The Centauri Device

EIGHT An End to Art and the Beginning of Artifice

The anarchists of Howell watched her final firework arc. She burst out of the dyne-fields like a morbid comet, rolling belly-up and launching volleys of torpedoes at nothing they could see, her stern consuming itself in pale feverish radiance. Great rents had opened along her length, her bow was an agonized mouth; her golden fins were bent and charred, her turrets melted stubs. She plummeted down on them in a fog of blind murder, braking savagely: slewed, showed a queer blunt profile. Something tore, deep down inside. She broke in half. The entire northern quadrant blazed up soundlessly, drenching their appalled faces with corpse-light.

The Green Carnation had come home.

Four hours later, they recovered her quarterdeck section from the aphelion of a long elliptic orbit. It was intact, and under survival pressure. VR units leached on to it, opened it up with plasma torches, and went in with respirators, Earth-morphine, and a sort of dumb awe. They brought out thirty bodies and ten survivors, all of them blue with anoxia, some suffering from induction burns. Most of the deaths were from subsonic rupturing of the great organs.

Two or three of them were still on their feet, staring inertly round a dark filthy trap full of carbon dioxide and cooked flesh as if they had come the long and significant way round from Hell. They had. Swinburne Sinclair-Pater was there, a hole the size of two fists in the back of his white suit; but he wouldn't let the VR crew give him morphine until they had checked that disgusting oubliette for a small bald musician and a transit-class haulage pilot in funny clothes. They were glad to avoid his bright, somehow elated eyes.

He hung on for twelve hours, in his bedroom at the heart of Howell. Its walls were dim and glorious with blue and gold peacocks he had painted himself. They couldn't cut the suit off him, because of the induction burns, but they pulled five petal-shaped fragments of some alien machinery out of his lungs, where they had embedded themselves as he wrestled mysteriously in the supernal places of the Dyne to keep his ship from falling apart. He woke up only rarely. When he did, his eyes were sunken but amused.

John Truck and Tiny Skeffern stood awkwardly by his bed for the last few minutes, their burns dressed and their faces pallid. Truck remembered little of Pater's ride out of the night. For a while, he knew, the hul1 of the flagship had seemed to melt or withdraw; all of them, the asphyxiated and the dying, had worn colored glass masks, or swum in senselessness, fish of the Impossible Medium; all solid forms had vanished in amazing twists and contortions, and he felt his interface with space diminish, felt it crawl through him in slow, luminous ecstasies. He knew what he'd felt, and it had seemed important at the time; but now all he saw was the stinking dark canister of the bridge, and all he found in his head was a strange embarrassed compassion for the withered figure beneath the printed silk coverlet.

Pater stirred painfully.

'Captain?' A terrible, disfigured whisper, but gaining strength: 'War. The one-eyed bitch has her war at last.' One of his ruined hands escaped the coverlet, touched his cheek — a short hissing breath. 'For decades they've drained the Galaxy; now they'll rip it apart like beasts in an alley. Stop it, Captain. They mustn't find you.'

He drew himself up, shaking fitfully; gazed without recognition at the gorgeous room.

'Did I -?' Irritated, he moved his hand feebly in search of a memory. 'All pleasure devours — Captain! — Dyne out!' He tried to wet his lips, choked. Quieter: 'I could never find it in me. There was too much I loved.' Spurred, perhaps, by this lapse into sentiment, the old Pater returned briefly, full of gentle malice. 'But you have a rich, vulgar iconoclasm, Captain. Let it speed you.'

'He sank back, watching the peacocks. Then, after a long time:

'You were there when she bled into the dyne-fields, you saw the substance of her flaring out like ritual evidence of the future. I believe she was near to her proper purpose, then. That's our heritage. Take her. We don't belong in the murk that nurtures Earth. Take her and remember that when your times comes. You've seen Space.'

He frowned. 'Where's Manteou?' he asked puzzledly. Then: 'I flung her out there for a while, Captain, against the dirty chance of dying.' His voice tailed off.

Truck bent close over the savaged face. 'She blew up, Pater. What can I do now? You can't give her to me, she blew up.' Pater was asleep, but the room smelled just like death. He said nothing more until the end, when he pulled himself upright in the bed, winced, shuddered with horror at something beyond the painted walls. 'More laudanum, Symons!' he shouted. He sighed, and a perilous calm iced his eyes. ' "Destroy all copies of Lysistrata and all bad drawings,'' ' he breathed. He looked straight at Truck and winked broadly. ' "By all that is holy all obscene drawings — '' '

It was 2367. On Sad al Bari IV military bands played 'Salute the Fleet!' while youths who had never seen Earth fortified the moons of Gloam and Parrot. The green carnation withered on its stem. Howell shrank to a rock. Its animating spirit had fled.

'Poor old sod,' said Tiny Skeffern, out in the studio. He wandered round scratching nervously at his bandages, picking up Pater's Chinese pots and tapping them to hear their clear fragile voices. 'Are you going to stare at that picture all day? Truck, honestly, it isn't even finished.' He screwed his face up over a hawthorn blossom. 'Do you know, that's the second guitar I've lost since Tuesday?'

'Shut up,' Truck told him roughly. 'He was a decent bloke.' A familiar lassitude had come over him: he hung like a wrecked boat in his own skull, drawn slowly down the gravity-well of sentiment. He couldn't define his relationship with Pater, but he knew that he owed some emotion, some regret or responsibility. Something had vanished from the Galaxy forever. 'Let's get out of here,' yet he hung about, hoping to hear from the anarchists drifting listlessly in and out of Pater's suite that Himation the conjurer had made it back.

He hung about, but Himation never came.

'Come on, Tiny. There's nothing here for us any more.'

Tiny folded up a small silk fan and put it in his pocket. It was an alley gesture, without decency, but of respect.

'Where will we go?'

The corridors were deserted: most of Howell was elsewhere, scanning the hard black sky for a destroyed fleet, shaking its head. Even the workshops were dazed and silent.

They boarded Ella Speed and found Fix the bos'n feeding Himation's lizard from a lengthy if shallow incision in his own arm, 'There's no need to go that far, Fix.' Truck stood over the chart-computer, observing his fingers as they busied themselves independently about. He had an original idea for the first time in his life. It tasted like rust for all that.

'There was nothing in that transporter,' he said bitterly. 'She knew Pater would try for it. She even knew from Veronica that Pater had taken me off Earth.' He punched the navigation display board gently. 'And there she was, waiting for us. It's still on bloody Centauri, under the ground.'

Pater.

He had fought both sides indiscriminately all his life, and gained nothing at the end. Out of what? A sense of responsibility? 'He was just a loser like the rest of us, Tiny. The Device was never there at all.'

Pater. Pater.

'What's this place we're going to, boss?' asked Fix the bos'n. 'Will the dope be good?'

Ella Speed left her pit and nosed gingerly through a belt of vaporized gold. Hull-plates yawned over her; miles of cable caressed her, arabesque. In passage through night: space was full of floating ribs.

'Shut your mouth and fly the bleeding thing, Fix. Don't I pay you enough?' Which was quite unfair. Truck spent the rest of the journey gawping out at the dyne fields, fiddling about with the screen adjustment, and wondering if he'd died out there during Pater's last flight.

'What the hell are we doing here?' asked Tiny incredulously.

Truck had harried himself to a standstill over the same question. But it remained that Pater had furnished him with an end (a purpose, fresh and raw, something he was so unused to that he couldn't keep his fingers out of it) and no means. It was the only place he could think of coming. People muddle through, he told himself, and that has to be sufficient.

The port hinterland at Golgotha stands on the periphery of an ash desert called Wisdom in the middle latitudes of Stomach (named for its discoverer, some way out in the poorly populated Ephesus-Ariadne sector, beyond the billowing CH30H clouds of 'Meth Alley'). Openers built Golgotha, before their sect became prominent. They had no history of persecution on Earth, but they came anyway, in 2143, and somehow (although it had nothing to do with any obvious exploitation, any crude process of blanket, bible, and Earth-syph) the pretty androgynes of Stomach lost their innocence, and many of them left the uplands for the port.

Its streets are wide. Elsewhere, the natives distill a perfume from the wings of insects; here, they have made themselves fetishes: objects of pleasure. The limestone hills at the far edge of Wisdom are strange, no one really knows what happens among them; here, day and night, dust and ash blow into the houses and the wet openings of the body on a sulky, changeable wind.

A double ghost breathes down the avenues of Golgotha in the wind: the thin twin spirit of religion and inhuman innocence — ash in the air. The delicate quick movements of the natives, who are only mirrors of your desire (who knows what they see in it, what it has replaced for them: their language has two hundred thousand separate and distinct words; they will speak it, if you ask them, at whatever climax you demand); and the Openers, in their cloaks of plum and scarlet, black and gold — they always seem to have their backs turned, to be striding away. Ash swirls round them all at dawn and dusk, when the wind thrusts little exploratory fingers beneath the door.

'Everyone comes here once,' said Truck.

But no one ever went there twice. In a time when decadence was all Earth's and anything else was imitation, there was something about that place: something to remind you of what you had voluntarily relinquished (and winked as you lost it) in other hinterlands to other more human beings. Port ladies took their lives on Stomach, and still do, slipping away in a langor of AdAcs, twisting a handkerchief — they have a crueler perception of vacuum.

An odd thing happened during the first few hours on Stomach. John Truck was later to regard it as symbolical (to the extent that he could regard anything in so abstract a way — it came in the end to little more than an itch down among the sordid experiential and intellectual gleanings of a spacer's skull), but at the time it filled him with a peculiar horror.

He had come to Stomach, obviously, to find the priest Grishkin; but since he had last seen that mysterious man on Earth, he had no idea of how he might be found. Tiny and Fix were surly, having hoped for dope in some familiar stamping-ground — so, with no better idea than that of wandering about the place until he met someone who could put him in touch with the Opener, he shrugged and left them to their own devices — took the high wire gate that leads from the landing field to Golgotha, Wisdom rolling away on his left hand in dove-gray dunes down a fifteen-hundred-mile front — the winds of Stomach already flour-papering his cheek.

Outside the gate, the androgynous whores of Golgotha crowded about him as he went, like subtly depraved children: all chemise and mutated orchids and their heads bobbing no higher than his waist, calling to him in soft, empty voices. Their minute hands plucked at his legs as he passed; some made offers of muted obscenity, others sang or raised their arms to be picked up, many simply clutched his hand and stared with ultimate cryptic promise. They flowed like a grey stream down the boulevards of the native quarter, sometimes leading him, sometimes following, all the while smiling seriously as though reflecting all acute desires.

It was impossible to think of her as 'it.'

She put her hands up to him; her voice was a rustle of unbelievable fabrics in a remote, passionate room. He lifted her gently by the armpits, feeling no weight but a special heat. She locked her legs round his hips and looked into his face. Disappointed, the others melted away, uttering sad, regretful cries.

' "The cranes call / As they cross to the reeds. / Faint and helpless, / Now I lie alone",' she murmured. She wore an insect perfume, the crushed wings of the desert hawk moth prepared in the hills beyond Wisdom. When he stared back at her, uncomprehending, her tiny, heart-shaped face shifted and changed.

'Then perhaps we might consider mirrors,' she teased, and secret languages surfaced in her eyes. 'I can see you are from Earth.' Her little legs tightened until they hurt. Her body became an icon, or a clue — a cool object, a revelation or alchemical tool.

'What?' said Truck, his mouth dry. He stopped there in the middle of the windy street.

'Oh hell,' she muttered, uncurling her legs. 'You fuck-fucky alonga me now bigfella starman?' She got down. 'Why do I always get the uneducated ones?'

But he was already lost

She led him for miles round the city, as if to tire him out. Confusing precincts and alleys of native architecture. The wind turned cold, and he was forced further and further into her sphere of heat. When he complained, she said, 'It is part of it, you must see us as part of it.' And he did, looking down at her then up at the precarious limestone buildings. At twilight it began to rain, the ash fell plush and damp, the narrower streets became dark and inviting. She tugged him along more urgently as the lights came on; she was now a tightness in the muscles at the back of the neck. 'Not far now,' she whispered. Did she understand a word she was saying?

Her house was warm and bizarre. Censers swung, moths fluttered and burned amid the incense fumes. His bemusement was completed there, among mirrors. He never remembered anything of what took place there: except that he would never allow it to happen to him again.

He woke in the early hours in a bed too small for him. His throat was sore and dry, the roof of his mouth itched. 'Where can I get some water?' he asked, trying to lubricate his tongue with saliva. She — it — wasn't there. He could hear footsteps in the alley outside. He went to the door; cold air seeped over his feet. Someone was in the alley, tall and obese, pacing to and fro. The ash from Wisdom had turned leprous, filling the alley with a wan illumination, patching the figure in its voluminous Opener cloak. 'What are you doing?' he called. A hood was pulled over the face. Ash eddied about it, feathery.

'I was looking for — ' The figure turned and pulled back its hood. It was Dr Grishkin. Truck got hold of the door post. His throat locked up solid. ' — You,' he croaked.

'I can see that your circumstances have changed somewhat, Captain Truck,' said Grishkin — his was a fine memory for unfinished conversations. He made no move to enter the house, stood there in the ash-storm, smiling his streamlined smile. 'It would seem to be time for a review of prices — '

Truck shivered in the wind. That meeting begun in another wind on Sad al Bari IV had finally run its course. He had only postponed the preliminaries.

A stupid thing to do, he thought (thirty minutes after dawn, in an aeroplane: somewhere in front of him, chronologically speaking at least, lay the transparent heart of Openerism — the city of Intestinal Revelation beyond the limestone hills). It was too late for that. Earth's vortex had sucked him in. Stomach turned beneath him like a rotting apple, 'Too long in an attic.'

'Mm?' said Grishkin, sprawled over two seats, his cloak open, his vast body smooth and perspiring where there was no plastic. He wasn't even half asleep. He was watching Truck out of the corner of one eye.

Truck shrugged. He pointed out of the window. 'That. Look, Grishkin,' he said, 'I'm only doing this on certain conditions. There is a price.' The muscles above Grishkin's left eye flexed briefly. 'I want to disappear, hide. If Gaw or ben Barka find me now — '

'I can understand that, my son,' said Grishkin ironically.

'Secondly, I want to know why you're interested in the Device. I'll have to know in the end anyway. On those terms, I'll agree to operate it for you — supposing you can get hold of it. As long as you don't use it for anything connected with this war. I'll cut my own throat first.'

Grishkin smiled, shook his head gently. 'Ah, Captain, Captain.' He hauled himself up, faced Truck properly. 'The war,' he murmured. 'Alice Gaw always wanted a proper war. One could hardly expect her to see things in their proper perspective. To listen to her description of — '

' — Cut it out, Grishkin. Do we have a deal?'

'Oh yes, Captain, we have that. Ad interim, I'll consider your disappearance. Quite.'

He seemed to go to sleep, and Truck had to be content with that. Down below, Stomach crawled on. After a while the cockpit door opened and out came the pilot, yawning. He grinned at Truck, grimaced rudely at the inert priest. 'All well in here?'

'Who's flying the bloody aeroplane while you're asking stupid questions?' said Truck. He hated atmosphere vehicles. There was so much to run into.

'What aeroplane?' Suddenly, he slapped his forehead and stared wildly about. 'Oh Christ, this aeroplane!'

'Ha ha,' said Truck. 'Very comical.'

Beyond the limestone hills there was only more desert — but uglier than Wisdom, with an air of acceptance and failure. He tripped leaving the aircraft, came up gazing at the gloomy sky with his hands coated in putrefying soil. 'What a hole, Grishkin. Can't you do better than this?' In the distance over the hopeless rock flowed rivers of abrasive dust; thick and brown, miles wide. Elsewhere small furtive birds eyed their surroundings sadly, ruffling their feathers as they hopped among the fallen, decaying trees.

Finally, that revelatory city — a handful of ball-bearings embedded in black sand — it closed on Truck like a trap.

'An early failure in climatic control,' admitted Grishkin. 'We were primitive if energetic when we came to Stomach, Captain.' He spoke as if he'd been there in 2143, which wouldn't have surprised Truck in the least. 'It will be rectified, like all things, with time.'

He hurried Truck into a silent place with clean cool white walls. An odd smell of ozone and antiseptic pervaded it. There were static dust-collectors and ventilators everywhere, humming faintly. If you looked closely at the walls, you could see countersunk rivets. People who might or might not have been Openers moved down the passageways dressed in pale green gowns and plastic gloves, their footsteps echoing with queer calm urgency.

'Are you sick?' asked Truck suspiciously. Hospitals made him uneasy. He thought of running back to the aircraft, but the pilot had gone off somewhere to get his breakfast.

'This anxiety, Captain — it isn't necessary. All your problems end here.'

'That's what I'm afraid of.'

He bit his fingernails, swallowed accidentally, coughed. He lagged behind, but Grishkin took his arm possessively.

'What are you going to do with me?'

'Come now, Captain, before we tend to the first part of our bargain, you must see something of our work here.' His diabolic or malefic avatar lurked just beneath his eyelids, peeping out but endeavoring to remain unobserved. 'You'll find the Memorial Theater very interesting. But we mustn't be late.' Things were fermenting, dissolving behind his windows. Every time they came to a fire door in the corridor, he glanced up at the clock above it. His grip tightened. He was actually pulling Truck along.

Suppose the Memorial Theater to commemorate a single genius of the movement (rather than, say, some murky instance or episode of its past) and he'd have to be a fable — a Minotaur of medicine and religion, some accidental connection between the brain of a mad vivisectionist and the bands of an inappropriate rector. Something any decent man would put a boot to without thought. On Stomach, no one had, and his spirit presided.

It was a huge room.

Normally, Truck sensed, it would be full of a seedy, vinegar-colored gloom strained through the thirty-foot stained glass windows (depicting what? Openerism is an eclectic, a catholic faith; there was a bit of everything, from Lazarus rising to Moses descending: but surely Lazarus hadn't died from a Caesarean incision?). Now it was lighted up starkly by thousands of watts of white light. Electrocorticogram operators and organists sat over their instruments while choirboys draped in thick plum felt paced slowly between the massive multifoil arches, their eyes fixed on the groined roof. The operating table, inviolate on the center of the flagged floor, was a limestone altar. The eerie modes of some plainsong chant echoed long and hollow and far away, as if from bare masonry.

Snip, pick, went the hands of the surgeons, slim and dextrous. '+ amp; -, + amp; -, + amp; -,' sang the electrical gear as, masked and gowned, Truck and Dr Grishkin slipped into the inner circle of light and odor.

'This is one of the most impressive events in our history,' whispered Grishkin. The patient lay under a local analgesic. A tent of surgical drape covered his body. Above him, spotlights and sheaves of cable hung from chrome bars. Thin bright laser beams crossed and danced. Grishkin bowed to the surgeons, moved nimbly forward — keeping hold of Truck's wrist — and whipped back the surgical tent. 'Look — ' he breathed.

At first sight, it was a flayed corpse: a mass of yellowish adipose tissue, great ropy blood-vessels, red and blue; all ligament and muscle, wet and sticky-looking and held together by a sac of cling-plastic. John Truck felt his throat fill up with something. He was back among the orbital hospitals and corpse-boats of Canes Venatici, packing them in their boxes. He tried to pull away, but Grishkin held on.

'For the first time, a Grand Master of the Movement is attaining total transparency — ' It was glass. The thing under the tent would never move again. It had a glass skin. 'His reverence is fully aware. Would you like to speak to him? Ask him something?' Grishkin radiated an ebullience, a vast energy. 'If you find this amazing, you should see what we're doing with the head Captain!'

Truck backed off, waving his free arm violently, dislodging a strand of hair from under his hygienic cap. Doctor Grishkin tucked it back for him, hissing with pleasure. The chant of the choir fell into the minor, over a pattern of unresolved chords from the organ: 'Hallelujah!' they cried, and Grishkin said, 'A crystal skull, Captain! The Brain Revealed!'

It poked through the back of the surgical tent, maggot-colored, patched with distended areas of cochineal, veined blue-black. It was covered with tiny squares of white paper, each bearing a number. It opened an eye and looked at him.

'Something's gone wrong!' he shouted. 'Oh, kill it — can't you see!'

'We've had some trouble with the allografting, I admit,' said Grishkin. 'But foreign-body reaction is well below the acceptable minimum. Don't carp, Captain. Ask!'

Truck swallowed. 'Why — ' Mild, swimming blue eyes, like bird's eggs in that wreckage. It was trying to smile at him. 'Why would you need a sentient bomb?' he managed. He was frantic; anything so Grishkin would be satisfied and take him away from there.

A faint chuckle. 'You,' whispered the Grand Master of the Openers. 'You — '

Grishkin began to laugh. He threw back his head and roared. 'Oh, Captain! You've been listening to poor, violent Alice Gaw. She has a mind like a howling desert. She's mad, my son — there's no bomb on Centauri. I was there first, I dug my way into the final bunker bare-handed. What she saw lies in her own head, not there. Didn't you realize that?'

His laughter died away. He wiped his mouth. 'But I — what I saw was something quite different. It filled that place, it — ' He shuddered. Condensation formed behind his windows. Anguish clouded his eyes. 'There is a Mystery at the foot of Shaft Ten: a receptacle of the Spirit — and God spoke to me from it — ' He swayed like a sick man, pawed his forehead. 'He asked for you, Captain, he asked me to bring him a Centauran.' His lips peeled back off his teeth, he seemed to be fighting the muscles of his own face for an instant, some actual battle — then he relaxed. His fingers left a red mark on Truck's wrist 'Now, Captain, the rest of our bargain.'

'I don't think I want to go on with this.'

Truck was always running for doors. This time he made it, and he was out in the corridor before something pricked him in the neck. For someone not getting any dope, he thought, I'm passing out more than I should.

He dreamed that pupation was almost over. Doctor Grishkin was forcing him to distend the sac on his forehead, to burst the brittle shell of the chrysalis. He hated it. His multi-jointed legs, however, scrabbled on of their own accord; his forehead strained against its confines, diminished, swelled again; the shell cracked, cold air flowed in. You could go anywhere like that, said General Gaw. Anywhere, sonny. He tried to withdraw. Let me be a grub again. But they wouldn't. His antennae waved feebly, already receiving messages of a new kind. That was an end to it: fighting to remain, he left the husk nevertheless, an imago full-formed. Woke up -

Terrified in case he discovered what kind of insect he was.

He waited for his head to clear. He looked down at himself. 'I never asked for this, Grishkin. Some day I might kill you for this.' He got carefully off the bed, rubbing his arms. His old clothes were gone. Wisps of the dream were still evaporating in his head. He got dressed in the only thing available (aware of Grishkin, arms folded, watching him curiously), avoiding the mirrors in the room when he could.

He flexed his hands in miserable defiance. 'One day.' Caught an accidental glimpse of himself — shivered.

'But Captain, you wanted to disappear. Now you're invisible. Who'll look at you and see Captain John Truck, a spacer? Mm?'

Truck walked blindly past him and out of the room, but he followed. 'I've fulfilled my part of the bargain, Captain. Both your conditions have been satisfied. You're mine, now.'

His numb misery gave way to panic. He was almost sobbing. He became lost in a maze of cool white corridors, where Openers nodded politely at him and his reflection lay in ambush for him at every glass door. He began to run, his breath scraping at his throat. But he couldn't lose the shadow behind him. 'Admit it, my son — ' Finally, he found the daylight, stumbled out with Grishkin waddling rapidly after. He fell down a flight of steps and into the ghastly spaces of the Stomach badlands.

He stayed there, on his hands and knees, gulping.

'The General has installed half the Fleet over Centauri VII, Captain. It will take time to breach her security. We can only wait a suitable opportunity. In the meantime, don't you see, you can take up a probationary ministry, like any other Novice of the order. You will be invisible. It's what you asked. I have provided not only security for you, but a means whereby you can remember our bargain.'

'You didn't have to do it this way, Grishkin.'

His cloak had fallen open. He looked up. In front of him stood the pilot of the atmosphere vehicle, a puzzled expression on his decent flier's face. 'What are you staring at, you bastard?' But he could no longer avoid his reflection. It was in the man's eyes: the plum-colored cloak; the horrible naked scrawny body, shaven and goosefleshed in the wind; the bald head -

And the little plastic panel implanted in his abdominal wall. He stared at it and began to weep.

It was disgusting.

It hurt.

'Here,' said the pilot, helping him up. 'Take it easy.'

But that wasn't the end of it, either, although he soon found that he could keep the cloak discreetly wrapped round him and ignore what lay beneath it — so that when he got back to Golgotha some of his composure, such as it was, had returned. It was precarious. He'd take Pater's injunction to heart and he could no longer guess what might become of him.

It was dark by then. My Ella Speed was blacked out. She seemed deserted, but up in the control room he stumbled over Tiny Skeffern, snoring on the floor, a ripped-off bottle of Pater's ethanol under his hand. He kicked the body gently. 'Tiny? Fix, why aren't there any lights on?' He found the switches himself, worked them petulantly. 'Fix, where are you?' There was something scrawled on a bulkhead in tremulous yellow crayon:

DERE BOS

IVE GOTTA JBO ONA FRATER OUT FRUM ERTH AN IF WEER TAUKGNI ABOT

PAY WEL I HAVENT BIN PAYD FRO 6 MNUTHS

FIXX

All Chromians are dyslexic from birth. It may be why their culture is still feudal. Truck sat down in one of the command chairs and shrugged at the inscription. 'Fix, Fix.' It was no more than he deserved. He felt unutterably weary.

Tiny, meanwhile, had stirred, rubbed his eyes, and sucked the empty bottle. 'Fix left,' he said, helping himself up with the edge of the chart computer. 'Christ that stuff stinks.' He staggered round the cabin looking for water, tripping repeatedly over the bottle, intent only on his own pain. 'Took his chopper and everything.'

'It's happened before. Hell be back. We're always falling out.' It was true, but it didn't make him feel any better: it was always his fault.

Finally, Tiny got his sight back.

'Hey, Truck,' he sniggered, 'did you get converted?' He squinted across the control room, a big, silly grin spreading across his face as he took in Truck's new clothes. 'Jesus, what — '

Truck, inspired by a dreadful rage, had leaped to his feet and was making determined grabs for Tiny's throat. He skipped smartly back. 'Truck, I — '

Truck got hold of him. Laugh, and I'll kick your head in, Skeffern,' he said earnestly. 'Come on then — ' He wanted to hurt somebody. He was being driven further and further out on his own, away from even the minimal decencies of the hinterlands. He shoved Tiny up against the bulkhead until his thin blond hair was rubbing out Fix's illiterate plea for fair treatment. 'Come on' — Inviting with steely fingers — 'say one word.'

And then, from all the sick misery of his awakening in Grishkin's ghoulish city; 'Oh sod it, sod it. Help me, Tiny.'

Tiny gaped and snuffled.

Truck slumped back in his seat and set his eyes sorrowfully on the bos'n's stupid half-erased note (he wasn't fit to be out on his own: he only got into fights with people bigger than himself, or pawned his chopper). 'What am I doing, Tiny? I made a deal with Grishkin. It was the only way I could see to get hold of the bloody Device. Now I'm not sure he didn't suspect that all along. He expects me to try and doublecross him. He cut me open as a warning. What am I doing?'

'It was only a joke, Truck, I didn't — '

Truck shivered and stared at the bulkhead.

Bleak steel.