The Centauri Device

SEVEN The Interstellar Anarchist, an Aesthetic Adventure — Part Two

'She's transferring the Device to Earth, Captain — a decision taken against the advice of her staff nearly three days ago, when she thought she had you safe in Albion Megaport. She is most anxious to effect an introduction between the two of you.'

It was some hours after the conversation in the studio. Truck had bathed, eaten, even slept a bit, and was now nearing the end of Pater's guided tour of Howell (which he did in fact insist on calling 'Versailles').

'But it seems the Device will not abide the dyne fields for more than a second or two at a time, so a journey that should have taken hours is still in progress. They send the transporter into Dynaflow drive and — pop! — out it comes again, for no reason that can be discovered. They have gained a few light days. In it goes again — and so it goes on. A comic process with a real attraction for us.'

Pater stood, ridiculously neat and dapper, beneath the great ventral curve of a ship named Driftwood of Decadence, which had squeezed itself into one of the massive repair silos of the asteroid like a wasp in an apple. To his white suit and green carnation he had added a fantastic low-crowned hat of cream straw. Here at the rim of Howell, away from the generators at the core, the artificial gravity was a little feeble: Pater bounced in it as if perpetually embarking on an entrechat, thumbs stuck into his waistcoat pockets.

'To keep pace with its charge, the Fleet escort must spend a lot of time out of Dyne. If we catch the convoy there, they can be embarrassed — we are lightly armed, but these vessels are quicker in ordinary space, and more maneuverable, than anything IWG or UASR has ever been able to field against us.'

Truck squinted the bright length of the Driftwood of Decadence. Turquoise arabesques glimmered mysteriously down her side; the smell of hot metal drifted about her like musk of a sleeping, barbaric priestess; the light of plasma torches exploded soundlessly off her hull to fill the silo with a ceremonial aurora. Pater — whom he had grown to like despite his incomprehensible humors and affectations — regarded him with a quizzical smile. He scratched his head. He was on the stony verge of some revelation.

'Who designed them for you?' he murmured. 'Who built them?' He reached out to touch one of the great anhedral tail-surfaces; she was warm and vibrant. Suddenly, he was at the very edge of it all. 'Where did they come from, Pater?' and — tumbling down the steep scarp of understanding — 'Where?' This almost a sigh, because for spacers there is one ritual enigma, and he was within sight of something unbelievable.

Pater laughed and took his arm. 'You could say I found them,' he suggested, 'or again, that they were given to me.' He examined these ideas for a time; neither seemed to satisfy him. 'Shall we walk back? I'll tell you something of it as we go.' But he said nothing more until they had reached the sphere of armories, the sphere of stillness. There, head tilted as if to catch the ghost of ecclesiastical music, he gazed at a bank of long black torpedoes and began abruptly, 'Imagine it, Captain!

'My ship was experimental. Some discontinuity, some lapse of topology — a woman nervously twisting a lilac stalk — had torn her out of the dyne fields. She was spiraling along the vacant rim of the Galaxy, her Dynaflow drivers gone. Imagine the horror with which I stared at the place they had occupied, watching a few thin-film control circuits drift about the engine room. Nothing more remained, just those few flakes of technology — as if lunaria annua had shed its seeds in free fall!

'I rushed to the exterior screens, despairing. But there -! A clinker, a cinder, the merest of dim, dead suns! It took me two years to reach that place, Captain. I knew it was useless to me, I saw ahead only the cemetery orbit; but what else was I to do?

'I became irresolute, drifting for a month round that slagheap sun, the ship like a wounded arum lily. Can you see me? Then, a point-source on screens, a collision alarm! And there they were, seven times seven of them, slipping past like a train of comets approaching aphelion. I signaled them on all frequencies — they ignored me; I expended the last of my sub-Dyne fuel to overhaul them — they were undeviating; I boarded them — they were deserted.

'I boarded all of them — how bright their interiors were, how complicated and alien! — and all were empty but one; on the last, I discovered him.

'He came from nowhere you or I will ever see, Captain. He was heraldic. His exoskeleton glowed dark green like oiled metal, his wings were shot with bizarre gold veins, and his eye-clusters caught the light like globes of rough obsidian. Complex chrome-yellow symbols covered his carapace!

'He was dying, he had been dying out there for fifty years, adrift alone with his magnificent fleet. Ocher fluids leaked from his joints, strange burns cross-hatched his thorax.

'Imagine us! For months we strive to communicate. His weak forelimbs scrabble against the floor, creating pointless, agonized patterns! But he understood me long before I him. He came from outside, Captain; his ships had crossed the cruel gap between the Galaxies. He could not tell me where. He spoke of his race's millennia-long search for the metaphysical nature of space; of a disease or madness that had led his crews at last to blow their hatches and beat their wings deliriously against the vacuum, like the hawk moth against the attic lamp!

'I sent him to join them out there the day he died. In his ultimate throes he stung himself repeatedly, his long abdomen thrashing. He was desperate to explain the InterGalactic drive — he was desperate that someone should continue the search. But I could not grasp its principles, save perhaps to dimly comprehend this: the continuum has emotions — and the golden shins are the culmination of an Art addressed to Space itself!'

For some time, Pater brooded quietly over his dyne-torpedoes as if exhausted by his queer eloquence, even his gestures limp as they continued to sketch or imitate the feeble scratching limbs of the dead alien commander. When Truck prompted, 'But you learned to fly the ships in Dyne?' he snapped his fingers impatiently and muttered, 'Yes, of course. What does that matter? It was easy: their drivers are quite similar to our own; but what use are such engines when -?' He contemplated that wasted opportunity.

'None,' agreed Truck, and walked on through the corridors of Howell — speechless, as spacers are when they consider that pillar of enigma at the closed gates of the Galaxy: the unattainable, the post-Galactic drive.

But five minutes later, Howell was shuddering to the clangor of alarms:

In the 'Hotel Pimodan, 1849,' the laser holograms of Maryx and Baudelaire faded like specters, caught between a whisper and a significant smile, as the asteroid drew power for the launch of Pater's raiders;

Out in the repair shops, grimy stunted engineers paused to scratch their horrid armpits and speculate about the target;

The crew of the Driftwood of Decadence stared at their ship and spat, gloomily reflecting that Pater would never allow her to lift in that condition;

And, pausing outside the doors of his apartments, the Interstellar Anarchist peeled his lips back off his feral teeth and winked at John Truck, his depression evaporating as the klaxons wailed. 'Now! We have them located! Fetch your friends, if they want to join the dirty work — but quickly! Meet me on The Green Carnation within the half hour!'

It was easier said than done. Howell boiled with anarchists: mad dandified gunners wearing mutton-chop whiskers and outrageous sideburns; navigators favoring the leather flying helmets and Sidcot-suits of a forgotten war; barrel-chested mechanics in striped jerseys and tight knee-breeches — and all of them making book on their chances of survival or spoils as they scrambled, shedding tarot cards, poems, and poker dice, for their ships.

Himation, glimpsed on a crowded corridor; his crew bobbed behind him like gulls in the wake of a black-sailed lugger. Pale hands flickered and danced, but the madness was infectious. All he said was, 'After the strike, Captain!' and he was gone.

Truck found Tiny in a small square room where faded charcoal sketches covered the brown and crumbling plaster. Over his knee was an old acoustic guitar with a warped rosewood fretboard; on the brass bed that filled the place sat Heloise the model, her tight sallow body glowing in the deteriorating northlight. She regarded Tiny sulkily and sang, ' "Ils sont des si artistes gens",' in her pretty, muted voice. 'Can't you tell him to play less accompaniment?' she appealed to Truck. 'It's the song that counts.' And she got up to stare out of the artificial window at the ateliers of a Paris long blown to hell by the Rat Bomb wars, her little bottom quivering petulantly.

'You don't need any electricity for this,' explained Tiny. 'Isn't that something?'

Truck dragged him through the bedlam of militant Howell. Their half hour was almost up, the asteroid was trembling to the pulse of warming engines, expectant. 'What about Fix?' cried Tiny, hugging his new acquisition.

'No time. He'd only want to bring that sodding chopper.'

They stumbled aboard The Green Carnation.

The klaxons died.

In the ensuing silence, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater smiled and adjusted the set of his coat, the tilt of his elegant hat. He raised his hand. 'Go!' he commanded. With a raffish cheer the engineers fed power, the navigators touched their good-hick charms: and forty-seven golden raiders took to the aether like a pack of lush Byzantine hounds, racing and quivering and vying for the scent. But however they tried, none could outdo The Green Carnation, and she ran out ahead of them, an incitement, a triumph, and a hard gemlike flame.

Aboard the flagship, Truck and Tiny, immobile, awed.

A blue-gray waxy light drowned her pentacular command-bridge, running like tepid fire down the slippery perspectives of an extra-Galactic geometry, forming optical verglas on planes of alien metalwork, tracing the formal interlacing designs that covered the inner hull. Every four or five seconds, banks of stroboscopic lamps fired off, freezing and quantifying jagged areas of shadow, but defining no shape the eye could appreciate. Nothing was perpendicular or dependable.

Now white and dazzling, now hard black silhouettes, Pater's quarterdeck crew moved at ease through this disjointed medium, tending the bizarre original equipment of the ship or settling like insects among more identifiable machinery bolted roughly to the deck. They trailed loops of cable from portable computing facilities, calling off queries and co-ordinates in a rising chant. A subsonic ground bass reverberated through the body cavities; other voices chattered and decayed in the foreground like the cries of autistic children heard in a dream.

Above them, ribbons of circuitry framed a layout of enormous screens, on which were visible the rest of the fleet:

They hung in gay ambush, Maupin, Trilby, and Les Fleurs du Mal; the Whistler, the Fastidious, and the Strange Great Sins. In two long wings of twenty-four, they poised themselves 'at the sharp apex of the present moment between two hypothetical eternities' — Madame Bovary and the Imaginary Portraits; Syringa and White Jonquil. Centauri was nearer here, a bare actinic jewel off the port bow of Atalanta in Calydon, from which Himation the conjurer led the second wing. Space enfolded them as they waited for their prey, they were embedded: a bracelet of gold in black volcanic glass — the Forsaken Garden, the Let Us Go Hence, and The Melancholia that Transcends All Wit.

'Here we begin to guess at the nature of space,' said Pater softly to Truck. 'Our palette is prepared. The Galaxy has given us our canvas, a dead dragonfly had bequeathed us the brushes we have to hand. We make Space. We define it. Look out there. IWG and UASR see at best a conduit for Earth's rubbish of politics. We infer reality. None of this belongs to Earth or to ideology. It is inviolate.'

To prove his point, perhaps, space ignored him.

Track, meanwhile, had been visited by peculiar, stealthy emotional stirrings. Oddly enough, he perceived something of what Pater was suggesting, and saw himself suddenly as a denizen of this metamathematical or aesthetical space, like poor Annie Truck, a losing vector — her life a movable analogy for hard vacuum, her AdAc habit a dyne field of the head, himself a last-minute fibril of hypothesis extending toward some once-glimpsed mental Galactic edge. He became uncomfortable.

'I don't know anything about that,' he said, squinting along the optical maze of the command-bridge, 'but this isn't any kind of flying I'm used to. It looks more like a one-night stand at the Spacer's Rave.'

What else could he say? He was a lout.

'What do we do now?'

'We wait,' said Pater (who wasn't misled, and appeared to be looking at him with a sort of compassionate irony): 'But not for long.'

In that, he was correct. A willowy young fellow wearing his blond beard tied up with tarred string leaped to his feet and waved a fist over his head. His arcane apparatus had discerned something leaving the dyne fields not a hundred thousand miles from their ambuscade. A few minutes later, it popped up on one of the forward screens, heading at a fair pace straight down the open anarchist throat: six IWG battleships like black and orange melons englobing an orbit-to-orbit medium haulage vehicle made of spidery girders, small ball bearings, and a big silver caterpillar — this last the hold section, with a capacity of several millon tons.

Activity on The Green Carnation redoubled: the lights became fierce; bursts of ultrasound attacked the command-bridge like bats; the quarterdeck crew donned one-way visors and multiplied their efforts, jerking spastically from machine to machine in the stroboscopic glare, calling 'It's green — it's brown — I have you on four — '

Himation came through scratchily on a battle-communication frequency, tidal RF interference grinding behind his voice. 'We can knock the drive pods right off it, Pater,' he suggested.

'Quick then, Manteau — before they can get it back into the Dyne. On les aura!'

The Green Carnation and Atalanta in Calydon detached themselves from the opposed files of the ambush: they raced toward one another, met head-on in a suicidal flare of retrofire, executed a terrifying Siamese turn through ninety degrees of arc, and hurled themselves side by side at the transporter, white heat blazing at their sterns and a trail of stripped and violated particles streaming out behind them.

IWG woke up, staggered about, broke formation. 'They've sent us beginners!' cried Himation joyously. And as The Green Carnation ran on in through the broken globement, her rearward screens showed the rest of the fleet closing like a golden jaw. Dyne-torpedoes flipped end over end out of their tubes and began a misleading vibration — in and out of Reality they went, like shoals of pike seen through muddy water, and slipped among the battleships.

Pater himself took control of the flagship. He bore down on the haulage vessel like a madman, the command-bridge glare turning his buttonhole carnation black and his teeth the color of steel. 'Torpedoes are so unselective, Captain!' he shouted in Truck's ear: 'And I love those long reaction guns!' The caterpillar expanded until it filled the screens, huge registration numbers against its silver skin. And bigger yet: until Truck was digging his fingernails into his wet palms; until The Green Carnation howled with proximity alarms; until Pater threw her up into the vertical position and presented his ventral guns in a sweeping broadside skid -

Move for move in impeccable formation, the two cruisers shuddered and shook, their gunners grinning in the red ectoplasmic backwash of the cannon — and, abruptly, the hauler was a dead whale, its drive compartments separating and vaporizing in a wild yellow rose of light, its hold sheared neatly away beneath the wrecker's torch. Before the rose was blown, Atalanta in Calydon and The Green Carnation were up and out, mirror-images tumbling and braking through a loop that brought them back to their wallowing prize.

And before that maneuver was complete, the rest of the fleet was hanging at rest in the vacuum, practicing fire-control on bits of wreckage. IWG hadn't fired a shot: they were split open, they had spilled their flesh all over the show. One of them was still trying to withdraw, caught by some failure of its drive as it faded into the dyne fields — a gray, ghostly rubber ball, perished, gaping with pain, neither here nor there.

Little Tiny Skeffern had suffered the entire circus with his eyes shut and his hands clamped round the neck of his guitar. 'Truck, I'm not cut out for this stuff,' he said. He sat down on the floor, drew up his legs, and jerked a thumb at Pater. 'He's off his head, that bloke.' He raised a feeble smile. 'Next time I see you coming, remind me of this — even three weeks on Sad al Bari is beginning to look bearable.'

The exterior screens caught fire for a moment as some thin-lipped gunner blew an IWG Dynaflow to pieces. Truck stared out at the drifting wreckage.

'We've got it now, Tiny. If Pater keeps his word, we can take the thing somewhere quiet and chuck it out of an airlock. Sigma-End's a nice place: we could go there and get smashed for a year — go back to being losers,'

Tiny watched his fingers stalking up and down the fretboard. 'We don't have to go there to do that,' he observed astutely.

Pater relinquished the flagship to his pilot, who grinned ruefully, made an aerobatical gesture with one hand, and murmured, 'Nice time, Pater.' Pater bowed and laughed. 'Dock it now,' he suggested, 'and be careful with the artwork.' The command-bridge relaxed, its peculiar voices diminished. The severed hold section of the hauler crept back into view, toppling end over end on a heading for M41 in Orion, a target it was unlikely to reach in the near future.

'Prepare to board, Manteau,' said Pater over the ship-to-ship.

There was a long pause, full of the croaking whisper of the stars. Someone adjusted the gain of the receiver, shrugged.

'Manteau?'

Himation came on. 'Pater,' he reported thoughtfully, 'we aren't boarding anything just at this precise moment. Have a look out there. The bloody Fleet's arrived.'

'Oh Jesus,' whispered Tiny Skeffern, and closed his eyes again.

IWG came out of the dyne-fields in three waves, fifty at a time, each spherical dreadnought half a mile in diameter and mounting enough fire power to pulverize Jupiter. Their fire ports were already open, sowing torpedoes like showers of steel needles. Syringa and The Melancholia that Transcends All Wit vaporized in the first second of the engagement, trapped among the slagged embers of the ambushed convoy. The New English Art Club ran helplessly through the resulting plasma-front and came out limned with a fire of her own; looping and twisting, plowed into the last of the escort ships (which was still trying to vanish) and joined it half in and half out of dyne, ectoplasmic and doomed -

Aboard the flagship, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater rubbed his jaw and saw that it was impossible to disengage. The command-bridge howled and wept, the crew leaped and gyrated among their alien machinery like salmon in white water -

'I'm going to ram, bugger it,' reported the Liverpool Medici, driving sideways across Pater's bows at a group of three Fleet vessels, and was never heard from again. Down in her belly, gunners threw up disgustingly and cheered the moment of impact -

'Get out of the way and let the ferret see the rabbit!' screamed White Jonquil to the Gold Scab. She took a hit on the bridge and, her turrets spouting erratically, cartwheeled twenty thousand miles in a halo of tangled struts and hull-plates. 'Now look what you've done! — '

' — and there's a core-melt on Number Five,' whispered a faint, injured voice. 'Can anybody help — ' He died away without identifying himself, merged with the sea of interference -

It was murder.

They winked out one by one, The Forsaken Garden, Les Fleurs Du Mal, the Whistler, and the Fastidious. Running on to the guns, Imaginary Portraits embedded herself in her assailant: they spun together disconsolately, drifting toward far Centauri. Trilby and the Strange Great Sins collided, embraced, tore through IWG like an impromptu scythe.

A distant bubbling moan, as the ship with the core-melt came back on, pleading. Himation's voice cut across him as Atalanta in Calydon cut across the top of Pater's screen, trying to outrun a coven of shimmering torpedoes. 'We've been suckered, Pater. The jig's up. I count fifteen of us left, and I'm getting damage reports from my own crew.'

' — if someone could just get a party aboard. We've lost steerage — '

In half an hour, it was all up with them. Fifteen had dwindled to five after an attempt to break out of the IWG englobement: then to two. Tiny Skeffern shook his head and stared glumly at Truck as Pater and Himation skulked through the tragic debris, powered down and on communications silence to avoid detection. Corpses with frosty eyes knocked gently on the bull of The Green Carnation, and anarchist ships like filleted golden carp floated across her screens; while out beyond the eddy of wreckage IWG depended — a colony of fat spiders — from invisible threads.

Parties of pressure-suited commandos began combing the outer derelicts for survivors. The pilot with the core-melt let them on board, then gave up trying to keep it in check — he was gone in a twinkling, the last flicker of the candle. Off the port bow of the flagship hung a great black and orange moon, peeled to the honeycomb decks and still spilling power conduit into the void like mile-long cilia; to starboard, Atalanta in Calydon prowled, her hull blackened and scarred, more wolf than fawn.

The command-bridge was silent, full of white, listless faces, its illumination desperate and spectral. When he closed his eyes, Truck could still see frozen after-images of the battle, the thin bodies of anarchists wrapped in white light, aspects of devotion. Beside him, Tiny Skeffern shifted uncomfortably. 'Truck, why aren't we just sneaking off into the dyne?' He was used to the hinterland alleys, the boot, the hasty retreat.

The quarterdeck crew chuckled morosely at this, looking to Pater. He turned from the forward screens, from some reverie of destruction and lost opportunity. 'We have become wreckage,' he mused, as if discovering something behind the words. 'There's a risk in operating any equipment at all now,' he explained. 'If we were to power up, they'd have us triangulated before we could compute a course.' His face was haggard. 'We can't do it, Mr. Skeffern. Even the screens are a risk.'

He appeared to lose interest. After a while he went on, 'While we remain wreckage we are safe. It seems as though they have retained the Device, Captain. I'm sorry about that.'

Truck shrugged.

'I don't suppose I'd have known what to do with it anyway.'

'You miss the point.'

'There's something going on out there,' said Tiny. In the distance, IWG was maneuvering indecisively, individual ships pulling out of the rubbish heap on pulses of green flame — while others seemed to be hastily retrieving their commando units. Wings and squadrons formed, grew, inclined toward Centauri. This obscure performance lasted for some minutes. Wreckage drifted and toppled, raising and lowering the curtain on it. Pater opened a channel on Fleet Frequency, but no one on the bridge could separate the urgent babble from its concomitant of interference.

Atalanta in Calydon broke silence suddenly. 'Pater!' shouted Himation. 'Something's up — I can see — Christ!' And he began to laugh. 'Pater, it's the Arabs! It's the Arabs! They've had it done all over them — ' His ship woke up, quivered, took fire at its stern. It drove away through the graveyard, trailing mirth. 'I'm going to try and get a better — '

Massive jamming overwhelmed his signal.

'Power up!' snapped Pater. Oscillating pulses of blue and violet light washed their faces, decaying echoes clattered around the bridge. 'That fool!' A Fleet dreadnought careened past under full thrust, firing madly at something behind it the way a man stares unbelievingly over his shoulder at a pursuer in the dark. It erupted into curious boils and ran into the wreck of the Forsaken Garden.

The flagship groaned with mysterious voices (and Truck, wrenched out of his head by mounting alien energies, hallucinated briefly a Roman sundial isolated by a single watery ray of light in a sunken garden, smelling mint, glycol, horsehair) as Pater hurled her up and out. They shot into clear space -

To discover imprudent Himation running under the guns of both IWG and UASR (Navy), with his ammunition spent and big dorsal holes.

Perhaps a hundred Arabs had arrived, cylindrical ships resembling mammoth nuts and bolts (they were, in fact, complete with threads, down which the command and power sections could be screwed at will) and carrying red and yellow insignia. Their ambush had telegraphed itself — unlike IWG's — and broken into small fragmented skirmishes across fifty million cubic miles or so of space.

'Dyne out!' pleaded Pater. 'Dyne out, Manteau!'

The Green Carnation lurched. Choking smoke began to pour into the bridge. Pater got her broadside on to his Arab and pounded it to junk. A cloud of dyne-torpedoes, released like breath from a terminal bubonic — the forward anti-missile batteries coughed once or twice. Something ripped them off, and the sweating gunners with them. 'We're losing pressure!' reported one of the quarterdeck crew. The ship lurched again, bellowing and creaking. Pater braced himself and bored in after Himation, drawing fire, yelling 'Dyne out!'

'I'm trying to,' said Himation coolly. 'Don't think I'm not, Pater old chap.'

Truck and Tiny groveled on the deck.

An enormous hand slapped the ship about.

'I can't hold her, Manteau!' cried Pater despairingly. 'Rendezvous at Howell! Dyne out!'

The Green Carnation was withering away.

Sardonic jungle-noises squawked and twittered from her circuitry as it melted to slag, inflicting terrible burns on the dazed crew. Pater slapped a bank of rocker switches grafted on to the alien controls. She slid into dyne, but it spat her out again, twice. Her spine cracked and flexed. As they went under for the third time, Truck clutching Tiny Skeffern's shoulders and praying with horrified self-disgust that Himation would get it and not them, IWG broke into their communication channels -

IT'S WAR NOW, LADDIE! CAN YOU HEAR ME, TRUCK? HOW D'YOU LIKE THAT?

I WANT TO SEE YOU AFTER I'VE FINISHED WITH THESE SNOTTY JACKALS. YOU HEAR ME, PATER? HE'S MINE, AND YOU'RE FINISHED.

TRUCK? IT'S WAR -

Then they were somewhere else.