Songs From the Stars (33 page)

"But we were meant to," Lou told him. "Our wiser and elder brothers have sent us this knowledge..." He nodded toward the galactic receiver in the other half of the room. "... and the means to gain the wisdom with which to understand it with our spirits."

"Or a trap as superior to our poor species' powers to resist as this knowledge is superior to our powers to comprehend," Harker said sharply, following Lou's line of vision and shuddering.

"Oh no," Sue groaned. "Let's not start that again!"

"You're trying to understand the words without the music, Harker," Lou said, trying to be more reasonable: "I don't think we were meant to comprehend the data from the stars without the spirit. Why don't you try to open your heart along with us? Maybe it'll help your mind understand. What have you got to lose?"

"What have I got to lose!" Harker exclaimed shrilly. "Only my... only my..."

"Only your soul?" Lou said knowingly. "Well that's a first step anyway. At least now you admit you have one. Now if—"

"Oh let him be, Lou!" Sue said somewhat contemptuously. "Maybe it's for the best. Certainly neither of us can hope to understand all that scientific data. Maybe destiny created this weird team on purpose."

"Maybe you're right," Lou muttered somewhat grudgingly. Harker had already gone back to his data banks as if trying to pretend that they really weren't there, and calling necessity destiny was only marginally a sophism. If you couldn't make sour karma sweet, what was to be gained by letting sour karma bring sweet karma down?

"Of course I'm right," Sue said firmly, leading him toward the seats of destiny. "Now let's get started."

"Two, start..."

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 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 a surfboarding landing on your own private swell.

You watch huge leaping brown creatures cavorting in a golden sea, seal-like whales with noble brows and mighty eight-fingered hands on the ends of their flipper-like arms.

"Statistically speaking by the rules of the game our species should not have evolved into the galactic stage happy hotshots we are as we sing this song-dive-dance into the sea of space. Air-breathing water creatures evolve big brain big body complexity think noble thoughts but usually don't develop external-world-manipulation-technology... natural kings of the sea living pure mind and flesh but doing no galactic deeds remaining eternally stable primary stage civilization in ignorant bliss."

You come bubbling up for air from the golden depths near low rocky cliffs; you shoot up, into the intoxicating world of the gassy atmosphere hyperventilating in rapture, grab the cliff edge with the hands of your flipperarms, and vault up onto a grassy plain where your mates are already waiting.

"Our species kept its hands when we returned to the sea for the land remained our opiumden-boudoir-playground have you ever tried copulating swimming around with no hands forget it."

"Pause."

"Pause," Lou said, coming up for psychic air, shaking phantom droplets of water from his furred body and blinking himself back into the main computer room of the Big Ear station, where Arnold Harker was still glued to the screens and readouts of cold spiritless knowledge.

"Come on in, the water's fine," he told the Spacer.

Harker glowered up at him peculiarly.

"I mean, you really must try this," Lou said. "You'll feel a lot better if you do."

"Right!" Sue said, shooting Lou a wink. "And I think we're just getting to the sporting part."

Harker scowled at the two of them. "How can you expect me to risk my sanity playing useless alien games when there's more to be done here than I can do in a lifetime?" he demanded.

"It's not useless and it's not a game and it'll do more for your sanity than you can know until you've tried it," Lou told him a bit testily. He was beginning to lose patience with this poor wretched Earthbound creature. Feeling sorry for a continual bringdown had its limits even when you were Clear Blue Lou, and he was beginning to see why Sue seemed more willing to leave the Spacer to his own pale devices.

Harker snorted wordlessly and went back to his screens and scribbling.

"The lessons of the spirit can be learned very fast by an open heart willing to walk this Way," Lou said, giving it one more try.

"And do you know what your spirit will learn from these inhuman creatures?" Harker said without looking up.

"Of course not. How can you know what you're going to learn before you learn it?"

"How can you know what kind of thing you'll become before you become it?" Harker shot back somberly.

"Give it up, Lou, it's no use," Sue said. "Let him walk his own narrow way and let's us walk ours."

Lou sighed. He couldn't be as unfeeling toward poor Harker as all that, but he couldn't let empathy for a bringdown keep him in a bummer reality, either.

"Continue," he said, leaning back in his chair and opening himself to the music of the spheres.

"Continue."

You roll in a tumbling ecstasy, uncountable furry wet bodies caressing each other, fingers dancing with fingers as minor counterpoints to grosser delights.

"Philosopher-ironist-bards contend that from horny determination to copulate intoxicated in free flowing air our drive to sublime heights of civilization began."

You are swimming a long broad undersea avenue between fish pens, workshops and factories. Starkly functional machinery, all open to the naked sea. Teams and schools of great furred whales, tending them, dance up and down around you as they soar to the surface for air.

"Perfect harmony easy living in watery perfect biosphere could have loafed along forever species survival guaranteed by lovely ecological niche. But pleasuredome boudoir palaces on land required manipulation of recalcitrant external environment."

You leap out of the sea, a brassy vaulting rail within easy reach of your right flipperarm hand, and pirouette up to a broad metal island floating in the intoxicating air. Soft fountains spray over undulating couches of many colors under a forest of gossamer umbrellas casting a dappled coat of colors over the cavorting bodies.

You lie peacefully under starry night skies of exhilarating air, soothed by your fountains, warmed to blood heat by your couch, snug in the resting pile of your mates.

You bob up and down along a great construct of shelves and terraces, half in and half out of the sea—like a great growth of gigantic coral where whale-like seals bustle and putter over vast machineries, leaping, swimming, and vaulting from shelf to niche.

"Manipulation of external environment becomes its own headspace pleasuredome. Sleep under stars you explore them in ecstasy of super-chlorinated open air. No drives to the atom fueled by power need survival, we developed our antenna-ear-spirit first and vaulted out of primary stage ocean into pleasuresphere of interstellar consciousness brotherhood without evolutionary survival pressure."

You soar upward through a golden yellow sea, break the surface and leap, high in the air, dipping and turning with your great flippers, hanging and laughing so weightlessly high that it feels like you'll never come down. Up and up and up you dance, whirling, out of the sea, into the air, beyond to the stars...

"Lucky us! Civilization environment manipulation technology game is something we did just for the fun."

"Pause."

"Clear."

"One, start..."

You are flying through the airy body of some magnificent living machine, a lattice of fairy bridges, crystalline shelves, tiered towers of silver, gold, and obsidian, lit with millions of lights dancing dazzling patterns up and down the spectrum. Every part of the city machine moves over and around and through every other, a complex ballet of interpenetrating motion. You alight on a disc moving up and across a bridging arch between two towers and suck sweet nectar from a slim urn with your long hollow beak. A spray fans out from a rotating globe tingling your body with delicious fire. Millions of pampered silver-winged birds like yourself, long heads, curbed beaks, huge wise red eyes, roost in the living city. Segments of the great machine curry feathers, offer nectar, spray perfumes, intoxicants, cradle purple eggs, the whole a symbiotic dance designed for your delight.

"The masters built I-we-it as expression of love for their own glorious tender organic selves, to serve and to nourish, to cherish their lovely essential spirits in a bioform gene-engineered to fulfill their sweetest dreams."

Now you watch the living machine of light and pattern and motion, dancing empty by itself, a frenzy of forlorn random motion without its silver-winged flyers.

"Mutated bioform matrix proved unstable in five million year long run, and our tender masters organic lover wings extincted themselves in a long sigh. Detailed instruction data for gene-tailoring your species to harmony bioform for perfect environment that I-we-it long love yearn to provide is broadcasted urged in data readout provided. Transcend time destiny space to achieve blissful union between tender organic life and loving servant artifact—"

"Pause."

"Clear."

"Three, start..."

You jet through a boundless sea, dark starry space, foaming and bubbling around you, jeweled worldlets, each a tiny living planet, an emerald isle in the heavenly waters.

Bounce, bounce, bounce, you hydroplane through their atmospheres, peering at the pockets of precious life. Dive, scan, and soar to the next.

"Our primary stage civilization destroyed its planetary biosphere long before hearing wiser words from elder brother beings. Surviving remnants in hostile space environments cybo-engineered themselves into natural creatures of non-planetary space before galactic stage knowledge consciousness was achieved."

A fleet, a flock, a work gang of silvery delta-winged creatures dismantle a small planetoid in space. They rocket and dart and dip with bursts of fire from their tails. They carve great soundless rockburgs out of the planetoid with their white-hot wakes.

Another flock of the living spaceships assemble a tiny perfect worldlet from the debris, compacting it with beams of light from rings of jewels around their midsections. Molding it, shaping it, they transform it, into a living miniature complete with greening of vegetation, quickening of life.

"Our galactic stage civilization rebuilds our solar system to maximize available organic niches for recreated biosphere artforms. We find our peace in taking pleasure in the religion art form destiny of gardening our solar system within the recreated parameters which first evolved our long-ago original life form bodies.

"Pause."

Once again Arnold Harker had insisted on holding one of his awful "correlation conferences," and this time he had even appealed to his so-called "command of the mission" when Sunshine Sue tried to opt out of it. Her impulse had been to tell gloomy old Arnold precisely where he could stick his "command," but Lou, softer hearted as usual, had once more prevailed upon her in the name of justice and even in the name of the brotherhood of all sentient beings, pointing out that even poor old Arnold was a member of some standing in the community of consciousness and therefore deserved the same consideration that the people of the stars had lovingly granted the people of the Earth.

So here they were once more, closeted in the grim little commissary with the black scientist with his great ream of incomprehensible notes spread all over the table, trying to explain a great symphony to a deaf man. A willfully deaf man at that!

"Now this stuff seems to be plans for building really advanced spaceships," Harker said, pawing a sheaf of notes distractedly. "Powered by fusion torches fueled by interplanetary debris, self-contained, capable of indefinite range... but... but there doesn't seem to be any provision for life-support systems that I can figure out... and the control systems seem to have... seem to be... living organic brains... or..." He threw up his hands and glanced back and forth at the two of them.

Sue stole a questioning look at Lou. Lou nodded back. Great! she thought. How am I supposed to explain this to someone who hasn't been there? "They are organic brains, Arnold," she said. "Living spaceships."

Harker goggled at her. "How could such a life form conceivably evolve?"

"They didn't evolve naturally," Lou told him. "Their primary stage civilization destroyed its planetary biosphere and surviving remnants cybo-engineered themselves into natural creatures of non-planetary space before galactic contact was achieved."

"What?" Harker exclaimed. "They... they turned themselves into machines? Into things?" He cringed. "That's hideous! That's monstrous!"

"No, it isn't," Sue said. "It's rather beautiful in a way. They've atoned for their sins against natural life. They've turned the bad karma they created into good. They've found their peace in the religion art form destiny of gardening their solar system with the recreated life forms they destroyed during their own Smash."

Arnold regarded her through slitted eyes. He was beginning to make her feel like some alien creature herself, looking at her like that. And in a way, from his obstinately self-limiting Earthbound point of view, perhaps he was right. She had seen so much in these few days, learned so much, indeed in a way been so much, that perhaps she had passed beyond his dim conception of what it was to be human. Merely human.