The Centauri Device

THIRTEEN In the Transit Lanes

Thoughtfully, Truck stole their guns.

The shafthead itself was littered with bodies in IWG uniforms, flung radially away from the center of a second explosion in postures stark and raw and strange. Has someone been here already, thought Truck. He stared around at the deserted sheds, doors banging in the wind, all those machines operating away unattended. It was coming on to rain again, trim gray curtains blowing between the buildings like wraiths. Truck attempted to scratch his head through his helmet.

'They've all had it,' reported Tiny Skeffern, trotting doggily from corpse to corpse, feeling his amphetamines and elated at not getting into a fight, 'I think.' His voice, filtering out through the capillaries of the respirator, was flat and ghoulish.

'Come on, Tiny.'

Truck left him to it and went to find the elevator mechanisms. The shafthead throbbed around him like a plucked string. Rain smoked at him unexpectedly round blind corners. Smears of rust on the walls. He found the lift cage, wiped absently at a film of moisture on the control panel.

DISENGAGE SECTION 5 AND PRESS FOR DOWN.

Under the earth again, he thought, under the earth again. He felt divorced, disinterested. None of the murder at the shafthead seemed to have affected him: perhaps he was preparing himself for his encounter with the Device, tying off unproductive sensory channels, shutting out all irrelevant stimuli.

'Come on, Tiny.'

They sealed the pressure doors of the lift cage, removed their respirators, and began their descent into the crust of Centauri VII.

Truck had no more sense of homecoming. The lift was slow, there was nothing to look at but Tiny. He was suspended between realities, he was powered down. Two miles deep, and he checked his dosimeter to see if he'd picked up any of the active caesium floating about on the surface. Two and a half, and he imagined desultorily the earth groaning and shifting beyond Omega Shaft, swallowing him up. It didn't happen. He breathed on the wall of the cage and wrote his name in the condensation.

'Oh, wow,' said Tiny, snapping his fingers. 'Under the earth, what a blast'

The cage grounded gently. Truck worked the doors.

Shaft Zero: they entered the bunker-chain ('Stay here and stop anyone who tries to come down,' Truck told Tiny. 'Not on your life,' said Tiny, shuffling his feet and looking paranoically over his shoulder) and almost immediately became lost in a labyrinth of filter passages, transit lanes, and every conceivable sort of dead end.

Plate movements during the later stages of the MIEV bombardment had tilted the whole system, giving the tunnels a general easterly slope of five or six degrees; some terminated abruptly at fault-lines, others were waterlogged and impassable. In the rest, power failure had left natural convection as the sole medium of ventilation, and the air in them was hot, humid, and heavy. Curious white clumps of mold, fat and glutinous, clung to the walls, giving the place a musty, evil odor. And while Grishkin's team had introduced fluorescent lighting to the major bunkers and some of the corridors, most were lighted only by the wan phosphorescence of the algae that dripped from the outputs of the ventilation plant like listless hanging gardens.

Despite the faulting, it was still a considerable warren. Truck and Tiny were quickly reduced to choosing their direction at random, wading half a mile at a time through eight inches of filthy water past alcoves full of enigmatic, corroding equipment, broached refrigerator units foul with partly decayed food, and doors that wouldn't open. The water trended east, chuckling around their feet to speed with mysterious echoes into the darkness ahead: they found a stream stronger than the rest and got some idea of following the direction of the current — but it only led deeper in, to pour finally over the lip of a fault into the absolute blackness beneath.

'Christ,' whispered Truck, staring at the jagged, tumbled blocks of concrete, the great rock dome the Centaurans had never planned, the long fall. After that, they tried three of the major bunkers: found only rusting consoles and heaps of bones covered in a damp green deposit, each pelvis or femur labeled with a neat white tag — 'female,' 'pre-pubescent male,' 'female adolescent' — by Grishkin's archaeologists. By pure force of will, they rediscovered the bright fluorescent walkways, but none of them seemed to lead back to the bottom of Omega Shaft.

It was Tiny who first noticed that they weren't alone in the maze.

The transit lanes were full of pathetic alien junk abandoned by the survivors in the aftermath of the war: personal effects, robbed of place and purpose and cultural definition, hard to identify in terms of human equivalence as the belt-buckles, bookends, or athletic trophies they undoubtedly were. Tiny, with the brain of a jackdaw and all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery, had been pocketing the shinier bits as he went along, exclaiming 'Look at that, Truck!' and 'Hey, someone's kicking himself for losing this.'

When he found the Chambers gun, however, he didn't say a thing: just hurried up and stuck it under Truck's nose. Truck, sodding and blinding with frustration and expecting each new bit of loot to turn out to be a pocket nuclear weapon, tried to ignore him. He waved it urgently about 'Truck? Truck?'

'Look, what the hell are you saying at, Tiny?' — pushing-the barrel aside. 'If we don't get out of here soon, there'll be murder done — '

'I found it on the floor.' '

Truck grabbed it, in a spirit of self-defense, and had a look.

'You dropped it.'

'Did I hell drop it. Look. Look. You can't tell me that's been down this bloody hole for two hundred years.'

It hadn't.

Five yards further on, they stumbled over its owner.

He was stone-cold dead on the ground, a strand-wolf from one of ben Barka's howling personal deserts, clutching a double handful of mud and grinning savagely into the haunted water that flowed past his head.

Silence.

Truck and Tiny looked down at him, appalled.

Then footsteps, quick and muffled, like murder in an alley, skittered down a parallel tunnel: something was keeping pace with them, stalking them out of the phosphorescent dark.

'Christ, Tiny, he's still here!'

A junction loomed ahead.

'Move!'

Truck threw up his pistol, sent a bolt flaring and sizzling down the passage, shadows bickering along behind it. He couldn't see anything, but someone was out there. He dragged Tiny along after him, stumbling and swearing. 'If he gets behind us — run, Tiny, run!'

They reached the junction and hauled up gasping — just in time to see the hem of a plum-colored cloak, violently agitated, vanishing into yet a third branch of the maze -

Neither of them felt very much like following it Suddenly, the labyrinth was full of disturbing echoes. And plum is the color of Openerism.

But Openerism wasn't the end of it

Fifteen minutes later, they came upon an entire unit of General Gaw's elite police, tumbled about the corridor like burst sacks. A Chambers bolt was still fizzing in the gloom, picking out slaughterhouse expressions on upturned faces, limning an indescribable mess of blood, scorch, and tangled limbs.

'Oh Jesus.'

Tiny cocked his head. 'Truck — '

Muffled Arabic whispered all around them on the complex acoustical fronts of the maze, a new ambush being set up at their very elbows. Distant but clear came the thump of grenade exchanges conducted through rock and concrete, faint shouts and cries. Ruin was loose beneath Centauri, and the bunkers were full of lost men blundering into invisible, desperate engagements.

Suddenly, and close: 'There's a whole nest of the buggers in here! Look alive, lads! — Let's have their trousers down! Where's that napalm!'

Truck shuddered. Bitter smoke had begun to drift down the empty corridor, nuzzling the corpses at his feet. He knew that voice, that awful gusto: he stood once more at the fulcrum, with the Galaxy shaking itself to pieces in a mad struggle for balance around him. 'Come on, Tiny.' He gazed warily round the abbattoir. The dead police stared back, their polarized contact lenses grim and gray and unblinking. 'I've got to find that bloody thing before they find me.'

General Caw's voice faded in the teeth of an Arab counterattack. Truck and Tiny, hermetic and apart, waded off hopelessly, deeper into the labyrinth, their shoulders hunched, the bunkers vibrant around them with the careless enthusiasm of the dance — Opener, Arab, Israeli, celebrating the abandoned figures and extravagant rituals of violence.

Tiny Skeffern dawdled once too often, and they missed each other in the dark. Truck ran wildly up and down the transit lanes bawling 'Tiny! Tiny!' not caring who heard. Only echoes answered him. He stumbled about firing off one of his Chambers guns at shadows until the click-clack of the empty mechanism brought him to his senses. Groaning, he leaned on a wall, put his forehead to the cold damp rock. Another dependent astray in the absolute broil of Circumstance.

Thereafter, he wandered with the gradient like a thin jackal, avoiding the larger concentrations of military and trying to surprise smaller ones by leaping out at junctions with bared teeth and oaths. He came to an area of seemingly endless geological disturbance, picking his way through a great choke of rubble and collapsed ceilings to the fault-line lip, where he watched the water spill over and down into the planetary chasm, not quite sure what he was seeing.

By that time, the Device itself was exercising control over the bunker maze; Grishkin, who'd mapped the system for IWG less than a year previously, was roaming it in a mad daze; Arab and Israeli alike were hopelessly confused. Truck was being cut out and guided toward an initiation he'd feared all along. He blundered along the fault-line, not thinking about much.

Twenty minutes walking brought him to the central redoubt, Grishkin's markers and lights, and an anteroom where luminous fungi cloaked the pipes and cables, and the wind hissed up out of Centauri like a voice.

From the anteroom the bunker doors, jammed open for about a quarter of their travel, made a tall rectangle of light, peculiar and leaping, as if some sort of fire was burning inside.

Byes narrowed, he advanced.

He preferred light to darkness. If that seems trite, then remember that it was a decision made long before he stepped over the threshold of that bunker, and he meant it literally. Though he loved the streets after nightfall — the cold blind littered alleys of the docklands — he found his true environment out among the weird spectral particle displays of the dyne fields, and he had indulged himself under the kaleidomats of a hundred different Spacer's Raves on as many planets until his brain jumped and resonated to the beat of their strobes and their unpredictable shift of wavelength. None of that, however, prepared him for the Centauri Device.

It hit him, the moment he walked in, with a hammer of light and sound designed to crack his head open like a walnut, and the complex antenna of his central nervous system became abruptly a receptor for everything from a 30 c.p.s. epileptic flicker to the ultrasonics of nonspecific anxiety. It was like walking into a brick wall — lights, noise, radiation. Wild bursts of sound set fire to the contents of his skull; white light raped his eyes; pulsed infrared attacked his epidermal nerve endings -

The inhibitory neuron blocks of the CNS depolarized. Synapse points and potassium-sodium exchanges across the axon membranes flared up wildly, went into frantic activity then locked up solid; gate levels disordered, swooped, dropped to zero. Masses of irrelevant information stormed the sensory-motor cortex, smashing up through the thalamus and hypothalamus, howled triumphantly round the reverberatory pathways of the association cortex; nerve ignition reached a frenzy as something bypassed the damping effect of sodium ion supply deficiency and total constant excitation was achieved; all three cortices blew out like candles in the wind -

Somesthesis became nothing but a memory. Truck was deaf, dumb, and blind, without feeling, without volition. His nervous system had been captured and enslaved -

In the sub-millisecond period following this onslaught, while membrane potentials were bedding back down into the millivolt range (after measuring in actual volts and attaining terminal impulse propagation speeds of more than four hundred miles an hour), the Device got to work on his biology -

In the limited sense, Captain John Truck was no longer there, conscious or otherwise: he could sense nothing; he could not order his limbs, nor was he aware of any limbs to order or any essential 'Truck' to order them — he existed solely as a metaphysic and a problem of philosophy. In that, he was lucky. Pain scorched up every nerve in his body, got in among the cells and began to unwind the dextro-rotatory helix — he didn't feel it; fingernails scraped samples from the marrow of his bones, broached the canal of his backbone, and dabbled in his cerebrospinal fluid — he didn't know; unbelievable methods of genetic exploration were loose in his skull and gnawing like the larvae of some parasitic wasp — he couldn't tell.

He couldn't tell. The Device, having research into his mere chemical credentials well in hand, had turned to psychometry — of a sort. Off in some debatable realm where thoughts drag themselves around without benefit of a single brain cell between them, Truck was looking at pictures. Pictures -?

— Everything he most desired: the secret of a new propulsion fitted to the Ella Speed (which was now somehow longer and slimmer, chased and inlaid, with a white fire flaring at its stern) — immense brass wheels, concentric and eccentric, which might enable him to shoot through into unmapped Galaxies; a girl he had never seen, Ruth Berenici's scar transfiguring her face; the studio of Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, a poem in porcelain; a drug; Fix the bos'n alive and well and baring his filed teeth, his stomach all neatly sewed up; finally, and very briefly, a scene at the Spacer's Rave -

Tiny Skeffern, immobile under the lights, a quirky smile on his lips — and a new music to replace the old, boiling from the H-line cabinets in a tidal wave fit to inundate the Galaxy -

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From that first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand.

His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest: but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other.

Standing where John Truck now stood (smashed and overwhelmed by the Device), Doctor Grishkin, Gadaffi ben Barka and, later, General Gaw — all paid-up members of what they liked to call the human race — had seen what they wanted most, grasped, and in grasping proved beyond doubt their genealogy. They would never see anything else.

While Truck, that mongrel of highly suspect lineage and scruffy demeanor, simply gazed a bit stupidly at what was offered and couldn't make up his mind. When he failed to grab at something with both hands (or even to show any exclusive preference — possibly because of his Centauran heritage, possibly because being a spacer and a loser he desired all and none of it), the Device pulled out its probes and let go. He was a borderline case, but blood will out, and old Annie's genes had done their work.

Truck measured his length on the concrete, twitching and whimpering. After a while, he crawled up to the thing and had a look. It had tested him and passed him, he saw it as its makers had seen it, and he knew he could operate it

He still didn't know what it did — but then, he had his father's eyes, too.

He fell asleep out of pure physiological relief, and was woken he didn't know how much later by the sound of Chambers fire echoing down the transit lanes outside. He put the Centauri Device under his arm and left the bunker at a run.

He went through the antechamber blind and panicking, careening off the walls and trying to arm his remaining pistol one-handed. The last thing he needed was to be caught with the Device. His mouth tasted filthy, sweat crawled between his plastic suit and his skin. When he got to the outer door he slowed up and listened, stuck his head around hoping no one would blow it off. Pitch black in the transit lane. The fluorescents were dead. Nothing was moving out there.

A low crooning noise started up somewhere off to his left

He peered into the darkness, seeing only slow violet patterns slipping aimlessly across the surface of his own eye. The noise again, bubbling up out of a wet place in the ground. His dark-adaption was slow in coming after the pounding taken by his CNS in the bunker. He cursed and blinked, cold premonitions burrowing through his head. He shivered; held his breath; released it in a great shout and leaped into the passage, gun first.

He found Tiny Skeffern a few feet down the corridor, lying with his face to the wall.

'Truck, oh Truck — '

Tiny was crying and sniffling with it, his blunt little fingers sidling up to the edge of the pit in his chest then scuttling away again like small terrified annuals.

'Truck, it's huge. I want to be sick — ' He curled up, rocking himself to and fro. 'Where've you been, Truck?' He moaned with horror, looking at his wet fingers. 'Christ, bloody Christ, bloody — '

Truck carefully turned him over onto his damaged side to give the unpunctured lung a chance — there was nothing else he could do but wait for the breathing to stop.

'It'll be all right, Tiny,' he murmured. 'There were other things to say, but he couldn't say them. 'It'll be all right.'

'But there's a hole!' Tiny shuddered and wept. 'Oh, why did I come down here? I'm hurt now — ' His blue lips slid back off his teeth, every muscle in his body tensed and quivered. 'Cloak!' he screamed suddenly, eyes wide: 'Cloak! Cloak!' It was meaningless and eerie. He was silent for a long time. Then he said: 'I'm always losing damn guitars,' gave a great retching cough and relaxed.

Truck sat down beside the corpse and dropped the Centauri Device. It rolled away from him. He kicked out at it feebly in the dark. He was alone in a desert of entrails and greed, while another Tiny Skeffern chased the Vulpeculan melon down Ruth Berenici's staircase, on Earth a million years before. He put his hands over his face. A noise came from between them.

'Captain?'

A huge, dun apparition with a bulbous, snouted head stepped out of one of the equipment bays that lined the corridor.

Grishkin the mad priest had come to collect, diabolical in his plum-colored cloak and black radiation suit, his whole vast bulk heaving with the after-effects of some mysterious exertion or compulsion. He stood staring at John Truck, his eyes enigmatic behind the smoky panes of his goggles. His respirator hissed evenly. Had Stomach been only another postponement?

'I kept coining back to the same place,' he confided suddenly.

His voice was thick and clotted. 'You know, I surveyed this place. I was never lost in it before.' He advanced a few paces, still gazing hard at Truck. His arm whipped out, he clutched one of Truck's wrists with the energy of an ambition near-fulfilled. 'I knew you wouldn't fail me, my son. The Ark has a special gravity, a — ' He put his other arm around Truck's shoulders. 'You must help me. There are ' — his grip tightened — 'others in the bunker.'

He saw the Centauri Device.

He rubbed his fingers, clumps of raw white sausage, over his goggles: they left faint beads of perspiration on the blank lenses. Then, quivering and collapsing like a pig in a midden, he knelt before it. One fat hand fumbled at the neck of his coverall, pulled, unzipped it to expose his plastic windows. Things swam there, ferocious and triumphant. Head bowed, he revealed the processes of his soul.

Truck laughed nervously. 'You're off your head, Grishkin,' Then he remembered something. 'Oh my God,' he whispered:

' "Cloak!" '

He pivoted on one foot and with every ounce of force he could muster drove the toe of the other into Grishkin's neck.

'You foul old bastard!' he raged. 'Why'd you kill him?'

Grishkin keeled over, still in a votive crouch; he swayed about, struggling to get up, but Truck was on him like a snake, full of poison and death, and had one hand fastened in the soft flesh at the nape of his neck. They fought for a moment in the echoing dark. Truck won — lugged him bodily over to Tiny's corpse. He was absurdly heavy. 'You disgusting sod! Open your dirty head to him! Go on, look at him!' And he gave the Opener's right arm a savage twist.

Grishkin squealed and tore himself loose. He knelt over the Device again. 'No,' he said. 'Forgive me,' he begged it. 'I didn't know what I was doing.' He looked furtively over his shoulder at Truck, advancing with steely hooked fingers.

A grotesque ballet ensued, danced out in the depths of a dead planet to the accompaniment of animal grunts and howls: time and again, Truck forced Grishkin to face the dead musician, while on his part the priest, squealing and groaning with fervor, flailed his way back to the Device. His respirator fell off. He tried to pray, but Truck kept kicking him in the side of the head, shouting, 'Pray to him!' and 'You're not God!' Soon, both of them were covered in blood and filth, panting and incoherent. Neither could get the upper hand: and Tiny Skeffern stared indifferently up at both.

'We made a bargain, Captain! We made a bargain!'

Finally, Grishkin's cloak came off; he lay there, fat and dripping, his radiation suit in tatters. Truck saw only a great white slug, full of something neither human nor animal. He choked disgustedly and gave up.

'I should kill you, Grishkin.'

Grishkin chuckled. 'Too late for that, Captain.' He came up off the ground with a Chambers pistol aimed at Truck's head.

Truck, abruptly calm, almost disinterested (understanding that Stomach had been a postponement, that all along there had only been one way to end the dialogue begun on Bread Street, Sad al Bari), shot him in the window of his belly.

'Captain,' said Grishkin.

Truck pulled the Device from beneath the body while the sound of the shot was still echoing through the bunkers and wiped the stinking fluids off it with a corner of the Opener's cloak. He stared down at Tiny, shook his head. There was nothing to do then but make his way back to the bottom of Omega Shaft: for him, at least, the confusion or curse had been lifted, and he found it easily. He got into the lift and returned to the surface of Centauri, his mind such a howling waste that even Gadaffi ben Barka might have felt uncomfortable in it.

Halfway up, his dosimeter reported a mild overexposure.

It was a long journey back to My Ella Speed. He pushed one foot doggedly before the other through the ooze, rain slashing into his face, the whole desolate landscape a gray-green vagueness shifting and mutating as the water ran off the lenses of his goggles. He stumbled into streams and buried his elbows in stuff he didn't dare look at. He'd been out in it ten minutes before he remembered to put his respirator back on. He coughed miserably.

It was a long journey, and worth nothing in the end. When he got back to his boat, he found the command-cabin blown off it in a tangle of cable and melted girder, the rest leaning and blackened like a dead tree.

Two other ships were squatting on the mudbank, enormous and silent. The UASR(N) Nasser, its fifteen million tons half-submerged in the silt, never built to touch the surface of a planet — it was on its side, nose down, all its locks opened up by demolition charges and its cavernous insides gutted; and the IWG Solomon like a red and black moon embedded after some inconceivable collision with the planet, her gun ports gaping. She had done the dirty business on the other, it was plain: but she seemed deserted, too. They loomed a hundred feet, two hundred feet, into the dead wet air, heaps of dead commandos scattered in great pools of shadow under their hulls.

Truck stared numbly at it all. It was beyond him. He went over and put his back against the ruin of his Ella; slid down into a peasant crouch, and wrapped his ragged cloak around him against the rain. He shivered. He was trapped. Whoever came up out of the furtive slaughter in the bunkers would have him, and the Device. He closed his eyes and waited. Ella groaned and leaned a few degrees more, settling into the mud. He had nothing left.

Presently, he heard shooting.

He got up wearily. Off in the direction of Omega Shaft, uncertain in the rainy distance, small ominous figures boiled toward him, spread out across the flood-plain and fighting as they came. Nothing was solved, then. He set off to meet them. What else could he do?

'Captain,' said a cold, lively voice from behind him, 'did Pater pull you out of the Snort for nothing -?