Songs From the Stars (31 page)
The Spacer had met his own natural man and found it wanting.
"Can't we wait?" Harker said. "Can't we eat and rest and sleep and then...?"
"You know we can't," Lou said very gently.
Harker stared at him woodenly. He gulped. His eyes rolled. "I think I'm going to be sick again..." he whispered.
"Cut that shit out, Arnold!" Sue snapped. "It won't work. Even you can't really think we can leave here without learning what we came to find out, now can you?"
The Spacer choked back his nausea, or perhaps gave up the pretense. "I suppose you're right," he admitted softly. "We've asked for whatever we're going to get. We deserve it. But I admit I'm afraid of what we're going to find out. You can't deny that those who came before us killed themselves..."
"They were watching their world die," Lou told him. "Ours still lives. They heard the songs from the stars in despair. We came to bring back hope."
"Are you trying to shame me with your bravery?" Harker said wanly.
Lou shrugged. "Both fear and bravery are useless now," he said. "Now is the moment and the only way out is the way through."
He reached out and gently touched the hand that Harker still held upon the switch. He moved it forward against only a momentary and flaccid resistance.
"... let those who have given us this gift speak for themselves. " The old man's face vanishes from the screen, a short blizzard of multicolored snow, and then—
A spiral galaxy of stars pinwheeling through space. Out on one of the spiral arms, a tiny purple point begins to pulse as a strange voice speaks.
"This is the... a... standard missionary introductory transmission-greeting to unconnected primary stage beings..."
The voice seems dead and artificial as if filtered through a distant radio transmission. The sentence is an uninflected string of words approximating human speech rather distantly. Yet the very tonelessness of the voice has a hypnotic quality that is not altogether unpleasant.
"This introductory song-packet-manual is transmitted to you by..."
A succession of eerie and beautiful moving images. Floating in space, a jeweled world. A rolling field of lavender grassland under a too-blue sky, a small unnatural white-hot sun. A city of crystal atop a conical mountain furred with waving red-crowned trees—spires of amber, emerald, sapphire, and ruby. Millions of tiny feathery motes dance around jewel-like buildings growing in random profusion out of a lavender meadow. One of the motes, seen large, rebounds from an aerial ledge of ruby—a creature whose body seems to be one prehensile lavender feather whose gossamer branches ripple and flex with obvious athletic purpose. Two red worms copulating in a double helix, traceries of black, white, lavender, and blue veining the space between spiral curves.
"Our species connects itself to the interstellar network-web of galactic stage beings. We-I have been part of the brotherhood consciousness of sentient beings for half a million years. We welcome-initiate your primary stage civilization-spirit to galactic consciousness-network-knowledge-gossip as elder-brother-neighbors said hello to us half a million years ago. Come on in in a relaxed psychic state the water is fine."
Squat blue mushrooms with bright red eyes dance around hairy brown trees. Great black butterflies skim the surface of a scummy sea, drawing up liquid with trailing tubular tongues. A living carpet of slimy green worms oozes across a yellow desert. A herd of maroon kangaroos with long flexible snouts hop madly around a copse of stalky green trees like giant celeries, nibbling at the branches.
"Life abounds on the planets of the galaxy... is warmed by every friendly sun... springs like decay from the body of unbeing..."
The hideous face of a yellow bird with one glaring humanoid eye. A living lavender feather. An impossibly attenuated spiderlike creature on stilt legs holds a cluster of insect eyes aloft on waving tentacles. The homey face of something very much like a yellow bear.
"Consciousness-curiosity-feedback with the material realm-environment arises at the pinnacle of almost-theoretically-any foodchain-planetary-biomass-ecosphere as a natural phenomenon-gift-consequence of bio-physiological-chemical process. Barring glitches-anomalies, every planetary ecosphere evolves a sentient species."
Feathery lavender creatures float and dance around an amber spire. A city of dull black stone under a cloud of smoke and lightning. Thousands of raftlike ships roll on an endless swell, bearing trees and machineries and what may be streets of conical houses. A city of metal monoliths that seem to move ponderously on wheeled feet. A flying disc of burnished copper bearing a crystal city above red hills and deep green canyons.
"Barring catastrophe-ecological-collapse-the-usual-fuckups, every sentient species evolves a primary stage civilization. But the survival rate to maturity of primary stage civilizations is less-than-satisfactory-pitifully-small-fills-the-soul-with-sadness. For-because-unfortunately every primary stage civilization arrives at confronted with the power of life-and-death moment-of-truth transformation point crisis."
Vast churning machineries burrow into a yellow mountainside within a cloud of dust and greasy smoke. A cliff of steel teeth winnows an emerald sea, dribbling ugly brown spume. Beams of searing light from devices set high on metal frameworks burn holes in the land that fountain black blood.
"Primary stage civilizations arise-out-of-transcend-the limits of their planetary biomass-ecosphere before they lovingly understand its science of harmonic relations. They produce artificial molecules things that never were and tend to terminally toxify their ecosphere-destiny beyond primary stage repair before realizing to learned sorrow that protoplasm beings are poisoned by primary stage technology cannot survive in matrix of their own shit."
Hideous explosions. Toadstool clouds. Soaring cities in flaming ruins. Deadlands under an evil purple mist. A succession of worlds bursts in fungoid atomic decay.
"The moment of truth crucible of all primary stage civilizations is reached when atomic-thermonuclear life or death power-knowledge puts planetary fate in control-choice-responsibility of beings more powerful than the ecosphere that evolved them. Knowledge-screwing-around-mastery of atomic forces gives sentient species paradox-power-decision to transcend molecular level matter limitations or destroy their biomass-planet-selves and suffer tragic-stupid-self-created extinction. Eighty percent of isolated-unconnected primary stage civilizations fail the test poison their ecosphere do themselves in. The remaining twenty percent transcend the primary stage become environmentally neutral clean living ten-million-year lifespan galactic stage civilizations."
A red cube spinning in space. A fleet of emerald ships spiraling up from a ringed planet. A dense cloud, thousands of wordlets englobing a red sun in perfect formation. An endless city or an endless forest, where organic buildings, trees, and beds of huge flowers grow out of the same garden soil. Something very much like the Big Ear floating in the starry blackness. A crystal city in the sunless depths of space ringing a tiny central star.
"Galactic stage civilizations derive their energy from thermonuclear-stellar forces inexhaustible in the galactic time frame and zero-waste-efficient down to a subatomic level. Total unified field knowledge gives galactic stage civilizations total mastery of matter and energy within the physical-parameters-rules-of-the-game..."
The starry galaxy, spiraling through space and time. Scattered widely through it, a few dozen pulsing red dots.
"In the early stage of galactic history, very few primary stage civilizations transcended to galactic maturity. Isolated primary stage civilizations are statistically unviable. The mature stage of galactic history began when density of the lucky survivors reached a level where interstellar communication became possibly inevitable."
More red dots pulse in the rotating galaxy, hundreds of them now, and the traceries of a galactic communications network begin to form an ever-more-complex and interconnected web of light.
"Once civilizations connect up to the interstellar network of becoming galactic stage beings, the ten-million-year survival rate increases to ninety-five percent. Shared knowledge-gossip-stories-and-songs from those who have made it is better than being out there all alone. The more the merrier you can't have too many good friends. Primary stage civilizations lucky enough to survive till we say hello achieve a galactic maturity rate of ninety-five percent... galactic consciousness distributes its long-term stability. Galactic level knowledge defines transcending transition point from primary to galactic stage."
A large fleet of strange oblate worlds moving with exaggerated speed through a starfield, slowly dwindling away into immensity.
"The total conversion of mass to energy is by definition the upper efficiency level of ultimate power sources and lightspeed limit of subatomic particles cannot be exceeded in the macrocosmic flesh. Physical interstellar flight is tedious energy inefficient why bother though some beings do it anyway."
The galaxy, knit together by a multicolored skein of light that dances tones and shades in complex symphonic harmony.
"Better easier more fun to sing our songs to the wide open spaces for any willing ear. Better to listen to the songs from the stars music of the spheres. Better to share the science-art-technology and soul-knowledge-spirit-feelings and join in on the chorus of the great song."
A myriad lavender feathers dance a complexly choreographed ballet around a towering spire of amber crystal that seems to glow from within.
"This is a standard missionary-introductory transmission greeting designed for primary stage beings. The galactic receiver it has broadcast-manifested-become is a gift-doorway-ear to the songs we sing all we knowing tell. This song which soon terminates its greeting is a program-scorecard-libretto for the galactic level mind concert brotherhood of universal astrally back-projected artworks-songs-realities broadcast by and for galactic stage civilizations as expressions of their spirit-karma-sense-of-humor. The galactic receiver is now programmed for the sensorium mix of your species and to record data read-in from galactic technological-library-patent-office-files in each species' song. Full operating directions are now voice-coded into your species-specific receiver in teaching sequence keyed to the word 'begin.' "
The galactic spiral cloud frozen in space.
"A final cautionary note-word-of-warning to the wise not so wise... Galactic reality retains surprises pleasant and not so pleasant even for masters of matter and energy for ten million years. It is an ongoing perpetually transcending test of the spirit that some beings have failed maybe we all fail eventually but the song goes on and you're dead already if you close your ears to it."
A feathery lavender creature waves its every tendril of gossamer flesh in an orgasm of greeting that transcends the gap of interspecies body language.
"Lots of luck drop us a line hope we all make it."
Clear Blue Lou watched Sue pore over the "galactic receiver" like a crafty buyer on the Exchange out of a corner of his mind as he tried to digest the meaning of what he had seen and heard.
Though many of the specifics were unclear, ambiguous, and perhaps even essentially beyond the understanding of a "primary stage being" such as himself, the amazing thing about the whole experience was how the interstellar network of galactic stage beings managed, against all expectation and logic, to speak their spirit so clear. The sweetness of their karma had spoken to his soul across all that distance, all that time, and all the differences of alien flesh to touch his heart of hearts. He could feel the greatness of the Way they walked, he could grasp the proffered hand of friendship across the unthinkably vast gap, he could taste the love they offered, he could even feel that these unseen and unknown alien brothers were his friends. If these weren't beings that you could trust—
"Harker, will you take a look at this and see if it makes any sense to you?" Sue said as she examined the maze of wiring that connected the four chairs to the rest of the jury-rigged equipment. "You're supposed to be the scientist."
"What?" Harker grunted, causing Lou to take notice of the fact that the black scientist had been staring fixedly and to no purpose at the blank screen before him since the galactic song had ended.
"I said come and have a look at this, will you! I'd like to know what the hell it is before we start playing with it."
Harker's eyes widened, perhaps in terror, as he snapped out of wherever his spirit had been hiding to stare at Sue. "You're not thinking of—"
"Come on, Arnold, will you snap out of it and do what you're supposed to do!" Sue said irritably. "Get over here and be a bloody scientist!"
Harker seemed to draw himself together and, with no little psychic effort, crawl back into his old sorcerer's shell. Woodenly, mechanically, he shambled over to the galactic receiver and began examining the jumble of equipment with something like a pretense of superior knowledge, poking and squinting at things, and muttering to himself. But Lou sensed that it was all surface and no feeling, that his spirit was still cowering in fear somewhere deep inside him.
Sue, however, didn't seem to notice this total dichotomy between heart and mind, or if she did, she just didn't care.
"Well?" Sunshine Sue demanded. Arnold seemed to be puttering around the equipment to no purpose now, as if postponing the inevitable moment when he would have to admit he couldn't figure it out. "Give it to us straight, how much of this do you really understand?"
"Well there's a computer..." Harker said, "and there's a feed from the antenna. There's a lot of data stored on videotape and in computer memory that looks as if it was recorded directly from the Ear... But there's a lot of equipment here that I don't understand..."
"Wonderful!" Sue said impatiently. "I really needed you to tell me that! But what the hell does 'programmed for the sensorium mix of your species' mean? What does this thing really do? How does it work?"
"It obviously records incoming data packets," Harker said, "but I don't understand why the feed from the computer memory bank processor is hooked up to the electrodes all over these chairs..."
"In other words, you haven't the foggiest notion of how it works or what it does," Sue said contemptuously. "Well, obviously, there's only one way to find out. As I remember, all you have to do to start it working is say the word—"
"Wait!"
"—begin!"
"Initiate galactic receiver instruction program," said a toneless mechanical voice from somewhere in the depths of the electronic maze.
"Now look what you've done!" Harker shrieked. "You've turned it on! You had no authority to do that!"
"Oh shut up, Arnold!" Sue snapped as the strangely hypnotic voice droned on. "I'm getting tired of your sniveling. Let's just pay attention, shall we?"
"In standby mode the galactic receiver scans an ever-widening sphere of space for interstellar wave packet songs. Upon picking up a call signal it locks in to record in sequence for playback retrieval... Memory bank playback tapes are voice command indexed in your species specific language of numbers in sequence of acquisition... There are currently... twenty-one song data tapes stored in the memory banks of this galactic receiver... This concludes introductory audio phase sequence... Sensorium warp galactic stage briefing follows after five minute delay... Please be seated."
"Well obviously, we're supposed to sit in these chairs," Sue said, and immediately started climbing into the nearest one.
"You can't do that!" Harker exclaimed, grabbing her by the elbow.
"Says who?" Sue snapped, pulling away from him.
"Says the commander of this mission! We don't know what this thing does! We don't know what will happen to us if we—"
"You know any other way to find out... Commander Arnold?"
Clear Blue Lou listened to this, trying to find the path of justice between them. While he knew perhaps even better than Sue that they must brave this unknown Greater Way or betray the destiny that had led them to this moment, while his instincts told him that the star beings were to be trusted, he could all but smell the stench of Arnold Harker's fear.
"Sue's right," he said as gently as he could. "We have no choice, Arnold. We can't live with ourselves if we refuse this karmic test."
"Like the last people who tried it?" Harker said. "If this is a test, they failed it."
"They were dying anyway," Lou told him. "And their wish was to preserve this chance for us. We can't turn our backs on that."
"We're all afraid, Arnold," Sue said in a tone of controlled patience belied by her nervously tapping foot. "But we can't let that stop us."
Harker sighed. He visibly gritted his teeth. "Well, maybe it won't hurt to at least find out how it works..." he muttered grudgingly. And he climbed into one of the heavily wired chairs. Sue sprang up beside him and Lou sat down beside her. He had enough time to exchange a quick glance with her before the toneless voice spoke again and the world vanished.
You hang weightless and senseless in a pure black void.
"The galactic receiver is programmed to derive species specific full sensory input data from standard galactic meaning code equations. By controlling your sensorium input along species specific parameters galactic songs astral back-project you into approximation of total involvement in artistically recreated broadcast realities..."
Now you feel the contour of your body against a chair. You hear the sound of your breath, the subliminal creaking of the great wheel rolling through space as one by one your senses come back on in sequence until you are sitting where you were when the lights went out.
"Your sensorium input is now controlled by the teaching program processor. The sensory data you are now receiving is artificially induced second order images synced with external reality for humorous pedagogic purposes..."
You grow heavy as lead, then light as air. The sound of your breathing appears and vanishes and appears in syncopated rhythm. You see stars, the interior of the main computer room of the Big Ear, a rolling green sea, nothingness. Your world is only what it seems.
"Simple instruction program for using your galactic receiver to play back recorded song-data-packets follows... Patent-office-data-file component of interstellar broadcasts is stored and retrieved conventionally in your indigenous style computer memory bank... Full sensory soul music opera component is retrieved and savored by simple voice command... Teaching example check-out on the controls commences... Speak the number of the desired tape stored in received order and initiate song playback by speaking the word 'start.'... Example:"
The words seem to form themselves in your mouth. "Two, start..."
Suddenly you are a great bubble-creature soaring upward through a golden yellow sea to the roaring music of—
"Pause."
You are back in your chair again.
"The command 'Pause' stops the playback restores your sensorium to primary perception... The command 'Continue' restarts sensorium tape song at previous 'Pause' locus..."
"Continue."
—breakers in strange syncopated harmony, and you break the surface and leap high in the sweet warm air, dipping and turning with your great flippers, hanging and laughing in glad-to-be-alive greeting, gliding in on your belly to—
"Pause."
You are back inside your real self.
"The command 'Recycle' begins you at the beginning again... The command 'Clear' readies the receiver for the next number command choice..."
"Recycle."
Suddenly you are a great bubble-creature soaring upward through a golden yellow sea to the roaring music of breakers in strange syncopated harmony, and you—
"Clear."
You are who you are again.
"This terminates your introductory course of controls check-out which may be recalled for review using the command 'begin.'... Your standard galactic receiver is now under your autonomous control... Have fun don't be afraid don't say we didn't warn you..."
"What was that?" Sunshine Sue muttered in a daze. Arnold scampered out of his chair as if the thing were on fire, and even Lou seemed to be trying to blink himself back into reality.
"What I was afraid of all along!" Harker gibbered, running a hand fitfully over the arms and back and seat of the chair he had just abandoned. "These electrodes somehow feed artificial sensory data directly into your nervous system. These creatures are broadcasting directly into our brains; they're sucking us inside their reality, taking us over, making us into... into unhuman things, controlling our minds, eating us up like... like..."
Sue climbed out of her chair, put her hands on her hips, and marveled at the gear that surrounded her in wondering and envious admiration. "Now that's what I call creating a media happening!" she said.
Lou seemed lost in thought as he stood up, but there was a cool, clear analytical tone to his abstraction. "In other words, it's like a radio and television transmission inside your mind...?"
"Worse than that!" Harker said. "You get feel and temperature too, and who knows what else! Don't you understand? This thing controls your whole reality! It takes you over, it tells you what to feel, it... it... it captures your soul!"
"Oh come on, Arnold, don't be so melodramatic," Sue said. Marvelous though this galactic art form was, it was just an art form, and she didn't exactly feel that she had been devoured.
"So that's what they mean by astral back-projection..." Lou said tentatively.
Sue eyed him questioningly.
"Seems like these songs are like dreams broadcast into your mind," Lou said, struggling to express the ineffable. "The dreams of the beings who broadcast them centuries ago... So in a way you do travel astrally back in time and across space into the realities created for you to experience—"
"Enough! Please!"
Arnold Harker's eyes were blinking rapidly. His hands were trembling in agitation and his face was ghastly pale. "Please..." he said much more softly. "No more for now... We've got to stop and think... Please, please can we rest now?"
Lou cocked a questioning eyebrow at Sue. Sue shrugged back. As usual, the world was conspiring to move too slowly for her taste. But she had to admit that even she might need some time to catch her psychic breath. This had been an endless day, measured in the changes it had encompassed. The longest day of her life.
And the most glorious.
Though time of day was a meaningless concept up here in the windowless wheel rolling through a space in which the sun neither rose nor set, Clear Blue Lou knew that it was very "late," measured by the hours that had passed since the three of them had finished their tasteless "dinner," by the fatigue fogging his body and his mind, and by Arnold Harker's bleary, bloodshot eyes.
The Spacer had kept them talking here in the cold comfortless commissary long after the meal was over, long after Sue's eyes and body signals had begun pleading for them to retire together to one of the sleeping quarters and leave the poor bastard to his own sour karma.
But Lou just didn't see how in all conscience they could do that until he could be reasonably sure that Harker had reached a point of exhaustion where he would gork off immediately once he was left alone. The Spacer was balanced on the thin edge of freak-out as it was, and if Lou had the self-preserving cruelty to leave him alone and awake and aware with his fears and horrors in this haunted metal tomb, then he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou.
But if he wasn't starting to get pissed off at the cruelty of inflicting this endless circular conversation on himself and on Sue, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either.
"Why can't I make you understand?" Harker said for what seemed like the thousandth time. "It would be insane to trust blindly in the good will of creatures who aren't even human. Who are so superior to us that we can't even guess at their real motivations and probably wouldn't even understand if we were told."
"But we have been told, Arnold," Sue said wearily, her heavy head propped in her hands as she leaned her elbows on the steel tabletop and regarded him like an obstinate child. "Left to their own devices, most so-called intelligent species just don't make it. They fuck up the way we did and destroy themselves. The people of the stars want to help us, is all. They want to see us make it."