M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

The walls had been his manuscript when he still slept here: all the way up to her floor, they sent him messages from a youthful alien head.

GO HOME TRUCK.

He didn't remember doing that one.

Ruth Berenici stood outside her open door, presenting out of nervousness her left profile only, perfect and still. She was tall and thin, she moved very slowly. Her eyes were gray (devoid, though, of ice), her hair was streaked with it; her jaw muscles were a little too strong.

'Ruth.'

'I saw you in the street.'

Ruth Berenici had allowed the universe to wound her at every turn; because of this, she possessed nothing but a sad grace, a yielding internal calm. Truck reached out to touch her right cheek. She closed her eyes, and the left side of her mouth smiled.

'It's still there, John.'

That hesitant turn of the head; the full face revealed; he bit the inside of his cheek in a kind of sexual shock.

'Why are you shivering?' he asked. He experienced a brief memory of her ascending the cellar steps of the Boot Palace some years before, a sectional assumption in the weak wet light of the Carter's Snort dawn. He found one of her long hands, trapped it.

'There are times when' — she disengaged her hand, spread the fingers, pressed them flat against his chest — 'I know you.' She shook her head. Profound bruised areas about her eyes, mark of the eternal victim. 'No, you're not coming in — '

The hand moved away, leaving no bruises on his second-best hide, no marks of any kind.

' — unless you're staying this time.'

Ruth recognized the significance of moments. It was her only defense.

'I am this time,' he lied. The room had changed, but he found one of his hats in a cupboard. 'You did it up nicely. I thought you might have gone somewhere else.'

Later, placing one of his hands beneath her tiny breasts:

'Here.'

Ruth worked in the front office of Bayley, the wrecker's on Lead Alley; at night, she brought him amusing presents ripped off from Bayley's stock. He stayed in the room all day because he knew it would hurt her to come back and find him out. He slept a lot. He scratched at the frost patterns on the inside of the window; stared, mildly surprised to discover himself still free.

They quarreled, crammed into her narrow hot bed.

'Why did you go?' Abruptly moving her leg, watching him seriously. And: 'We ought to be able to talk about it now.'

''I don't really know. Come on.'

'No, wait a minute, we ought to be able to talk about things like that.'

He grunted at the ceiling, rolled onto his stomach. 'Oh well.' He got out of bed, scratching listlessly at the hair under his armpits. With nothing to do all day, he had become a glutton for sleep, perpetually dozy. He felt as if a layer of sponge separated him from objects, from the floor.

'I have to move. I have to meet new people. I like people.'

She followed him round the room, talking over his shoulder, picking things up and putting them down again.

'In the abstract, in the abstract. Liking everybody keeps individuals at a distance. If you can feel responsible for some smashed port loser you never met, why not me?'

'Oh, that's a bit simplif — '

'Right.' She pressed herself against him, all that amazing white flesh, tinted smoky blue in its declivities. 'You'll go again. Ill be hurt, but I'll still be here. This will always be here waiting for you.'

She snatched his hand, forced him to touch her right cheek, her belly and thighs.

He shrugged. 'I don't believe it's like that at all.' He picked his jacket up and began to go through the pockets.

Back on the bed, Ruth sniffled. 'I'm sorry.' She faced the wall. 'Stuff your bloody head with dope, then.'

Four days.

Nobody came.

Nobody arrested him (except Ruth: the longer he stayed, the more frightened she became of his eventual departure — it was an ascending spiral of dependence). He was at the window constantly, watching the snow turn to sleet and then rain. Out in wrecker territory the plasma torches hissed; whole plantations of steel were pruned and lopped; the dark-visored gnomes bobbed and grinned.

Caught between Ruth's inability to feel anything but pain and the uncertainty of his own position, Truck grew nervous and mean. He didn't understand how General Gaw and her police could have missed him. He needed information. He picked moody bones with Ruth when she came home from work — finally put on his jacket and left the house.

Tiny Skeffern couldn't tell him anything.

'Something is moving down there underneath it all,' he said, blowing on his fingers to warm them up. It was practice afternoon at the Boot Palace, but the rest of his band hadn't turned up. 'But nobody's mentioning your name.'

He was squatting on the dusty stage, up to his elbows in an amplifier. The Boot Palace was gloomy and cold, smelling of stale audience. Grimy swirls of fluorescent dye blinked dimly from its cavernous walls, echoes of the previous night's sartori .

'The narcotics police are getting ready to close Chalice Veronica's import operation. You're not involved with that are you?'

He plugged in. Nothing happened.

'I'd like to see Veronica,' said Truck. 'He has paid ears.'

Tiny kicked his amp. 'Look here, fuck you, work ,' he said. He washed his hands of it. 'Let's go and get smashed,' he suggested, 'We could drop in on Veronica later.'

'I'd have to tell Ruth,' said Truck. But it was past dark before he made it back to the wrecking grounds.

Somewhere between Three Jump House and the Spastic Quasar he stole a great pink Vulpeculan fruit as a present for Ruth. He and Tiny ran through the rain on opposite sides of the street, tossing this obscene thing between them until it began to show signs of irreversible wear. They giggled. Tiny was falling down a lot

'Shush,' whispered Truck, as they sneaked up the stairs.

GO HOME TRUCK, said the walls.

He missed a step. Ruth's present ballooned away through the darkness like a stupid ghost, pink and glowing. 'Catch it, Tiny!'

He knocked on the door. 'Ruth?' No answer. Tiny chuckled. 'It went all the way down again.' He tried to balance the fruit on one finger. 'Not going to let you in, mate. Oops.'

'Ruth?'

No answer.

Truck lowered himself carefully down, sat with his back to the door. Faint sounds of someone weeping filtered through it. They came from far away, and made him infinitely upset. 'Oh, Ruth, I'm sorry.' He brightened up. 'Let us in and well give you something.'

Tiny dropped the fruit. 'Yes.'

'Just go away,' said Ruth from the other side of the door. 'Just go away, John.'

He left the fruit. He shrugged. Halfway down the stairs, he hung over the banister and vomited dismally. His eyes watered.

'Tiny,' he said, 'we're losers. What good is all this doing us?'

Ruth Berenici sat on her narrow bed, tall and gray and beautiful, tracing with her fingertips the scar that immobilized the right side of her head from beneath the eye down to that place where neck meets shoulder. It would be naïve to mistake John Truck's half of that ramshackle, enduring affair for pity.

It might well have been the other way round.

Chalice Veronica, the intellectual pusher-king, lived in a five-story converted warehouse, a grim and ancient monument behind the old rocket-mail pits of Renfield Street.

Beneath the pits, he plied his trade, in a chain of fuel cisterns abandoned during the domino recessions. There the myriad sensations of the Galaxy were cut, stored, packaged, and dispatched (it was rumored) by a hundred naked Denebian mainliners working out a mysterious debt to the King. For miles in every direction, the earth was honeycombed with traps and tunnels and boltholes.

Above ground, in twenty sumptuous rooms, the longest-running party in the history of the universe was still in progress. People were born, people died there; some were said to have lived entire lives there. It slowed, but it never stopped; the dope was benign, the cuts were appetizing — and, by agile bribery, the King kept even the least of his guests safe from harm and from all arrest.