive shuffle of feet.

She pushed him away and raised the pistol, breathing in great noisy gasps. Her eye patch bad come adrift, and raw pulpy horror stared out of the hole in her head.

'I think I'll do it now — '

The window exploded inwards, and a stray shot from the street buried itself in the opposite wall, fizzing and spitting like an angry cat. A spatter of glass, a sudden stillness. Into which John Truck said:

'It's now or never, General. Quick! — Make us a bid!'

The pit in her face gaped above Mm. Her chin was wet.

'Growth,' she croaked, and he hardly recognized her voice. She swallowed. 'A free market economy. Law and progress. Peace with honor. You know all that.' She thrust her face up very close to his. Cosmetics were caked in her pores. He wondered how old she really was. 'Truck? We must stop them! They're a threat to every worthwhile human value!' she said.

'Freedom and dignity, Truck, how much are they worth?' she demanded, her single eye blazing. 'You've had them all your life because we kept watch -!'

From the windy concrete plains of Anywhere, the bleak industrial complexes of Parrot and the radio-deserts of Weber II, from the filthy vapor-lit alleys of the Snort, the new Centaurans — disenfranchised by poverty, barred from action by law, a pusher's market — crowded into that junction box between past and present atrocities that was John Truck's skull.

They were silent

'Well, Truck?' She bent over him anxiously, as if sensing a little of what he represented at that moment. He knew she didn't.

'Let ben Barka make his bid,' was all he said.

She threw up her hands in disgust

'Laddie, I was hoping for a minute there you weren't completely out of your head -

Fighting had broken out on the stairs as ben Barka's death-commando pushed its way off the roof. Dust and smoke billowed into the room; a dispute over the third turning of the fourth flight became an action, a battle, a siege; screams, burning meat, and bellows from the amplifier truck outside. Somebody in the street had brought up a small rocket launcher and was busily pounding the top floors of the building to rubble with it

Truck could see nothing now unless it was within a couple of feet of his eyes. He felt his substance boiling off into the void with the effort of holding himself together against the twin pressures of the Device and its inheritors.

'Let him speak!' he hissed.

In the event, ben Barka came up of his own accord, The General's police vanished to back up a holding action on the stairs, but he made no move to escape. He studied Truck's white and sunken face impassively. He brushed at something that might have been fine sand, lodged in a crease of his uniform.

'What precisely are you offering me, Captain?' he inquired. He raised his hand. 'No, General Gaw. Consider: what have either of us to lose? Our footing' — a thin smile — 'would now seem to be equal.' The muzzle of the pistol wavered, dropped. 'Captain?'