The Centauri Device Part 3

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26.

The Centauri Device Qattara Depression menaced Niger and the keetyards 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 naive 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 Cartels 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 ex-

27.

pect that his own star would eventually outshine h on all scales of magnitude.

He had to argue with Fix, the Chromian bosun, 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 ten you if they've pinched me. The boat's yours until you hear from me again."

Fix grinned with embarra.s.sment His teeth were like a sawmill.

"You need big protection out there, boss. HI just-" He made off toward the corner of the hold where he kept his stuff.

"Leave that b.l.o.o.d.y 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.

"Fll 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-gra.s.s that had forced their way through the broken concrete of the landing field.

"See you."

28.

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 succ.u.mb 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 fewkeelyards 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 hi 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 aH 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 UVES, 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 The Centauri Device

29.

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 ma.n.u.script 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 s.e.xual 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 a.s.sumption in the weak wet light of the Carter's Snort dawn. He found one of her long hands, trapped ft.

"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-w The hand moved away, leaving no bruises on his second-best hide, no marks of any kind.

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The Centaur! Device "-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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s: "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 tot He scratched at the frost patterns on the inside of the window-stared, mildly surprised to discover himself stffl 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="">

*'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 respon-

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sible for some smashed port loser you never met, why not me?"

"Oh, that's a bit simplif-M "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 stffl be here. This will always be here waiting for you."

She s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 snifiled. "I'm sorry." She faced the wall. "Stuff your b.l.o.o.d.y head with dope, then."

Four days. , n.o.body came.

n.o.body 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 die rest of his band hadn't turned up. "But n.o.body's mentioning your name."

32.

The Centaur? Device 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 safari.

"The narcotics police are getting ready to close Chalice Veronica's import operation. You're not in-. volved with that are you?"