Songs From the Stars (19 page)

"Starbase One," Harker said. "We'll give you a chance to inspect it before we go on to the spaceport tomorrow."

The pilot did something to the controls, and a long disgusting stream of grayish black smoke plumed out from a vent in the wing near the back of the cabin, and the eagle began sinking toward the rapidly approaching buildings.

Soon they were circling over the strangest-looking town that Lou had ever seen. A perfect square of green about the size of La Mirage seemed to have been painted on the sere valley floor. In the geometric center of the square was a huge geodesic greenhouse dome, five times the size of the Exchange and crafted of glass and metal. Long low sheds radiated out from its circumference like the metal petals of a flower. A quadrangle of big squat ugly gray buildings enclosed this weird construction.

Except for a much smaller dome of gray concrete way up in one corner of the cropland and a line of "airplanes" southeast of the center close by a large series of sheds and squat metal cylinders, the whole thing was as inorganic and symmetrical as a mathematical diagram.

And except for the eagle's nest and the concrete dome, all the buildings were connected by passageways like the links of some gigantic half-buried metal worm. A gridwork of arrow-straight concrete roadways was laid over the green area like the lines of a huge chessboard.

It was unlike any human habitation Lou had ever seen, and he couldn't even begin to guess its population.

"How many people live here?" he asked Harker.

"Almost three thousand."

"There are that many black scientists?" Sue exclaimed.

"That few," Harker said. "There's a work force of about a thousand at the spaceport and a few hundred more at scattered installations, and that's all there is of the most advanced civilization on this planet."

"That's still a lot of black scientists by my reckoning," Lou said.

"Most of us are pilots and gardeners and craftsmen and technicians," the pilot said, speaking for the first time in hours. "It takes a lot of workers to keep a modern civilization going. We can't all work on Operation Enterprise. But we all know what our work means."

"What does your work mean to you?" Lou asked ingenuously as the eagle, streaming petroleum fumes, began to sink rapidly toward a landing, for he was curious to know how a Spacer who was not a full-fledged sorcerer felt about what they were doing. The karma of the followers had as much to say as the karma of the leaders about the justice of any enterprise.

"We're building the new Age of Space," the young woman said with an idealism that seemed clear and genuine. "We're building a spaceship so that men may listen—"

"Here we are!" Harker interrupted loudly and perhaps somewhat shrilly, obviously and deliberately cutting her off. What had she been about to say? What was the sorcerer hiding?

The Spacer eagle slowly settled the last few feet to the ground as the engine died, and a horseless cart sped out of one of the sheds toward it at twice the speed of a running horse, trailing the inevitable plume of sooty poison. There were two benches under a canvas awning on the flat bed behind a grimy petroleum engine.

By now Lou found himself taking the appearance of such a thing almost casually. But what he was not ready for was the awful still heat that assaulted him once the draft of the propeller was gone.

"How do you stand this heat?" he groaned as they climbed out onto the fried brown earth. He had never known there could be heat like this—dry and windless and hot as the mouth of a furnace.

"It drops a little when the sun goes down," Harker said. "During the day, we stay indoors where it's cool and pleasant."

"Where it's what?"

But the petroleum cart had come to a halt in front of them, rumbling and rasping, heat waves shimmering above the hot metal of the engine, and Harker was already climbing up beside the driver under the inviting shade of the awning.

Lou climbed up onto the rear bench beside Sue; the sun no longer glared down on them, but the heat was not much less intense.

"Just take us to the dome and let's get indoors as quickly as possible," Harker told the driver, and a moment later the petroleum cart was tearing along up a concrete roadway toward the big greenhouse dome, the wind of passage supplying some small relief from the heat. Lou wished the driver would take his time about it. He couldn't imagine why Arnold Harker was so damned eager to bake indoors.

By the time the cart reached an entrance to the greenhouse dome, Sunshine Sue was sweating even in the bone-dry desert air, her eyes were smarting from the cruel glare of the sun, and forlorn images of cool mountains and shaded forests teased sardonically at her mind. How did the Spacers survive in this horrid climate that seemed totally unfit for the human species?

Harker opened a metal door in the side of the dome, and as they stepped inside, Sue was stunned by the sudden coolness. It should have been like the inside of an oven under the big glass bubble, where brilliant sunlight illumined endless rows of tall green corn. Instead, it must have been thirty degrees cooler inside the greenhouse, and there was a strange foreign tang to the air, an illusive wrongness she couldn't quite place.

Harker was grinning smugly at the effect this sorcery was having on his visitors. "Air conditioning," he said. "All of Starbase One is a sealed environment, something like a space station. We cool the air electrically to 70 degrees, an optimum temperature for human functioning."

"You cool the air electrically?" Sue said. "What kind of sorcery is that?"

"A spin-off from the life-support system of the Enterprise," Harker said enigmatically. "Before the Smash, every dwelling had it."

Lou was inspecting the nearest stand of corn. The plants were growing in a long shallow metal tray, and on second look, the entire floor of the dome was a series of such trays, connected by a complicated-looking system of valves and piping. "There's no soil in here!" Lou exclaimed. "These plants seem to be growing in water!"

"Actually a scientifically controlled nutrient solution," Harker said. "It maximizes yield and eliminates the absorption of radioactive isotopes from the soil. Pure cattle fodder, pure meat."

With that he led them across the floor of the greenhouse where here and there, men and women stooped like farmers among the rows of corn doing things to the valves of the piping. There was something totally un-bucolic about the scene. This didn't seem like a farm, it was more like... a food factory. Somehow, it seemed to epitomize the Spacer spirit, alienated from the natural world and yet triumphant over it.

Harker opened a door at the other side of the greenhouse, and a rich ripe manure stench assailed Sue's nostrils. She peered down the length of a long dark shed where rows of gross placid animals stood dumbly in the gloom, confined in endless tiny stalls hardly bigger than their bodies.

"Cattle," Harker said. "We feed them hydroponically grown corn and distilled water, and the result is beef fit for human consumption. Milk and butter and cheese too. Concentrated protein."

"They don't look very happy to me," Lou said dubiously.

Harker eyed him peculiarly. "They're just dumb animals," he said uncomprehendingly. "Hardly capable of either happiness or its opposite."

Then he closed the door on the unsavory spectacle and the smell of shit, and led them around the curve of the dome wall to yet another door, and into a long tunnel with curved walls of some dull silvery metal brightly lit by a line of electric globes running down the center of the ceiling. "This leads to the living quarters," he said. After about forty yards, the tunnel opened out into a giant hallway, a long, wide indoor concourse that seemed like a grim Version of the main street of some small Aquarian town.

Brilliant sunlight streamed into the gallery from a row of high windows along the right-hand wall which, however, afforded no view of the world outside. The walls themselves were painted forest green and festooned with unhealthy-looking potted ivy. The ceiling was sky blue, and the tile floor a simulated earth brown. A line of shops and public rooms ran the length of the left-hand wall sans emblems or signs or idiosyncratic embellishment.

"The habitat is an entirely self-contained living module," Harker said proudly as he led them past a dining room, clothing shops, a nearly empty tavern. "The amenities are down here on the first level, and the upper floors contain housing for three thousand people."

"You mean all your people live indoors all of the time?" Lou asked incredulously.

Harker nodded. "This optimized habitat is preferable to the hostile outside environment," he said. "It's also an ideal model of what self-contained space habitats will someday be like, a foretaste of the human future."

"Let us hope not," Lou muttered sourly, and Sue could sympathize with what he felt.

You had to admire the ability of the Spacers to craft this little self-contained world and maintain a bubble of habitability in a hostile environment. You had to admire it, but she couldn't imagine how anyone could like it.

It didn't feel like indoors, but it didn't feel like the outdoors either. Yet people wandered around in here as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Young, old, men, women, wearing utilitarian clothing of an almost uniform design, they went about their business like the folk of any natural town, to the pervasive but subtle rhythm of music that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, so soft and bland that it took Sue long minutes to even notice it. Clean, pallid of complexion but healthy and purposeful looking, moving along to ghostly music they probably weren't even aware of, the inhabitants of Starbase One seemed almost like an idealized version of humanity, fitting denizens of this flat simulation of reality. Like the environment itself, they were clean and shiny and spotless; not a dirty face or a grimy hand or a soiled garment was to be seen. Crowded though it was, murmuring with unreal ghostly music, the place somehow didn't seem lived in, and the people themselves seemed to have banished the dirt and sweat of living from their own karma.

There was no word for the strange feeling this aroused in Sunshine Sue. Admiration mixed with disgust. Superiority combined with personal diminishment. Like the soulless magic of the musicianless music, it seemed somehow coldly seductive and utterly repellent at the same time.

It had been an amazing display of the unguessed wonders of black science and a dismaying exhibition of its twisted spirit. The more that Clear Blue Lou saw, the more knowledge he obtained, the less he understood of the soul of Space Systems Incorporated.

Arnold Harker proudly conducted them on a grand tour of this little secret world of sorcery. Huge windowless manufactories where teams of craftsmen and incomprehensible machinery created the electronic components that later turned up in the goods flowing out of La Mirage. Smelters for steel and aluminum and copper. Workshops turning out "airplanes" and petroleum carts and mighty machineries.

Electric lights were everywhere. Tools and machinery were run by electricity, the air in every building was cooled by electrical power, and even stairs were replaced by cable-lifts powered by huge electrical engines.

Starbase One was an overwhelming demonstration of the wonders that forthright use of black science could create. Given enough electrical power, it seemed there was nothing that the Spacers could not do to lessen human effort and increase human ease. Out of the deliberate and systematic defiance of the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, sorcery had built a little sealed world where magic seemed utterly ordinary after a while.

Anything that can be done, will be done, seemed to be the rule, and there seemed to be no consideration whatsoever of the karmic consequences. Starbase One must use more electricity than all of Aquaria and then some. Lou had to admit that this naked and lavish sorcery had created a world that appealed to his distaste for wasted person effort. "Never make a man do the work of a machine" had been Arnold Harker's "first lesson in the morality of sorcery." In Star-base One, this seemed to have been pushed to its logical extreme: "Make a machine do any work that makes a man sweat" seemed to be the true principle here, and if he didn't feel the temptation of that, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou.

But if he didn't wonder at what cost all this wonderful electrical power was produced, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either. And if he hadn't guessed the answer long before he was told, he would have been just plain stupid.

The climax of Harker's day tour was a tense dinner in a grim little commissary with three of Starbase One's "Section Managers." The food, like the irritatingly anonymous background music, might have been made in one of the Spacer factories—six platters of cow steak, fried potatoes and corn, identical down to the shape of the steak and the size of the portions.

"The diet of Starbase One is a scientific balance of all necessary nutrients," Life Support Manager Marta Blaine assured him as he picked listlessly at the grim fare. A plain-looking woman of middle age, she shoveled away the stuff with all the gustatory delight that this glum endorsement could be expected to call forth. Harold Clarke, the tall, blond, sallow Export Manager, and Douglas Willard, the wizened, quite ancient-looking Enterprise Production Manager, also packed it away without seeming to taste it. Only Harker himself seemed to display any lip-smacking enthusiasm, and that seemed calculated for effect.

Lou found himself laying back sourly and letting Sue ask most of the obvious questions.