Songs From the Stars (2 page)

"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 trans-human aeons. The Smash had not touched it. Even the awful black science of the pre-Smash Americans ad 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 unnamable 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.