Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  "They'll believe my justice when I speak it..." Lou said without much confidence.

  "Really? When you reveal that you've secretly flown into space with sorcerers? Now perhaps you overestimate yourself..."

  Lou sighed. "So what are you asking me to do?" he asked quietly.

  "Harmonize Operation Enterprise with the Way in the eyes of your people as the scenario calls for," Harker said.

  "You don't ask too much, do you?" Lou said dryly. "Does your scenario tell you how I'm supposed to do it?" He shrugged. "I just don't see how it's possible to remove the odor of sorcery from Operation Enterprise before the spaceship returns, and even then—"

  "But I do," Sue suddenly said. Lou saw that she had a strange faraway look in her eyes. But there was nothing dreamy about it at all; a sardonic pucker twisted her lips, and the vibes she was giving off were down and dirty.

  "What if Aquaria believed that the Enterprise itself came from the stars?" she said slowly. "What if superior beings from space landed in La Mirage?"

  "Huh?" Lou goggled at her. "What are you talking about?" he said. "That just isn't going to happen."

  Sue laughed. "Unless we make it happen, love," she said.

  Harker looked at her most peculiarly. "And you call us sorcerers?" he said. "You're going to convince your people that the Enterprise comes from the stars? What kind of... sorcery is that?"

  "My kind, Arnold," Sue said smugly. "A long-lost software science of the ancients called 'media hype.' By this art, the networks were able to create unreal events called 'happenings' more cogent than reality itself. I've never tried it before, but I think I can make it work."

  Lou eyed her narrowly, with a sardonic uneasy awe not entirely untinged with a certain sincerity. For she had reminded him that she did in fact possess a kind of lore beyond his knowledge, that together they had walked beyond the parameters of the Clear Blue Way and into the karmically clouded unknown. Perhaps it was her turn to lead and his turn to follow. Certainly he saw no clear path through this part of the woods.

  He grimaced owlishly at her with a little shrug. "You're the sorcerer now, lady," he said.

  Deus ex Machina

  "From the time the rockets fire till we make orbit, the preprogrammed onboard computer flies her," Arnold Harker said, patting the console between their acceleration couches. "It takes over again on the way back as soon as we clear the Ear and key up the re-entry program."

  Sitting in the cabin of the Enterprise amidst all the electronic arcana, Clear Blue Lou regarded this latest wonder dubiously. "You're telling me that this thing flies itself?"

  "We're talking about reaction times measured in fractions of a second and speeds measured in thousands of miles an hour," the sorcerer said. "No human has reaction times like that. Of course the launch and recovery eagles have to be flown manually because—"

  "Because no machine can feel the wind and the sun and the air and use them with the spirit of a bird."

  "You would put it that way," Harker said sourly.

  It had been Harker who had first suggested that it would be a good idea for Lou to learn enough to serve as back-up pilot, in case of need, and Lou who had been somewhat daunted by the idea that he might learn enough sorcery to master black science's most advanced piece of wizardry. But now that Lou had learned enough to comprehend what he was shown in his own terms and speak his mind on the sorcerer's world as a perfect master and a natural man, the Spacer was getting a bit testy. And taking orders from Sue hadn't helped his disposition much either.

  "The launch eagle will be flown by its own pilot in a small pod so that it can be returned to the spaceport after it drops the Enterprise," Harker continued, after Lou refused to rise to the bait. He fingered a series of small levers arranged in easy hand's reach of each other. "These are the recovery eagle wing controls for steering and warpage. Each one is the electronic equivalent of the corresponding control line on an ordinary solar eagle, so you'd have no trouble flying that if you had to."

  He frowned. "In fact, since you're forcing us to use solar propellers, you could probably fly the damn thing at least as well as I can," he said.

  Lou nodded but refrained from making another Clear Blue remark. In fact, he was finding that it took less skill to master black science than white, once you shoved moral considerations out of the picture. Instead of yanking control lines with both hands and some muscle as with a solar eagle, you did the same thing with the fingers of one hand through the muscle-magnifying magic of electricity. Instead of pedaling like a son of a bitch to kill lift, you simply threw a switch and let an electric compressor do all the work. Yeah, he thought, I'm sure I could fly the recovery eagle as well as you can.

  "You could even fly the Enterprise back for orbit if you had to," Harker told him, poising his finger above a button on the computer console. "Just hit this button and call up the preprogrammed re-entry sequence. The computer will set the attitude, wait for the launch window, fire the rockets, control the hypersonic glide, deploy the drogues, and then pop the recovery eagle. That's all there is to it."

  "Got it," Lou said briskly. "What about maneuvering in space itself?"

  Harker regarded him dubiously. "Getting a little ambitious, aren't you?" he said.

  Lou shrugged. "I'm probably never going to have to do any of this," he said. "But if I'm going to be gray enough to trust my fate to your machine, I might as well be gray enough to know how it works."

  Harker scowled, but then he shrugged and proceeded to show Lou the space maneuvering system. Once in orbit, you turned on something called the acquisition radar, then called up another program on the computer, and the Enterprise flew itself to the target. For close maneuvering, there was a set of levers that fired short bursts on steering rockets. You used them to point the nose where you wanted to go and then gave the main rockets a short burst.

  "It's really not as hard as it sounds," Harker concluded.

  "Seems easy enough to me," Lou said, "with a machine doing your thinking for you."

  "Computers don't—"

  "I know, I know, computers don't think!-" Lou interrupted, not wanting to hear that lecture again. Harker had explained it to him often enough already. Computers didn't think, they just stored the thoughts of men as "programs" to be released as needed. But from the point of view of the pilot, the dead machine did function like a living mind. In some ways, this was the most arcane sorcery of all, more mysterious and amazing than atomic power, of manufactured air, or indeed the spaceship itself.

  The machineries of sorcery were relatively easy to master, but the spirit of them remained elusive. Indeed, they almost seemed deliberately crafted to be used without psychic connection, as if on some level beyond their own understanding, the Spacers feared psychic contamination by too intimate a relationship between the natural man and their magicks. Aside from the wound to his ego, perhaps the reverse of this was why working with Sue on her magic so troubled Arnold Harker. For she was using machineries she didn't understand to craft something psychic beyond the black scientist's comprehension.

  And for that matter, perhaps beyond mine, Lou admitted to himself.

  A male Spacer poked his head into the open hatch behind them. "Sunshine Sue wants to see you in her media shop," he told Harker. "She says it's important."

  Harker seemed to draw in on himself. "All right, all right," he said petulantly, "I'll be right there." He climbed out of his acceleration couch and led Lou out the hatch into the searing desert sun. He paused at the bottom of the ladder as Lou descended, staring up at the bulk of the spaceship and shaking his head.

  "Do you really understand what she's doing?" he said sourly.

  Craftsmen were crawling all over the Enterprise with brushes and paint. Half the body of the spaceship and one whole wing were already a bright Sunshine yellow. Other craftsmen were installing banks of electric lights on the lower surfaces of the wings.

  Lou shrugged. "She's explained as much of it to you as she has to me," he said.


  The Enterprise and the launch eagle, made glorious and mysterious by all this strange stagecraft, would appear in the sky as the fulfillment of Sue's own self-created prophecy and summon men to listen to the stars with trumpets of heavenly glory. They would ride into space not in an evil portent of black science but in a chariot of Sunshine Yellow borne by a Clear Blue eagle, on a wave of good karma.

  This would be the "happening"—good karma crafted out of bad by the science of "media hype." How the illusion would be brought about, Lou was beginning to understand. But the color of Sue's magic was harder for him to fathom. By convincing people that bad karma was good, it would seem that she would create good karma itself, or so she claimed. But how could sour karma be sweetened by a lie? It seemed both possible and impossible at the same time.

  Harker eyed him suspiciously. "But you two are... lovers," he said. "And you're a perfect master, you're supposed to be an expert on the things of the spirit. You're telling me that this 'media hype' is beyond your understanding?"

  Lou laughed. "It's sorcery to me," he said, shrugging.

  Harker shook his head ruefully. "It may be sorcery to you," he said, "but it's certainly not science to me."

  Lou smiled at him fatuously. "Maybe her scenario is behavioristic," he suggested wryly. "How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?"

  Things are really rolling along, Sunshine Sue thought, as she waited impatiently for Arnold Harker to show up at the media shop she had set up on the second floor of the habitat. They were moving almost fast enough, thanks to the wonders of black science and the efficiency of the assistants she had been given. But she was anxious to get things over with here and get back to La Mirage for the real fun.

  Although her Spacer workers were intelligent and efficient and conditioned to do what they were told without asking questions and although Spacer technology was allowing her to craft a happening far beyond her original conception, Sue had no desire to linger longer in Spacer country than necessity required.

  For one thing, she was itching to try her hand at the untested art of media hype, for which all this was only preparation. And for another, only the excitement of the task at hand kept this place from driving her crazy.

  Breathing the manufactured air was giving her a continuous funny taste in her mouth, and she seemed forever on the brink of a cold. And although she was repeatedly assured that all the cow meat she was served was clean and pure, her appetite just wouldn't believe it.

  Of necessity she was spending more time with Harker and the Spacers than with Lou, and she could sense a certain unwholesome triangular tension building up. Old Arnold knew enough to keep his personal distance, or perhaps more accurately, she knew enough to keep him well at bay, now that he was being forced to follow her scenario. Which was not to say that he liked being mindfucked any more than she had or that she wasn't taking a certain nasty pleasure in paying him back.

  But Lou was spending a lot of time with Harker too, learning to fly the spaceship and sticking his nose into all the mechanical arcana he could. Perfect master though he was, he really couldn't understand what she was doing any better than Harker could, and it seemed to Sue that he was compensating for this by attempting to become adept at arts she didn't have time to learn under the tutelage of the Spacer. There was something unsettlingly circular about this daisy chain of dominance relationships that might not bode well when the three of them were stuck in space together for ten days, and she was anxious to remove Lou and herself from the unwholesome spirit of this place. The fact that she could not help enjoying the numbers she was running on Arnold made her a bit uneasy about her own karmic purity too.

  Yes, while there might be worlds more to learn by staying around here, there were sweeter worlds to regain, and she was glad that her presence at the spaceport would soon no longer be needed.

  Coloring the Enterprise Sunshine Yellow was a simple matter of paint and brushes, but the Spacer craftsmen had moaned in dismay when she told them that the launch eagle had to be Clear Blue Lou blue. It was impossible, they had insisted, they'd have to recover the entire framework, it would take months.

  That one had been solved when Sue pointed out that all they had to do was put powerful electric lights shining through glass of the proper blueness inside the translucent wing.

  Once she had gotten the Spacer technicians playing with colored lights, they came up with all sorts of lighting arcana as if to prove the puissancy of black science to her—colors of any hue she desired, lights that changed colors continuously by revolving panes of different colored glass before them with electric motors, even a magic device called a stroboscope, which emitted short sharp bursts of brilliant light that made people seem to move like jerky marionettes and did something really weird and unsettling to vision's vibes.

  With this palette to play with, Sue had designed a complex show of lights to illumine the spaceship and its eagle that would probably convince her that they were the products of superior beings from the stars if she hadn't designed the illusion herself.

  And when Spacer craftsmen showed her how they produced the eerie background music that pervaded so many areas of their installations, her concept for the happening expanded far beyond her initial expectations. They could record sound on tape and play it back through a device like a radio. But they weren't technically limited to the quiet bland stuff they seemed to esthetically favor. If they wanted to, they could make even the human voice come out louder than a brass horn band. Celestial music would accompany the advent from the stars, and the star being would speak with a voice of thunder.

  All of this was already being crafted and installed. Now all that remained was to convince Arnold Harker to become a god from the stars. His natural arrogance working off the chastening his ego had been taking lately as she remade his beloved Operation Enterprise to her own design should take care of that. The beard... well, that might be a different matter!

  Harker finally arrived a few minutes later, just as Sue was getting impatient enough to treat him like a tardy member of the Sunshine Tribe. "Well, you took your time getting here," she snapped by way of greeting.

  Harker glanced owlishly about the small room. A bizarre silvery costume hung in one corner. There was a sink table with a mirror, pots of theatrical makeup, a razor and shaving soap. A weird metal collar lay half completed on a workbench strewn with small electric lights and electronic components. It looked something like a thin horse collar scaled down for a man, and its inner surface was studded with small electric lights and radio microphones. Harker's eyes were caught by it.

  "What's that?" he said, looking as if he should be scratching his head. "What now?"

  "Relax, Arnold, you'll love it," Sue drawled. "I'm going to make you what the networks used to call a 'star.' "

  Arnold squinted uneasily at her. Since the tables had been turned, he had developed a wary attitude toward her. No doubt he knew she was getting even. But there wasn't very much he could do about it.

  "We're going to turn you into a god from the stars," she said dryly by way of explanation.

  "You're going to what?"

  "You'll wear that costume over there," Sue said. "And you'll wear this under the collar." She picked up the metal ring and handed it to Harker. The sorcerer pawed it over uncomprehendingly. Sue smiled. That's right, Arnold, she thought, I've had your craftsmen make a piece of hardware you don't understand. And as for the software...

  "See all the electric lights inside the collar?" she said. "They'll illumine your face very dramatically, there's even one that's stroboscopic. And the microphones will play your voice back through big speakers mounted on the spaceship. You'll look like a god from the stars and you'll sound like one too."

  Harker eyed her most peculiarly. "You're going to make your people think I'm an advanced being from the stars?"

  "Right!" Sue said. "You should enjoy the role."

  "Like an actor in a play...?" Harker mused. It seemed to be beginning to appeal to h
im.

  "The leading role," Sue said. "The best part."

  "But this isn't a play, it's... it's..."

  "A happening," Sue said. "A media hype. A fictional story presented as reality, a play in the form of news."

  Harker shook his head in wonder. "Reality and yet not reality," he muttered. "A real event in the eyes of all who see it, yet crafted by you like a stage play..."

  "Now you're getting it," Sue said. "The ancients called it 'managed news,' I think. Sweet karma crafted out of sour, reality enhanced by art. With you as the star. It's perfect casting, Arnold; I know you can handle it."

  Harker shrugged resignedly. "Well, if it's absolutely necessary..."

  Sue smiled sweetly at him. "There's just one thing Arnold," she said. "The beard has to go. You'll have to shave it off."

  "My beard!" Harker cried, clutching at his face defensively. "Now you taunt me too far!"

  Sue went over to the sink and began lathering up the shaving soap. "Be reasonable, Arnold," she said. "We have to make up your face, after all. Maybe blue skin flecked with gold and red teeth and a jewel glowing in your forehead like a third eye. You'll be magnificent. But we have to get rid of the beard first." Sadistically, she began stropping the razor. "I'll do it for you, if you like," she offered.

  "You're not going to shave off my beard!" Arnold shouted.

  Sue shrugged. "Then do it yourself," she said, handing him the razor. "But it has to be done. Surely you're not going to let personal vanity stand in the way of the greatest event in human history..."

  Harker glared at her. Sue glared back. He caved. "My beard...?" he whined plaintively.

  "Your beard, Arnold."

  The sorcerer sighed in surrender. He went to the sink, lathered up his face, and, muttering under his breath, made his personal sacrifice for the higher good.

  Sue regarded the new Arnold Harker staring at himself in the mirror. Without his mask of beard, he looked younger, somehow smaller, and a good deal less in command of karma and destiny. The newly exposed skin was pallid, almost gray, and the chin seemed weak and slightly recessive.