The Centauri Device (3 page)

'You don't look like a member of the Chosen Race to me, General.'

This, he managed to deliver with an insinuating snigger. The General, though, merely adjusted her eyepatch and sighed. Her bleached-out hair was chopped off all the way round her head at ear level; her nose had been broken during a police action on Weber II.

'I don't like you either, sonny, but I'm keeping quiet about it. This baiting stuff doesn't work on me, so forget it. I'm simply an executive of the World Government, doing a job. If you've got any sense, you won't make it difficult for me. I wouldn't have had you within a yard of this office if it hadn't been absolutely necessary.'

She studied his clothing with distaste. 'I can't believe we ever had you in the Fleet,' she said. 'God, what a shambles it must have been.'

He had been rendered uncomfortable despite every resolution.

'You own half a world, General, and it isn't this one. Half of Earth you neither govern nor own; and to the rest of the Galaxy you have no right whatever. That lays you open.'

'We govern the civilized world. We police the civilized colonies. Without the security we represent, scabs like you might have less freedom to speak. Would you chop logic with a UASR representative sitting in my place? There are three hundred billion people in the Galaxy and we have only one per cent of them. We're outnumbered, and we have what they want. Everything that happens out here affects us.'

Truck shrugged. Events would carry him; it was only left to him to discover in which direction. Abruptly, two separate images welled up from the back of his head —

He recalled the Negev, the hot boredom broken only by brief violent engagements with infiltrators from the Union of Arab Socialist Republics, the dull report of a Chambers gun, the dreadful anger that welled up when he realized he had been shot at. And he saw the packed corpse-boats orbiting Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici, their cold spectral avenues limned with a faint milky light, the plastic packing cases filled with dead children, the ranked carcasses of the adults without box of any kind, the wounds glittering at him like eyes; he smelt them.

'Get on with it,' he said. 'Have you got anything good to smoke? — Oh well.'

'You may have to pay a little more attention than that, laddie.'

She swung her leg, tapped the table. Truck locked his hands in his lap and played absently with them. It looked as if it might be a long session.

'We don't know very much (began General Gaw) about the old inhabitants of the Centauri system: they were the first of the so-called 'civilized' races too intercept the wave-front of human expansion; they were wiped out as a coherent group two centuries ago in what we've been taught to call since the 'Centauri Genocide.' Shut up, Truck. You don't understand enough of anything for your opinion to be worth anything to me. That was what the intellectuals of the time called it. I'm in favor of intellectuals as a whole, but I have reservations.

However, it was a traumatic business for humanity, that can hardly be denied; and by the time we'd finished running round getting off on our guilt complexes, tile Centauri survivors had bolted off like rats and scattered themselves over the newly-colonized planets. They were absorbed fairly quickly — no drive, you see; they lacked cultural strength.

They were enough like us to suggest common ancestry (it had already been discovered that two miscegenations out of three were fruitful or some such revolting thing); they weren't at all native to the Centauri system, although nobody ever discovered traces of them anywhere else; there was even some speculation that they might have originated on Earth, which really put the cat among the pigeons.

But the rubbish died down, and at least one decent piece of thinking came out of it.

Marsden's hypothesis of Niche Competition described the Galaxy as an ecological complex in which separate space-going races replace the separate species of a planetary ecosphere. The competition between species whose demands on the environment are identical is inevitable, natural, and harsh.

Yes, I do believe it, as a matter of fact. Never mind that. Keep your grubby little fingers out of my head.

Now.

The peculiar thing about that war is that the Centaurans needn't have lost it. They couldn't have won, but for fifteen years they stood us off; then, quite suddenly, they stopped intercepting the MIEVs and the atmospheric intruders. Within three days, Centauri VII was rubbished. They did a good job of that sort of thing in those days.

But listen to this, Truck: we had an on-planet intelligence network down there, living as Centaurans, poor sods — it's in the records — and they were sending reports through right up until Centauri VII chucked it in. So why did they commit suicide, laddie, when they'd just concluded R&D on a weapon they fully expected to finish the whole shooting match in then-favor?

You think about that, while we talk about you.

You were born in the Pontisport hinterland on Parrot, in the rest room of a bakery. Your mother was a part-time port whore, one of the refugees who came down the Carling Line in refrigerators from Weber II. She was mainlining adrenochrome activators cut with the ribosomes of a local breed of bat. She asked for a cure, but the port authorities already had her scheduled for resettlement as a displaced person. No, I'm not asking you any of this, I'm telling you — because I know more about you than you know about yourself.

Spaceport Annie Truck was shipped to the Heavy Stars when you were six months old.

AdAcs penetrate the placenta, of course, and you had to be weaned off the stuff. She left you behind. Do you ever dream about bats?

But what's more important about Annie is this: she was a full-blooded Centauran.

As far as we can decide statistically, there's a ninety-four per cent chance that she was the last true Centauran to exist in the Galaxy. That makes you a half-breed, Truck. Finally, on this score at least: for some reason, Annie had the primogeniture. If you'd ever read a book, you might have recognized your bone-structure and general proportion as predominantly Centauran. Your father had weak genes, whoever he was.

You won't find that so amusing in a minute, chummie.

'Let's go back to the Centauran War. Have it your own way, genocide; it honestly makes no difference to me. That weapon existed, you know. The MI reports worried us then, but we have our own reasons now.

We found it, Truck.

Some bloody lunatic of an archaeologist found it in a bunker cut three miles into the crust of Centauri VII, as nasty a little bolthole as ever I saw, and I've seen a lot.

We found it, but we don't know how to work it. We can't even get very close to it. We can't get any instrument readings off it. I've seen it myself, and it seems half sentient. Can you see that, Truckie — a sentient bomb?

We need your genes. They gave up and conceded Centauri without using the weapon all right; but they built its operating codes into the chromosomes of their unborn brats, because they wanted to be able to sneak back to it like dogs to sick, later. It won't go off without a Centauran.

Annie died twenty years ago, and you're the only one we could find.

Truck mulled it over a little. He felt a wry sympathy for the port lady from Weber II. It was easy to see his own birth as a momentary lapse, a miscalculation. But again: had Annie Truck answered some unconscious urge on Parrot? In dividing, to produce another vector, a small image of herself — as if by that multiplication of possibilities, the long uncomprehending migration might be expedited; something lost by her might be gained by him.

This in the silence that followed General Gaw's monologue, while her good eye impaled him and wouldn't let go. All spacers are incurably sentimental. Eventually, he got out of his chair and stood looking down at her.

'How much good will your bomb do us when you drop it?' he asked. He wasn't sure on whose behalf he was asking. He fingered the tear in his jacket. 'Who will you drop it on?'

When she said, 'I expected that, Truck, it's predictable from the way you dress. You can leave it out, because I don't need it,' he turned his back on her. She went on: 'We blew two UASR agents in the team that uncovered the Centauri Device. There was a third, but we didn't discover that until he'd shoved off.

'That's what it's about, duckie; it always is.'

Indistinctly, because he was thinking about something else: 'Then get someone else to prime the thing, General.'

He reached the door, went as far as touching the handle, then faced her again.

'I was on Morpheus,' he said. 'I stacked them up for the graveyard orbit at Cor Caroli. I've seen the library footage of Weber II. You understand, I don't care if you and the Arabs blow each other to junk. But I loaded people who'd never heard of you on to those boats.'

She was still lounging, undisturbed and negligent, her thighs powerful and ugly, her eye bright and compelling. He was growing terrified less of what she represented than of the woman herself.

'That shanghai attempt,' he said, 'was it to persuade me that the Arabs want to talk to me too? That would have made it nice and easy to accept whatever deal you have in mind, wouldn't it? Don't do it again. I'll try and kill the next lot, so help me. The only people who wear lace-ups are Fleet Police. It only makes you look silly, you see. No spacer would be seen dead in lace-up shoes. At least the Arabs have the gumption to dress their men for the part.'

She laughed, breezy and fierce.

'I told the stupid bitch it wouldn't work. I'm going to have to have a chat with her.' She swung her legs out of the chair and leaned forward. 'I can't say I didn't expect this. We need you, we were prepared to pay for you — but there won't be any offers now.'

Truck opened the door.

'You've got yourself into my bad books, I don't mind telling you that. I'm giving you twenty-four hours to consider it, then I'll have you pulled in. Wherever you are. The charge will be trading in Fleet medical supplies when you were last on Earth, and I can prove it.

'I'll be here if you should decide to behave yourself. Bye-bye, laddie.'

Truck closed the door quietly after him.

He went back to The Spacer's Rave, feeling as if he had suddenly gained a dependent. Why should Annie Truck and her AdAc habit be on
his
conscience? It was a strange reversal: but under the hinterland lamps, all kinds of dependency are possible. It assumed a kind of reality, Annie flickered into life for him there, and he accepted her.

Tiny Skeffern was winding up his gig in a desultory fashion:
Phencyclidine Dream
, which he always used as his encore, was over; bass drums and most of the audience had packed up and gone home, but a cadaverous ectomorphic spacer was sitting smirking stupidly over the controls of the Rave's H-Line synthesizer, making attic, flutelike noises, while Tiny picked at the high notes with meditative fingers. Only the stoned and persistent remained to listen, wondering how they might find somewhere to go, something to do at four-thirty St. Crispin's Day morning on Sad al Bari IV.

By the time the last of them had lurched out onto the street, dirty brown light was filtering between the buildings and the vapor lamps were wan. An occasional chandler, bleary and reluctant with sleep, crept past the door of the Rave on his way to another day. Tiny turned it all off and gently laid the Fender in its hardshell case. He slapped the shoulder of the guy on the synthesizer, yawned, did a weary shuffle. 'Oh, man.'

There is a kind of cold particular to the dawn. All nightside losers know and revere it for its healing stimulant properties. Shivering and grinning at one another, Truck and Tiny hunched off toward the port and Truck's boat. The compass wind blew: it lay in wait for them at intersections, came whistling round the corners of warehouses to meet them. When that happened, Tiny would run on ahead, swinging the Fender case and kicking out at bits of rubbish in the gutter.

'Hey look,' he said, 'it's an Opener.'

Waddling down Bread Street toward them in the morning chill was an enormous splay-footed, wobbling man wearing a plum-colored cloak. His head was bald and round, his features streamlined into his facial tissue so that they were mere suggestions of a mouth, a nose, a chin. His eyes were swaddled deep and tight in flaps and swathes of flesh. His cloak was open at the front.

He was an Opener all right — one of that curious sect whose members believe that honesty of bodily function is the sole valid praise of God (the existence of whom they freely and frequently aver), that function being analogous, it only through cortical representation, to the very motions of the psyche.

When the wind peeled back the cloak, he was naked. His body was shaved as hairless as his head, his skin was like a pink, shiny polymer. Let into his stomach, thorax, and belly were the thick plastic windows the Openers have surgically inserted to show off their internal processes. They were surrounded by thick callused lips of flesh, and nothing altogether pleasant was going on behind them.

He stared as he passed Truck and Tiny: His eyes were black and secretive. He had eaten a fairly light breakfast. He moved his small, indeterminate lips into a smile. Suddenly, a short thick arm whipped from under his cloak (as if the action were quite divorced from him, the arm belonging to some dwarf or ape hiding beneath the garments: his smile remained). His meaty hand clutched John Truck's shoulder.

'Here,' said Truck. 'Get off.'

'Good morning, Captain,' said the Opener. 'I am Dr Grishkin. The Lord is kind.'

'What?'

Truck, gazing through the windows on Dr Grishkin's raw and convoluted soul, recalled that he hadn't eaten for some time. The Opener still had hold of his arm. His stomach rumbled.

'I have just this moment come from your ship. Your bos'n told me you were unavailable.

I'm glad to find him wrong.'

'That's right,' mumbled Truck, 'not available. Sorry.'

Dr Grishkin nodded slowly, once — until he was looking at Truck like a sad fat animal from the cave-mouth of his own brows. It was accomplished, it was dramatic. With his free hand, he spread his cloak wide. Truck began to feel ill.