Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  Something evil must have really captured her karma, for who but demons would want to go up there into the cold and the dark. The stars seemed to hide the secret of tomorrow's dawn with cold and impenetrable knowingness. How could anyone expect to sleep soundly under the pitiless gaze of a fate beyond understanding or control?

  And now it was slate gray dawn, and she was blearily awake at this ghastly hour as Lou began to stir against her. He blinked. He sat up. He rubbed his eyes in the baleful light and kissed her dryly on the cheek.

  "Hi, how did you sleep?" he said in a loathsome attempt at early morning cheerfulness.

  "Terrible," she snapped at him. "Are you sure you know what you're doing? This is how I'm supposed to prepare myself for karmic rebirth?"

  "You are where you are," Lou told her, crawling out of the sleeping bag. "That's the whole point."

  "Spare me your ineffable wisdom please, and let's get it over with," Sue snapped as she emerged into the morning chill and began pulling on her clothes.

  "Hey, I'm not your enemy," Lou said in a wounded tone of voice as he pulled on his pants.

  "I'm sorry," Sue said much more softly, kissing him briefly. "But this hour of the morning is not exactly my time to shine, and I didn't like the thoughts that kept me awake half the night, and I really don't think either of us knows what we're getting into, and I don't even—"

  Lou stopped her with a finger to the lips. "You're more ready for rebirth than you think," he said. "You're right, it's time to do it. Let's go inside."

  The interior of the cabin seemed like a self-contained bubble in the sea of the universe, a cabin on a ship built to sail the waters within. The only windows were high up under the eaves where the world outside manifested itself only as shafts of pale early morning light. The floor was the living earth of the mountains, and the walls were rough-barked logs, and the only furnishing was a round pit dug in the center of the floor and padded by thick goose-down quilting.

  Out of a pocket, Lou produced two brown wafers of rex, the ultimate achievement, or so it was claimed, of Aquarian mindfood art.

  "Just chew it up like pastry," he said, handing Sue one of the dense-looking cookies. She shrugged, saluted ironically, then gobbled it down like a hungry animal.

  Clear Blue Lou chewed his wafer of rex slowly and contemplatively, enjoying the not-unpleasant mushroomy flavor, evoking the full awareness of what he was doing.

  The exact ingredients of the wafer were the trade secret of the Clear Light Tribe, and Lou, being no psychoherbalist, wouldn't have understood the magic of the recipe anyway. But he knew full well what rex did, and he had always employed it with a sense of some moral trepidation.

  Rex erased the barrier between the mind and the mouth, between consciousness and speech, between the secret stream of the mind and the edited version the soul ordinarily spoke to the world. You spoke your truth as you saw it in your heart of hearts. Your mind lay open to whomever you were with as surely as if it were the pages of a book.

  Rex was used for karmic rebirth alone. Anyone under its influence could not help but be transformed by any question with which they were confronted. And any questioner might get answers closer to the core of truth than he had intended. Only a perfect master could lead a soul through its own unself-controlled truth without imposing outside patterns. Only a perfect master could refrain from programming this open fluid consciousness with his own input.

  It was the hardest task a perfect master was called upon to perform, because if he wasn't perfect, he'd taint his own karma with the sin of mindfucking, and the transformed soul would emerge in a programmed persona.

  The unofficial lynch-law penalty for using rex to program minds or seek gainful knowledge of another human was death, and it had had to be applied only a few times in all of Aquarian history. This was deep and heavy stuff, and everyone knew it.

  No one more so than Clear Blue Lou, who had rebirthed a score of souls, who had peered into their twisted karma with clear detachment, and led them by not leading through their own truth to a new Clear Blue harmony. The perfect master of karmic rebirth was a mirror held up to the soul's own truth. If that detachment wavered, the karmically reborn would not be a free spirit.

  This was a heavy moral burden. Each time he led a soul through karmic rebirth, he risked the whiteness of his own. Though he hadn't failed yet, each time he came to this place, the possibility of failure existed anew.

  And never before had he taken the rex himself except under the guidance of another perfect master. Certainly not with someone whose karmic rebirth he was supposed to be guiding, and definitely not with a lover.

  He was doing something that had never been done before. And he was doing it in the face of karma few had faced before. He was a perfect master confronting the need to be transformed himself. Together he and Sue were voyaging as equals into unknown waters where neither knew the Way.

  It was not exactly comforting, but never had the process seemed more just.

  They sat across from each other in the upholstered pit in the dark cabin, where only the palest light trickled in through the high windows and the birds greeting the morning sounded muffled and far away. Lou had lit a few candles to soften the chill gray light, but nothing could convince Sunshine Sue that this was not the grim hour of dawn or take the edge off her impatience.

  "Well what's supposed to happen?" she demanded. "I don't feel any different."

  "Any different than what?"

  "Any different than the way I felt all night," Sue said. "We're in a trap, Lou. Even this is part of Harker's bloody scenario. Truth is, the whole thing was a plot to get us to do exactly this. I knew it, and I went along with it even though I didn't want to, and I couldn't even tell you—"

  "Until now," Lou said with a little smile.

  "Don't you understand what I'm telling you? I couldn't help myself. And neither could you. Here we are, in karmic rebirth together, not as the result of your Clear Blue justice, but because of a sorcerer's scenario!"

  "I'm here because my karma demands it," the Clear Blue oaf insisted.

  "Bullshit! You're here because the scenario calls for it. Because your free will was stolen from you. And I helped."

  "By stealing my heart away? I'm also here because I want to be." He gave her a fey little smile. "Because I'm a natural man."

  "I know," Sue said sheepishly. "I was briefed on your predilections by a sorcerer."

  Lou peered at her with amused skepticism. "You're telling me you haven't been a natural woman?"

  "No Lou, I'm telling you I wanted you the moment I saw you. I wanted you before I saw you. The Spacers had figured out scientifically that we'd be irresistible to each other. That's why they did all this to bring us together."

  It seemed as if she was finally getting through to him. His mode shifted from assertion to attention. "But I don't feel I've done anything against my will," he said. "Do you?" His big green eyes mirrored the question.

  "I feel like you and I are a natural number," Sue told him. "But how can either of us trust what we feel? We were chosen to feel it, and maybe we were programmed to feel it too. I feel I could fall in love with you. I feel that I'm betraying you. I feel that what I want to do is right, but I see myself willing to do some very wrong things to get it done. I'm starting to feel that there's a level on which our conceptions of black and white or good and evil just don't add up. How can anyone trust their feelings in a space like this?"

  "Relax," Lou said. "You've just reached the point where you've accepted the fact that your previous persona is no longer viable. As long as you can feel confused, you know that your mind is free."

  Pow! Zap! Clear Blue truth! As long as I'm squirming, I'm aware of the hook. But somehow that satori was not as liberating as it should have been. "But my will isn't free," Sue insisted. "I was told that the scenario was behavioristic, and you should have heard how Arnold Harker made that sound. Like we were pawns he could move around at will. What we feel doesn't matter to him, h
e just uses it to control our karma. Doesn't that make you feel used? Doesn't it make you feel violated?"

  "Did you feel that way when you made love with Arnold Harker?" Lou asked impenetrably.

  "Low blow!" Sue cried, cringing inside. "Made love with him? It was more like war than sport! I started teasing him to salve my ego, and he turned the game around on me as if I were a doll on a string. It was so down and dirty that it turned me on even though he disgusted me. Maybe because he disgusted me. Great gods what is this stuff? What am I saying?"

  "The truth of our karma," Lou told her. "Its form is starting to take shape. And it's beginning to scare me."

  Clear Blue Lou stared across the pit at Sue, while candle flames flickered a false sunset across the rough-barked walls as above them the pale early light of dawn seeped into the shadows. Time, like karma, seemed fragmented, and the fabric of reality was slowly unraveling, revealing the moral ambiguity of something seemingly beyond parameters of white or black, good and evil—the enigmatic full face of the moral unknown that men called sorcery.

  How could minds be free while wills served unknown ends? Yet it seemed that this was possible, despite its contradiction of the laws of black and white logic. Somehow the Spacers controlled karma, not the will. Somehow they could make room for at least the illusion of free will in their scenarios. Was that white or black? Could you even say it was either?

  "Now I know what really brought both of us to karmic rebirth," Clear Blue Lou said. "Our old personas weren't forced to face the reality that lay hidden beneath the Maya of our world. Because once they were forced to face it, their previous perceptions were no longer viable, and therefore karmic transformation became the only way through. Because once you really understand it, the world we know really doesn't exist."

  Sue hunched over, goggling at him. It was painfully clear that while she didn't yet understand what was becoming all too obvious to him, she was certainly picking up the queasy unease in his vibes. "Aquaria needs to believe in its own whiteness. And it is white. We live well and prosper under the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, and our karma tastes sweet. Yet none of this would be possible without a steady trickle of black science that we conveniently close our eyes to. Somehow black science transforms itself to white, and the conjurer's trick seems to work, even on a karmic level. Black science has always been a secret not-so-secret part of our civilization, and the thing of it is that our civilization works."

  Sue's expression sharpened. Something flashed between them. "And what we're realizing now," she told him, "is that we really don't know how."

  They sat there silently in the evaporating darkness trying to digest the indigestible truth they had come to. Sue took Lou's meaning on a personal as well as public level, for she could now see that sorcery had thoroughly infiltrated her karma as surely and stealthily as it had been the essential underpinning of fair white Aquaria all along. Lou saw his harmonious vision of the totality of the Way clouding over with enigmatic darkness masking a great essential unknown. Sue realized that her own vision of the world had never been the standard model, not since that day in the Rememberers' hut deep in the darkening forest. Even that now smelled of sorcery too.

  Was the whole of reality, outer and inner, knit together by the scenarios of black science?

  "Things are not what they seem, are they... ?" Sue finally said.

  "Things are what they are and maybe we're not what we seemed."

  "What are we, then?"

  "We're two people who have already lost our past personas. We know too much about our world to go back and be the same people. We can't go back. We can only complete the transformation."

  "Just as the scenario calls for..."

  "Just as the scenario calls for. But we don't even know what that is, do we?"

  "We do. Our part in the scenario is to help the Spacers get their spaceship launched and bring back their beloved Age of Space."

  "Really? Centuries of scenarios and fifty years of work to launch a single spaceship to visit a station in space? For this they're willing to provoke a holy war against them?"

  "The world satellite broadcast—"

  "That's what you want, Sue, but what do they really want out of it? A mob of the whitely righteous for them to slaughter?"

  "They want you to prevent that, Lou."

  "But why do they believe I'll help them, even if I could? What do they know that I don't?"

  "They don't have to have a rational reason. This Age of Space dream has devoured them whole."

  "Like your dream has devoured you, Sue?"

  "Yes!" Sue snapped. "Yes..." she whispered softly.

  "They're humans just like us after all," Lou said. "And that's the real mystery. They follow a Way they believe is good, and yet to us it seems evil. And although it seems evil, we're walking it now, even in the shared truth of this process. What makes sorcerers so convinced of the rightness of their Way that they seem to be willing to commit so much evil to walk it?"

  "The same thing that turns an Arnold Harker into a cold unnatural creature and convinces him that his sterile life is so superior...?" Sue said.

  And will it do the same to us? they both thought together, realizing that the inevitable decision had already been made.

  "We have to know, don't we?" Sue said. "Even if it turns us into sorcerers, too..."

  Lou nodded. "This process has gone as far as it can," he said. "And we're still not reborn. We know too much to go back to being who we were and not enough to become who we must be, and we sure can't stay in this space between. We have a karmic rebirth task to complete together, like it or not."

  "The scenario is behavioristic," Sue said. Every time she repeated it, the enigmatic phrase developed deeper and more sinister implications. Apparently not even rex was powerful enough to break the sorcerer's spell.

  "But the sorcerers are human," Lou said. "Their Way is not the Great Way, even if they think it is, else they could not work such evil on others or themselves. Knowledge is not wisdom."

  "And you think your wisdom is stronger than their sorcery?"

  Lou shrugged. "I know that wisdom without knowledge is blind and that until we know what's really shaping our world and why, we're souls without a home."

  "If that wasn't what we were to begin with," Sue said softly. She crawled across the goose-down padding of the pit and sidled up to Lou. He could feel her lonely lostness as she pressed her body against his.

  "There's nobody in this space but us," he said. "We really are in this together."

  "Lovers and allies, huh?" Sue said wanly.

  "We have no choice..."

  "And it's sorcery that's flung us together..."

  Lou put an arm around her and hugged her to him. "If this be sorcery," he said, "it seems we have no choice but to make the most of it."

  After they had made love, they went outside to meet the new morning. The sun was peering up over the high spine of the cordillera behind them. East of the mountains lurked their new unknown destiny, hidden from the sunlit slopes falling away from them to the west.

  The world down there looked the same as it always had, timeless green mountains tumbling down to the familiar lands of men. All seemed fair and serene in those lovely lands under their invisible cloak of poisoned air. Yet just as Aquaria swam in an invisible sea of black pollutants, so did it float on a hidden undercurrent of the black science whose shadow even now stretched westward from beyond the mountains.

  The world was in fact the same as it had always been, but the eyes that surveyed it saw with a terrible new vision. Here, high in the mountains where the known world ended and that which was called sorcery began, they found themselves stripped of comforting lowland illusions, above the landscape of the world they had known.

  And towering still higher above them in all their shadowed majesty were the great mountains that rimmed the world beyond which lay their destiny in a future beyond their present comprehension. The very land itself seemed an ideogram of this pa
ssage through rebirth as they stood there hand-in-hand, two new souls on the borderland, all alone in a suddenly unknown world.

  New Worlds for Old

  Clear Blue Lou had been circling for at least an hour since Sue had landed at the Spacer eagle's nest, waiting for the landing signal. He was starting to get nervous. For once he found himself wishing he had chosen a less emblematic color for his solar eagle. His famous Clear Blue Lou blue eagle would be a noteworthy portent even to back canyon mountain williams, so they had agreed that Sue would land first and clear the place of unwanted eyes and ears before he descended.

  Lou had spent the anxious interval circling over the lower end of the long sloping meadow, hoping that he wouldn't be noticed. It was a new experience for him, slinking about the shadows, and he didn't like it. It made his soul seem already tainted with sorcery; he was already playing one of their games.

  Finally a mirror flashed three times below the towering crag at the upper end of the meadow. Lou turned out of his circle and came soaring up the long grassy slope, pedaling lift out of his wing.

  He drifted in to a hitching rail where the only other eagle was Sue's, scanning the Spacer eagle's nest dourly as he came in. Great big sheds that had to be warehouses up here where there were no crops at all, and that huge radio antenna at the crest of the ridgeline blatantly pointed east toward the Wastes! These sorcerers certainly seemed sure of themselves.

  Sue was waiting for him at the hitching rail. The man with her seemed every inch the legendary black scientist—hard blue eyes peering out of a dramatically chiseled face framed by black hair and beard so closely and sharply trimmed that he almost seemed to be wearing some kind of helmet.