The Centauri Device

FIVE Under the Snort with the King of the Moment

For an instant, the sleet fell as mud, bellying like a curtain in a storm wind as the wave front of the explosion pushed it down the conduit of the street. Track staggered back toward the doors of West Central with his knees quivering and his hair wrapped round his face (the cilia of some wet friendly animal, tickling his eyes and filling his mouth). Above him, the concrete symbol of hinterland justice broke up into powder and stones and fell like a waterfall, the globes shattered, the balance dropping away, the grasping hand dissolved.

'Sodding hell!'

He stared up at it, terrified,

Lumps of it bruised his shoulders, beat him coughing to the floor. Nodes dragged him into the lobby, pushed him headlong into the cool plastic floor where he lay trying to ignore his soaking wet trousers. Something burned its way through the glass and battered itself into a glowing smear on the further wall, hissing furiously. The drunken spacer surfaced from some maudlin contemplation of his confinement, stared wildly about him. He shouted, 'Christ, skipper, Number Five's dropped its load again!' blinked enormously, and rolled under his bench.

Truck twisted round to get a look at the street. Visibility was a dead loss. Engines raced as the Fleet tried to get its vehicles out from under; patched with a dermatitis of half-melted sleet, they maneuvered in blunt confusion, booming and roaring. General Gaw was invisible in the murk, but he could hear her voice raised in anger. Slow red bolides arced through the weather to a common vanishing point, and the reaction rifles coughed and choked like sick old men.

'Who the hell is that out there?' he demanded of Nodes.

The IWG man gave it consideration, his tired eyes resting on the commotion outside. 'I'd say that's a politically naïve question even from you,' he decided. His hands discovered a small Chambers pistol in one of his pockets. He pointed it at Track. 'I think we'd be safer away from here, don't you, John?'

As they backed cautiously out of the lobby, the spacer stirred beneath his bench. Down in the abused recesses of his skull some vestige of a martial emotion prodded his bruised brain. He raised a wavering contralto and, after a couple of false starts, assayed a passage from the Finnsburg fragment:

' "Each man made his private piece with Reagan/And, at a signal, released/Heat seekers, side winders, desiccant, decorticant, defoliant;/They ran out their salvaged disrupter grids,/Swallowed their anti-sympathy pills,/Hoping for a sight of the enemy." '

His delivery was round and tremolando; he drew great sobbing breaths between the lines and beat out the intervals with his horny hand. Pleased with the acoustics of West Central, he began on 'Salute the Fleet!' — guttered into a gloomy silence three bars in.

'God bless you, bos'n,' he called after Truck. He belched, gazed disconsolately round the flickering, vacant lobby. 'You're a sterner man than I am!'

Later, Truck said, 'I think we're — ' But then, he owed IWG nothing. He shuffled along, feeling dismal and exposed, while Nodes pursued a steadily downward course, into the chilly and echoic deep-detention levels where nobody had bothered to plaster the walls. Every three or four minutes, a fresh explosion — perceptible here only as a sustained vibration in the soles of the feet — shook the peripheries of the building.

Condensation dripped from the expansion joints in the ceilings, growing milky nubs of mineral, and seeped across the sour untreated floors. It was a warren of right angles: clusters of small-bore pipes followed the passages, faithfully, like giant circuitry; dust furred the ventilators. Peculiar underground winds whistled aimlessly in the stairwells. Nodes avoided the elevators, 'in case of power failure, John.'

'Look, I think we're being followed,' Truck admitted finally. The soft whisper of feet — receding feathery echoes, hesitant, spasmodic — had unnerved him.

The warren opened out into an underground motor pool, a wistful gray light leaking down its access ramp. It was empty but for a few Port Authority five-tonners, jacked up and incomplete. Old rags and bits of paper blew around the oily floor and mere were little mounds of dust in the corners.

'That would be a pity, John,' said Nodes absently, working his way round the walls, inspecting each vehicle in turn. He stopped, rubbed at a smear of oil on his gun hand with his other thumb (the Chambers threatened erratically: a support pier; a pile of sixty-inch wheels; and a notice which read DISCIPLINARY ACTION WILL BE TAKEN AGAINST OFFICERS CAUGHT — the rest was grimy and illegible). 'None of these work, you see.'

He stared up the ramp. 'You may not be much use to the General in other hands. In those circumstances, I suspect you would be a definite danger to security.'

'What other hands? Come on, Nodes!'

'Frankly, John, I have orders to kill you if that looks likely.' Nodes's eyes became interested in the stairwell that had dropped them into the pool. Truck backed off rapidly; he didn't know whether it was fear or repugnance; he felt entitled to either, but outrage looked like eclipsing them both.

'I've had it with you, Nodes! I'm sick of being "John"! I'm sick of being it!' He waved his arms about. Evaporating sweat chilled his skin. 'My God, you lot crawl out of your holes and turn the entire Galaxy into an asylum. Whose hands?' He wiped the hair out of his eyes. 'And as for General bleeding Gaw's bleeding "sentient bomb" — '

Nodes swung on him, alert and tense. The old-animal eyes focused properly on Truck for the first time since he had entered the interrogation cell.

'Don't go on,' he said quietly. 'That is information classified above my level, and I'm not prepared to hear it.' He made a most human gesture with his free hand. 'You can only damage us both by giving information I'm not cleared to hear. I suggest we — '

A scrape of bootsoles like the sound of bandages tearing.

A shadowy figure in the stairwell.

Nodes turned far too late.

His Chambers blew a pit in the concrete at his feet; splashback set his trouser-legs on fire. He tangoed back, trying to shake both legs at once, looking horrified. Fizzing and moaning like an angry cat — like Tiny Skeffern's Fender — a five millimeter shell took him full in the chest and began to burn its way in. He fell on his back, crying 'Shoot! Oh, shoot!' trying to get a final desperate message to his fingers. The figure on the stairwell cackled softly, its feet scraping like torn cloth, like butter muslin, faint destroyed, on it came.

Nodes emptied the reaction pistol at the ceiling, attempting to get Truck. Down on one knee over the maimed ribcage, choking on the stink and smoke, Truck took it gently away from him and tossed it across the garage. It clattered and rang. Nodes groaned, put his fingers in the soft wet edge of his atrocious wound. 'I have an odd blood-group, Mary,' he said clearly. 'Oh Jesus Mother Christ.'

'You needn't have done that,' accused Truck, getting reluctantly to his feet 'I swear you all take pleasure from it.'

The King chuckled faintly. He was wearing a white leather jumpsuit of peculiar cut, tight round the crotch and armpits, hanging loosely off his old frame elsewhere. His hands were quite steady, puncture marks standing up among the hairs on their backs, sore scarlet against the gray junk grime deep in the very cells of his wrinkled pachydermic skin.

'Ingenuousness spoils the Moment, Captain Truck,' he whispered. 'It can't be your cynical amorality they all want you for. Are you out of your wits?'

He scuttled off like a lizard surprised on a warm brick, over to a dark corner, where he scrabbled in the dust on the floor. A section of the wall above him creaked and slid away. His decaying voice rattled across the garage to John Truck (puzzled and hurt and never noted for his eager intellect), two sticks rubbing in a dry wind:

'I prepared long ago for some much eventuality — I sensed a similar Moment whispering back to me across the years — H-lines alive with meaningless programs. Escape all situations. Everything comes to me beneath the rocket-mail pits, Captain — I — ' He raised his voice. 'Come! Come in, now, my friends! You are back in the domain of the King, and you can come to no more harm!'

And he vanished inside.

From the stairwell came a timid susurrus of movement. White faces peeped into the motor pool, retreated, tasting the air this way and that. Giggling and murmuring in hushed but rising tones, joking at last, their confidence growing by the second, the King's guests issued from their brief captivity in the West Central warren, their gauzy sleeves fluttering nervously at every disturbance of the air.

Truck stood like a mad stone over the fuming corpse, and they fled past him, giving him not a second glance, their lips parted, their eyes bright. The longest-running party in the history of the universe disappeared into the earth. He stared inarticulately after it. He thrust his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders.

Other, harsher footsteps rang in the corridors above — other voices, mechanical and raucous. He shook his head over the dead man. He ran.

The party having streamed on ahead of him, bent on the bright lights and the delicacies of the cutting-room floor (among which, presumably, might be numbered one hundred Denebian mainliners sweating out their unnamed obligation to the King), Chalice Veronica was alone behind his secret door. His reptilian, scrawny hand urged Truck through the gap; he cocked his head and listened; he threw the steel lever that fastened the bolthole.

'Run for it, Captain!' he hissed. 'The invading faction has been embarrassed; they are preparing a final stand.' And he made off down a low, ill-lighted tunnel. Crouching and lurching, scraping the top of his head on ancient stinking brick, his feet reluctant in two inches of evil water, Truck followed.

They had made perhaps four hundred yards from the motor pool when the floor sank a foot and the bolthole cleared its throat behind them with a vast, bellowing cough. Dust stormed about them, the lights went out, and they clung together in the dark, staggering about to keep their balance like practitioners of a strange vice. Locked in that unpleasant embrace, the King's sour old junk-breath in his nostrils, Truck felt the earth creep and shift in the dark. He was deafened, there was foul grit in his eyes and in his mouth.

After millennia, or perhaps seconds, the subsidence stabilized. Track disengaged himself from the King's arms, spat, and rubbed his eyes.

'The whole bloody Snort's come down on top of ns,' he suggested.

Veronica bared his yellow teeth in the gloom.

'I don't think so, Captain. But someone — inadvertently, perhaps — has made sure that West Central won't hold spacers for some time to come, and we seem to be safe for the Moment. Look!'

At the further end of the tunnel, a blue light glowed. They walked toward it, brushing ineffectively at the filth on their clothes.

'If s a pusher's Galaxy, Captain Truck,' said the King complacently, eating white iced cakes and applying the traditional tourniquet to his upper arm with a stained silk necktie four centuries old.

The Party ebbed and flowed desultorily around them like a thick, landlocked sea as they sat in quaint inflatable chairs (vinyl gone yellow as a junkie's face with age, its transparency clouded) beneath the Renfield Street silos.

'Each in our own way, IWG and UASR, myself, even poor mad Grishkin and the masters of his idiotic religion, we keep people from remembering that they hurt, or that they are made puzzled and miserable by the immensity of the Galaxy, the irreversibility of their own humanity. It isn't a state that can last of course — ' He snickered at himself, licked pale crumbs from his blue, anoxic lips. 'Still, we never close, Captain. We make you feel nice.'

Fat worms of cable ran the floor of the abandoned cistern — one of the four that served Veronica's trade — to power the drying plants and chemical vats; and batteries of floodlights slung fifty feet up in a network of girders poured out a devastating heat. The King's court moved slowly and amiably, drenched with warmth, sleepy with it; the party had become introspective, like a frog in the sun.

'A pusher's market, and you're a prime commodity now. Alice Gaw needs you, so the Arabs must have you — oh, yes! Don't avoid the issue, Captain! Why else would Gadaffi ben Barka, nobody's fool and an astute commando, lead an absurd strike on an obsolete prison in a cold country? He's innovative, but not given to adventures.'

Truck was appalled by the speed of the King's intelligence operation. Eighteen hours had passed since the escape from West Central, and he had slept most of them away. Now he sucked on a knickerbocker glory, sweating a little, and meditated on price — the King being the King and information being another pusher's market.

'I hope they wiped each other up,' he said.

Veronica closed his eyes sleepily. 'It's unlikely. Both are survivors. Whoever exploded himself down there, it wasn't Colonel ben Barka. And remember: it was Alice Gaw's aide-de-camp who got caught in the "accidental" bombardment of Weber II; she'd been off-planet for five hours or more — ' He tapped his fingers to the sluggish tune in his blood. 'I wonder about Grishkin. If he was there as you say — '

'Grishkin!' Truck sneered.

'Ah.' The King opened his eyes again. 'Even he wants you, Captain. It was him who unearthed the — property — which makes you so valuable; among Openers, I'm told, the feeling is that this gives them prior right. Who's to gainsay them?' He sniggered slyly. 'The old lunatic has already built a myth about it. They're calling it the Ark of the Covenant, Captain. How does that strike you for Romance? The One Entrail of the Living God, brought from Earth during some ancient migration.

'As to whether Grishkin was mad before he entered the bunker on Centauri, I have no reliable intelligence.

'But don't underestimate him. He is as fanatical as the other two, he has as much to gain (if less to lose), and the Opener net catches odd fish on half a dozen planets.' His eyelids drooped, but failed to close. He watched Truck from two thin bright slits. 'A demented archaeologist,' he mused, 'and a strange device. And you with a gift of tongues. Could you lead an Opener crusade, Captain? Can you imagine yourself interpreting the Word for Dr Grishkin?'

His eyes snapped open suddenly.

'Oh, they all want you. Captain, but you're safe with me.'

Truck couldn't bear his cunning old gaze, or think of anything to say. He interested himself in the murmuring guests instead. Silence stretched out, white skin over junk bones. 'I suppose I'll have to leave soon,' he said, finally. No answer. 'I think that's somebody I know over there. It's been quite a party, though.' But the lizard's eyes were closed once more. Opiates being opiates, the King had fallen into a light doze.

He got up and hovered around indecisively for a minute or two. Nobody had taken any notice of his exchange with Veronica. He bit his nails, regarding unwillingly the King's withered limbs and pinched, evil old mouth in case the audience wasn't over; but it was, and he wandered off, feeling safe no longer.

Oddly enough, he had seen someone that he knew: Tiny Skeffern, squatting on the floor with an instrument he had stolen somewhere, while an electrically thin port lady with eyes like a surprised squirrel smiled possessively down at him.

'West Central?' he said when Truck asked him. He shook his head. 'Wait a minute, there was — No — I suppose I must have been there.' A smile spread hesitantly over his face. 'Eventually, you only remember the party,' he told himself, confronting with wonder the ineffable. 'But if you say so, Truck.'

The port lady was warning Truck off with a green, implacable stare. He cringed politically at her and led Tiny away, checking furtively over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. The lights had begun to poke consistently at one sore spot at the edge of his field of vision. His sense of discomfort and distrust grew moment by moment.

'Look, I don't think Veronica's going to let me leave. I'm not sure I know what to do. If he uses me to make a deal with the General — '

'Oh, he's a decent enough old boy,' said Tiny politely, yearning back toward his lady (who threw Truck a glance that would have debilitated a planet and stalked off, even her shoulder blades spiky with malice). 'Now look what you've done. Oh well.'

In the event, it proved harrowing but not too difficult. Truck hung back, convinced of his vulnerability but afraid to commit himself to the attempt to leave, for an hour or more. Then Tiny Skeffern drew his attention to a peculiar phenomenon. The fuel cistern was becoming unbearably oppressive, the party turgid and still, lifeless, tideless; a Dead Sea of humanity in which blank sweating faces floated obstinately, determined not to drown. The music faded, stopped on an unresolved chord; people shifted their feet and stared at one another. Truck detected profound swelling undercurrents; hot, irritated interfaces.

'My God,' whispered Tiny, 'I really think it's ending this time.' He studied the sluggish waves. 'He's misjudged it. Down here — ' He nudged Truck excitedly. 'It couldn't be stopped from outside. But down here the system's closed. Look at those faces! Truck, they're bored!'

The breakdown was quick and cruel. Aimless patterns developed as the guests blundered about the cistern to the invisible rhythms of their ennui; the heat poured down unceasingly, settled in the hollows of their collarbones; their party clothes became adhesive, rumpled. Silence, but for the shuffle of feet. Some of them lay down, the rest carefully trod on them, eyes fixed elsewhere. In the face of the overwhelming quiet, they condensed like a spiral Galaxy, tracking in to the center of the room.

'The port exit, if you want to go,' said Tiny. 'Over there.' And they set out to push their way through the congealing clot of flesh. Someone gripped Truck's shoulders: Horst-Sylvia, the biological sculptress, with her heaving coloratura bosom; yellow, motionless eyes stared into his own in passive, mute interrogation. Her jewels glittered. He dragged himself away.

'I… ' said a voice near him, in the nightmare tones of the partially deaf, 'I… eye… aye… ' A dreadful, stammering pause. 'I know… what you mean. Hermann… Hermann Goring… so… such a… '

The King's guests were desperately trying to reassure — reactivate — themselves: but it could never be the same again. They had allowed it to run down, they were separate, isolate. The damage was done.

The walls of the cistern lurched through a haze of heat. Despite his sleep, he felt exhausted. He was punched in the small of the back, but when he swung bloodthirstily around, no one met his eyes. He could hear himself breathing. He ground his knuckles into his eyes, fighting the drowsy hysteria emanating from the guests, who had begun to shove one another about silently like animals in a pen. When he took his hands away again, the floodlights stabbed him unerringly in that one sore spot on his retina.

He blinked. The exit was plain. But beside it, like a black beacon, had appeared a tall figure in a soft-brimmed hat. A pale hand beckoned. He thought he was hallucinating. It stood by his escape route like Death at the feast. He tried to laugh, made a dry, choking sound. It was Sinclair-Pater's courier, the anarchist in the black cloak.

'They all want me, Tiny,' he whispered. A boot scraped down his shin, ground into the small bones of his foot. He fell over. The guests began to mumble; faces hung above him like decaying moons. Tiny dragged him upright. They were ten paces from the bolthole when, flanked by two massive Denebians, Chalice Veronica, aware that the party was terminal, blocked their way.

His face was gray and awful, the corners of the lips stretched high and wide, yellow teeth and red gums peeled, the brutal revelation of the skull beneath. He chuckled, and saliva trickled down his chin.

'You're too much of an attraction to leave, Captain,' he said. 'They all want you, but I seem to have cornered the market. So why not enjoy yourself?' He raised his track-marked arms, swept the cistern with a gesture. 'All life is here! Art, sophistry, crime — '

'You told me that before,' said Truck weakly, 'and all they talk about is this bloody Hermann Something-or-other.'

The King's Denebians advanced in a quick, deadly crouch, but the man in the black cloak was quicker. From nowhere, he placed himself between them and the anxious Truck. His bright blue eyes glittered with laughter; his long white hands flickered hypnotically: and a perfect, long-stemmed green carnation lay along his palm, beads of moisture sparkling in the minute folds of its petals.

'Captain Truck wants to leave the party, Veronica,' he said, and his voice was cold and lively, like air from outside. He watched the King closely. 'Why be impolite?' The flower vanished; the white hand, amused, danced in the air, then plucked it from behind Veronica's ear. 'You know, I think that's mine. Good Lord.'

'You know who I am,' said the King softly. 'Don't be a fool. I rule down here. I am the King.'

The anarchist shivered with laughter. It filled him, it brimmed out into his hands; every finger writhed with it — they flicked, clicked, produced a little disposable syringe. He looked down at it with amazement.

'You know, I believe that's yours.' He went closer to Veronica and said in a low voice: 'You know who sent me. You know what the carnation means. Pater is within striking distance, King, however far away he seems. Pater is always within striking distance.'

His shoulders shook as if he could no longer contain his mirth. The syringe snapped in his fist. He cast the shards up into the glare of the floodlights, and no one ever saw them again. He clapped one hand to Truck's shoulder, the other to Tiny's; he urged them gently forward. An entire pack of playing cards showered from beneath his cloak. The King stepped back, his face collapsing into a senile mask, cunning and silly and frightened.

As they left the cistern, two women began a listless fight, rolling on the floor, kneading one another's flesh with blunt fingers.

Out in the maze of unlighted streets behind the Renfield mail pits (where they had risen from the ground in a fog of their own breath, three tiny figures darting and ducking beneath the concave midnight, dwarfed by rockets and the dark fret of access gantries), Tiny Skeffern grinned jauntily and said: 'Lucky for us you came along, I expect.' He rubbed his hands. 'Christ, but it's cold up here.'

'There was no luck in it.' The anarchist — his friends called him Himation, possibly a reprisal since, in the youthful belief that entertainment should have a moral end, he stole their money and retrieved it from the most embarrassing places — stared back the way he had come. 'But I got you out in time, it seems. I suspected some hours ago that Veronica had already made his deal with the Cow of all the Galaxy.' He spat into the darkness. 'If so, hell have to face her without you, and his party will be over for good.'

Cor Caroli, the killing star, shone out above the Snort through wisps of high cirrus. Down by the river, the wrecking yards were silent.

'I feel quite sorry for the old fool.'

Himation glared down at the little musician. 'Don't be naïve,' he advised, and wrapped his cloak tighter round him suddenly. 'You've been to Avernus, and seen those yellow-faced men in their alligator shoes, peddling the stuff in gangs under the lamplight at Egerton's Port. They look like vultures, they look like preachers, they look like corpses; but the King is worse than any dozen of them. He's Death's uncle, with a finger in filthier pies than Earth-heroin.'

He shrugged at his own fervor.

'You can go back to your ship now, Captain,' he said to Truck, who was regarding Cor Caroli as if it had done him some deep personal injustice, overcome with self-concern. 'I'll come with you if you decide to take up Pater's offer. If not, I have other transport arranged. It would be worth your while, perhaps, to talk to him.'

'I'll see him,' said Truck. He was beginning to regard himself as a responsibility he wasn't fit to take on alone. 'I can't think of anything else to do.' He examined his feet. 'I wonder what he wants me for.'

Himation refused to be drawn,

'Good. As we may have to take your boat back from the Port Authority, we'd better hurry.' He strode off, his cloak flying out behind him. For a moment, he looked so like Dr Grishkin that Truck was forced to repress a shudder. But as they passed rapidly into an area of wan mercury lamps, the impression was dispelled. It was the second time he had placed himself willingly in someone else's hands.

Tiny, running to keep up, asked, 'If Veronica is so dangerous, how come he gave us up so easily?'

Amusement filled Himation's hands. The green carnation appeared briefly and spectrally between them.

'Pater told me what to say. That old junkie terrified me, but he knows Pater could cut his supply-lines at a thousand places between here and the rim of the Galaxy. Pater is a little more flexible than Narcotics Section; and, unlike IWG and UASR, he has nothing to lose if Veronica closes down completely.'

This gnomic accusation they couldn't get him to explain.

'Do that thing with the flower again,' said Tiny. 'You know.'