'There are people, at least. You couldn't have expected me to put her down at Albion.'

Truck blew on his cupped hands. 'No.' He set his back to the wind — he would let it blow him along: when had he ever done anything else? — and hunched his shoulders, looking along the valley. 'I'd better go before I freeze to death.' Nothing moved down there in the wind. Boulders or buildings, everything was covered with verglas and frozen snow.

'Look,' said Himation, holding out his hand, 'I'm sorry if this seems hard — '

Truck laughed bitterly. 'It's hard,' he said. 'And it's no good me saying that I don't blame you, because I do. But' — he grinned — 'I'd do the same myself.' He touched the anarchist's hand briefly and walked quickly away, before he was tempted to say anything more. He'd gone about ten paces when Himation called 'Wait!'

He went back.

Himation had taken off his cloak and hat. He was thin and hollow-chested, younger than Truck had imagined, perhaps nineteen or twenty. His great shock of red hair and dead white face made an astonishing contact with his bright blue eyes. Shivering and jogging from one foot to the other, he bundled the clothes up and held them out.

'It's bloody bitter out here — and I shan't need them any more.'

He looked suddenly diffident and boyish.

Truck took them from him. 'You don't look much like your father,' he said.

Himation smiled uncertainly. 'My father? Oh, Pater.' He laughed, 'Did he tell you he was my father?'

Truck shrugged.

'It doesn't matter.' He held up the bundle. 'Will these do tricks for me?'

'Who knows?'

Himation smiled shyly. He reached out and plucked a green carnation from behind Truck's ear. 'I'd better have this back. Goodbye, Captain.'

He made off toward his ship: stooped, lean, full of energy, as if he'd been newly released from some prison. A flurry of snow whirled round him, like the prop to an illusion.

'Tell them to look for me in Andromeda,' he called.

He raised his hand. A flower fell from it and was snatched away by the wind.

Truck slung the cloak around him, buttoned its collar, and pulled down his hat. He retrieved the Centauri Device from a small puddle it had melted for itself in the snow, and went into the darkness of the valley, alone. Behind him, he heard Atalanta in Calydon lift into the air.

' "The wolf that follows, the fawn that flies." '

He didn't dare look back.

Perhaps four hours later, exhausted and covered with snow, he blundered into an IWG early warning post somewhere in the derelict suburbs of Gottingen. 'I've come to give myself up,' he said, and peered bemusedly into the twilight of the operations room, the skin of his face smarting in the sudden warmth.

Thin, unnatural faces squinted back at him through a haze of tobacco smoke, underlit by the backwash of green light from plotboard and ultrasonic map: red-eyed, eerie and frightened, like underground animals blinking up from burrows -

After a month in one of those places, waiting for the war-to start an operator begins to see things up on the empty slopes of the Vogelsburg, where nothing has stirred for over three centuries; he imagines massive troop movements among the drowned storm-cellars of Braunshweig and Salgitzer; he discovers an intruder in every silent fall of powdered mortar in a vacant city. He wears five keys chained to his neck — used in a proper sequence, they will kill the world.

After two months, he can hardly remember in which order to avoid using them -

Halfway through the graveyard shift, tired and sick among a litter of disposable plastic cups, all they saw was a faceless, threatening figure in a dark cloak, snow swirling behind it; and under its left arm an indistinct, shifty object that somehow chafed at their irritated eyes. All they heard it declare, in a muffled, deadly voice, was: 'I've come — '

A Chambers gun spluttered in the gloom.

Shadows hurled themselves over the walls, jerky and panic-stricken.

'You bastards!' screamed John Truck, and clutched at himself in astonishment. He snatched his own gun from his boot and dived behind a radar module.

It was a short exchange. At twenty-five or less, photophobic and with the ulcers of a sour responsibility eating at their insides, they were already old men. He killed them all, lay for a minute behind the console, whimpering. When he came out, he saw that some of them were clutching their keys, while others simply stared relieved at the low ceiling, blood on their rolled-up shirtsleeves — each one thankful, perhaps, that it was only his own death and not the world's.

Truck moaned. He was seeing in half-tones. 'You should have given me a chance,' he murmured, supporting himself against the door-jamb.

Outside, the wind was gusting up to Force Eight. There was a small VTOL pad behind the building. Halfway to it, he collapsed; lay there surprised under the sickening slow sweep of the ultrasound antennae and examined his wound. The bolt had eaten its way into his ribs, low down on the right side. The fire had gone out, but something was leaking from a fist-sized hole.

'Oh God,' he prayed. 'Oh, Christ'

He leaned on one elbow in the frozen slush and retched with fear. He couldn't feel anything down there, no pain, nothing. He wiped his mouth, looked up. A single aircraft was on the pad. He hauled himself laboriously toward it, hissing and gasping every time his right side touched the ground, out of horror that he'd get something in the wound.

He hadn't once let go of the thing under his armpit was warm enough now to give him comfort in the wild night.

FIFTEEN

The Last Anarchist

It was 6 a.m. Christmas morning in Carter's Snort when John Truck brought the stolen VTOL into the abandoned rocket-mail field at Renfield Street. Snow was on the ground, Sauchihall was full of crêpe paper streaming in the wind; in warm entrances and fuggy hallways, the port ladies were singing carols to their customers.

He came in hard, failing to kill all the vehicle's forward momentum. It slewed drunkenly over the concrete, falling apart, to fetch up finally with a surprised grunt against the base of an old launching gantry. For a minute or two it pushed itself in a grinding, obsessive circle round the obstacle, like a blind and dying crab on an empty beach. Then the engine gave up, and there was only a thin hiss of low-pressure air escaping from a fractured puff-pipe in the wing.

Off in the dark, undercarriage wheels rolled toward the edge of the field, bouncing and spinning like tossed coins.

Truck let his forehead rest against the landing-computer display. He was delirious, full of morphine and amphetamines from the VTOL's survival kit; his lower chest was an awkward, pulpy bag of pain; visions came and went like minutes of wakefulness in a week of sleep. 'We made it, Pater,' he muttered.

After a while, he raised his head, feeling a pressure, a radiation on the back of his neck. He couldn't see Cor Caroli, but he knew it was up there somewhere, one bad eye winking sardonically down on all murder and death. Cor Caroli, dog into wolf. He pondered his own transmigration, accomplished somewhere between Sad al Bari and Centauri VII. Where had his old body gone? He was sick now, but he was all wolf.

The Device whispered urgently to him. He ignored it as much as he could, occasionally waving one preoccupied, impatient hand in front of his face as if to dispel the persistent fevers that hovered round his skull. It showed him movies of Omega Shaft. He was gray-faced, he was burning up. It cost a century of effort to drag himself out of the cockpit. Civilizations rose and fell while he blundered up and down Renfield Street, trying to remember who he was.