Songs From the Stars (17 page)

"Congratulations on your incredible insight," Lou said sarcastically.

Harker leaned back and smiled with loathsomely crafted warmth. "And so you shall," he said. "For that's what the Company requires of you, Clear Blue Lou—your justice on Space Systems Incorporated and all our works, freely spoken to your own people, after you have seen all and had all your questions answered. A justice we agree to accept without condition. Surely no true perfect master could refuse a request like that..."

"Huh?" Lou grunted. "What?"

"Consider it a formal request," Harker said blandly, now taking an open amusement in Lou's befuddlement. "Will you grant it?"

Lou looked at Sue. She seemed as dumbfounded as he was. He eyed Harker narrowly, his mind scrabbling for psychic purchase. "I don't get it," he said. "Surely you must know what my justice would have to be. I don't believe you, Harker. If you were telling the truth, all you've done would have been unnecessary. All you would have had to do was ask."

Harker shook his head slowly. "I think not," he said. "You've just admitted that you've already reached a conclusion based on insufficient data. A conclusion based on ignorance and shun us as evil. No one likes to be and legend and foolish superstition. No doubt the scenario thus far has already shaken many of your beliefs and assumptions..."

The sorcerer rose, leaned his hands on the steel desk for support, and loomed forward, staring at Lou with what suddenly seemed like a strange dreamy sincerity. "But I tell you that the truths you must learn to render true justice will make all that has gone before seem like sleepwalking," he said. "To judge so-called sorcery, you must share our knowledge and know the inner heart of black science. Do you dare do that, perfect master of the Clear Blue Way?"

He subsided back into his chair. "Do you dare not to?"

"You know the answer to that!" Lou blurted. "Of course, you know the answer to that," he muttered. For that was precisely the karmic rebirth task set for both of them by implacable destiny. By destiny? Or by the Spacer scenario? Or were they somehow the same thing? Reflexively he squeezed Sue's hand. He was beginning to see how this vibrationless man had been able to bed her.

"Just what are you proposing to show me?" he asked.

"Everything. The Company installations beyond the Wastes and all that we do there."

"Beyond the Wastes?" Sue exclaimed. "What lies beyond the Wastes?"

"The world," Harker said pregnantly. "And the greater reality beyond."

"And after you've shown us your world, you'll accept my justice on it?" Lou said skeptically. "Why should I believe you'd do that?"

Harker sighed. He seemed to shrink in on himself. Suddenly there seemed to be something quite fragile about him.

"Because we believe what we're doing is right," he said plaintively. "Because we know that what we are doing must be done. Because we believe that you will be convinced of this once you know the whole truth..."

The sorcerer leaned forward and cocked his head ruefully. "We do have feelings, you know," he said heavily, as if he felt it would be a cosmic revelation. "For centuries we've lived with our knowledge and kept it alive, and enabled your backward society to prosper with gifts of technology for which we've asked nothing." His face twisted with bitterness and his voice hardened. "And you? You call us sorcerers and shun us as evil. No one likes to be hated, least of all benefactors."

He blinked, as if catching himself in a persona he had not intended to reveal. All at once he was the hard-eyed sorcerer again, sure and proud. "But now a great new age is coming and it must be shared and accepted by all. The superstition and ignorance which cripples our species must be annihilated before we can face the stars. Our wounded race must be healed before it can transcend its lowly state. In your terms, black science must be harmonized with the Great Way in the eyes of your people or all of us will be unworthy."

For the first time, Lou glimpsed something of the natural man behind the sorcerer's persona. And he could not deny that there was something noble there—or at least something that believed sincerely in its own nobility. Great would be a healing that harmonized sorcery with the Way! Precisely necessary seemed this healing to his own rebirth and to Sue's. Harker had pointed clearly to the wound in the very heart of humanity's karma, to the paradox from which all disharmony flowed. And he had challenged Lou to heal it. He really is placing his trust in me, Lou thought, twisted with arrogant pride though that trust might be.

"You know very well I have to do what you ask," Lou said, in a tone of quiet resignation.

"The scenario is behavioristic," Harker said. "But your free judgment nevertheless remains a factor. In time you will understand that. We leave tonight."

"Tonight?" Sue said. "How? For where?"

"For the Company installations beyond the Sierras. By eagle."

"But no eagle can cross the Sierras! And no eagle can fly at night!"

The sorcerer laughed. "No means one thing to you and quite another to us," he said. "That will be your second lesson in the morality of sorcery."

"I'm beginning to wonder what I've gotten us into," Sunshine Sue said as she and Lou sat together on the floor of the common room at the end of the cabin hall, much like the two mountain williams she had encountered the last time she was here, hunkering together over a phantom campfire, trying to ignore the black vibes that surrounded them.

The empty room, with its blatantly inorganic furniture of false leather and angular steel, its all-too-real-looking pictures of unreal places, seemed to be trying to warp them into another world, and one that seemed devoid of all comfort. Outside the windows, the night was a black void which her mind peopled with demons from the world within.

Lou was staring out into the darkness with an unreadable expression. "Well we're going to find out," he said. "As we knew we were fated to."

"Or as we were forced to."

Lou sighed, turned to her, shrugged. "Maybe the astrologers are right," he said abstractedly. "Maybe our destinies are preordained in the stars. Yours and mine and the Spacers'. Maybe all of us are forced to do what we must. Maybe human free will is an illusion. Maybe what makes the Spacers sorcerers is that they're willing to admit it."

Sue cocked her head at him speculatively, not liking the deeps to which he seemed to be sinking. How much do I really know about this man after all? she wondered. "Pretty weird talk coming from the perfect master of the Clear Blue Way," she said.

"I'd say we're in a pretty weird place, lady!"

"And I have a feeling it's going to get a lot weirder," Sue said, "without you drifting off into space with these sorcerers."

"I'm sure I can resist the temptation at least as well as you did," Lou said airily. But was there a hint of wounded male ego behind it?

"You're really jealous because I got it off with Arnold Harker?" she said. "How un-Clear Blue of you!"

Lou squinted at her. "Jealous?" he snorted. "You've got to be kidding! It's painfully obvious that he makes your flesh crawl. But I must admit that it bothers me that he was able to bed you with your feeling that way about him."

"Sorcery," Sue said. "I can't explain it. I don't understand myself."

"Uh-huh," Lou said, putting a protective arm around her shoulder. "What really bothers me is the feeling that any mindfuck good enough to work on you might just be good enough to work on me. Uh... not in the carnal sense, of course."

Sue started at the sound of footsteps coming down the hall, and they both turned to see who was coming. Since Harker had left them to their own devices, the only people they had seen were the three Spacers in the little commissary where they had been offered an unsettling dinner of some strange savory roast hefty enough to be deer but of a light and subtle flavor she had never experienced before. Strange droning rhythmic music seemed to emanate from two small boxes near the ceiling which looked something like large radio speaker grids.

"Where's the music coming from?" Lou had asked conversationally around his first mouthful of meat. "Where are you hiding the band?"

The three Spacers laughed patronizingly. "From the speakers, of course," the balding one said, nodding toward the two boxes high up on the far wall. "Authentic re-recording of an ancient pre-Smash tape fragment. It's called 'raga' or 'reggae' or something like that. Do you like it?"

"And what's this stuff?" Sue asked, waving a forkful of meat.

"Beef," the tall thin Spacer said with a grin. "A good cut too, don't you think?"

She dropped her fork. Lou nearly choked on a morsel he was chewing. The three Spacers seemed highly amused.

"Beef?" she gasped. "Cow meat?" Once, she knew, cow meat had been a staple of the pre-Smash diet, and even the milk of the cow had been eaten. But after the Smash, carcinogenic poison had concentrated in the flesh and milk of cows, making them unfit for consumption, and extinct, or so she had thought.

"You're feeding us poison!" Sue said, staring in disgust and bewilderment as the Spacers continued to devour the cow flesh with relish. "You're eating it yourselves!"

"Tastes good, doesn't it?" the chubby one said slyly.

"High in essential amino acids."

"Perfectly harmless—to us," the balding Spacer said, and the three of them broke up into hootingly superior laughter.

That had ended dinner, and it had also ended their contact with the strange birds that roosted in this black eagle's nest. The Spacers seemed to be keeping away from them—perhaps under orders—and after swallowing cow flesh, Sue yearned not for their company.

Now, however, Arnold Harker was coming down the hall toward them with purposeful strides. "Our eagle is about to arrive," he said as they scrambled to their feet like country cousins. "We'll be leaving in a few minutes, but I thought you'd be interested in seeing it arrive."

"I've seen eagles land a thousand times," Lou said offhandedly.

"Ah, but you've never seen one of our blackbirds of the night, now have you?" Harker said, shooing them toward the back door leading to the big open yard behind the cabin. "You've never seen sorcery like this."

Outside, the air was chill and thin and clear, and half the starry sky was hidden by the great wall of rock that loomed above, the impenetrable ramparts at the edge of the world. Crickets chirped their offbeat chorus. Something hooted far away.

"Listen," Harker said. "Can you hear it?"

Behind the quiet night sounds, Sue thought she heard a faint thrumming at the edge of audibility. As she strained her ears to catch it, the sound seemed to get stronger. Stronger and stronger still, till she realized it wasn't close by and faint but distant, and loud, and rapidly approaching.

Then the sound level seemed to suddenly jump, reverberating through the canyons below, and the black shape of an eagle became visible, silhouetted against the stars and coming toward them with impossible speed from the northeast, dropping in for a landing.

It was huge—quadruple the wingspan of an ordinary eagle and then some—and it was unlike any solar eagle Sue had ever seen. Instead of a saddle, there was some kind of closed cabin slung close under the wing, and at the rear of the cabin a huge propeller, a great monster whirling at such speed that it should have taken twenty men at the pedals to run it.

As it eased down into the yard in front of them, the draft of the propeller kicking up a storm of twigs and small stones, Sue got a sickening whiff of burning petroleum, and she realized that the propeller was in fact driven by a huge and baleful engine mounted on the rear of the cabin, the source of the awful din. Foul hydrocarbons and metallic oxides gushed into the atmosphere from a vent in the bottom of the wing even after the racket ceased and the propeller stopped turning. The gigantic eagle wing seemed to sag, and the cabin came to rest on four little wheels. The eagle wing held its shape even after its lift was gone; the cabin was connected to the wing by rigid metal struts, and the wing itself apparently had an internal framework.

"What in the black pits of hell is that?" Sue muttered.

"A true flying machine," Harker said proudly as three Spacers trotted out to the thing with their packs. "What is called an 'airplane.' It doesn't need helium for lift and it doesn't need the sun for power and it can fly nearly sixty miles in an hour ten thousand feet above the ground."

"All by burning petroleum," Lou said angrily.

"All by burning petroleum," Harker repeated enthusiastically, perhaps deliberately mistaking Lou's tone. "The petroleum engine not only drives the powerful propeller, it provides two forms of lift. The hot exhaust inflates the wing, and the strong draft under it enhances the airfoil effect. This is how men were meant to fly in the atmosphere!"

"Assuming they had any atmosphere left to fly in," Lou snapped. "It's hard to believe even you would be this black."

"Most of the exhaust gasses are trapped in the wing," Harker said somewhat defensively. "We only have to vent them when we want to lose altitude. Besides, by now there are less pollutants left in the atmosphere than you people think."

"So you might as well pump some more carcinogens into the air," Lou said angrily. "This really is evil."

"You promised not to give justice until you saw everything," Harker reminded him more belligerently.