Alice Gaw whipped her Chambers gun out of its holster and rammed its barrel up into the soft place under ben Barka's chin. 'Hold them!' she screamed at the noncom. 'Chummie, I'm going to blow your head off the moment any of that filth gets down here — ' She pulled his head back with her free hand.
He overbalanced, plucked at her arm, eyes wide and empty; and for some seconds they tottered about in a circle, locked in the excesses of the Dance. Harsh, mechanical grunts and sobs, an eerie, obsessive shuffle of feet.
She pushed him away and raised the pistol, breathing in great noisy gasps. Her eye patch bad come adrift, and raw pulpy horror stared out of the hole in her head.
'I think I'll do it now — '
The window exploded inwards, and a stray shot from the street buried itself in the opposite wall, fizzing and spitting like an angry cat. A spatter of glass, a sudden stillness. Into which John Truck said:
'It's now or never, General. Quick! — Make us a bid!'
The pit in her face gaped above Mm. Her chin was wet.
'Growth,' she croaked, and he hardly recognized her voice. She swallowed. 'A free market economy. Law and progress. Peace with honor. You know all that.' She thrust her face up very close to his. Cosmetics were caked in her pores. He wondered how old she really was. 'Truck? We must stop them! They're a threat to every worthwhile human value!' she said.
'Freedom and dignity, Truck, how much are they worth?' she demanded, her single eye blazing. 'You've had them all your life because we kept watch -!'
From the windy concrete plains of Anywhere, the bleak industrial complexes of Parrot and the radio-deserts of Weber II, from the filthy vapor-lit alleys of the Snort, the new Centaurans — disenfranchised by poverty, barred from action by law, a pusher's market — crowded into that junction box between past and present atrocities that was John Truck's skull.
They were silent
'Well, Truck?' She bent over him anxiously, as if sensing a little of what he represented at that moment. He knew she didn't.
'Let ben Barka make his bid,' was all he said.
She threw up her hands in disgust
'Laddie, I was hoping for a minute there you weren't completely out of your head -
Fighting had broken out on the stairs as ben Barka's death-commando pushed its way off the roof. Dust and smoke billowed into the room; a dispute over the third turning of the fourth flight became an action, a battle, a siege; screams, burning meat, and bellows from the amplifier truck outside. Somebody in the street had brought up a small rocket launcher and was busily pounding the top floors of the building to rubble with it
Truck could see nothing now unless it was within a couple of feet of his eyes. He felt his substance boiling off into the void with the effort of holding himself together against the twin pressures of the Device and its inheritors.
'Let him speak!' he hissed.
In the event, ben Barka came up of his own accord, The General's police vanished to back up a holding action on the stairs, but he made no move to escape. He studied Truck's white and sunken face impassively. He brushed at something that might have been fine sand, lodged in a crease of his uniform.
'What precisely are you offering me, Captain?' he inquired. He raised his hand. 'No, General Gaw. Consider: what have either of us to lose? Our footing' — a thin smile — 'would now seem to be equal.' The muzzle of the pistol wavered, dropped. 'Captain?'
'A chance to speak, ben Barka.'
'Very well, then.' He looked to Alice Gaw for confirmation. She nodded, shrugged, pursed her lips. 'It'll get you nowhere, duckie. Mark my words.'
Ben Barka clasped his hands behind his back.
'Captain: IWG rapes and plunders, exploits criminally the labor force of the Galaxy. Used in the service of a genuinely Socialist revolution, the Device will bring about redress, stability, peace — and a just share in the profit and the adventure by the labor force.'
He glanced toward the door, speculating on the state of the conflict. 'Social forces work like natural ones, Captain — blindly, forcibly, erosively. I know what you want. If we are to be a viable alternative to the corruption of IWG, we must be a hot, corroding wind — stripping off the topsoil where we must, reshaping — '
Truck closed his eyes.
'You haven't any conception of what I want. Either of you. The odd thing is that you both actually seem to believe all this stuff. We've heard enough.'
A quick, frightened movement in the fog: Ruth Berenici, bruised and dirty, unable to understand. She pushed between Alice Gaw and the Colonel and, kneeling, touched one of Truck's hands.
'John, this is mad! You're dying! What does it matter which of them you give it to, when either of them could get you a doctor?'
He regarded her in silence. There simply wasn't enough of him left now to tell her anything.
'Don't I get a chance to bid?' she pleaded. 'What use are you to either of us dead?'
'I'm sorry, Ruth.'
'Sorry? John, it's me in here!' Then, quietly: 'Damn you. Damn you for a loser.'
They were leaving him the way they had come, through some back door of his brain; evaporating into fields and fluxes more subtle than any Dynaflow can create. Dogma means nothing to them. Personal relationships they take where they can, and always lose them somewhere between the Right and the Left, somewhere in the scorched field, in the urinal smell of the transit camp or the subway station.
It comes down to scars and empty bellies in the end. It comes to numb brains and the long trudge.
When they had gone — refugees from life and death, shuffling back down the light years and the centuries, hunched up against that eternal bitter Compass Wind — he smiled over his bitter disappointment. He saw quite clearly again. He saw what the hat and the cloak meant. How much better Himation or Pater would have been able to say it.
'It isn't enough,' he decided. 'So I am left with this thing after all.
'Listen, General. The Centauri genes have been scattering themselves over the Galaxy for two hundred years. There's a survivor of the Genocide in every drifter who ever lifted from a planet.
'But more: all of us down here are survivors of some personal atrocity, even if it's only birth.
'We breathe the dust of tragedy, and you offer us politics.
'Colonel — both of you — we're sick of ideology. It doesn't seem to work for us, only for you. You watch us crawl round the world — because there's nothing else for us to do — and see in us the reflection of a dream that was never worth the words you use to describe it; everywhere, you discover the symbols of your own obsession, codified but unreal — just as you discovered them in the bunker on Centauri.'
He touched the thing on his lap. It seemed to swell beneath his hand.
'This is the only thing that has ever belonged to us. When we hurt, you sell us something to ease the pain. This is the power to say, we aren't buying any more, and to mean that we're not buying it from either of you.
'Let's see what it does, shall we?'
Outside, the street erupts in silent flame. The Snort is burning. What does it matter, now? It was never worth anything, anyway.
Earth's old diplomatic grin splits wide open, to reveal a scaffolding of bone.
The room spins like a top and whirls away. Ruth Berenici, unattainable warm declivity, wounded, fading, falls away. Behind her Arab and Israeli, plucked away insensate, topple from the bloody stair.
'Christ, Gadaffi, stop him!' screams the General.
— They might hurl themselves forward forever, open-handed, gripped by eternal preternatural fear -
To hang, a dying-insect-hum on the moving air, while John Truck transliterated, last of the Old Centaurans and first of the New, allows that other voice, electric, to flood his inner ear.