Songs From the Stars (9 page)

"I might ask you the same question... Arnold," she cooed. I'll get a rise out of you yet, she decided. I'll make you come on so I can have the pleasure of turning you down.

"I was looking at the stars," Harker said.

"How romantic."

"I was searching for unplotted satellites," the Spacer explained drearily. "Hundreds of them were orbited before the Smash. No immediate scientific value, but

"So at least you have a hobby. How human of you."

Arnold Harker frowned. His icy eyes suddenly seemed a tiny bit vulnerable. "Why are you so sure I have no feelings?" he said petulantly.

"Because you don't care about anyone else's feelings, Arnold."

"I'm a cold passionless manipulator, is that it?"

"Well aren't you?"

"You think me cold because I don't share the piddling feelings of your limited little world," Harker snapped angrily, "and yet to the greatest passion of all, you're cold as ice yourself!"

Well, well, well! Sue thought. He does have some strings after all and I must just have pulled them. "Try me, Arnold," she said.

"I already have and you didn't even know it," he said. He looked at her speculatively. "But I'm willing to try again. Let me show you."

Oh really? Sue thought. Well what have I got to lose? "I'm all yours," she said. "For the moment."

But strangely, Harker didn't lead her to his bedchamber. Instead, he took her outside the cabin to a little porch on the roof of the building where a thick black tube pointed up at the starry sky. He sat her down on an upholstered bench by the tube, from which vantage she saw that it terminated in an optical eyepiece at her eye level. "Look through the telescope," Harker said, squeezing in beside her.

Sue squinted upward into the eyepiece. A circle of stars, millions of them all crammed together, flickered skittishly in the focus of her vision. "What do you see?" Harker asked softly.

"Stars," she said, trying to make it sound ingenuous rather than snide. "What am I supposed to see?"

"The destined home of man," Harker told her fervently. "Not the remnants of a once-proud species scrabbling for survival on a ruined planet around an insignificant sun, but worlds without end, ours for the taking. Once they seemed finally within our reach. Then came the Smash and we threw away our chance. You talk of passion? Can you imagine the passion of keeping that dream alive all these centuries, of dedicating your life to redeeming your species no matter what the cost?"

Sue looked away from the meaningless dancing image in the telescope and stared at Arnold Harker, sorcerer, his face blazing with energy now, wistful yet angry.

"But you can't understand, can you?" he said bitterly. "That's the final tragedy of it all, a species that can no longer even comprehend what it's lost. We're evil black sorcerers, and that's the end of it."

"I know what it is to dream of things that were and might yet be again," Sue said somewhat defensively. "And I admit I may have bent my virtue a bit in the process too."

She leaned forward into his body space and watched him flinch. "But what's really black about your karma is what it's made of you, Arnold," she said. "Maybe this destiny of yours is really worth it to you, but if you ask me, you've paid too high a price to follow it. You tune out other people's feelings, and you end up turning off your own."

She could see old Arnold blush under his beard. "You have no right to say a thing like that to me!" he whined.

"Oh don't I?" Sue said, moving even closer, speaking her words into the air he was breathing. "What if I were to offer to sport with you right now, under these stars of yours? Could you untangle yourself from your scenarios long enough to be a natural man?"

Harker started. He gaped. He flinched back again. He eyed her narrowly. "Practicing your technique for Clear Blue Lou?" he said snidely. "More proof that we've chosen well."

"That's just what I mean. You're not man enough to take me seriously."

"As seriously as you intended?" Harker said, leaning forward into her body space. "So you could then salve your wounded ego by making a fool of me in your own eyes?"

"But I've done that already, haven't I, Arnold?" Sue said lamely, trying to cover up the shock she felt at having this creature, turned off or not, see right through her completely.

"Really?" Harker said. "Well, then I might as well return the favor." He moved even closer, daring their lips to touch. "I'll take you up on your offer, unless of course you're not really the natural woman you pretend to be."

And with that, he kissed her full on the lips, pressing his mouth to hers lightly, challenging her to pull away and show her true cock-teasing colors. Sue could not tell for all the world whether he was messing with her mind again, or whether this down-and-dirty game was starting to turn him on, too.

"Of course, you know that this means war," she said, undoing the front of her blouse.

"What a peculiar thing to say," Harker said woodenly as he ran his hands mechanically over her cool bare flesh. Sue found herself shrinking from his unwholesome touch—and yet that very queasiness filled her with an equally unwholesome lust.

"Let's see what you've got, sorcerer," she said, thrusting a hand into his crotch as she slid down onto the bench and drew him down on top of her.

Harker removed the remainder of her clothes with unsensuous speed and clumsiness, and Sue gritted her teeth in anticipation of a clumsy and fetid grudge fuck.

But old mold turned out to be not quite what she had expected or indeed like anything she could have expected. He was reasonably dexterous and quite thorough but cold as ice. No false kisses of feeling lip to lip, no feigned sounds of passion. He knew exactly what he was doing, and he knew exactly what this was.

He was maddeningly patient and in tireless control of his mechanically proficient performance. So much so that Sue tried to prolong the necessity of his effort as long as possible, partly to make a point and partly because this was a unique sexual experience, to say the least, and one which she knew she would not have the stomach to try again.

He stayed with her like a hero—or like a well-lubricated machine—and made sure she was both satisfied and exhausted before he allowed himself a loathsomely controlled release in utter silence.

"Well," he said when it was over, "have I proven to you that I'm a natural man?" He seemed to be studying her face for a reaction as if it really seemed to matter to him.

You really think you're good, don't you? Sue thought. And she had to admit that by his own criteria of competence and control, the wretch had a right to think of himself as an accomplished technologist of sex. I could never tell you how awful you are in terms you could understand, she realized.

"Let's just say you've made your point and I've made mine, Arnold," she said, disengaging herself from him and retrieving her clothes.

He looked at her peculiarly, and for a moment, Sue thought she could see hurt and confusion flicker across his face. But then the sorcerer's mask reformed itself in its facade of arrogance and control.

"Maybe they were the same after all," he said sardonically. "Maybe what just happened was as inevitable as what will happen when you meet Clear Blue Lou."

Sue measured him in somewhat fearful amazement. Is he laughing at me inside? she wondered. Have I just been had? Did this son of a bitch just run another of his scenarios on me? Who had just mindfucked whom? She quivered in disgust and confusion.

She had fallen into the realm of dark sorcery indeed.

Clear Blue Lou hated to be early to any party, even his own. The giving of justice was a social event, but the meaning of "social" went deep. The giver of justice chose the place of justice, decreed the refreshment and entertainment, and summoned whom he would to the Court of Justice. All parties to the dispute and all parties whose karma had been touched by it. Anyone he thought might contribute to the richness and complexity of the vibes. Anyone anyone else wanted to have there, within reason. Gate-crashers who were in no wise discouraged.

Thus began an open-ended party that truly represented the totality of the karmic moment, a party that threw everyone even remotely involved together in a high-proof distillation of their common reality itself and let them boogie together until it all hung out.

No reason why justice shouldn't be fun, and every reason why it should be a social event. Hopefully, good vibes in, good vibes out. And as a social event, a Court of Justice could at least be counted upon to be royally catered, since the perfect master ordered up the fare and the parties to the dispute paid the bill. Any hint of mingyness would be bad karma indeed, and disputants usually vied with each other in the addition of their own extras. Everybody was trying to prove that the vibes they contributed to the whole were noble and beneficent, and of course, no more so than to the master of the Court of Justice himself.

"Punishing the guilty" and "exonerating the innocent" were merely enforcing the law. One who would give sweet justice must make it a boon to all. Ideally, no one should leave the party feeling bad.

Needless to say, this was not always possible. The giving of justice was an art, not a science, and the degree of perfection was determined by the material at hand as well as the skill of the artist.

And as he waited upstairs at the Garden of Love in his private cloud chamber for things to really get underway before he made his grand entrance, Clear Blue Lou wondered whether it was going to be possible to come up with happy endings for all this time around.

Sunshine Sue was guilty of sorcery in point of fact, the meaningful question being only the color of her honest intent. The Lightning Commune had openly proclaimed their own blackness. The technically righteous Eagles should have been the heroes of the hour, but in reality, justice that did not chastise the "innocent" Eagles would leave La Mirage seething with paranoia and resentment. If he went far enough to clear the karma of La Mirage in the eyes of the whitely righteous, he might destroy what he was trying to preserve and play right into the unseen hands of the Spacers. But if he didn't go far enough, black science would win a public victory, and the sorcerers would also reap the reward.

Lou could see no way around it: when justice was given, he was going to have to kick ass. And that was the part of giving justice that he liked the least. Sorcery cases were rare; most often disharmonies arose from the equal evil of mindfucking. There could be no greater crime against the Way than the theft of free will, and it was Lou's conviction that the villain himself was also the victim of programming that had seized his karma and bent it into disharmony.

Thus the sweetest justice was obtained not by edict but through satori for all concerned, as he had achieved last night in saving the love of Carrie Sunshine and Laurie Eagle. He had cleared the tribal control programs through shame, not diktat.

But when a perfect master could not achieve justice in this ideal manner, he had to be willing to take the moral responsibility for telling people what to do—in effect, committing a kind of mindfuck himself. Lou always felt like something of a hypocrite inside this paradox, and the only thing that let him accept such karma was the knowledge that a giver of justice who didn't feel like a hypocrite in such circumstances would not be truly walking the Great Way.

And here, where the Way had been poisoned not by disharmonies among those who tried to walk it but by sorcery from outside, there seemed no way through to justice that would not involve the kicking of unwilling asses.

I don't like the headspace I'm getting into, Lou thought, as he left the cloud chamber and descended into the Court of Justice he had convened below. But of course, the head-space he was getting into was the headspace that needed him to be there. Getting into it was what the Court of Justice was all about.

The cloud chambers around the outside of the tavern floor had been converted to private booths with tables, curtained off from each other but open to the rest of the scene. Sex was not the obsession of this party, nor would it be the entertainment. What liaisons of the bedchamber that might arise in this atmosphere would likely be intense and private, for intrigue, not casual sport, was definitely the vibe.

Lou had timed his entrance well. The place was already fairly crowded, and many people of import had already arrived. Levan the Wise, hovered over by two liveried ladies in his employ, reclined in one of the booths, surrounded by traders from the Exchange and a dense cloud of smoke. In another booth, North Eagle, one of the four leaders of the tribe, sat alone nursing a flagon of wine, the glum object of many passing dirty looks. There were plenty of people in Sunshine Yellow in evidence, mingling freely and spreading their own Word of Mouth. Sunshine Sue had apparently not yet arrived, and the mountain william Lightnings would have stood out at once even in this mob scene.

The long bar along one wall was laden with pastries, curries, pillaws, bowls of fruit, platters of vegetables, tureens of soups and chilis, and even a single large platter of roasted deer meat. Bottles of wine and distilled spirits lined the bar behind the food like a picket fence. At the Court of Justice, everyone served themselves, and there was a solid press of people attacking the buffet. Mages, merchants, Sunshines, Eagles, astrologers, magnates, soothsayers, and the unknown children of the night passing food and drink to each other, unified for the moment by the ceremony of culinary chaos.