The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison Page A

have them located! Fetch your friends, if they want to join the dirty work— but quickly! Meet me on The Green Carnation within the half hour!'
    It was easier said than done. Howell boiled with anarchists: mad dandified gunners wearing mutton-chop whiskers and outrageous sideburns; navigators favoring the leather flying helmets and Sidcot-suits of a forgotten war; barrel-chested mechanics in striped jerseys and tight knee-breeches — and all of them making book on their chances of survival or spoils as they scrambled, shedding tarot cards, poems, and poker dice, for their ships.
    Himation, glimpsed on a crowded corridor; his crew bobbed behind him like gulls in the wake of a black-sailed lugger. Pale hands flickered and danced, but the madness was infectious. All he said was, 'After the strike, Captain!' and he was gone.
    Truck found Tiny in a small square room where faded charcoal sketches covered the brown and crumbling plaster. Over his knee was an old acoustic guitar with a warped rosewood fretboard; on the brass bed that filled the place sat Heloise the model, her tight sallow body glowing in the deteriorating northlight. She regarded Tiny sulkily and sang, ' "Ils sont des si artistes gens",' in her pretty, muted voice. 'Can't you tell him to play less accompaniment?' she appealed to Truck. 'It's the song that counts.' And she got up to stare out of the artificial window at the ateliers of a Paris long blown to hell by the Rat Bomb wars, her little bottom quivering petulantly.
    'You don't need any electricity for this,' explained Tiny. 'Isn't that something?'
    Truck dragged him through the bedlam of militant Howell. Their half hour was almost up, the asteroid was trembling to the pulse of warming engines, expectant. 'What about Fix?' cried Tiny, hugging his new acquisition.
    'No time. He'd only want to bring that sodding chopper.'
    They stumbled aboard The Green Carnation .
    The klaxons died.
    In the ensuing silence, Swinburne Sinclair-Pater smiled and adjusted the set of his coat, the tilt of his elegant hat. He raised his hand. 'Go!' he commanded. With a raffish cheer the engineers fed power, the navigators touched their good-hick charms: and forty-seven golden raiders took to the aether like a pack of lush Byzantine hounds, racing and quivering and vying for the scent. But however they tried, none could outdo The Green Carnation , and she ran out ahead of them, an incitement, a triumph, and a hard gemlike flame.

    Aboard the flagship, Truck and Tiny, immobile, awed.

    A blue-gray waxy light drowned her pentacular command-bridge, running like tepid fire down the slippery perspectives of an extra-Galactic geometry, forming optical verglas on planes of alien metalwork, tracing the formal interlacing designs that covered the inner hull.
    Every four or five seconds, banks of stroboscopic lamps fired off, freezing and quantifying jagged areas of shadow, but defining no shape the eye could appreciate. Nothing was perpendicular or dependable.
    Now white and dazzling, now hard black silhouettes, Pater's quarterdeck crew moved at ease through this disjointed medium, tending the bizarre original equipment of the ship or settling like insects among more identifiable machinery bolted roughly to the deck. They trailed loops of cable from portable computing facilities, calling off queries and co-ordinates in a rising chant. A subsonic ground bass reverberated through the body cavities; other voices chattered and decayed in the foreground like the cries of autistic children heard in a dream.
    Above them, ribbons of circuitry framed a layout of enormous screens, on which were visible the rest of the fleet:
    They hung in gay ambush, Maupin , Trilby , and Les Fleurs du Mal ; the Whistler , the Fastidious , and the Strange Great Sins . In two long wings of twenty-four, they poised themselves 'at the sharp apex of the present moment between two hypothetical eternities' — Madame Bovary and the Imaginary Portraits ; Syringa and White