M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

'A chance to speak, ben Barka.'

'Very well, then.' He looked to Alice Gaw for confirmation. She nodded, shrugged, pursed her lips. 'It'll get you nowhere, duckie. Mark my words.'

Ben Barka clasped his hands behind his back.

'Captain: IWG rapes and plunders, exploits criminally the labor force of the Galaxy. Used in the service of a genuinely Socialist revolution, the Device will bring about redress, stability, peace — and a just share in the profit and the adventure by the labor force.'

He glanced toward the door, speculating on the state of the conflict. 'Social forces work like natural ones, Captain — blindly, forcibly, erosively. I know what you want. If we are to be a viable alternative to the corruption of IWG, we must be a hot, corroding wind — stripping off the topsoil where we must, reshaping — '

Truck closed his eyes.

'You haven't any conception of what I want. Either of you. The odd thing is that you both actually seem to believe all this stuff. We've heard enough.'

A quick, frightened movement in the fog: Ruth Berenici, bruised and dirty, unable to understand. She pushed between Alice Gaw and the Colonel and, kneeling, touched one of Truck's hands.

'John, this is mad! You're dying ! What does it matter which of them you give it to, when either of them could get you a doctor?'

He regarded her in silence. There simply wasn't enough of him left now to tell her anything.

'Don't I get a chance to bid?' she pleaded. 'What use are you to either of us dead?'

'I'm sorry, Ruth.'

'Sorry? John, it's me in here!' Then, quietly: 'Damn you. Damn you for a loser.'

They were leaving him the way they had come, through some back door of his brain; evaporating into fields and fluxes more subtle than any Dynaflow can create. Dogma means nothing to them. Personal relationships they take where they can, and always lose them somewhere between the Right and the Left, somewhere in the scorched field, in the urinal smell of the transit camp or the subway station.

It comes down to scars and empty bellies in the end. It comes to numb brains and the long trudge.

When they had gone — refugees from life and death, shuffling back down the light years and the centuries, hunched up against that eternal bitter Compass Wind — he smiled over his bitter disappointment. He saw quite clearly again. He saw what the hat and the cloak meant. How much better Himation or Pater would have been able to say it.

'It isn't enough,' he decided. 'So I am left with this thing after all.

'Listen, General. The Centauri genes have been scattering themselves over the Galaxy for two hundred years. There's a survivor of the Genocide in every drifter who ever lifted from a planet.

'But more: all of us down here are survivors of some personal atrocity, even if it's only birth.

'We breathe the dust of tragedy, and you offer us politics.

'Colonel — both of you — we're sick of ideology. It doesn't seem to work for us, only for you. You watch us crawl round the world — because there's nothing else for us to do — and see in us the reflection of a dream that was never worth the words you use to describe it; everywhere, you discover the symbols of your own obsession, codified but unreal — just as you discovered them in the bunker on Centauri.'

He touched the thing on his lap. It seemed to swell beneath his hand.

'This is the only thing that has ever belonged to us. When we hurt, you sell us something to ease the pain. This is the power to say, we aren't buying any more, and to mean that we're not buying it from either of you .

'Let's see what it does, shall we?'

Outside, the street erupts in silent flame. The Snort is burning. What does it matter, now? It was never worth anything, anyway.

Earth's old diplomatic grin splits wide open, to reveal a scaffolding of bone.

The room spins like a top and whirls away. Ruth Berenici, unattainable warm declivity, wounded, fading, falls away. Behind her Arab and Israeli, plucked away insensate, topple from the bloody stair.

'Christ, Gadaffi, stop him!' screams the General.

— They might hurl themselves forward forever, open-handed, gripped by eternal preternatural fear -

To hang, a dying-insect-hum on the moving air, while John Truck transliterated, last of the Old Centaurans and first of the New, allows that other voice, electric, to flood his inner ear.

His hands move: precise, elegant.

The thing on his lap like an animal stirs to meet them

Nothing is lost

something twists the world away

So little comes down to us.

While the above is not solely fiction — being, as the reader will have realized, a dramatized account of some of the events leading to the Sol-Centauri Hypernova of 2367, and the formation of what is still known in hinterland argot as 'Truck's Gap' — sources are few and scattered: a handful of secret files relating to the mysterious Centauri Device recovered from IWG and UASR embassies on Sad al Bari IV, Avernus, and, oddly enough, considering its backwater position, Gloam; records of coded tachyon transmissions by the cruisers Solomon and Nasser prior to the battle of Centauri VII, and of Earth-Fleet communications right up to the moment of occlusion; and, perhaps less bare but no less tantalizing, evidence gathered over some years — and in difficult conditions — from spacers who had known or talked with Captain John Truck.

We have no record of the mode of operation of the Centauri Device — here we follow (somewhat inaccurately, we fear, to the end of a more satisfying drama) the most popular of the current 'psychic' theories. And nothing, not even the unstrictured imagination, can explain that curious spatial discontinuity which engulfed everything within a radius of ten light years from Earth in the winter of that, Earth's most urgent year: Sol was destroyed, along with Centauri, to produce the power for this vast sleight of hand; the chains of Terran politics were broken; no more can be said. Further, we have no clue whatever to the appearance of the Device in its armed phase — the sole descriptions extant refer to what was seen in the Omega Shaft bunker by Dr Grishkin's archaeological team, General Gaw and two of her police force, and the UASR agent Colonel ben Barka. It was never our intention to produce original research, or shed new light on these matters, but to concern ourselves with what is more relevant in human terms.

Of the golden ship Atalanta in Calydon , there has been no sign since. She called at Pater's secret base shortly before the engulfment of Earth, and evacuated those of its complement who wished to leave. Many of these anarchists chose to remain in the Galaxy. About eighty of them were put off on the night side of Avernus some hours before the hypernova took place, and it is from them that we have our accounts of the 'Third Speed,' of the asteroid Howell and its fastidious prince, and of Himation's last words to Captain Truck. Whether Atalanta in Calydon 's stopover on Avernus was in any way connected with the reactor accident which finally destroyed the warren known as 'Junk City' will never be proved. The events, however, were undeniably coincident

But our greatest concern must undoubtedly be with the greatest mystery: the character of Captain Truck himself.

Say what you like of him: that his friendships were shallow and callous; that his morals were those of a cretin or a small animal; that his interests were tawdry. Say that he had sold drugs on nine planets and abused them on ninety more; that he had fought in dishonor and squalor in every back alley of the Galaxy, displaying only the courage of desperation. Say that he was young and unformed and uneducated, and of a depth of naïveté matched only by his premature bitterness -