Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  "Now that wasn't so bad, was it, Arnold?" Sue cooed.

  Harker looked away from the mirror and up at her. The expression on his face was almost pathetic. "It's going to take some getting used to," he said unhappily.

  "Relax," Sue told him. "It makes you look more human." She was laughing inside, but she managed to keep a straight face as she dipped her fingers in a pot of makeup and began smearing it on his pale face. "Now let's see what we can do to reverse the process..."

  The Spacer "airplane" curved southwest as it climbed out of the spaceport's desert valley, and soon the land of sorcery had passed out of view. Lou leaned close to Sue in the back of the cabin, the heavy drone of the propeller masking his voice from the pilot in front as he spoke.

  "Well, we'll be back in La Mirage in three days," he said, "but I wonder if it'll really feel like going home."

  "I know what you mean," Sue whispered loudly. "Is this what it feels like to be karmically reborn?"

  Lou shrugged. "Yes and no," he said. "If this is karmic rebirth, then it's rebirth into a kind of karma nobody's been born into before."

  The illusionary paradox at the heart of the world to which they were returning had indeed been stripped away. But what had been revealed was not a clearer vision of the Great Way at all but a mystery far deeper at the core of a reality far vaster than anything the human spirit had yet contained. Whether in the end the human spirit could encompass that reality in harmony with the Way was still very much an open question.

  And whether what they were doing right now was in harmony with the Way was no less in doubt as far as Clear Blue Lou was concerned.

  He had absorbed the lore of black science. He now knew how to fly a spaceship and command a thinking machine. He understood how it was possible to survive in outer space, where the cold was deadly bitter, and there was no air to breathe, and he would weigh less than a feather. He had accepted the need for all these things in the service of something whose ultimate karma he could never judge until it passed through his lifeline. He had left his world behind him to voyage into the physical and moral unknown.

  And he had been led along this Way not by a wiser being but by a sorcerer whose own soul had been blackened and deadened by this very quest. If he didn't think he could avoid Arnold Harker's fate, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou. But if he weren't aware of the danger, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either.

  And what about you, Sue? he thought as he watched her musing out the window at the clouds slipping by. Is your Way really Clear Blue?

  Could a lie be sweet when the truth was unpalatable? Could bad karma really be transformed into good by "media hype" as she was so sure it could? He could dimly see how a worldly lie could bring the spirit a higher vision. A play or a story did that with metaphor. And as a metaphor, this happening would give the world a vision spiritually closer to the essence of the truth than any literal recitation of the mere facts could hope to accomplish.

  But this was not a story, it was a sub-species of mindfuck. Could good come of that, no matter how logical it seemed? The answer seemed hidden in the true karma that the songs from the stars would bring. If great good came of listening to them, then the sin could be borne gracefully for the sake of the greater good. But if evil came, if humanity proved unworthy of such knowledge, then we will have blackened our souls like no one before us, he realized.

  Sue came out of her reverie, and Lou found himself watching her studying him. "You're looking at me a little strangely," she said.

  "I was thinking we're either very brave or very arrogant," Lou said. "We're taking the destiny of the whole world in our hands. What if we're wrong? Who gave us the right to decide that men should listen to the stars?"

  "Who gave us the right to decide men shouldn't?" Sue told him flatly. "If we don't act, we're making the decision too. We're stuck with it, Lou. We're the only people in the whole world who know both sides of the mountains. And in my heart, I know what we're doing is right."

  "I wish I was so sure..." Lou said slowly. The logic of their destiny seemed inevitable, but their mastery of their fate seemed illusion. In such a situation, certainty itself was almost a sin. Did they truly comprehend a whole or merely see some of the parts?

  "Trust me, Lou," Sue said., squeezing his hand. "As I trusted you when I didn't see the Way clearly."

  Lou managed a wan smile. "I trust you as I trust myself," he said truthfully. But at the moment, that didn't seem to be saying very much.

  Word of Mouth

  Everything's the same and everything is different, Sunshine Sue thought as she passed the Exchange on her way to the Smokehouse. Or rather everything is the same and I'm different.

  The entrance to the Exchange was thronged with peddlers and vendors. Merchants and mountain williams poured in and out in a steady stream, and the loading docks were crowded with merchandise. Business had returned to normal and then some by the time she and Lou had gotten back to town. The suspension of trade during the atomic radio affair had backed up an avalanche of orders which had broken over La Mirage after the giving of justice had cleared the way for renewed commerce. In particular, new orders for solar eagles were running at record levels, what with a one-year guarantee of a ten-percent discount. Mountain william tribes who had never been heavily in the component trade before had "discovered" new caches of "pre-Smash" supplies to neatly take up the slack caused by the disbandment of the Lightning Commune, and no one was about to question their whiteness under the circumstances.

  La Mirage was still La Mirage. Only she and Lou clearly knew the reality beneath business as usual, and they weren't talking.

  Nor was anybody asking. For it was bad form to question the reborn about their period of karmic rebirth, and it would have been worse form to question the sweetness of the new karma of Sunshine Sue and Clear Blue Lou, the darlings of the town, the backhanded bringers of the current boom.

  The game was the same, but Sue now knew more about the real rules than anyone in town cared to. Knew? She was playing by them, and none of the subtle sophisticates of La Mirage, not even Levan himself, was any the wiser. The craftiest people in the world she had always thought she had known now seemed shallow, slightly insubstantial, as she worked her sorcery unnoticed right under their noses.

  Even Lou's presence in town long after the task he had been summoned for had been completed aroused no suspicion. They were living together at the Sunshine Tribe's hostelry, and in the eyes of La Mirage, their love explained all, as the town basked in the good karma of which they seemed to be the center.

  Even her own tarrying in town did not arouse serious murmuring among the local members of the Sunshine Tribe, though the Word of Mouth network buzzed with messages demanding her personal attention to tribal business elsewhere. It was easy enough to make sure that unofficial Word of Mouth leaking back into the net explained her peculiar behavior in terms of love, sweet love.

  "Managing the news," however, was a more subtle task, and Lou's attitude was not making it any easier.

  Sue's first step had been to sift the news moving up and down the Word of Mouth chains for items having to do with portents in the sky and mystical visions of godlike beings. Given the amount of mindfood ingested in Aquaria and the number of astrologers, a few such items were always readily available. These she arranged to give priority distribution, so that news of the moving lights over Castroville, the Napa Fireball, and the Advent at Palm quickly spread wherever Word of Mouth reached.

  By the time the rest of her tribe might have been beginning to notice the strange emphasis being put on these items, it didn't seem strange at all, for bizarre events and weird portents in the sky had become a topic of more than usual interest. This was a resurrection of the ancient idea of the "self-fulfilling prophecy," a fad created by the news of its own existence.

  Thus, no one questioned Sue's instructions to Word of Mouth news gatherers to seek out such items, and once people realized that a moment of personal fame might be achieved by watching th
e sky for wonders, an abundance of visions began to be presented to the gatherers of news.

  Without resorting to the deliberate spreading of false items of news, Sue had managed to create a blizzard of sky visions in the consciousness of the Aquarian populace, a storm of sightings which fed on itself. Of course, many of these visions might be the creation of mindfood and Word-of-Mouth-created expectations, and many others were no doubt tall tales concocted by seekers of momentary fame, but all the Sunshine Tribe was doing was spreading news gathered from the lips of the people. She was being true to the spirit of Word of Mouth, or so she tried to convince Lou.

  Lou, however, was having his silly moral qualms, and it had not been easy to gain his cooperation in initiating the final phase.

  "Now that really is the spreading of lies," he had insisted last night when she asked him to help initiate the rumor chain. "You're making up stories and getting people to believe them."

  "No, I'm not!" she insisted. "Uh... not exactly. I'm making up stories, but I'm not telling anyone to believe them. Just reporting the public word of mouth..."

  They were lying in bed at the hostelry long after dinner, but they had not made love. Sue had carefully explained that the whole point of the sky portent obsession she had created was to create the proper atmosphere for the "planted news" about visitations from beings from other worlds. This receptivity would give the planted stories credibility, and the stories would give the craze for celestial portents content and direction, and both would enhance the credibility of the eventual happening.

  But the oaf insisted on being dense.

  "Let me get this straight," he said dryly. "We hang around taverns and smokehouses, spreading stories about beings from the stars landing in spaceships... but we're not spreading lies?"

  "Well, we're not telling anyone that the stories are true, are we?" Sue said slyly.

  Lou stared up at her owlishly from the pillows. "Then you gather this false news that you've planted from the lips of people who've heard it from people who've heard it from you. And that's not lying?"

  "Just reporting the news as we hear it," Sue insisted righteously. But she couldn't entirely wipe the grin off her face.

  "You create word of mouth and then you report it..."

  "Media is its own reality; that's a basic principle of the science," Sue told him. "And I think you'll agree I know a little more about it than you do."

  Lou's seriousness finally cracked a bit. "That I can go along with," he said, rolling his eyes. "I see it, but it's hard to believe it."

  "The hand is quicker than the eye," she laughed, making mystical motions in front of his face.

  "I just hope the head isn't faster than the heart," Lou replied, obdurately reverting to his righteous mode. "Everything is working the way you said it would, and if you say that in a few days people will be making up their own tall stories about beings from the stars for you to gather as news, I believe you'll have them doing it. But I can't believe it doesn't violate the spirit of truth; I can't believe that what you're doing can be in harmony with the Way."

  "Sometimes there are better ways to higher truth than the straight and narrow, love," Sue said, wagging a finger in his face. "All these 'lies,' as you insist on calling them, are preparing people for a greater truth, now, aren't they? Without these little lies, the big truth wouldn't be believed. If we didn't get people believing in noble beings from the stars, they'd insist on believing that the songs from the stars were evil Spacer sorcery, wouldn't they? And they'd be wrong, wouldn't they?"

  "It's for their own good, is that it?"

  "Well, isn't it?"

  Lou sighed. "I don't know any more," he said wearily. "Since I met you, the world has become a much more confusing place."

  Sue stroked his hair. She kissed him fleetingly on the lips. "Trust me, Lou," she said. "I know what I'm doing. This is the way the global electronic village worked. It's the only way to get people to face knowledge from the stars without weirding out. Or do you have a better idea, oh perfect master of the Clear Blue Way?"

  Lou stroked her cheek tentatively, perhaps somewhat reluctantly. "No," he finally said. "I guess yours is the only game in town..."

  "Then take it on faith and help me," Sue had told him, and slowly, lip on lip, thigh on thigh, she had cozened away the lingering vestiges of his resistance. Or at least banished his doubts to a corner of his mind.

  But in the process, she had come to see some of the new strangeness in herself. Even Lou had become an object of her manipulations. How much wrong could be done in the service of higher good without tainting her own soul?

  When she reached the Smokehouse, den of gossiping soothsayers and mages, the haze of reef smoke seemed like a fogging of her own inner vision. Behind it even these adepts of the white sciences and the mystical arts seemed slightly wraithlike, mages of a limited reality whose time must soon be passing.

  This must be what it feels like to be a sorcerer, she thought, as she glided and nodded between couches and tables, and she didn't much like it. Possession of secret knowledge seemed to have its karmic drawbacks, and she was beginning to see how the Spacers were able to distance themselves psychically from the objects of their scenarios. And thereby from their own human hearts.

  She bought a pipe of reef and sat down alone, waiting for someone to come to her. It didn't much matter who. The vibe of the Smokehouse was intellectual and a good-looking woman didn't instantly attract sensual speculators, particularly a woman famously involved with the likes of Clear Blue Lou. But Sunshine Sue, Queen of Word of Mouth, was always an object of immediate interest in this bazaar of knowledge; she could be counted upon to be good for the most up-to-date gossip and maybe a bit of news that hadn't yet filtered out through the Word of Mouth chains.

  So it didn't take long for a little group to form around her. Merle Quicksilver, an up-and-coming young astrologer of some repute and more ambition. May Songcloud, a weather mage whose dabblings in the questionable art of astronomy had somewhat grayed her reputation. And a short, fat little man whom Sue did not know.

  Interestingly enough, the rash of strange events in Aquarian skies was already foremost in their minds; Sue didn't have to steer the conversation. She was pleased but almost taken aback by how well her hype had already diffused into the public consciousness.

  "...charts predicted this; it's happened before," Quicksilver said, after they had swapped stories of the latest celestial sightings. "Portents in the sky always herald the dawn of a new astrological age. When the Age of Aquarius began just before the Smash, many strange things were seen in the sky. Lights, flying discs, comets, new stars. Now the stars are moving into a new Great Sign, and a new age is aborning. The Age of Leo, master of men, power, and knowledge."

  May Songcloud snorted. "Are you sure you haven't conveniently discovered a new astrological age to encompass the events in the sky within your own art?" she said. "I'd say that every time there are a lot of strange events in the sky, you astrologers manage to discover a significance for them in your charts."

  "And you, I suppose, have a more arcane explanation?" Quicksilver shot back indignantly.

  "Astronomy has long been a neglected art," May said. "The ancients knew much and we know little. They knew of things in the heavens besides planets and comets, the sun and the moon. Asteroids. Quasars. Pulsars."

  "And what are these asteroids, quasars and pulsars of yours?" Quicksilver asked archly.

  May shrugged. "Just words whose meaning has been lost," she said. "But perhaps the ancient astronomers used them to describe the very events taking place in the heavens now."

  Quicksilver laughed snidely. "And we're the ones who are trying to encompass events in the sky with mystic significance in our own charts?"

  Amazing! Sue thought. Here they are, fighting over whose art encompassed the pure product of mine! What wizardry this media hype is! How cogent it must have been before the Smash, when there was hardware to match the software. And how cogent it would be
again with a satellite broadcast network. Lou is dead wrong in his qualms about this. What could be more karmically fitting than that this software science should be the instrument that allows us to obtain the hardware for its higher functioning?

  "I'm just a mindfood grower from up north, looking for better equipment with which to distill my extracts, and I don't claim that my art encompasses this sphere," the fat little man said. "But it seems to me that some of the things we've heard about can't be explained by astrology or astronomy, like the Advent at Palm, where strange winged beings—"

  "That one probably is the product of your art," Quicksilver snorted.

  "Like the Yappoville landing," Sue said with deliberate dubiousness, seeing her opportunity.

  "Yappoville landing?" May Songcloud said. "I haven't heard that one."

  "For that matter, where the hell is Yappoville?"

  "A tiny village north of Shasta," Sue said, locating the nonexistent place as vaguely as possible. "Supposedly, a star fell from the sky and landed in a commune, and out stepped some strange creatures who conversed with the locals. What mindfood do you suppose they had gorged themselves on in Yappoville in order to believe that?"

  "Strange creatures riding a star to Earth?" Quicksilver said sharply. "What did they look like? What did they say?"

  Sue shrugged. "A Sunshine messenger heard the story in some tavern down in Shasta, and the details are too vague to use it as an item of public news. In fact, someone along the line probably just made it up..."

  "Oh, come on, Sue, tell us!"

  "I don't want you to start thinking I'm crazy enough to believe this stoned-out story..." Sue drawled teasingly.

  "We understand that it's off the record."

  "Way off the record!" Sue said. "Well anyway, for whatever it's worth, the fellow in the tavern told our messenger that someone from Yappoville told him that some members of this commune had told him that a star fell from the sky into their cornfield, and the creatures who got out didn't look like men but spoke our language and told them that they came from another world in outer space."