Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  "Arnold Harker, Project Manager of Operation Enterprise," the sorcerer said. There was no tone of greeting in his voice, and he didn't offer his hand. "Sue tells me you want security maintained to the fullest and I concur. No point in taking chances. We'll deflate your eagle and store it in a shed."

  "Deflate my eagle?" Lou exclaimed. "That's going to take someone hours of pedaling, and it sure isn't going to be me! And I don't like the idea of your making someone else do that much sweating for me."

  The Spacer laughed, a thin and not very jovial sound. "Your first lesson in the morality of sorcery," he said dryly. "Never make a man do the work of a machine."

  Two men had already emerged from a nearby shed. They were pulling a low four-wheeled cart. On the front of the cart was a grimy metallic thing, all tubing and machinery and wiring. As the two men positioned the cart under his eagle, Lou caught a whiff of a foul chemical odor that seemed the distilled essence of sorcery. One of the men disconnected the wing nozzle from his helium tank, and the other connected it to a hose from the thing on the cart.

  Then he did something to the device, and a horrible loud roar rattled Lou's ears, a peal of thunder that went on and on and on, an eerily continuous explosion that jarred his teeth and hummed in his bones. A keen acrid chemical stench filled the air. Lou could see the damned stuff emerging from a pipe—evil and gray and shimmering with unnatural heat.

  "Petroleum?" he shouted over the din. "Is that damned thing burning petroleum?"

  The Spacer nodded mechanically as if this stinking sorcery were the most natural thing in the world. Behind the roaring sound, Lou could now detect a loud steady hiss, and he saw that his eagle wing was already visibly collapsing. He knew that it would have taken half an hour of pedaling to achieve the same result, and he could slothfully appreciate how much grunting and sweating was being saved, but it appalled him that even black scientists would spew all this poison into the air just to save a little time and honest effort. What would they be willing to do when it came to something that really mattered?

  "Let's get out of here!" he shouted at the Spacer over the noise. "I don't want to have to breathe any more of this filth than I have to!" Indeed, it already seemed as if he could feel the petroleum fumes searing his lungs, blackening the fragile life-giving tissue with carcinogenic muck.

  Harker smiled inanely, nodded, and loped off toward the main cabin without looking back, as if he were long accustomed to being followed without question.

  Sue, who had almost seemed to be cowering in the sorcerer's shadow, fell in alongside Lou in the Spacer's wake, wrinkling her nose at the deadly stench, and trying to establish some kind of sympathetic eye contact.

  Lou took her hand, but he really wasn't feeling too comradely toward her at the moment. He might have been psychically prepared to confront the karma of black science, but he certainly hadn't been prepared for the deadly chemical stink and the ear-splitting reality of sorcery actually at work.

  And he didn't like the way Sue seemed to fold in on herself in the presence of Arnold Harker. She actually fucked this creature? he thought in wonder. He didn't like it. He didn't like it at all.

  Arnold Harker didn't waste any time on a grand tour of the premises, nor did he give Lou any interval in which to examine his own reactions to the strange ambience of the room he took them to.

  "I freely admit you've been brought here by stratagem and guile and feminine wiles," he said as soon as he had seated himself behind a cruel steel desk whose burnished top gleamed in the harsh light of the powerful electric lamp upon it. "But let me assure you that your free will and our scenario are ultimately congruent."

  The way he said it reeked of an arrogant self-assurance that set Lou's teeth on edge. Indeed this whole lair seemed crafted to present an atmosphere of unnatural arts forth-rightly and proudly displayed. The chairs were all shiny steel frameworks slung with a grainless black material with the feel of leather and the faint smell of petroleum, or so it seemed to Lou as he sat gingerly down in one of them. The pictures on the walls—planet Earth floating in space, ringed and banded Saturn, something flying over a hellish landscape—seemed deliberately emblematic of black science. A mass of unfathomable electronic arcana glowered in one corner, and the whole was lit by two powerful electric lights that blazed their contempt of the energy units it cost to run them. The room's image was doubled by an immense mirror of perfect glass, turning the very space itself into a sorcerer's illusion.

  Here there be sorcery, the room seemed to say, and proud of it.

  "I find that pretty hard to believe," Lou finally said. "So far everything I've seen just makes me feel more whitely righteous."

  "Sue has told you—"

  "Sue has told me everything," Lou snapped, ostentatiously taking her hand as she settled down uneasily into the chair beside him. "Everything," he repeated, squeezing her hand and shooting her a glance of solidarity for the benefit of the Spacer. "We have no secrets from each other."

  "And you've seen to that haven't you?" Sue added sardonically. "How do you like the match you've made?"

  But Lou could detect no vibe of jealousy or wounded male ego. Indeed, it was hard to pick up any vibe at all from this sorcerer. "I'm glad to see the scenario is still working so nominally," he said with eerie colorlessness. "It saves me tedious explanation." Was the last a subtle little zinger? "You already know, then, what your part in the next phase is to be."

  "Do I?" Lou said angrily. Harker's arrogance was beginning to sound like deliberate insult. "You seriously expect that I'll help you after what I've already seen?"

  "Quite seriously," the sorcerer said, leaning back fatuously in his chair. "In fact, I can guarantee you that you are more than ready to perform the function we now require of you."

  "Oh you can, can you! You're so sure you can predict everything that I'll do? You think you can run your lame games on a perfect master?"

  "Precisely on a perfect master," Harker said smugly, leaning forward and trying to stare down Clear Blue Lou with those icy eyes. Oh now he thinks he can mesmerize me with eye-contact games as if I were some brain-burned mountain william, does he? Lou thought angrily. Who the hell does he think he's dealing with?

  Lou broke the staring contest by deliberately smirking at Sue. "You fell for this line?" he said ironically.

  Sue cringed, but that didn't seem to prick Harker's bubble either.

  "I can even tell you what you'd most like to do at this moment," the black scientist said knowingly.

  "You don't have to be a sorcerer to figure that out," Lou snarled.

  "You'd like to give justice on Space Systems Incorporated and all its works, wouldn't you? You'd like to speak your justice upon us for all the world to hear."

  "Congratulations on your incredible insight," Lou said sarcastically.

  Harker leaned back and smiled with loathsomely crafted warmth. "And so you shall," he said. "For that's what the Company requires of you, Clear Blue Lou—your justice on Space Systems Incorporated and all our works, freely spoken to your own people, after you have seen all and had all your questions answered. A justice we agree to accept without condition. Surely no true perfect master could refuse a request like that..."

  "Huh?" Lou grunted. "What?"

  "Consider it a formal request," Harker said blandly, now taking an open amusement in Lou's befuddlement. "Will you grant it?"

  Lou looked at Sue. She seemed as dumbfounded as he was. He eyed Harker narrowly, his mind scrabbling for psychic purchase. "I don't get it," he said. "Surely you must know what my justice would have to be. I don't believe you, Harker. If you were telling the truth, all you've done would have been unnecessary. All you would have had to do was ask."

  Harker shook his head slowly. "I think not," he said. "You've just admitted that you've already reached a conclusion based on insufficient data. A conclusion based on ignorance and shun us as evil. No one likes to be and legend and foolish superstition. No doubt the scenario thus far has already shaken m
any of your beliefs and assumptions..."

  The sorcerer rose, leaned his hands on the steel desk for support, and loomed forward, staring at Lou with what suddenly seemed like a strange dreamy sincerity. "But I tell you that the truths you must learn to render true justice will make all that has gone before seem like sleepwalking," he said. "To judge so-called sorcery, you must share our knowledge and know the inner heart of black science. Do you dare do that, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way?"

  He subsided back into his chair. "Do you dare not to?"

  "You know the answer to that!" Lou blurted. "Of course, you know the answer to that," he muttered. For that was precisely the karmic rebirth task set for both of them by implacable destiny. By destiny? Or by the Spacer scenario? Or were they somehow the same thing? Reflexively he squeezed Sue's hand. He was beginning to see how this vibrationless man had been able to bed her.

  "Just what are you proposing to show me?" he asked.

  "Everything. The Company installations beyond the Wastes and all that we do there."

  "Beyond the Wastes?" Sue exclaimed. "What lies beyond the Wastes?"

  "The world," Harker said pregnantly. "And the greater reality beyond."

  "And after you've shown us your world, you'll accept my justice on it?" Lou said skeptically. "Why should I believe you'd do that?"

  Harker sighed. He seemed to shrink in on himself. Suddenly there seemed to be something quite fragile about him.

  "Because we believe what we're doing is right," he said plaintively. "Because we know that what we are doing must be done. Because we believe that you will be convinced of this once you know the whole truth..."

  The sorcerer leaned forward and cocked his head ruefully. "We do have feelings, you know," he said heavily, as if he felt it would be a cosmic revelation. "For centuries we've lived with our knowledge and kept it alive, and enabled your backward society to prosper with gifts of technology for which we've asked nothing." His face twisted with bitterness and his voice hardened. "And you? You call us sorcerers and shun us as evil. No one likes to be hated, least of all benefactors."

  He blinked, as if catching himself in a persona he had not intended to reveal. All at once he was the hard-eyed sorcerer again, sure and proud. "But now a great new age is coming and it must be shared and accepted by all. The superstition and ignorance which cripples our species must be annihilated before we can face the stars. Our wounded race must be healed before it can transcend its lowly state. In your terms, black science must be harmonized with the Great Way in the eyes of your people or all of us will be unworthy."

  For the first time, Lou glimpsed something of the natural man behind the sorcerer's persona. And he could not deny that there was something noble there—or at least something that believed sincerely in its own nobility. Great would be a healing that harmonized sorcery with the Way! Precisely necessary seemed this healing to his own rebirth and to Sue's. Harker had pointed clearly to the wound in the very heart of humanity's karma, to the paradox from which all disharmony flowed. And he had challenged Lou to heal it. He really is placing his trust in me, Lou thought, twisted with arrogant pride though that trust might be.

  "You know very well I have to do what you ask," Lou said, in a tone of quiet resignation.

  "The scenario is behavioristic," Harker said. "But your free judgment nevertheless remains a factor. In time you will understand that. We leave tonight."

  "Tonight?" Sue said. "How? For where?"

  "For the Company installations beyond the Sierras. By eagle."

  "But no eagle can cross the Sierras! And no eagle can fly at night!"

  The sorcerer laughed. "No means one thing to you and quite another to us," he said. "That will be your second lesson in the morality of sorcery."

  "I'm beginning to wonder what I've gotten us into," Sunshine Sue said as she and Lou sat together on the floor of the common room at the end of the cabin hall, much like the two mountain williams she had encountered the last time she was here, hunkering together over a phantom campfire, trying to ignore the black vibes that surrounded them.

  The empty room, with its blatantly inorganic furniture of false leather and angular steel, its all-too-real-looking pictures of unreal places, seemed to be trying to warp them into another world, and one that seemed devoid of all comfort. Outside the windows, the night was a black void which her mind peopled with demons from the world within.

  Lou was staring out into the darkness with an unreadable expression. "Well we're going to find out," he said. "As we knew we were fated to."

  "Or as we were forced to."

  Lou sighed, turned to her, shrugged. "Maybe the astrologers are right," he said abstractedly. "Maybe our destinies are preordained in the stars. Yours and mine and the Spacers'. Maybe all of us are forced to do what we must. Maybe human free will is an illusion. Maybe what makes the Spacers sorcerers is that they're willing to admit it."

  Sue cocked her head at him speculatively, not liking the deeps to which he seemed to be sinking. How much do I really know about this man after all? she wondered. "Pretty weird talk coming from the perfect master of the Clear Blue Way," she said.

  "I'd say we're in a pretty weird place, lady!"

  "And I have a feeling it's going to get a lot weirder," Sue said, "without you drifting off into space with these sorcerers."

  "I'm sure I can resist the temptation at least as well as you did," Lou said airily. But was there a hint of wounded male ego behind it?

  "You're really jealous because I got it off with Arnold Harker?" she said. "How un-Clear Blue of you!"

  Lou squinted at her. "Jealous?" he snorted. "You've got to be kidding! It's painfully obvious that he makes your flesh crawl. But I must admit that it bothers me that he was able to bed you with your feeling that way about him."

  "Sorcery," Sue said. "I can't explain it. I don't understand myself."

  "Uh-huh," Lou said, putting a protective arm around her shoulder. "What really bothers me is the feeling that any mindfuck good enough to work on you might just be good enough to work on me. Uh... not in the carnal sense, of course."

  Sue started at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, and they both turned to see who was coming. Since Harker had left them to their own devices, the only people they had seen were the three Spacers in the little commissary where they had been offered an unsettling dinner of some strange savory roast hefty enough to be deer but of a light and subtle flavor she had never experienced before. Strange droning rhythmic music seemed to emanate from two small boxes near the ceiling which looked something like large radio speaker grids.

  "Where's the music coming from?" Lou had asked conversationally around his first mouthful of meat. "Where are you hiding the band?"

  The three Spacers laughed patronizingly. "From the speakers, of course," the balding one said, nodding toward the two boxes high up on the far wall. "Authentic re-recording of an ancient pre-Smash tape fragment. It's called 'raga' or 'reggae' or something like that. Do you like it?"

  "And what's this stuff?" Sue asked, waving a forkful of meat.

  "Beef," the tall thin Spacer said with a grin. "A good cut too, don't you think?"

  She dropped her fork. Lou nearly choked on a morsel he was chewing. The three Spacers seemed highly amused.

  "Beef?" she gasped. "Cow meat?" Once, she knew, cow meat had been a staple of the pre-Smash diet, and even the milk of the cow had been eaten. But after the Smash, carcinogenic poison had concentrated in the flesh and milk of cows, making them unfit for consumption, and extinct, or so she had thought.

  "You're feeding us poison!" Sue said, staring in disgust and bewilderment as the Spacers continued to devour the cow flesh with relish. "You're eating it yourselves!"

  "Tastes good, doesn't it?" the chubby one said slyly.

  "High in essential amino acids."

  "Perfectly harmless—to us," the balding Spacer said, and the three of them broke up into hootingly superior laughter.

  That had ended dinn
er, and it had also ended their contact with the strange birds that roosted in this black eagle's nest. The Spacers seemed to be keeping away from them—perhaps under orders—and after swallowing cow flesh, Sue yearned not for their company.

  Now, however, Arnold Harker was coming down the hall toward them with purposeful strides. "Our eagle is about to arrive," he said as they scrambled to their feet like country cousins. "We'll be leaving in a few minutes, but I thought you'd be interested in seeing it arrive."

  "I've seen eagles land a thousand times," Lou said offhandedly.

  "Ah, but you've never seen one of our blackbirds of the night, now have you?" Harker said, shooing them toward the back door leading to the big open yard behind the cabin. "You've never seen sorcery like this."

  Outside, the air was chill and thin and clear, and half the starry sky was hidden by the great wall of rock that loomed above, the impenetrable ramparts at the edge of the world. Crickets chirped their offbeat chorus. Something hooted far away.

  "Listen," Harker said. "Can you hear it?"

  Behind the quiet night sounds, Sue thought she heard a faint thrumming at the edge of audibility. As she strained her ears to catch it, the sound seemed to get stronger. Stronger and stronger still, till she realized it wasn't close by and faint but distant, and loud, and rapidly approaching.

  Then the sound level seemed to suddenly jump, reverberating through the canyons below, and the black shape of an eagle became visible, silhouetted against the stars and coming toward them with impossible speed from the northeast, dropping in for a landing.

  It was huge—quadruple the wingspan of an ordinary eagle and then some—and it was unlike any solar eagle Sue had ever seen. Instead of a saddle, there was some kind of closed cabin slung close under the wing, and at the rear of the cabin a huge propeller, a great monster whirling at such speed that it should have taken twenty men at the pedals to run it.

  As it eased down into the yard in front of them, the draft of the propeller kicking up a storm of twigs and small stones, Sue got a sickening whiff of burning petroleum, and she realized that the propeller was in fact driven by a huge and baleful engine mounted on the rear of the cabin, the source of the awful din. Foul hydrocarbons and metallic oxides gushed into the atmosphere from a vent in the bottom of the wing even after the racket ceased and the propeller stopped turning. The gigantic eagle wing seemed to sag, and the cabin came to rest on four little wheels. The eagle wing held its shape even after its lift was gone; the cabin was connected to the wing by rigid metal struts, and the wing itself apparently had an internal framework.