The Centauri Device (8 page)

'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.'

The Interstellar Anarchist, an Aesthetic Adventure — Part One
 

A little of the previous day's snow had settled on the field where
My Ella Speed
lay grounded.

Between the blockhouses and the gloomy oubliettes of the freighter silos, patches of it betrayed the unwary foot — a skim of brown slush, gelling steadily as the thermometer dropped. The field was almost deserted; the lights were doused; the earlier cirrus had blown away east and left behind it a fast-moving two thousand meter cloudbase that dyed the night as black as Himation's hat

Truck, prone in the muck fifteen yards from his boat, awaited a signal. He was soaked from head to foot, clenching his jaw to keep it from tearing itself off and his teeth from betraying his position to the pair of General Gaw's policemen on sentry-go at the base of the unlit ship. There was no sign of Fix the bos'n, which worried him no less than the fact that the General hadn't even bothered to keep up the fiction of a Port Authority arrest.

The policemen beat their arms and stamped their feet, cocked their heads as a distant siren fluted momentarily down empty arcades, morose and fading — 2 a.m. dock stinks breathed over the field. It was the uncertain hour, when all kinds of rats dance beneath the sidewalks and the air is as bitter as lead in the lungs.

Truck sneaked a look to the left of him, where Himation lay in similar discomfort. The pale hand rose and fell, the cloak whirled like the wing of a cormorant.

Truck heaved himself to his feet and skulked toward his man. He'd gained three quarters of the distance — and the Fleet still quite oblivious — when Himation overtaxed his sense of balance on the tricky surface, flailed his arms, and went down like an empty black gunny sack. Immediately, Truck's intended victim raised a shout and sent a Chambers bolt fizzing into the slush alongside the anarchist's head. Himation wailed and began crabbing rapidly about on his hands and knees. Shadows pranced dangerously on the blistered hull of the
Ella
Speed
.