Songs From the Stars (7 page)

Their respective tribes had made it quite clear that each must give the other up in order to prove their whiteness and loyalty.

"So where is the Way?" Carrie asked plaintively. "Do we part and lose the best part of our lives or stay together and be banished to the canyons which are no longer our home?"

"And prove to the whitely righteous of this town that once a william, your soul is always tinged with black," Laurie said bitterly.

"But we'd have each other," Carrie said softly, clutching at Laurie's hand.

Lou was saddened by this story, but more than saddened, he was outraged by the unfairness of it all. His heart was touched and his sense of justice was angrily aroused.

"You stay together," he said firmly. "And you stay with your tribes."

"But that's the one thing they won't let us do!"

"Justice demands it," Lou said. "I won't stand for this shit."

"But this is a tribal matter," Carrie said. "You can't give justice unless our tribes both request it."

"Which they won't..."

"There is justice that speaks when spoken to and there is justice that speaks up for itself," Lou declared. And as the words passed his lips, the Way opened up to him, clear and blue.

All night, he had been searching for a lady he might sport with without involving himself in the mind games that swirled around him. Now he was confronted by two loving women torn asunder by the very karma his justice was called upon to unravel. Now the giver of justice would make love and the natural man would get off on justice. He might not find sport, but love he would make.

Then again, these ladies might just still be into their old mountain william ways...

"How about I make you ladies a loving down-and-dirty proposition?" he said. "What say the three of us go to the Garden of Love and rent a cloud chamber? There, for the world to see, Laurie of the Eagles, Carrie of the Sunshines, and the giver of justice to both their tribes will sport together openly. My karma will be your karma. I magnanimously offer you my body to sanctify your union before the assholes of this town. What I join together, let no tribe split asunder!"

He winked at each of them in turn. " Which they sure as shit won't after tonight, seeing as neither of them is exactly anxious to arouse my displeasure."

"You'd do that for us?" Laurie eyed him somewhat suspiciously, whereas Carrie's eyes shone with gratitude.

"Uh—of course, I'm not suggesting we actually get it on," Lou said deliberately unconvincingly. "All we have to do is rent a cloud chamber and go to sleep..."

Laurie's suspicion evaporated. "You really are what they say you are, aren't you?" she said.

In more ways than one, Lou thought, his lips creased in a fey little smile. Carrie looked at Laurie. Laurie looked at Carrie. They both beamed at Lou. Ah yes!

"Is there something wrong with us?" Carrie said archly.

"Wrong with you? What could be wrong with you?"

"You're risking your reputation for us," Laurie said, "and we're two healthy william girls who grew up believing in sharing their joy. And you suggest the three of us rent a cloud chamber and just go to sleep?"

"Pretty insulting."

Lou laughed. "Well I didn't mean to be all that insistent about it..." he owned.

"Thought you didn't," Laurie said, licking her lips. The three of them laughed together and then the two of them kissed Lou on either cheek together like a sly little fox and the three of them rambled around Market Circle to the Garden of Love, arm in arm in arm, nuzzling and feeling each other, to the somewhat scandalized delectation of passersby.

They spent a conspicuous ten minutes in the big tavern downstairs, drinking brandies at the bar until even the groups of public lovers enjoying their own pleasures in the open cloud chambers around the tavern floor were constrained to notice the politically improbable trio signaling their outrageous intentions with eyes and hands and frank caresses. Clear Blue Lou, called upon to judge the tribes of these star-crossed lovers, was going to sport openly with them in a public cloud house. Outrageous!

It was an act of bravery, an act of charity, and a demonstration of loving justice, La Mirage style, that could not fail to charm the town's convoluted gray heart. Even La Mirage liked its love stories to have happy endings, and now the town could not help but embrace the love of Laurie Eagle and Carrie Sunshine in its own. Blessed be the loving justice of the Clear Blue Way.

Upstairs, in the curtained cloud chamber, with its pink-tinted aphrodisiacal incense and its soft featherbed floor, sweet love likewise embraced justice far into the small hours of the morning. Not until joy had thoroughly exhausted flesh did love and sated languor merge into a common downward drift into black velvet sleep.

Clear Blue Lou awoke briefly at the sun's first dawning with two lovely sleeping heads tucked into his shoulders, with the two lovers' hands clasped together in sleep across his chest. He sighed contentedly. He laughed sardonically.

Justice had been well served tonight, and so had he, both in more ways than one. He had saved a love and been lovingly treated himself. And without quite realizing it at the time, he had told the town that he cared.

And as he drifted back into sweet sleep, hugging his bed-mates to him, he realized that he had found a place with the right vibes for the Court of Justice.

What better place of justice than the Garden of Love, now that he had made it forever an emblem of the path between, the Clear Blue Way!

Down came Sunshine Sue, following the Spacer eagle into the tethering rail of a most peculiar eagle's nest. In addition to the main cabin, there were four barnlike sheds, a corral full of burros, and four eagles at the rail with camouflage wings of sky blue wisped with white. Strangely, there seemed to be no beacon light. Stranger still was the big round antenna high atop the overhanging crag, pointedly facing east toward the unknown lands of black science.

You didn't need to be the Queen of Word of Mouth to figure out the color of the birds that nested here!

Swensen led her past the sheds and corral toward the main cabin. A bearded mountain william, hunched over against the psychic shadows that seemed to hover over the place, led a string of burros toward the first of the sheds. The door was ajar on the second, and inside Sue saw a whole team of Williams loading panniers onto burros, regarding the intense-looking man who supervised the operation with no little unease.

Inside the cabin, down a long hallway past a series of closed doors, and into a big bare room at the other end, which looked out across a backyard where a dozen or so male mountain williams sat on the ground in front of a fire, eating potatoes and passing the hose of a hookah. The room itself was furnished with odd chairs and couches—angular frames of burnished steel slung with a material that did not quite look like black leather. A single huge painting hung on a wall, done with a realism that would've convinced Sue that it was a photograph except for the impossible subject depicted—great Saturn, with its banded rings. Faint and eerie music seemed to waft into the room as if some invisible orchestra were playing in the yard outside—strings and horns and reeds, both exalting and yet somehow blandly soporific, phantom musicians playing an ethereal and ghostly symphony, soothing to the ear but chilling to the spirit.

Two more williams squatted together on the floor fitfully toking pipes, apparently knowing how out of place they seemed in this strange lair.

"Wait here," Swensen said. "I'll inform the PM." The mountain williams exchanged uneasy glances as he left, and then their stoned-out eyes fixed uneasily on Sue.

"Never seen ya before, and ya don't look like one of them," one of the williams said. "Who your mates? What the demons giving ya?"

"Live Oak Commune," Sue said off the top of her head. Demons? Giving me? What's going on here?

"Never heard of no Live Oaks..."

"Uh—we like to keep to ourselves. Don't know what the demons are giving us yet. What they giving you?"

"Computer chips, they say. Sell 'em to the Lightnings."

"Aw, you guys ain't gonna sell no more chips to the Lightnings. Not since they got caught selling demon stuff. Clear Blue Lou gonna bust 'em up."

"So we find someone else to buy 'em."

"Ah, I dunno. All the lowlanders are scared of demon stuff now."

"Lightnings ain't exactly lowlanders."

"Yeah, but all the tribes that buy demon stuff from us gotta sell the stuff they make to lowlanders, and the lowlanders are scared of demon stuff now."

"Assholes are scared of it, but they gotta have it."

"Ah, I dunno. What you think. Live Oak?"

Oh shit! Sunshine Sue thought. What have I gotten myself into? Now she knew what this place really was, and it terrified her that they were letting her see it. This was where the Spacers passed the components they made on the other side of the mountains to the outlying mountain william tribes. This was the place no one wanted to know about, the bottom-line point of entry of black science into Aquaria, where the Williams were dealing directly with sorcerers and knew it. This was far deeper into black science than Sunshine Sue cared to get—especially since she didn't see how the Spacers could afford to let her out. And now these Williams were looking at her very peculiarly. Gods forbid that these brain-burn cases should ever cop to who she really was!

"Uh, I think the lowlanders'll be scared off for a while, but when Clear Blue Lou takes care of things, they'll be buying again," she said. "The whitely righteous ain't all that white and they ain't all that righteous. They ain't gonna do without the demon stuff for long."

The mountain Williams laughed. "Yeah, they end up serving the demon god same as us, 'cept they ain't got the balls to own up to their karma."

Sunshine Sue blanched. This stoned-out bullshit was starting to cut a little close to the bone.

"Mike, your burros are loaded now. Thor, your people will receive four burro-loads of solar cells; these are not to be sold to the Eagles."

A tall spare man loped briskly into the room. His black hair was cropped close to his skull with a hard line between hair and skin at the neck and around his ears—the weirdest male hairstyle Sue had ever seen. He had a similarly cropped black beard that dramatically framed his angular face and set off his piercing blue eyes. This one really looked like a sorcerer, he spoke with precise tones of absolute authority, and the two williams shambled to their feet as he made his entrance.

"I'm the Project Manager," he said, turning to Sue with the same arrogant assurance. "Follow me please."

He turned on his heels and loped down the hallway, forcing Sue to trot after him like a good little girl. It was hate at first sight.

The Spacer led her into a medium-sized room decked out with more of the steel-framed sling furniture; the black material definitely didn't feel like leather when Sue gingerly lowered herself into a hammock-like contraption. A fortune in energy units blazed from an electrical light in the ceiling and another on the burnished steel desk. There was a thing in a corner that looked like a much more advanced version of the computer she had bought from the Lightnings last year. One wall was an amazingly huge and perfect mirror, something she would have thought impossible to craft. Each of the other three walls displayed utterly realistic pictures of utterly unreal subjects—an image of planet Earth floating in space, something like a steel eagle flying over a nightmare landscape that might have been hell, and another picture of ringed Saturn.

There was no attempt to disguise this lair as other than it was. It crowed of black science in all its evil glory; it reeked of unnatural craft, of petroleum fumes, and coal dust, and smashing atoms—of all that the world shunned. And unguessably more.

What did anyone really know about the Spacers anyway? That they favored La Mirage with laundered sorcery? That they manufactured electronic components beyond the Sierras using black power sources? That their black science had been handed down in a direct line of evil perfect masters extending back beyond the Smash?

But how much was legend and how much was fact? Truth was, no one really wanted to know, and Sue already had the feeling that she knew more than was good for her as the "Project Manager" settled himself in a chair behind the desk and fixed her with those eyes of fiery ice.

"Arnold Harker, Project Manager of Operation Enterprise," the Spacer said coldly. "First I will tell you something that will cause you to loathe me; then I will tell you a wonderful thing that will change your mind and your life."

Sue stared back woodenly at this strange creature. It was hard for even the Queen of Word of Mouth to think of a comeback to a statement like that!

"You have been brought here as part of the scenario for Operation Enterprise," the sorcerer continued brusquely. "You were selected as the optimum female operative by a program factoring in all known parameters, so rest assured, we know what we're doing. The nominality with which the scenario has been actualized thus far is further proof of that—you are here and Clear Blue Lou is in La Mirage to give justice in your case, and this was the sole goal of phase one of the scenario. You will go operational in the next phase. Your assignment is to bring Clear Blue Lou to us."