Songs From the Stars (37 page)

"Well, he's violating our free will by... by psychic force," Sue said angrily. "He's forcing a situation that violates the free will of every human being to choose their highest possible destiny. It'd serve him right if we just snuck off in the spaceship with the memory bank tapes and left him here to die."

Lou gave her one of those heavy green stares. "Did you hear what you just said?" he asked her sharply. "In order to elevate humanity to a higher state of consciousness, we're supposed to commit murder? I don't think you really meant that, did you?"

"No," Sue said in a tiny little voice, and all at once she realized that the anger she felt toward Lou was entirely misplaced. He wasn't the enemy, this mess wasn't really his fault. And it wouldn't do for her to take out her frustration on him.

For they really were irrevocably in this together in ways neither of them had dreamed existed when fate had thrown them together a few short weeks and an eternity of changes ago. They were mated to each other by something that made even the question of love seem irrelevant. As things stood now, they were the two lone members of their kind, the only humans to have walked the first halting steps of the Galactic Way, the first citizens of a nonexistent galactic stage human civilization. And if that fucker Harker had his way, they would know no others of their kind in their lifetimes.

So she had concentrated quite earnestly on making love to Lou, on experiencing the fleshly reality of the only other human being whose spirit could even hope to share her full psychic space. The two of them were going to be together for a very long time; the task before them made that inevitable. Together they would have to make the world understand that which only they had experienced and lead their fellow humans to their galactic birthright. Strangers to the world, they could hardly afford to be less than lovers to each other. Fate had thrown them together as much as love; it was destiny, kiddo, kismet, and if you forced yourself, you could think of that as pretty damn romantic.

But it wasn't enough to let her sleep. That son of a bitch Harker had contrived to poison even what love they might share by turning it into the prospect of a lifelong psychic exile. And he and those like him would be fighting them back on Earth every inch of the way while they sought to end it by bringing humans back to the Big Ear and their galactic destiny. While the songs from the stars waited up here for—

"Oh shit," Sue hissed aloud, sitting bolt upright.

If Harker was so determined to protect humanity from what was on those tapes might he not simply destroy them?

Now you're really getting paranoid! she told herself. Nevertheless, she carefully disentangled herself from Lou, crept out of the bed, slid into her clothes, and glided out into the endless silent corridor.

Listening for errant sounds, she padded barefoot up the curve of the corridor toward the main computer room. Silence, except for the hum of distant machinery and the subliminal groanings of the great wheel as it revolved through space.

The door to the main computer room was ajar. The working lights were on.

Cautiously, she flattened herself against the wall next to the door and peered inside.

Arnold Harker sat slumped over in one of the seats of the galactic receiver. Memory bank tapes were piled high in the center of the room amidst wads of paper kindling. Sue watched him for long moments, deciding what to do. He didn't move. Sue shrugged to herself. She sighed. She took a deep breath.

Then she kicked the door wide open and burst into the room. " All right, Arnold, what the hell are you doing?"

The black scientist didn't twitch. He didn't move. He didn't utter a sound.

Sue slowly walked over to him. Arnold Harker's mouth hung open in a slack-jawed grimace, and his sightless eyes had rolled to the top of their sockets. He was dead.

"He must've found the poison that the original crew took," Clear Blue Lou said, throwing a sheet over Arnold Harker's horribly staring dead face. He turned to Sue, curling an arm around her. "Are you all right?"

"As all right as I'm going to be," she said in a trembling voice, burrowing her head into his shoulder. "Oh Lou... why...? Why...?" A single sob wracked her body.

Of course, she had been mightily upset when she woke him, as who wouldn't be, finding the ugly lifeless shell of what had once been a living human being. But he sensed that she suffered something beyond that. For she might very well feel that she had in a sense willed this to happen, and her last words to Harker had been snarled in anger. Now she felt that he had died with her denying his humanity, that perhaps, in some unfathomable way, she had somehow pushed him to this. That now that Harker had removed himself as an obstacle to her will by his own hand, this all-too-convenient death somehow tainted her soul.

If he didn't realize that this feeling was as much his own as hers, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou. But if on another level he couldn't honestly hold the two of them blameless in his own court of justice, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou either.

Unknown destiny had done this to Harker, not their deed or even will. No one had willfully sought to sour anyone else's karma, perhaps not even poor Harker inside his own reality. Indeed, neither of them could even fathom why he had killed himself.

But the man was indisputably dead by his own hand. And it could not be denied that they had perhaps willfully blinded themselves to whatever psychic process had finally led him to take his own life. Absorbed in the wonder of the Galactic Way, they had stood by while Harker followed his way to destruction. They had allowed his own coldness of spirit to make them forget that behind that impenetrable carapace of scenarios and self-assumed superiority there had been a brother human spirit with fears and agonies and passions like any other man. They had never really known that Arnold Harker. They had never really tried.

That's the true source of this feeling of guilt, Lou realized, and it's mine as much as Sue's.

"Why did he do it, Lou?" Sue said, pulling away from him and skittering nervously about the room. "He was having things his way, wasn't he? He could've just burned the tapes, and..." She froze and looked at him with a stricken grimace. "Just because of what I said? Oh gods, did I kill him with my foul temper and my big stupid mouth?"

Lou stared at the sheet-draped body in its chair, surrounded by the arcane machineries of the galactic receiver, then at the pile of data tapes apparently prepared by the Spacer for burning, a destruction that for some unknown reason had never been consummated. Or did I? he began to wonder nervously.

"No, you didn't kill him with your big mouth," he said, taking her hand. "He died in that chair, after—" He caught himself short. "Oh, no!"

"Oh, no, what?"

"He must've been ready to burn the tapes," Lou said slowly. "And then he probably decided that since he was going to destroy them, and we were about to leave the Ear, that... that... that he would prove to us that he was no coward..."

"And finally try the galactic receiver himself? And he did, and... But that makes no sense. There's nothing in the songs from the stars that would make even Harker kill himself."

"Or so I assured him," Lou said queasily. "On my word as a perfect master. Oh shit."

"Lou!" Sue said sharply. "Don't you go blaming yourself now! There's nothing bad for anyone's spirit in the songs from the stars, and we both know it."

"Unless..."

"Unless?"

"Unless the receiver picked up a new song while we slept," Lou said speculatively. "Something that we don't know about. Something that..."

Sue stared into his eyes, her lower lip trembling. "Easy enough to find out," she said. "All we have to do is sit down beside him and recycle whatever it was he was playing at the end..."

"The twenty-second song...?"

"If there is one."

"Do we dare?" Lou said. But it was really not a question. Do we dare not? he thought, and that wasn't a real question, either.

"We owe it to him, don't we?" Sue said. "If you hadn't told him you were so sure it would be all right, and I hadn't called him a coward, he wouldn't have... So what does that make us if we refuse to walk the way we made him follow? We have to know what made him kill himself, don't we? We can't go home without knowing."

Lou nodded. "Justice demands it," he said. He forced a wan smile. "But we're not Arnold Harker. I can't think of anything that would make us want to curl up and die. We'll be all right..."

"Sure we will..." Sue said in a tiny pale voice. And she took his hand and led him toward the final confrontation with the destiny written in their stars.

"Recycle."

"Twenty-two, start..."

Stars stream past you, or perhaps you are streaming past them, for all is chaos and confusion as planets, suns, streams of glowing gas, spiral down around you into something behind, flickering in and out of substantiality as if all this is coming from a long ago and attenuated far away, or as if that something is fragmenting the very body of reality itself. A something huge and terrible that you flee from at the straining edge of your powers like a dreamer trying to run up a hill of sand in a nightmare. Something that is gaining on you, inexorably sucking you down, down, down...

"Good-bye to you brothers, good-bye to you good friends, our story is over, our chapter ends. We were the children of ten thousand suns..."

You float in a vast cluster of tightly packed stars. Tiny motes of light drift among them like swarms of fireflies in the night. Wavefronts of colored light dance slowly back and forth among the stars. You soar high above the star cluster, and you see that it is the center of the galactic spiral, the living heart of the island universe.

You dive back into the great concourse of central suns, rejoining the streams of ships and worldlets and mysterious unknowable objects plying the slow starways from world to world.

Like the great swooping bird of time, you dip through the atmospheres of a dizzying succession of worlds, sampling the profusion and complexity like a connoisseur of life. Rafted cities plying azure seas. Glowing townships spread across the tops of immense forest canopies. Castles of crystal and gold, floating among the high passes of enormous green mountains. Great archipelagos bridged by faerie traceries of spun steel. A myriad islands in the stellar stream of life...

"... in the galaxy's heartland, ah, we had fun! Long was our summer, wise was our mind..."

You float in the jeweled cluster of suns at the galactic center, where motes of mind and waves of light knit the rich density of stars together into a living manifestation of the triumph of the sentient spirit over the empty void.

But something is happening at the very heart of this triumphant glory, something cold and dark and ultimately terrifying is announcing its existence with baleful black vibrations. A bone-chilling sucking presence, a cosmic undertow, begins to subtly draw you down...

"Galaxies too birth, live, and die. Ten billion years is the blink of an eye.

An endless crystal void. Like firework pinwheels, thousands of tiny galactic spirals coalesce into incandescent existence, then fade back into the dark. The dancers are myriad and transient, but the dance goes on.

You float above a single spiral galaxy now. A vortex is beginning to appear at its core as it revolves through time—a deadness at the center, a slowly growing carcinoma of utter void sucking matter and energy into it...

"Young central suns burn hot and fast. Before life can quicken their hour is done."

A huge cluster of moribund suns. Some gutter out into dead black nodules. Others explode in showers of superheated supercompressed gas, flinging clouds of particles and light into the interstellar medium until nothing exists but glowing vortices of gas and drifting particles and chunks of utter darkness.

Nodes form in the swirling gas as eddies begin to interact. They thicken and proliferate and wink into existence as new stars.

"From this cycle of fire, new suns are born, circled by planets birthed by new light."

Now the stars disappear, and there is nothing but dark nodules and tiny pinprick clouds of black sand, deeper darknesses against the void. A negative image of the universe of light, where holes of nothingness form in the slow eddies. Form, and grow, and suck each other into themselves...

"But out in the darkness and out of the light, symmetric forces marshal the night. Matter compressed and matter imploded. Holes in space where suns exploded. Coming together in entropy's dance, time is their ally, the slow hand of chance."

The galactic spiral revolving faster and faster through space and time, a sphere of dead black darkness forming at its core, a darkness that sucks the light spiraling down into it, devouring suns and gas and growing, growing, growing...

"At the heart of a galaxy an anti-life is formed. Our ending was written before we were born. Great suns collapse into burnholes in space, light goes into darkness, death comes in its place and we all disappear, our futures all go into the vortex..."

The spherical vortex of darkness grows and grows, ever faster, ever larger, as it feeds on the clouds of suns that whirl down its black maw into inevitable oblivion.

"... into the depths, the terminal black hole."