Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  "But it sounds like something we could use," Sue offered.

  "If it can draw power with the electrical system in the standby mode," Harker said, throwing the final switch.

  He turned a wheel set in the center of the round door, pulled it open, and crawled inside.

  Following Lou inside after the Spacer, Sue found herself floating in a long wide tunnel, its far end lost in perspective. Rows of lights arrowed down into the gloom. Two braided steel cables slid like snakes up and down the center of the tunnel, one going and one coming.

  Turning, Sue saw that the two cables were really one, reeling about a wheel spun by a humming engine fastened to the round plate at this end of the tunnel.

  Harker closed the hatch, staring at the moving cables. "I don't know how this works..." he stammered. "There's nothing about this in the specifications we've preserved..."

  "It's simple!" Sue shouted, pushing off the wall with her feet, like a swimmer making a turn in a pool, arms outstretched as if in a dive. "You just grab on and catch a ride!"

  So saying, she clamped her hands about the inward bound cable and was yanked down the tunnel at exhilarating speed.

  "Sue! Are you all right?" She heard Lou's voice through the speakers close by her ears even as she was whisked out of sight.

  "I'm fine!" she said. "Come along, you'll enjoy the ride!"

  "Whoo-ee!" Clear Blue Lou laughed as he let go of the cable, bounced gently up against the round hatch at the end of the tunnel and the breathless cable ride, and floated about like a drifting balloon alongside Sue and Harker.

  The Spacer was already fiddling with yet another control panel, this one festooned with whole rows of switches. It had taken some persuading to get him to ride the cable, and he had screamed and moaned on the radio all the way. How sad, how ironic, that the Spacer, who had pointed his whole life toward this reality, could not enjoy it like a natural man. Now he was throwing switches left and right, mumbling under his breath, and choking back gags. "Crew quarters life support system... on. Gurgh! Crew quarters electrical system... Urk!... on. Main switch... on..."

  "What are you doing now?" Sue asked, swimming over to watch him with a kick of her legs against the wall.

  "Turning on the systems that were shut down when the crew put the station in standby mode," Harker grunted. "This hatch leads to the main airlock. Soon the wheel will have light and heat and air. And we can get out of these suits and... and..." He choked back another gag with a disgusting liquid gurgle.

  Then he spun the lockwheel, opened the hatch, and vaulted into the airlock. As Lou started to follow him, he heard the Spacer scream. Then he was inside and saw the reason why.

  A roped-together chain of human corpses floated in the center of the cylindrical airlock like a string of unspeakable sausages, neatly secured to rings screwed into the curving wall. Eight men and six women—naked, desiccated, and cured to a tough brown like too-old leather. Strung across the airlock like wash hung out to dry.

  "Oh no..." Sue gasped as she vaulted in beside him.

  "Oh, look at this!" Harker shrilled, pointing to neat lettering in red paint on a portion of the curved wall. "They committed suicide! They killed themselves!"

  Lou peered wonderingly at the meticulous hand lettering.

  To the relief expedition, if one ever comes. We've taken our cyanide capsules together rather than wait for the inevitable. There is a prepared briefing tape in the main computer room, where all data is stored, catalogued, and preserved. We've put all life-support systems in standby mode to extend their useful life as long as possible. If you are reading this, then there is still hope for our sorry species. We request that you give us a Christian burial together in space.

  "They would have had to tie themselves together, cycled the air out of the airlock, and then calmly taken poison," Harker croaked. "Just to... just to preserve their bodies for us to find! Why would they do a hideous thing like that? What do they mean, a Christian burial in space?"

  "I don't know what a Christian burial is either, but I think I understand the vibe," Lou said softly. "Is there a hatch to the outside here?"

  "Over there," Harker said shakily, pointing to a large square panel with rounded corners. "What are you going to do?"

  "Give these people what they asked for as best as I can," Lou told him, untying one end of the string of corpses. If these poor souls had expired with this peculiar concern filling their minds, then justice, indeed simple humanity, demanded that the memory of their spirit be respected. "Come on Harker, give me a hand!"

  In the end, it was Sunshine Sue who had to help Lou untie the string of corpses from the wall and float them into position in front of the door to naked space. Harker wouldn't touch the bodies; he would hardly even look at them, and her appeals to masculine chivalry got her nowhere.

  It somehow seemed typical of the Spacer that he figured out a way to launch the bodies into space without having to touch them. All head and no heart, Sue thought as Harker valved partial pressure into the airlock.

  "Hold onto something when I open the hatch," he said mechanically. "There's not much pressure in here, but it should be enough to... to..."

  Well, maybe I'm misjudging him, Sue thought as she grabbed onto a handhold. Maybe this is his only path to psychic survival; maybe some inner wisdom tells hint that he can't afford to look at what he's feeling. Arnold was beginning to seem more human, if not more admirable.

  Lou moored himself to one of the rings that had secured the floating corpses, trying to look as dignified as he could under the circumstances. He nodded to Harker, who pressed a button. The door slid open, revealing a slice of starry blackness. Sue felt a breeze tugging her toward that eternal darkness as the bodies drifted out to their final rest, tumbling away from the Big Ear down into the bottomless well of space and time.

  "May you walk in the Way of your choice and arrive at its end where you wanted it to take you," Lou said softly.

  In this moment, Sue felt a moment of oneness with these ancient sorcerers' final request. Let us drift forever in the universe we died trying to conquer. Let our journey continue. And may the hope we placed in you for our species' future not have been in vain.

  The Big Ear Lies Silent

  Although Harker said it would be another ten minutes before the wheel built up a breathable atmosphere, he insisted on getting out of the haunted airlock at once, and Clear Blue Lou agreed that this was a headspace better left behind. Although his heart went out to those long-ago people who had died so tragically, they had certainly gone to demonic lengths to lay their bad karma on whoever might chance to find them, an act of angry bitterness that seemed aimed at humanity in general.

  Harker opened the inner hatch and they floated through it into... into...

  A truly disorienting space. They were inside the hub of the great wheel, a huge cylindrical drum rotating around them. Four gaping holes—the ends of the spokes—went up, down, under and around them in a dizzying dance. No up, no down, no—

  "Oooh no..." Harker moaned greenly. He began thrashing and screaming as they slowly drifted toward the curved rotating wall.

  "Take it easy, man, take it easy!" Lou shouted. "Hang onto the wall!" He grabbed the Spacer by the boot with one hand, clutched one of the many handholds that ran around the revolving drum with the other, and pulled them together. He had to pry the Spacer's hand open and close it around the handhold as he let go of Harker's boot and grabbed another handhold for himself. Sue had secured herself beside them, and the three of them hung there, whirling slowly and weightlessly around the inside of the cylinder. It was not conducive to calm clarity or a healthy appetite.

  "Oh, oh, I can't keep it down, I'm going to vomit!"

  "Fuck it, Arnold, I'll kill you if you puke!" Sue snarled, rapping on his helmet. "Tell us how to get out of here!"

  "Elevators in the spokes..." Harker moaned. "Got to get to one of the shafts..."

  Lou studied the big round hole just above him—or below him, o
r whichever way was up or down. A round metal plate plugged the shaft about six feet down. He began moving along the handholds toward it, hand over hand until he reached the lip. Sue herded the reluctant Harker after him with thumps and kicks and curses.

  Finally, somehow, perspective reversed itself, and the three of them were standing on the round platform, secured by their magnetic boots, and "up" and "down" began to make some sense again.

  They were contained inside a circular wirework fence secured to the lift platform. There was a small control console mounted on the cage with buttons marked "In" and "Out."

  "Which button do I press?" Lou asked Harker, walking over to the controls.

  "Oooh... what? I'm going to be all right, I've got to be all right..."

  "Which button do I press?" Lou asked again. All he got by way of reply were gurgles and chokes and suppressed gags.

  "Ah the hell with it!" Lou muttered. "I don't need you to figure it out." We're in at the hub, so we want to go out to the rim, he decided, pressing the "Out" button.

  The floor began to move beneath them, sucking them down the tunnel by the magnets in their boots, though Lou didn't feel as if he were falling, and Harker didn't start screaming until he noticed the smooth walls of the tunnel gliding past through the wirework of the cage.

  After a few minutes of this, Lou began to feel the subtle return of weight to his knees, the vertiginous sensation of plummeting in his stomach. By the time the platform stopped falling, it was very definitely the floor.

  Harker staggered toward a hatch in the tunnel wall beyond what Lou now saw was a gate in the wirework cage. He opened the gate, wheeled open the hatch, and the three of them walked into a square steel cubicle with rounded corners and a row of what were obviously spacesuits hanging from a rack across one wall.

  Harker closed the hatch behind them and scrabbled over to a series of small dials set into the inner door.

  "There's air in here!" he exclaimed. "Ooh, argh, at last..."

  The Spacer unscrewed his helmet, fumbled it off, gagged, and vomited horribly on the steel floor, doubling over, groaning, and retching.

  By the time Lou and Sue had unsuited, Harker's stomach was empty and his dry heaves seemed to be quieting down, but his eyes remained glazed and his face was ghastly pale.

  "Are you finished?" Sue asked rather unsympathetically, wrinkling her nose at the sour odor that filled the little cubicle. "Can we get out of here?"

  "Finished?" Harker muttered, straightening up shakily.

  "Are you finished throwing up?" Lou said more gently. "Are you going to be all right?"

  "All right...?" Harker said woodenly as he began climbing out of his spacesuit. "Of course I'm all right, it's just a normal physiological reaction... isn't it? I've been trained for this, I've got to be all right..." He seemed to be trying to convince himself and not doing a very good job of it.

  "Now let's do what we came here to do," he said after he had unsuited, forcing himself back into his mechanically competent mode. But his eyes remained glassy and his pallid face was filmed with sweat. "We've got to find the main computer room..."

  So saying, he opened the inner door and led them out into... into...

  The inside of the enormous wheel. A narrow circular corridor that curved away, not left and right but up and down, either end of the hallway disappearing around its own curve high up the gentle slope.

  "What the...?"

  "How are we supposed to—"

  But Harker seemed almost ready for this. "The floor is always down..." he muttered. "Gravity is perpendicular to the axis of spin... I can handle this... I've been trained for this... I've been fully briefed." And so saying, he hunched forward and began scuttling up the curving floor like a human fly.

  The longer Sunshine Sue walked up the endlessly curving floor like a caged rodent in an exercise wheel, the more natural it began to seem. She seemed to carry less than half her normal weight, and it wasn't too hard for her equilibrium to invent the calming illusion that she was simply bouncing along up a long steep hill. If only Harker would stop babbling and muttering to himself under his breath! If only they didn't have to worry about their guide freaking out...

  An endless row of doors ran along the left side of the corridor, and old Arnold pissed and moaned nervously when she and Lou paused to see what was on the other side of some of them. What's he in such a hurry about? Sue wondered irritably. We're going to be here for days.

  Though she had to admit that prospect was getting a little eerie. The wheel was huge, and their footsteps echoed hollowly in its vast emptiness. In a certain sense, this corridor was endless—the row of doors swallowed itself, and only their stenciled signs provided any orientation.

  The rooms behind the doors had flattened floors and squared off walls and ceilings, apparently to create an illusion of normalcy for the missing inhabitants, and there were no windows anywhere.

  There were identical living quarters with beds, chests and toilets. There were laboratories and workrooms filled with neatly stowed equipment. There was a commissary and what might have been a lounge area.

  With people and clutter and personal touches, the wheel might have seemed almost ordinary; indeed it seemed designed to create that illusion. But the Big Ear lay silent and empty, and every bit of humanity had been wiped clean or stowed away. There were no pictures on the walls of the sleeping quarters, and all items of clothing or personal effects were stored in closets or chests. Not a dab of dirt or a bit of clutter anywhere, as if the crew had been determined to expunge its spirit from the place before they killed themselves.

  Eerie indeed! The ghosts that were missing made it eerier still; perhaps that was what was getting to poor Arnold.

  "This is it," Harker called from twenty feet up the curving floor. "The main computer room."

  Following him through the door, Sue found herself inside the biggest room yet. The far wall was a maze of electronic machinery. Two other walls were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with identical small black boxes and reels of tape. The right half of the room was occupied by a big instrument console with four glass screens set in its face and four chairs bolted to the floor behind them.

  The other half of the room was a crazy jumble of electronic equipment flung all over the floor, piled on top of itself, and seemingly infinitely cross-connected by an untidy maze of wiring, as if some unfathomable device had been thrown together out of bits and pieces with sloppy speed. Incongruously enough, four more chairs were bolted to the floor in the midst of this untidy sorcerers' workshop.

  "Computer input... antenna feed... television playback machines..." Harker skittered around the room inspecting the place, seeming to avoid the arcane clutter that filled half of it. "Yes, all this is in the specifications..."

  "What about that?" Lou asked, gesturing toward the jerry-built jumble.

  Harker stole a sidelong glance at whatever it was. "I don't know," he said nervously. "It looks like they were trying to build something. I wonder..."

  "Hey, here's a note," Sue said. There was a piece of paper glued to the instrument panel below one of the screens, varnished over with some clear hard protective coating.

  "Orientation briefing is keyed up on this video player," it said. "Play this tape before touching anything."

  "Can you play this for us, Arnold?" Sue asked.

  The Spacer peered at the note, then at the screen, then at the controls below it set beside a slot holding one of the small black boxes. "I think so," he said, fiddling with the controls. "All I have to—"

  The screen suddenly came to life. An old man's face appeared on it. His white hair was long and wispy, and he wore an untidy white beard. His sad green eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, his sallow skin seemed lined by something more than mere age, and there was a bitter set to his thick lips.

  Sue stood there transfixed as the ghost of the long-dead sorcerer began to live and speak.

  The Big Ear Remembers

  "I'm Dr. Benjamin Wolfs
on, Scientific Director of the Big Ear station," the old man said in a weary bitter voice. "Or rather, from your point of view, I was Dr. Benjamin Wolf-son, for as I record this, we are about to put the station into standby mode and die by our own hands like the rest of our wretched so-called civilization.

  "The air is running out, there will be no relief mission, and from where we sit facing inevitable death, we have a grandstand view of mankind bombing itself back into the stone age or perhaps into extinction."

  The globe of the Earth appeared on the screen—fair, beautiful, seemingly serene. Then it leaped forward in perspective so that only a slice of it was visible, a great continent rolling by under a fleecy cloud deck. Blinding balls of light began to explode on the planet as the voice of the old man continued to speak, and then a ghastly forest of billowing toadstool clouds bloomed on the planet's skin like fungus on a decaying log.

  "I will not bore what posterity there may be with a polemic against the evils of war, pollution, greed, and human stupidity. If any humans survive this holocaust, you will either have learned this bitterest of lessons or be as deaf to reason as your benighted ancestors."

  Wolfson's face glared from the screen, twisted with despairing frustration. "But we in the Big Ear are surely the most wretched of our miserable species. For only we are burdened with the knowledge that humanity is destroying itself just as we've established a connection between mankind and a vast brotherhood of stellar civilizations who have been singing cosmic songs to each other across time and space for millions of years."

  A picture of the jumble of electronic jury rigging in the right half of the main computer room appeared on the screen, a perfect miniature of the reality.

  "Through this standard galactic receiver, which assembled itself here by the magic of interstellar media itself, software creating its own hardware over a thousand years of space and time. Here in this very room is a receiver for interstellar data packets that was assembled by such a packet itself. An actual artifact of advanced galactic technology, assembled by a broadcast from a planet circling a star nine hundred light years away."