38.

The Centauri Device 39when the decline became apparent-conceived, built, doomed to be a slum, to deliver hinterland justice. Not that anyone inside it is interested in the latter (which is represented nonrepresentationally in a mural above the unwelcome gate and has, apparently, to do with globes, balances, and lightning-very inspiring, but all that can be said for sure is that it smells of disinfectant); no, they're deep down in all that concrete to earn a living.

It bows their shoulders, as if they supported the whole steel-laced, flat faced pile on their necks.

If they have cells for souls, no one's to blame.

Outside, it's a reflection of the Snort it claims to serve: fans of rust where metal touches the walls; wet and dirty and down by the river.

Inside, John Truck. Well, he's been here before. Or in places very like it.

He was alone in a charge room with the echo of his own waking cry, the sole and total literacy of the hinterlands scratched and daubed on the pale green walls around him. This is where they write their only books: Picking Nick was here, busted for speed; Og, caught holding for a friend. All coppers do it with their mothers; if you get off, Angel, tell the Rat I didn't. Stuff and screw and stuff again. Novels of rage, futile exposed addressed to lawyers, relatives, and life; vomit and other things in corners; a cold steel door with rivets and only memories of paint through being kicked so. often in silly resistance.

Truck was strapped on a bench, vertiginous from the anesthetic, already bleak and bored, wondering if the General had caught up with him at last. From beyond the door came a continual sc.r.a.pe of footsteps, a whole army of offenders filing past. Faint voices, the odd shout, some smashed loser who had or hadn't come down: the King's guests, paying their forfeits without the fun of the party. It was way past dawn.

He lay there for some time, silently fighting the crab lice in the restraining jacket and staring at the ceiling. People came to the door, changed their minds and

40.

went away again. Angel and the Rat and Fast Harry pa.s.sed on their advice in disconnected misspelled prose, but he'd read it all before. When the door sc.r.a.ped open, he was half asleep. Imagine his surprise, to find Dr. Grishkin, the flabby priest, bending solicitously over him.

Cooped up in Ruth's apartment with tune to consider that meeting on Bread Street, he had begun to feel a metaphysical uneasiness, even alarm, whenever he thought of Grishkin. He would have been hard put to explain why.

Nevertheless, it was amplified unreasonably by the actual apparition or avatar of the man. Endeavoring to dispel some of it, he stared up into the round, lunar face where he could almost see himself reflected in a faint cheesy film of perspiration and muttered: "I thought I told you to sod off?"

It was hardly a body blow (One of these days, Truck, he told himself sadly, somebody is going to discover the real you under all this foulmouthed repartee-a foulmouthed Teddy bear), and a mistake even to imply he might be continuing their previous exchange. The doctor had reversed his cloak, but not his stance. Black, with a thin gold stripe. Very fetching.

"Captain, it is a little more complex than that. If you could bring yourself-if you could co-operate-"

His little eyes gleamed extravagantly. Things, amorphous and juicy, shifted to and fro behind his windows like the slow stirrings of some core, some hub-something real, at any rate-which existed quite apart from his benign and greasy faith: inexplicable urgencies of the psyche mimicked in the motion of the gut, demands that perhaps only Grishkin could fully comprehend and Truck completely fulfill. Faced with such ambition- such enigma and compulsion-Truck's bravado slipped a little.

**Don*t tell me you're a copper. I wouldn't have believed they had it in them."Crucified by someone else's crabs (he hadn't yet ac- Tne Centaur/ Device

41.

cepted that they were now his although they evidently had-the eternal misunderstanding), wrapped up, in sweaty rubber and flat on his back besides, he wasn't at his freshest; it was a stupid thing to say. But the good doctor merely smiled. He was no copper and both of them knew it. Truck hunched one shoulder.

"That was a stupid thing to say. Why are you here, then?"

Any port in a storm.

Grishkin beamed. He waddled very rapidly round the room once, touching the walls here, tapping them there.

"Captain," he said as he went, "yii*ve been detained before. You aren't a fool For an offense such as this, for a narcotics offense**-he spread his arms, the palms of his hands upwards; he stared up at the conjunction of wall and ceiling-"no one could reasonably expect a lawyer. But the twenty-fourth century admits-indeed, insists upon-your right to religious representation.

Why else should I be here?" He nodded several times to himself, murmuring "Just so, just so," as if he were thinking of something else altogether.

"How you got in here I don't much care; get to the point, Grishkin.**

The Opener thrust his face close to Track's. He seemed to have had late nights recently; there were pouches of slack, slightly discolored skin beneath his eyes. He licked his tiny lips and then whispered earnestly: "To open certain avenues to you, to-*

"Grishkin, if you-**

-to offer you a way out, Captain."

Truck felt absurdly disappointed. He chuckled sourly, thinking of the General.

Grishkin made a gesture of impatience and turned his back. "Captain, you are a difficult person to feel concern for!" When he turned back, some of the urgencies contained behind his windows had escaped into his facial musculature, pursing his mouth intermittently

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and drawing his forehead into two thick long l.a.b.i.a of flesh.

"Captain," he said, "there are questions other than that of personal satisfaction, of ideology. I need an agent; if you like, an interpreter; possibly even more. Do you understand me? You are the last person in the Galaxy who speaks the language I am interested in. My doctorate is not in theology or medicine, but in archaeology; do you take my point?'*

Breathing heavily, he leaned closer, supporting his gross bulk with a hand placed each side of Truck's head. Beneath the perspiration, his skin was grainy, matted.

"It is no laughing matter. The local penal system can be circ.u.mvented. If you agree to act for me, you will be released. If not-a narcotics offense, Captain-it speaks for itself."

He levered himself upright.

Truck? He was invincibly ignorant of his "Time and Place, only beginning to recognize the nature of the tides. He sn.i.g.g.e.red. "Can you circ.u.mvent IWG Fleet, doctor?" he asked. "Can you circ.u.mvent General Alice Gaw?"

It wasn't really funny.

"Oh, sod these bleeding lice!**

Grishkin winced. The walls of his stomach contracted furiously behind the window of his soul. Of their own accord, his pudgy hands moved until their blunt fingertips touched Truck's neck. His cloak fell forward and obscured the light. After an effort, he controlled his fingers and stepped back; he wrapped the cloak about him and stood there, looking down almost compa.s.sionately.

"You are worth more than you imagine, Captain, If I suspected you were simply parroting things of which you had no understanding-you cannot be quite as naive as-but no: you have seen her already. I had hoped to be in time." He shrugged. "Until there is

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some change in your circ.u.mstances, my offer wul have to be withdrawn."

"You won't have anything to offer then, doctor."

There was a hiss and thud of automatic bolts being withdrawn; servos whined and the charge-room door swung slowly open to admit two uniformed.policemen.

Grishkin spread his cloak like a lunatic birdman, raised his eyes to the ceiling.

"The price will be right when the time comes, Captain.*' Then, "Open yourself to the Universal Principle, my son," he intoned. "You may not believe in Him, but He believes in you. That is my advice. Learn trust and honesty, pick only those blooms from the flora in the Gut of Matter. They may look drab to you now, surrounded by the garish petals of illusion. But later, later- "Ah, the secular arm. Open yourself to them, my son."

He folded his arms and strode away, nodding at the policemen. They ignored him, and turned gray faces on Truck. One of them had a key to the restrainer.

When the sound of Grishkin*s boots had faded away down the pa.s.sage, he held it up and grinned maliciously. When Truck returned the grin, his face closed up abruptly and he put it away again.

"Less of that for a start," he said.

They took him to a cell that opened off the pa.s.sageway from the charge room and unlocked the restrainer so he could sit in front of a small metal-topped table on which the contents of his pockets had been spread. One of them left, the other stood behind him fidgeting and sighing occasionally as if he hoped Truck might try to engage him in conversation.

For half an hour nothing happened. A draft carried a strong smell of disinfectant into the cell.

Eventually two men came in: an IWG agent in plain clothes carrying a blue plastic folder, and a middle-

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The Centaur; Device aged sergeant of the civfl (effectively, Port Authority) police with a long, jowled face and a rumpled uniform. They sat down on the other side of the table, not looking at Truck. The agent gave his file to Truck's guard. "Take that to Whillans for me, wffl you."

"Whfllans is sick," the guard told him, "sir."

"Well, give it to Jansen, then." He examined Truck's papers. He seemed interested in the log book from My Ella Speed. He was young-looking and tanned, but partly bald, and there were deep lines running down from his nose to the corners of his mouth.

"We know he was on Morpheus, whatever the BCA have to say," he said to the sergeant. Suddenly, he turned to Truck and asked, "Who are you selling to these days?"

"I*m not selling,*1 said Truck. He had to give them something, so he went on, "I admit I was at Veronica's place, but I was only consuming." He'd had precious little time to do any of that. "Fm not selling anything-"

The sergeant got up noisily and pointed his finger at Truck. He was slack in the beHy and shoulders, which is where West Central weighs heaviest on its executives. He shook his finger accusingly.

"You'd better straighten yourself up. You're up to your ears in Earth heroin and morphine. We could break your leg and no one would care. In here we could break your leg."

Truck had always avoided the opium derivatives. n.o.body wanted colonial heroin because papover som-niforum lacked "bite" when grown away from Earth, and its alkaloids were always either weak or peculiar. Rigid control of growing by both IWG and UASR had shut down the black market-there was simply raw material to be had; so the only trade in the genuine article was gray, a thin trickle of refined and packaged material stolen mainly from military medical supplies, traveling a precarious conveyer belt to the cutting factories of the giant H and M monopolies of Earth.

45.

It was scarce, it was expensive, and it was profitable enough for the monopolies to protect then1 connections jealously. Truck had never wanted his head blown off.

(There was a second reason, one that seemed odd even to Truck. He called it squeamishness because he didn't think he had any right to a moral stance. In that, he was probably correct. But underneath his leather hat and funny clothes lived a puritan. He wouldn't sell anything he didn't believe in taking himself. He never ceased wondering about it He thought of it as a fatal flaw in his character.) "Earth heroin can get you killed,** he said. "You know that as well as I do.**

The IWG man rapped the table. "He's not playing fair with us, sergeant," he said distantly.

The sergeant sat down. **Why don't we make it harder for him?'* he complained, looking at his blunt, hairy hands as if he loathed them.

The IWG man was staring vaguely up at the ceiling. "There's an easy way and a hard way of getting things straight," he agreed. He opened the log book again, flicked its pages over. He iwgan to poke Truck's belongings about.

"You're not co-operating John," he said. "Look, this-could have been harder for you personally; we've shown you a lot of consideration.*' IBs eyes were blue and watery, aimless; he gave his full attention to anything they happened to focus on, like an old animal. He blinked, and everything had equal weight for him. "We know you were on Morpheus, not too many years back, dealing in amphetamines. Your operation made a significant contribution to the b.u.t.ter Putsch, so we can a.s.sume you have a political involvement. Now you turn up in a raid on Veronica's. Why shouldn't you have a heroin connection as well?

"You're in a bit of a mess, John."

In those callow days, drifting among the dark machine-tool factories and vast rolling mills, concerned only with making enough money to buy back his in- 46 dentures and get off the planet, Truck hadn't been able to tell a political involvement from a vomiting fit. He was still having trouble.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he confessed. "I don't see what H has to do with politics. I've never had much to do with either."

The sergeant jumped to his feet again. This time his chair fell over. He made a fist and slammed it down on the table in front of John Truck's nose. His face had grown very red. Small objects rolled about the table top, dropping off the edge.

"You're working for Veronica!" he hissed. "Don't try to deny it." He sneered.

"Just tell me one thing," he said: "Which are you? Anarcho Syndicalist or Situ-ationalist? Which is it?"

"Oh Christ," said Truck, amazed.

The IWG man winced. "Could you let me handle the political angle, Sergeant?"

he murmured. He began to fumble through his pockets.