Songs From the Stars (24 page)

For one thing, she was itching to try her hand at the untested art of media hype, for which all this was only preparation. And for another, only the excitement of the task at hand kept this place from driving her crazy.

Breathing the manufactured air was giving her a continuous funny taste in her mouth, and she seemed forever on the brink of a cold. And although she was repeatedly assured that all the cow meat she was served was clean and pure, her appetite just wouldn't believe it.

Of necessity she was spending more time with Harker and the Spacers than with Lou, and she could sense a certain unwholesome triangular tension building up. Old Arnold knew enough to keep his personal distance, or perhaps more accurately, she knew enough to keep him well at bay, now that he was being forced to follow her scenario. Which was not to say that he liked being mindfucked any more than she had or that she wasn't taking a certain nasty pleasure in paying him back.

But Lou was spending a lot of time with Harker too, learning to fly the spaceship and sticking his nose into all the mechanical arcana he could. Perfect master though he was, he really couldn't understand what she was doing any better than Harker could, and it seemed to Sue that he was compensating for this by attempting to become adept at arts she didn't have time to learn under the tutelage of the Spacer. There was something unsettlingly circular about this daisy chain of dominance relationships that might not bode well when the three of them were stuck in space together for ten days, and she was anxious to remove Lou and herself from the unwholesome spirit of this place. The fact that she could not help enjoying the numbers she was running on Arnold made her a bit uneasy about her own karmic purity too.

Yes, while there might be worlds more to learn by staying around here, there were sweeter worlds to regain, and she was glad that her presence at the spaceport would soon no longer be needed.

Coloring the Enterprise Sunshine Yellow was a simple matter of paint and brushes, but the Spacer craftsmen had moaned in dismay when she told them that the launch eagle had to be Clear Blue Lou blue. It was impossible, they had insisted, they'd have to recover the entire framework, it would take months.

That one had been solved when Sue pointed out that all they had to do was put powerful electric lights shining through glass of the proper blueness inside the translucent wing.

Once she had gotten the Spacer technicians playing with colored lights, they came up with all sorts of lighting arcana as if to prove the puissancy of black science to her—colors of any hue she desired, lights that changed colors continuously by revolving panes of different colored glass before them with electric motors, even a magic device called a stroboscope, which emitted short sharp bursts of brilliant light that made people seem to move like jerky marionettes and did something really weird and unsettling to vision's vibes.

With this palette to play with, Sue had designed a complex show of lights to illumine the spaceship and its eagle that would probably convince her that they were the products of superior beings from the stars if she hadn't designed the illusion herself.

And when Spacer craftsmen showed her how they produced the eerie background music that pervaded so many areas of their installations, her concept for the happening expanded far beyond her initial expectations. They could record sound on tape and play it back through a device like a radio. But they weren't technically limited to the quiet bland stuff they seemed to esthetically favor. If they wanted to, they could make even the human voice come out louder than a brass horn band. Celestial music would accompany the advent from the stars, and the star being would speak with a voice of thunder.

All of this was already being crafted and installed. Now all that remained was to convince Arnold Harker to become a god from the stars. His natural arrogance working off the chastening his ego had been taking lately as she remade his beloved Operation Enterprise to her own design should take care of that. The beard... well, that might be a different matter!

Harker finally arrived a few minutes later, just as Sue was getting impatient enough to treat him like a tardy member of the Sunshine Tribe. "Well, you took your time getting here," she snapped by way of greeting.

Harker glanced owlishly about the small room. A bizarre silvery costume hung in one corner. There was a sink table with a mirror, pots of theatrical makeup, a razor and shaving soap. A weird metal collar lay half completed on a workbench strewn with small electric lights and electronic components. It looked something like a thin horse collar scaled down for a man, and its inner surface was studded with small electric lights and radio microphones. Harker's eyes were caught by it.

"What's that?" he said, looking as if he should be scratching his head. "What now?"

"Relax, Arnold, you'll love it," Sue drawled. "I'm going to make you what the networks used to call a 'star.' "

Arnold squinted uneasily at her. Since the tables had been turned, he had developed a wary attitude toward her. No doubt he knew she was getting even. But there wasn't very much he could do about it.

"We're going to turn you into a god from the stars," she said dryly by way of explanation.

"You're going to what?"

"You'll wear that costume over there," Sue said. "And you'll wear this under the collar." She picked up the metal ring and handed it to Harker. The sorcerer pawed it over uncomprehendingly. Sue smiled. That's right, Arnold, she thought, I've had your craftsmen make a piece of hardware you don't understand. And as for the software...

"See all the electric lights inside the collar?" she said. "They'll illumine your face very dramatically, there's even one that's stroboscopic. And the microphones will play your voice back through big speakers mounted on the spaceship. You'll look like a god from the stars and you'll sound like one too."

Harker eyed her most peculiarly. "You're going to make your people think I'm an advanced being from the stars?"

"Right!" Sue said. "You should enjoy the role."

"Like an actor in a play...?" Harker mused. It seemed to be beginning to appeal to him.

"The leading role," Sue said. "The best part."

"But this isn't a play, it's... it's..."

"A happening," Sue said. "A media hype. A fictional story presented as reality, a play in the form of news."

Harker shook his head in wonder. "Reality and yet not reality," he muttered. "A real event in the eyes of all who see it, yet crafted by you like a stage play..."

"Now you're getting it," Sue said. "The ancients called it 'managed news,' I think. Sweet karma crafted out of sour, reality enhanced by art. With you as the star. It's perfect casting, Arnold; I know you can handle it."

Harker shrugged resignedly. "Well, if it's absolutely necessary..."

Sue smiled sweetly at him. "There's just one thing Arnold," she said. "The beard has to go. You'll have to shave it off."

"My beard!" Harker cried, clutching at his face defensively. "Now you taunt me too far!"

Sue went over to the sink and began lathering up the shaving soap. "Be reasonable, Arnold," she said. "We have to make up your face, after all. Maybe blue skin flecked with gold and red teeth and a jewel glowing in your forehead like a third eye. You'll be magnificent. But we have to get rid of the beard first." Sadistically, she began stropping the razor. "I'll do it for you, if you like," she offered.

"You're not going to shave off my beard!" Arnold shouted.

Sue shrugged. "Then do it yourself," she said, handing him the razor. "But it has to be done. Surely you're not going to let personal vanity stand in the way of the greatest event in human history..."

Harker glared at her. Sue glared back. He caved. "My beard...?" he whined plaintively.

"Your beard, Arnold."

The sorcerer sighed in surrender. He went to the sink, lathered up his face, and, muttering under his breath, made his personal sacrifice for the higher good.

Sue regarded the new Arnold Harker staring at himself in the mirror. Without his mask of beard, he looked younger, somehow smaller, and a good deal less in command of karma and destiny. The newly exposed skin was pallid, almost gray, and the chin seemed weak and slightly recessive.

"Now that wasn't so bad, was it, Arnold?" Sue cooed.

Harker looked away from the mirror and up at her. The expression on his face was almost pathetic. "It's going to take some getting used to," he said unhappily.

"Relax," Sue told him. "It makes you look more human." She was laughing inside, but she managed to keep a straight face as she dipped her fingers in a pot of makeup and began smearing it on his pale face. "Now let's see what we can do to reverse the process..."

The Spacer "airplane" curved southwest as it climbed out of the spaceport's desert valley, and soon the land of sorcery had passed out of view. Lou leaned close to Sue in the back of the cabin, the heavy drone of the propeller masking his voice from the pilot in front as he spoke.

"Well, we'll be back in La Mirage in three days," he said, "but I wonder if it'll really feel like going home."

"I know what you mean," Sue whispered loudly. "Is this what it feels like to be karmically reborn?"

Lou shrugged. "Yes and no," he said. "If this is karmic rebirth, then it's rebirth into a kind of karma nobody's been born into before."

The illusionary paradox at the heart of the world to which they were returning had indeed been stripped away. But what had been revealed was not a clearer vision of the Great Way at all but a mystery far deeper at the core of a reality far vaster than anything the human spirit had yet contained. Whether in the end the human spirit could encompass that reality in harmony with the Way was still very much an open question.

And whether what they were doing right now was in harmony with the Way was no less in doubt as far as Clear Blue Lou was concerned.

He had absorbed the lore of black science. He now knew how to fly a spaceship and command a thinking machine. He understood how it was possible to survive in outer space, where the cold was deadly bitter, and there was no air to breathe, and he would weigh less than a feather. He had accepted the need for all these things in the service of something whose ultimate karma he could never judge until it passed through his lifeline. He had left his world behind him to voyage into the physical and moral unknown.

And he had been led along this Way not by a wiser being but by a sorcerer whose own soul had been blackened and deadened by this very quest. If he didn't think he could avoid Arnold Harker's fate, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou. But if he weren't aware of the danger, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either.

And what about you, Sue? he thought as he watched her musing out the window at the clouds slipping by. Is your Way really Clear Blue?

Could a lie be sweet when the truth was unpalatable? Could bad karma really be transformed into good by "media hype" as she was so sure it could? He could dimly see how a worldly lie could bring the spirit a higher vision. A play or a story did that with metaphor. And as a metaphor, this happening would give the world a vision spiritually closer to the essence of the truth than any literal recitation of the mere facts could hope to accomplish.

But this was not a story, it was a sub-species of mindfuck. Could good come of that, no matter how logical it seemed? The answer seemed hidden in the true karma that the songs from the stars would bring. If great good came of listening to them, then the sin could be borne gracefully for the sake of the greater good. But if evil came, if humanity proved unworthy of such knowledge, then we will have blackened our souls like no one before us, he realized.

Sue came out of her reverie, and Lou found himself watching her studying him. "You're looking at me a little strangely," she said.

"I was thinking we're either very brave or very arrogant," Lou said. "We're taking the destiny of the whole world in our hands. What if we're wrong? Who gave us the right to decide that men should listen to the stars?"

"Who gave us the right to decide men shouldn't?" Sue told him flatly. "If we don't act, we're making the decision too. We're stuck with it, Lou. We're the only people in the whole world who know both sides of the mountains. And in my heart, I know what we're doing is right."

"I wish I was so sure..." Lou said slowly. The logic of their destiny seemed inevitable, but their mastery of their fate seemed illusion. In such a situation, certainty itself was almost a sin. Did they truly comprehend a whole or merely see some of the parts?

"Trust me, Lou," Sue said., squeezing his hand. "As I trusted you when I didn't see the Way clearly."

Lou managed a wan smile. "I trust you as I trust myself," he said truthfully. But at the moment, that didn't seem to be saying very much.

Everything's the same and everything is different, Sunshine Sue thought as she passed the Exchange on her way to the Smokehouse. Or rather everything is the same and I'm different.

The entrance to the Exchange was thronged with peddlers and vendors. Merchants and mountain williams poured in and out in a steady stream, and the loading docks were crowded with merchandise. Business had returned to normal and then some by the time she and Lou had gotten back to town. The suspension of trade during the atomic radio affair had backed up an avalanche of orders which had broken over La Mirage after the giving of justice had cleared the way for renewed commerce. In particular, new orders for solar eagles were running at record levels, what with a one-year guarantee of a ten-percent discount. Mountain william tribes who had never been heavily in the component trade before had "discovered" new caches of "pre-Smash" supplies to neatly take up the slack caused by the disbandment of the Lightning Commune, and no one was about to question their whiteness under the circumstances.