Songs From the Stars (4 page)

The photographs seemed a random lot—faces of the long-dead, a silvery bird flying through the clouds, a strange device like a glass aquarium but with tiny manikins inside it, playing an unknown game on a grassy field. The magazines were called Time and Radio Digest and Listener's Log and TV Guide. The lone crumbling book was called Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.

Far into the night, Sue studied the Rememberers' hoard, alone by the firelight in the dark forest, trying to make sense of the arcane lore, trying to decide whether this science called "media" was white or black or something in between.

She took the hoard with her in the morning and down through the years studied it still. Much of it remained beyond her grasp. "Television," some strange form of radio which transmitted pictures that moved. "Ratings," which seemed to be a pre-Smash form of numerology. "Prime time," which did not seem to be a unit of duration.

But buried in the mass of incomprehensibility and the nearly impenetrable dialect of the book and the magazines was the concept that came to rule her destiny.

The pre-Smash world had been blanketed by things called "networks," immaterial electronic webs of radio and television messages. If this lore were to be believed, there were millions of radio receivers and "TV sets," and almost everyone had access to one. Huge transmitters, powered by black science, broadcast "programs," messages in the form of plays and stories. These transmitters or "stations" were organized into "networks" so that everyone in the world could receive the same messages at the same time.

The networks also broadcast something called "news," messages about events happening all over the world, aimed at all the "viewers" or "listeners" as a whole.

Thus the people of pre-Smash times had been united by plays and stories and news which they all received at the same time. Anything that happened anywhere was immediately known to all. McLuhan believed that these message networks changed the consciousness of the people by knitting them together into something he called "the electronic global village." These "artificial senses" changed the very nature of human thought and magnified intelligence even as the invention of printing had aeons before.

Thus the "electronic villagers" had not merely possessed black sciences lost to modern man, their minds themselves were more cogent.

True, these selfsame electronic villagers had destroyed their world and poisoned Sue's own by their fatal affair with black science. But it was the devices of black science, the

"hardware," that had brought man to ruin, not the "software," which was concept and spirit alone, a path of the Way, independent of science, white or black.

Now the world lay poisoned perhaps unto death; a person's world was the area in which he lived and what sparse news moved up and down the creaky Word of Mouth net, and before Sue had built Word of Mouth with her secret software lore, not even that.

How limited we ire if only we knew, Sunshine Sue thought as she sped up the dry lake bed toward La Mirage with the speed of the wind. How fast I seem to be moving and yet how slowly our thoughts crawl from town to town and mind to mind! Now, as so often since that day in the Rememberers' hut, she felt like a poor lorn creature trapped outside her proper time. The secrets she alone knew tormented her soul with impatience for the distant rebirth of the electronic global village that might one day reunite the scattered remnants of the species in a web of consciousness beyond her poor imagining, a worldwide community of spirit that might yet heal what was left of the shattered Earth.

Up ahead, she could see wagons inching up the switchback road that ascended the mountain to La Mirage, and beyond, the great central peaks of the Sierras that rimmed the known world. East of the horizon lay the terra incognita of black science—out of sight, but hardly out of mind.

Yes, the law of muscle, sun, wind and water was the Way. But could the present world of crawling, limiting isolation truly be called good?

It was destiny that had taken her to that Rememberers' hut, destiny too that had made her a member of the Sunshine Tribe where her secret knowledge could be put to use. And if destiny required that she risk graying her soul in the service of her dream, then so be it. For surely that dream was in the end whiter than the rigid narrowness of the asshole righteous.

And if her silent patrons now sought to destroy what she had built for their own unknown reasons, those Spacer bastards were going to have one hell of a fight on their hands.

"Move, damn you, move!" she shouted into the wind, pushing against the steering gear as if she could squeeze more speed out of the sail cycle by sheer force of will. Why couldn't this bloody thing go faster?

* * *

The mountains began abruptly at the northern end of the dry lake bed; from this angle, the Sierras were a vast ziggurat staircase reaching upward and eastward. La Mirage was built atop one of the lower flattened steps of the cordillera stairway, and the lake-bed road ended abruptly at the foot of a severe three-thousand-foot slope.

Here the road became a torturous zigzag, climbing the mountain in an endless series of steep switchbacks, forty miles of crawling agony to ascend three thousand feet. A procession of horse-drawn wagons inched up this nightmare back door approach, dwindling away to insect-like dots toward the heights.

Barreling along the valley road at top speed to the last minute, Sunshine Sue slammed on the sail cycle's brakes and came to a screeching stop in a cloud of dust right outside the cabin that the Sunshine Tribe had built many years ago at the foot of the mountain road. Half a dozen sail cycles with furled yellow sails and four Sunshine yellow solar eagles were tethered to the hitching rail. No sail cycle could ascend the mountain road, and the geography precluded radio contact with the town, so from here to La Mirage, Word of Mouth—and Sunshine Sue herself—would travel the last three thousand feet straight up by eagle.

Teddy Sunshine, the station honcho, emerged from the cabin even as Sue was shakily unwinding her cramped legs from the long drive. Sue pointed to the line of solar eagles, not wanting to waste even a minute, and they met under the golden shadow of the nearest eagle wing.

"What's the word from La Mirage?" she asked breathlessly, stowing her gear behind the eagle saddle. "Lou arrived yet?"

"Not yet," Teddy said, as Sue climbed into the saddle and began strapping in. It seemed to Sue that he was not exactly eager to meet her eyes.

"What's wrong, Teddy? What's the bad news now?"

"Worst possible," Teddy grunted. "The Lightnings are now claiming we knew about the atomic power cores when we bought the radios."

"WHAT?" Sue screamed. "Those lying brain-burned sons of bitches!" Bloody fucking hell! If Clear Blue Lou ended up believing that, he might very well decide to disband the tribe! And I could end up in karmic rebirth!

She studied Teddy, who seemed to be studying her most peculiarly.

"You don't believe that shit, do you!" she demanded. "Do you think for a moment that I'd—"

"Of course not!" Teddy interrupted none too convincingly. "But... uh, maybe Gloria might have, uh, gotten a little carried away..."

"No way! I made that deal myself, remember?"

"Then why—"

"It's a set-up, it's got to be!"

"But who—why—?"

"Who do you think made the power cores?" Sue asked sharply. "As for why..." She nodded toward the east, shrugging. "That's what I'm going to find out," she said. "Now please untether this thing."

Teddy slipped the hitching rail bolt. "I'd never fool with atomic power," Sue told him earnestly. "That black, I'm not. You do believe me?"

But the eagle shot skyward before she could hear his response, and Sue found herself contemplating what the electronic villagers would have called her "image" with a new sense of unease. If my reputation is so gray that even my own people can half believe I'd knowingly fool with atomic power, how am I going to convince Clear Blue Lou that the Lightnings are lying? And why would they tell a lie that convicts them of black science out of their own stupid mouths?

The eagle bobbed upward along the mountain face where the string of wagons groaned laboriously toward La Mirage. Rapid though her rise was relative to these groundlings climbing in the dust, it seemed achingly slow to Sunshine Sue. She valved the last of her helium into the wing and nosed the eagle skyward. The eagle began to climb even more rapidly but still not fast enough.

"What's going on up there?" Sunshine Sue demanded aloud, craning her neck upward.

Muttering imprecations, she began to pedal.

Clear Blue Lou's eagle soared along the ascending meadow, and then was buffeted upward and backward for a moment as it crested the lip of the plateau and hit a sudden swirl of freer air. After this dramatic fanfare, it regained its forward momentum, and in a few minutes, Lou was floating high above La Mirage.

From this perspective, the name of the town seemed a poetic image of innocent purity. La Mirage was the lone handiwork of man in a vast vision of primeval grandeur. The colorful buildings and groved avenues seemed to spring like magic mushrooms from the center of an oval meadow rimmed on three sides by a sheer drop into immensity. The ascending cordillera east of the town formed a dwarfing backdrop that reversed Lou's aerial perspective, an amphitheater of the gods looking down from on high on man and all his tiny works. Here the upland meadow unraveled into a seemingly infinite complexity of canyons that began as fingers of brown raking the green plain below, and then climbed and branched and grew in scale as they became the texture of the mountains towering away high above his eagle.

Lou circled over the center of La Mirage and began to recompress helium with his pedals, descending in a lazy spiral that was also a dance of arrival for the benefit of the town below.

How serene it looked from this deceptive viewpoint, how in harmony with the wilderness to which it served as a humble human grace note. And what a mirage that vision of bucolic tranquility really was!

The town streamed eastward from Market Circle like the thinning corona of a comet about its head. West of the Circle toward the abyss, it quickly petered out into residential groves and isolated farmsteads. To the east, the main avenues fanned out into a sweep of manufactories, workshops, residential neighborhoods and manse grounds, attenuating back into the canyons that climbed up into the higher Sierras, as if the town had chosen to turn its back on the western landscape that sent the soul soaring out over vast natural vistas to bask in the craggy ambiguity pulling the mind toward the looming mountain strongholds of the unknown to the east.

The tradehouses and inns and civic buildings of Market Circle were built along the rim of the circular park in the center. Trees dappled most of the park, but its center was a clear circular bull's-eye where scores of varicolored eagles were tethered like carnival balloons. As Lou descended toward them, he saw that scores of people were drifting through the park toward his landing point; his Clear Blue Lou blue eagle was an easily recognizable ensign and by now, most of the town would be aware of his arrival.

A small crowd was already milling around as he landed, waving and shouting his name in greeting. By the time he set foot on the grass, someone had tethered his eagle, someone else had unfastened his pack for him, and he was surrounded by a babble of greetings, invitations, and the inconsequential, as if this were simply another casual visit by La Mirage's favorite perfect master. Dinner invitations, pleas for personal council, sexual come-ons—both subtle and overt—a wineskin tossed into his hands, a pipe of reef stuck in his mouth—welcome to La Mirage!

Puffing on the reef between courtesy swallows of wine, Lou made his way out of the park amidst the ebb and swirl of his casual reception committee. None of the major mavens had turned out to greet him, nor had any Lightnings or Eagles—though of course there was a Sunshine messenger hanging back at the periphery. Apparently, the movers and shapers were trying to be as cool as was possible under the circumstances.

People began to melt away into the general traffic as he circled around the thoroughfare toward the Exchange. Market Circle was crowded as usual, but the vibes were all wrong for this time of day.' The taverns and smokehouses were buzzing with nighttime-sized crowds, and the general tune of the conversation was not exactly a holiday air. Many of the tradehouses he passed did not seem open for business. The establishments of the astrologers and soothsayers, on the other hand, were bursting at the seams with worried customers. La Mirage had the ozone reek of a storm waking to break, and you could hardly say the town had no reason to be nervous.

The big redwood-and-glass geodesic dome of the Exchange dominated the northern quadrant of Market Circle, and ordinarily merchants and mages would be pouring in and out of the main entrance and a dozen wagons would be lined up outside the freight dock. The Exchange was the commercial and karmic heart of La Mirage. Here the mountain William tribes came to sell their components to the manufacturers and craftsmen of the town and Aquaria beyond. Here La Mirage displayed its products for out-of-town buyers. Here white scientists came to acquire somewhat gray knowledge by osmosis, though of course they wouldn't admit it. Here presided Levan the Wise, Arbiter of the Exchange, passing on the whiteness of questionable goods, adjudicating commercial disputes, renting out space, and in general maintaining the dynamic harmony.