Songs from the Stars

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

He was Clear Blue Lou, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way, at one with the law of muscle, sun, wind and water governing Aquaria. She was Sunshine Sue, always in a hurry in a world that was too slow, Queen of Word of Mouth. Their meeting had been arranged - but by whom? and why? Beyond the beginning of where the world ended, beyond the highest peaks of its primeval majesty, lay a radio active hell and the lairs of the black sorcerers, the Spacers. The black scientists had not forgotten man's old dream of touching the stars: they wanted the Age of Space reborn. But they needed a little help.

Release date: November 14, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 279

Sample

Cruising southeast on a golden afternoon for eagles, Clear Blue Lou had left the world behind him. Below, the Sierra foothills were a chiaroscuro tapestry of crumpled green velvet, and the cloudless sky filled his soul with clear blue glory. His spirit was absorbed into a birdlike awareness of the dips and slips of the mountain airstreams. He was Clear Blue Lou, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way. In the towns and communes and farmsteads of Aquaria below, that meant cleansing other people’s karma, but up here all alone in the Clear Blue, he himself found his own Way. Every master must dance his own song.

Lou hung suspended in time and space beneath the clear blue helium-filled eagle; from the ground, he appeared to be riding beneath an almost invisible wing of air. From where he sat in his saddle slung beneath the eagle, the glider wing was a sunshade lens attuning the blue of the sky to a deeper and more tranquil vision. Nowhere else was he more totally in the Way.

So blissfully was Clear Blue Lou riding the Clear Blue Way that before he knew it, sunset was creeping up behind him.

Oh shit! he suddenly realized. I’ve done it again!

Long streaks of purple and carmine were playing over the eagle wing, and the ribwork of the lower surface had become a cathedral archwork of lengthening shadows. Below, inky pseudopods were oozing east through the rugged canyon bottoms of south-central Aquaria, and the tops of the scattered clouds were turning mauve and pale orange.

Clear Blue Lou might be in sync with the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, but of this white tetrad of sanctioned powers, the one that made him grunt and sweat was the one he liked the least. And now, to pay back this golden afternoon of sweet karma, he was going to have to pedal.

The solar eagle is a helium balloon in the form of a subtly flexible glider wing. Hanging bellow it in a saddle, the eagle rider flexes and warps it with the control lines like an aerial puppeteer riding beneath an avian marionette. Given the right wind, an ace like Clear Blue Lou could follow a general vector with no power at all. Unfortunately, such optimum karma occurred maybe a dozen times a year.

And today was not one of those clays. A light headwind was blowing up from the east, there was less than an hour’s sun left, and the last eagle’s nest between here and La Mirage was at least eight miles away. He was going to have to pedal.

The upper surface of the eagle wing is covered with solar cells that produce enough electricity to power two pusher props halfway out toward the tips. In still air, the sun can move the eagle at about ten miles per hour. When it is up.

When it is not up or when the wind blows the wrong way, there is a central pusher prop run by the pedals. No true eagle freak enjoys pedaling. If he did, he’d be a cycle sailor, who enjoyed that dubious pleasure every time he lost his wind.

Nevertheless, muscle was part of the Way, and there were perfect masters of certain ways who taught that sweat was good for the soul and sprinted about their rounds on bicycles. There were even those who thought that solar eagles were tinted a suspicious tone of gray.

As Clear Blue Lou hit the pedals, as his legs established a rhythmic pump and he let his muscles drive his lungs, flesh warped consciousness closer to immediate reality, and Lou

was forced to remember that the Eagle Tribe who had built his sky chariot were deeply involved in this mess in La Mirage. They were under a cloud whose belly was black with the shadow of sorcery.

The sky was deepening to darkness behind him, and the land below had cloaked itself in shadows that made it seem more craggy and forbidding as Clear Blue Lou pedaled laboriously east through the sweet sunset musk given off by the forested foothills. On the eastern horizon, the jagged peaks of the Sierras themselves blazed redly in the setting sun. Beyond them … the Great Waste, from whose depths black science oozed its subtle way into Aquaria, grayed by the time it reached La Mirage, and ostensibly pure as the driven snow by the time it cleared the Exchange.

Somewhere between here and the other side of the Sierras, someone’s hand was quicker than the eye. Or, anyway, eyes that chose to look away. No taint could be pointed to on the whiteness of solar eagles, no molecule made by the hand of man, no power other than that of sun and wind and muscle. Well within the letter of the law.

Of course, the solar cells had to come from somewhere, and the fabric of the glider balloon was a rather outré derivative of cellulose, and the Eagle Tribe’s train of supply drifted back ambiguously into the hermetic mountain william canyons way up in the eastern slopes of the central range where the righteously white did not care to risk sticking their noses.

Clear Blue Lou did not make a habit of questioning the karma of that which sweetened his own, and he believed in doing likewise for the good karma of others. If it tastes good to the spirit, you can eat it.

But now, with the landscape gone sinister and his own misattention trapping him in the penitive task of pedaling, Lou was reminded that not even a perfect master could count on a perpetual free lunch. Perhaps having to keep in the Way by force of will over protest of flesh was good for the soul, a cautionary cosmic zinger.

Right now it reminded him that this was no joyride after all, that he had been summoned to give his justice in a dispute that touched on the karma of this selfsame eagle that had transformed him from a high-flying rider of the wind to the beast of his own burden with the setting of the sun.

Good for the soul, like peyote, he told himself sourly, leaning into the pedals. But that didn’t mean he had to like the way it tasted going down.

Within the hour, the land below had sunk into a black abyss, the moonless sky blazed with pinpoint lights like the landscape of some eldritch pre Smash city, and Clear Blue Lou had had more than enough of the yoga of pedaling.

So it was with a certain sense of relief that he finally spotted the eagle’s nest beacon, a powerful 200-watt reflector beam winking at him like a grounded star from the next ridgeline. He shifted gears, and a portion of his footpower was shunted into the pump that recompressed wing helium to kill the eagle’s lift for a glide-in. This did not make pedaling any easier, and by the time he established his descent curve, he was groaning and wheezing, and it was pure ecstasy to stop pedaling for good and float down like a moth toward the light.

Down he came into a high mountain meadow shining ghostly pale under the stars. Only one other eagle was tethered to the hitching rail. Millions of insects circled in the beam of the spotlight on the roof of the single-story rambling lodge cabin.

The main room of the cabin had walls of undressed timber, smooth-hewn tables and chairs, and a big wood stove where Matty the cook presided over two big iron kettles and a pot of cider, which blasted out food odors that went straight to Lou’s empty stomach.

“Food and flop, Matty,” Lou called out. “I’ve been pedaling for hours.”

“In such a hurry to get to La Mirage?” The only other customer was a tall willowy woman in a yellow Sunshine messenger jumpsuit who sat alone over the remains of her meal, beckoning him to her table. She was neat, she looked a little mean in all the right places, and she seemed just a little hostile.

“As a matter of fact, I’ve got all the time in the world,” Lou said, beaming invitingly at her as he sat down across from her.

The Sunshine Girl ran her tongue over her lower lip and smiled back ironically. “Are you soliciting a bribe, oh giver of Clear Blue justice?”

“Are you offering one?” he asked.

The Sunshine Girl shrugged. “It might enliven an otherwise dull night,” she said.

Matty set a bowl of rice fried with vegetables under a sauce of soybean chili before him, and Lou considered the karma as he savored the first welcome mouthful.

Sunshine Sue’s whole operation could be on the line when he gave his justice, and from what he had heard, it had been the Eagle Tribe who had first suggested him, not the Sunshines. And here he was, flying in on their product. It could be argued by a good enough sophist that he owed the Sunshine Tribe some counterbalancing equivalent, which might be most pleasantly provided at sport with this member who was both willing and a turn-on.

On the other hand, the hoary maxim that a stiff prick knows no conscience was not the bottom line for Clear Blue Lou.

“Is it against your rules to discuss our case?” the Sunshine Girl asked.

“What’s your name?”

“Little Mary Sunshine,” she answered dryly.

“Well Mary,” Lou said, “that depends on whether I’m talking to Little Mary or to Sunshine Sue’s Word of Mouth.”

“Off the record. Cross my heart.”

Lou eyed her narrowly. Sunshine Sue’s Word of Mouth earned its way by carrying other people’s messages, but it also carried public news up and down the length of Aquaria. News that it collected however it could. If he didn’t want to trust Little Mary Sunshine, he wouldn’t be Clear Blue Lou, but if he trusted her implicitly, he wouldn’t be Clear Blue Lou either.

“And hope to lie?”

Little Mary laughed. “No, really,” she said. “I just want to tell you something. The Sunshine Tribe isn’t into black science; we’re no grayer than anyone else who does business in La Mirage.”

“That’s not exactly a certificate of karmic purity,” Lou said dryly.

“I’m leveling with you, Lou. Sure, you could say that some of our electronic components might not be ultrabright, but our radios are as white as your eagle.”

“I can’t think of a blacker science than atomics,” Lou said. “Can you?”

“That’s what I’m telling you!” Little Mary said in a tone of some exasperation. “We wouldn’t mess with sorcery like that! What do you think we are, monsters?”

“But you were caught with radioactive power cores in twenty-five radios. Or do you dispute the facts as charged by the Eagles?”

“The Eagles? Where do they come off so whitely righteous? How did they know about the power cores in the first place? We didn’t.”

“You didn’t?”

Little Mary reached out and touched his hand. She looked into his eyes. “Really we didn’t,” she said quietly. “We bought them on the open market from the Lightning Commune, and we’ve never had trouble like this with them before; they’ve always been a reasonably white outfit. And now suddenly they set us up for a sorcery judgment. …”

“How come the Eagles knew about the atomic cores if you didn’t?”

“Now you’re catching on,” Little Mary Sunshine said.

I am? Clear Blue Lou thought. But to what? This side of the story didn’t add up. And it wouldn’t until he got an explanation from the Eagles. And he had an uneasy feeling that they’d have a hard time giving him a straight answer too. And he didn’t at all feature whom this was all beginning to point to. He also realized that this discussion had gone a little too far. He had already asked some questions that could be turned into items by Word of Mouth with a little embellishment.

“This is all off the record?” he said. “It’s not going to be all over Aquaria that I discussed this with you in the course of coming on?”

“Whose karma would that sweeten?” Little Mary said. She smiled. “So you admit you’d like to while away the night together?”

Oooh, this was getting tasty. But it was also getting dicey. The mind game that was going on would make for fiery sport. But that would tie another Gordian knot in the skein of karma he was being called upon to unravel, with something more intimate than his finger tied up in it.

At times like these, he could do with being a little less Clear Blue.

“I admit I’d like to,” he said.

Now she was touching both of his hands. “So would I.”

Lou’s flesh surged toward her, but his head held him back. “Some good things,” he said dryly, “were not meant to be.”

She sighed and relaxed back against her chair. “Can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said easily.

“Were you really trying?” Lou asked.

“Was I really trying what?” Little Mary Sunshine drawled ingenuously.

“To suborn a giver of justice with your sweet charms,” Lou said half seriously.

“Was the giver of justice maybe using the situation to see if he could get it down?” she asked slyly.

“Would I contemplate a thing like that?”

“Are you sure you don’t want to talk that over in my room?”

“Much as I’d like to, the karma isn’t clear,” Lou said regretfully. “If we sported, either you’d incline me favorably toward your tribe, or I’d bend over backward the other way to be fair. Unjust either way.”

He laughed. “Besides, right now, neither of us could figure out what was fucking whom anyway.”

“It might be fun trying.”

“I’m sure it would, but I’d hate myself in the morning,” Lou said, getting up from the table. He kissed her hand. “Maybe when this is over, we can wake up one morning in bed together and remember this with a smile.”

“I sure hope we all come out of this smiling,” Little Mary Sunshine said dubiously. “Nobody’s smiling now.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Clear Blue Lou said. It was as good an exit line as any. But with his glands sulking in frustration and his mind already whirling through the numbers, he went to bed already warped into the karmic maelstrom. And he was still a good morning’s flight from the scene that awaited him at La Mirage, where the winds that were blowing had more of a whiff of the east about them than usual.

Next morning after a solitary breakfast of wheatola and hot cider, Clear Blue Lou took off through the damp mist that fogged the high mountain meadows, his spirit soggy with last night’s missed pleasures and the sorcery-tainted karma that had trapped him in its evil spell of chastity.

But soon he was above the fog, soaring rapidly east on a

favorable wind and a high mountain sun that warmed his body to wakefulness arid clarified his soul.

The karma that he was being called upon to judge had already prevented two innocent people from sporting together, and he was one of them. As far as Lou was concerned, that was proof enough that somewhere at the bottom of this lay a mindfuck pattern, a violation of free will, an outrage to both himself and the Great Way. The seeking of justice had already begun.

For the giving of justice was no neutral intellectual process. In order to clear karma, a perfect master must enter its realities. Otherwise, he would be writing law, not fulfilling destiny; he would be acting like a government. What was left of the world could do without people who thought they could be unmoved movers.

Atomic power cores aside, karmic imperialism was at work here; it had already quite literally grabbed him by the balls. And justice would require that this karmic debt not go unpaid.

The fair following wind was taking him rapidly toward the beginning of the central range of the Sierras. No rolling foothills below him now, but apprentice mountains rising up toward him.

This was the beginning of where the world ended. Or at least the world that the whitely righteous knew. No eagle could cross the High Sierras powered only by sun and wind and muscle. Beyond that immense wall of mountains was the greatest of all Wastes, Aquaria’s knowledge of its extent petering out into the infinity of legend. Great was the mega-tonnage that had fallen upon the eastern slopes of the Great Divide during the Smash. Still deadly was the vast radioactive wound which the hand of man had gouged in the body of the Earth.

But the world did not end in a bleak abyss or with an unseemly suddenness. Now Lou’s eagle was flying abreast of the peaks of the higher foothills, and he was ascending into a great aerial river system of canyon passes leading on into ever higher and more forbidding mountains, awesome in their beauty.

Here was truly a land untouched by the unclean hand of man, a world unto itself that had existed in its impenetrable vastness for transhuman aeons. The Smash had not touched it. Even the awful black science of the pre-Smash Americans

had not been able to seriously mar these mothers of mountains. All they had left behind was a sparse network of roads where tall trees burst from the shattered concrete. Lou soared past fir-covered slopes where hawks and eagles circled, high verdant meadows where sheep and deer grazed. The world ended in a wilderness Eden whose far boundary was impenetrable to man. What irony that beyond the highest peaks of this primeval majesty lay a radioactive hell and the lairs of sorcerers!

In all of this mountain fastness, the only significant human settlement was La Mirage, one of Aquaria’s major towns, a long day’s flight from anything of significance and two days from Palm by wagon on the torturous back-door road.

What this bustling town was doing way out here in the middle of nowhere was generally considered best left unsaid. La Mirage was near nothing but the fuzzy mountain boundary between Aquaria and what lay beyond.

And now the sorcerers beyond the mountains had showed their hand at work with uncool clumsiness. More than the fate of the Eagle Tribe, the Lightning Commune, and Sunshine Sue’s Word of Mouth was at stake. La Mirage itself was now under a heavy cloud of black science of the most blatant sort.

And the fact was that Aquaria needed La Mirage for the very reason that made it content to leave the doings in the shadow of the High Sierras out of sight and out of mind.

An arcane chemistry took place here upon which the civilization of Aquaria depended. The children of Aquarius had built a civilization based on the white sciences, under the law of muscle, sun, wind and water. Now they could fly like eagles, and generate electricity, and pass messages along by solar radio. White science advanced year after year, and its mages and merchants did their business together in the La Mirage Exchange. New technology was manufactured most often in the workshops and factories of the town and from there diffused slowly outward.

It was conveniently said that the scattered mountain William tribes in the eastern back country had preserved certain manufacturing techniques from pre-Smash days, and it was certainly true that these simple people zealously guarded their so-called trade secrets.

It was also true, however, that somewhere up in the Sierras, mountain william country ended and the haunts of the

Spacers began. It was hard to believe that there was no interpenetration. It was hard to believe, but most people tried.

Expeditions too high up into the mountains had a way of not coming back. Besides, bounty flowed across the land from La Mirage, and none could prove that the law of muscle, sun, wind and water was violated by eagles or solar radios or sophisticated batteries and wind generators.

Such was the delicate balance that allowed La Mirage to flourish. By such a nonexistent pact with the unnameable did Aquaria ultimately thrive in its righteous whiteness. Some perfect masters saw this as a fatal flaw, but Clear Blue Lou didn’t believe in being bad for business. Which was why he was the favorite perfect master of La Mirage.

Which was also why the nature of this klutzy confrontation pointed to machinations by the Spacers. Sunshine Sue might very well be capable of knowingly purchasing atomic-powered radios—her reputation was well grayed to say the least. But the Eagle Tribe had no percentage in wanting to expose her. Shining unwanted light into someone else’s dark corner was against the rules of the game, if only because you yourself might be next.

Around the next bend, the canyon that Lou was following widened out into a steep green meadow that swept upward before him. He valved more helium into his eagle and nosed it upward, slowly inching up above the steep slope, making his final climb to La Mirage in a long climbing arc.

On the high mountain plateau above him was a town that had summoned his justice, a town that trusted him and which he had perhaps come to love. Perhaps that might prove to be a stain on his karma. Certainly the missed night of sport with Little Mary Sunshine had already made things personal.

As he soared upward through the most beautiful country in his world, the Eden below seemed to mock him with its purity and innocence. For the shadow of black science lay heavily across this mountain greenery where the domain of sorcery touched the lives and fortunes of men.

As always, Sunshine Sue was in a hurry, and as always, her world moved too slowly. There was a great bleeding freight wagon clogging the road up ahead of her, just as the wind was finally getting some speed out of this stupid contraption!

Her current mode of transport was a sail cycle. She had made it down the coast from Mendocino by boat in under three days, but from Barbo, her way to La Mirage had become a crawling nightmare. Endless hours on a dumb smelly horse to Javelina and then two bloody more days to Palm by coach, where she missed her connection to La Mirage because of a busted axle and was told she’d have to lay over for eighteen hours.

Fortunately the Sunshine Tribe maintained a messenger station in Palm and had its own transport. Of a kind.

Now her sweet ass was riding a few inches above a rock-strewn dirt roadway in the saddle of a speeding sail cycle. With a good wind, this thing could really move—right now she must be doing nearly thirty miles an hour. But the trouble was you lost your following wind around every other bend in the road, and most of the time, you had to lean

against the torque of the angled sail to keep on the ground. And when the wind died, kiddo, it was hit the pedals.

The sail cycle had two small wheels up front for steerage; behind was a big pusher wheel that rode free under sail and was driven by the pedals when the wind died. Sue reclined low against the road in her saddle behind a deerhide fairing to minimize drag. The triangular sail rode on a boom behind the rear wheel and was controlled by a crank through a system of ratchets.

She had been told in Palm that the record time to La Mirage in one of these things was under thirteen hours, whereas the coach would take nearly two days—and that after a layover.

She had also been told that she was crazy, that you had to be in shape for pedaling, that you needed to know what you were doing, but Sunshine Sue was burning with adrenaline and impatience, and she would’ve hitched a ride on a passing mountain lion to get to La Mirage a few hours sooner.

In the Word of Mouth business, she was fond of telling apprentice messengers, the fastest transport between any two points was the one you took. The fastest transport was always too damned slow anyway.

She had been up in Mendocino, setting up a net node station for the new fifty-mile radio transmitter whose arrival should have been imminent. Instead, word had crawled up the coast that the entire shipment had been interdicted by Levan the Wise. For sorcery.

A black science interdiction in La Mirage? By Levan? Atomic power cores in the transmitter circuits? What the fuck was going on down there?

Sue sent a blizzard of questions into the Word of Mouth net, but she didn’t sit around waiting for answers. She knew that her presence was required on the spot the day before yesterday.

She grabbed the first ship south and couldn’t make radio contact till she got to Barbo. There she had learned that the Eagle Tribe had supposedly discovered an atomic power core in one of the new radios which the Lightning Commune had tried to sell them. When the Eagles righteously blew the whistle, even cool old Levan had been forced to interdict the twenty-five examples of this black science that the Sunshine Tribe had taken delivery of in La Mirage.

That did not exactly clarify the logic, but it did transmit

the brimstone smell of the shadowy Spacers. The Lightnings might just have the collective intelligence to assemble the devices, but no one who did business with them seriously believed that they were really reproducing pre-Smash designs. And anyone who believed that even more brain-burned mountain Williams farther back in the woods supplied their components from pre-Smash stashes might as well have believed that solar cells and microcircuits grew on trees. Someone somewhere out of sight was making this stuff and using the Williams as a thin camouflage which fooled only those who wanted to be fooled, namely, any reasonable person.

The Eagles might buy solar cells and electric motors from the Lightning Commune, but they didn’t buy radios. They didn’t know squat about radios. So how come they found the atomic power cores hidden in the circuitry when our own aces didn’t? And why would they want to blacken the reputation of their supplier of solar cells and motors?

Sunshine Sue had pondered these questions during the endless horseback trip to Javelina without coming up with answers that satisfied the test of self-interest. And this was too complex a mess to be the result of mere random fuck-ups; uncool things like that just did not happen in La Mirage. Therefore, someone with a hidden self-interest was pulling strings from out of sight, and that meant the damn Spacers.

Who else could hide atomic power sources so thoroughly in the transmitter circuits that they could get past the radio mechanics of the Sunshine Tribe? The Eagles could not have discovered the atomic cores unless they were meant to.

But why? Why would even the Spacers pollute Aquaria with atomic power sources and then somehow arrange to have their own dupes exposed for the blackest of sciences?

Before she left Javelina, Word of Mouth came from La Mirage that Levan had decided that this situation required justice from a perfect master. The Eagles had suggested Clear Blue Lou and the Lightnings had accepted. Would she agree? Of course, she had to decide immediately because otherwise they would have to await her arrival to negotiate another choice of perfect master, and it could take a week for one to arrive whereas Clear Blue Lou was two days away, and in the meantime, the Sunshine Tribe might find itself under sorcery boycott until the situation was resolved. …

Some “freely agreed-upon choice of judges!” It was Clear Blue Lou, or this mess would fester for weeks. And of course it was common folklore that Clear Blue Lou was in love with his solar eagle; no doubt the pea-brained Eagles thought that would shield them from any repercussions.

But Word of Mouth on Lou was that he really was Clear Blue; few people lost when he gave justice. And he was practically the patron saint of La. Mirage. He and Levan saw eye to eye on keeping things cool. Furthermore, the solar cells in Lou’s eagle came from the same source as the Sunshine radios. A perfect master like Clear Blue Lou would be wise to the wider implications, and he himself already owned a piece of this karma.

Finally, Clear Blue Lou was a perfect master who boogied. Better him than some whitely righteous celibate or vibrating lady!

So she sent her agreement down the net and hauled ass for La Mirage, hoping to get there before anyone else had a chance at working on Clear Blue Lou’s head.

That is, if you could call this hauling ass!

Sue sounded her klaxon, and up ahead the wagon began to inch to the right side of the so-called road. But not fast enough. She would have to lose some momentum by using the brakes, or she’d hit the damn thing going by.

She slowed down to under twenty, centered the boom, and slipped by. Then she found the road going into a rising bend, lost the wind, and had to pedal, puffing and cursing, to gain the crest.

And that was what this whole bleeding trip had been like! Finding out about things days sifter they happened and not being able to make your reaction fel. . .