Songs From the Stars (26 page)

And it really didn't matter whether they believed it or not. They would repeat it. And the people they told it to would repeat it to other people who would repeat it. The original source of the story would be forgotten, and imaginative details would be added by embellishers along the chain.

Meanwhile, she'd be going to more smokehouses and taverns, dropping this tale and others again and again, telling the stories not as truth but as silly gossip. And Lou, to the best of his ability and within the limits of his uneasy conscience, would be doing the same.

In a day or two, she thought, the stories will be all over town in different forms and with different details, and maybe people will soon start to assume that there were many landings by beings from space. At which point it could be truthfully reported by Word of Mouth as an item of news that stories of landings by space beings were rife in Aquaria.

Once this spread into the public consciousness, seekers of fame and tellers of tall tales would naturally weave the legendary beings from space into their fabulations. And the Sunshine Tribe's news gatherers would seek out such items and pour them into the Word of Mouth net. Thus would the art of media hype create an item of common folklore, and when the happening was staged, it would seem the fulfillment of widespread prophecy.

Sunshine Sue smiled. She puffed contentedly on her reef. It began to seem as if there was nothing that this magic might not accomplish, that reality itself might be altered through the power to mold the human consciousness that perceived it. She caught herself thinking this and chewed it over with a certain distaste.

That, too, must be what it feels like to be a sorcerer, she decided uneasily.

The stars shone in unclouded glory over La Mirage and a bone-white moon loomed over the mountains. The dinner hour was long gone, and the crowds in the taverns and smokehouses and music halls had peaked.

Clear Blue Lou had to admit that the atmosphere was right and what Sue called the "public consciousness" had reached the predicted fever pitch of psychic acceptance.

They had spent this last evening in La Mirage—indeed, on Earth, and perhaps in an age that would soon be passing—making the rounds of Market Circle. It had been days since they had stopped spreading stories of beings from space, and tonight they had just circulated inconsequentially, listening to the expanding and overlapping ripples of the small stones they had cast into the pond of public speculation.

At the Sorcerer's Saloon, they heard North Eagle repeating some story he had heard about beings from space landing somewhere east of Mendocino and describing their spacecraft in florid detail in terms of his own product. In the Blue Hawk, an astrologer held forth on the cosmic significance of the golden auras and bright cat eyes of the space beings he had heard tell of. According to a young woman reciting the tale breathlessly, a whole squadron of celestial ships had landed on a southern coast, and a horde of preternaturally beautiful and horny green men had emerged with auras of energy flaming from their enormous erections to sport en masse with the local lasses. The feature act at the Palace of Dawn had even performed a new song called "Gods of Light," something about space beings whose full meaning had been drowned out by an excessively enthusiastic drum player.

"What magic you've wrought!" Lou admitted to Sue as they ambled along Market Circle, where small groups of people were drifting from tavern to smokehouse and couples were angling off into the park. "But who can say whether it's black or white?"

Bits of interpenetrating conversation pattered his ears with more proof of the wry cogency of her art.

"—tall as bears, with faces like birds—"

"—beautiful well-built women only three feet tall—"

"—slowly up into the sky drawn by birds of fire—"

"—singing in an unknown tongue—"

"Well, we'll know tonight," Sue said, perhaps a bit uneasily. "The Enterprise should be here in an hour or so." Her hand in his seemed to squeeze a little tighter."

Lou eyed her speculatively. She definitely was a little nervous. "Finally having second thoughts?" he asked.

"Whether this science of yours is black or white, deception or inner truth?"

Sue frowned. "It's beyond black or white," she said, "and this will be commonplace when I've built a global electronic village with the Spacers' satellite network, so we all had better get used to it. But... but..."

"But?" Lou cocked an inquisitive eyebrow at her.

Sue stopped walking. She waved her arms once to encompass the taverns and smokehouses, the people and the lights, the worlds of men. "But it all is beginning to seem a little unreal."

"Aquaria?" Lou asked. "Or outer space?"

"Both! I mean, in a few hours, we're actually going to be in a spaceship, up there where it's black as the tomb and we float around like feathers, and we can't go outside because our blood would freeze solid and there's no air to breathe. I know it's going to happen, but I can't conceive of how it's going to feel."

"I know what you mean..." Lou said somberly. The Spacers simply ignored such questions, and perhaps he had unknowingly been infected by that abstracted detachment, but it surely was going to feel like something. Something powerfully strange.

"Thing is, the world we're leaving is beginning to seem as unreal as where we're going," Sue said. "Maybe the trouble with too much knowledge not shared is that people begin to seem a little less real to you than you are."

Lou nodded. "And the trouble with wielding too much karmic power is that you make those people a little less free than you are."

Sue stared deeply into his eyes for a long moment. "You think maybe my freedom not to do what I'm doing is as much of an illusion as what I've gotten people to believe?" she said anxiously. "Could I still be acting out a Spacer scenario?"

"A little late to worry about that, isn't it?"

"Yeah..." she sighed. "Well, maybe our destiny really is written in the stars."

Lou forced a little laugh and gave her a quick hug. "Ours certainly is, in more ways than one," he said. He glanced up and down the street speculatively. "There's the Lodestar Tavern," he said. "Shall we have one more drink for the long road?"

They went into the tavern, ordered a flagon of wine and two glasses, and took them to a corner table, as far away from the crowd at the bar as possible. Lou had had more than enough of talking to people who didn't share their secrets and whose major topic of conversation was the illusion that Sue had wrought. They hunched close to each other, not really talking but establishing a loverly seclusion that only a boor would disturb.

Lou sipped at his wine, glancing over Sue's shoulder at all the people drinking and talking and mingling in this ordinary tavern in a town close to his heart. It was a homey familiar scene and it should have aroused homey familiar feelings, but a haze of unreality seemed to hover over it. Everyone in the tavern save himself and Sue seemed like actors in an old play, and the surface reality of the only world he knew seemed like a stage set. Beyond which lay... the great and terrible unknown...

This is the true moment of karmic rebirth, he realized. Our old reality has already dissolved into mist, and the reality to come as yet has no face. This was as open as the soul could get to the flow of unfolding unknown destiny, and it should have been a moment of perfect Clear Blue clarity. Instead, a chill wind seemed to be blowing through his soul from—

"In the sky! Coming toward us from the northeast!"

A wild-eyed man burst into the tavern, shouting and waving his arms. "A huge light in the sky coming toward La Mirage! A great blue thing spitting lightning!"

The tumult of the tavern guttered into silence. A woman stuck her head inside the door. "A chariot from the stars! Coming down toward the western meadows!"

Then she was gone and everyone was babbling at once as they surged toward the street.

Lou and Sue sat there until the place had emptied, and they could hear the shoutings and rumblings of people pouring out of every tavern and smokehouse on Market Circle, a roar of excitement and confusion.

Lou stood up. He clinked glasses with Sue. "Let's go see the show," he said, draining his glass in a single swallow.

And hand in hand they went to put the world behind them.

High above the lip of the world it hung, an angel's wing of blue fire moving toward the plateau across the heavens like a portent from unknown and terrifying gods.

An unruly sea of people surged toward the edge of the high plateau on which La Mirage sat, toward a vista of high mountain shapes outlined against the stars beyond an immense drop into the jumbled canyon vastness which seemed to separate their world from that distant vision.

Moving toward them, the beacon that they followed grew huger now as it crossed the great blackness, a celestial portent swooping in out of the firmament upon the worlds of men.

Almost the whole town was there, thousands of people flung across the meadow, craning their eyes skyward and wondering at the fearful thing they saw.

A great glowing blue bird seemed to be soaring on the canyon updraft, losing altitude as it came toward the crowd, like a goose bellying in for a landing. Huge it was, how huge it was still impossible to tell, and it burned from within with a clear blue light. Strange lightnings flashed around it, rhythmic short bursts that seemed to shatter time into thousands of discontinuous fragments, as if the very fabric of reality itself was warped by the magic of its passage.

Silently, the great firebird glided in from out of the darkness, and then it was directly overhead and growing ever larger as it sank toward the earth.

A great collective gasp arose as the winged shape came slowly down out of the sky in its cloak of lightning, and the crowd drew a perspective on its true size. Larger than the moon it seemed while it was still a thousand feet up, and as it descended, it grew and grew, threatening to blot out the sky.

It was still five hundred feet high when the crowd oohed and sighed as it began to pick up the first far-off faint strains of the celestial music.

A ghostly keening of the heavenly strings and the thin silver eeriness of a chorus of flutes. The firebird descended toward the earth, wailing a spectral rising song that got louder and louder as the glowing blue shape became the most immense thing that any living eye had ever seen—a wing of fire large enough to encompass them all, a soaring ear-splitting swell that shattered the soul with expectation even as the rhythmic dance of the lightning shattered vision into flickering slices of time.

Like birds mesmerized by a snake, not an eye tore itself away from that fearful sight, not a person turned and fled. Now the entire population of La Mirage stood crowded under the blue shadow of the bird of light. Within that shadow, night was banished, and the world flickered on and off faster than the eye could blink, and the spirit was encompassed in its clear blue glow, while a keening celestial song made bones hum in harmony with the mighty voice of unknown gods.

Two hundred feet up, the great rising note crescendoed into a shattering fanfare of heavenly trumpets, and below the huge blue wing, a smaller, fatter winged shape winked into existence, outlined in points of jeweled light that went through a continuous cycle of transmutation—emerald, ruby, sapphire, back to emerald again.

Slowly, majestically, the apparition settled in over the spellbound throng, an eagle of good omen bearing a jeweled prize in its claws, a cloud of light enveloping them in a magic piece of the sky.

Another great fanfare—longer and even louder than the first—and from all around the underside of the wing, powerful beams of white light converged on the jewel-outlined shape below it, flashing it into full glowing brilliance in an instant.

Suspended beneath the sky-filling firebird was a smaller bird of bright golden yellow—substantial and metallic and set with colored lights like a jeweled piece crafted by a godlike goldsmith.

A mighty full orchestral chorus played a paean to glory as the wing-shaped blue aura settled in low over the crowd, bearing its gift to the earth.

And then the gods spoke.

A long low rumble of thunder, then another, and another, in steady serene fearfulness. The world under the canopy of the sky-spanning wing flickered on and off, seemingly at the command of Those Who Controlled the Thunder and the Lightning. The world was split asunder and the whirlwind was loosed upon the Earth.

A monstrous thunderclap split the air, and then a huge voice spoke out of nowhere, louder than any living man, and in an unearthly metallic tone.

"PEOPLE OF THE EARTH!"

The crowd surged and shrieked and babbled its awe.

Another great thunderclap cowed them into silence.

"PEOPLE OF THE EARTH! WE BEAR A GREAT GIFT. PREPARE TO RECEIVE IT."

A triumphal march sounded the glory of the heavens as the golden bird was slowly lowered to the Earth in the middle of a great circle that the crowd scrambled to clear for it. The wing was the low roof of an immense cathedral now, where the world flickered in syncopation to the lightning under the clear blue light of the gods.

The music resolved to a final mighty chord as the golden bird touched the earth on wheeled feet, a fanfare of offering that made the moment of utter silence that followed it thunderously pregnant with awed wonder.