Songs From the Stars (23 page)

"That doesn't feel right," Lou told her. "But if it should turn out to be true, then don't you think they should be judged by a perfect master, not a sorcerer? You can't judge the sweetness of celestial music with a morally deaf ear."

"Now who's being arrogant?" Harker said grimly.

Lou sighed. He stared at Harker, trying to reach the human brother that surely must exist behind the cold sorcerer's eyes. "Look," he said, "you went to a lot of trouble to convince me to walk your path, and you asked for my justice on it. Well, how can I speak justice truly until I've followed that path to the end?"

"You're really willing to do it?" Harker said more softly. "You're willing to trust your life to our machineries to listen to the songs from the stars?"

"Aren't you?" Sue said.

"You too? And you're willing to make the risk that much greater to satisfy your criteria of righteous whiteness?"

"Lou's followed my way this far," Sue said, "and I'm willing to follow his the rest of the way. We're in this together. The three of us, like it or not."

"If we're willing to trust our lives to your science, then what does it make you if you don't have the courage td trust your fate to my justice?" Lou asked the Spacer. "We dare what you dare. Aren't you man enough to dare what we dare?"

Arnold Harker sighed. Somehow, in this moment, he seemed small and sad, diminished in spirit. How stunted was a soul that could not envision in others a spirit as daring as his own! How chastened when confronted with the reality.

Harker paused, as if pondering his decision, but Lou sensed that it was an empty gesture. For the sorcerer himself was now a captive of his own scenario, the scenario that had brought the three of them to this fateful nexus. Perhaps it had never been his scenario after all but fate's scenario, the inevitable destiny of the three of them, written in the stars.

"Very well," Harker said sharply, as if pretending that the logic of his own will had delivered up its decision, "perhaps it was meant to be. We will honor our promise to accept your justice." His expression narrowed and he regarded the two of them shrewdly. "Provided you fulfill your end of the bargain."

"Bargain?" Lou snapped. "You don't bargain with justice."

"Call it a necessary task then," Harker said. "What would happen if your people learned that black science was launching a spaceship to reach a pre-Smash space station to talk to beings from the stars?"

Lou shuddered. "There'd be a jihad," he said. "All the Rememberer pogroms rolled into one and set aflame. The spaceship will have to be launched in secret, much as I—"

"And when it returns?" Harker snapped. "Would you have us keep that secret from Aquaria too?"

Lou fell silent. He had nothing to say to that!

"Maybe you underestimate us too," Harker said almost imploringly. "We don't seek secret knowledge from the stars to enhance our own power. Far from it, we seek knowledge with which to heal our whole planet and raise our fallen species from the dust. So what we bring back from the Big Ear must be shared and accepted by all or it will be useless." He shook his head sadly. "Will your people accept the whiteness of science brought back in secret by sorcery? Will they even believe that it came from the stars?"

"They'll believe my justice when I speak it..." Lou said without much confidence.

"Really? When you reveal that you've secretly flown into space with sorcerers? Now perhaps you overestimate yourself..."

Lou sighed. "So what are you asking me to do?" he asked quietly.

"Harmonize Operation Enterprise with the Way in the eyes of your people as the scenario calls for," Harker said.

"You don't ask too much, do you?" Lou said dryly. "Does your scenario tell you how I'm supposed to do it?" He shrugged. "I just don't see how it's possible to remove the odor of sorcery from Operation Enterprise before the spaceship returns, and even then—"

"But I do," Sue suddenly said. Lou saw that she had a strange faraway look in her eyes. But there was nothing dreamy about it at all; a sardonic pucker twisted her lips, and the vibes she was giving off were down and dirty.

"What if Aquaria believed that the Enterprise itself came from the stars?" she said slowly. "What if superior beings from space landed in La Mirage?"

"Huh?" Lou goggled at her. "What are you talking about?" he said. "That just isn't going to happen."

Sue laughed. "Unless we make it happen, love," she said.

Harker looked at her most peculiarly. "And you call us sorcerers?" he said. "You're going to convince your people that the Enterprise comes from the stars? What kind of... sorcery is that?"

"My kind, Arnold," Sue said smugly. "A long-lost software science of the ancients called 'media hype.' By this art, the networks were able to create unreal events called 'happenings' more cogent than reality itself. I've never tried it before, but I think I can make it work."

Lou eyed her narrowly, with a sardonic uneasy awe not entirely untinged with a certain sincerity. For she had reminded him that she did in fact possess a kind of lore beyond his knowledge, that together they had walked beyond the parameters of the Clear Blue Way and into the karmically clouded unknown. Perhaps it was her turn to lead and his turn to follow. Certainly he saw no clear path through this part of the woods.

He grimaced owlishly at her with a little shrug. "You're the sorcerer now, lady," he said.

"From the time the rockets fire till we make orbit, the preprogrammed onboard computer flies her," Arnold Harker said, patting the console between their acceleration couches. "It takes over again on the way back as soon as we clear the Ear and key up the re-entry program."

Sitting in the cabin of the Enterprise amidst all the electronic arcana, Clear Blue Lou regarded this latest wonder dubiously. "You're telling me that this thing flies itself?"

"We're talking about reaction times measured in fractions of a second and speeds measured in thousands of miles an hour," the sorcerer said. "No human has reaction times like that. Of course the launch and recovery eagles have to be flown manually because—"

"Because no machine can feel the wind and the sun and the air and use them with the spirit of a bird."

"You would put it that way," Harker said sourly.

It had been Harker who had first suggested that it would be a good idea for Lou to learn enough to serve as back-up pilot, in case of need, and Lou who had been somewhat daunted by the idea that he might learn enough sorcery to master black science's most advanced piece of wizardry. But now that Lou had learned enough to comprehend what he was shown in his own terms and speak his mind on the sorcerer's world as a perfect master and a natural man, the Spacer was getting a bit testy. And taking orders from Sue hadn't helped his disposition much either.

"The launch eagle will be flown by its own pilot in a small pod so that it can be returned to the spaceport after it drops the Enterprise," Harker continued, after Lou refused to rise to the bait. He fingered a series of small levers arranged in easy hand's reach of each other. "These are the recovery eagle wing controls for steering and warpage. Each one is the electronic equivalent of the corresponding control line on an ordinary solar eagle, so you'd have no trouble flying that if you had to."

He frowned. "In fact, since you're forcing us to use solar propellers, you could probably fly the damn thing at least as well as I can," he said.

Lou nodded but refrained from making another Clear Blue remark. In fact, he was finding that it took less skill to master black science than white, once you shoved moral considerations out of the picture. Instead of yanking control lines with both hands and some muscle as with a solar eagle, you did the same thing with the fingers of one hand through the muscle-magnifying magic of electricity. Instead of pedaling like a son of a bitch to kill lift, you simply threw a switch and let an electric compressor do all the work. Yeah, he thought, I'm sure I could fly the recovery eagle as well as you can.

"You could even fly the Enterprise back for orbit if you had to," Harker told him, poising his finger above a button on the computer console. "Just hit this button and call up the preprogrammed re-entry sequence. The computer will set the attitude, wait for the launch window, fire the rockets, control the hypersonic glide, deploy the drogues, and then pop the recovery eagle. That's all there is to it."

"Got it," Lou said briskly. "What about maneuvering in space itself?"

Harker regarded him dubiously. "Getting a little ambitious, aren't you?" he said.

Lou shrugged. "I'm probably never going to have to do any of this," he said. "But if I'm going to be gray enough to trust my fate to your machine, I might as well be gray enough to know how it works."

Harker scowled, but then he shrugged and proceeded to show Lou the space maneuvering system. Once in orbit, you turned on something called the acquisition radar, then called up another program on the computer, and the Enterprise flew itself to the target. For close maneuvering, there was a set of levers that fired short bursts on steering rockets. You used them to point the nose where you wanted to go and then gave the main rockets a short burst.

"It's really not as hard as it sounds," Harker concluded.

"Seems easy enough to me," Lou said, "with a machine doing your thinking for you."

"Computers don't—"

"I know, I know, computers don't think!-" Lou interrupted, not wanting to hear that lecture again. Harker had explained it to him often enough already. Computers didn't think, they just stored the thoughts of men as "programs" to be released as needed. But from the point of view of the pilot, the dead machine did function like a living mind. In some ways, this was the most arcane sorcery of all, more mysterious and amazing than atomic power, of manufactured air, or indeed the spaceship itself.

The machineries of sorcery were relatively easy to master, but the spirit of them remained elusive. Indeed, they almost seemed deliberately crafted to be used without psychic connection, as if on some level beyond their own understanding, the Spacers feared psychic contamination by too intimate a relationship between the natural man and their magicks. Aside from the wound to his ego, perhaps the reverse of this was why working with Sue on her magic so troubled Arnold Harker. For she was using machineries she didn't understand to craft something psychic beyond the black scientist's comprehension.

And for that matter, perhaps beyond mine, Lou admitted to himself.

A male Spacer poked his head into the open hatch behind them. "Sunshine Sue wants to see you in her media shop," he told Harker. "She says it's important."

Harker seemed to draw in on himself. "All right, all right," he said petulantly, "I'll be right there." He climbed out of his acceleration couch and led Lou out the hatch into the searing desert sun. He paused at the bottom of the ladder as Lou descended, staring up at the bulk of the spaceship and shaking his head.

"Do you really understand what she's doing?" he said sourly.

Craftsmen were crawling all over the Enterprise with brushes and paint. Half the body of the spaceship and one whole wing were already a bright Sunshine yellow. Other craftsmen were installing banks of electric lights on the lower surfaces of the wings.

Lou shrugged. "She's explained as much of it to you as she has to me," he said.

The Enterprise and the launch eagle, made glorious and mysterious by all this strange stagecraft, would appear in the sky as the fulfillment of Sue's own self-created prophecy and summon men to listen to the stars with trumpets of heavenly glory. They would ride into space not in an evil portent of black science but in a chariot of Sunshine Yellow borne by a Clear Blue eagle, on a wave of good karma.

This would be the "happening"—good karma crafted out of bad by the science of "media hype." How the illusion would be brought about, Lou was beginning to understand. But the color of Sue's magic was harder for him to fathom. By convincing people that bad karma was good, it would seem that she would create good karma itself, or so she claimed. But how could sour karma be sweetened by a lie? It seemed both possible and impossible at the same time.

Harker eyed him suspiciously. "But you two are... lovers," he said. "And you're a perfect master, you're supposed to be an expert on the things of the spirit. You're telling me that this 'media hype' is beyond your understanding?"

Lou laughed. "It's sorcery to me," he said, shrugging.

Harker shook his head ruefully. "It may be sorcery to you," he said, "but it's certainly not science to me."

Lou smiled at him fatuously. "Maybe her scenario is behavioristic," he suggested wryly. "How does it feel to be on the receiving end for a change?"

Things are really rolling along, Sunshine Sue thought, as she waited impatiently for Arnold Harker to show up at the media shop she had set up on the second floor of the habitat. They were moving almost fast enough, thanks to the wonders of black science and the efficiency of the assistants she had been given. But she was anxious to get things over with here and get back to La Mirage for the real fun.

Although her Spacer workers were intelligent and efficient and conditioned to do what they were told without asking questions and although Spacer technology was allowing her to craft a happening far beyond her original conception, Sue had no desire to linger longer in Spacer country than necessity required.