Songs From the Stars (16 page)

"Things are not what they seem, are they... ?" Sue finally said.

"Things are what they are and maybe we're not what we seemed."

"What are we, then?"

"We're two people who have already lost our past personas. We know too much about our world to go back and be the same people. We can't go back. We can only complete the transformation."

"Just as the scenario calls for..."

"Just as the scenario calls for. But we don't even know what that is, do we?"

"We do. Our part in the scenario is to help the Spacers get their spaceship launched and bring back their beloved Age of Space."

"Really? Centuries of scenarios and fifty years of work to launch a single spaceship to visit a station in space? For this they're willing to provoke a holy war against them?"

"The world satellite broadcast—"

"That's what you want, Sue, but what do they really want out of it? A mob of the whitely righteous for them to slaughter?"

"They want you to prevent that, Lou."

"But why do they believe I'll help them, even if I could? What do they know that I don't?"

"They don't have to have a rational reason. This Age of Space dream has devoured them whole."

"Like your dream has devoured you, Sue?"

"Yes!" Sue snapped. "Yes..." she whispered softly.

"They're humans just like us after all," Lou said. "And that's the real mystery. They follow a Way they believe is good, and yet to us it seems evil. And although it seems evil, we're walking it now, even in the shared truth of this process. What makes sorcerers so convinced of the rightness of their Way that they seem to be willing to commit so much evil to walk it?"

"The same thing that turns an Arnold Harker into a cold unnatural creature and convinces him that his sterile life is so superior...?" Sue said.

And will it do the same to us? they both thought together, realizing that the inevitable decision had already been made.

"We have to know, don't we?" Sue said. "Even if it turns us into sorcerers, too..."

Lou nodded. "This process has gone as far as it can," he said. "And we're still not reborn. We know too much to go back to being who we were and not enough to become who we must be, and we sure can't stay in this space between. We have a karmic rebirth task to complete together, like it or not."

"The scenario is behavioristic," Sue said. Every time she repeated it, the enigmatic phrase developed deeper and more sinister implications. Apparently not even rex was powerful enough to break the sorcerer's spell.

"But the sorcerers are human," Lou said. "Their Way is not the Great Way, even if they think it is, else they could not work such evil on others or themselves. Knowledge is not wisdom."

"And you think your wisdom is stronger than their sorcery?"

Lou shrugged. "I know that wisdom without knowledge is blind and that until we know what's really shaping our world and why, we're souls without a home."

"If that wasn't what we were to begin with," Sue said softly. She crawled across the goose-down padding of the pit and sidled up to Lou. He could feel her lonely lostness as she pressed her body against his.

"There's nobody in this space but us," he said. "We really are in this together."

"Lovers and allies, huh?" Sue said wanly.

"We have no choice..."

"And it's sorcery that's flung us together..."

Lou put an arm around her and hugged her to him. "If this be sorcery," he said, "it seems we have no choice but to make the most of it."

After they had made love, they went outside to meet the new morning. The sun was peering up over the high spine of the cordillera behind them. East of the mountains lurked their new unknown destiny, hidden from the sunlit slopes falling away from them to the west.

The world down there looked the same as it always had, timeless green mountains tumbling down to the familiar lands of men. All seemed fair and serene in those lovely lands under their invisible cloak of poisoned air. Yet just as Aquaria swam in an invisible sea of black pollutants, so did it float on a hidden undercurrent of the black science whose shadow even now stretched westward from beyond the mountains.

The world was in fact the same as it had always been, but the eyes that surveyed it saw with a terrible new vision. Here, high in the mountains where the known world ended and that which was called sorcery began, they found themselves stripped of comforting lowland illusions, above the landscape of the world they had known.

And towering still higher above them in all their shadowed majesty were the great mountains that rimmed the world beyond which lay their destiny in a future beyond their present comprehension. The very land itself seemed an ideogram of this passage through rebirth as they stood there hand-in-hand, two new souls on the borderland, all alone in a suddenly unknown world.

Clear Blue Lou had been circling for at least an hour since Sue had landed at the Spacer eagle's nest, waiting for the landing signal. He was starting to get nervous. For once he found himself wishing he had chosen a less emblematic color for his solar eagle. His famous Clear Blue Lou blue eagle would be a noteworthy portent even to back canyon mountain williams, so they had agreed that Sue would land first and clear the place of unwanted eyes and ears before he descended.

Lou had spent the anxious interval circling over the lower end of the long sloping meadow, hoping that he wouldn't be noticed. It was a new experience for him, slinking about the shadows, and he didn't like it. It made his soul seem already tainted with sorcery; he was already playing one of their games.

Finally a mirror flashed three times below the towering crag at the upper end of the meadow. Lou turned out of his circle and came soaring up the long grassy slope, pedaling lift out of his wing.

He drifted in to a hitching rail where the only other eagle was Sue's, scanning the Spacer eagle's nest dourly as he came in. Great big sheds that had to be warehouses up here where there were no crops at all, and that huge radio antenna at the crest of the ridgeline blatantly pointed east toward the Wastes! These sorcerers certainly seemed sure of themselves.

Sue was waiting for him at the hitching rail. The man with her seemed every inch the legendary black scientist—hard blue eyes peering out of a dramatically chiseled face framed by black hair and beard so closely and sharply trimmed that he almost seemed to be wearing some kind of helmet.

"Arnold Harker, Project Manager of Operation Enterprise," the sorcerer said. There was no tone of greeting in his voice, and he didn't offer his hand. "Sue tells me you want security maintained to the fullest and I concur. No point in taking chances. We'll deflate your eagle and store it in a shed."

"Deflate my eagle?" Lou exclaimed. "That's going to take someone hours of pedaling, and it sure isn't going to be me! And I don't like the idea of your making someone else do that much sweating for me."

The Spacer laughed, a thin and not very jovial sound. "Your first lesson in the morality of sorcery," he said dryly. "Never make a man do the work of a machine."

Two men had already emerged from a nearby shed. They were pulling a low four-wheeled cart. On the front of the cart was a grimy metallic thing, all tubing and machinery and wiring. As the two men positioned the cart under his eagle, Lou caught a whiff of a foul chemical odor that seemed the distilled essence of sorcery. One of the men disconnected the wing nozzle from his helium tank, and the other connected it to a hose from the thing on the cart.

Then he did something to the device, and a horrible loud roar rattled Lou's ears, a peal of thunder that went on and on and on, an eerily continuous explosion that jarred his teeth and hummed in his bones. A keen acrid chemical stench filled the air. Lou could see the damned stuff emerging from a pipe—evil and gray and shimmering with unnatural heat.

"Petroleum?" he shouted over the din. "Is that damned thing burning petroleum?"

The Spacer nodded mechanically as if this stinking sorcery were the most natural thing in the world. Behind the roaring sound, Lou could now detect a loud steady hiss, and he saw that his eagle wing was already visibly collapsing. He knew that it would have taken half an hour of pedaling to achieve the same result, and he could slothfully appreciate how much grunting and sweating was being saved, but it appalled him that even black scientists would spew all this poison into the air just to save a little time and honest effort. What would they be willing to do when it came to something that really mattered?

"Let's get out of here!" he shouted at the Spacer over the noise. "I don't want to have to breathe any more of this filth than I have to!" Indeed, it already seemed as if he could feel the petroleum fumes searing his lungs, blackening the fragile life-giving tissue with carcinogenic muck.

Harker smiled inanely, nodded, and loped off toward the main cabin without looking back, as if he were long accustomed to being followed without question.

Sue, who had almost seemed to be cowering in the sorcerer's shadow, fell in alongside Lou in the Spacer's wake, wrinkling her nose at the deadly stench, and trying to establish some kind of sympathetic eye contact.

Lou took her hand, but he really wasn't feeling too comradely toward her at the moment. He might have been psychically prepared to confront the karma of black science, but he certainly hadn't been prepared for the deadly chemical stink and the ear-splitting reality of sorcery actually at work.

And he didn't like the way Sue seemed to fold in on herself in the presence of Arnold Harker. She actually fucked this creature? he thought in wonder. He didn't like it. He didn't like it at all.

Arnold Harker didn't waste any time on a grand tour of the premises, nor did he give Lou any interval in which to examine his own reactions to the strange ambience of the room he took them to.

"I freely admit you've been brought here by stratagem and guile and feminine wiles," he said as soon as he had seated himself behind a cruel steel desk whose burnished top gleamed in the harsh light of the powerful electric lamp upon it. "But let me assure you that your free will and our scenario are ultimately congruent."

The way he said it reeked of an arrogant self-assurance that set Lou's teeth on edge. Indeed this whole lair seemed crafted to present an atmosphere of unnatural arts forth-rightly and proudly displayed. The chairs were all shiny steel frameworks slung with a grainless black material with the feel of leather and the faint smell of petroleum, or so it seemed to Lou as he sat gingerly down in one of them. The pictures on the walls—planet Earth floating in space, ringed and banded Saturn, something flying over a hellish landscape—seemed deliberately emblematic of black science. A mass of unfathomable electronic arcana glowered in one corner, and the whole was lit by two powerful electric lights that blazed their contempt of the energy units it cost to run them. The room's image was doubled by an immense mirror of perfect glass, turning the very space itself into a sorcerer's illusion.

Here there be sorcery, the room seemed to say, and proud of it.

"I find that pretty hard to believe," Lou finally said. "So far everything I've seen just makes me feel more whitely righteous."

"Sue has told you—"

"Sue has told me everything," Lou snapped, ostentatiously taking her hand as she settled down uneasily into the chair beside him. "Everything," he repeated, squeezing her hand and shooting her a glance of solidarity for the benefit of the Spacer. "We have no secrets from each other."

"And you've seen to that haven't you?" Sue added sardonically. "How do you like the match you've made?"

But Lou could detect no vibe of jealousy or wounded male ego. Indeed, it was hard to pick up any vibe at all from this sorcerer. "I'm glad to see the scenario is still working so nominally," he said with eerie colorlessness. "It saves me tedious explanation." Was the last a subtle little zinger? "You already know, then, what your part in the next phase is to be."

"Do I?" Lou said angrily. Harker's arrogance was beginning to sound like deliberate insult. "You seriously expect that I'll help you after what I've already seen?"

"Quite seriously," the sorcerer said, leaning back fatuously in his chair. "In fact, I can guarantee you that you are more than ready to perform the function we now require of you."

"Oh you can, can you! You're so sure you can predict everything that I'll do? You think you can run your lame games on a perfect master?"

"Precisely on a perfect master," Harker said smugly, leaning forward and trying to stare down Clear Blue Lou with those icy eyes. Oh now he thinks he can mesmerize me with eye-contact games as if I were some brain-burned mountain william, does he? Lou thought angrily. Who the hell does he think he's dealing with?

Lou broke the staring contest by deliberately smirking at Sue. "You fell for this line?" he said ironically.

Sue cringed, but that didn't seem to prick Harker's bubble either.

"I can even tell you what you'd most like to do at this moment," the black scientist said knowingly.

"You don't have to be a sorcerer to figure that out," Lou snarled.

"You'd like to give justice on Space Systems Incorporated and all its works, wouldn't you? You'd like to speak your justice upon us for all the world to hear."