Songs From The Stars

by Norman Spinrad

  Ah, you've been through so much! Sue thought as she looked up at the wounded, living, breathing planet. You deserve a second chance. And we're going to give it to you.

  "What are you thinking?" Lou's soft voice said over the suit radio.

  "I'm thinking that it's all been worth it," Sue told him. "Poor Arnold's death. The horrid things he did to bring us here. The strange and lonely creatures it's forced us to become. Even black science, with all that it's done to our poor planet. This must be what it feels like to be karmically reborn."

  "Yeah," Lou said quietly. "I think we're finally standing on the other side." He paused. "But there's still one karmic task that remains before we can stand around congratulating ourselves on our new personas."

  "What's that?"

  Lou laughed a brittle and nervous laugh. "The minor matter of getting our asses safely home," he said.

  "Ready to initiate re-entry program," Clear Blue Lou said, great beads of sweat rolling down his forehead inside the damnable helmet.

  "I'll drink to that," Sue said shakily. "If only I could! I don't know how you did it, and please don't tell me."

  "What makes you think I know?" Lou grunted.

  It had been a hairy passage indeed, from the docking slab to where the spaceship now drifted, well clear of the spinning wheel and the great web of the antenna. Lou had found the switch that disengaged the hoops holding the Enterprise to the slab easily enough, but then they had to scramble frantically on board as the ship unexpectedly started to drift clear.

  He had had no time at all to think about whether he could fly the ship or not for as soon as his ass hit the pilot's seat, he saw that the spaceship was already drifting on a course that would soon suck it into the huge spinning spokes of the great wheel. Lou corrected course frantically, then found that the new course was taking the ship toward the antenna which formed the other wall of the narrow canyon he suddenly found himself flying it through.

  No time to wonder what he was doing as he re-corrected and re-re-corrected until he finally got the nose of the ship pointing out into the clear corridor between the wheel and the web, at least momentarily. No time to think. He hit the main rockets as gently as he could. The Enterprise roared and groaned and shuddered for a moment, and then it was moving outward far faster than he had intended, too fast for any more corrections to be made, and all they could do was shut their eyes and vibe good vibes as it angled out past the wheel, missing the heavy spinning rim by mere yards.

  Lou swiveled his helmet around to get a distant glimpse of Sue through their faceplates. "Well, now it's Space Systems Incorporated's turn at the controls," he said. "Are you ready for that? I'll tell you something, after that, I am!"

  "We really have to trust our lives to a piece of machinery built by our own home-grown black scientists? We have to trust this thing to fly itself home?"

  "The Spacers were good enough to get us here," Lou said. "Just barely, maybe, but good enough. Maybe this is going to be a good karmic lesson. The righteously white, the sorcerers' black, and a couple of gray characters like ourselves—it took the best all the parts of our poor fragmented species could do to put our first footsteps on the Galactic Way. And it's going to take the same to get us home with the knowledge to put it all back together again. We've all got to trust each other if our species and ourselves are going to make it."

  And as he said it, Lou got a foreflash of what it was all going to mean if they did make it. The world would be split asunder and then, hopefully, be put back together again in unguessable new configurations. Black and white, science and sorcery, karma and destiny—the deepest patterns of mind that underlay the interface between the spirit and the world would all be shattered and transformed into something new. Yes, something new was coming into the world, something that had been lost was about to be reborn again. Clear Blue Lou could not quite discern what it was, and perhaps that was its very nature—ongoing everlasting change was the only stable dynamic of galactic stage consciousness.

  And it somehow seemed appropriate that this cosmic pivot point of destiny balanced on something as mundanely human as the proper functioning of this Spacer construction and the ability of a single man to fly it home.

  "Well here we go," he said. "Galactic Way or no, sooner or later, we have to trust our own poor human machineries." And he punched in the re-entry program.

  Sunshine Sue gripped the sides of her couch uneasily as a series of little hisses and juddering vibrations went through the crowded little metal cabin, and the Earth started to roll and shake outside the window.

  Then there was a silent pause as if the computer were checking out its handiwork. Looking out the window, Sue saw that the Earth now lay "below" them from this new perspective, and it was revolving in the wrong direction as if the spaceship were flying above it tail first.

  Then the main rockets roared and the cabin trembled and metal shrieked and groaned and something grabbed her insides and rattled them for what seemed like a long time as she was slammed back into her couch.

  Then—

  Suddenly—

  Nothing.

  The Enterprise floated silently in space. The world spun by serenely backward below as if nothing at all had happened.

  "What's wrong?" Sue said.

  "I don't know," Lou told her. "I have no idea of how this thing comes down until the recovery eagle is deployed. We're in the hands of the computer. I only hope the thing is working."

  "Marvelous!"

  Then as if to reassure them that it was still alive, the spaceship began to hiss and judder and roll and jerk around like a skittish crab. When the spasms were over, they were flying over the curve of the Earth with their nose pointed in the right direction, and the planet seemed perceptibly closer...

  "What now?"

  "I think we're coming down," Lou said.

  They were coming down, in a slow, lazy, decaying spiral that looked as if it would take them three-quarters of the way around the curve of the planet that was now clearly looming closer and closer...

  "Hey, we're really falling now," Sue said uneasily. "I can feel it. Isn't this thing coming in awfully fast?"

  "How fast is it supposed to come in?" Lou said philosophically. "Your guess is as good as mine."

  The green curve of the planet wasn't rolling below them now; they were plummeting down at it from a vast distance at tremendous speed. It might look the same, but Sue's stomach knew the difference.

  Then the spaceship did its jiggle dance again, and the Earth was no longer visible, as the Enterprise came in nose up and belly first like an ungainly pelican. It should have been a mercy not to see what was happening, but it wasn't. Sue could envision the ship falling belly forward like a stone in her mind's eye in far more horrific detail than any perceptual reality, and when the cabin began to shake and shriek, she groaned aloud.

  "Oh shit..."

  The ship rattled and shook and moaned. It seemed to jolt and flip and tumble like a stone skimmed across a pond. Wisps of steam rose up around the window, and it was getting awfully hot inside. Craning her neck in her helmet for a better angle, Sue saw that the undersurfaces of the wings were glowing an angry red as the ship skipped and buffeted against invisible obstacles.

  It was an eternity of terror that might have lasted only a few minutes. Then the nose seemed to dip forward of its own accord, and they were falling soundlessly like a diving swan high above a vast sere desert, plummeting down through a blueing black sky toward a miniature landscape of jagged craters and purple scars, far, far above the scudding white clouds.

  The Clear Blue Way

  Oh, no, we're not flying, we're falling like a stone! Clear Blue Lou thought to himself as he watched the clouds coming up at dizzying speed. The cratered landscape was getting to be less and less of a miniaturist's abstraction as it leaped up to squash them. Everything was suddenly getting all too real!

  A tiny explosion rocked the Enterprise, and then a great hand seemed to yank it backward for a fe
w moments. It seemed to almost hang suspended and then snap back, but falling more slowly now.

  "What the hell was that?" Sue cried.

  "I think it's deploying the drogue parachutes," Lou said. "I think we're going to be all right." Another little explosion, another backward jolt, and this time a longer moment of suspension before the drogue tore free.

  "The third one had better hold long enough for the recovery eagle to deploy," Lou muttered. "There aren't any more."

  A final explosion, and the Enterprise's descent slowed again. There was a thud and a bang and a loud hissing noise that went on and on and on.

  "The eagle's inflating! Here it comes!"

  A vast ungainly wing was slowly unfolding above them like a huge tent being hauled up its poles, like a butterfly emerging from its coccoon. The wind tore and buffeted at it as it struggled to fill and take shape. The ship snapped and groaned as the final chute tore loose, and the recovery eagle was almost blown away.

  Then in the next moment it was all over, and they had returned to the skies of Earth.

  They were floating through a fleecing of white clouds under the enormous shading canopy of the recovery eagle wing. The shadow of the eagle moved like a giant bat across a vast wasteland landscape over which they hung suspended silently in time and space.

  "Well, welcome home, I guess," Sue said. "I just wish we had come down in a more hospitable place."

  "Not to worry," Lou said, throwing a switch that fed energy units from the solar cells atop the eagle wing to the pusher propellers. Slowly and ponderously, the shadow-bird on the ground began to pick up speed and steady its course.

  Lou checked out the controls. Huge, ungainly, and ponderous though it was, the electric linkages that warped the great wing made it simpler and less taxing to fly than his own manually controlled solar eagle. He did a few banks and dips just for the hell of it, and then turned westward toward the afternoon sun.

  "From here on in, it's the sun and the wind," he said happily. "The Clear Blue Way will take us home."

  Lou finally found a way to vent outside air into the cabin, and they struggled out of their space suits, grateful to breathe the free-flowing wind.

  Sue relaxed as she watched him happily flying the great eagle, slipping the air currents, and slowly climbing for altitude as the purple rim of the Sierras peeped up over the western horizon.

  Soon the wastelands would be behind them, and they would cross the mountains that once had rimmed what they had known of the world. Soon they would be back in the fair green lands of home.

  While in their hidden lairs below, the black scientists would be awaiting their return with anxious wonder...

  "You thought about where you're going to land this thing?" she asked Lou. "You're not going to come down at the Company's spaceport, I hope?"

  Lou scratched at his chin and pondered the passing clouds. "It is their spaceship," he said. "And Harker diddie in their service. And they are the only ones who can get it flying again."

  "Yeah, but will they? With Harker dead and the two of us coming back alone, they have only our word for what really happened, and somehow I don't think they'll understand what we have to tell them, do you? And if we just hand over the data banks to sorcerers, what will they do with all that knowledge? Keep it secret, or try to, is my guess. We may owe them something, but we owe the world more."

  "I gather you have an alternate suggestion?" Lou said dryly.

  "I say fuck you to any more knowledge held in secret. I say let's throw it all onto the open Exchange and let the Spacers try and sort it out with Levan. And let's make sure they have to. If all this isn't going to turn into just one more unworthy failure on the part of our fragmented species, we've got to knock everything apart and force a new age to put things back together in new ways. And I think I know just how to create a happening that will start us all off again fresh on the right path."

  "What do you have in mind?"

  Sunshine Sue laughed wickedly. "Let's ring up the curtain on the galactic show with an eye-opening first act."

  West of the central peaks of the Sierras, the landscape below quickened with greenery, and the twisting canyons seemed like the sustaining arteries of life. The sky was clear, the wind was gentle, and Clear Blue Lou flew the great eagle effortlessly toward La Mirage, his spirit riding the Way with a serene tranquility, spiced, nevertheless, with no little sense of relished devilment.

  Sue had managed to make fleeting radio contact with Star-base One as they passed nearby it, just long enough to let the Spacers know that they'd have to come openly to La Mirage to claim their spaceship and bring the promised satellite network ground station with them, and not long enough to tell them that the galactic knowledge the spaceship now contained would be offered freely to all on the open market of the Exchange.

  Now they were on the final leg of their long, long journey, soaring on the wind and the sun down the final great canyon aisle to La Mirage, where it had all begun. Their mighty shadow fell across the lands of the mountain Williams and then the outlying suburban manses east of town. Tiny buildings were visible, nestled in the lovely greenery, and a dusty ribbon of road leading into Market Circle.

  Lou could well imagine invisible figures scurrying around below to spread the news that the celestial chariot was returning from the stars, and parties of nervous black scientists wending their fearful way toward their confrontation with Levan the Wise. The shadow of a new age already lay on the lands of men. It was all over but the shouting, of which there would certainly be no dearth.

  Laughing and winking at Sue, Lou flew a slow, low promenading circle over Market Circle itself, and watched the tiny figures boiling out of taverns and smokehouses, manufactories and inns, to marvel and shout at the prophecy fulfilled. Then he headed west toward a landing on the very grasslands from which men had first watched two of their kind ascend to discourse with the people of the stars.

  "Can you picture what's going on down there now?" Sue cackled happily. "The prophecy is fulfilled before all the world. Black is white and white is black and now the twain will bloody well have to meet!"

  Lou grinned at her as he looked down across the grasslands, where even now a horde of townspeople was following the shadow of the great eagle as the chariot of the gods descended upon the Earth. "And where better than in good old La Mirage," he said dryly.

  Sue squeezed his hand as the spaceship touched down in the middle of a wild and wondering horde. No one moved, not a sound was heard, for a long frozen moment.

  "And so we reach our journey's end," said Sunshine Sue.

  Then a single figure moved toward the ship on tottery legs. It was Levan, and behind him, the whole town seemed to surge forward, shouting and waving.

  Clear Blue Lou shrugged at Sunshine Sue. "Somehow," he said, "I doubt it."

  FINIS

  Information

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  Also By Norman Spinrad

  Novels

  The Solarians (1966)

  Agent Of Chaos (1967)

  The Men In The Jungle (1967)

  Bug Jack Barron (1969)*

  The Iron Dream (1972)

  Riding the Torch (1978)*

  A World Between (1979)

  Songs From The Stars (1980)

  The Void Captain's Tale (1982)

  Child Of Fortune (1985)

  Little Heroes (1987)

  Russian Spring (1991)

  Pictures at 11 (1994)

  Journals Of The Plague Years (1995)

  Greenhouse Summer (1999)

  He Walked Amongst Us (2003)*

  Collections

  The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde (
1970)*

  No Direction Home (1975)

  The Star-Spangled Future (1979)

  Other Americas (1988)

  Deus X and Other Stories (2003)

  Non-Fiction

  Science Fiction In The Real World (1990)

  Dedication

  For

  David Hartwell,

  gentleman and scholar

  Norman Spinrad (1940 – )

  Norman Richard Spinrad was born in New York City in 1941. He began publishing science fiction in 1963 and has been an important, if sometimes controversial, figure in the genre ever since. He was a regular contributor to New Worlds magazine and, ironically, the cause of its banning by W H Smith, which objected to the violence and profanity in his serialised novel Bug Jack Barron. Spinrad's work has never shied away from the confrontational, be it casting Hitler as a spiteful pulp novelist or satirising the Church of Scientology. In addition to his SF novels, he has written non-fiction, edited anthologies and contributed a screenplay to the second season of Star Trek. In 2003, Norman Spinrad was awarded the Prix Utopia, a life achievement award given by the Utopiales International Festival in Frances, where he now lives.

  Copyright

  A Gollancz eBook

  Copyright © Norman Spinrad 1980

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Norman Spinrad to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Gollancz, The Orion Publishing Group Ltd, Orion House, 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane, London, WC2H 9EA. An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 0 575 11724 2

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.