Songs From the Stars (3 page)

She grabbed the first ship south and couldn't make radio contact till she got to Barbo. There she had learned that the Eagle Tribe had supposedly discovered an atomic power core in one of the new radios which the Lightning Commune had tried to sell them. When the Eagles righteously blew the whistle, even cool old Levan had been forced to interdict the twenty-five examples of this black science that the Sunshine Tribe had taken delivery of in La Mirage.

That did not exactly clarify the logic, but it did transmit he brimstone smell of the shadowy Spacers. The Lightnings might just have the collective intelligence to assemble the devices, but no one who did business with them seriously believed that they were really reproducing pre-Smash designs. And anyone who believed that even more brain-burned mountain Williams farther back in the woods supplied their components from pre-Smash stashes might as well have believed that solar cells and microcircuits grew on trees. Someone somewhere out of sight was making this stuff and using the Williams as a thin camouflage which fooled only those who wanted to be fooled, namely, any reasonable person.

The Eagles might buy solar cells and electric motors from the Lightning Commune, but they didn't buy radios. They didn't know squat about radios. So how come they found the atomic power cores hidden in the circuitry when our own aces didn't? And why would they want to blacken the reputation of their supplier of solar cells and motors?

Sunshine Sue had pondered these questions during the endless horseback trip to Javelina without coming up with answers that satisfied the test of self-interest. And this was too complex a mess to be the result of mere random fuck-ups; uncool things like that just did not happen in La Mirage. Therefore, someone with a hidden self-interest was pulling strings from out of sight, and that meant the damn Spacers.

Who else could hide atomic power sources so thoroughly in the transmitter circuits that they could get past the radio mechanics of the Sunshine Tribe? The Eagles could not have discovered the atomic cores unless they were meant to.

But why? Why would even the Spacers pollute Aquaria with atomic power sources and then somehow arrange to have their own dupes exposed for the blackest of sciences?

Before she left Javelina, Word of Mouth came from La Mirage that Levan had decided that this situation required justice from a perfect master. The Eagles had suggested Clear Blue Lou and the Lightnings had accepted. Would she agree? Of course, she had to decide immediately because otherwise they would have to await her arrival to negotiate another choice of perfect master, and it could take a week for one to arrive whereas Clear Blue Lou was two days away, and in the meantime, the Sunshine Tribe might find itself under sorcery boycott until the situation was resolved...

Some "freely agreed-upon choice of judges!" It was Clear Blue Lou, or this mess would fester for weeks. And of course it was common folklore that Clear Blue Lou was in love with his solar eagle; no doubt the pea-brained Eagles thought that would shield them from any repercussions.

But Word of Mouth on Lou was that he really was Clear Blue; few people lost when he gave justice. And he was practically the patron saint of La. Mirage. He and Levan saw eye to eye on keeping things cool. Furthermore, the solar cells in Lou's eagle came from the same source as the Sunshine radios. A perfect master like Clear Blue Lou would be wise to the wider implications, and he himself already owned a piece of this karma.

Finally, Clear Blue Lou was a perfect master who boogied. Better him than some whitely righteous celibate or vibrating lady!

So she sent her agreement down the net and hauled ass for La Mirage, hoping to get there before anyone else had a chance at working on Clear Blue Lou's head.

That is, if you could call this hauling ass!

Sue sounded her klaxon, and up ahead the wagon began to inch to the right side of the so-called road. But not fast enough. She would have to lose some momentum by using the brakes, or she'd hit the damn thing going by.

She slowed down to under twenty, centered the boom, and slipped by. Then she found the road going into a rising bend, lost the wind, and had to pedal, puffing and cursing, to gain the crest.

And that was what this whole bleeding trip had been like! Finding out about things days sifter they happened and not being able to make your reaction felt until more days later. It was a source of wonder to Sunshine Sue that anything ever managed to get done in Aquaria at all.

She but dimly remembered how much worse it had been before she took leadership of the Sunshine Tribe and established the Word of Mouth net. In those days, it could take a week to get a hand-carried message from Mendocino to La Mirage, and there was no such thing as public news. Now at least the Sunshine Tribe had enough solar radios to relay messages all up and down Aquaria while the sun was up. Well, almost. The damn things had only a five-mile range—less in hilly country—and you still had to shift them around to set up Word of Mouth chains. And if too many radios had been shifted to the wrong places, it could take days to set up the right chains.

Last year she had purchased a solar-and-battery-powered computer, which had magically appeared on the Exchange, and now at least the radios she had could be moved around to reform new chains with maximized efficiency. But it was still nothing like the old networks.

Sue crested the ridgeline just as her lungs were starting to give out. Before her, the road circled down a few bends, then debouched upon a long straight dry lake bed without a bend or a dip until it reached the famously awful switchback road that climbed torturously up to La Mirage.

Those new radios should have been the beginnings of a real Sunshine Radio Network. With their fifty-mile range, they would form an unbroken chain of relay stations covering all Aquaria. Voices could be transmitted up and down the land instead of secondhand messages. And the Lightning Commune had promised her cheap and plentiful solar receivers for next year. With the beginnings of a Sunshine Radio Network already broadcasting, she could have marketed them to every town and commune and farmstead in the land. It would have been the beginning of the new electronic village.

Sue had to ride the brakes as the sail cycle nosed over and began to speed down around the curves toward the dry lake bed. Now all that was down the willy hole because of the atomic power cores that had been found in the key piece of hardware. And if this situation came out badly, who knew how much of the Sunshine Tribe's equipment might end up proscribed!

Sunshine Sue had never met an admitted Spacer, nor had she met anyone who admitted to dealing with Spacers. Who, after all, would admit a connection with black science, even in La Mirage? But she had always felt that the unseen sorcerers somehow favored her enterprise.

When she needed a large supply of the old radios, the Lightnings had magically managed to triple their production. When she was ready to make good use of a computer, up popped that piece of legendary arcana, white as the clouds in the sky, or maybe almost. And the new fifty-mile radios had seemed like the latest gift from the trolls who apparently were her silent partners twice removed.

Hell, everything up until then had checked out ultrabright, hadn't it? If these pure white devices had been dropped in her lap, who was she to find out more about their ultimate source than was good for her to know?

Sunshine Sue accepted the law of muscle, sun, wind and water as the distilled wisdom of human history. The black science of atomics had poisoned the vast continent beyond the Sierras and who knew how much of the rest of the world, and filled the air of the planet with carcinogens. Unnatural chemistry had killed the fish of the sea. And the burning of black coal and black petroleum rotted the lungs and made the air unfit to breathe. Every human on Earth was still paying for the sins of black science with a reduced life span, and the species itself might eventually pay for its folly with extinction. Black science was evil, and the Spacers were sorcerers.

Or were they? After all, none of the technology that seeped across the mountains was demonstrably other than white. None of the equipment she had bought did anything but sweeten the karma of Aquaria.

Until now, that is.

Was this karmic punishment for her flirtation with black science? Now her whole enterprise was threatened by the very distantly removed black science that had allowed her to build it to this point in the first place. Could this bad karma be just?

The sail cycle rounded the last descending bend and whooshed out onto the long straight road up the dry lake bed. She ratcheted the sail around to catch the following wind blowing north toward La Mirage, and the sail cycle began to pick up even more speed. Twenty, twenty-five, thirty, nearly forty miles an hour, fairly skimming along this well-maintained high-speed section of the road. Faster than a horse, faster than an eagle, faster than any yacht, faster than anything else in the world save Word of Mouth. Almost fast enough.

Justly earned bad karma, my ass! Sue thought. The karma that took me this far has been sweet, for me, and for mine, and for Aquaria too. I've been true to my destiny, I've walked my own Way.

Admittedly, it had been a Way that no other feet had trod in centuries, a Way that narrow minds might find streaked with black had she revealed the true path now, before its time. More Rememberers' hoards than not were burned for sorcery when discovered, and the dim remnants of this mysterious ancient tribe were shunned by the whitely righteous.

Even her first reaction had been a certain dread when she stumbled upon the abandoned Rememberers' hut on that long-ago late fall afternoon in the redwood country northeast of Mendocino. She had been plain Susan Sunshine then, a teenaged messenger carrying a packet through the mountains from Mendocino to Shasta. She had stopped along the road to relieve herself and improperly tethered her horse. By the time she had gotten her breeches back on, the animal had wandered off into the forest.

The waning sun sent intermittent shafts of ruby light through the dark aisles of giant trees. Bird sounds seemed abnormally far away, and the still forest air was redolent of resin and loam and cool with impending night. The atmosphere seemed pregnant with mysterious import.

And then she caught up to her mount, sipping placidly from a little brook. On the bank of the stream, half-hidden by the saplings and brush that had grown up around it, was the crumbling log hut.

She tethered her horse to a tree—very carefully this time—and gingerly entered the abandoned hut through the open portal where the door had fallen from its rotted leather hinges.

Inside, moldering rough-hewn furniture, semi-darkness, and the earthy rank odor of the pallid mushrooms that grew all over the dirt floor. Bits and flakes of paper scattered about like dirty snow. When she fingered one of the larger fragments, one surface felt slick as glass. Holding it up to a thin shaft of sunlight filtering through a crack in the log wall, she saw the right upper quarter of a woman's face impressed upon the parchment. Her heart skipped a beat.

A "photograph!" The perfect likeness of a human face printed on the magically smooth paper by lost pre-Smash black science. Now she knew what this place was and what it was doing here hidden in the depths of the woods. This was a cabin of Rememberers, abandoned for many years by the look of it.

Dread not unmixed with a certain morbid curiosity chilled her spirit as she poked about. The Rememberers were a dying breed, and their reputation was well streaked with black. A century ago, there had been thousands of them scuttling about the land in small groups, zealously guarding their hoards of pre-Smash books, photographs, and publications. Aquaria had never entirely made its mind up about the Rememberers. It was clear that they venerated these pathetic remnants of pre-Smash black science, but it was also clear that these bits and pieces of the lost and evil world were entirely beyond their dim comprehension. Periods of uneasy tolerance alternated with pogroms. Hoards relating to the obviously black sciences were righteously burned, but some hoards relating to less clearly black arts were sometimes allowed to remain with their guardians or just as often seized for study. The Rememberers themselves were frequently slain and universally abominated.

Now, Rememberers were few and the discovery of a new hoard a major event. By the look of this ruin, nothing remained here but debris and fragments. Still, something made Sue search through the abandoned hut, kicking over fungi, rifling through piles of rotting wood, peering into decayed wooden boxes.

The light was fading fast when she found the metal box under a heap of amorphous filth. It was about the size of a saddlebag, silvery, but too light to be silver. She almost dropped the unholy thing when she realized what it was. The strange light metal had to be aluminum, a pre-Smash metal whose manufacture involved obscenely vast amounts of electrical energy. How many carcinogens had been pumped into the atmosphere to make this thing, how many lives had it cost down through the ages?

But of course she had to know what was inside. The lid opened easily, and within were a few moldering ancient magazines, a handful of photographs, and a single decaying book.

The cabin interior was nearly totally dark now. She removed the hoard from the aluminum box and tossed the black thing away into a corner. The forest outside was a cavern of black shapes and shadows, and the creatures of night had already begun their eerie symphony. Of necessity, Sue made camp for the night, got a fire going, gulped down some bread and dried fruit, and by the flickering firelight, began to examine the hoard she had discovered.