Songs From the Stars (22 page)

Reeling from the heat of the short walk to the habitat building, reeling too from the adrenaline backlash of her abortive fight with Lou, Sunshine Sue was too grateful for the cool air inside to think much about the energy units her ease was costing, and she was too curious about Arnold Harker's promised cosmic secret to think much about justice or righteous whiteness either.

Harker led them down a long gallery similar to the one in the Starbase One habitat, but here there was just a series of big, secretive closed doors. What few Spacers were in evidence seemed to be rushing from place to place with preternatural intensity and purpose. There was an exciting psychic charge in the chemically tanged air unlike anything Sue had previously experienced.

They took a cablelift to an upper floor in silence, and Harker didn't speak again until they were walking down a long branching hallway. "The space station we're going to is called the Big Ear," he said. "It had a specific mission and just as the first Age of Space was tearing itself to pieces, that mission was successful. Then the bombs fell, and the Age of Space died, and the Big Ear was cut off from resupply or rescue. The world destroyed itself on the brink of true history, and for centuries we've been crawling in the dirt instead of listening to the stars."

Harker opened a door and led them into a small room dominated by a strange metal console topped by a rounded square of pale gray-green glass.

"The Big Ear was listening for signals from beings living on planets of other stars," the sorcerer said in a voice deliberately pregnant with drama. "Thinking creatures like ourselves so far away that their transmissions could take centuries to reach us traveling at the speed of light itself. Creatures thousands or millions of years older and wiser than us. Beings as far above us as we are above a frog."

He moved over to the console and began doing things to the controls. "This is a television monitor," he said. "A device for reproducing pictures broadcast like radio or recorded as electromagnetic patterns on tape. What you are about to see was recorded centuries ago by the Big Ear and retransmitted to the Company just before our species smashed itself into the dust and left them there to die in space. It was broadcast centuries before that by unknown beings on a planet circling a star so far from here that those who finally received it were not yet born when it began its immense journey through time and space. Songs from the stars to us poor earthbound creatures—the knowledge of a million years of science, if only we can listen and understand."

Suddenly, incredibly, the plate of pale gray-green glass became a wondrous window into a strange miniature world. Tiny feathery creatures of pale lavender floated around a spire of amber crystal.

And then Sue heard the song.

It was like the piping of many metal insects whistling random patterns composed of four pure tones, idiot music without tune or chord. It was the most moronic music Sue had ever heard; it bounced her ear around with nothing to cling to in a way that made her head reel. And yet something about it captured her soul.

"What is it? What are those creatures?"

"We don't know," Harker admitted. "Only a small portion of what the Big Ear recorded was ever transmitted to Earth, and all that's survived are these few pitiful fragments."

The view through the magic window suddenly changed—scintillating specks of multicolored snow seemed to flicker on and off in synchronization with the bizarre tuneless music. When the next picture appeared, Sue realized what she was seeing—not a window into a miniature world, but a reduced-scale moving picture of something huge.

Deep green canyons and rolling red hills under a wrong-looking sky the color of green grapes fleeced with purplish clouds. Above this strange country floated... what? A huge disc of burnished copper with a forest of multicolored crystal spires growing out of its upper surface. Were they buildings? Was it some kind of flying town?

Then the scene dissolved into colored snow again. A moment later, an interlocked double helix appeared, like two red worms copulating. Thinner lines of black, white, lavender and blue formed a spiderweb of light connecting the two lines of the double spiral.

More multicolored snow. What looked like a living world turning slowly in starry blackness. More scintillating sparkles. Another world, this one circled by three concentric pale white rings. An endless string of emeralds spiraled up from the surface at great speed, and then the first jewel on this invisible string flashed by—a glowing green cylinder with wings and windows along its length.

Another confetti blizzard. Creatures like blue mushrooms with bright red eyes dancing a pavane with hairy brown trees. A great cliff of yellow ice splintering and crashing down into a deep blue sea. The head of a yellow bird with one huge and horribly human-looking eye. A bright red cube whirling in space about its diagonal axis. A string of beads or planets rotating around a black vortex that sucked at the eyes.

And all the while, the strange song from the stars whistled its random beeps in Sue's brain, pattern and meaning seeming to flit teasingly just beyond the grasp of her awareness.

A song from the stars... she thought in wonder. A message from thinking creatures that aren't human. She tried to sync herself into the inhuman music, hoping that a clue to its meaning might be found, but it was impossible either to find a pattern or quite believe there was none.

"It doesn't seem like music at all..." she muttered.

"We don't think it is music," Harker said. "More like some kind of code we haven't been able to solve..."

Then the sound suddenly stopped, and the window to the stars once more was just a plate of pale gray-green glass.

Harker sighed. "All we have are these poor few fragments," he said. "But up there on the Big Ear are many more recordings and the means with which to listen for more. Would these star beings send messages to us over trillions of miles and centuries of time if they were not meant to teach us secrets beyond our present comprehension? They can't be meaningless! Up there beyond the sky, beings a million years wiser than us are trying to speak to us. Beings who can teach us. Who can heal us. Who can show us the way to a new Age of Space far surpassing that which the stupidity of our ancestors destroyed."

The sorcerer's voice hardened, and his eyes challenged the perfect master of the Clear Blue Way. "Isn't that worth breaking any petty law of men for?" he said. "Isn't it worth any risk or danger? Does it not transcend our very concept of humanity itself? Will you not willingly help us now? Can you dismiss this as sorcery and turn your back on the Galactic Way?"

Sue watched Lou staring back at Harker and wondered what he would decide, wondered if this moment would bring the parting of their ways.

For in her heart of hearts, she knew that for her there was no turning back now. At the core of sorcery did lay something which transcended all that the world thought it knew of black or white, good or evil, right or wrong. Atomic power, black science, petroleum, the law of muscle, sun, wind and water, cancer, pollution, death and destruction, the Great Way itself—how petty all the things of men seemed in the face of this incredible unknown. How irrelevant. How small and dim.

Even her cherished global electronic village paled into nothingness when confronted by this broadcast from the stars. She had thought that a world culture linked by an electronic network would bring about a higher state of human consciousness? Must not these songs from the stars be part of some network linking beings of many worlds? The level of consciousness that implied quite literally dwarfed any human conception. No spiritually alive soul could resist that siren song. Least of all Sunshine Sue.

Even less, she hoped, the perfect master of the Clear Blue Way.

Lou's eyes slowly narrowed. His expression softened. He shrugged almost imperceptibly. He sighed. "You win," he told Harker softly. "Let's go somewhere and talk."

The tension whooshed out of Sue in an audible sigh. And so do I win, she thought, taking Lou's hand. We're still in this together. All the way to the stars.

Clear Blue Lou had kept his thoughts to himself until they reached the spaceport's greenhouse dome, where, he had hoped, the Way would seem clearer amidst growing things within sight of the sky. But this environment only seemed to epitomize the karmic paradox at the heart of black science. Here grew not a monoculture of corn but long rows of mixed vegetables spreading their leafy arms to catch the life-giving sun, an ecosphere in miniature, an experiment in artificial self-sufficiency, a dry run for the food supply of some future city in space, or so Harker told them, a piece of the natural world under glass. But these growing things were rooted not in the natural soil of the earth but in vats of chemicals crafted by the mind of man. They were separated from the true sky by glass and aluminum and the air was cooled by atomic power. Beyond the glass ceiling, he could see the sky, and beyond the sky lay hidden worlds beyond human comprehension.

Like the Spacers themselves, this garden was walled off from the natural world in a howling desert. Like the Spacers, wrongness here seemed somehow to serve an ultimate good. Knowledge wrought wonders, but its spirit seemed dead. This sterile indoor garden was emblematic of the sourness of black science's karma as manifested in the lives of the sorcerers themselves. Yet every instinct told him that the knowledge they sought was good. How could this be? How could the knowledge of beings a million years wiser than men fail to enhance the human spirit?

Unless, he thought somberly, the human spirit is truly unworthy. We certainly proved ourselves unworthy the first time we had this karmic opportunity, poisoning our planet on the brink of a great new age! If we confront higher beings now riding another wave of bad karma and shitty vibes, might we not get what we deserve the second time around too?

But if we refuse the challenge of cosmic knowledge, will we not have judged ourselves unworthy before the fact?

"True justice can never flow from willful ignorance," he finally said, just as Sue was beginning to regard him a bit peculiarly. "Least of all from willful ignorance of the Way of beings greater than ourselves."

The tension broke. Sue moved closer to him. Harker seemed to visibly relax. "Then you'll help us?" he said. "You'll make your people understand?"

Make my people understand? Lou thought sardonically. What I don't understand myself? "I'll speak my justice now," he said carefully, "and I'll live by it if you will."

"I'm ready to listen," Harker said just as carefully, and Lou wondered whether Space Systems Incorporated was really willing to abide by justice other than that which they assumed their scenarios had created.

"Then hear my justice," he said. "You're right, we must listen to the songs from the stars, the Enterprise must be launched. Knowing that superior beings are broadcasting to us, we would only deny inevitable destiny by shutting our ears. It would be a suicide of the spirit. So I will serve this cause however I can."

Harker broke into a wide smile and offered his hand, but Lou held up an admonishing finger. "However," he said, "while whatever evil that's already been done cannot be undone, from here on in, Operation Enterprise must remain within the Way."

"What does that mean?" Harker asked, eyeing Lou suspiciously.

"It means that the spaceship must be launched and returned to Earth within the law of muscle, sun, wind and water," Lou told him. "No jet engines on the launch or recovery eagles. No burning of petroleum. Only the sun may be used to power the eagles."

"You don't know what you're saying!" Harker exclaimed. "It would reduce the reliability of the system by half! It would double the danger!"

"I know exactly what I'm saying," Lou told him sharply. "But if we can't confront the beings of the stars with clean karma, we'll be as unworthy as the sorcerers of the Smash were, and we'd deserve to suffer their fate. We must risk as much danger to reach your Big Ear within the Way as you have made the world risk with your atomic power and petroleum. Justice demands it on more levels than one."

"Easy enough for you to spout such moralistic drivel!" Harker snapped. "But I have to fly the Enterprise, it'd be my life you'd be risking for the sake of your righteous whiteness, not your own!"

"Oh, we'll be going with you," Lou said airily. He hadn't exactly planned to say it, but as soon as he did, it seemed utterly foreordained all along.

"WHAT?" Harker shouted.

Sue's eyes widened for an instant, but it was merely a reflex gesture. "Right!" she said, grasping Lou's hand with a self-satisfied grin. "You dragged us into this and now you're stuck with us."

"You're serious?" Harker said incredulously. "Three days ago I was a sorcerer and you were superstitious Aquarian primitives, and now you're ready to go into space!"

"You underestimate Aquaria and you overestimate yourselves!" Lou snapped. He had had just about enough of this superior attitude. "You really think you're fitter to understand superior beings that we are? You know a few evil things that we don't and you're ready to use them, but I'm not exactly awed by your wisdom or envious of your karma. Superior beings must be in harmony with the Way, a harmony deeper than my own, and certainly deeper than yours. Otherwise, they wouldn't be so superior."

"You really so sure about that, Lou?" Sue asked somewhat dubiously. "Couldn't they be smarter than we are without being wiser? Couldn't they be geniuses of evil?"