THE CENTAURI DEVICE

She ran a hand through her hair. Her attention wandered. 'Truck, my love, why haven't you introduced us?'

And she smiled over at Ruth Berenici.

— who, emerging from whatever personal nightmare found its expression in the street below only to find herself in a more public one, cried, 'Who are you? How can you just burst in here like this -! Animal!'

Alice Gaw cocked her head to one side like a small deformed bird. 'My, my,' she said. She planted herself, feet apart, in front of Ruth and stared up at her with an expression of chilly intimacy. 'Look, lovie,' she began evenly, 'I like you. I liked you on sight. If I hadn't, I might have resented that.'

She reached out lazily and captured Ruth's lower jaw in one hard hand. She tutted sympathetically.

'That's a nasty scar. No, don't be shy. Let's have a look at it.'

And, with the muscles of her forearm trembling slightly, she forced Ruth's marred profile into the light.

'You know, that really is nasty,' she mused. 'Look duckie,' she murmured confidentially, 'I'll tell you what: I'm fifty-six years old, and I've been on my feet all bloody night long. Just you keep on the right side of me, and I'll keep on the right side of you. Hm?'

'Leave her alone, General,' said Truck quietly.

Since his trip across the long floor, it cost him pain to breathe, to speak — even to concentrate. A warm brown fog had crept up while he was unaware and filled the room: events filtered through it to him only after a peculiar delay. There was a salty taste in his mouth.

'You can leave her alone, now.'

The General relaxed her grip. Rum Berenici twisted out of it and fled whimpering toward the door, her long body ungainly with fear. One of the Fleet men caught hold of her. 'Just see she doesn't do herself any harm, lad,' said Alice Gaw. Tiredly, gazing out of the window: 'All right then Truck — where is it?'

Keeping his eyes open had become difficult — some kind of grit had worked up under the lids. He got the Centauri Device out from under his cloak, painstakingly stripped the charred and blood-stained rags of that other garment off it, and set it on his lap. It didn't look much.

'What do you see, General?' he asked. He shrugged painfully. 'I don't think I really want to know. No — I'd stay put if I were you. You're talking to a Centauran.'

And she was.

His eyes closed. In twos and threes, driven across airless spaces by a wind no one can name, coming the long way round from the gutter-edge outposts of the Galaxy, they were still drifting into his head, pressing up against the shuttered windows to await a glimpse of that crucial room — a direct, inevitable link between the Centauri Genocide and the deaths of all his friends.

All us losers are Centaurans — and that conceit established his ancestry more effectively than any biochemistry. Eyes open again he discovered General Gaw squinting across the room at him.

'You'll regret that, sonny,' she promised. And: 'It doesn't look like the thing I saw in the bunker.'

'I think it armed itself when I picked it up. You only saw its dormant phase.'

Something caught at his throat: he swallowed, coughed, tasted blood again — and this time the contraction of his diaphragm muscles triggered off a quick, uncontainable spasm of his lower intestine — he'd dislodged the spent Chambers bolt and it had fetched up somewhere in the mess behind his window. 'Oh,' he whispered. 'Oh, shit.'

Then, hearing a sharp intake of breath, a scrape of feet, 'I can set it off at any time, General!' He raised his head slowly from where it had slumped on his chest. She had moved in a couple of yards and stood before him in a relaxed professional crouch. 'What made you think you'd be any closer to owning it when you found your Centauran?'

She showed her teeth.

'Come off it, Truck. I'm your only chance. From the stink in here, I'd say somebody stuck one right in your guts. What's to stop me waiting? You're going to die, Truck.'

'I promise you I'll fire it off if that looks like happening, General. I've got nothing much left to lose.'

Confounded, she withdrew; and through the thickening fog he watched her confer with one of her policemen, who presently nodded and left the room.

'Ruth?' said Truck, but she didn't hear him. He wiped his hand across his mouth, and it came away wet and shocking. Successive storms of fear and pain and vertigo swept through him, each crisis leaving him weaker — while the Centauri Device, a high, electrical voice, vibrated in every cell of his brain.

There wasn't much left of him up there — a thread of memory, the odd little bit of personal stuff. It came down to streets and faces in the end, scraps that still defined nun, a fading signal from the hinterland. He was a proxy, he was a junction-box -

'I'll tell you what I think, Trackie.'

He had almost fallen asleep. He peered about the room. He was deadly tired.

'I think you're waiting for your gyppo friends to pull you out of this. If you are: forget it Bring him through, lads!'

When 'he' came through, under the watchful eye of the Fleet, he was much changed. Occupying the same space as he occupied, coextensive yet divorced, breathing — if it could be said to breathe — the same air as he breathed, came his long-time spectre.

The flat and watchful planes of his face were simple implications of the bleached and jawless skull beneath, pouring fine sand from the sockets of its eyes, generator and epicenter of all deserts; resident in the marrow of his spine were other vertebrae — scattered beneath a dead tree, polished, mourning; as he moved, he shed brittle echoes of past deserts and intimations of the Desert to Come. And, far off in his liquid brown eyes — broken white columns, like reflections in a failing cistern -

Ben Barka. The ghost encompassed him It wore his uniform without pity.

'General — ' The promptings of a parched wing. 'I am a prisoner of war. This is a charade. I object to taking part in it'

'Cut it out, Gadaffi,' advised General Gaw. 'I know you.' And she gave him a breezy grin. He shrugged infinitesimally and seemed to forget her. 'What I don't know, Truck,' she went on, 'is what deal you two scabs cooked up in the Avernus parking-orbit — '

Ben Barka chuckled sourly. 'General — '

'Speak when you're spoken to, ben Barka. Truck, you aren't denying that you shipped him up to a rendezvous with Nasser in that sardine can of yours?'

'There was no deal, General; there was no rendezvous. He killed a friend of mine.' Truck couldn't understand what she was getting at. 'You must be mad.'

But it was hardly worth it Her voice rose and fell, endless, accusing, endlessly beside the point; ben Barka's deserted husk replied with the dry song of the locust; above them both, electrical, crystalline, angelic — the voice of the Centauri Device reminded how certain things might be done, ushered him, a particle of human silt down the long slow watercourses of Centauri VII.

Where at last he might be initiated into that queer half-life beneath the ooze, the purgatorial suspension of his mother's race -

He woke up abruptly, in a panic because he thought the Fleet men were ushering ben Barka from the room.

'Wait!' he cried. 'General, make me a bid!'