The Centauri Device

THREE The Longest-running Party in the History of the Universe

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.

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.

It couldn't last for much longer.

Every six months, each room was redecorated in the style of the Important Moment: now, the moment was twentieth century. Captain John Truck (somewhat recovered from his recent malaise) and Tiny Skeffern entered the King's domain by a chromium plated vagina, passed into a plastic lobby where valuable objets d'art — the reheat pipe and aft fan assembly of a GEYj93, cut away to reveal V-gutters and low pressure turbine; original pressings of Bing Crosby and Johny Winter; a calf-bound set of Ethel M Dell firsts, signed and numbered by the author — strewed their path.

Beyond, in a room full of drifting colored smoke, where the strobes jumped and hopped from one wavelength to another and Tiny Skeffern's sound fell in solid blocks from original quadrophonic equipment, Chalice Veronica himself lounged on a sofa wearing crocheted culottes.

'Hello,' said Tiny Skeffern, bobbing around. 'I brought a friend.'

'That's so nice,' whispered the King. He pulled himself languidly to his feet and smiled at Truck. His hand was icy; his skin had the texture and color of distemper, damp and powdery; he was old, and his voice was fault, destroyed; arcus senilis, the yellow band of decay, disfigured his eyes. It was common knowledge that he knew everything but the date of his own death.

'I want some information,' said Truck.

The King laughed. 'He's very direct, isn't he?' he said to Tiny Skeffern. 'I do love a celebrity, though. So good of you both to come.'

He studied Truck, and it was like being measured by Death.

'I've been hearing so much about you. But you're safe here. Nobody will bother you here.' He tilted his blunt, lizardlike head to one side. 'A lot of them would like to, though. What on Earth can you have done?'

Truck zipped his jacket up. 'Thanks. That's all I wanted to know. I'd better go. Tiny tells me you're expecting a raid.'

Chalice Veronica held his hand up in the ancient mainliner's gesture, forearm stiff from the elbow, palm open.

'There'll be no raid,' he murmured. 'The party won't stop. Stay. Circulate. Some of the finest minds in the Galaxy are here, Artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. Criminals. Do stay.'

Truck caught Tiny's eye. Tiny nodded dubiously.

'We'd love to,' he said. 'Only for a moment, though.'

Chalice Veronica smiled distantly. He began to roll up his sleeve. Someone brought him a tray of sweet cakes. 'For the Moment,' he mused, 'a fine sentiment Yes, always the Moment.'

As they walked into the next room, Tiny said: 'He's showing his age this last year. He can't face facts any more. But we should be all right for a while.'

'Ah, Hermann Goring! Now there was a true Romantic maligned by his own age. Always the fate of the innovator.' In the long gallery on the fifth floor, Horst-Sylvia, the biological sculptress, was demonstrating her latest animal, something small and multimorphic. 'Such excitement, such — ' Upset by the hubbub, it skittered over a waxwork tableau depicting Nixon and Brezhnev and the other great landowners of the twentieth century, gazing down benignly on their peasants and bondsmen. It squealed. 'Gaw hunting for him, I hear. Smoke?' In rapid succession, it became an albino marmoset, a spider, a golden salamander. It vanished into the folds of Sylvia's robe.

'Tiny's music is so… well… I just can't describe. Only the music can say it, you see. That's the beauty of the nonverbal.' Finally, it took the form of a black mongrel dog and sneaked round peeing on everyone's shoes. 'Harking back to the optimism — the Romance — of the Cold War, the promise of technology!' Someone found a piece of leather for a collar, but the dog had died. It was a great success.

'They don't last very long, of course,' said Horst-Sylvia.

John Truck, hanging about in a dim alcove beneath a blurred black-and-white photograph of an XB-70 ('so very characteristic of the imagination of the period'), picked sourly at his nose. Tiny had wandered off to be told what gave his music such an acute sense of aesthetic urgency.

'What did the old fool say about minds?' muttered Truck.

'You're in Carter's Snort, Captain' — a low, amused voice from somewhere in the alcove — 'it doesn't do to expect too much.'

Truck squinted into the gloom, positive that the recess had been empty when he entered it. He jumped. A shadowy figure wrapped in a black cloak had detached itself from the wall, eyes hidden by the brim of an enormous soft hat.

'At least they aren't dressed like silly buggers.'

A hollow laugh. The mouth was obscured by a ridiculous stormcollar; beneath the cloak, bones seemed to stick out at peculiar angles.

'You have to play your part, Captain. Look here — '

A thin white hand slipped from beneath the cloak, palm upward; across it lay a single long-stemmed green carnation, uncrushed and delicately perfumed.

'Sinclair-Pater sent me. He wants to tell you this: he admires what you did on Morpheus; he wishes to help you now in any way he can.'

The carnation vanished. A conjurer's gesture. It reappeared.

'What does he want from me? I've got nothing to sell. I'm no more an anarchist than an Arab.'

Pater's messenger snapped his slim pale fingers. He was incredibly tall.

'An offer of help. No more. You may need it sooner than you think.'

Chalice Veronica's warehouse shuddered. The lights went out. A long, rolling explosion rocked the gallery. Feeble emergency flares spluttered into life. The King's guests moaned and groaned in a sick gray twilight, gazing into each other's ghastly faces.

The anarchist swung his cloak tighter about him and stalked away into the crowd, his long legs carrying him off at great speed. Almost out of sight in the crush, he turned and shouted, 'Narcotics, Captain. They'll have stopped all the boltholes. Try the roof.'

And he vanished.

The emergencies died.

Truck fought his way out into the sweating, heaving darkness. Someone elbowed him in the groin. He kicked out. 'Move, you — ' It was useless. A Chambers bolt flared out in front of him. 'They'll never take me alive!' A hysterical laugh.

'REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE,' said a calm, gigantic voice.

Aerosol anesthetics hissed into the gallery.

Something blew up silently in the back of Truck's skull and he slid down into a profound hole. His last thought was that everybody seemed to know more about him than he knew about himself.