The Centauri Device Part 21

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 sflent 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 warmdeclivity, wounded, fading, falls away. Behind her Arab and Israeli, plucked away insensate, topple from the b.l.o.o.d.y stair.

The Centauri Device 209.

"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 Cen-taurans and first of the New, allows that other voice, electric, to flood his inner ear.

His hands move: precise, elegant The thing on his lap like an animal stirs to meet them ...

Nothing is lost... / something twists the world away...

Epilogue.

So little comes down to us.

While the above is not solely fiction-being, as the reader will have realized, a dramatized account of some of the events leading to the Sol-Centauri Hyper-nova of 2367, and the formation of what is still known in hinterland argot as "Truck's Gap"-sources are few and scattered: a handful of secret files relating to the mysterious Centauri Device recovered from IWG and UASR emba.s.sies on Sad al Ban IV, Avernus, and- oddly enough, considering its backwater position- Gloam; records of coded tachyon transmissions by the cruisers Solomon and Na.s.ser prior to the battle of Centauri VII, and of Earth-Fleet communications right up to the moment of occlusion; and, perhaps less bare but no less tantalizing, evidence gathered over some years-and in difficult conditions-from s.p.a.cers who had known or talked with Captain John Truck.

We have no record of the mode of operation of the Centauri Device-here we follow (somewhat inaccurately, we fear, to the end of a more satisfying drama) the most popular of the current "psychic** theories. And nothing, not even the unstrictured imagination, 210.

211.

can explain that curious spatial discontinuity which engulfed everything within a radius of ten light years from Earth in the winter of that, Earth*s most urgent year: Sol was destroyed, along with Centauri, to produce the power for this vast sleight of hand; the chains of Terran politics were broken; no more can be said. Further, we have no clue whatever to the appearance of the Device in its armed phase-the sole descriptions extant refer to what was seen in the Omega Shaft bunker by Dr. Grishkin's archaeological team, General Gaw and two of her police force, and the UASR agent Colonel ben Barka. It was never our intention to produce original research, or shed new light on these matters, but to concern ourselves with what is more relevant hi human terms.

Of the golden s.h.i.+p Atalanta in Cafydon, there has been no sign since. She called at Pater's secret base shortly before the engulfment of Earth, and evacuated those of its complement who wished to leave. Many of these anarchists chose to remain in the Galaxy. About eighty of them were put off on the night side of Avernus some hours before the hypernova took place, and it is from them that we have our accounts of the "Third Speed," of the asteroid Howell and its fastidious prince, and of Himation's last words to Captain Truck. Whether Atalanta in Calydorfs stopover on Avernus was in any way connected with the reactor accident which finally destroyed the warren known as "Junk City** wfll never be proved. The events, however, were undeniably coincident But our greatest concern must undoubtedly be with the greatest mystery: The character of Captain Truck himself.

Say what you like of him: that his friends.h.i.+ps were shallow and callous; that his morals were those of a cretin or a small animal; that his interests were tawdry. Say that he had sold drugs on nine planets and abused them on ninetymore; that he had fought hi dishonor and squalor in every back alley of the Galaxy, display- 212.

The Centaur! Device ing only the courage of desperation. Say that he was young and unformed aud uneducated, and of a depth of naivete" matched only by his premature bitterness- But admit also that while he found life unpleasant, he found death worse. He loathed killing and conscious hurt, hypocrisy and cant, and the glib lip-service solution of human misery provided by ideology-but could find no means to articulate that loathing. This most honest of dishonesties could only find its expression in surliness, in bravado, in a constant search for impermanent oblivion. He had in fact, despite it all, innocence. Only that innocence or Grace made his gesture possible: only innocence can ever make such gestures possible, or acceptable.

Did he see his action as a belated revenge for the Centauri atrocity? Was he simply disgusted by the irrelevance to reality of the politics of his tune? He has been cast in both these roles in previous accounts, and both are forceful human activators. Again, though: 8 more simple, direct revenge for the killings he had seen or taken part in during the last few weeks of his life may have motivated him-or he may simply have triggered the Device accidentally, while delirious from the injuries he received in the Go'ttingen early-warning station.

There are even grounds for that peculiar and poetic myth of the s.p.a.ceport subculture-die belief that John Truck destroyed Earth as a proxy of the "new Centau-rans," those fabulous underground denizens of the dockland slums and the dyne fields, who will someday emerge as the true inheritors of the Galaxy.

The reader must judge for himself.