M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

'Grishkin, piss off.'

And he walked away, leaving Tiny Skeffern and the Opener staring after him. Tiny was puzzled, but there was a certain satisfaction in Grishkin's unconvincing eye. Truck sensed that he had not won the encounter, only postponed it

Tiny caught up, swinging the Fender case. 'I think I am going to be sick,' he chuckled. 'How can he live with his own breakfast like that?'

Truck stopped and watched the Opener watching him. His neck ached, and the wind stung his tender lip. 'Tiny,' he said, 'I'm going to Earth. There's no better place to be arrested.'

'What?'

Out in space, other winds blew. While thoughtful Truck brooded round the exterior screens, gazing at the flying streamers of illusion produced by Ella's improbable progress through the impossible medium of the dyne fields, Fix the bos'n prepared him meals he didn't eat.

'You got to eat, boss.'

Tiny Skeffern patched his Fender into the communications equipment. Broadcasting the Dynaflow Blues into the quaking, distorted universe outside — trailing slow ribbons of tachyon noise that might some day and in some unimaginably distant place be received and decoded as a stretched, alien music, the ship groped and crabbed and hurtled her way by turns a few light years closer to her captain's destiny.

Nobody mentioned Earth until it became necessary for landing procedures.

By that time, Truck had six of his twenty-four hours left.

Earth:

IWG and UASR, initially parasites of the political muscle-tissue, had eaten what remained of their twentieth-century hosts during the aftermath of the tragic and infamous 'Rat Bomb' wars of 2003-45, when the client-state system, that uneasy and paternalistic compromise between autonomy and empire, fragmented and fell apart.

A new Arabia swallowed the entire Sino-Soviet continent, engulfed the more fertile areas of Africa, but lost its original nerve center in Egypt. IWG swelled to contain both Americas, the husk of the unsuccessful European Economic Community, and the Mediterranean shores.

Between them, they devasted Australasia and, in a quarrel over the missile pits of Antarctica, set fire to the Pacific Ocean.

Now, they faced one another along the crooked boundary lines of the Syrian Desert and the Taurus Mountains, the cratered wastes of the German Strip, the Bering Sea. Silos in the radio-glass puddle of the Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keelyards of Nubia. They disputed the Red Sea warily, in gunboats — from the Israeli, causeway at Sinai to the fifty-lane Arabian road bridge at Al Shaab.

Hydrofoil flotillas, spraying rainbow arcs of oil and semipolymers to calm the sea before them, patrolled the South Atlantic; above them, piloted missile interceptors hung in precarious fragmentary orbits; and off' the tip of South America, Tierra del Fuego, enigma and threat under its power dome, humped out of the Magellan Strait like a huge, stranded alien fish.

There were many fronts, but few confrontations; they used the Galaxy for those.

It would have been naïve to consider the inheritors of the Earth as 'Jews' and 'Arabs': they had sold that birthright, and retained of it only the terminology. The millennial grievances that had motivated their wars prior to the last quarter of the nineteen hundreds had vanished; in consolidating their secondhand empires, they had merged a thousand nationalities and religions, only to lose their own.

More important, perhaps: each of them had surrendered its self-determination in favor of the politico-social and economic principles of the dead powerblocs — so that they were caught in the inevitable conflict of ideologies already worn pitifully thin four hundred years before, when Tiny Skeffern's shiny antique had given its first performance.

2367:

The Mohorovicic Discontinuity was mined on both sides of the Red Sea Fault.

There were no more neutral zones.

Truck decided to visit his wife.

Cor Caroli was visible over the deserted inspection pits of Carter's Snort when, unaware of his position as an activator of entropy, he brought his boat down among them. He knew it for a murder-star, the killer in the houndpack of Venatici; but as yet he did not expect that his own star would eventually outshine it on all scales of magnitude.

He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bos'n, who stood stubbornly on the loading ramp of My Ella Speed , coughing in the dirty winter air of Earth and saying: 'I'll bring the chopper, boss.'

Truck shook his head.

'You stay here, Fix. Tiny will tell you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again.'

Fix grinned with embarrassment His teeth were like a sawmill. 'You need big protection out there, boss. I'll just — ' He made off toward the corner of the hold where he kept his stuff.

'Leave that bloody thing where it is, Fix. You're not coming.'

'Stuff it.'

'Sorry.'

He was, too. He fastened his second-best jacket, a heavy brown leather thing lined with peculiar gray fur from some place he had never been. Some of his hair got stuck in the ornamental zip; zips were as fashionable in the hinterlands that year as Tiny Skeffern and for similar reasons. He shrugged at Fix. He left the ramp.

Tiny was still in the ship. Hearing Truck's receding boot heels, he stuck his head out of the forward lock and, silhouetted against the cabin lights, puffed ectoplasm into the frosty night.

'I'll be at the Boot Palace on Sauchihall if you need me,' he called.

'Thanks, Tiny.'

Gazing sentimentally back over his shoulder, Truck lost his footing among the clumps of couch-grass that had forced their way through the broken concrete of the landing field.

'See you.'

He brushed himself down and trudged out into the empty, depressed streets of Carter's Snort.

Most northerly of the five major zones of Albion Megaport (that 60,000 square mile complex of bunker-docks, keelyards, freight terminals, and warehouses that had once been called 'Great Britain'), the Snort had been the first of them to succumb to the domino recessions of the post-colonial period, and the only one never to have recovered.

Cargo was no longer handled there, and no ships were built — although a few keelyards still had tower cranes erected above them, as if to disguise their impotence. Only the breakers flourished, catering to the spares trade and melting down what they couldn't resell in great pig-furnaces that turned the midnight concrete arcades of Carter's Snort into a dull red maze.

Its original population dispersed in search of work, the zone had moved quickly through that process of cultural decay peculiar to ports, attracting the poor, the rootless, the ruthless — and finally the artistic and cheap intellectual elements not only of IWG but of the stars. The only music you heard in Carter's Snort was the New Music. Its feet were booted. It was the hinterland of all hinterlands.

Truck, who had once lived there long enough to make one of his more elementary errors, hunched his shoulders and walked east. He stopped for a moment to gaze at the broken spine of a refrigerator ship curving up out of its own corroding ribs, his face over-lighted by the savage glare of the plasma torches; their half-visors dark and numinous, the wreckers grinned at him, a race of amiable Vandals.

FREE ANYWHERE, said the graffiti on the walls of the dim derelict warehouses; SUSQUEMADELION LIVES, and IS THERE LIFE BEFORE DEATH? Truck laughed; he liked them; he felt at home. He pulled his collar up and ignored the few bitter flakes of snow that stung his face when he turned into the wind.

Ruth Berenici Truck lived in wrecker territory down by the river. He stood in the street looking up at her windows and wondering not so much why he had come as what part of him had suggested it. Silent explosions of light from the yards, then the tolling of a monstrous girder as it flexed and fell.