Songs From the Stars (6 page)

"Okay, so you've got me for the moment," she admitted belligerently. "Now what, sorcerer?"

"My directive is to take you to the Project Manager at once," the Spacer said, rising from his chair. "He's waiting up in the mountain william country away from watching eyes. I'll be waiting over Canyon Boulevard in a silver eagle to lead you. We have to leave at once to get there before we lose the sun; it's a long flight up."

"And how do I know you'll let me return?" Sue asked skeptically.

"You have to take our word for it," the Spacer said almost pleadingly. "Besides," he said more coldly, "you really have no choice, do you?"

And with that, he departed, taking any vestigial illusion of Sunshine Sue's free will with him.

Just how far up into the mountains is this person taking me? Sunshine Sue wondered as she soared up a jagged rocky cleft that seemed to climb up forever into the mountain fastness that now towered all around her. Long shadows already obscured the rugged land below, and only the tops of the peaks still gleamed in full sunlight.

She had been following the silver eagle for hours, and now the sun was starting to sink. Up here even the mountain william encampments were few and far between; in fact she didn't remember seeing one below for the better part of an hour.

Where the hell am I? she wondered. What am I doing here? I must be crazy.

She didn't know how far east they had come, but it was certainly far enough to become frightening. Outsiders didn't penetrate too far up into mountain william country if they knew what was good for them, and now it appeared that she was flying through country that the Williams themselves were none too eager to brave. This was terra incognita already. No one ever dared fly this far east. Soon the sun would be down, which meant that this was farther toward Spacer country than she could return from without spending the night where no whitely righteous foot ever trod. Where did Spacer country begin? And was she already in it?

She shuddered in the sunset breeze that blew up the gorge through which she was flying. The canyon walls around her were deeply shadowed, forbidding and ominous in the pregnant aura of oncoming twilight. What might be slithering about the unseen landscape below?

This is insane, she decided. I'm not following my way up here, I've been forced into this. Without being able to stop myself, I'm following their bloody scenario. I've got about as much free will as a gear in some Spacer machine. Up ahead the Spacer eagle veered off down a side canyon which opened out into what seemed like the last highland meadow before the central peaks of the Sierras rose up as an impassable barrier. A tongue of deep shadow extended east up most of the meadow, but the upper quarter was still a bright green where the day yet held back the creeping onset of night.

Something round and bright gleamed high atop a peak of rock that loomed over the upper terminus of the meadow. Squinting against the brilliant contrast of light and dark, Sue made out a cluster of buildings at the top of the meadow and a cluster of eagles tethered beside them.

An eagle's nest? All the way up here? It made no sense; there was no eagle traffic at all this far up into the mountains.

But there it was, for all the world like any rest stop on the way from Mendocino to Lina, up here in the mysterious shadowy territory where the whiteness of Aquaria ended.

After leaving the Exchange and checking into his usual free room at the La Mirage Grande several blocks away from Market Circle, Clear Blue Lou spent the afternoon making the rounds of the taverns and smokehouses, trying to pick up an inspiration for his choice of place of justice—and perhaps some sport for the night.

Within reason, a giver of justice could ordinarily choose any place he fancied for the scene of his big party, and within a few days, it would be gladly turned over to him and rearranged to his liking. The present circumstances, however, seemed to demand that the Court of Justice be convened quickly, by tomorrow night if possible. This limited Lou's choices. On one level, he couldn't expect to have the town clear out the Exchange or a major public house overnight. On another, he knew damn well that La Mirage would be only too happy to let him run such a power trip under the current paranoid circumstances. But if he took advantage of this psychic injustice, the Court of Justice would open to bummer vibes. So he needed a place that would be immediately available without gross imposition.

In the Sorcerers' Saloon, he ran into Kelly the Munificent, an old bedfriend who owned the Palace of Dawn. She let it be known that both her music hall and her bedchamber would be happily available to him on instant notice. The Palace of Dawn was the largest music hall in La Mirage and eminently suitable. Kelly was big and blond and a noble sportswoman of fucking. However, she was literally the intimate of most of the key figures in town, and involvement with her karma at this point promised too many additional complications.

"The trouble with you, Lou, is that you really are Clear Blue," Kelly told him good-naturedly when he explained his polite regrets. Perhaps they could sport after the giving of justice was over, he told her, and in any case, of course, she would be invited to the Court of Justice.

His next stop was the Smokehouse, where the reef was the best in town, and the soothsayers and mages gathered to engage in dialectic, and where, if legend were to be believed, black scientists got stoned with the locals incognito. Today, however, Spacer machinations were the sole topic of conversation, and any black scientist in attendance would have gotten his ears scorched.

An intense lady astrologer assured Lou that while Sunshine Sue's stars were bad, the heavens were about to look on La Mirage with favor. She also assured him that the stars would smile on their union if he cared to come to her place. It was the opinion of the La Mirage mages that Sunshine Sue was too cool to have dealt knowingly with black science, though opinions on the true color of her soul varied. The Lightning Commune was held in the general contempt reserved for mountain williams.

But aside from the enigmatic Spacers, the true ire of the denizens of the Smokehouse seemed reserved for the Eagle Tribe, and there seemed to be a general conspiracy to paint them as the villains in Lou's eyes. Whether or not Sunshine Sue was guilty of black science, it was pointed out to him forcefully, the Eagles were flagrantly guilty of assholery.

"Where's there percentage in this?" Mithra the Biomaster demanded indignantly. "Now their own manufactory is shut down too."

No one seriously considered that the Eagles had acted out of a sense of selfless virtue, and it would have been jejune of Lou to suggest this possibility in this company, especially since he found the idea hard to swallow himself.

"Business is terrible," Dusty Windman complained. "You can't even sell some farmer a simple wind generator without his insisting that it be examined by a neutral expert for sorcery. You've got to reharmonize the vibes, Lou, and if that means sanctions against the Eagles, well, they're the ones who really violated the rules of the game."

"Lou understands that. He's been around."

"On his eagle!" someone blurted, and at that point, Clear Blue Lou decided it was time to leave. The lady astrologer was sidling up to him again with unwelcome stars in her eyes, and the mind games being run on him were starting to get personal. He could see what was coming. Use his well-known love of his eagle to put him on the defensive, and he might bend over backward when the time came to prove the purity of his justice by punishing the Eagles. And for what? For doing their civic duty?

He cut off the conversation by inviting most of the patrons to the Court of Justice, including, softheartedly, the lady astrologer, and continued his round of Market Circle until the sun started to set and his stomach began to rumble from the afternoon's overload of come-ons, mind games, and aperitifs.

Clear Blue Lou was used to being offered a constant choice of bed companions, and especially in La Mirage. But the problem with being a perfect master was that it was hard for most women to treat him as a mere lover or sporting partner. Even a single night with a master was filtered through the vision of transcendent expectations. Many perfect masters found this no problem at all since expectation usually led to at least the illusion of fulfillment, and not too many men, perfect master or no, failed to get off behind a mirror image of their own wonderfulness in a lover's eyes.

Lou, however, got off behind being a pure sexual organism in bed, whose consciousness was totally involved in the act of making love itself, not in the mind games that drove it. As far as he was concerned, the ideal fuck was like a flash of satori, where verbal thought dissolved into a oneness with the timeless ecstatic moment.

This, aside from a suitable place of justice, was what Lou was looking for—and this was what was looking hard to find in La Mirage at the moment. Usually this town abounded With ladies cool enough to sport with Lou as if he were just another natural man. But now he couldn't get away from being Clear Blue Lou, the giver of justice in a case in which no one in La Mirage could feel entirely uninvolved, and it would not be the Way to fuck anyone who was out to fuck the giver of justice. Lou brooded over this during a solitary dinner of stuffed artichokes and wheat noodles with curried mixed vegetables in the small dining room of the La Mirage Grarlde. Somehow it synced with his difficulty in finding a suitable place of justice. Neutral vibes were hard to find.

After dinner he bathed, chose new clothes from his pack, and lazed around so that he would hit the night after the action had fairly started.

Under a brilliant canopy of high mountain stars, La Mirage boogied. Music halls rocked with dance bands, and smokehouses offered your choice of esoteric talk or comic entertainment. Deals were proposed and concluded at parties in the suburban manses of magnates. Orgies were not unknown, and if you hadn't been invited to any, there was usually the mountain Williams' open-air insanity in the park. The taverns buzzed with gossip, shop talk and assignations.

And tonight the town was seething with nervous tension and in a mood to blow it all out. And of course wherever Clear Blue Lou went, the determination to boogie away the bad news blues was heightened by the frantic desire to show him what a good time La Mirage was, how sweet his karma was here, how much everybody loved him, and how essential it was to all that he give justice that would let the good times roll on.

Well if Clear Blue Lou didn't like to boogie, he wouldn't be Clear Blue Lou, and if his favorite place to boogie wasn't La Mirage, he wouldn't be the town's favorite perfect master. Besides, the giving of justice required a personal openness to the total karma out of which justice must come. You had to dance to the music before you could give it words. So if the music got down and dirty, why, you did a down-and-dirty dance if it seemed like fun.

So as he hopped from tavern to smokehouse, Lou refused not the reef and wine that were thrust upon him, not a sip or a toke, enjoying it all for the good-natured bribe it was. And as the night rolled on, his sexual fastidiousness began to transform itself into inspired compromise; since mindfuck games were the life of tonight's party, he would allow himself to succumb to some honest dishonesty if such could be found. As long as everyone knows what they're doing and knows that everyone else knows, there is no blame along the Clear Blue Way, or so he told himself.

Nevertheless he had hardly expected to end the night in a ménage à trois with a Sunshine and an Eagle. He had met the two star-crossed lovers in a tiny food shop where he chanced to stop for a beer and a spinach pie in the wee hours after midnight. The place was empty save for the two women who sat together nursing the remains of a large flagon of wine and apparently saying tearful goodbyes. Laurie Eagle was tiny and blond, with narrow intense eyes and an appropriately aquiline nose. Carrie Sunshine was larger, darker, and rounder, her sadness vulnerable, whereas the smaller woman seemed to rage against the dying of their light.

When they saw him enter, it was Laurie Eagle who asked him over to their table with a request for his counsel too insistent for him to deny, even had he known what he was about to get involved in. When they told him their story, he knew that the Way had taken him to the karmic heart of the night.

Laurie was now an Eagle and Carrie was a Sunshine, but they had grown up together back in mountain william country where everyone got it off with everyone else of any sex, and the two of them were, in effect, sister-lovers. Carrie, the elder, had ambitions beyond the life of a simple william and had managed to join the Sunshine Tribe. Through the influence of her new tribe, she had gotten Laurie into the Eagles so that they could be together in La Mirage.

Now, however, their relationship was under double pressure from their respective tribes. Since the Eagles had denounced the Sunshines for sorcery, the blood between the two tribes had become bad indeed. Both of them would have lain on the edge of expulsion for continuing to consort with each other, even if they hadn't grown up as mountain Williams together.

But since everyone felt that black science country began just east of their own karma, the Williams had a black reputation even among the gray worthies of La Mirage. And here were two girls from the upper canyons united by a bond that went back further than their tribal loyalties, back east in space and time to their mountain william origins.

And since the Lightnings had openly admitted to sorcery, williams were in particular disfavor now.